Gay N Gay: haiti

Showing posts with label haiti. Show all posts

Planned Statehood

I just finished reading Building a More Resilient Haitian State, a Rand Corporation report that was published in the wake of the 2010 earthquake that devastated Haiti. It is somewhat better than I expected it to be, since it acknowledges the destructive roles that both France and the US have played in Haitian history -- up until the election of Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the Presidency in 1990,

Planned Statehood

Democracy, Whiskey, Sexy Redux

This (via, via) is really depressing.

The clip comes from an alternative-media source, but it could just as easily be CNN. There's the same exclusion of historical context, of the past and present role of the US in Haiti's problems. I'm certainly not going to complain because US troops distributed food and water to hungry people, but it's primarily a photo op, like a politician kissing babies. American soldiers often distribute goodies to the locals in countries they occupy; it's a cliche, and while it's better than shooting people in the head or torturing them or running them over with tanks, they do those things too. (In comments at the original post, the reporter writes, "Like Captain Selmo says in the video, it’s not normally what they do. A telling statement." But not really news except to people who prefer to ignore the norm in favor of the photo op.)

Notice too that they ran out of supplies with long lines still waiting -- oh, too bad, go home now (and they were nervous, fingering their weapons, that the crowd would turn on them, but it didn't). "For me [the Americans] can take the whole country," says one woman. Oh, hadn't you noticed? We already have, several times, and then left it in the hands of military dictators, corrupt aristocrats and multinational corporations. As the current troop occupation shows, we'll take it again whenever we feel like it.

As for Aristide, there is no chance the US will ever let him come back. The US took him out of Haiti in 2004, and has kept Haiti on a tight rein since then, making sure that there's no danger democracy will break out again.

Democracy, Whiskey, Sexy Redux

This (via, via) is really depressing.The clip comes from an alternative-media source, but it could just as easily be CNN. There's the same exclusion of historical context, of the past and present role of the US in Haiti's problems. I'm certainly not going to complain because US troops distributed food and water to hungry people, but it's primarily a photo op, like a politician kissing babies.

Democracy, Whiskey, Sexy Redux

Port au Prince of Peace

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The Baptist missionaries accused of kidnapping 33 children have been indicted in Haiti, and of course it's become a sideshow. The MSNBC clip above doesn't reassure me, considering its slant. According to this reporter (who can't pronounce "Port au Prince" correctly -- it's not "ow" but closer to "oh"), the children's parents are now saying they gave their children to the missionaries, with promises that they'd be able to see them later on. But the missionaries keep sticking their feet in it, claiming that they were looking for children who were orphaned or had been "abandoned" by living parents, and these children clearly don't fit those criteria. Even if the missionaries weren't "trafficking," they still appear to have been careless of legalities and ethical concerns, waving around flyers for their Dominican orphanage, with a color picture of a swimming pool, in front of desperate parents. Their lawyer is now trying to claim the missionaries were "duped" by their Haitian confederates into thinking they had the proper papers, though previous reports have them admitting that they had no papers and didn't think they needed any.

And I still can't help wondering if taking the kids across the border into another country, away from their families, is really the most cost-effective way of giving them the "help" the missionaries say they were trying, in their bumbling, well-intentioned way to provide. As I suggested before, it sounds like they just thought this was an easy way to get some free children they could indoctrinate into their particular cult, blithely ignoring the fact that they were already Christians.

Their leader babbles that they trust in God, the same God who killed over 150,000 Haitians with that earthquake. "Most of the Americans, who have been in jail since last Friday, were covered with severe mosquito bites," the MSNBC story reports. "The prosecutor asked them at one point if they wanted to see a doctor." That's not how Christian tales of martyrdom are supposed to go: God is supposed to protect his agents in prison from all harm, like Daniel in the lions' den. I don't think they should be convicted of kidnapping, and I doubt that the US government will allow them to languish in a Haitian jail for long anyway. Just kicking them out of the country with a warning, and letting them know that there are other ways to help the poor than taking away their children, should be enough. We'll see how it turns out.

