Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Khouri, How do Salafist-Jihadists happen? Daily Star, 8/29/2007

Many in the West allow themselves to see militant Salafist-Jihadists like Fatah al-Islam only through US President George W. Bush’s “global war on terror,” without sufficiently grasping the local and global root causes of radicalism - including American, British and other Western powers’ policies - that are easily traceable in the modern history of the Middle East. On the other hand, those in the Middle East who delight at any sign of indigenous resistance to American-European-Israeli-Arab regime dominance are prone to put up with Salafist-Jihadist criminality as an inevitable reaction to the many malaises of the modern Arab-Iranian-Muslim world.

Neither approach is very useful and only condemns us all to more confrontation, destruction and death. We must understand correctly the root causes that drive the continuing proliferation of groups like Fatah al-Islam, if we hope to nip such criminality in the bud. This particular group will soon be defeated or killed in Nahr al-Bared, but what happens after that?

Sara Roy, A Jewish Plea, Counterpunch, April 7-8, 2007. My mother and her sister had just been liberated from concentration camp by the Russian army. After having captured all the Nazi officials and guards who ran the camp, the Russian soldiers told the Jewish survivors that they could do whatever they wanted to their German persecutors. Many survivors, themselves emaciated and barely alive, immediately fell on the Germans, ravaging them. My mother and my aunt, standing just yards from the terrible scene unfolding in front of them, fell into each other’s arms weeping. My mother, who was the physically stronger of the two, embraced my aunt, holding her close and my aunt, who had difficulty standing, grabbed my mother as if she would never let go. She said to my mother, “We cannot do this. Our father and mother would say this is wrong. Even now, even after everything we have endured, we must seek justice, not revenge. There is no other way.” My mother, still crying, kissed her sister and the two of them, still one, turned and walked away.

Religion and Violence by James Hitchcock, March 6, 2002
Religious believers are accustomed to being accused as perpetrators of intolerance and violence, and there is enough truth to such charges to take them to heart. At the same time it should be recognized that what is called religious strife is usually only partly that. The “religious wars” of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were at least as much about politics, with, for example, Catholic France supporting German Protestants in order to weaken the Catholic German emperor. Today it would be extremely simplistic to think that religion is all that fuels the strife in Northern Ireland or the Near East.

God vs. Science.
TIME: Professor Dawkins, if one truly understands science, is God then a delusion, as your book title suggests?

DAWKINS: The question of whether there exists a supernatural creator, a God, is one of the most important that we have to answer. I think that it is a scientific question. My answer is no.

TIME: Dr. Collins, you believe that science is compatible with Christian faith.

COLLINS: Yes. God’s existence is either true or not. But calling it a scientific question implies that the tools of science can provide the answer. From my perspective, God cannot be completely contained within nature, and therefore God’s existence is outside of science’s ability to really weigh in.

Teresa Watanabe, It Sounds Like Hate, But Is It? LAT Feb. 16, 2002

Religion; It Sounds Like Hate, but Is It?; Most sacred texts contain passages shocking to modern sensibilities. Los Angeles Times, Feb. 16, 2002, p. B20.

How do you make sure ancient scriptures mesh with modern-day sensibilities?

The prevailing answer among scholars: You can’t. No scripture is politically correct–nor, many scholars argue, should anyone expect it to be.

Right Wing Watch: Jerry Falwell Archives
Before his death, Jerry Falwell was interviewed by CNN’s Christiane Amanpour for her series “God’s Warrirors” and stated that, in the next election, national security was more important than social issues, attacked the Democrats, and stood by his post-9/11 comments blaming “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians … the ACLU, People For the American Way” for the attacks.

MEMRI is a right-wing Israeli organization that seeks to attribute Arab and Muslim hostility to Israel to anti-Semitism and thereby divert attention from the agony of the Palestinians. This perspective is both absurd and morally repugnant. That said, Islamist antisemitism is also absurd and morally repugnant. Middle East experts who are rightly critical of attempts to demonize all Islamists should not go to the opposite extreme of idealizing them all. The fact that Islamist antisemitism is often used to divert attention from Palestinian suffering does not mean it can be ignored. The following statements by the former Turkish prime minister Prof. Necmettin Erbakan, who is the founder and leader of the Islamist movement Milli Gorus are clearly outrageous. And those of us outraged by Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians should condemn such rhetoric just as vehemently as we condemn the bigotry of Christian and Jewish religious reactionaries. If we do not, we simply invert the moral myopia of the neoconservatives.

