Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Giustozzi, The resurgence of the neo-Taliban, openDemocracy December 14, 2007

The neo-Taliban’s achievement in widening its sphere of influence is all the more remarkable given that the movement’s fighters are recklessly brave - a fact remarked on by coalition troops - but tactically often naïve. This explains why they have suffered high casualties and turned to improvised explosive devices (IEDs) as “force multipliers”. From 2005, the movement also resorted to suicide-bombings, although these have more of a psychological than a strategic impact. Contrary to a widespread view among Afghans, therefore, military proficiency is not the key to the neo-Taliban’s success.

The movement is more technologically accomplished than hitherto and its media-savvy propaganda campaigns utilise DVDs and other formerly detested symbols of western influence. And while some field-commanders now rely on laptops to track logistics and casualties and help plan attacks, technical illiteracy among rank-and-file fighters continues to hamper its campaign, ruling out the effective deployment of anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons.

A Palestinian farmer waiting at the West Bank Barrier gate separating him from his olive groves located behind the Barrier, in the area of Ariel settlement.
©ICRC/E. Linklater/il-e-01265

Palestinians queuing at Huwara checkpoint, one of the two entry passages along the main road connecting Nablus to the rest of the West Bank. Private vehicles are not allowed through this check point, unless the owner holds a special permit.
©Associated Press/N. Ishtayeh

A Palestinian family crosses Huwara checkpoint, one of the two entry passages along the main road connecting Nablus to the rest of the West Bank. Private vehicles are not allowed through this check point, unless the owner holds a special permit.
©Associated Press / M. Mohammed

ICRC, The occupied Palestinian territories: Dignity Denied, December 13, 2007

“To be a Palestinian means to face limits in every aspect of life. We are blocked everywhere: we lose our jobs, we cannot travel freely, we are separated from our families. To be a Palestinian means to be deprived of many things that to others are normal.”
Mohammed, a Jerusalemite

Throughout the occupied Palestinian territories, in the Gaza Strip as well as in the West Bank, Palestinians continuously face hardship in simply going about their lives; they are prevented from doing what makes up the daily fabric of most people’s existence. The Palestinian territories face a deep human crisis, where millions of people are denied their human dignity. Not once in a while, but every day.

While the Gaza Strip is sealed off, the conflict between militants and Israel continues inexorably. Palestinian militants are launching rockets towards Israel almost every day. The Israeli army regularly carries out incursions deep into the Strip, air strikes and attacks from the sea. The civilian population remains trapped, with no escape possible, and is also affected by continued intra-Palestinian clashes.

Munson: If only 27% of Iowa’s caucus voters were white evangelicals in 2004, it seems strange that 40% of caucus voters (61% of Republicans) in 2000 thought that a candidate’s relationship to Jesus Christ should play a part in the campaign for the presidential nomination.

Pew Forum, Religion and Politics 2008: Iowa

Iowa voters care deeply about presidential candidates’ individual beliefs. For example, according to a 2000 Los Angeles Times survey (registration required to view webpage), 40% of all Iowa caucus voters thought that a candidate’s relationship with Jesus Christ should play a part in the campaign. For Republican voters, that number jumped to 61%.

The influence of religion on Iowa’s caucuses and elections has grown since the early 1980s. A book co-edited by Pew Forum Senior Fellow John Green notes that in 2000, 40% of GOP caucus participants were evangelical Protestants, the highest percentage ever recorded. In an April 2007 Religion News Service story, one state GOP spokesman estimated that evangelicals and social conservatives account for 50-60% of all Iowa voters.

For Iowa Republicans, particularly evangelical Protestants, religion is a key political factor. In presidential elections since 1984, “the single best predictor of Republican voting is the evangelical population in the county,” according to Green’s book.

In the 1988 caucuses, evangelical religious broadcaster Pat Robertson won a quarter of the Iowa vote, placing him above eventual Republican nominee George H.W. Bush. Robertson’s strong showing surprised political observers. His backing came primarily from conservative Christians, whose concern about moral issues motivated their politics.

Mark Lattimer on the brutal treatment of women in Iraq, Guardian, December 13, 2007

Khanim’s organisation sees cases from across Iraq, including from Baghdad and as far away as Basra. She tells me of a man from Kirkuk who accused his sister of adultery. “When we asked him why he wanted to kill his sister, he said, ‘Because it is now a democracy in Iraq’. He thought that democracy meant he could do whatever he wanted.” But the man’s stupidity hid an important point: under the new system of government developing in Iraq, family disputes are increasingly settled not in state courts but by local tribal or religious authorities. “Not that any religion allows such abuse - it is the culture,” says Khanim. “And we see cases from all the communities, including the Christians. It is even worse outside Kurdistan.”

