The most horrible story in the Bible is told in Judges 19-21. Here we read the tragic tale of a reluctant young bride who is assaulted, raped, and murdered by criminals from the tribe of Benjamin. The unfeeling husband dismembers her body and sends the pieces throughout Israel in witness to the foul deed. The other tribes unite to punish the guilty, and demand that Benjamin hand over the criminals. For reasons that are not recorded, “the Benjaminites would not listen to their fellow Israelites.” (Judges 20:13b) They gird for war instead.

In the course of that war tens of thousands of Israelites are killed. The tribe of Benjamin is wiped out, except for a small remnant of 600 men who flee to the Rock of Rimmon. Israel mourns the destruction of their brother tribe, and eventually uses more war and trickery to arrange wives for the remnant, so that the tribe of Benjamin will not die out completely.

This happened in roughly 1,100 BC. Perhaps the Benjaminites were unaware that a similar fate had befallen another city about 100 years earlier – a city that had also refused to correct its own wrongdoing, but had armed themselves defiantly for war instead. The name of that city was Troy.

As recounted in Homer’s Illiad and brought again to life by Brad Pitt and Eric Bana in the movie Troy, a few Trojans had committed a grave sin against their neighbors. Prince Paris of Troy had stolen away Queen Helen of Sparta from her lawful husband Menelaus. Instead of returning Helen with apologies as by all rights he should have done, King Priam resolved to fight the Greeks instead. Nobody claimed that stealing another man’s wife was right, but they held their nationalism above what was right and wrong.

And for that sin, they died.

I find this stuff fascinating even if nobody else does. This thought is still under development, but what I see here is a pattern in history. Here’s how it works:

1. A small band of people commit a crime, a deed that everybody agrees is wrong. The victims are members of another ethnic or nationalist group.
2. The offended group (Israelites, Greeks) demands punishment of the guilty persons.
3. The offending group (Benjaminites, Trojans) refuses these demands. They turn the problem into an ethnic/nationalist conflict instead. In doing so, they bring the guilt for the original crime upon themselves.
4. The offended group prevails in war. After great loss of life on both sides, the offending group is utterly destroyed. 

The Book of Judges and the Trojan War are relevant today. In Darfur the Janjaweed militia commit atrocities against Sudanese villagers. The U.S. and U.N. demand that Khartoum disarm the militia. In response, the Sudanese government attempts to whip up nationalist feeling and portray the conflict as the nation of Sudan against those nasty Western imperialists.

In April in Fallujah, Iraq, terrorists murder four American contractors and hang their mutilated bodies from a bridge. No rational person claims this is right, but when coalition forces demand the murderers be turned over for justice, the leaders in Fallujah beat the drums of ethnic/nationalistic/religious war instead. They portray the crime in terms of Islamic jihad, instead of some out-of-control terrorists committing crimes that Islam forbids. The original guilt was confined to a small group of people, but by offering sanctuary to terrorists and not fixing their own problem, the Fallujans have taken the guilt upon all themselves.

We saw the consequences of the same history pattern this week: The city of Fallujah depopulated and severely damaged by the coalition assault. Thousands of terrorists killed (no regret there). Many civilians wounded and killed.

I saw this same pattern occur in Serbia during the 1990s. Ethnic and nationalistic pride were held higher than what was right and wrong. Muslim civilians were massacred at Srebrenica. Serbia later paid the price. Unfortunately, so did lots of innocent people. If the Taliban had turned over bin Laden they would probably still be in power.

The moral lesson here is that if you don’t fix your own moral problem, somebody else will. And you probably won’t like the way they go about fixing it.

Yusuf Islam, formerly Cat Stevens, formerly Stephen Georgiou, was denied entry to the United States and returned to London:

He [Cat Stevens / Yusuf Islam] was widely reported to have endorsed the late Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni’s 1989 decree calling for the death of British novelist Salman Rushdie after Khomeni said Rushdie’s novel, “The Satanic Verses,” was blasphemous. 

But Islam has said his comments were taken out of context by a reporter, and that he opposed anyone “taking the law into their own hands.” 

Here’s what I remember of the Salman Rushdie “Satanic Verses” incident (15 years after the fact): After Khomeini issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie and ordered Muslims to kill him, some reporters asked Stevens about the death sentence. Yusuf Islam’s response was something like this: “Well, blasphemy against the Koran is a very serious matter. I acknowledge the authority of Muslim religious leaders, and in principle I support their decrees.” The headlines the next day read: 

Cat Stevens Says Rushdie Must Die 

Of course Stevens hit the roof when he read the newspaper, and he angrily called a press conference. He said his comments had been taken out of context, that his position had been exaggerated, and so on. 