MEMRI:
Erbakan: “When we look at the map of the world, we see about 200 countries painted in colors, and we think that there are many races, religions, and nations. The fact is that for 300 years, all these [200 nations] have been controlled from one center only. This center is the racist, imperialist Zionism. Unless you make this correct diagnosis for the illness, you cannot find the cure to it. You will ask, ‘What is this belief, this racist imperialism that destroys happiness in this world?’

“This belief began 5,765 years ago, when the children of Israel were living in Egypt, with a book of magic that was written by someone called Kabbala. The author or authors of this book later claimed that they belonged to the tribe of Moses, but this is not true. They distorted the Tevrat [bible] of Moses and put in it the Kabbala. If you want to see proof of this, you can look at their Tevrat and then look at the Kabbala.

“What do these people believe in? Their belief has four principles [while ours has six] that say: […] 1) You are the real people of God; all others are created to be your slaves; you were created as men and others [were created] as monkeys that later turned into men. This is what they believe and what they teach. They believe that they are the superior class. 2) This superiority will be not only in thought, but will be materialized, actually realized. They will be the masters and the others will be their slaves. 3) For all this to come true, they must perform three duties: The first duty will be to gather all the exiled sons of Israel into Quds [Jerusalem]; the second duty is to build the ‘Greater Israel’ between the Nile and the Euphrates, within these determined borders, and to provide for the safety of this Greater Israel.

“Do you know what the safety of Israel means? It means that they will rule the 28 countries from Morocco to Indonesia. Since all the Crusades were organized by the Zionists, and since it was our forefathers the Seljuks who stopped them, according to the Kabbala there should be no sovereign state in Anatolia. This is these people’s [i.e. the Jews’] religion, their faith. You can’t argue or negotiate with them. This is their religion, and it comes from the Kabbala.

Reidel Hamas - jumped, provoked, and pushed, bitterlemons-international.org, 8/16/2007
So a heady mix of Hamas firebrands eager for war, the barely concealed American and Israeli desire to reverse the results of the 2006 elections and pressure from both the Shi’ite and Sunni global jihadist centers created the explosive mix last June. Finally, of course, there was also the incompetence of the Fateh leadership. How much each factor alone counted is impossible to know; the combination is what mattered. The question now is, will Hamas be able to exploit its posture as the “real” voice of Palestine to undermine a “quisling” Fateh in the West Bank, where it is even more dependent on Israeli and US support and especially IDF bayonets to survive?

Idaho senator severs ties to Romney campaign because of arrest in men’s room, The Boston Globe, 8/28/2007
The undercover officer was monitoring the restroom at noon on June 11. A few minutes later, Craig entered and sat in the stall next to him. Craig began tapping his right foot, touched his right foot to the left foot of the officer in the stall next to him and brushed his hand beneath the partition between them. He was then arrested.

Le Monde.fr, August 28, 2007
Des centaines de palettes de bouteilles de boissons gazeuses sont entreposées sous l’immense hangar de l’usine Pepsi Cola, à Jabaliya, dans le nord de la bande de Gaza. En temps normal, ces stocks sont écoulés en quelques heures auprès des épiceries du mince territoire palestinien. Mais depuis deux mois et demi, aucun camion de livraison n’est sorti du hangar, car les bouteilles sont vides. Le blocus de la bande de Gaza imposé par l’armée israélienne à la suite du coup de force du Hamas, le 14 juin, a en effet épuisé les réserves de l’usine en dioxyde de carbone (CO2). Faute de ce gaz nécessaire à la confection de toute boisson à bulles, les bouteilles n’ont pas pu être remplies.

“J’ai le sucre, les étiquettes, les bouteilles, les composants chimiques, les bouchons et les cartons, fulmine Mohamed Yazegi, le patron de cette entreprise familiale, ouverte en 1960. L’armée israélienne sait très bien qu’avec un seul container de CO2, je pourrais me remettre à travailler pendant deux semaines. Mais parce que les dirigeants israéliens sont décidés à mettre le Hamas à genoux, ils refusent de laisser rentrer mon gaz. J’ai dû licencier 200 de mes employés.”

The police, security services and army are under the constant threat of active resistance on the settlers’ part, and they submit to that threat. The necessary monopoly over this power no longer exists. There are two states; one committed to a Western democratic government, and the other committed to extremist, messianic religious rule.