[+] As individuals and nation, we are what we remember

by Rev. Dale Turner

Saturday, May 29, 2004

We humans are unique among living creatures in our instinct to preserve our own memory. We alone bury our dead, build tombs, mark our graves. We write books, give gifts and endow institutions not only to help worthy causes but to assure our own perpetuity.

It is sweet to be remembered, bitter to be forgotten. When we address others by name, we affirm their dignity and identity. When we remember others after they are gone, we testify to their worth.

We live in an age of exaggerated speech, with extravagant claims bombarding our senses daily. "You are what you eat," they say (or what you wear or drive or feel). But it is much closer to the point to say that we are what we remember. If we could know what a person has remembered or forgotten, we would know that person well.

For example, some people nurture memories of wrongs committed against them. Aided by their memories, they build a thirst for revenge and live to satisfy that thirst. Francis Bacon wrote: "A man that studieth revenge keeps his wounds green, which otherwise would heal and do well."

Memory plays a positive role in religion. The Hebrew word "zachar" -- to remember -- is found often in the Old Testament. It was critical for Israel not to forget its past. Scriptures were recited and liturgical acts repeated to stimulate the memory of God's care and leadership. This continues today.

Christians, too, are held to the faith by memory. When young Christians were advised not to neglect meeting together, as they were in Hebrews 10:25, it was not a tool to encourage church attendance. The advice was given to make new converts aware that they lived in a world that operated with a different history.

By gathering on the Lord's Day, Christians would be reminded of their special history of redemption -- the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Remembering our secular, national heritage is important, too. Congress showed wisdom in designating a national day of remembering. It began as a day for memorializing our war dead, but has been expanded to include all loved ones who have gone before us.

The fact that Memorial Day has degenerated, for some, into little more than a three-day holiday does not take away from the need to remember its origin.

Do you remember John Adams' words? "Posterity," he thundered, "you will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in heaven that ever I took half the pains to preserve it."

That was nearly two centuries ago. Think of the cost of freedom since that day! Not one of us can fully repay the thousands of men and women who have bought our freedom with their lives.

We long for the day when wars will cease and the symbols for peace will be as strong and moving as those that catapult us into war. Doves and olive branches are no match for marching bands, uniforms, flags and banners.

But we honor our nation's history also when we remember the lives of all who prayed and worked for peace and justice in paths other than the military. President John F. Kennedy said, "War will exist until the distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today."

Woodrow Wilson said, "My dream is that as the years go by and the world knows more and more of America, it will turn to America for those inspirations which lie at the base of all freedom; that the world will never fear America unless she feels that it is engaged in some enterprise which is inconsistent with the rights of humanity; and that America will come into the full light of the day when all will know that she puts human rights above all other rights and that her flag is the flag not only of America but of humanity."

While dictatorship in a way can be inherited, as it rests on coercion, no democracy can be inherited. Rather, it must be reborn with each succeeding generation. It depends on personal character, the responsible uses of freedom, the willingness to hear and weigh contrary opinion debated in the state.

The first line of democratic defense is not against the external foe but against the internal loss of those ideas, ideals and qualities that must in every generation reproduce and uphold democracy.

www.drdaleturner.com

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

[Thanks to SjySpiritElohim (David Enroth) for forwarding Dr. Turner's article.]

[+] An Open Letter to the American Public

by Omar Barghouti

Dear Americans,

I've written to you a published open letter a year after the criminal attacks of September 11th reiterating my heartfelt condemnation of those attacks, while reminding you, despite your pain, to search deeper for the context, for the root causes that made them possible. I still had not run out of sympathy for your victims then. After Iraq, you can still count on my moral rejection of any similarly criminal attack against you in the future, but you can forget about my sympathy. I hope you realize what the difference means. 'Who cares?', you may ask. Well, although I obviously do not speak for the peoples of the south, the Arabs, or even my own people, the Palestinians, I suspect much of what I convey to you here is widely shared in all three domains.

