Facts and Impressions
April 18, 2006
The more I think about it I realize that my questioners are correct in that what I write is primarily impressions as fact facts are so hard to come by. So with that in mind let me share some more impressions and you consider them based on your understanding of Jesus of Nazareth, the God he made known, and how his challenge to love one another as he loved us, makes his difference in our reactions.
I recently realized I could read an English version of Aljazeera on the internet. (You can get it for yourself very simply on Aljazeera.net.) On April 5 of this year a woman by the name of Soumaya Ganoushi wrote a paper on “The birth of a global civil society” which was printed in this paper. After pointing out the “ideological erosion of the old political parties,” she states that “politics has turned into the art of manipulating public opinion in a Machiavellian world that divorces politics from ethics and rejects substance for form, great goals for image and sound bite.” I might add that even when there are great goals proclaimed they are often just turned into sound bites. She goes on, “The great political narratives are, however, far from dead… a new political phenomenon has recently risen to the surface to reclaim the ideals long abandoned…Its architects are drawn from opposite ends of the political and cultural spectrum, from socialists, trade unionists and human rights activists, to Christians, Muslims and other religious groups.
…this coalition born in the wake of the Iraq invasion revolves around a set of core domestic and foreign issues. These range from the preservation of civil and individual liberties, to the defence of the sovereignty of nations and the demand for a more equitable, more balanced world order.“ She calls this a global civil society.
…Unilateralism and the notion of pre-emptive strikes have acted as the midwife for the birth of this cross cultural, cross political global phenomenon. The strikes on Afghanistan, crackdown on civil and individual liberties, and occupation of Iraq have indeed only given greater momentum to the movement of resistance to American world dominance not only in the countries of the South, but in London, New York, Sydney, Rome, Paris and across the West itself.” She goes on to discuss the specific Muslim reaction in all of this and then sums up “To the eyes of many across the Muslim world, the stop the war movement and evolving global civil society have unveiled another West, different from Bush’s and Blair’s, the West of carpet bombs, Abu Gharaib and Guantanamo Bay. To these, New York, London, Madrid, and Rome are no longer the command centres of armies and war fleets only, but great capitals of protest and popular mobilisation against aggression and expansionism too. They are episodes in an unfolding global conflict over the shape of the world order, the structures of international relations and the right of nations to sovereignty and self-determination.”
I cannot due justice to her whole argument in this page. However, I think there is enough to have us all take another look at how we can place Jesus in the midst of the change taking place all around us.
John Davey