It’s not the first American fatwa.
But it comes at an awkward moment. The West just announced open hunting season — investigation, prosecution, persecution, deportation, long prison terms — on Muslims who “preach hate.” Politically motivated murder — assassination — surely is included. So when, on television, US Christian evangelist Pat Robertson called for America to assassinate Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, well, Robertson’s fatwa didn’t pass unnoticed.
“Huh? Wha....who says I said that?” Robertson replied when reporters pounced.
“I didn’t say ‘assassination,’” Robertson insisted.
Ah. Well, as the sports analysts say, let’s go to the videotape: “If he (Chavez) thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think we really ought to go ahead and do it. It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war.... We have the ability to take him out and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability.”
“I didn’t say ‘assassination,’” Robertson says, no matter how many times we rewind and replay. “I said, ‘Our special forces should take him out.’ Funny, it must be a problem with my machine. Hear that? The video showing Robertson’s mouth moving keeps saying the word “assassinate.” Of course, “take him out” is just a more colloquial way of saying, “assassinate.” Unless Robertson wants to take Chavez out to dinner. Or something.
But Robertson wants to get jiggy with it: “’Take him out’ can be a number of things including kidnapping,” Robertson claims. “There are a number of ways to ‘take out’ a dictator from power besides killing him. I was misinterpreted.”
Well, whether it’s by “Special Forces” such as the US Drug Enforcement Agency that once kidnapped a Mexican doctor who’d allegedly aided drug dealers, or by Israelis who spirited the notorious Adolph Eichmann out of his South American hideaway, kidnapping still involves snatching someone against his will, often with great violence endangering innocent and uninvolved persons, and violating the sovereign territory of whatever state you’re snatching from. International law experts were unhappy about the technical violations of Eichmann’s kidnapping, but kept quiet for all kinds of reasons, the most obvious being that he was an important Nazi. And who wants to defend a Nazi? The banality of his alleged evil made some Israelis wonder whether Eichmann was too boring to execute, but once inside Israel, Eichmann’s fate was never in doubt. However, the DEA was less successful with its Mexican kidnapping — courts eventually released the doctor.
Kidnapping is almost as reprehensible as murder.
And honestly, after kidnapping Chavez, whatever would Robertson do with him? America didn’t exactly kidnap “Baby Doc” Duvalier, the hated Haitian dictator and son of the hated Haitian dictator “Papa Doc.” We just kind of pushed and pushed and then told his wife there was a huge sale going on at Galleries Lafayette in Paris, and she grabbed her chubby hubby, three of her nicest mink coats, and all the jewels she could stuff into her handbag, and off to France they went. And luckily, the Riviera has a lot of climatic similarities to Port-au-Prince, so Baby Doc feels very much at home there.
Chavez will be harder to coax onto the plane, that’s for sure.
And although the Riviera has a lot of climatic similarities to Caracas, it’s hard to imagine Chavez staying there very long.
Meanwhile, reactions to Robertson’s fatwa range from the left’s sputtering outrage to a sublime unstartled “Huh? Wha...?” from the Bush administration, which Robertson implied was the real architect of his “Take out Chavez” policy. The US State Department pronounced Robertson’s remarks “inappropriate,” which is kind of a warm-water word to describe murder solicitation. But the US of course has a history of tepidity on this point, having engineered the assassination of at least one foreign leader, South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963. US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld chuckled that Robertson is “a private citizen. Private citizens say all kinds of thing all the time.”
Well, if Robertson’s a private citizen who can freely issue a fatwa, are Muslims, including imams, similarly free to make statements similar to Robertson’s? Are Muslims not private citizens who say all kinds of things all the time? Or is Robertson freer because he has a television show influencing millions of voters? Is Robertson more special because he once announced Bush had been chosen by God to be America’s president?
When the furor broke, Chavez was in Cuba visiting Fidel Castro, whom the United States unsuccessfully tried to kill for decades, after first waging a fraudulent war of “liberation” that failed abysmally. What did Chavez think, asked reporters, about Robertson’s fatwa? “Huh? Wha?” replied Chavez. “Who’s Pat Robertson?”
It was a poignant moment. Standing with Chavez, communist Castro stroked his beard thoughtfully as any imam and mused of Robertson’s fatwa, “Only God can punish crimes of such magnitude.”
Hmmm. Castro invoking God. Huh? Wha...? That’s not a fatwa, but that’s a first!
