Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

DeWayne Wickham, Linkage of two conflicts key to peace in Mideast, USATODAY.com, December 18, 2007

If Daniel Levy is right, the way out of the morass the Bush administration has stumbled into in the Middle East is through the Palestinian territory.

To drain the swamp in which al-Qaeda and other U.S. adversaries operate and make it harder for this nation’s foes in the Middle East “to speak above the heads” of moderate Arab leaders, Levy says, a way must be found to end Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territory.

The long-running struggle between Israel and the Palestinian people “is the mother-of-all grievances” for many in the Muslim world — and the United States’ backing of Israel is the root cause of the antagonism that many in the Muslin world harbor for this country, Levy argues.

He should know.

Levy is no backbencher when it comes to trying to find a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. An Israeli citizen, he’s director of Prospects for Peace Initiative, a group based in Washington that seeks to bring “new think” to the quest for Middle East peace. Levy was an adviser to former Israeli prime ministers Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin, and a member of the negotiating team that tried to broker a peace agreement with the Palestinians in 2001.

New peace proposal

Last month, Levy helped draft an open letter from a bipartisan group of U.S. foreign policy experts to President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. It urged them to back a peace agreement that returns Israel to its 1967 borders and creates an independent Palestinian nation. It also called for Jerusalem, which both the Palestinians and Israelis claim, to serve as the capital of both states.

Ammar Yazji stands in front of empty Pepsi and 7-Up bottles in his factory in Gaza.
David Blumenfeld for TIME

Tim McGirk, Soft Drink Fizz Goes Flat in Gaza - TIME, December 13, 2007

Every closed factory has its own kind of unbearable silence. The Yazegi Group’s soft-drink plant in Gaza, with its maze of metal tubes and conveyor belts all switched off, has the hush of a futuristic mausoleum. Marketing manager Ammar Yazegi pauses beside empty 7Up bottles stacked in perfect emerald-green cubes up to the rafters and says, “I miss the music of the machines and workers. It’s a beautiful noise. This silence drives me crazy.”

His family misses another sound: the ka-ching! of money. For years the Yazegi Group had a captive market of 1.48 million Palestinians living in the narrow coastal strip of Gaza. Captive, unfortunately, is the right word because the Israelis, who are contending daily with rocket-firing Palestinian militants, have destroyed the airport and harbor and keep Gaza’s inhabitants behind a concrete-and-barbed-wire fence that is 25 miles (40 km) long. Gaza has one entry and exit point, which the Israelis strictly control. Gazans refer to their overcrowded enclave without too much exaggeration as “the world’s largest prison yard.”

Amira Hass, Where are the suicide bombers? Occupation Magazine, December 2007

The truth is that nearly every Palestinian has many reasons to be fed up with life to the point of suicide and thoughts of revenge, and those thoughts are not linked only to military attacks. Even without killing, the Israeli occupation regime kills – hope, plans, relationships, ways of life. Living among Palestinians brings daily examples of the thousands of shades that despair has, just as the regime of occupation and colonization brings with it thousands of variants of material and mental abuse. Every moment, people mourn for the lives they could have had and which they are not experiencing. How explosive is the daily insult which people experience, under a foreign rule that decides who will live in their own houses and who will not, who will have access to their lands and who will not, when the bulldozer will tear up your grandparents’ land in order to attach it to a highway and a green settlement, who will waste several hours every day at a checkpoint, who will send their children to university and who will send them to beg, who will lose their source of livelihood, who will see their family and when, and who will not. Massive is the insult felt by the many who depend on charity. Added to all this, of course, is the constant opprobrium of a disappointing and failed Palestinian leadership and the absence of hope in its ability to effect change.

Paulson, John Haught theology | Salon, December 18, 2007

Theologian John Haught explains why science and God are not at odds, why Mike Huckabee worries him, and why Richard Dawkins and other “new atheists” are ignorant about religion.

By Steve Paulson

Dec. 18, 2007 | Evolution remains the thorniest issue in the ongoing debate over science and religion. But for all the yelling between creationists and scientists, there’s one perspective that’s largely absent from public discussions about evolution. We rarely hear from religious believers who accept the standard Darwinian account of evolution. It’s a shame because there’s an important question at stake: How can a person of faith reconcile the apparently random, meaningless process of evolution with belief in God?The simplest response is to say that science and religion have nothing to do with each other — to claim, as Stephen Jay Gould famously did, that they are “non-overlapping magisteria.” But perhaps that response seems too easy, a politically expedient ploy to pacify both scientists and mainstream Christians. Maybe evolutionary theory, along with modern physics, does pose a serious challenge to religious belief. To put it another way, how can an intellectually responsible person of faith justify that faith — and even belief in a personal God — after Darwin and Einstein?

That’s the question John Haught has set out to answer by proposing a “theology of evolution.” Haught is a Roman Catholic theologian at Georgetown University and a prolific author. His books include “God After Darwin,” “Is Nature Enough?” and the forthcoming “God and the New Atheism.”

Munson: It is perfectly natural that a Baptist minister would send a message to the members of his church, and to his family and friends, reminding them that Christmas is “really” about celebrating the birth of Christ. But Huckabee’s Christmas message is a political ad paid for the Huckabee campaign to be broadcast in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina to influence the January caucuses and primaries in these states. The implicit message in this seemingly innocuous videotaped Christmas card is that “real” Christians should vote for Huckabee. This in turn implies that the simple fact of being a “real” Christian is directly relevant to one’s qualifications for the presidency. Most of the people who support Huckabee assume this is true since they see the US as a Christian nation. The fact that current polls show Huckabee defeating all his opponents in Iowa and South Carolina demonstrates the influence of white evangelicals in these states. Huckabee is much weaker in states like Michigan, New Hampshire, and Florida, all of which also hold primaries in January 2008. But national polls show Huckabee narrowly trailing front-runner Giuliani.

Ironically, given that Huckabee attributes his “surge” to God, his views on foreign policy are more sensible than those of the other leading Republican candidates, although he is much less sensible than pragmatic realists like Senator Chuck Hagel.

Mike Huckabee for President, New Ad: What Really Matters, December 17, 2007

(Warning: The film accessible by clicking on this article’s title contains graphic images.)

Mona Mahmoud, Maggie O’Kane and Ian Black, UK has left behind murder and chaos, says Basra police chief, Guardian, December 17, 2007

In an ITV film on the Guardian Unlimited website , Basra’s police chief lists a catalogue of failings, saying:

· Basra has become so lawless that in the last three months 45 women have been killed for being “immoral” because they were not fully covered or because they may have given birth outside wedlock;

· The British unintentionally rearmed Shia militias by failing to recognise that Iraqi troops were loyal to more than one authority;

· Shia militia are better armed than his men and control Iraq’s main port.