Port au Prince of Peace

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economyThe Baptist missionaries accused of kidnapping 33 children have been indicted in Haiti, and of course it's become a sideshow. The MSNBC clip above doesn't reassure me, considering its slant. According to this reporter (who can't pronounce "Port au Prince" correctly -- it's not "ow" but closer to "oh"), the children's

Port au Prince of Peace

In Never Never Land

When I heard about the American Baptist missionaries who have been arrested for trying to take allegedly orphaned Haitian children out of Haiti, allegedly to a new institution in the neighboring Dominican Republic, I remembered an incident that occurred here in Bloomington in the 1970s. A local evangelical church sent its Sunday School bus around to some local playgrounds, including one near University married housing, where many foreign students lived. The idea was to invite children to come to its Sunday school, where they would be exposed to the Gospel and find hope of salvation. To the church's great surprise, many parents thought that they should at least be consulted before their children were whisked away by strangers. The church's leaders maintained their good intentions, their purity of motive, and plaintively lamented the outsiders' inability to understand that they only wanted good things for these children. Who, they protested, could object to a child's going to Sunday school?

It was hard for me not to see their defense as disingenuous. At the very least, if the children's parents -- and therefore the children -- already had a non-Christian religion of their own, they might very well object to their children's being taken away for indoctrination by Christians. The parents might just as easily have been Christians, though evangelicals often do not consider non-evangelical Christians (or even evangelicals of different flavors) to be Christians. The most obvious response to the church leaders' arguments, I thought, would be to ask them how they would react if the local synagogue or mosque -- or for that matter, one of the Roman Catholic churches -- had sent a bus to the local Christian schools to round up children for perfectly innocent visits to their institutions of spiritual instruction.

I'd still like to know how they would answer that question. I imagine they simply did not regard parents from competing sects as having any rights at all; as I remember it, they never did acknowledge that parents of other religions might have legitimate objections to what they were doing. Not that I think they were especially malicious -- I just don't think that people outside their church were real to them. (Readers may remember the time a Christian college student asked why heterosexuals shouldn't decide that homosexuals were not fit parents and take their children from them, so I asked her how she would feel if Protestants took Catholics' children from them on the same ground, or if mainline Episcopalians took evangelicals' children from them. Unable or unwilling to see the analogy, she became quite upset at me, accusing me of religious intolerance; so did the graduate student teaching the class in which our panel was speaking.)

Something similar seems to have been going on in the minds of those Idaho Baptists in Haiti. I'm sure their intentions were pure, and that's the problem: they were so pure in heart, mind, and spirit that reality never impinged on their mission plan. It's apparently been established that most of the children had living parents or other adult relatives who had not given up their claims on their children. The Austrian children's aid charity SOS Children's Villages told the Guardian that "According to a 12-year-old girl, she and her family had been told she was going to a boarding school in the Dominican Republic."

The Telegraph's religion writer, the amusingly named Will Heaven, splutters:

So, bearing this in mind, why don’t we listen to the version of events from the Christian group? Laura Sillsby, one of those being held in Port-au-Prince, said: “We had permission from the Dominican Republic government to bring the children to an orphanage that we have there.” And where did the children come from? “We have a Baptist minister here (in Port-au-Prince) whose orphanage totally collapsed and he asked us to take the children to the orphanage in the Dominican Republic,” she replied. “They accuse us of children trafficking. This is something I would never do. We were not trying to do something wrong.”

Of course we should listen to the version of everyone involved. Unfortunately, Mr. Heaven doesn't seem to be interested in listening to the children's version of events. Notice, too, how he refers to the missionaries' side as "the Christian" one. Most Haitians are Roman Catholics. The children and their families are Christians too. So why not listen to the other Christians' version of events?

