This is the eternal question: how do we fight hate?
How especially do we fight hate when people claim that “God” has directly told them that murder, genocide and destruction are divinely sanctioned?
A terrorist act inspired by hate
A number of years ago, a horrific terrorist attack left multiple people dead and wounded in Mumbai, India. I didn’t pay much attention to the event — it was just another piece of bad news filling the newspapers and airwaves. My inner response, “It doesn’t really affect me anyway.”
Then I got an email from my oldest son, who at the time had been doing some graduate work in France. One of his classmates’ fathers was injured in the attack. Although the whole description of the attack is too long to print in full, here is a portion of his classmate’s description of the events following the moment when terrorists entered a hotel restaurant and began to shoot:
The terrorists then rounded up anyone alive (about 20 people) and made them climb the service staircase to the 18th floor. Upon reaching the 18th-floor landing, they made the people line up against a wall. One terrorist then positioned himself on the staircase going up from the landing and the other on the staircase going down from the landing.
Then, in a scene right out of the Holocaust, they simultaneously opened fire on the people. My father was towards the center of the line with his two friends on either side. Out of reflex, or presence of mind, he ducked as soon as the firing began. One bullet grazed his neck, and he fell to the floor as his two friends and several other bodies piled on top of him.
The terrorists then pumped another series of bullets into the heap of bodies to finish the job. This time a bullet hit my father in the back hip. Bent almost in double, crushed by the weight of the bodies above him, and suffocating in the torrent of blood rushing down on him from the various bodies, my father held on for ten minutes while the terrorists left the area.
After further recounting of the horrors and the eventual rescue of the four who survived this particular attack, my son’s classmate continued:
“How do we fight such hate? How do we inject humanity into such monstrosity? How do we convince those who think they kill in god’s name that no God would condone such barbarity? How do we maintain our own values and humanity when faced with such hate and provocation?”
This is the eternal question: how do we fight hate?
Does God Give Divine Sanction To Hate?
How especially do we fight hate when people insist that “God” has directly told them that murder, genocide and destruction are divinely sanctioned?
Right now, the US is involved in an “excursion,” i.e., politics-speak for a war that the US Congress has not authorized, against Iran, admittedly not the most friendly of nations.
And, according to Pete Hegseth, God is on our side and, by implication, sanctions anything necessary for US victory. Here’s how the New York Times put it, pulling from an interview with CBS News.
More than any top American military leader in recent history, Mr. Hegseth has framed U.S. military operations in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America as bigger than politics or foreign policy. Often he has imbued these actions with a Christian moral underpinning that suggests they are divinely sanctioned.
It is this view of a higher power, married to lethal American firepower, that Mr. Hegseth says gives him confidence that the United States will prevail in Iran.
“Our capabilities are better. Our will is better. Our troops are better,” he said in a recent interview with CBS News’s “60 Minutes.” “The providence of our almighty God is there protecting those troops, and we’re committed to this mission.”
So, God is protecting our troops—well, except for those who have already died. God, however, is clearly not protecting the 100 schoolchildren and multiple adults who were killed by a US-manufactured-and-fired weapon.
Amnesty International’s analysis of audiovisual evidence of missile strikes on the adjacent IRGC compound and of missile remnants published by state media in Iran indicate that a US-manufactured Tomahawk missile was likely used for the attack. Tomahawk missiles are used exclusively by US forces in this conflict and are precision-guided missiles.
So, the “God” on the side of the US has no care or concern for innocent Iranian schoolchildren. That’s because . . . we are such a righteous nation? Because when we hate, it’s OK, but when Iranians hate, it’s bad?
Now, I’m not here to defend the truly despicable Iranian regime, whose leaders are also sure they are ruling and destroying under a divine mandate. But if God sanctions US hate—and the destruction that follows—what does that say about this God?
And what about these words, recorded in the very Bible happily quoted by those who are sure God not only approves of but also mandates their hate and the destruction they order others to carry out, “Bless those who persecute you. Bless and curse not.”
Somehow, those biblical words never manage to surface—or are rudely discarded when someone quotes them.
We ALL Claim God Is On Our Side
Throughout history, people have claimed God on their side for the most atrocious crimes against humanity. What the US is doing right now, claiming a mandate from the Holy God for this undeclared but very real war, is a desecration of everything called holy.
Do we as a nation have the right to defend ourselves, to arm ourselves, to be prepared for nasty stuff happening? Darn right. Do we need to fight back, to stop those who attack us, or our allies? Absolutely.
But we do NOT have the right to claim that God is delighted with the decision of a few men who need to feel more manly and powerful and thus raise the hate level against and rain destruction upon a nation that even they know does not have the capability to attack us.
This solves exactly nothing and makes us no better than the terrorists in that hotel in Mumbai many years ago. We are better than this. Or at least we should be.
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