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FORKED TONGUE . . . Barack Obama sings Amazing Grace after celebrating gay marriage

Edmund Kudzayi Political Mondays

What is duplicitous and unacceptable is to enjoy the credibility that comes from confessing the Christian faith while simultaneously holding views that are explicitly condemned in that faith.

IF you are in the habit of bedding prostitutes it would be imprudent to volunteer and take a prominent role in the affairs of your local parish. Better to keep a low profile; in the event that your ungodly pastimes are somehow discovered, you are less likely to suffer the humiliation that invariably comes to hypocrites.

This would be sound advice in a world where people are judged based on the congruence of their words and actions. Sadly, that world no longer exists. Instead we live in Orwellian times where the rich and powerful have mastered doublethink and can say yes and no in the same sentence while captive audiences applaud.

For how else can one explain the foolish grins and boyish amusement that swept across the internet last Friday when Obama sang Amazing Grace at the funeral of Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who was gunned down by a racist white youth.

Leaders that show their human side have always been preferred to their pretentious alternatives, and here was Obama casting aside the propriety of high office, acknowledging his mortality and unashamedly singing Amazing Grace to the Lord of the heavens. What’s there not to love?

There is just one small problem, only a few hours earlier the same man had been gleefully celebrating a Supreme Court ruling that imposed gay marriage on the entire United States. This was not a grudging concession by a leader who would have preferred otherwise, Obama has actively campaigned for the legalisation of homosexual marriages.

Homosexual marriages that will allow gay men to adopt little boy and girls and impose themselves as parents, exposing innocent children to their ungodly filth.

This position is clearly at odds with Christian values as they are espoused in the bible. I can entertain an atheist argument that rejects the bible as a legitimate basis on which people are governed but what is duplicitous and unacceptable is to enjoy the credibility that comes from confessing the Christian faith while simultaneously holding views that are explicitly condemned in that faith.

How does Obama sincerely sing Amazing Grace to a God whose laws he had only a few hours earlier defeated in the courts of man? Are these not obvious contradictions?

But this is all beside the point, American homosexuals and Obama’s questionable faith are really not of interest to me.

What I find worrying is that this same pattern of Western hypocrisy regularly manifests in international relations and often goes unremarked.

Last week the head of Rwanda’s intelligence branch general Emmanuel Karenzi Karake was arrested in London.

He awaits extradition to Spain where he is wanted on what many believe are trumped up charges.

This is not a trivial affair, when the head of a foreign intelligence service is arrested this can only be as a result of decisions at the highest level of the arresting government. The British planned to arrest him. The suggestion that they were taken by surprise is patronising nonsense.

It is worth noting that Karake had travelled to London numerous times since the Spanish government issued a European arrest for him and other Rwandan officials in 2008. The British have not bothered to explain why the police were legally compelled to arrest him on this particular occasion when the warrant in question was issued seven years ago.

Let us give the British the benefit of the doubt and assume that their hands were indeed legally tied.

This did not leave them without options if they had no desire to arrest Karake. Consider the pre-emptive actions taken to protect Israeli war criminals. In 2009 an arrest warrant was issued against the Tzipi Livni, Israel’s then foreign minister. Livni aborted the trip and the arrest warrant was subsequently withdrawn when it became clear that she was not in the country.

In 2011 the British government took an extraordinary step and granted automatic immunity to all Israeli officials visiting Britain on official business thereby shielding Livni from possible arrest. This is how Britain behaves when it wants to protect a foreign official. Claims that its hands were tied are clearly disingenuous but it fits neatly into their perfidious culture of saying one thing yet doing the exact opposite.

The sad truth is that Westerners claim to respect Africans but their actions indicate otherwise.

This duplicity, like Obama’s rendition of Amazing Grace, is allowed to go unquestioned. It is as though they are superior beings that can be trusted with discretion. Africans must follow the rules hard and fast because they cannot be relied upon to use such discretion wisely.

This explains the West’s outrage when South Africans refused to arrest Sudan’s president Omar al-Bashir. While it is understandable for Britain, in its noble efforts to further global peace, to extend immunity to Israeli criminals it is certainly out of the question that South Africans could make similar determinations in the case of al-Bashir. Their motives can only be corrupt.

I was previously of the view that white people are deliberately racist but I have come to realise that the reality is a bit more nuanced. Their duplicity and bias is so deeply woven into their psyche that it barely registers in their conscious minds. It is a cultural phenomenon of superiority as opposed to one strictly confined to race.

This is why they cannot understand the fuss around Guantanamo. In their view, they are civilised vanguards of the rule of law and can be trusted to responsibly suspend some of its key principles when practical necessities so demand.

This is why our own white farmers feel a great injustice has been done to them but have absolutely no empathy for the blacks that they dispossessed when they invaded the lands they now claim are rightfully theirs. Not a week goes by without David Coltart whining loudly about the misfortunes of his white comrades but he has said nothing of the black victims of white colonial pillage. Mugabe must ‘move on’ and forget about colonial injustices only 35 years gone by but it is somehow legitimate for elderly Nazi collaborators to be dragged to court 70 years after the event. It is an incurable sense of entitlement.

This is why al-Bashir is nothing more than a ‘dirty’ African criminal but Bush and Blair are legitimate leaders that made difficult decisions at difficult times. This why the NSA and GCHQ can legitimately intercept global communications but it is somehow thuggish for the CIO to snoop on phone calls.

It is one standard for them and a different one for everyone else. The hypocrisy is brazen, shameless and somehow acceptable; this is why Obama can praise homosexuality and in the same breath launch into worship.

Ndatenda.