The Associated Press also tried to divert attention from the real issues, with a story that reports parents in one Haitian "tent camp" saying that they saw nothing wrong with giving their children to foreigners, in hopes they would have a better life in America or Europe. Fair enough, but I don't see why the Baptists preferred to take children with living families who had not chosen to give them up for adoption, when so many other children and parents were (literally) going begging. The AP story admits, though, that "The church group's own mission statement said it planned to spend only hours in the devastated capital, quickly identifying children without immediate families and busing them to a rented hotel in the Dominican Republic without bothering to get permission from the Haitian government." Given the history of US interference in Haiti over the past two centuries, the group's lack of interest in dealing with the Haitian government seems high-handed, to put it gently.

And I'm sure that the good Baptists were not trying to do something wrong; the trouble is that they have a rather distorted version of what is wrong and what is right, as their conduct shows. They're members of the Southern Baptist Convention, whose record on many social issues leaves something to be desired. Back in Idaho, the senior pastor of the missionary's home church told the AP that they acted "because we believe that Christ has asked us to take the gospel of Jesus Christ to the whole world, and that includes children." Again, it seems not to have occurred to them that Haitians, as Catholics, would already have received the gospel of Jesus Christ; Baptists aren't terribly fond of Roman Catholicism anyway. Nor does it occur to them that they could bring the gospel to Haitian children without spiriting them away from their families -- but then, their families were Papists (or worse), and probably would have objected to their children's being saved. The missionaries simply followed the teaching of Christ that a Christian's real family is not flesh and blood, but "whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother" (Mark 3:35).

"Abduction" and "stealing" are strong words. These Baptists seem to have thought that Haitian children could be plucked from the trees, that as Christians and as Americans they could do whatever they wanted. To do something wrong implies that they saw other people as, well, people, with interests and wishes of their own; this doesn't seem to have occurred to them at all. Only their motives and wishes mattered. I'd like to think that their experience in Haiti will give them something to think about, but so far they seem to be too busy shutting down their minds as they protest their innocence to do any thinking.

In Never Never Land

I Burn Down Your Cities, How Blind You Must Be

President Obama's ... well, whatever it is, it's in the current issue of Newsweek, as we were warned it would be. To call it an article is a stretch. It has no real content; it's just a gaseous effusion of high-sounding rhetoric, the sort of thing you don't need to read or listen to because it just is. You stand there with your hand over your heart and your eyes on the flag, and listen to the boring man drone on.

But above all, we act for a very simple reason: in times of tragedy, the United States of America steps forward and helps. That is who we are. That is what we do. For decades, America's leadership has been founded in part on the fact that we do not use our power to subjugate others, we use it to lift them up—whether it was rebuilding our former adversaries after World War II, dropping food and water to the people of Berlin, or helping the people of Bosnia and Kosovo rebuild their lives and their nations.

This is purest moonshine. The US does, and often has, used its power to subjugate others. I'm not keeping score, but in my present mood I'd say we've done it more often than not. Obama knows better, or used to. Though, as often as not, there was no need to subjugate when we could simply exploit, as Naomi Klein reminds us on the Newsweek site; but she also links to some good news at her own webpage, which is a good resource for those interested in what else is going on in Haiti. See, for example, Rebecca Solnit's piece. Newsweek tries to undercut Klein, though, with another article, an interview with Klein misleadingly titled "Naomi Klein Sees Exploitation in Rescue Missions." (It's reminiscent of the responses to Peter Hallward's Guardian article.) How many people will read past that title? You should. Klein answers the interviewer's stupid questions very effectively.

Other writers at Newsweek are less vague and therefore more obnoxious than Obama. John Meacham, for example, argues that humanitarianism is good policy:

As FDR noted elsewhere, experience has taught the United States that Emerson was right: the only way to have a friend is to be one. The world watches how we act toward those less fortunate than ourselves—and just about everybody on earth is less fortunate than we are. Rebuilding Haiti will not kill jihadists in Afghanistan, Somalia, or Yemen. It will not calm Iraq. It will not slow Iran's march toward a nuclear weapon. Yet it will show us to advantage—a great power doing good, even when the do-gooding is outside a realist's flinty calculus of a national interest. ...

