Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Le bien, le mal et le « terrorisme », par Eric Rouleau (Le Monde diplomatique)
Il n’y a pas si longtemps, aux Etats-Unis, un conférencier devait éviter d’analyser les causes politiques et sociales de la violence, de crainte d’être soupçonné de justifier le terrorisme. L’oukase officiel exigeait que l’on considère la planète comme menacée par la haine irrationnelle de la démocratie. Politologues et journalistes évitaient prudemment de s’engager à contre-courant. Cependant, la vague de contestation qui déferle, à la suite des scandales qui éclaboussent l’administration Bush, balaye progressivement les tabous et les idées reçues, comme en témoignent plusieurs œuvres parues récemment. Elles ne justifient pas le terrorisme, elles analysent ses causes et suggèrent des remèdes.

AlterNet: God’s Harvard: The New Grooming Ground of the Evangelical Movement, Alternet, 8/23/2007

One night my husband finally asked her the question: “So, are we going to Hell?” The Patrick Henry statement of faith, which Sarah and all the other students have to sign, is quite explicit on this question. Satan is real, it says, so is Hell. “All who die outside of Christ shall be confined in conscious torment for eternity.” Barring the Second Coming, chances are quite high that my husband and I and our two young children are going to die outside of Christ.

At this point, Sarah had been living with us for almost a month. She’d bathed our children and read them bedtime stories. She’d given my five-year-old daughter a magnificent white model horse, Snow White, that she herself had loved as a child.

“Yes,” she answered. “But I’m not jumping up and down with joy about it.”

Israël, ça n’existe pas. Ce n’est qu’une grande colonie peuplée par des clans mafieux. La télévision palestinienne, pareil : ce n’est qu’une chaîne aux ordres du Fatah. Nous, au moins, on ne triche pas. On représente le Hamas et on le dit.”

Media Matters
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, some religious conservatives have speculated that the storm was sent by God as an omen or as a punishment for America’s alleged sins.

Christians, Jews in Holy Land alliance - CNN.com, August 21, 2007

Gods Warriors - Special Reports from CNN.com

HEZBOLLAH’S CREEPY NEW MUSEUM
Exhibition Game
by Zvika Krieger
The New Republic

Post date: 08.17.07
Issue date: 08.27.07
Beirut, Lebanon

Earlier this week, I found myself standing in the courtyard of Beirut’s newest museum in front of the warped propeller of a Yasur CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopter. The propeller, a placard helpfully explained, had been “destroyed by the resistance” during last summer’s war, a fate that had also befallen the half-dozen charred Israeli military vehicles surrounding it. A group of hijab-clad women nudged me out of the way so they could snap some photos with the propeller.

The downed helicopter is on display at the Spider’s Web, Hezbollah’s new war museum. The free exhibition commemorates the group’s “divine victory” over Israel last summer by offering up a professional and slickly curated collection of war paraphernalia–the work of over two dozen conceptual artists, graphic designers, engineers, musicians, and lighting technicians. Since opening last month, it has become this summer’s hottest tourist destination, attracting, mostly by word of mouth, over 200,000 visitors. “We don’t even remember the war in the Christian area where I’m from, but I felt like it is something that should not be forgotten soon,” explains Danya, a 26-year-old Christian financial consultant, as she made her way into the museum past a busload of schoolchildren. “Also, I wanted to see what all my friends were talking about.”

And that’s exactly Hezbollah’s intention. The militant group has struggled to maintain its wartime popularity since it withdrew from the government last fall, occupied downtown Beirut, and threw the country into political turmoil. The Lebanese government has condemned Hezbollah, claiming it dragged the country into war. It has also refused to mark the war’s anniversary this month. The Spider’s Web, by contrast, won’t let the Lebanese forget it.

Entering the museum, visitors are greeted by massive posters of the war’s most reviled villains. A menacing picture of Condoleezza Rice announces that “This war is part of birth bangs [sic] of the new middle east [sic],” while a jester-like George W. Bush assures viewers that “[o]ur nation is wasting no time in helping the people of Lebanon.” Former Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz, in Israel’s crowning moment of the war, gazes pensively through capped binoculars. “Hassan Nasrallah won’t forget the name Aameer Peretz [sic],” quotes the caption under his larger- than-life portrait.

The main hall is lined with a panorama of crisp, glossy photographs: scenes of the bombed-out Al Manar building (Hezbollah’s TV station); floor-to-ceiling portraits of Lebanese refugees bawling in front of their leveled homes; a couple taking their wedding pictures in the rubble of south Beirut. One of the installations contains photos of bloody Lebanese children and infants covered in bandages and IV tubing, all surrounding a teddy bear recovered from a bombed-out Lebanese house. Lest anyone fail to realize who could possibly be so bloodthirsty, another display–which includes pictures of Israeli children excitedly signing missiles and a Hasidic man pumping his fist in front of an Israeli tank–proclaims, “This is their culture, this is their belief.”

