Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Wheatcroft, The Church in England: Downright Un-American, New York Times, November 25, 2007

The authoritative Catholic paper The Tablet of London now writes that, some time before Christmas, Anthony Charles Lynton Blair will at last be received into the Roman Catholic Church by Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales.

The historical resonances and political overtones of this are as significant as the event itself — which also illustrates again the great trans-Atlantic gulf. Not only are the English now a notably irreligious people; in striking contrast to America, religion plays no part in British political life.

For years it has been rumored that Blair would one day convert, the culmination of a journey that began when he discovered religion at Oxford. An Australian clergymen named Peter Thomson introduced him to the work of another writer. “If you really want to understand what I’m all about, you have to take a look at a guy called John Macmurray,” Mr. Blair has said. “It’s all there.”

Little read now, Macmurray was an academic theologian and proponent of “communitarianism” who died at 85 in 1976. Not everyone was as enthusiastic as Mr. Blair. George Orwell, for one, was suspicious of Macmurray as a “decayed liberal” who was even susceptible to totalitarian rhetoric.

However that may be, Mr. Blair joined the High or “Anglo-Catholic” wing of the Church of England, whose adherents, from John Henry Newman on, have been inclined “to pope” (as they used to say) and go the whole way. His wife, Cherie Booth, is a Catholic, and for years he went to Mass with her and their children, even taking holy communion, irregularly and sacrilegiously in Catholic eyes.

All of which sets him far apart from his compatriots. When an interviewer once tried to raise the question of faith, Mr. Blair’s press officer, Alastair Campbell, snapped, “We don’t do God,” and on that occasion at least he was quite right.

THE TRAIN BOMBER Jamal Ahmidan, top left, known to friends as Chino, turned from drug dealing to terror. THE MEN WHO LEFT Clockwise, from top right: In 2006, Bilal Ben Aboud, Muncif Ben Aboud, Abdelmunim Amakchar Elamrani, Hamza Akhlifa and Younes Achbak departed to wage jihad in Iraq.

Andrea Elliott, Where Boys Grow Up to Be Jihadis, New York Times Magazine, November 25, 2007

If there is one outlet for the neighborhood’s wellspring of male energy, it is soccer. In the summer, hundreds of boys gather on bleachers to watch as players glide across a worn, concrete pitch, some of them barefoot. Sitting around the bleachers one afternoon in July, a group of teenagers talked to me about their heroes. They said they worshipped Zinédine Zidane, the Muslim of Algerian descent who conquered the soccer world from France. They loved the Prophet Muhammad. The mere mention of Osama bin Laden elicited a sea of upturned thumbs.

“He’s very courageous,” said Ayman, a short, spunky 13-year-old with honey-colored skin. “Nobody did what he did. He challenges the whole world. He even challenges George Bush.”

Another teenage boy said he would gladly volunteer to fight the American occupation in Iraq if it meant bringing independence to Iraqis. “We want to help our Muslim brothers,” he told me. Of the Americans, he added: “If they kill us, we go to God. If we stay here, there is joblessness.”

Levy, Demands of a thief, Haaretz, November 25, 2007

Israel is not being asked “to give” anything to the Palestinians; it is only being asked to return - to return their stolen land and restore their trampled self-respect, along with their fundamental human rights and humanity. This is the primary core issue, the only one worthy of the title, and no one talks about it anymore.

No one is talking about morality anymore. Justice is also an archaic concept, a taboo that has deliberately been erased from all negotiations. Two and a half million people - farmers, merchants, lawyers, drivers, daydreaming teenage girls, love-smitten men, old people, women, children and combatants using violent means for a just cause - have all been living under a brutal boot for 40 years. Meanwhile, in our cafes and living rooms the conversation is over giving or not giving.

Israeli students stand at checkpoints as part of their army reserve duty, brutally deciding the fate of people, and then some rush off to lectures on ethics at university, forgetting what they did the previous day and what is being done in their names every single day.

The incarceration must be ended and the myriad of political prisoners should be released unconditionally. Just as a thief cannot present demands - neither preconditions nor any other terms - to the owner of the property he has robbed, Israel cannot present demands to the other side as long as the situation remains as it is.

…we have no right to do what we are doing: Just as no one would conceive of killing the residents of an entire neighborhood, to harass and incarcerate it because of a few criminals living there, there is no justification for abusing an entire people in the name of our security.