Then there is what my colleague John Barry calls the "old-fashioned but real" interest in perpetuating the Monroe Doctrine. "I can easily foresee that Russia and, especially, China may choose to tweak Obama by mounting very public relief efforts in Haiti," John says. Hugo Chávez and his comrades will also capitalize on any impression that America is ignoring Haiti.

Meacham's opening summary of US policy toward Haiti ends, conveniently, with Woodrow Wilson's 1915 invasion, with no mention of intervening events (for which, again, read Peter Hallward), "history suggests that we won't stay the course", though we always have before, to the Haitians' great cost. But Meacham can't take his eyes off the calculator for a nanosecond. Why does he assume that Russia and, especially, China don't want to be good neighbors too, outside a realist's flinty calculus of a national interest? The world -- meaning everyone but the US -- is probably aware of Cuba's relief efforts in Haiti, as it is of Cuba's past relief efforts around the world. And the world is also aware of past US interference in Haiti: Chavez and John Barry's other bogeymen are not likely to worry too much about the US "ignoring Haiti" -- rather the people (not necessarily the governments) of the world will be watching about how the US imposes itself on Haiti.

Finally, in an article only partially available online, one Lisa Miller sets out to justify the ways of God to man. She mentions Pat Robertson's much-vilified remarks on the disaster; quotes Bart Ehrman, bless him, on Robertson -- "If that happened to the Haitians because they're so sinful, then why hasn't it happened to him?" -- then turns to Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People, a title that was often deservedly parodied in its day.

Kushner sniffs, "I think that it's supreme hubris to think you can read God's mind," then shows his own hubris by explaining that "The will of God is not to send us the disaster, but to send us the disaster to overcome." How does he know? Surely he hasn't been reading God's mind; maybe they were talking on the phone the other day. But as Ehrman says, this is no answer either. It takes, well, hubris to tell people who've watched their families die that they should just make the best of it, grow spiritually, and "overcome." I've quoted before the opinion I share, that I'd rather believe there is Nobody out there, than believe there is Someone who watches and does nothing -- let alone "sends us the disaster to overcome." Rabbi Kushner is, in his own way, as disgusting as Pat Robertson.

Did someone mention hope? To each his or her own, but I don't see much hope in a belief system which holds that a big guy in the sky will kick over every sandcastle we puny mortals build, just to see us scurry to build it up again, and perhaps to weep great salty tears in sympathy with us. Lucy snatching the football away from Charlie Brown is a saint by comparison.

I Burn Down Your Cities, How Blind You Must Be

The Way We Argue Now

Peter Hallward's piece on Haiti last week filled in most of the gaps that I'd noticed in mainstream / corporate news coverage. This one, for example:

Aristide's own government (elected by some 75% of the electorate) was the latest victim of such interference, when it was overthrown by an internationally sponsored coup in 2004 that killed several thousand people and left much of the population smouldering in resentment. The UN has subsequently maintained a large and enormously expensive stabilisation and pacification force in the country.
Haiti is now a country where, according to the best available study, around 75% of the population "lives on less than $2 per day, and 56% – four and a half million people – live on less than $1 per day". Decades of neoliberal "adjustment" and neo-imperial intervention have robbed its government of any significant capacity to invest in its people or to regulate its economy. Punitive international trade and financial arrangements ensure that such destitution and impotence will remain a structural fact of Haitian life for the foreseeable future.
...The same countries scrambling to send emergency help to Haiti now, however, have during the last five years consistently voted against any extension of the UN mission's mandate beyond its immediate military purpose. Proposals to divert some of this "investment" towards poverty reduction or agrarian development have been blocked, in keeping with the long-term patterns that continue to shape the distribution of international "aid".
The same storms that killed so many in 2008 hit Cuba just as hard but killed only four people. Cuba has escaped the worst effects of neoliberal "reform", and its government retains a capacity to defend its people from disaster. If we are serious about helping Haiti through this latest crisis then we should take this comparative point on board. Along with sending emergency relief, we should ask what we can do to facilitate the self-empowerment of Haiti's people and public institutions. If we are serious about helping we need to stop trying to control Haiti's government, to pacify its citizens, and to exploit its economy. And then we need to start paying for at least some of the damage we've already done.

