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Bill Bennett, God-Man : "When 4 Americans Are Hung.... You Level The City"
 "No person can be more rightly credited with making morality and personal responsibility an integral part of the political debate than William J. Bennett."
Until revelations concerning a gambling addiction torpedoed his burgeoning career, Bill Bennett was busily building brand name recognition as a conservative moralist and an advocate for personal responsibility. But, Bennett seems to have drifted far since those days and now appears to champion a new allegedly "Biblical" values system based not in themes of mercy and forgiveness from the New Testament that Christianity has traditionally emphasized but, rather, rooted in a focus on Old Testament narratives on mass killing, and the punitive face of God, that ignores large swaths of the Old Testament of a distinctly different character, passages which emphasize mercy and forgiveness. The concept that whole populations can be held accountable for the actions of a few violates typical American popular notions of fair play ( as well as the Geneva Convention ) and seems to contradict the conservative ethic which holds that we are masters of our fates. |
I'm at the 2006 "Voter Values" conference sponsored by the Family Research Council, and this morning's first prominent speaker was Sean Hannity, followed by William Bennett. Recounting the incident that led to a massive US military assault on the Iraqi city of Fallujah - and implying that the US response to the deaths of four American private mercenaries working for Blackwater USA was somehow mild , Bennet stated : "When four Americans are hung and the city cheers, you take out Fallujah. You level the city...." Bennett then cited the example of the destruction of Hiroshima. Bennett's exhortation to mass collective punishment - the slaughter of hundreds or thousands of innocent civilians perhaps, or at least the destruction of their homes and cities - received enthusiastic applause.
[ note: in response to one criticism of the following passage I originally wrote : "But, Bennett seems to have drifted far since those days and now appears to champion a new "Biblical" values systen based not in New Testament theme of mercy and forgiveness but, rather, in Old Testament narratives of mass slaughter. " I've amended the passage to now read: "But, Bennett seems to have drifted far since those days and now appears to champion a new allegedly "Biblical" values system based not in themes of mercy and forgiveness from the New Testament that Christianity has traditionally emphasized but, rather, rooted in a focus on Old Testament narratives on mass killing, and the punitive face of God, that ignores large swaths of the Old Testament of a distinctly different character, passages which emphasize mercy and forgiveness." ] |
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