An Iraqi staff member at the UN mission agrees. “As there is no state authority in Iraq, everyone turns to the local sheikh. Every year since 2003 honour killings have increased.” In just one month last year, 130 unclaimed women’s bodies were counted in the Baghdad morgue, a representative from the Organisation of Women’s Freedom in Iraq has told the BBC. Another women’s activist tells me why she refuses all media interviews: “The work has to be secret. In Kurdistan it is possible, but in Baghdad we couldn’t open a shelter for women, we would just be attacked.”

In a nondescript building on a busy road in the north I visit one of the few secret shelters in Iraq for women fleeing violence. A broom-cupboard door is unlocked to reveal a hidden staircase, leading to a two-room apartment where the morning sunshine and the hum of traffic filter through high-set windows. A pile of thin mattresses show that up to 20 women can stay here at any one time. The most recent arrivals are a woman and her two children from the local area. The woman, Zaynab, says she wants to divorce her abusive husband, a drunk, but he has refused. She had gone to live with her mother but he had come to threaten her. “I love my children. My family wanted me to marry again but I don’t want to marry anyone, I want to be with my children.” She stretches her arm out towards the room next door where her curly-haired daughter, eight, and son, seven, are playing.

Munson: Krauthammer is a neoconservative whose views on foreign policy are myopic–to put it mildly. But this column demonstrates that neoconservatives can be quite sensible when not discussing foreign policy.

Charles Krauthammer, An Overdose of Public Piety, washingtonpost.com, December 14, 2007

Mike Huckabee explains his surge in the polls thus: “There’s only one explanation for it, and it’s not a human one. It’s the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of 5,000 people.”

This campaign is knee-deep in religion, and it’s only going to get worse. I’d thought that the limits of professed public piety had already been achieved during the Republican CNN-YouTube debate when some squirrelly looking guy held up a Bible and asked, “Do you believe every word of this book?” — and not one candidate dared reply: None of your damn business.

Instead, Giuliani, Romney and Huckabee bent a knee and tried appeasement with various interpretations of scriptural literalism. The right answer, the only answer, is that the very question is offensive. The Constitution prohibits any religious test for office. And while that proscribes only government action, the law is also meant to be a teacher. In the same way that civil rights laws established not just the legal but also the moral norm that one simply does not discriminate on the basis of race — changing the practice of one generation and the consciousness of the next — so the constitutional injunction against religious tests is meant to make citizens understand that such tests are profoundly un-American.

Fareed Zakaria, The Fearful Superpower, Newsweek.com, December 12, 2007

The notion that the United States today is in grave danger of sitting back and going on the defensive is bizarre. Since 2001, Washington, with bipartisan support, has invaded two countries and dispatched troops around the world, from Somalia to the Philippines, to fight Islamic militants. It has ramped up defense spending by $187 billion—more than the combined military budgets of China, Russia, India and Britain. It has created a Department of Homeland Security that now spends more than $40 billion a year. How then would Giuliani go on the offensive? Invade a couple more countries?

To recover its place in the world, the United States should first recover its confidence. It remains the world’s only superpower, the only big country with a total portfolio of military, economic and political dominance. Most major states are either well disposed toward it or, at worst, neutral. The challenges America confronts come from small, faceless terrorist organizations and a few rogue nations. This is not to minimize the challenges. Today’s asymmetries of power mean that small groups can do big damage. But it is to put things in perspective. When President Bush speaks of Iran’s nuclear program as the road to World War III, one wonders if he has noticed that Iran’s total GDP is just one sixty-eighth that of the United States, or that its military spending is less than 1 percent of the Pentagon’s.

The real challenges that the United States faces come not from globalization’s losers but from its winners, not from yesterday’s bombs but from tomorrow’s factories. The crucial project for the next president will be to change the basic focus of U.S. foreign policy, away from the Middle East and toward the Far East. When the history of these times is written, surely the great trend that will dominate the accounts, far larger than the war in Lebanon or the tensions over Iran, will be the rise of China and India and how they reshaped the world.

Laurie Goldstein, Huckabee Is Not Alone in Ignorance on Mormonism, New York Times, December 14, 2007

Mike Huckabee insists he spoke out of ignorance, not malice against the faith of a Republican rival, Mitt Romney, when he asked, “Don’t Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?”

