Church leaders express gratitude for racist, war criminal.

[_Dr. Shades]

For a worldwide church supposedly led by Christ, it's not a good idea for it to eulogize a deceased former leader of one country unless it does similarly for deceased former leaders of all other countries, too.

[_Kishkumen]

One could be a good emperor of Rome or a bad one. One was in any case the leader of an empire founded on human misery.

[Guest]

You’ve posted this thread in the wrong forum, as it has nothing to do with the LDS church.

Incidentally, some of you have very interesting definitions of terms like “war criminal.”

I disagree.

This thread is about the leaders of the Church publicly honouring an allleged racist and alleged war criminal. It’s about their public support for such a person, rather than a thread about the person they are showing support for. The details posted about Bush are to demonstrate what kind of a person Church leaders are prepared to align themselves with.

The term “war criminal” comes from the articles posted rather than from me applying it. But feel free to show why it has been wrongly applied to George H W Bush and that LDS Leaderships public support for him is justified.

So, church leaders are aligning themselves with someone like George H. W. Bush. (If by align, you mean a respectful statement honoring his service and life.) For once, I'm on the same page as church leaders.

And BS on the "war criminal" label merely coming from an extreme op-ed in the Intercept. You posted it, you created the title to this thread, you own it. So have some balls and take responsibility for sharing that extremist position.

[_Gray Ghost]

https://theintercept.com/2018/12/01/the ... f-justice/

The Intercept? a.k.a. the Putincept.

[Guest]

A war crime is an act that constitutes a serious violation of the laws of war that gives rise to individual criminal responsibility.[1] Examples of war crimes include intentionally killing civilians or prisoners, torturing, destroying civilian property, taking hostages, performing a perfidy, raping, using child soldiers, pillaging, declaring that no quarter will be given, and seriously violating the principles of distinction and proportionality, such as strategic bombing of civilian populations.[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crime

He committed war crimes. Under Bush Sr., the U.S. dropped a whopping 88,500 tons of bombs on Iraq and Iraqi-occupied Kuwait, many of which resulted in horrific civilian casualties. In February 1991, for example, a U.S. airstrike on an air-raid shelter in the Amiriyah neighborhood of Baghdad killed at least 408 Iraqi civilians. According to Human Rights Watch, the Pentagon knew the Amiriyah facility had been used as a civil defense shelter during the Iran-Iraq war and yet had attacked without warning. It was, concluded HRW, “a serious violation of the laws of war.”

https://theintercept.com/2018/12/01/the ... f-justice/

U.S. bombs also destroyed essential Iraqi civilian infrastructure — from electricity-generating and water-treatment facilities to food-processing plants and flour mills. This was no accident. As Barton Gellman of the Washington Post reported in June 1991: “Some targets, especially late in the war, were bombed primarily to create postwar leverage over Iraq, not to influence the course of the conflict itself. Planners now say their intent was to destroy or damage valuable facilities that Baghdad could not repair without foreign assistance. … Because of these goals, damage to civilian structures and interests, invariably described by briefers during the war as ‘collateral’ and unintended, was sometimes neither.”

Got that? The Bush administration deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure for “leverage” over Saddam Hussein. How is this not terrorism? As a Harvard public health team concluded in June 1991, less than four months after the end of the war, the destruction of Iraqi infrastructure had resulted in acute malnutrition and “epidemic” levels of cholera and typhoid.