Despite the horrifying exposure of your military's war crimes and systematic dehumanization of and terror against Arabs and Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo, your elected representatives are feverishly seeking a technical, bureaucratic explanation of what happened, and are trying -- to no avail, evidently -- to portray every incident of terror or abuse as a rare occasion committed by an isolated group of individuals against standing orders and in contravention of American ethical values and norms. Whom are they fooling? Is there anyone left in Europe, not to mention the Arab world, who still believes your government's policy gives a damn about moral principles or international law? Hasn't it become abundantly clear that your country is increasingly being viewed by the rest of the world, especially the southern part of it, as a lawless, immoral, bullying and murderous empire?

If all what has been revealed about the illegal, racist behaviour of your armed forces around the world has failed to convince you to democratically impeach, or at least withdraw your support for, the ruling neo-conservative regime in Washington, then you're proving that far from being an isolated aberration, this arrogant, fundamentalist, imperialist junta does in fact represent America today. Still, from my perspective, this can never justify a terrorist attack against civilians in your country or anywhere else, but it can surely blunt any potential sympathy one would normally have -- and did indeed express after September 11th -- in such circumstances.

The next time the US is afflicted by terrorism many of us who did in fact shed tears in 2001 will not do so again. For one, I shall maintain my moral consistency and still condemn any comparable attack as criminal and immoral, mainly out of principle; but, honestly, I doubt I shall re-experience the sincere dejection and searing agony that I felt the first time.

Whatever you ask, please do not ask why we "hate" you. Putting aside the simplistic and dichotomic nature of such a question -- "you're either with us or against us," your great leader says -- let me give you my straight answer: I don't.

But, I hate what your government is doing in your name, with your tax money, and with solid support from most of you. I despise the fact that your country is sponsoring Israeli colonial oppression against my people, shielding Israel from the world's wrath and from the overdue prospect of sanctions for violating every applicable precept of international law in maintaining its military occupation and illegal colonies in the West Bank and Gaza, its racial discrimination against its own Palestinian citizens and its obdurate rejection of the internationally protected right of our refugees to return to the lands from which Israel had expelled them, and on the ruins of which it had established itself.

I hate the way your mainstream media refers to our innocent victims, whether in Iraq or Palestine, as faceless numbers, as relative humans, as dispensable objects in your empire's crusade for world domination.

I hate the repugnant hubris of your "elected" lawmakers, who owe their seats and privileges to a few very powerful lobbies controlling your lives and minds, and forming the pillar of American flouting of international law in every field imaginable. It is ironic that lawmakers anywhere can become such an infested breeding ground for lawlessness in international affairs.

I hate the fact that your military, oil and other sinister industries have flourished at the expense of killing, injuring or ruining the livelihood of millions in Asia, Africa and Latin America. And I strongly resent the fact that in order to keep prices low at your gas pumps, Arabs have had to suffer under despotic rulers, hand-picked and buttressed by your consecutive governments for decades.

I hate the silence, the apathy -- and therefore the implicit approval -- that your majority espouses when faced with incriminating evidence of your government's wrongdoing in our countries. After Falluja, you were silent. After Rafah, you were apathetic. After Guantanamo's horrors were revealed, you turned your eyes and ears the other way.

Why do most of you hate us, we, people of the south, should ask? Why can't you accept us as beings who are equally human, who possess a similar sense of pride, who have similar dreams and aspirations, and who value peace and dignified living more than anything else? Why can't you see that all we need is justice and a chance to develop on our own, without your government's oppressive exploitation, patronizing intervention, or masterly dictates.

Your country is way too powerful now for anyone to have the guts to drag it to the international criminal court, where most of your leaders ought to stand trial; but if Rome is any example, I would not take solace in that transient strength. You have a clear moral, legal and political obligation to change your country's course. For the foreseeable future, it can afford to stay on its current path, crushing every head raised in resistance, and battering every soul that refuses to be enslaved, but this path has always led to one destination: utter defeat under the feat of the oppressed majority which will undoubtedly prevail, as it always has.

