Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Source: openDemocracy.net, September 28, 2007

Myanmar - Monks - Buddhism - Protests and Demonstrations, New York Times, September 30, 2007

Burmese monks have taken part in protests in the past, against British colonial rule and against a half-century of rule by military dictatorship. The most notable recent occasion was in 1990.

Their militant resistance to the British produced the most prominent political martyr of Burmese Buddhism, U Wisara, who died in prison in 1929 after a 166-day hunger strike.

His statue stands near the tall, golden Shwedagon Pagoda, the country’s holiest shrine, which was a rallying point for the recent demonstrations and the scene of the first violence against the monks last week.

A Revival in Chechnya, Under an Iron Hand of Russia’s Proxy - New York Times, September 30, 2007Three years after a wave of guerrilla and terrorist attacks caused many analysts to say that Russia’s war against Chechen separatists could not be won, the republic has fallen almost fully under the control of the Kremlin and its indigenous proxies, led by Ramzan A. Kadyrov, the Chechen president.

Mr. Kadyrov’s human rights record is chilling, and allegations of his government’s patterns of brutality and impunity are widespread. Yet even his most severe critics say he has developed significant popular support, in part because of the clear changes that have accompanied his firm and fearsome rule.

Fighting has been sporadic and small in scale for a second year. A large rebel offensive did not materialize this summer, as the separatists had predicted. Buoyed by a sustained lull in fighting and flush with cash, Mr. Kadyrov’s government has rebuilt most of its capital and outlying areas….

The insurgency, though diminished, is still a factor. Mr. Malashenko said that as many as several hundred fighters remain, although they do not appear as well organized or equipped as before.

Sarah Mendelson, a director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said it was too soon to say that Chechnya had recovered. Its lingering problems, including the questionable loyalties of the former rebels now in power and the competition between the Kremlin and the Chechen government for oil, are significant enough that the republic could slip into disorder again.

Gideon Levy, The war for the house - Haaretz, September 30, 2007

Does the fact that the commander of the Popular Front in the camp lives in the house justify demolishing the entire five-story building? When will the IDF learn that the next terrorists will sprout from among these very ruins? Was not the urge for revenge aroused in the heart of the child who searched for the bicycle among the ruins of his home, who saw his world destroyed? Anyone wishing to become acquainted with the real “infrastructure of terror” is invited to travel to Nablus, to see the ruins of the home at the edge of the Ein Beit Ilma camp.

The Monks Are Cut Off, and Burmese Clashes Ebb - New York Times, September 29, 2007

BANGKOK, Sept. 28 — Myanmar’s armed forces appeared on Friday to have sealed tens of thousands of protesting monks inside their monasteries, but they continued to attack bands of demonstrators who challenged them in the main city, Yangon.

Protesters continued to challenge authorities in Yangon Friday, after thousands of monks were sealed off in monasteries.

Witnesses and diplomats reached by telephone inside the country said troops were confronting and attacking smaller groups of civilians around Yangon, chasing them through narrow streets and sometimes firing at protesters and arresting them.

Woman’s face covered by black paint in cell phone ad

‘Shiite Taliban’ rises as British depart Basra | csmonitor.com, September 18, 2007

Now, as the British prepare to exit Basra Province altogether after pulling out from this provincial capital last week, they leave behind what has been described by many here as an emerging “Shiite Taliban state,” a reference to Sunni extremists in Afghanistan.

And with the British gone, many say, they leave open the possibility that Iran could extend its influence within the mosques, religious schools, and militant party headquarters. Over the past four years, Basra has undergone its own Islamic revolution of sorts.

Posters of the leader of Iran’s 1979 social and religious revolt, Ayatollah Khomeini, who at the time imposed similar limits on his society, are plastered everywhere in Basra.

Public parties are banned. Selling musical CDs is forbidden in shops. Those who sell or consume alcohol face recrimination, even death. Artists and performers are severely restricted and even labeled as heretics. A famous city landmark, a replica of the Lion of Babylon statue that stood here for decades was blown up by militants in July. It was considered idolatrous, according to the strict interpretation of Islam.

Signs ordering women to cover up appear throughout the city. One woman, an Iraqi female activist from Basra, says the notices even threaten death. One banner, she says, said unveiled women could be murdered and no one could remove their bodies from the street.