Although there may have been a kernel of truth in his question, Mr. Huckabee’s confessed ignorance about Mormonism is widely shared.Americans are notoriously uninformed about faiths other than their own, and they are particularly perplexed about Mormon beliefs. Mormons make up 2 percent of the American population, and their faith, which emerged 177 years ago in upstate New York, is a relative newcomer.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as the Mormon church is called, shares many beliefs with traditional Christianity. But it departs substantially on key doctrines, a fact that has often made it a target of hostility. Mr. Huckabee’s remark, and Mr. Romney’s major speech on faith last week, is dragging those contrasts into the open.

The question posed by Mr. Huckabee in an article to be published Sunday in The New York Times Magazine and available at nytimes.com/politics is one of the standard sensationalistic A-bombs often hurled at Mormons by their detractors, said Scott A. Gordon, president of the Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research, a group based in Redding, Calif., that defends Mormon theology.

“It’s an attack question,” Mr. Gordon said, “because it starts with a kernel of truth and shapes it into something that most Mormons wouldn’t recognize about their faith.”

Mr. Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas and a Southern Baptist minister, quickly apologized to Mr. Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, for the question.

In Mormon theology, God is literally the father of all beings, and all beings once existed in a “premortal” state as “spirit beings,” said Robert L. Millet a professor of religion at Brigham Young University, a Mormon institution in Provo, Utah. Jesus was God’s first-born son, and everyone who came after that, including Satan could be considered the siblings of Jesus, he said.

“Latter-day Saints believe that all of us, Christ included, existed in a premortal existence, as spirits,” Mr. Millet said. “Yes, Jesus and Lucifer were in that premortal existence, together. But what we need to make very clear is that Jesus was God and there was never a time when Jesus and Lucifer were on the same plane.”

Sudarsan Raghavan, Iraq’s Youthful Militiamen Build Power Through Fear, WP, December 13, 2007

BAGHDAD — On the first day of class, two male teenagers entered a girls’ high school in the Tobji neighborhood, clutching AK-47 assault rifles. The young Shiite fighters handed the principal a handwritten note and ordered her to assemble the students in the courtyard, witnesses said.

“All girls must wear hijab,” she read aloud, her voice trembling. “If the girls don’t wear hijab, we will close the school or kill the girls.”

That October day Sara Mustafa, 14, a secular Sunni Arab, also trembled. The next morning, she covered up with an Islamic head scarf for the first time. The young fighters now controlled her life. “We could not do anything,” Sara recalled.

The Mahdi Army of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr is using a new generation of youths, some as young as 15, to expand and tighten its grip across Baghdad, but the ruthlessness of some of these young fighters is alienating Sunnis and Shiites alike.

The fighters are filling the vacuum of leadership created by a 10-month-old U.S.-led security offensive. Hundreds of senior and mid-level militia members have been arrested, killed or forced into hiding, weakening what was once the second most powerful force in Iraq after the U.S. military. But the militia still rules through fear and intimidation, often under the radar of U.S. troops.

The radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr ,gestures while delivering Friday sermon, in a Mosque, in Kufa, 160 kilometers, (100 miles) south of Baghdad, Iraq, Friday Sept. 22, 2006. Firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has quietly resumed seminary studies to attain the coveted title of a Shiite Ayatollah–a goal that could make him and his Mahdi Army an even more formidable power broker in Iraq. (AP Photo/Alaa Al-Marjani)

Iraq’s Maverick Cleric Hits the Books, AP, December 14, 2007

BAGHDAD (AP) — The leader of Iraq’s biggest Shiite militia movement has quietly resumed seminary studies toward attaining the title of ayatollah — a goal that could make firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army an even more formidable power broker in Iraq.

Al-Sadr’s objectives — described to The Associated Press by close aides — are part of increasingly bitter Shiite-on-Shiite battles for control of Iraq’s southern oil fields, the lucrative pilgrim trade to Shiite holy cities and the nation’s strategic Persian Gulf outlet.

The endgame among Iraq’s majority Shiites also means long-term influence over Iraqi political and financial affairs as the Pentagon and its allies look to scale down their military presence in the coming year.

Al-Sadr’s backers remain main players in the showdowns across the region, where fears of even more bloodshed are rising following Wednesday’s triple car bombing in one of the area’s main urban hubs. At least 25 people were killed and scores wounded.