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Expenses leak -- "for the public good". mmm??

A few questions occur to me here.

BBC NEWS | Politics | MP expenses leak 'not for money'.

A middleman who helped pass on details of MPs' expenses to the Daily Telegraph has said it was done for the public good and not to make money.

Yes, it was right the situation be confronted.

But I wonder if the loss of confidence in MP's, and thus of those in public office, and ultimately of authority, is of as much ultimately more worrying that the fiddling the books. The timing of the leak, before an election, allowed the minority parties a strong voice. It could have been worse, but the gains by UKIP was significant and they have a definite agenda.

So what was the political agenda of the leak? 

And do we really trust the press as the guardians of our morality?  I know I don't.
 

Iran and Pakistan: danger signals

How much does foreign affairs really influence the current razz-a-mattaz in the USA?

Link: Iran and Pakistan: danger signals | openDemocracy.

The Iowa and New Hampshire primaries in the United States have generated huge political buzz and media commentary, but very little of this has focused on the foreign-policy challenges facing the country in general and the war on terror in particular. This pattern may be understandable in light of the money, power and influence at stake in winning the presidency in the November 2008 election; but it also represents a certain retreat from reality, in the context of the current potential for a rapid development of crisis involving US forces in two regions: the Persian Gulf and Pakistan. ....

... Meanwhile, back in the United States the primary election campaign is approaching full flow with virtually no mention of these issues. In regard to both Iran and Pakistan, however, the potential for sudden crises and even overt conflict involving US forces, may now be higher than just a month ago.

Where Boys Grow Up to Be Jihadis

How do we understand and respond in the spirit of Jesus to these men?

Where Boys Grow Up to Be Jihadis

By ANDREA ELLIOTT

Published: November 25, 2007

Many of the men involved in the Madrid train bombings came from one small neighborhood in the Moroccan city of Tetouan. A number of would-be suicide bombers in Iraq are from there, too. What is it about the place?

" .....  In the years since Sept. 11, the question of what makes a terrorist has become ever more urgent. Much about young Muslim militants remains opaque, from the texture of their family lives to the full scope of their desires. Theories of radicalization have come and gone. Experts have variously blamed poverty, Arab nationalism, the Internet, geopolitics, alienation, charismatic sheiks, dictatorial regimes and youthful anomie. But in the study of contemporary terrorism, there has never been a laboratory quite like Jamaa Mezuak.

Perhaps no theory could have predicted Jamal Ahmidan, a mastermind of the Madrid bombings. He was a feisty drug dealer with a passion for motorcycles and a weakness for Spanish women. His fellow plotters from the old neighborhood in Morocco included petty criminals and a candy vendor. If they seemed a poor fit for militant Islam, so were the young men from Jamaa Mezuak who eventually left for Iraq. One styled his hair after John Travolta. Another was a frustrated comedian. They had yearned for a life in Europe, it seemed, not death in the Middle East.

What, then, caused them to embrace violent jihad? In a city flooded with televised images of civilians dying in Iraq, the forces of politics and religion surely weighed on these men’s lives. For some of them, public outrage merged with personal grievance. One man lost his job and left for Iraq six months later. Another was forbidden to marry the girl he loved. The drug dealer had languished in a Moroccan jail, separated from his young son.

Yet individual experiences and ideological convictions can only explain so much. Increasingly, terrorism analysts have focused on the importance of social milieu. Some stress that terrorists are not simply loners, overcome by a militant cause. They are more likely to radicalize together with others who share the same passions and afflictions and daily routines. As the story of Jamaa Mezuak suggests, the turn to violence is seldom made alone. Terrorists don’t simply die for a cause, Scott Atran, an anthropologist who studies terrorism, told me. “They die for each other.”

Encouraging Changes Down Under

Jim Wallis is enthusiastic about the new PM of Australia. We have Christian activists of a different persuasion enthusiastic about Christian (in this case Catholic) politicians, so lets pray he displays more discernment ( and that Rudd remains uncorrupted by power.  His words -- see below - give every hope of that.

Link: God's Politics - Jim Wallis blog, faith blog, religion, christian, christianity, politics, values.

The BBC has reported that Rudd has already said he will offer an apology to the Aborigines, which John Howard consistently refused to do.  Rudd to apologise to Aborigines   

Mr Howard held back from offering a full apology to the so-called Stolen Generations, saying the current generation should not feel guilty about mistakes from the past. But Mr Rudd signalled his administration's change of direction soon after Labor's election victory.

"It will be early, early in the parliamentary term," Mr Rudd said of his planned apology. "However, we would frame it in a consultative fashion with communities, and that may take some time," he added.

And today he signed the Kyoto agreement, another Howard no-go zone.

Rudd set out his views in an essay on  Faith in Politics last year.  He begins:

Above the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey are arrayed ten great statues of the martyrs of the Church. Not Peter, Stephen, James or the familiar names of the saints sacrificed during the great Roman persecution before Constantine's conversion. No: these are martyrs of the twentieth century, when the age of faith was, in the minds of many in the West, already tottering towards its collapse.

