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“We’re Not Sunni And Shia Here!”

Dave Weigel (via Matt Yglesias) on the video of “awkward fanboy” Romney and Ann Coulter prior to Coulter’s failed joke: The most interesting exchange is Coulter’s defense of Romney’s Mormonism (most probably how the media covers Romney’s Mormonism). COULTER: No, they don’t understand! We hate liberal atheists! You can’t get these sectarian wars going with […]

Dave Weigel (via Matt Yglesias) on the video of “awkward fanboy” Romney and Ann Coulter prior to Coulter’s failed joke:

The most interesting exchange is Coulter’s defense of Romney’s Mormonism (most probably how the media covers Romney’s Mormonism).

COULTER: No, they don’t understand! We hate liberal atheists! You can’t get these sectarian wars going with us. We’re all Christians.

ROMNEY: We’re not Sunni and Shia here!

Iraq civil war humor – slays ’em every time. But seriously, this is evidence that Coulter doesn’t actually go to church. I’ve been to Baptist Bible studies where the question of whether Catholicism is a cult was heatedly debated. Romney may be doing a good job of papering over his differences with evangelical Protestants, but the differences exist.

I don’t know which is more amusing: that one of the few famous right-wing pundits to endorse Mormonism’s claims to being Christian is Ann Coulter (which pretty much proves those claims false right there if nothing else does) or that Ann Coulter has effectively affirmed here that she must approve of all theists anyway (which tends to render moot her whole “we’ll convert you to Christianity” shtick), since it is apparently only “liberal atheists” that “we” hate.  There is something grimly ironic about sectarianism jokes from the sort of people who wouldn’t have known or cared about the differences between different sects in Islam four years ago.  With the invasion they backed having stoked and even more sharply politicised those sectarian rivalries than they already were and turned them into the source of widespread violence, it is now a throwaway line to laugh about the supposedly enduring hatreds of two groups that this war has encouraged and inflamed. 

This is not unlike when ham-fisted internationalists were meddling in the early break-up of Yugoslavia, which precipitated open war between the constituent republics of Yugoslavia and then, through foreign recognition, turned that internal war into an international one.  Their own meddling, which helped reopen the old wounds and politicise the ethnic and religious identities of the peoples in the region, then gave way to scenes of exasperated Americans and western Europeans puzzling over the supposedly “ancient” and “centuries-old” rivalries between the different groups.  Having thrown fuel on the fire of relatively recent resentments from their own century, about which they knew nothing and cared even less, these buffoons then pretend that the entire conflict is some timeless, inscrutable blood-feud that cannot be understood by “rational” and “enlightened” people such as they are.  This allows them to pose as the superior, benevolent outsiders who have come to make the squabbling child races stop their petty bickering–but, remember, it is the people who acknowledge and take seriously the reality of ethnic and religious difference that are the ones denigrating the humanity of other peoples!    

There is something else worth noting.  Prior to the invasion and during the early years of the war, paying attention to those sorts of different identities would mean that you think other peoples privilege “tribe or religion or whatever” over sweet freedom (the public assertion of which is obviously “racist,” and we have that on good authority).  If these loyalties supposedly weren’t important for Iraqis in 2003 and afterwards, because that would evidently be a mark of some kind of backwardness (rather than being, oh, the normal experience of humanity), it is no wonder that Republican elite figures have no clue that the same kinds of religious and cultural identities make relatively quite strong claims on Americans (albeit not as strong as in many other parts of the world).  This tells you something about the superficiality of the religious identities they publicly hold if they literally cannot imagine how confessional or religious differences might cause tensions or political opposition.  In this they are as blind as they were when calling for the invasion of Iraq on the assumption that the “Iraqi people” would all join together in the work of rebuilding the country together.  On the other hand, to the extent that they might be able to acknowledge that such religious identities are tremendously powerful in this country, they would almost certainly view people committed to such identities as regressive or dangerous.  One gets no sense from this little exchange that these people use their respective religions as anything more than a flag with which they can rally seriously religious people to their side, while they meanwhile snicker and laugh about potent religious identities in private.  That is in its way far more damning of both Romney and Coulter than anything else they have said in the past, because it makes their public pose as some sort of Christian or religious conservative vanguard to be little more than a pose.

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