After 40 years, one might have expected that the real core issue would finally be raised for honest and bold discussion: Does Israel have the moral right to continue the occupation?

Thomas Jefferson quotes

But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.-Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782

A Revisionist Historian Looks at Religious Toleration - New York Times, November 24, 2007

At this moment, there may be no more important story than the one Europeans and Americans proudly tell themselves about the rise of religious toleration. So please take note of Benjamin J. Kaplan’s argument that the story may be dangerously flawed.

Mr. Kaplan makes that argument in “Divided by Faith,” just published by Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. The book’s subtitle is “Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe.” The crucial word is “practice.” Compare it with “idea” in “How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West” (Princeton, 2003), a recent overview of the same history by Perez Zagorin.

In his account, Mr. Zagorin, an emeritus professor of history at the University of Rochester, moves swiftly from St. Augustine’s case for the persecution of heretics to the Protestant Reformers, who challenged the Roman Catholic monopoly on doctrinal authority but not the belief in using coercion to defend true teaching. Finally, Mr. Zagorin marches through his pages a regiment of champions of religious toleration.

They begin with the admirable Sebastian Castellio. Castellio protested the execution in John Calvin’s Geneva of Michael Servetus, the anti-Trinitarian theologian who had run afoul of both the Catholic Inquisition and Protestant officialdom. Dutch and English defenders of toleration next pass in review until, on the cusp of the 18th-century Enlightenment, the story culminates with the philosophers John Locke and Pierre Bayle.

A brief coda brings in Voltaire, James Madison, the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Roman Catholic Church’s 1965 Declaration on Religious Liberty.

This is a familiar kind of triumphal history. It pits the forces of progress, i.e., those who share our modern values, against the forces of resistance, i.e., those who don’t. Whatever the struggle, each step mounts another rung on a single ladder leading, by natural stages, to ourselves.

Mr. Kaplan, a professor of Dutch history at University College London and the University of Amsterdam, does not set out to refute this account but to shift the focus, from elite thinkers and theories to popular beliefs and behavior.

His first achievement is to convey the communal nature of early modern religion. Every town and village was a microcosm of the body of Christianity. Civic rituals were not separate from sacred ones. Daily, weekly and seasonal time had a religious dimension. Communal welfare depended on divine wrath or favor, which might bring on flood, famine or bountiful harvest. Tolerating heretical deviations was a high-stakes business.

“It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg,” Jefferson could write in 1781. A century earlier, such individualism was unthinkable to most Europeans. Indulging heresy, as Mr. Kaplan points out, threatened not only to pick their pockets but also to endanger their souls.

Contrary to the once-popular notion that religious toleration rose steadily from the Middle Ages through the Protestant Reformation and on to the Enlightenment, Mr. Kaplan maintains that religious toleration declined from around 1550 to 1750.

This was the age of frightful religious wars, as rulers yoked religion to dynastic ambitions. But religious wars did not usually mean neighbor against neighbor. Religious violence among neighbors tended to be sporadic, often ignited when one religious group engaged in public rituals that a rival group felt contaminated communal space.

Munson: Scheuer ignores the fact that Sunni militias armed by the US have been defeating al-Qaeda in Iraq and bin Laden knows it. Bin Laden can of course portray Iraq as a great victory in the sense that the US is bogged down in a prolonged and ultimately unwinnable war that has intensified the hostility toward the US that facilitates recruitment by militant Islamic groups like al-Qaeda. But the fact remains that Shiite fundamentalists–supported to various degrees by Iran–will continue to control most of Iraq. Such people are fundamentally hostile to the anti-Shiite fundamentalism of Sunni groups like al-Qaeda in Iraq, which have absolutely no chance of ever taking control of the Iraqi government. Al-Qaeda’s vision of a Wahhabi state in Iraq is as chimerical as the Bush administration’s vision of a docile pro-American state that would serve as a model of “the new Middle East.”

Scheuer, Bin Laden talks of victory, not defeat, Asia Times Online, November 22, 2007

Nearly a month since Osama bin Laden published his message to “our people in Iraq”, it is worth taking a look at what bin Laden really said versus what the media, Western leaders and some prematurely mirthful pundits claim he said.

