Washington, May 28: Religious authorities have lashed out at the former US administration’s recently-exposed manipulation of the Holy Scriptures to glorify their ‘anti-terror’ campaign.
The former officials have been revealed to have quoted biblical verses out of their context in the classified reports which would be submitted for high-level consideration, Los Angeles Times reported on Monday.
Last week, GQ reporter and credited chronicler of the former administration’s adventures, Robert Draper exposed the 2003 reports which were directed to former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld before being sent to former president George W. Bush.
The documents were emblazoned with pictures of soldiers during their devotions and contained ‘misused’ passages of the Bible.
One such picture on the cover of one of the reports was captioned with “whom shall I send and who will go for us? Here I am, Lord. Send me” from the Book of Isaiah in the Old Testament.
“As a Christian, I am deeply troubled that…a verse about a great prophet’s call to indict his own people for their infidelity . . . is being presented as a divine call for the U.S. to invade Iraq,” the daily quoted Scott Alexander, director of the Catholic-Muslim Studies Program at Chicago’s Catholic Theological Union as saying.
“What is at issue is the possibility that the highest levels of the executive branch took biblical texts out of their proper context to cast the mission of the US military in explicitly religious terms,” he added.
A verse on the cover of another document read “put on the full armor of God” – the demand in the New Testament that the believers strengthen themselves with “the virtues of truth, justice and peace.”
“It is a misuse of the Bible to take passages out of context and employ them to support one side against another,” Rev. John Buchanan, pastor of Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago claimed.
“Open the gates that the righteous nation may enter,” was another Isaiah verse so applied.
——Agencies