Church Leaders have, to all intents and purposes, thanked him for doing that^

At the time, Bush wrote that “normal relations between the U.S. and Iraq would serve our longer-term interests and promote stability in both the Gulf and the Middle East.” National Security Directive 54, which Bush signed in January 1991, also declared that Middle East oil was vital to U.S. national security and that it remained committed to using force to defend “its” interest [Iraqi oil presumably belongs to the United States]. The Bush administration reversed course, however, declaring in the document that “Iraq, by virtue of its unprovoked invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990, and its subsequent brutal occupation, is clearly a power with interests inimical to our own.” The two NSD documents reveal that the primary U.S. concern in Iraq was oil, and that Bush was willing to marginalize Iraqi human rights atrocities in pursuit of neocolonial interests. The documents also revealed that the U.S. was committed to the use of force in the name of dominating Iraqi oil, contrary to President Bush’s public lies.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/12/04 ... r-on-iraq/
...and that^

"We are grateful today for the life and service of President George H. W. Bush. We honor him as a devoted husband, father and grandfather, a man of deep conviction who marginalized Iraqi human rights atrocities in pursuit of neocolonial interests. Who deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure for “leverage” over Saddam Hussein. Who knowingly ordered an airstrike on an air-raid shelter in the Amiriyah neighborhood of Baghdad killed at least 408 Iraqi civilians. We express our love to the Bush family. We have been blessed by his legacy of war crimes, and we pray they will be granted God's peace as they remember and celebrate his remarkable life."
...said the LDS First Presidency

[_I have a question]

So, church leaders are aligning themselves with someone like George H. W. Bush. (If by align, you mean a respectful statement honoring his service and life.) For once, I'm on the same page as church leaders.

That's speaks to my point - Can you think of a reason the Church should refrain from issuing such a statement for any country's political leader?

[_Maksutov]

One could be a good emperor of Rome or a bad one. One was in any case the leader of an empire founded on human misery.

[_toon]

So, church leaders are aligning themselves with someone like George H. W. Bush. (If by align, you mean a respectful statement honoring his service and life.) For once, I'm on the same page as church leaders.

That's speaks to my point - Can you think of a reason the Church should refrain from issuing such a statement for any country's political leader?

Uh, an easy distinction can be made because it's headquartered in the US, because it has and at least tries to maintain close relations with the US government (closer than with other countries), because the largest percentage of its members are in the US, because it is still essentially an American religion, because it likely reflects the sentiments of most of those US members and probably many international members, because it meets the sentiments of most Americans, because Bush Sr. met with Mormon leaders two times during his presidency (his son met with Mormon leaders in Utah four times), because Mormon leaders have an affinity for him, because they're being sincerely respectful, because it's a good PR move, etc.

[Guest]

So, church leaders are aligning themselves with someone like George H. W. Bush. (If by align, you mean a respectful statement honoring his service and life.) For once, I'm on the same page as church leaders.

That's speaks to my point - Can you think of a reason the Church should refrain from issuing such a statement for any country's political leader?

Uh, an easy distinction can be made because it's headquartered in the US, because it has and at least tries to maintain close relations with the US government (closer than with other countries), because the largest percentage of its members are in the US, because it is still essentially an American religion, because it likely reflects the sentiments of most of those US members and probably many international members, because it meets the sentiments of most Americans, because Bush Sr. met with Mormon leaders two times during his presidency (his son met with Mormon leaders in Utah four times), because Mormon leaders have an affinity for him, because they're being sincerely respectful, because it's a good PR move, etc.

Those are reasons why Church leaders should issue a statement. I was asking if you could think of any reason why they should refrain. Reading between your lines, you seem to be saying one reason the Leaders of the Church should refrain is when the person isn't an American President.

Can you think of any reason which should stop the Church issuing such a statement for an American President upon their death?

[_krose]

I consider any war of choice to be a crime against humanity, so I suppose that makes war criminals of many presidents as well as leaders of other nations. (Bush junior and Cheney were much worse in that regard.) I do recall the invasion being based on suspicious evidence, so sure, I guess so.

As for his being a racist, I don’t know what was in his heart. The only thing I can say for sure is that he certainly didn’t object to his campaign running horribly racist ads to get elected. He was once a centrist, but chose to fully embrace the far right in order to ride the Reagan wave.

His response to AIDS was deplorable.

All this puts Bush Sr. pretty much in line with the COJCOLDS hierarchy, who have their own race issues, were on board with the war, and have been hostile to the ‘not-quite straight.’