Word: satanizing
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...smart bombs, making mischief and brimstone? Each side demonized the other, as in every war: Gott mit Uns. Saddam Hussein had George Bush down as the Evil One. George Bush had Saddam down as Hitler. In most of the West, Hitler is the 20th century's term for Great Satan. After the war, quick and obliterating, Hussein hardly seems worthy of the name of evil anymore...
...deeper, unstated thought is that acknowledging evil implies that Satan is coequal with God. Better not to open that door. It leads into the old Manichaean heresy: the world as battleground between the divine and the diabolical, the outcome very much in doubt: "La prima luce," Dante's light of creation, the brilliant ignition of God, against the satanic negation, the candle snuffer. Those uncomfortable with the idea of evil mean this: You don't say that the shadow has the same stature as the light. If you speak of the Dark Lord, of the "dark side of Sinai...
...possible that evil is a problem that is more intelligently addressed outside the religious context of God and Satan? Perhaps. For some, that takes the drama out of the discussion and dims it down to a paler shade of Unitarianism. Evil, in whatever intellectual framework, is by definition a monster. It has a strange coercive force: a temptation, a mystery, a horrible charm. Shakespeare understood that perfectly when he created Iago in his secular and motiveless malignity...
Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the powerful Shi'ite literary critic who upheld a death sentence against Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses, wants to be a best-selling author himself. Rafsanjani's co-author is offering the 400-page manuscript for Our Revolution: The Ideology Behind the Movement to U.S. publishing houses. Excerpts from the work show that the Ayatullah Khomeini's political heir still has a jaundiced view of the Great Satan. "Our real desire, from the beginning, was to humiliate the United States throughout the world," writes Rafsanjani. Moreover, Westerners "are members of the school...
Rafsanjani is quietly eager to improve ties with Washington, at least in part to get back $11 billion in American-held assets frozen in 1979. But Rafsanjani cannot easily reverse 12 years of violent rhetoric directed against the "Great Satan." So while government officials have toned down the + diatribes against the U.S. in the hope of better relations, they still lash out now and again lest the contradictions become too obvious. Two weeks ago, Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, the country's new spiritual leader, declared, "The U.S. will never have normal relations with a system that has made Islamic values...