I thought that was fairly clear and entirely reasonable. But it wasn't, apparently, to some of the Guardian's commenters, who seemed bent on giving Youtube commenters a run for their money as the world's stupidest. Here, for example, is the very first one in its entirety: "I think we should stop oppressing Africa with aid as well." As you can see from what I quoted, Hallward urges us to send emergency relief. What he does consider oppressive is the regime imposed by US and other foreign interference, which twice overturned Haiti's elected government by violence. Another commenter hastened to show the same careful misunderstanding: "I was going to send some American dollars to help, but now I understand that would be classified as 'neoliberal 'adjustment' and neo-imperial intervention'." And so on, and on, and on.

Others fell back on the Let's-Not-Bother-With-the-Past-Let's-Do-What-We-Can-Now line: "You can't bring history into this." Or: "[Haiti's] problems are not our fault." Or, even more beautifully, "Are you absolutely sure that this is a good time to be scoring poltical [sic] points?" (Here and here as well.) Of course there's no reason why we can't do both, and again, Hallward was explicit about the importance of sending emergency relief now while allowing Haitians to run their own country in the future.

Another fastened onto Hallward's crimethink about Cuba: "Personally I think not having the freedom to express dissent against your goverment to be a disaster. The rest of the article is not even worth commenting upon". Later, "What the Cuban government is concerned with protecting is its own position of power. Why else would so many people want to leave the 'socialist paradise'?"

The trouble here is that Haitians didn't have the freedom to express dissent against their government for most of the twentieth century, and when they succeeded in electing a government they wanted, against terrible repression, it was overturned with US and other foreign support. The US didn't object to Castro because he's a dictator; if he were our kind of dictator -- a Duvalier, an Emmanuel Constant, a Somoza, a Marcos -- he'd have received lots of US money and training for his secret police torturers. (We insist on the secret police torturers.) The US had no objection to dictatorship in Haiti; it was democracy that it feared. And Haitians by the tens of thousands want to leave the capitalist paradise that the international community has imposed on them. The US, mindful that Haiti is a free country (unlike Cuba), regularly sends them right back so they can work in free-trade sweatshops for 38 cents an hour. It's to Obama's limited credit that, because of the earthquake emergency, he has granted a stay of deportation for Haitian refugees currently in the US. But when things return to normal -- Haitian normal -- it's a safe bet that he'll revert to continuing Bush's policy and send them back.

As Lady Augusta Bracknell sagely remarked a century ago, "Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever." That certainly seems to be the case with the commenters on Hallward's article. Their responses cast light on the way that people think, or don't think, about difficult matters.

The Way We Argue Now

Peter Hallward's piece on Haiti last week filled in most of the gaps that I'd noticed in mainstream / corporate news coverage. This one, for example:Aristide's own government (elected by some 75% of the electorate) was the latest victim of such interference, when it was overthrown by an internationally sponsored coup in 2004 that killed several thousand people and left much of the population

The Way We Argue Now

Haiti: Give Sphere a Troutman, It'll Generate Spin for the Rest of the News Cycle

The earthquake in Haiti is horrifying, and I'm glad that so many people care, and that so much is being done to try to help.