In the most obvious sense, bin Laden’s October 23 statement is a post-Iraq war statement and a further development of Ayman al-Zawahiri’s 2005 message to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the now dead leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. From al-Qaeda’s perspective, the war is over and Islam has won; Washington’s announcement last week that it intends to begin the withdrawal of 3,000 troops, as well as the US Congress’ recess without renewing war funding, will bolster this perception. Bin Laden’s message is, however, a warning to all Iraqi mujahideen - Sunni and Shi’ite - that the hardest task is yet to come: namely, the creation of an Islamist state in Iraq.

Bin Laden’s October 23 message builds on the July 2005 letter from Zawahiri to Zarqawi. At that time, Zawahiri told Zarqawi that the mujahideen had beaten the US-led coalition and urged him to prepare for US withdrawal, which might, he added, be “precipitous”. Bin Laden’s October message mirrors Zawahiri’s in concluding that the US coalition has been beaten, and in stating that the only unknown is the precise moment of its withdrawal.

There is nothing in bin Laden’s statement that criticizes the mujahideen for not fighting well - indeed, he refers to “magnificent victories” that make Americans “prisoners of their bases and the Green Zone” - much less anything that suggests they are losing. “The world has stood stunned, amazed, delighted and wonder-struck” over the Iraqi mujahideen’s effectiveness and perseverance, the al-Qaeda chief said.

AMONA, West Bank/Feb. 2006
A Jewish settler struggles with an Israeli security officer as authorities evacuate a West Bank settlement near the Palestinian town of Ramallah after Israel’s Supreme Court cleared the way for the demolition of nine homes at the site. This photo won first prize in The World Press Photo awards. (AP Photo/Oded Balilty)

Teibel, Subject of AP’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photo says God on her side, ap, 4/19/07

AMONA, West Bank (AP) — The photo caught the world’s attention: a lone 15-year-old girl holding back a wall of riot police moving in to demolish Jewish homes illegally erected in the West Bank.

Speaking for the first time since The Associated Press image won a Pulitzer prize this week, the girl, who would identify herself only as Nili, said God was on her side during the confrontation.

“In the photo you see me — one person as it were — against many. But that’s only an illusion,” said Nili, now two weeks shy of her 17th birthday, as she stood amid the ruins of the nine homes demolished in Amona in February 2006.

“Behind the many stood one man — (Prime Minister Ehud) Olmert,” who ordered the demolition. “Behind me stood the Lord Blessed Be He, and the people of Israel.”

Nili, a shy, gangly teen born in Israel to American parents, was one of several thousand Jewish protesters who barricaded themselves behind barbed wire and on rooftoops in an unsuccessful effort to keep club-wielding riot troops from demolishing the homes built on private Palestinian land.

Jacob Holdt, 2006

Jacob Holdt, 2006

Jacob Holdt, 2006

Jacob Holdt, 2006

Jacob Holdt, 2006

The people in this picture no longer belong to the Klan. The man has died and the two women are now active in their church.

Munson: The best Herzl biography remains Amos Elon’s Herzl (1975). Elon mentions that Herzl initially thought Dreyfus was guilty, but he also notes that when Herzl heard the Parisian mob’s shouts of “Down with the Jews,” he “sensed a kind of evil-smelling fog rise from the massed crowd” (p. 127). Elon states that Herzl’s editors at the Neue Freie Presse changed his account of the Parisian mob’s chant of “Death to the Jews” after Dreyfus’s conviction to “Death to the traitors” to avoid exacerbating anti-Semitism in Vienna (pp. 128-29).

Sarid, A man of action, Haaretz, November 11, 2007

We have been taught that the Dreyfus Affair, in 1894, planted the seed of Zionism in Herzl; that the humiliating public ceremony, by which the French captain was stripped of his rank in the French army, left the Austrian journalist shocked, pained and angry, and suddenly removed the scales from his eyes; that through the hatred directed at Dreyfus, Herzl came to understand the meaning of the situation of European Jews in general.

Now Avineri comes along and changes the picture: It turns out that initially, Herzl was convinced of Dreyfus’ guilt: “It is now clear that Captain Dreyfus sold his country’s defensive secrets to the Germans,” the correspondent calmly reported to his journal, without even noting his subject’s Jewish identity. In a later dispatch, he reports, without qualification, the comment of the French war minister, General Mercier, that “the guilt of Captain Dreyfus is indisputable.” Even in his piece describing the cashiering ceremony, and the breaking of his sword, there is no clear echo of the cries of “Death to the Jews” that we all read about in our textbooks.