[Omar Barghouti is an independent Palestinian political analyst. He can be reached at: jenna@palnet.com]

An Old Refrain that Stabs at the Heart

by Meron Benvenisti (former vice-Mayor of Jerusalem)

The sights of Rafah are too difficult to bear - trails of refugees alongside carts laden with bedding and the meager contents of their homes; children dragging suitcases larger than themselves; women draped in black kneeling in mourning on piles of rubble. And in the memories of some of us, whose number if dwindling, arise similar scenes that have been a part of our lives, as a sort of refrain that stabs at the heart and gnaws at the conscience, time after time, for over half a century - the procession of refugees from Lod to Ramallah in the heat of July 1948; the convoys of banished residents of Yalu and Beit Nuba, Emmaus and Qalqilyah in June 1967; the refugees of Jericho climbing on the ruins of the Allenby Bridge after the Six-Day War.

And perhaps the most shocking of all, the grandfathers and fathers of the Rafah refugees, abandoning the houses in Yibna in which they were born, in fear of the approaching Israeli army on June 5, 1948. "At dawn," reported the AP correspondent, "it was possible to see the civilians fleeing from the town [Yibna] in the direction of the coast, without the intervention of the Israeli attackers."

Some 56 years have passed, and they are again fleeing in fear of the Israeli attackers.

And the attackers adopt the same tactics, spread rumors and fire warning shots; and when the residents flee out of fear, they claim that they are not responsible for the flight, but then destroy the homes, for "after all, they are empty and deserted."

Laundered language and sterile military terms camouflage a primitive desire for vengeance and uninhibited militancy. Slogans such as "combat heritage," "righteousness of our path" and "the most moral army in the world" immunize the soldiers and their commanders from having to contend with the humanitarian tragedy they are creating.

The political echelon, which is supposed to guide the army according to ethical criteria, reveals even crueler and more extreme tendencies that the commanders of the army. All they are interested in is the "image" of Israel and the condemnation of the "hostile media."

S. Yizhar has already said these harsh sentences about all of us: "To be deceived open-eyed, and to on the spot join the big, common throng of liars - composed of ignorance, expedient apathy, and simple unashamed selfishness - and to exchange one big truth for the clever shrug of the shoulder of a veteran criminal." He said this in May 1949, in reference to the incident at Khirbet Khiza'a, some of whose former residents live in one of the Rafah refugee camps.

The community of those seeking vengeance, and who crave "the appropriate response" will no doubt respond with anger and abuse: How can you show empathy for a bunch of base murderers, desert savages who are led by corrupt gang chieftains? But there is a sneaking suspicion that this too is "combat heritage" - exploitation of the murderousness of the Palestinians to "punish" them, uproot them from their homes, "bare" their fields and then "redeem" the abandoned land for the needs of Israelis. Generation after generation, we cause them to abandon their homes, settling in them, and afterward, when the opportunity arises, take over their sanctuaries as well, and drive them away from there.

Generation after generation, we feed the refugee consciousness, reconstruct the pain of displacement and expose another generation to the powerless rage of the displaced person. Afterward we face, frightened and threatened, the "return" - the life's hope of every refuges and a stain on the settler's conscience.

Something basic has gone awry here. If commanders, the sons of the fighters of 1948, send the grandchildren of the fighters for independence to "widen the route" - which means the expulsion of the grandchildren of the refugees of 1948 - on the pretext of existential threat, then there was something defective in the vision of the founding fathers.

If after a half-century their enterprise still faces existential threat, this can only mean that they condemned it to eternal enmity, and there is no community that can for years on end survive a violent war for its existence.

And if this is merely a pretext - and Operation Rainbow in Rafah was an instinctive reaction that evolved into second nature - we must reflect deeply and sadly on our own responsibility for the enterprise that at its start embodied so many exalted ideals.

Is there some "original sin" that lies at the foundation of the Zionist enterprise? Those who initiated the Rafah operation, and those who are executing it, should know that one of the outcomes of their actions will inevitably be the raising of questions about this heresy.

[From TikkunMail Newsletter, an email publication of Tikkun Magazine, Friday, May 21, 2004]

The Big Unanswered Questions About 9/11

by Revrickm

Today's article by James Ridgeway in the Village Voice raises once again the great unanswered questions of 9/11 that just won't go away (and never will until they are answered).

You know the questions by now -- just about everybody does -- and they have to do with what didn't happen on 9/11 -- timely and effective response by responsible government personel (including the President and Vice President), protective scrambling of fighter planes to head off known hijackers, and honest and transparent handling of these issues immediately and in later inquiries.