Some predictable media-whoring is going on, of course. Tiger Woods, we're told, is keeping a low profile since his scandal broke, but Russell Simmons told the New York Daily News that Woods is "considering" a $3 million dollar donation to help Haiti. Well, he can certainly afford it, and if he comes through, his motives don't matter. (Update.) Rush Limbaugh argued that Haiti shouldn't receive aid. Pat Robertson said that the earthquake was God's punishment (and having read the Bible, I wouldn't put it past him) for Haitians' allegedly having cut a deal with Satan; I'm not sure whether Robertson was referring to Voudoun or to the slave uprising that won their independence in the first place, but I'm betting on the latter. Slave revolts are only the first step down the slippery slope that leads to gay marriage. President Obama has agreed to write a cover story about Haiti for Newsweek, which is sure to exhibit the same historical accuracy and depth of analysis as all of his public statements. But this sort of thing is, as I said, predictable, and not worth worrying much about.

What bothers me a little more is the absence of historical context in much of the mainstream news coverage. Again, in the short run it's not important as long as the media are drumming up concern and help, but in the long run it does matter since the earthquake is really just a cap to centuries of misery imposed on Haiti from without. Democracy Now!, whose reports I linked to at the beginning of this post, is an exception, but then they're not mainstream. Probably only DN! would feature a guest who was even aware of the irony of Obama's appointing George W. Bush and Bill Clinton to coordinate the US aid program:

RANDALL ROBINSON: Well, Amy, I’m, of course, troubled by that. I don’t think this is the time—neither the time nor the place to discuss those things that have troubled me for a long time in the history of American policy towards Haiti. Now the focus must be upon the rescue efforts that are underway to save lives.
But I hope that this experience, this disaster, causes American media to take a keener look at Haiti, at the Haitian people, at their wonderful creativity, at their art, at their culture, and what they’ve had to bear. It has been described to the American people as a problem of their own making. Well, that’s simply not the case. Haiti has been, of course, put upon by outside powers for its whole post-slavery history, from 1804 up until the present.
Of course, President Bush was responsible for destroying Haitian democracy in 2004, when he and American forces abducted President Aristide and his wife, taking them off to Africa, and they are now in South Africa. President Clinton has largely sponsored a program of economic development that supports the idea of sweatshops. Haitians in Haiti today make 38 cents an hour. They don’t make a high enough wage to pay for their lunch and transportation to and from work. But this is the kind of economic program that President Clinton has supported. I think that is sad, that these two should be joined in this kind of effort. It sends, I think, the wrong kind of signal. But that is not what we should focus on now. We should focus on saving lives.

But in the last analysis, I hope that American media will not just continue to—the refrain of Haiti being the poorest country in the western hemisphere, but will come to ask the question, why?

Most of what I'm seeing doesn't bother to ask that question, and it is not because the writers want to focus firmly on what must be done now, without fussing over the past. This writer, for example, who modestly confesses that she "traveled with an honorary title, U.N. Citizen Ambassador", laments that

Haiti was so destitute, so broken. ... The hurricanes that devastated Haiti, particularly the town of Gonaives, in 2004 and 2008 made planning a priority. The priority. But for most of its existence, Haiti has had a highly centralized government, with local authorities either invisible or impotent ... It's a problem that all the humanitarians in the country felt they contributed to: a culture of dependence. The phrase I heard most in Haiti, from everyone at every level of society was, "Give a man a fish, he eats for a day ..."

But the needs remained. Haiti's problems were complicated, old and typical. Haiti was ruled by autocrats for so many years that it seemed no one shared any sense of national identity. If the country doesn't serve you, why should you serve it?

Well, you know how it is. Haiti's problems are old. Things are bad, that's all. It's nobody's fault. The actual history that produced these problems seems to be entirely unknown to Emily Troutman (and the article as a whole is even more offensive than this excerpt suggests), especially the grass-roots political movement that showed that Haitians do indeed have "a sense of national identity" and political dedication that puts most Americans to shame. That's why they had to be stopped, and stopped, and stopped again.