Munson’s comment: I am the kind of “buttery” atheist Dawkins criticizes in the following article. Rather than focus on the substance of the arguments he criticizes, Dawkins focuses on the “tone of voice” of those who make them. With respect to the “I’m an atheist, but religion is here to stay” argument, Phil Zuckerman cites a series of polls indicating that somewhere between 4 and 9 percent of Americans do not believe in God (The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, p. 48). These numbers could of course increase some day to the 31-39 percent found in Britain (p. 49). But the fact remains that if one looks at the world as a whole, trying to eradicate belief in God, or gods, is almost as futile as trying to eliminate sex. This may not always be true, but it will clearly be true for the rest of the twentieth-first century. So rather than trying to eliminate religion, a more fruitful strategy is to cooperate with moderate believers who support the kind of tolerant society favored by most atheist intellectuals.

‘I’m an atheist, BUT . . .’ by Richard Dawkins - RichardDawkins.net, Nov. 2006

I’ve noticed five variants of I’m-an-atheist-buttery, and I’ll list them in turn, in the hope that others will recognize them, be armed against them, and perhaps extend the list by contributing examples from their own experience.

1. I’m an atheist, but religion is here to stay. You think you can get rid of religion? Good luck to you! You want to get rid of religion? What planet are you living on? Religion is a fixture. Get over it!

I could bear any of these downers, if they were uttered in something approaching a tone of regret or concern. On the contrary. The tone of voice is almost always gleeful, and accompanied by a self-satisfied smirk….

2. I’m an atheist, but people need religion. What are you going to put in its place? How are you going to comfort the bereaved? How are you going to fill the need?

I dealt with this in the last chapter of The God Delusion, ‘A Much Needed Gap’ and also, at more length, in Unweaving the Rainbow. Here I’ll make one additional point. Did you notice the patronizing condescension in the quotations I just listed? You and I, of course, are much too intelligent and well educated to need religion. But ordinary people, hoi polloi, the Orwellian proles, the Huxleian Deltas and Epsilon semi-morons, need religion.

Former chief rabbi dies after illness - Haaretz, September 28, 2007

Former chief rabbi Abraham Shapira, 96, died yesterday after an illness.

Shapira will be remembered as one of Israel’s most political chief rabbis. During the Oslo Accords, Rabbi Shapira ruled that handing over territories, even as part of a peace agreement, was against Jewish law.

He also called on soldiers to refuse orders, an instruction he reiterated many times over the years, including during the disengagement from Gaza in 2005.

He was considered the unofficial spiritual leader of the National Religious Party.

Roger Owen, Chaos and unity in a fragmented Iraq - The Boston Globe, September 28, 2007

The major reasons why sectarian leaders cannot come together to create a united leadership for a united Iraq is that, rather than being able to control their followers outside the Green Zone, they are now, to a larger extent, controlled by them.

How and why this came about can be summed up under two related reasons. One concerns the long history of the devolution of local power by British and American authorities, first to the Kurds, then to those Iraqi sectarian parties that won a majority in the provincial elections in 2005.

In the case of the British in particular, control over the local administration and the police was simply handed to whichever Shi’ite party, or coalition of parties, gained the most electoral support. The same happened in the northern provinces, for example in the Mosul region, a process that greatly added to sectarian fighting in and around the city itself as a result of the fact that the Sunnis, by boycotting the election, had excluded themselves from the official political process.

The second, increasingly important reason is the fact that, as in the case of Lebanon during its own civil war, there were enough economic resources scattered around the country for local warlords who controlled them to maintain their own loyal militias and civilian constituencies without having to reply on the leadership’s financial support.

These included such tangible assets as police stations and armories, as well as economic assets like oil pipelines or refineries, electricity substations able to route local supplies, ports, and vital roads where traffic coming in and out of Kuwait in the south and Jordan and Syria in the east could readily be taxed, used for the smuggling of drugs and weapons or both.

Martin van Creveld, The World Can Live With a Nuclear Iran - Forward.com, September 24, 2007

Iran may indeed have some Shihab III missiles with the range to hit Israel, but their number is limited and their reliability uncertain. Should the missiles carry conventional warheads, then militarily speaking the effect will probably be close to zero. Should they carry unconventional ones, then Iran — to quote former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, speaking not long before the first Gulf war — will open itself to “awesome and terrible retaliation.”

Iran’s other options are either to stir up trouble in the Gulf or to launch terrorist attacks in the West. Trouble in the Gulf will cause the price of oil to skyrocket, but it will not save Iran from being heavily bombed.