I think he deserved it. One does not equivocate and give vague statements of implicit support when death sentences are issued publicly against authors of books. Either Khomeini is an out-of-control theocratic idiot or he’s a revered Imam of the true Islamic faith. Khomeni didn’t leave us with many choices in the middle. 

Yusuf Islam seems to have learned his lesson: “He also condemned the recent attack on a school in the southern Russian town of Beslan that killed more than 300 people, many of them children.” Good for him. Maybe he’ll donate money or blood to help them.

By the way, nobody claims that Cat Stevens is a terrorist, despite the disingenuous remarks by him and some American Muslims like Ibrahim Hooper (spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations). The complaint is that some of the charities he supports may be funneling money toward non-charitable causes that support terrorism.

Here’s some more background on the creator of “Tea for the Tillerman”

(This is a blog. I’m supposed to be provocative, right?) Humanity’s march toward righteousness continues. From CNN.com:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/africa/08/30/war.peace.ap/index.html

Despite headlines, global war casualties decline 

Monday, August 30, 2004 Posted: 12:13 PM EDT (1613 GMT) 

(AP) — The chilling sights and sounds of war fill newspapers and television screens worldwide, but war itself is in decline, peace researchers report. 

In fact, the number killed in battle has fallen to its lowest point in the post-World War II period, dipping below 20,000 a year by one measure. Peacemaking missions, meantime, are growing in number. 

“International engagement is blossoming,” said American scholar Monty G. Marshall. “There’s been an enormous amount of activity to try to end these conflicts. 

. . . 

A collaboration with Sweden’s Uppsala University, that report will conservatively estimate battle-related deaths worldwide at 15,000 in 2002 and, because of the Iraq war, rising to 20,000 in 2003. Those estimates are sharply down from annual tolls ranging from 40,000 to 100,000 in the 1990’s, a time of major costly conflicts in such places as the former Zaire and southern Sudan, and from a post-World War II peak of 700,000 in 1951. 

The article cites studies by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the Canadian organization Project Ploughshare, and the Human Security Report from the University of British Columbia. Okay, I’m kidding about the “march toward righteousness”, but I thought that story ought to be received as good news. 

Monty Marshall and others attribute the cause of the decline to the end of the Cold War’s aftermath, and to peacemaking and peacekeeping missions, often under U.N. auspices. And you thought Kofi Annan was just some annoying guy who runs onto the battlefield just as American armies are lined up ready to give the bad guy what he deserves! You may still be correct about that, but these researchers think that some good is being accomplished by peace missions that embody what the U.N. is supposed to be. 

The fly in the ointment here is that humans have thought up other ways to be nasty to each other that do not involve armed conflict. “The Canadian center’s director, Andrew Mack, said the figures don’t include deaths from war-induced starvation and disease, deaths from ethnic conflicts not involving states, or unopposed massacres, such as in Rwanda in 1994.” So North Korean leader Kim Jong Il can still allow 2-3 million people to starve to death during 1994-1998, and it won’t get added to the number of combat deaths. 

Probably the encouraging statistics from 2003 will not comfort any parents who lost a child in the Beslan terrorist attack on a school this past week. Still, the statistics suggest that for every Beslan school there are two or more schools where children coming running out to their waiting parents, hug them, and travel happily homeward with nary a terrorist in sight. Is Vladimir Putin our friend? I suppose not. However, Christian theology includes the idea of treating your adversary kindly in his hour of need, and possibly making him your friend. See the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:25-37 for details. God can make good come out of evil (Genesis 50:20). 

As George Bush said shortly after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks: “Hug your children!” Take them on whitewater rafting trips. And love their mother with all your heart.

Orin Judd links to a long piece by Bruce Bowers in the Hudson review about European/American relations based upon experiences in Europe. It’s well worth the time to read.

One of the crucial differences between Europe and America is that Europe is full of people who decided to stay and America is full of people (and their descendants) who decided to leave. You can almost imagine a diffusion process where on one side of the Atlantic you have the least volatile people and on the other the most. I suppose it isn’t a surprise then that Europe has increasingly looked to comfort and security while American continues to look to opportunity and success. In a sense on of the problems with Europe really is America — it’s attracted the strivers and the boat rockers that Europe needs. That outflow of people has been interrupted for sixty years from the old Eastern bloc countries — another difference between our old allies and our new ones.