I was in a chat room where Haiti was being mentioned from time to time, and one participant declared that Haiti could be "a paradise 10 years from now." I asked him who it would be a paradise for (the Haitians? tourists? multinational corporations who are in heaven when they pay workers 38 cents and hour?) but couldn't get him to elaborate. Naomi Klein did elaborate, however. The vultures are hovering, and this disaster is just the opportunity they're waiting for.

On Facebook, my old friend the minister is saying nice things, and of course urging people to help. He's properly embarrassed by Robertson's rant, of course, but why? I mean, yes, it's bad PR, but it also goes back to a question I addressed some time ago. Most people would agree that we should judge religions by their best adherents, not by their worst (though most people judge competing sects by their worst adherents). But how do you decide who are the best and who are the worst? Robertson's position is biblical enough. King David took a census, and Yahweh punished him by sending a plague that killed 70,000 people. According to 2 Samuel 24, Yahweh incited David to take the census; the Chronicler (1 Chronicles 21) solved the problem by claiming that Satan incited David to take the census, which only implies that Yahweh is Satan. If you want to argue that this doesn't count because the Old Testament God is a God of Wrath, Jesus is reported to have said that Jerusalem would be destroyed because Israel had failed to recognize him as Messiah. This doesn't make any more sense, really, because if Israel had recognized Jesus as the Messiah, he would not have been crucified and mankind could not have been saved by Jesus' saving sacrificial blood.

Beyond this, natural disasters are conventionally known as acts of God. Most modern Christians, even very conservative ones, are uncomfortable about this, but it's traditional Christian doctrine that Yahweh is not just the creator of the world but its sustainer. Everything that happens is his doing. Not even a sparrow falls without his knowledge, according to Jesus, and as an omniscient and omnipotent being Yahweh is therefore responsible for that sparrow in a way that no mere human being could ever be. It's also traditional Christian doctrine that Yahweh is a god who acts in history. The Deist philosophy -- that God created the universe but has followed a hands-off policy ever since -- is not reconcilable with Christianity, which holds that Yahweh intervened at least in Jesus' career. So in Christian terms, it doesn't really matter if the Haitian earthquake was a punishment or had some other motivation: it was still an act of the Christian God. Whether Christians should help the Haitians (who are themselves Christians, remember), or whether aid constitutes an act of rebellion against their god's will, is a question that, as an atheist, I happily don't have to answer.

P.S. It turns out that the Haitian revolution was exactly what Pat Robertson had in mind. It also turns out that Robertson didn't make the story up himself; it's been circulating for several years now. This historian provides some background (via) while still largely ignoring the direct US support for those plundering Haitian plutocrats.

Jon Stewart gets a wee bit self-righteous in this clip, pointing out all the pretty parts in the Good Book and asking why after such a disaster Robertson didn't quote any of them: passages where Yahweh reassures his Chosen (after he's hit them with yet another plague, earthquake, invasion, or deportation) that his love for them is steadfast and they can lean on him all the way. Except that it was always Yahweh who sent the plague, earthquake, invading army of deportation in the first place, which makes him like the classical abusive husband/lover: first he beats you black and blue, then he swears that he only did it because he loves you, and if you'd only stop making those deals with Satan he wouldn't have to chastise you. The prophets of Israel, including Jesus if you want to include him, were all about Tough Love, and repellent as Robertson certainly is, he stands squarely in that demented tradition.

Stewart also is displeased by a Rachel Maddow item in which she points out the USAID / US military connection. It's a good thing he didn't see Naomi Klein's warning, quoted above! Granted that the first priority right now is getting help to Haiti as soon as possible, there's no reason not to be wary of US / corporate intentions at the same time. Unless Stewart is packing his bags to go minister personally to the suffering Haitians, he can't really fault Maddow for doing her job, just as he continues to do his. (Satire? While people are dying? Jon, how could you?) Then he engages in an embarrassing interview with Tom Brokaw, which tiptoes around the history of Haiti with vague references to "corruption and oppression."

(both photos)

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