One of those honoured above the Great West Door is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian, pastor and peace activist. Bonhoeffer is, without doubt, the man I admire most in the history of the twentieth century. He was a man of faith. He was a man of reason. He was a man of letters who was as well read in history and literature as he was in the intensely academic Lutheran theology of the German university tradition. He was never a nationalist, always an internationalist. And above all, he was a man of action who wrote prophetically in 1937 that "when Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die." For Bonhoeffer, whatever the personal cost, there was no moral alternative other than to fight the Nazi state with whatever weapons were at his disposal.

US is‘worst’ imperialist: archbishop

Ok so the Archbishop has maybe overstated his case. A pity as the heart of what he says is right.  It does not help though to compare America with the UK, or its current ME activity with the Britisg Raj in India:

“It is one thing to take over a territory and then pour energy and resources into administering it and normalising it. Rightly or wrongly, that’s what the British Empire did — in India, for example. It is another thing to go in on the assumption that a quick burst of violent action will somehow clear the decks and that you can move on and other people will put it back together — Iraq, for example.”

US is 'worst' imperialist: archbishop

and Archbishop attacks Violent US

The text of the interview is here - the page linked on the article is just the Muslim magazine cover; the text will doubtless appear on www.archbishopofcanterbury.org   but for now it is on Ruth Gledhill's Times religious blog - Why we should all love America   and also pasted to the extension of this page.

-----

or download PDF of Interview here

Download archbishop_on_us_policy.pdf

Palestine Remembered

Only one part of the story, but a part that has to be remembered.

Link: Palestine Remembered.

Rice reveals Mid-East peace plans

At last the invitations have gone out.

Link: BBC NEWS | Middle East | Rice reveals Mid-East peace plans.

Could it just work?  The cynic says no. But I am challenged to pray that progress is made. It is interesting how experienced journalists are saying the same:

Long Live Annapolis!

Pray for a miracle.

"The Imperial Presidency

Dead Certain -- Anthony Lewis reviews two books on the George Bush's US administration, the "war on terror" and the war in Iraq:

DEAD CERTAIN : The Presidency of George W. Bush.  By Robert Draper.

THE TERROR PRESIDENCY:  Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration.  By Jack Goldsmith.

"Three years after the American invasion of Iraq, after endless searches had found no sign of weapons of mass destruction, President Bush still believed that Saddam Hussein had had them. He expressed that conviction repeatedly to his chief of staff, Andrew Card, until Card left the White House in April 2006.

So writes Robert Draper in his unusual biography of George W. Bush. It is unusual because Draper, a national correspondent for GQ magazine, was given extraordinary access to this press-averse president and his aides, including six private meetings with Bush, surely in the belief that he would be a friendly biographer. Draper is friendly, at times admiring. But he also unhesitatingly supplies devastating evidence of the characteristics that have helped to produce the disasters of the Bush presidency.

“Dead Certain,” the title, conveys one of those characteristics. Bush knows he is right. When facts turn out to get in the way, he brushes them off.   .... read on here

Waking up to war with Iran

Link: Waking Up to war with Iran   Brian McLaren on the rising liklihood of war with Iran:

"I am disgusted, concerned, appalled, and furious about the current saber-rattling of our government ....."

He concludes with some questions:

We Christians who cannot follow this path into another war must ask ourselves two kinds of questions:

1. What will we do if we wake up and find our government has attacked Iran while we were sleeping? What actions - public and private - would be appropriate?
2. What can we do now to decrease the possibility of that occurring? What will we wish we would have done in the weeks and months before the morning after?

"Fear's a dangerous thing"

I have in the past week been deeply disturbed by reports of how torture has been sanctioned, despite many denials  and "redefinitions", by the CIA, the US government and ultimately President Bush.

eg:  Debate erupts on techniques used by CIA

Time's comments on it here: Bush's Dangerous Torture(d) Stance

Yet despite the leaked memo the president continues to defend what was done and state that this was not torture:   Bush defends interrogation methods

And former President Carter says it's wrong: Jimmy Carter: US Tortures Prisoners

Its so wrong. The consequences of excusing the inhumane treatment of your enemy is so insidious.  It undermines any possibility of strong moral ground.

Brian McLaren hits the mark here: Who Has Betrayed Us? (by Brian McLaren)  He writes:

"I remember about eight years ago when then presidential candidate George W. Bush repeatedly claimed that he would restore honor to the presidency, soiled as it had been by our previous president's infamous affair. I remember hoping he would succeed. But a new kind of shame has come to the office and to our nation as reports surface about our government's secret authorization of torture. We all share in this shame. ...."  (read on)

Today he continued:   'Devils and Dust': How We Learned to Torture (by Brian McLaren)   In his article he quotes words from Bruce Springsteen:

"Fear's a dangerous thing.
It can turn your heart black you can trust.
It'll take your God-filled soul
Fill it with devils and dust."