I was left spluttering.
Will no one call out this lying hypocrite? Will no one
challenge the filth and bile that pours forth from his mouth?
First of all, yes, hundreds of thousands have died in Syria.
Who bears the responsibility for this? Who started the conflict? Who fueled it
with money and arms? Who imported foreign jihadis? Who created the conditions
that led to the rise of ISIS?
It is John McCain and those like him that have pushed for
war, have sought to arm nation states and paramilitary groups. They are always
eager to employ militarism as a means to expand American power and influence.
The US, its European and Gulf State allies have flooded Syria with arms flowing
from US assembly lines and Balkan smuggling routes. They have exported
Salafists from the European immigrant community and North Africa and they have
done all they can to foment the Syrian Civil War and fan its flames.
Assad, hardly a virtuous leader was nevertheless a source of
secular stability. He has fought viciously for his regime's survival and consequently
called upon his Russian, Iranian and Hezbollah allies to aid him in the fight.
Syria as a political entity is under existential threat and the nation's status
is critical for the survival of the many minority communities, of which he is a
part.
There is a great deal of blood-guilt on the part of Assad but
by no means can any honest assessment ascribe all the blame to him as McCain
seems to suggest.
But there's a larger irony to McCain's words.
Indiscriminate Bombing? Why, this is the very thing John
McCain himself is guilty of. He was shot down by people trying to defend their
country while it was being 'indiscriminately bombed' by an imperial power which
had meddled and collaborated with their colonial oppressor, divided their
country and was in the process of waging a virtually genocidal war on them and
eventually the entire region of Indochina.
John McCain was shot down during Operation Rolling Thunder,
the first of the major bombing campaigns that was responsible for tens if not
hundreds of thousands of dead. The numbers in Indochina are so staggering as to
defy accurate quantification. John McCain is an indiscriminate bomber, a killer
of women and children, a criminal and a monster by any moral standard. The
world calls him a 'hero' but as Christians we know what we is.... an unrepentant
and defiant idolater... a murderer.
The fact that eight years ago many Christians clamoured to
offer political support to this filth defies any ethical sensibilities and is
indefensible in terms of the New Testament. Their support for McCain was
tantamount to apostasy from the faith.
The faithful did not listen to him in the 1970s when he
sought to capitalise on his more or less deserved torture at the hands of
captors and sought congressional office. If he wants to live by the sword, then
let's just say he got off easy. The faithful rejected his testimony in the
1980s when he took up the mantle of Barry Goldwater in Arizona and we continued
to reject him as he ran for president in 2000 and 2008.
Today he advocates and pushes for war not just in Syria but
also in the Caucasus and the Ukraine. Though his defeat would by no means end
American militarism, I had remained somewhat optimistic that his voice would be
silenced by his challenge in the primary. McCain the corrupt Arizona Senator
plugged into 'big money' and one of the great banking scandals of the 20th
century, survived the test and will likely win once more in November 2016. The
80-year old is too arrogant to step down even though his ability to perform is
diminished. One way or another he won't be around for too much longer. His time
for repentance is running out.
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