Rootsie

Who Would Jesus Assassinate?
Wed, 24 Aug 2005
By Ron Jacobs

Hugo Chavez and the men who claim to speak for Jesus

Update: Hardest media job in the world: Pat Robertson’s spokesperson. After first denying that he had called for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez (which he clearly did), evangelical leader and former Republican presidential candidate (he won the Iowa primary in 1988) issued an apology today. A written statement said, “Is it right to call for assassination? No, and I apologize for that statement.” Bill Maher put it best on MSNBC’s Scarborough Country last night, saying he was hard-pressed to see the difference between a urine-soaked street preacher with a bullhorn babbling about the apocalypse and the multi-millionaire head of the Christian Broadcasting Network. Here Ron Jacobs explores the dangerous distortion of Jesus’ message in another wing of Christianity, the Catholic cult Opus Dei:

You know, when I was growing up as a Catholic, I was given many differing views of Jesus Christ. Virtually all of them were speculative, of course, and as I grew older, I became aware that most of them were based on the teacher’s particular political and cultural persuasion. The Pallotinian nuns that taught me in the first and second grades were always telling us horror stories about the communists in the Soviet Union and China and had us pray for the souls of their children every morning. The Jesuits I knew in high school provided me and my fellow catechism students with a different view of Jesus. Indeed, for most of these men Jesus was a revolutionary. How much of his revolution was spiritual and how much was social depended on their level of social and political involvement. Being a very political person, I saw Jesus as a revolutionary communist with a small “c.” Of course, there were a number of men with Roman collars at the time who were taking this perception and turning it into the basis for a social movement in many parts of the world, especially in Latin America. Many of them were Jesuits.

It is this tradition that Hugo Chavez of Venezuela recalls in his speeches and social programs. It is also this tradition, known today as liberation theology that the late pope John Paul II attacked within months of his appointment in 1978. John Paul II’s opposition to this perception of Jesus and his works were also part of the reason for the demotion of the Jesuit order as the pope’s protectors and the ascension of the right wing Catholic organization Opus Dei into that role. The new pope is even less sympathetic to this train of thought. The underlying reason for this vehement opposition to liberation theology among the Catholic hierarchy stems from its alliances with nonreligious leftists and its attacks on the Church’s role as part of the oppressive structure in the world of the peasantry. Nowhere is this role greater than it is in Latin America.

Ever since Chavez began his popular upheaval in Venezuela he has been under attack by the Catholic hierarchy in that country. In fact, members of Opus Dei were involved in the failed coup of 2000 and have been instrumental in the CIA-funded opposition movement since the coup, just as they were intimately involved in the murderous CIA-sponsored coup in September 1973 in Chile. Last month, Bishop Baltazar Porras, president of the Venezuelan bishops’ conference, said proponents of radical liberation theology are using it to weaken and divide the Church. “This is part of a plan to debilitate the Church,” Porras told The Associated Press in an interview last week. He cited a recent forum in which the Church was accused of turning her back on the poor, where Chavez garners most of his political support. “This is a new program led by a group of theologians like the ones in the times of the Sandinista rule in Nicaragua with the same arguments,” said Porras. “The argument is fundamentally anti-Catholic, anti-hierarchy.” (Catholic World New, 8/15/2005) It is quite interesting to note Porras equating being anti-hierarchy with being anti-Catholic. I wonder how the Jesus who threw the moneychangers out of the temple and challenged the Scribes and the Pharisees would feel about that equation.

Now, in addition to having the Catholic hierarchy opposed to him, Mr. Chavez has incurred the wrath of some in the evangelical community. Given the generally political conservatism of much of this community, this is not surprising. What is surprising, however, is the vehemence of this wrath. Pat Robertson, former US presidential candidate and head of the multimillion-dollar Christian Broadcast Network, called for Chavez’s assassination in a broadcast Monday night. Calling assassination ” a whole lot cheaper than starting a war” Robertson went on to say that if Chavez were killed by US covert operatives he didn’t “think any oil shipments will stop.”

