Protest: Pro and Con in Rochester
As you may recall, when President Bush visited Rochester a few weeks ago, there were protests. Two protestors at the site of the visit were arrested. One was Grace Miller, long-time activist and member of the religious order, the Sisters of Mercy. The other was Dr. Harry Murray, a professor of Sociology at Nazareth College. The local Gannett outlet, the Democrat & Chronicle, printed an op-ed by Dr. Murray. It is, unfortunately, now hidden behind a wall of “pay for it archives”. Here is the teaser:As the “other person” arrested with Sister Grace Miller during President Bush’s visit to Greece, I would like to reflect on some of the issues raised by writers of the June 2 letter “Law should get tough on Sister Grace Miller.” The letter writers raise an important issue when they address how our actions affect children, particularly in the context of Catholic teaching on morality. Although Catholic teaching does encourage respect He went on to offhandedly compare the protestors’ actions to those of Jesus when he cleansed the Temple. And so on.
I wrote a response, and it was published today as a letter to the editor. They limit letters to about 170 words, though I had far more to say. Here is my response:The June 7 essay “When America engages in unjust war, conscience must overrule law,” by Harry Murray, is an exercise in self-justification, couched in a wrapper of “it’s for the children.” He continues on to make a series of claims, unsupported by the actual facts.
Pope John Paul II never called the liberation of Iraq an “unjust war.” Never.
The Bush administration has gone out of its way to deny, repeatedly, that the Iraqi thugocracy had any connection to the murders of Sept. 11, 2001. The connection of Saddam’s regime to terrorists worldwide, including the bombers of the World Trade Center in 1993 and the murderer of American citizen Leon Klinghoffer is, however, undeniable.
The biggest distortion of all is that the administration lied about weapons of mass destruction. From the end of the war that freed Kuwait from Saddam’s aggression until the present, no one has accounted for the tons of weapons of mass destruction materials that Saddam failed to produce for destruction as required by the United Nations. Every report from the United Nations and from the American search teams spells out in detail how Saddam’s thugs schemed to hide their continuing illegal activities in this respect.
These are complex issues, and the children should be exposed to them. But we should begin with accurate information, not disproven distortions.
Googling Dr. Murray reveals that he has written on the issue of just war extensively. I shall not attempt to debate him on this topic, since he has done far more work on it than I ever care to. However, any attempt to analyze the current Iraq war must begin with the facts, and the facts begin with Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in 1991. The actions of the United States and its allies in March 2003 did not spring from someone’s imagination, they were part and parcel of a process that had gone on for a dozen years. That process had as its beginning the manifestly unjust war of aggression made by Saddam on the nation and people of Kuwait. The process included many, many resolutions by the United Nations Security Council that Saddam disregarded, and repeated violations of the ceasefire agreement that ended the fighting in 1991.
Saddam is a truly evil man. It has been indisputably documented that he and his thugs are among the greediest and cruelest rulers of modern times. They ran Iraq as a criminal enterprise, not as a nation, and the Iraqi people suffered for two generations because of that. If there were to be a biblical allusion to be made, removing Saddam and his gang from power would certainly deserve a comparison to the acts of Jesus far more than would those of two people lying down in the driveway of a school before the President of the United States arrived.
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