Here, over three and one-half years later, the 9/11 inquiry commission is haggling over 'coordination problems' among rescue workers, while the most basic questions regarding a responsible and coordinated response by the top echelons and agencies of the federal government are apparently being swept under the rug -- again.

It is supremely ironic to this observer that it is a columnist anmed Ridgeway -- and not the responsible security official named Ridge -- that is raising these questions which are and have been the 'elephant in the center of the room' for all these many months now.

I suppose the Bush administration in its usual arrogance figures that the American public will not notice and that they will be pacified by repetition of more pious cliches -- just like always with this bunch.

You are invited to read and pass on this column by Mr. Ridgeway. Maybe someone has the answers and can illuminate the rest of us. If so, they are most welcome to make the answers known to the news media. Maybe they might even have the guts to print them.

Don't hold your breath, however.


Why Were We on Our Own? -- 9-11 inquiry merely hints at the feds' inaction on fatal day
by James Ridgeway, The Village Voice

May 19th, 2004 4:45 PM

NEW YORK — The 9-11 Commission inquiry is full of unspoken questions. One of them is whether poor communications impeded the city's fire department at the scene of the World Trade Center's collapse and contributed to the deaths of hundreds of firefighters.

A second issue, looming just below the surface, is the unspoken battle between New York City and the federal government. At Wednesday's hearing, the focus on the failures of city rescue agencies obliterated any inquiry into the broader question of whether New York got up-to-date intelligence from the FBI and CIA—and if not, why not. In his testimony earlier today, Rudy Giuliani said it wouldn't have made any difference.

Focusing on what went wrong with the city’s fire and police communications systems is small stuff compared with trying to figure out why George W. Bush jumped around the country from one bunker to another, finally turning up in New York three days after the attack.

That larger question may never be answered. But some ugly facts about the federal government's action—or rather, inaction—is seeping out during testimony before the commission. Consider the following:

According to Giuliani's testimony, when he was first told of the crash, upon leaving a midtown hotel, he immediately realized it must be a terrorist attack. Speeding downtown, the mayor tried to reach the White House on his cellphone, but couldn't get through.

After reaching ground zero, he went to the city's command center and, from a secure phone, he spoke to Governor George Pataki, who offered to mobilize the National Guard. Giuliani accepted the offer. He called the White House and spoke to a presidential aide, asking if it were true the Pentagon had been hit. "Confirmed" was the reply. Giuliani asked whether the city had air cover. Fighters had been sent aloft 12 minutes before, said the aide. The mayor was told tthat Vice President Dick Cheney would call him shortly. Almost immediately, the phone rang and an operator said Cheney was on the line. Then, the room started to shake under the tremendous crash of the first tower coming down.

Check out the chronology of events on 9-11 (for instance, at 11 Sept 2001 the Center for Cooperative Research's detailed and heavily sourced timeline of accounts, news stories, and documents), and think about it:

American Flight 11 took off from Boston at 7:59 a.m. By probably 8:13 and certainly 8:15, the FAA knew it had been hijacked. Now, according to government officials quoted in a January 2002 Slate article, NORAD is notified by the FAA "about one minute" after it notices anything amiss, and NORAD says the military can scramble fighters "within a matter of minutes to anywhere in the United States." That didn't happen on 9-11. At 8:46, half an hour after the FAA knew that Flight 11 was hijacked, it crashed into the World Trade Center, unimpeded by any air-defense system. At almost exactly the same moment, Flight 77 from D.C. goes radically off course. Meanwhile, Flight 175 hits the WTC at 9:03. Just afterwards, Secret Service agents burst into Dick Cheney's office, grab him under his arms and propel downstairs to the White House basement and then into a bunker. Bush, at a Texas grade school, is told about the second crash into the WTC but spends the next ten minutes with second-graders, listening to them read a story called "Pet Goat."

At 9:59, the South Tower of the WTC collapses. At 10:28, the North Tower collapses.