Terrorist attacks are certainly possible. However, their strategic impact will be close to zero. After all, the September 11 attacks — the largest such attack of all time — did not diminish the capability of the American armed forces by one iota.

In case Bush does decide to attack Iran, it is questionable whether Iran’s large, well-dispersed and well-camouflaged nuclear program can really be knocked out. This is all the more doubtful because, in contrast to the Israeli attacks on Iraq back in 1981 and on Syria three weeks ago, the element of surprise will be lacking. And even if it can be done, whether doing so will serve a useful purpose is also questionable.

Since 1945 hardly one year has gone by in which some voices — mainly American ones concerned about preserving Washington’s monopoly over nuclear weapons to the greatest extent possible — did not decry the terrible consequences that would follow if additional countries went nuclear. So far, not one of those warnings has come true. To the contrary: in every place where nuclear weapons were introduced, large-scale wars between their owners have disappeared.

General John Abizaid, the former commander of United States Central Command, is only the latest in a long list of experts to argue that the world can live with a nuclear Iran. Their views deserve to be carefully considered, lest Ahmadinejad’s fear-driven posturing cause anybody to do something stupid.

firstamendmentcenter.org: news, September 24, 2007

WASHINGTON — Sixty-five percent of Americans believe that the nation’s founders intended the U.S. to be a Christian nation and 55% believe that the Constitution establishes a Christian nation, according to the “State of the First Amendment 2007” national survey released Sept. 11 by the First Amendment Center.

Burma’s revolt | openDemocracy.net, September 27, 2007

Eyewitness reports from bloggers inside Burma - Times Online, September 26, 2007

With the Burmese government restricting visas to foreign journalists, and all internal media controlled by the state, the internet provides one of the few routes left for getting eyewitness reports from inside Burma to the outside world. Despite rumours that the junta intends to close down internet access, a few brave bloggers continue to report their experiences.

Monks’ protests put pressure on junta, Financial Times, September 25, 2007

…the dramatic display in recent days of the Burmese public’s long-pent up resentment is threatening the military’s plans, as they confront a mass protest movement led by Buddhist monks chanting prayers for peace.

In spite of warnings to monks to stop marching and keep out of “secular affairs”, the generals have shown an uncharacteristic tolerance for the protests, probably out of concern about the repercussions both at home and in relations with key allies, such as China, of any violent crackdown.

Nir Rosen, No Going Back, Boston Review, September/October 2007

By early 2007 all my Sunni Iraqi friends were trying to leave Iraq….

Hamid continued: “The American government is stupid. They invaded and gave Iraq to Iran.”

…”God is with us!” he said, “Each Sunni is worth one hundred of them. Sunnis, as few as they are, will return and kill the Americans, Iranians, and apostates.”

…Iraq had no history of civil war or sectarian violence even approaching this scale until the Americans arrived….

I recently spoke to a close Iraqi friend, a Sunni doctor who was desperately trying to get his family out of Iraq…. “You know what makes me crazy?” he asked me. “How they want to pull their troops out.” I was surprised. I thought he had been opposed to the American occupation; I certainly was. “You want them to stay now?” I asked. “Can you imagine what will happen if they left?” he asked. “I don’t know if things would be very different,” I responded. “If they left the government will kill all of us,” he told me…. Before my friend succeeded in obtaining his passport, his father was murdered, his body found in a Baghdad morgue.

Yehuda Bauer, A human being without fault, Haaretz, September 27, 2007

Over the years, a strange friendship developed between us: On the dais, we would engage in a virulent argument but afterward, we would drink coffee together and tell each other personal news, talk about new findings and mutual friends. We sought each other out, we went together to book stores in the places where we met, we wrote to each other from time to time, and he would send me his books with the most important dedication of all: “To he who, like me, seeks the truth.”

Like me, he was a total atheist, and like me, he was a warm Jew in every sense. We grew up, as he would tell me, on “the same garbage heap,” with the same mother tongue, in the same cultural milieu. We were born a few months apart and our families fled from Europe in the same month…. During the only conference that was held in his honor, when he retired from his teaching position at the University of Vermont, he insisted that I be the main speaker. There too, as always, I did not hide the differences between us, and he sat and listened. Later, we embraced. Raul Hilberg was a great man, a great researcher, irritable, furious and loving, but above all, a human being without fault. I lost a close and personal friend.