(see 10 for introduction)
2.5 next
John Nichols’ Capital Times column Tuesday is headlined Curtailing Christians in Occupied Iraq in the print edition. Bethlehem’s mayor and Jerusalem’s Latin patriarch have been speaking out, will Thursday bring Curtailing Christians in Occupied Palestine? We’ll know soon enough but for now, that’s 107 “Israel”less columns down, three to go.
Ideally, the holistic approach should be taken, the two occupations linked, as in Curtailing Reports in Occupied U.N. Yep, scratch one U.N. report.
John’s “Iraq” percentage is inching back up, he uses it for the 42nd time in those 107 columns, and in the process startles us with words we haven’t seen in the previous 41. “Baghdad?” “Mosul?” “Kirkuk?” You mean Iraq has cities where things actually happen? Should we prepare ourselves for “Najaf” and maybe even “Fallujah?”
“Lies” and “lying”; “claims” and “claiming”; “deceit, “deceiving,” “deceiver,” and “deceptive”; “spin”; “phantasy”; “discredited”: these are the words to be found in the brunt of the 41 “Iraq” columns. A journalism maven, John understands the message has to be hammered home again and again, the Bush administration is deceitful, deceitful, deceitful and must be voted out.
If a message has to be repeated for it to start sinking in, what practical difference does it make if John addresses the Israeli/Palestinian conflict before the end of the year? None, obviously, it’s the principle that counts.
Notes
John regresses re the Iraq sanctions, they’re not even “U.N”, they’re non-existent. “When Christians left during Saddam’s time, they tended to do so for economic reasons,” he writes. AFP reports that 700,000 have left since 1987, in part because of “crippling sanctions” (maintained throughout the Clinton years).
Should US-based churches boycott certain companies doing business with Israel? You can vote at the CSM website if you’re willing to risk offending the plucky little kingdom.
If John does trip up, it may be over Israeli soldiers urged to refuse orders.