During this entire time, New York City authorities were on their own. Beyond that, it seems scarcely conceivable, that with a nation under attack, the mayor of New York had to call Bush—not the other way around. Why was Giuliani not immediately alerted by the Pentagon or the White House or even the FAA?

It's a "scandal," says former Reagan Secretary of the Navy John Lehman, a member of the 9-11 Commission, that the city had such a lousy command structure. Not even the caliber of the Boy Scouts, he says. Instead of dwelling on the technical inadequacies of the fire and police, why won't this commission get to the bottom of things? Why did the federal government not alert the city to what was going on? Why did the mayor have to call the White House? Where were the Air Force fighter jets? Where were the other federal agencies? Giuliani is high on his Office of Emergency Management. In that case, since the FAA knew almost immediately there was a hijacked plane, changing course and heading toward New York, why didn’t the Port Authority officials at the city airports receive an alert and pass it on?

If the federal agencies had acted promptly, passing on the news of the hijacking to the Pentagon and White House and from there to New York, it might well have been possible to fully evacuate at least one of the buildings before it was struck.

The responsibility for these massive failures lies with the Bush government, not local fire and police. Already many of the families are furious with the commission for ducking tough questions. To many of them, the commission is just another cover-up.

Original article in Village Voice

[+] Why It is Imperative to Defeat George W. Bush

by Rosemary Radford Ruether

The defining issue of the 2004 Presidential elections is to defeat George W. Bush and to remove his "team" from national political power. The reasons are critical and urgent. This is a defining moment in human history. The trajectory of global crisis in terms of poverty, environmental degradation and monopolization of dominating power and wealth by a small, mostly western, elite has grown alarmingly in the last few decades. There is a growing world consensus about the direction that needs to be taken to ameliorate this crisis, manifest in assemblies, such as the World Social Forum, meeting yearly since 2000. Humans must convert their economic system toward more sustainable ways of living together with each other and the earth.

The Bush administration, however, represents an extreme reactionary set of policies that opposes every aspect of what needs to be done to lessen this crisis and begin to turn it around. They seek to set in stone a global imperial regime that will exacerbate every aspect of this crisis and thereby assure violent debacles of inter-human conflict and environmental crisis. I will lay out five dimensions of this clash between two different directions of the human trajectory, the one represented by enlightened world opinion and the other by reactionary imperialism, represented by the Bush administration.

1. Corporate wealth and world poverty.

Since the 1970's there has been increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of a corporate elite at the expense of most humans and the environment. 86% of the world's resources are in the hands of 20% of the world's people, mostly concentrated in the top 1%. This is a formula for extreme global conflict. The Bush administration determinedly bends its domestic and foreign policy toward exacerbating this concentration of wealth by tax cuts to the rich and the use of the US military to control world resources.

2. Environment.

There is an urgent need to reverse the trends toward global warming, air and water pollution, deforestation, disappearance of species and toxic waste that erodes the fertility of the land. The Bush administration, however, has withdrawn from the Kyoto climate treaty and continually undermines all the laws that have been developed in the United States and worldwide toward ameliorating this crisis of the environment.

3. Militarism.

There is an urgent need to turn around the arms race that developed in the Cold War and to convert the world political community toward negotiated settlements of conflicts and use of the vast funds of armaments for human needs. The Bush administration represents a determined escalation of militarism, doubling the American military budget from its Cold War high, reaching almost half of all world military expenditures. It seeks to use an expanded US military for global political and economic dominance.

4. Civil liberties.

In spite of its claims to champion "democracy," the Bush administration has contempt for public opinion and self determination. Under the guise of an endless war on terrorism, it seeks to undermine basic safeguards of human rights at home and worldwide.

5. Women, sexual and reproductive rights.

Women and sexual minorities have been gradually earning the rights to control their own bodies and reproductive choices worldwide. But the Bush administration has sided with the most reactionary forces of Christian fundamentalism and the Catholic Right to oppose legal abortion, emergency contraception, sexual education, same sex rights and AIDS prevention through use of condoms in the US and worldwide.

Another four years of this administration could be a disaster for human life, making much more difficult the turn-around that is necessary and urgent.