The museum simultaneously tries to portray Hezbollah as helpless victims and brave warriors. The Spider’s Web draws its name from a Nasrallah speech in which he boasted that Israel is “more feeble than a spider’s web”–a theme he reiterated in a speech to tens of thousands of screaming fans outside the museum this week. Throughout the exhibition, glass cases sunk into the ground display some of the Israeli spoils captured by Hezbollah: helmets, boots, machine guns, radios, oxygen tanks, and even personal items such as iPods and tefillin (Jewish prayer straps) looted from dead Israeli soldiers. “Watch it burn,” proclaims a poster of a capsized Israeli warship. “It will sink taking with it dozens of Zionist Israeli soldiers.”

Perhaps fearing that the deaths of just dozens of Zionists won’t make enough of an impression, the Spider’s Web design team has made sure that pictures of bloodied and limbless Israeli soldiers make up the largest part of the exhibit. Some are digitally altered to be surrounded by hellish flames; others are rendered with anguished faces into art deco portraits; still others are engulfed in spider webs constructed with Koranic verses. “The invincible army!” gloats one of these montages. “It’s Lebanon, you fools,” reads another. A Warhol-esque portrait of Nasrallah presides contentedly over the display.

The museum’s main event is a sound-and-light show around Hezbollah’s prized artifact–a Merkava tank bombed during the war–displayed in a recreated bomb crater lined with mannequins of (what else?) dead Israeli soldiers. Every few minutes, the lights dim for an effects-laden video extravaganza that shows the explosion of the tank, up-close shots of Hezbollah militants launching Katyusha rockets, and Hezbollah’s missiles raining down on the Israeli city of Haifa. After the show, the lights come up on posters of crying Israeli soldiers.

Following this grand finale, visitors are quickly ushered out of the museum to a grassy, serene “Martyr’s Oasis.” This installation is filled with white pillars and a white staircase leading up to a white doorframe, perhaps a subtle nod to the glorious fate in store for those who died fighting for Hezbollah last summer (and whose pictures line the streets surrounding the museum).

The museum’s visitors, however, are relegated to worldly pleasures for the time being: The Hezbollah gift shop is located conveniently near the exit of the museum. For sale are fashionable Hezbollah hats, DVDs of Nasrallah’s speeches, and Hezbollah’s latest video game, “Special Force 2: Tale of the Truthful Pledge”–available in Arabic, English, French, and Farsi.

Mark Lilla, Politics of God, New York Times, August 19, 2007
Today, we have progressed to the point where our problems again resemble those of the 16th century, as we find ourselves entangled in conflicts over competing revelations, dogmatic purity and divine duty. We in the West are disturbed and confused. Though we have our own fundamentalists, we find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still stir up messianic passions, leaving societies in ruin. We had assumed this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong.

Fifth Dalai Lama’s instructions to repress Tibetan rebels, issued in 1660:

Make the male lines like trees that have had their roots cut;

Make the female lines like brooks that have dried up in winter;

Make the children and grandchildren like eggs smashed against rocks;

Make the servants and followers like heaps of grass consumed by fire; …

In short, annihilate any traces of them, even their name

(Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 6)

Marsh, Evangelicals against the Iraq war, The Boston Globe, July 8, 2007

Devenu chrétien, un Égyptien vit un calvaire, Le Figaro, August 17, 2007

[Le] quotidien gouvernemental Al-Messa…affirme que selon un «sondage» réalisé par ses soins, tous les oulémas sont unanimes sur la «nécessité de tuer l’apostat» : un verdict lapidaire clairement destiné à contredire le grand mufti d’Égypte, qui a récemment affirmé que les hommes n’ont pas à se substituer à Dieu pour faire justice…

Bar-Ilan again forced to deal with the extremists in its midst | Jerusalem Post, August 16, 2007

Akiva Eldar, The “College of Judea and Samaria in Ariel” is now called “Ariel University Center of Samaria, Haaretz, August, 2007

Jason Leopold,Video, Report Details Evangelism at Highest Levels of US Military, Truthout, August 3, 2007

Munson Intolerable Tolerance, Contention 5/3, 1996

The laudable desire to eliminate popular misconceptions about Islam in Western culture has sometimes induced Western scholars to embrace notions as fanciful as those they seek to refute. One thinks, for example, of the argument that Islamic fundamentalists, or “Islamists,” are benign revivalists who have been unfairly maligned by biased Western journalists, government officials, and scholars. There is a kernel of truth to this argument, but those who make it tend to minimize the significance of those aspects of Islamic militancy that are rightly condemned not just by non-Muslims, but by many Muslims as well. The notion that every Muslim is an infidel-hating terrorist is of course ludicrous — and dangerous. But trying to eradicate this stereotype does not entail glossing over the intolerance, violence, and fanaticism associated with many of the movements that advocate strictly Islamic states.