Of course, for those who keep their religion close to their heart or use it only when necessary to cynically convince the public of the rightness of their actions, the comments regarding oil must strike a chord. After all, that’s the underlying reason for Washington’s (and the old guard in Venezuela) opposition to Chavez in the first place. Not only does he using Venezuelan oil revenues to help the perennially poor in Venezuela, he is also selling it to Cuba at cut rates and making deals with China, much to the chagrin of Washington. Chavez and his supporters understand this. In addition, they also understand the Jesus who inspired Father Gutierrez and his liberation theology. That was the Jesus who said: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Unfortunately, if Mr. Robertson and many others in Washington, Caracas and the Vatican have their way, Hugo Chavez may get his chance to enter that kingdom well before they do. Although I still like to think that if there is a heaven, Mr. Robertson and his ilk will be denied admission.


Is Pat Robertson Out of His Mind or in the Loop?
by Bill C. Davis

Republished from Common Dreams

There is something not only rotten but seemingly deranged in the state of mind of Republican leaders. I would call Pat Robertson a Republican leader. He did well in a few Republican primaries back in 1988 until scandal hit the whole Evangelical enterprise, which Mr. Robertson assumed was a Bush Sr./Lee Atwater conspiracy. It seemed convenient, he thought, that the scandal hit just as he was hitting his stride.

Reverend Pat made peace and perhaps a pact with the powers that be and currently has a direct line to the White House. He, with Jerry Falwell, claims to have helped make the double-barrel-two term Bush presidency possible. On Monday the iconic American Christian using the language of gangsters endorsed the assassination of Hugo Chavez so we could save 200 billion dollars. The assumption was that the only two alternatives to dealing with an elected leader who is critical of the military industrial complex running our country is to “take him out” or to wage a war. He presents the options and then chooses the less expensive one.

One does pause to wonder if he is not a loose cannon but that the direct line to the White House runs both ways. If in fact Venezuela and Iran are considering an oil embargo against the US, this may not be a random Christian perspective from the baby- faced aw-shucks father figure for the consumers of sign-on-the-dotted-line religion. Could this be a request from the top? Either Mr. Robertson is truly out of his mind or he is “useful,” a word that Rumsfeld loves to use. When asked about the comment Rumsfeld referred to Robertson as a “private citizen” and rather than condemn the comment he said, “private citizens say all kinds of things all the time. Next question.”

How would this endorsement of assassination from the giddy Evangelical be “useful” and to whom would it be useful? Does a holy Christian man rattling a saber make any sense to the essential logic of Christ? On the subject of sabers, rattling or penetrating, Christ said, if you live by the sword you die by the sword.

But here is the most amazing, confounding thing Christ said – Love your enemy. This phrase means nothing to the most boisterous Christians like Pat Robertson. To them, this phrase is invisible. In their minds, it is a soft, silly lapse in the Savior’s prescription for the salvation of the world. The Passion of Christ was a bloody canvas for paranoid sadism. The prime actors against Jesus, the alleged center of Pat Robertson’s universe, were soldiers taking orders from the likes of Mr. Robertson. Pat Robertson sees an assassin and an army as legitimate functionaries in realizing his view of a safe and decent world.

We can certainly paraphrase the question standing before the president in Crawford: “What noble cause did my son die for?” What noble cause will be served by Pat Robertson’s Fatwa?

In December 2000 the incoming administration declared Hugo Chavez a threat because he was selling oil to Cuba. And now, if Venezuela is going to block the sale of their nationalized oil to the U.S. what does that mean to a Christian leader? Does he have investments he’s worried about? Does he believe Venezuela will be a conduit for terrorism and communism and anti-Christian principles? Does he want to make that case or would he prefer that his government “off” an elected leader who just happens to urge OPEC convert officially the standard of buying oil from the dollar to the Euro?

Hugo Chavez speaks at length to his people over the TV – and he reads to them. One of his favorite authors to read to his people is Walt Whitman. At the Youth Conference in Caracas earlier this month he called the people of the U.S. “brothers” to Venezuela. He embraced the traditions of Walt Whitman and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and gave them as examples of the progressive history of the U.S. Walt Whitman understood spirit and America. Pat Robertson contradicts both.

One would think the FCC, under some aspect of the Patriot Act might revoke Robertson’s license to broadcast. If he’s out of his mind they might – if he’s in the loop – they won’t. Stay tuned.

http://www.guerrillanews.com/articles/1632/Who_Would_Jesus_Assassinate