[Rosemary Radford Ruether is Carpenter Professor of Feminist Theology, Pacific School of Religion / Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA. This essay is available on the PSR web site at http://www.psr.edu/page.cfm?l=62&id=1903.]

How the Christian Right Isn't Christian At All

by Jimmy Carter
Interview by Ayelish McGarvey
C 2004 by The American Prospect, Inc.

April 5, 2004 -- Former President Jimmy Carter, America's first evangelical Christian president, still teaches Sunday school at his Baptist church in Plains, Georgia, and he and his wife, Rosalynn, continue their human-rights work in developing nations through the Carter Center at Emory University.

In recent months, the Carters toured Togo, Ghana, and Mali to raise awareness of the public-health needs of those nations. In February, Carter spoke about the role of evangelical Christianity in democratic politics with Prospect writing fellow Ayelish McGarvey.

Ayelish McGarvey (AM): Republicans have been extremely successful at connecting religion and values to issues like the fight against terrorism, abortion, and gay rights.

Democrats have been far less adept at infusing our issues -- compassion, help for the poor, social justice -- with any sense of religious commitment or moral imperative. Why do you think that is?

Jimmy Carter (JC): When I was younger, almost all Baptists were strongly committed on a theological basis to the separation of church and state. It was only 25 years ago when there began to be a melding of the Republican Party with fundamentalist Christianity, particularly with the Southern Baptist Convention. This is a fairly new development, and I think it was brought about by the abandonment of some of the basic principles of Christianity.

First of all, we worship the prince of peace, not war. And those of us who have advocated for the resolution of international conflict in a peaceful fashion are looked upon as being unpatriotic, branded that way by right-wing religious groups, the Bush administration, and other Republicans.

Secondly, Christ was committed to compassion for the most destitute, poor, needy, and forgotten people in our society. Today there is a stark difference [between conservative ideology and Christian teaching] because most of the people most strongly committed to the Republican philosophy have adopted the proposition that help for the rich is the best way to help even poor people (by letting some of the financial benefits drip down to those most deeply in need).

I would say there has been a schism drawn -- on theology and practical politics and economics between the two groups.

AM: What has attracted conservative Christians to a party that protects corporate interests and promotes an aggressive foreign-policy agenda? How do those square?

JC: There is an element of fundamentalism involved, which involves the belief on the part of a human being that [his or her] own concept of God is the proper one. And since [he or she has] the proper concept of God, [he or she is] particularly blessed and singled out for special consideration above and beyond those who disagree with [him or her].

Secondly, anyone who does disagree with [him or her], since [he or she is] harnessed to God in a unique way, then, by definition, must be wrong. And the second step is if you are in disagreement with [his or her] concept of the way to worship, even among the Christian community, is that you are inferior to [him or her]. And then the ultimate progression of that is that you're not only different and wrong and inferior, but in some ways you are subhuman.

So there's a loss of concern even for the death of those who disagree. And this takes fundamentalism to the extreme. This is an element of the fundamentalist cause in this country.

If you are a wealthy white man, then you are naturally inclined to think that the poor are inferior and don't deserve your first consideration. If you are a wealthy white man, then you also take on the proposition that women are inherently inferior. This builds up a sense of prejudice and alienation that permeates the Christian right during these days.

AM: What issues do you see galvanizing moderate evangelicals as they go to the polls in November?

JC: I've been involved in national politics now for more than 25 years. But this year we will see the Democratic Party more united than ever before in my memory, and even the earlier history that I studied before my life began. I think we're completely united with a determination to replace the Bush administration and its fundamentalist, right-wing philosophy with the more moderate qualities that have always exemplified what our nation is: a nation committed to strength in the military. I served longer in the military than any other president since the Civil War except Dwight Eisenhower. I was a submarine officer. I used the enormous and unmatched strength of America to promote peace for other people and preserve peace for ourselves.

Now it seems as though it is an attractive thing in Washington to resort to war in the very early stage of resolving an altercation -- a completely unnecessary war that President Bush decided to launch against the Iraqis is an example of that. And I think that a reaction against that warlike attitude on the part of America to the exclusion of almost all other nations in the world -- and arousing fear in them -- is going to be a driving issue.

