Is he really this ignorant?

Or does he just think we are?

George W. Bush visited Israel and Palestine this week, and came up with three statements which appallingly revealed either how ignorant he is, or how ignorant he thinks we are.

For one thing, after having all but ignored the Arab-Israeli conflict for the past seven years -- and, indeed, having thrown in with the Israelis and further antagonized the Palestinians every time the region heated up -- Bush somehow manages to say, "I believe it's going to happen, that there will be a signed peace treaty by the time I leave office. That's what I believe." Incredible. It takes more than blind faith to make that leap. If he truly believes that one, he's the only person on earth who does.

During the trip, he also repeatedly made comments such as this: "But the only lasting peace will be achieved when the duly elected leaders of the respective peoples do the hard work." Does this mean he's forsaking Abbas for Hamas? For in fact, whether he likes it or not, the duly elected leaders of Palestine are from the Hamas party. Bush has consistently refused to acknowledge the inconvenient truth that in the most recent free and democratic Palestinian elections, Hamas swept to an overwhelming victory over the Fatah party of Abbas, and that Abbas remains in power on the West bank primarily through force of arms. So with this statement, Bush demonstrates a total disregard for the principle of democracy for Palestinians. (Of course, I suppose this is hardly surprising, given Bush's happily moving into the White House after losing the 2000 election by 532,000 votes; one doesn't look to the leader of a constitutional putsch to care much about the voice of the people.)

Given his lack of knowledge about contemporary issues, I suppose it's hardly surprising that his grasp of history is just as poor. While in Israel, Bush visited the Israeli Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, he "was most impressed that people, in the face of horror and evil, would not forsake their God, and in the face of unspeakable crimes against humanity, brave souls young and old stood strong for what they believe."

Wrong.

The 6 million Jews (and Roma, and homosexuals, and other victims of the Holocaust) weren't murdered because of their beliefs, but because of who they were. Jews who were atheists, Jews who were agnostics, Jews who had converted to Christianity, and people who only had only one Jewish parent and might not have considered themselves Jewish at all were murdered right along with the most pious of Jews, simply because the Nazis considered them all Jewish, and all sub-human. They couldn't have saved themselves from the gas chambers by renouncing their religion if they had wanted to; with the greatest possible respect for these victims, one must say that the strength of their faith was immaterial to their mortal fate.

Hitler wasn't interest in their conversion to Christianity. He wasn't trying to "Christianize" (it seems horrific to use the term in such a context) Jews. He was trying to exterminate them. They were murdered for their ancestry.

Mass murder is repugnant in all its forms, but it is worst when it is used to exterminate people for immutable qualities of their being. This wasn't some horribly criminal attempt to influence religious beliefs; it was genocide at its very worst. Bush should know that. Every human should know that.

But then, maybe some of us are so stupid, after all. I heard one reporter ask Bush how it felt to be "walking in the footsteps of Jesus." Huh? Walking in the footsteps of Jesus? Is there any contemporary American who has demonstrated less of an inclination to walk in the footsteps of Jesus than George W. Bush? If the answer to that question isn't painfully obvious to you, go back and read the Beatitudes, and then reflect on the entirety of Bush's career in the public sector: the illegal and awful war in Iraq, the executions, the manifold suffering he has visited upon millions, his disregard for the sufferers, his clear preference for the rich and powerful coupled to his contempt for the meek, his ridicule of the world's peacemakers, his disdain for all of creation; the list goes on and on. There is absolutely no way George W. Bush could be considered to be "walking in the footsteps of Jesus," and anybody who could even ask the question must be as stupid as Bush and his handlers think we all are.

Note: this was originally posted in ketches, yaks & hawks 11 January 2008