January 12, 2006 2:21 PM
Julia Irwin’s Shameful Speech
By Mark Durie
January 2006
On November 28, 2005 The Hon Julia Irwin, Labor member for Fowler in the New South Wales lower house, presented a speech entitled ‘Religious Tolerance’.
In her speech Irwin made an extended comment on the Bible, to counter claims that some have made about the Qur’an:
Those who refer to Muslim fundamentalists may choose to quote from the Holy Koran, and there are passages that might be taken to show a vengeful God. But when it comes to good old-fashioned violence, the Judaeo-Christian God is hard to beat. I will take one example from the Bible story of the Exodus. In that story, God first hardens the heart of Pharaoh to make sure that the Egyptian ruler will not be moved by the pleas of Moses to let his people go. Then, because Pharoah’s heart is hardened, God turns the Nile into blood so that people cannot drink its water and will suffer from thirst. Not satisfied, God sends swarms of locusts and flies, rains hail, fire and thunder on them and destroys all the trees and plants until nothing green remains. God orders every firstborn male child to be slaughtered. The massacre continues until there is not one house where one is not dead. Then, while the Egyptian families are mourning their dead, God orders Moses to loot from their houses all their gold and silver and clothing. Finally, God’s thirst for blood is satisfied and God pauses to rest and boasts, ‘I have made sport of the Egyptians.’ If that is not enough, the story continues as Moses heads into the Promised Land. There he is urged to hack women and children to death, rip unborn babies from their mother’s womb and level the cities. The virgins are taken at God’s command for the pleasure of his holy warriors and, when his holy warriors spare the lives of 50,000 captives, God sends Moses back to finish the job saying: And when the Lord your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them; you shall make no covenant with them; and show no mercy to them … and your eyes shall not pity them.
If I were to take those verses as written, I could easily associate any Christian fundamentalist with a dangerous and extreme mindset, but we are more likely to associate the term ‘Christian fundamentalist’ with psalm singers and happy clappers, although we could hardly take that view from the actions of US Army Lieutenant General William Boykin. After leading US troops into battle against a Somalian warlord, Boykin announced: I know my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his God was an idol.
Boykin later attended evangelical revivals, giving the message that as a Christian nation America was in a holy war battling Satan and that America’s Muslim adversaries will be defeated only ‘if we come against them in the name of Jesus’. General Boykin has since been promoted and is now the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in the United States of America.
When Irwin writes “If I were to take those verses as written”, the reader may gain the impression that she has actually read the Bible passages she refers to. This seems quite unlikely, however, for much of the above passage (all the sections underlined) appears to have been plagiarized – lifted word for word without acknowledgement – from the text of a speech given a few months earlier by American journalist Bill Moyers.[1]
Moyer’s speech was already a slander of the Bible. For example, one of Moyer’s sentences which Irwin incorporated into her speech was: “While the Egyptian families mourn their dead, God orders Moses to loot from their houses all their gold and silver and clothing.”
Is this report true? What did God actually say to Moses, according to the book of Exodus? The Bible says: ‘Now the Lord had said to Moses… “Tell the people that men and women alike are to ask their neighbors for articles of silver and gold.”’ (Exodus 11:1-2) The Israelites did subsequently ask the Egyptians, and ‘The Lord had made the Egyptians favorable disposed toward the people, and they gave them what they asked for.’ (Exodus 12:35-36)
Errors in this single sentence were that God did not tell Moses to ‘loot’ the Egyptians, the Israelites did not take ‘all’ their gold, silver and clothing, and the instructions to Moses did not in fact come while the Egyptian families were mourning their dead.
Such exaggerations are taken over uncritically by Irwin. In other cases Irwin’s editing of Moyer’s material worsens the distortions. For example when Moyer reports of the Israelite invasion of Canaan that ‘unborn infants are ripped from their mother’s womb’ – a claim that finds no support whatsoever in the Bible – Irwin turns this fiction into the libel that Moses ‘is urged’ by God to ‘… rip unborn babies from their mother’s womb’
As if it were not enough to put the most offensive of words into the mouth of God, Irwin goes on to slander Christians. For example, she claims that ‘Christians have failed to condemn our own (sic)
atrocities, like the massacre by Christians of Muslims in Bosnia or the massacre by the Christian Lebanese allies of Israel of Muslim Palestinians at Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.’
In reality Christians have repeatedly condemned these atrocities. Has Irwin forgotten that the US and other ‘Christian’ nations intervened in the former Yugoslavia to stop such things from happening? President Reagan’s response to the Sabra and Shatila massages was “All people of decency must share our outrage and revulsion.” Moreover, within two weeks Reagan had sent into Lebanon a multinational force of Americans, French and Italians. This effort proved most costly for the multinational alliance when over the next two years suicide attacks were to result in the deaths of hundreds of the peacekeepers.
It is hard to understand why a public figure like Irwin would make such a misguided attack on the Bible and on Christians. What was her agenda in making such a speech? It is telling that her final words were to assert that Islam is ‘a peaceful religion’. How does slandering the Bible and Christians demonstrate the peacefulness of Islam? Sadly Irwin’s words can only serve to discredit her in the eyes of her constituents.
We live in difficult times. It is true that there are distressing and debatable things in the Bible. It is also true that the example and teaching of Muhammad include incidents which are deeply shocking. These are all entirely legitimate matters for public debate, as long as this is conducted reasonably, with a regard for truth. One important consideration is whether particular events reported in the Bible or the Qur’an were “one-off” incidents, or do they reflect on-going models for behaviour which are incumbent upon those who believe in Islam or Christianity?
Since Christians profess to follow the example of Jesus, and Muslims the example of Muhammad, a fruitful and legitimate line of discussion could be to contrast the life of Jesus with the life of Muhammad. However to throw around in parliament ill-researched, plagiarized, distorted and inflammatory allegations about religious texts is highly irresponsible. What Irwin has said so carelessly, under the protection of parliamentary privilege, is damaging for religious harmony in our community and can be considered an attack on religious tolerance.
The people of Australia, whatever their faith may be, deserve better from our leaders.
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In preparing this article Julia Irwin’s office was contacted by e- mail with a request for clarification of certain points made in her speech. After a month, no reply or acknowledgement had been received.
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