Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

No room for ‘misfits’ - Haaretz - Israel News, September 21, 2007

“Zman yehudi hadash” is a white project that corresponds with Europe and North America while casually erasing entire Jewish histories, those lived by the Jews of the Islamic countries.

As I pointed out last week, the encyclopedia’s editorial board consists of 14 learned members, among them only one woman (Shulamit Volkov) and one Mizrahi (Michel Abitbol). And what about the contributors? The five volumes contain some 380 entries written by about 240 different authors. Of the 380, 67 were written by women (about 18 percent), three by Arabs (on “Arab topics”), and 15 at most were written by Mizrahim (about 4 percent).

This bias, which is even more severe than the outrageously low representation of these groups among Israeli university faculty members - where the numbers are 20 percent women, 7 percent Mizrahi and about 1.5 percent Arabs - is also evident in the contents of the different entries. It is astonishing to see, for example, how for most of the writers, Mizrahi Jews simply do not fall within their field of vision.

M.J. Rosenberg, It’s lobbying, but is it really pro-Israel? - Haaretz, September 21, 2007

The U.S. (and Israeli) policies of all sticks and no carrots led predictably to Abbas’ defeat by Hamas and a Hamas-controlled Gaza that has resumed its attacks on Israeli towns.

Peter Galbraith, The Victor?, TomDispatch, 9/18/2007, and NYRB, Oct. 11, 2007

In his continuing effort to bolster support for the Iraq war, President Bush traveled to Reno, Nevada, on August 28 to speak to the annual convention of the American Legion. He emphatically warned of the Iranian threat should the United States withdraw from Iraq. Said the President, “For all those who ask whether the fight in Iraq is worth it, imagine an Iraq where militia groups backed by Iran control large parts of the country.”

On the same day, in the southern Iraqi city of Karbala, the Mahdi Army, a militia loyal to the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, battled government security forces around the shrine of Imam Hussein, one of Shiite Islam’s holiest places. A million pilgrims were in the city and fifty-one died.

The U.S. did not directly intervene, but American jets flew overhead in support of the government security forces. As elsewhere in the south, those Iraqi forces are dominated by the Badr Organization, a militia founded, trained, armed, and financed by Iran. When U.S. forces ousted Saddam’s regime from the south in early April 2003, the Badr Organization infiltrated from Iran to fill the void left by the Bush administration’s failure to plan for security and governance in post-invasion Iraq.

Munson, International Election Monitoring: A Critique Based on One Monitor’s Experience in Morocco Middle East Report, 1998

Since the early 1980s, countless teams of “international observers” have monitored elections in countries ostensibly becoming more democratic. Most monitors typically arrive shortly before voting begins and leave shortly after it ends. Foreign election observers usually visit only a small fraction of the polling sites and electoral districts. The capital and easily accessible cities tend to receive more attention than the countryside.

Most foreign observers know little about the political context of the elections they are observing. Too often they focus on the technical mechanics of elections while ignoring basic questions such as the role of voting in any real distribution of power. To term a technically flawless election to a parliament lacking effective power “free and fair” is misleading.

Munson, Fundamentalism — Britannica Online Encyclopedia

Although the terms fundamentalism and fundamentalist have entered common parlance and are now broadly applied, it should not be forgotten that the myriad movements so designated vary greatly in their origins, character, and outlook.

Munson, Fundamentalism Around the World–What’s Really Behind It? -Britannica Blog, Nov. 17, 2006

Fundamentalism reflects moral outrage at the violation of traditional religious values, but can it also articulate nationalistic and social grievances as well?

Fundamentalism, as I discuss in my new entry on the subject for Encyclopaedia Britannica, is a type of militantly conservative religious movement characterized by the advocacy of strict conformity to sacred texts and a moral code ostensibly based on them. It existed long before the word did. One could speak of the Maccabean revolt of the second century B.C.E. as having a fundamentalist impulse insofar as it insisted on strict conformity to the Torah and Jewish religious law. Similarly, Calvin’s 16th-century Genevan polity and 17-century Puritanism could be called fundamentalist insofar as they insisted on strict conformity to the Bible and a moral code based on it.

Munson, Lifting the Veil: Understanding the Roots of Islamic Militancy, Harvard International Review, 2004

Public opinion polls taken in the Islamic world in recent years provide considerable insight into the roots of Muslim hostility toward the United States, indicating that for the most part, this hostility has less to do with cultural or religious differences than with US policies in the Arab world.

Al Qaeda leaders release new videos | csmonitor.com, 9/21/2007

Al Qaeda intensified its propaganda campaign Thursday by issuing its third video since the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. In a lengthy commentary, Al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri urged Muslims to fight the United States and its allies, targeting the prospect of African Union and United Nations peacekeepers in Darfur. Later on Thursday, Al Qaeda released a new recording of Osama bin Laden declaring war on Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and Pakistan’s Army.

Munson, More Americans to Die for Iraq’s Pro-Iranian Theocracy -Britannica Blog, Jan. 11, 2007

Just as American governments failed to see the local social and nationalistic dimensions of communist movements during the Cold War, so too have they failed to see the local social and nationalistic dimensions of militant Islamist movements in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. (See my Britannica Blog on fundamentalism.) A “global war on terror” has now replaced the global war on communism as the paradigm shaping American foreign policy. The various local grievances that fuel militant Islamic movements are ignored. Armed force is seen as the key to defeating Islamic militancy when in fact this approach strengthens the very forces it is supposed to weaken. The totally unnecessary fiasco in Iraq is a case in point.

