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Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West
God, if there is one, has a very ironic sense of humor. If you don’t believe me, if you are ever in Atlanta, Georgia, cruising down Ponce De Leon and looking for the Driving Miss Daisy house, a person will see a beautiful church named St. John’s Lutheran. What makes this place so beautiful is not the stonework, nor the sanctuary with its worship in the round, it is that it is a light of hope in what sometimes seems like, at times, a bleak world. Why? Because in the same office where the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan sat his racist backside, an openly homosexual pastor now sits. African-American congregation members open hymnals and raise a joyful noise to the Lord (and dare I say it, often sitting next to a white member in the same pew, even). In a city that proudly proclaims that it was too busy to hate, almost a century ago Hate Central had a bulls-eye right where the church stands. A keen eye might notice the secret society symbols elaborately carved in the expensive wood work. This grand old mansion was the national headquarters of the 2nd Ku Klux Klan.
The 2nd Klan did not package itself as a hate organization, even though that is what it was. It draped itself in robes of patriotism and Christianity and at one point became the largest fraternal organization in America. Now, see if this does not sound familiar. At the turn of the twentieth century, many Americans felt their way of life was disappearing in a massive migration wave of workers from eastern and southern Europe. Instead of focusing on the companies that were recruiting these low cost workers, newspapers delighted in stories of the vice and corruption in the ghettos where these populations settled. Young people were flocking to the cities and there is no need to mention the monkey business that the un-chaperoned can get into, especially when there was this new fangled invention, complete with backseat, called the automobile. African-American servicemen returning to their cities and towns were refusing to be treated as 2nd class citizens. Gasoline was poured on this fear fire when liberal Hollywood’s D.W. Griffith made The Birth of a Nation, which celebrated the 1st Clan and the sensational coverage of the murder of a 13-year-old girl working in an Atlanta factory named Mary Phagan. (The railroading of Jewish factory manager, Leo Frank, is one of the saddest footnotes in American history, but even more tragic was that all of these masculine defenders of Christian womanhood did not question why a 13-year-old was even working in a pencil factory in the first place, kind of like today.) With a few aging original members symbolically watching, in 1915, the Klan was reborn in a cross burning ceremony on top of Stone Mountain outside of Atlanta. Using churches as recruiting centers, millions of red-blooded American men flocked to this organization that claimed to represent the ideals of masculinity, Christianity, and the chivalrous defense of upstanding, white womanhood. It was so powerful that various chapters actually controlled the politics in several states. Corruption, hypocrisy, and a few courageous individuals standing up against it, ultimately led to its downfall, but not before thousands of innocent people got hurt.
The once majestic mansion had seen it’s better days when the Lutherans bought it in 1959 as the new home for a nearby congregation. There the story would have ended, except a few years back the congregation called an openly gay pastor. The same forces that oozed out of that residence returned to its now defensive walls. In 2006, the synod filed formal charges against the pastor for having a committed relationship. (At least for openly stating such. Lesson for you children, the church believes it is better to lie and keep your job than be open and honest, because that is what Jesus would do.) The sleepy little church again found itself in the national spotlight, especially once “defend traditional family values” groups began to sound the alarm bells and make the congregation a poster child of what is wrong in America.
Franklin Roosevelt once said that “the only thing we have to fear, is fear itself” but what can you expect from a crippled country club elitist who could not control his mouthy battle ax wife who was probably a lesbian. She should have been making cookies, shopping, shooting wolves from a helicopter, or something, rather than talking to and socializing with poor people, miners, and the colored. If we have learned any lesson the last few years, it is that fear gets you elected, allows you to turn the Bill of Rights into a piece of toilet paper, and gives you the green light to torture to your heart’s content. Fear gives you power. Fear gets you a military budget more massive than the rest of the world’s combined. Fear allows you to demonize entire groups of people and greases the capitalist system so you buy a whole bunch of crap you do not need. It is the mother’s milk of modern politics. It is juice, baby, juice.
In the past few months, fear has been passed around churches across this land in the form of millions of copies of a DVD called Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West. The distribution of it was meant to cynically scare people and influence the election. It is a call to check one’s reason and common sense at the door and engage in a crusade against 1.1 billion people. It is better to kill or convert them before they try to do the same thing to us. These evil doers want death to Israel, death to America, and Islam for everyone. The only people I would recommend see this film are philosophy majors because of all the logical fallacies abounding throughout this film. In trying to detail all the misinformation, scare tactics, falsehoods, and logical leaps, I scratched out 21 single spaced pages. Instead, I decided it would be best to show how such a fear flick could be made about us. The picture opens with a series of pictures of mangled and bloody children, women, and old people due to U.S. air strikes in Iraq and in the aftermath of some of our covert military activities in various Arab countries. In between interviews with innocent victims of torture, the film details George W.’s grandfather Prescott Bush’s financial dealings with the Nazis and then asks if it is a mere coincidence that his son and grandson became President. Quick cuts of George uttering the words “Axis of Evil” and how no option is off the table including nuclear weapons, Senator John McCain chanting “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran,” and similar statements by other prominent politicians. Clips of nut jobs like Ann “kill them or convert them” Coulter, Pat Robertson, Rev. John Hagee, and others stating how we need to “nuke Mecca” and “turn the Middle East into a glass parking lot.” Would such a film be a fair representation of America?
When we wipe the fear from our eyes, what one finds is that there are a few hundred, maybe a few thousand, bad guys. Most of the people we are fighting in Iraq are simply fighting us because we are in their country. The majority of Muslims want to be left alone to raise their children, love their friends and neighbors, and pray to their God.
St. John’s is one of the reasons I have faith that documentaries like this will be thrown onto the scrapheap of history where they belong. The lowest moments in American history, those times when we have tarnished the ideals this country stands for, are those when we have given into fear and see the other as different and threatening before letting reason and other moral guide points, as found in the constitution, take hold.
Verdict: An Awful, Awful Documentary