So what if the devastation by Katrina is an "act of God"? The doctrine of unilateralism fuelled by unbridled arrogance and Star Wars weaponry makes no distinction between the Kingdom of Man and the Kingdom of God.
For a long time, the same arrogance and weaponry has been directed at the helpless Children of God the world over, many at times unilaterally.
It usurped the process of global consultation in preference to playing God.
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Maybe Katrina is a stern reminder that He is not exactly pleased with how His name has been taken in vain. But, will the self-proclaimed gods of the world ever learn?
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the leading spiritual mentor of Sephardi Jewry, told an audience in Jerusalem Tuesday that Katrina was US President George Bush's punishment for supporting the pullout from Gaza and northern Samaria.
"He [Bush] brought about the expulsion [from Gaza], now he has his own expulsion," said Yosef.
"There was a tsunami and there were horrible natural disasters. It's all a result of too little Torah study. Where there is Torah, the world has sustenance.
"Over there [Louisiana] is where black people live. Do blacks learn Torah?" asked Yosef rhetorically. "'All right,' said God, 'let's bring a tsunami and drown them.' Hundreds of thousands are homeless, tens of thousands are dead. All that because there is no God there."
Just days before "Southern Decadence", an annual homosexual celebration attracting tens of thousands of people to the French Quarters section of New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina destroys the city.
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"Although the loss of lives is deeply saddening, this act of God destroyed a wicked city," stated Repent America director Michael Marcavage. "From 'Girls Gone Wild' to 'Southern Decadence,' New Orleans was a city that had its doors wide open to the public celebration of sin. From the devastation may a city full of righteousness emerge," he continued.
New Orleans was also known for its Mardi Gras parties where thousands of drunken men would revel in the streets to exchange plastic jewelry for drunken women to expose their breasts and to engage in other sex acts. This annual event sparked the creation of the "Girls Gone Wild" video series. Furthermore, Louisiana had a total of ten abortion clinics with half of them operating in New Orleans, where countless numbers of children were murdered at the hands of abortionists. Additionally, New Orleans has always been known as one of the "Murder Capitals of the World" with a rate ten times the national average.
Muhammad Yousef Al-Mlaifi, director of the Kuwaiti Ministry of Endowment's research center, blamed Allah. In an article entitled "The Terrorist Katrina Is One of the Soldiers of Allah," Yousef Al-Mlaifi first thanks America for making Iraq "the most tranquil and secure country in the world." He then writes, "How sad I am for America. Here it is, poor thing, trying with all its might to lower oil prices [and then comes] this storm, the fruit of Allah's planning, so that a barrel of oil will increase further still." The Kuwaiti closes with a quote from the Koran: "The disaster will keep striking the unbelievers for what they have done."
Also notably lacking in the response to this disaster are suggestions that Katrina is a punishment sent by God. When the tsunami struck Asia, such notions came from across the spectrum, but most pungently from Christian conservatives who noted that Aceh, an "exporter of radical Islam," as National Association of Evangelicals president Ted Haggard put it, had been hardest hit. Such neanderthal theology apparently does not apply to the U.S.
Rather, the God invoked most often now is the distant, inscrutable deity responsible for other no-fault acts such as earthquakes and tornadoes. The "acts" of this God are not willful so much as "natural" -- hence the rise of the term "natural disaster" in the late 19th century. "The concept of an act of God implied that something was wrong," writes scholar Ted Steinberg in an important book called Acts of God: An Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America, "that people had sinned and must now pay for their errors. But the idea of natural disaster may have implicitly suggested the reverse, that something was right, that the prevailing system of social and economic relations was functioning just fine."
But the federal government's lethal ineptitude wasn't just a consequence of Mr. Bush's personal inadequacy; it was a consequence of ideological hostility to the very idea of using government to serve the public good. For 25 years the right has been denigrating the public sector, telling us that government is always the problem, not the solution. Why should we be surprised that when we needed a government solution, it wasn't forthcoming?from the article, this was shocking news to me
But the downgrading of FEMA continued, with the appointment of Michael Brown as Mr. Allbaugh's successor.
Mr. Brown had no obvious qualifications, other than having been Mr. Allbaugh's [previous director] college roommate. But Mr. Brown was made deputy director of FEMA; The Boston Herald reports that he was forced out of his previous job, overseeing horse shows. And when Mr. Allbaugh left, Mr. Brown became the agency's director. The raw cronyism of that appointment showed the contempt the administration felt for the agency; one can only imagine the effects on staff morale.
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