Herzl heard the crowd, which watched the ceremony from outside the gates, shout “Death to the traitor,” and he also reported hearing Dreyfus called “Traitor Judas.” That’s what he heard, and that’s what he reported before he and others who also were there decided to rewrite history, and the cry of “Death to the Jews” took on a canonical status. On December 30, 1894, a day before the rejection of Dreyfus’ appeal of his conviction, Herzl published a long and detailed article in the Neue Freie Presse summing up the major events of the preceding year in France: The Dreyfus trial is not even mentioned in it. Herzl left Paris the following summer. When he returned to Vienna, the Dreyfus trial was still an unremarkable event, which hadn’t yet turned into an “affair” that rang of anti-Semitism. The Dreyfus affair came to its conclusion only a decade later, in 1906, two years after Herzl’s death. Emile Zola’s “J’accuse,” in January 1898, a half year after the convening of the First Zionist Congress, in Basel, by which time Herzl’s attention was fully focused on his movement.

Hence, it was not the Dreyfus Affair, as an event in and of itself, that wakened in Herzl the impulse to go along the ways of Zion that mourn, which he tried to pave the way anew after a period of two millennia of neglect, having become finally convinced that all roads must lead to the Land of Israel, and not to Argentina or El-Arish, nor to Uganda, that there’s no point looking for shortcuts. Herzl adopted that road map after trials and errors that almost succeeded in derailing him, and leaving him in the margins of history.

Gideon Levy, The tahini trail, Haaretz, November 23, 2007

It started at my supermarket in Ramat Aviv. Suddenly huge wooden pallets piled with raw tahini (known in Hebrew as tahina) appeared in the store. The packaging was old-fashioned, the labels tattered, the graphic design uninspired, the Hebrew riddled with errors. But the taste was marvelous. The telephone number listed on the underside of the plastic jar piqued my curiosity. The dove of peace is not dead, nor even bleeding. More and more jars with doves on them have appeared on the shelves of the supermarket. There is Dove Symbol tahini from Nablus, Peace Dove tahini from Mishor Adumim (a Jewish industrial area in the West Bank), and the tahini I discovered, which the supermarket poster calls Dove Tahini, also from Nablus.

But this week we discovered that the dove-like bird on the blue label is not a dove at all, but a karawan, or sand partridge. Karawan Tahini is my house recommendation; I always take some to my good friend Imad Saba, who is in exile in Holland. This item, probably just about the last Palestinian product sold in Israel - and made in the West Bank’s most confined city - has become a hit. It’s the New Middle East, and we are hot on its trail….

There is no sign at the entrance to the plant: We followed the pungent smells. There are two floors - a basement and a ground floor - each 600 square meters in area, with seven employees, 13 at the height of the season, with steam boilers and millstones. Welcome to Karawan Tahini. This is a fourth-generation sesame enterprise, in a Dickensian setting: a few workers in ragged dress are stirring, mixing, pouring and packaging amid swirling steam saturated with the aroma of tahini. Workers in the plant make an average of NIS 50 a day. Politicians and purveyors of the occupation need not apply….Thanks or not, the tahini has to pass through at least two checkpoints on its way to Israel: one that dominates Nablus, the other being the Taibeh checkpoint next to Tul Karm, at the entrance to Israel. You will not hear a word of criticism or complaint from the Tamams. Their tahini passes through the checkpoints quickly and has never been held up for more than a few hours.

Poll: Only 20% of Israelis consider themselves secular, Haaretz, November 23, 2007

Just 20 percent of Jews in Israel describe themselves as secular, according to a recent poll. Since the early 1970s, surveys that have measured Israeli Jews’ affinity to tradition have fluctuated among various communities. But the recent figures represent a new low point for the secular community. For example, in 1974, the number of those describing themselves as secular stood at more than 40 percent.

The new Democracy Index conducted by the Guttman Center at the Israel Democracy Institute, is based on 1,016 interviews. It includes a breakdown along general national and cultural origins, namely Ashkenazim (Jews of European descent), Mizrahim (Jews of Middle Eastern descent) and Israelis (both the subjects and their parents born in Israel).
Advertisement

Of the Israelis, 85 percent claimed some form of religious affiliation, compared with 93 percent of the Mizrahim and 64 percent of the Ashkenazim.

Describing themselves as religious were 56 percent of the Mizrahim compared with 17 percent of the Ashkenazim.

The current survey, as in previous polls, reflects a link between secularism and age, education and political views. Younger people are more religious, people with academic degrees are more secular, and the secular tend to identify more with the left.