I think that the abandonment of environmental issues even endorsed by President Nixon when I was governor (as well as virtually all of the Republicans and Democrats) has been notable under the Bush administration.

One of the things I learned as a young Baptist boy was to be a steward of the world that God blessed us to enjoy. And I think the abandonment of basic environmental standards by the Bush administration rallies us.

And I think the third thing is the obvious orientation of the Bush administration toward Halliburton, Enron, and other major corporations. You see this in the enormous tax reductions that have been granted to people that make more than $200,000 a year. That is another issue on which the Democrats will rally a common goal.

AM: Do you think that Democrats will be able to attract Bible-believing Christians in a year that gay marriage will be used as a smokescreen to distract attention from those issues?

JC: I think so. There isn't a major candidate who has endorsed gay marriage; they are in favor of equal protection through a civil-union arrangement. I personally, in my Sunday-school lessons, don't favor the religious endorsement of a gay marriage. But I do favor equal treatment under the law for people who differ from me in sexual orientation.

AM: What about abortion? How would you speak to moderate evangelicals who withhold support for Democratic candidates on that single issue?

JC: This was an issue that I had to face when I was campaigning 25 years ago. I have always been against abortion; it's not possible for me in my own concept of Christ to believe that Jesus would favor abortion. But at the same time, I have supported the Supreme Court ruling of our country as the law of the land. And the present arrangement, whereby a woman is authorized to have an abortion in the first trimester of the pregnancy, or when the pregnancy is caused by rape or incest -- these are the things that moderates who have beliefs like mine can accept as the present circumstances in our country. The liberality of abortion is anointed by the laws of our country, including the ultimate ruling of the Supreme Court.

AM: How do you think the fundamentalist Christian right has misrepresented Christianity, as well as the democratic process?

JC: Well, what do Christians stand for, based exclusively on the words and actions of Jesus Christ? We worship him as a prince of peace. And I think almost all Christians would conclude that whenever there is an inevitable altercation -- say, between a husband and a wife, or a father and a child, or within a given community, or between two nations (including our own) -- we should make every effort to resolve those differences which arise in life through peaceful means. Therein, we should not resort to war as a way to exalt the president as the commander in chief. A commitment to peace is certainly a Christian principle that even ultraconservatives would endorse, at least by worshipping the prince of peace.

And Christ reached out almost exclusively to the poor, suffering, abandoned, deprived -- the scorned, the condemned people -- including Samaritans and those who were diseased. The alleviation of suffering was a philosophy that was enhanced and emphasized by the life of Christ. Today the ultra-right wing, in both religion and politics, has abandoned that principle of Jesus Christ's ministry.

Those are the two principal things in the practical sense that starkly separate the ultra-right Christian community from the rest of the Christian world: Do we endorse and support peace and support the alleviation of suffering among the poor and the outcast?

AM: You spent so much of your career working toward a reasonable, peaceful solution to violence and strife in Israel and Palestine. Increasing attention has been paid to traditionalist evangelicals' strong support for Israel, based on the New Testament prophecy that the reconstruction of the ancient kingdom of David will usher in the "end times" and the Second Coming of Christ. As a believer and a peacemaker, how do you respond to this?

JC: That's a completely foolish and erroneous interpretation of the Scriptures. And it has resulted in these last few years with a terrible, very costly, and bloody deterioration in the relationship between Israel and its neighbors. Every president except for George W. Bush has taken a relatively balanced position between the Israelis and their enemies, always strongly supporting Israel but recognizing that you have to negotiate and work between Israel and her neighbors in order to bring about a peaceful resolution.

It's nearly the 25th anniversary of my consummation of a treaty between Israel and Egypt -- not a word of which has ever been violated. But this administration, maybe strongly influenced by ill-advised theologians of the extreme religious right, has pretty well abandoned any real effort that could lead to a resolution of the problems between Israel and the Palestinians.

And no one can challenge me on my commitment to Israel and its right to live in peace with all its neighbors. But at the same time, there has to be a negotiated settlement; you can't just ordain the destruction of the Palestinian people, and their community and their political entity, in favor of the Israelis.

And that's what some of the extreme fundamentalist Christians have done, both to the detriment of the Israelis and the Palestinians.