Plan for Sea Canal Puts Hindu Belief In Sharp Relief - washingtonpost.com, September 18, 2007

“Millions of Hindus believe that Ram built that bridge across the sea. Our scriptures and epics mention it,” said Surendra Jain, a leader of the World Hindu Council, a hard-line Hindu group. “We will not let them destroy our religious heritage.”

Sectarian Toll Includes Scars to Iraq Psyche - New York Times, September 17, 2007

On a recent Tuesday, a thin parade of tired-looking couples trudged through the office of a family court judge in Sharchiya, a mostly Shiite neighborhood in central Baghdad. Only about 5 percent of the marriage contracts he registers are for mixed-sect couples, down from about 50 percent before the war, the judge said…. The court is one of the city’s few family courts, but as a testament to how separated the neighborhoods are now, just one in 10 couples he marries is Sunni.

Omar’s father was shot dead by six men from the neighborhood in May. Omar can name every one of them. Now they visit his grocery shop and take sodas without paying. They were poor before the war. Now they drive Land Cruisers taken from their victims.

They drive through the neighborhood, windows down, blasting songs about the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr and sometimes honking the horn….

Omar seethed in silent fury as he gave soda and cellphone scratch cards to his father’s killers.

Robert Fisk: The forgotten holocaust - Independent, August 28, 2007

The photographs, never before published, capture the horrors of the first Holocaust of the 20th century. They show a frightened people on the move – men, women and children, some with animals, others on foot, walking over open ground outside the city of Erzerum in 1915, at the beginning of their death march. We know that none of the Armenians sent from Erzerum – in what is today north-eastern Turkey – survived. Most of the men were shot, the children – including, no doubt, the young boy or girl with a headscarf in the close-up photograph – died of starvation or disease. The young women were almost all raped, the older women beaten to death, the sick and babies left by the road to die.

The unique photographs are a stunning witness to one of the most terrible events of our times. Their poor quality – the failure of the camera to cope with the swirl and movement of the Armenian deportees in the close-up picture, the fingerprint on the top of the second – lend them an undeniable authenticity. They come from the archives of the German Deutsche Bank, which was in 1915 providing finance for the maintenance and extension of the Turkish railway system. One incredible photograph – so far published in only two specialist magazines, in Germany and in modern-day Armenia – actually shows dozens of doomed Armenians, including children, crammed into cattle trucks for their deportation.

The Nonbelievers - The Boston Globe, September 16, 2007

Over the past two years, Greg Epstein, 30, has become a kind of ministerial paradox, a member of the local clergy who disavows God, preaches to atheists and agnostics, and seeks to build the equivalent of a church for nonbelievers and others skeptical of or alienated by religion. A former lead singer of a rock band, he now serves as the humanist chaplain at Harvard University, one of a small but growing number of such chaplains for nonbelievers on college campuses. In his position, which is endowed, he has helped marry and bury fellow atheists. He has presided over baby-naming ceremonies and organized a “coming out” ceremony for a congressman, Representative Pete Stark of California, one of the few public officials to acknowledge he doesn’t believe in God. He also counsels students and approximates evangelizing by handing out pamphlets with the question: “Are you a humanist?”

Today, 12 percent of Americans surveyed age 20 and older describe themselves as not religious, up from 8 percent in 1987.

The publisher of Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything had printed some 300,000 copies less than two months after it went on sale this year. Other popular titles include evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, of which there are more than a half million hardcover copies in print….

…unlike other humanists, many of whom argue that acceptance of even moderate views about religion legitimizes religious extremists, Epstein is more ecumenical in his atheism. He has even sparked controversy by criticizing more militant, religion-bashing atheists – in a press release promoting a conference on humanism last spring, his office referred to that group as “fundamentalists.”

Held in My Homeland - washingtonpost.com, September 16, 2007

On May 8, I was arrested by agents of Iran’s intelligence ministry on suspicion of working to destabilize the Islamic Republic. For the next 105 days, this cell in Ward 209 of Tehran’s Evin Prison would be my “home.”

…I dreamed of my leisurely Sunday morning coffee with my husband, Shaul, and my weekend dinners with my daughter, Haleh, and my grandchildren….

Late in the afternoon of Aug. 23, my senior interrogator came to Evin and told me to pack my things. I was free to go. Ten days later I had my passport, and on Sept. 3, I boarded an Austrian Airlines flight for Vienna.

5 Myths About Terrorism - washingtonpost.com, September 16, 2007

In fact, terrorists are typically motivated by geopolitical grievances, not blind hatred. The agendas of individual terrorist groups vary, but their tactical goal is always more or less the same: to sow fear and confusion by deliberately targeting civilians in order to intimidate a country into changing its policies and ways….

Jitka Maleckova of the Russell Sage Foundation and I found that members of the military wing of the radical Shiite group Hezbollah who were killed in action in the 1980s and early 1990s were better educated and less likely to be poor than their Lebanese countrymen….

Every major religious faith has had followers involved in terrorism. (Sri Lanka, for instance, has grappled for decades with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a separatist group that pioneered suicide bombing as a terrorist tactic and hopes to create a homeland for the country’s mostly Tamil minority, who are largely Hindu.)