Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Anthony Gottlieb, I’m a Believer, New York Times Book Review, December 23, 2007

In 2001, rumors started to hit the blogosphere that Antony Flew, a British philosopher born in 1923, had found God after six decades of atheism. At first Flew denied the reports. But in May 2004 he told a conference in New York that he had indeed changed his mind and become a believer. A flurry of online pundits debated the meaning of this shocking conversion.

Now, in a book written, according to its title page, “with” Roy Abraham Varghese — of whom more later — Flew tells the story of his “discovery of the divine.” This sounds like a victory for the faithful in the God wars: a welcome riposte to the atheist tomes of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. Although Flew is not “the world’s most notorious atheist,” as the subtitle of “There Is a God” claims, and never was, even in his native Britain, he ought to count as quite a catch. Now retired from the University of Reading in Berkshire (he has also taught at Oxford and in Scotland, Canada and the United States), he is the author of several cogent and elegant works of philosophy, including accomplished critiques of religion. In many public debates he has vigorously made the case for unbelief. But I doubt thoughtful believers will welcome this volume. Far from strengthening the case for the existence of God, it rather weakens the case for the existence of Antony Flew.

The book has five main parts: a preface and an appendix by Varghese; an intellectual autobiography and an account of his case for God, attributed to Flew; and another appendix, on the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus, by N. T. Wright, the Anglican bishop of Durham. Varghese is an Indian-born business consultant who founded the Institute for MetaScientific Research in Texas, and writes and edits books on the interplay between science, religion and philosophy. He helped organize the conference at which Flew announced his conversion and is the author of a book, “The Wonder of the World,” that Flew recommends. Varghese has also written “God-Sent: A History of the Accredited Apparitions of Mary,” which argues that more than 50 such apparitions cannot be explained away as hallucinations and that there is better evidence for them than there is for any ostensible U.F.O. sighting.

MEMRI, December 21, 2007

A polemic has recently erupted between noted Egyptian sociologist and reformer Dr. Sa’ad Eddin Ibrahim and Iraqi liberal authors over the war in Iraq. The controversy centered on recent articles by Ibrahim comparing the Iraqi resistance to the Vietnamese fighters at Dien Bien Phu and to the Algerian FLN. In response, a number of Iraqi liberals - Dr. ‘Abd Al-Khaliq Hussein, Kazem Habib, and Iraqi Kurdish author Hosheng Broka - rejected Ibrahim’s historical comparisons, and accused him of supporting Ba’thist and Al-Qaeda terrorists responsible for crimes against the Iraqi people.

The following are excerpts from Sa’ad Eddin Ibrahim’s articles and the Iraqi authors’ responses to them:

Sa’ad Eddin Ibrahim: “Foreign Occupation Must Inevitably Give Rise to National Resistance”

On October 27, 2007, Dr. Sa’ad Eddin Ibrahim published an article titled “Vietnam and the Search for Iraq’s Future” in the Qatari daily Al-Raya and in the Egyptian opposition daily Al-Masri Al-Yawm. The article, written during a visit to Vietnam, was a reflection on U.S. Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez’s recent statement that the Iraq war was “a nightmare with no end in sight,” interspersed with reflections on the author’s student days as an anti-Vietnam War activist. [1]

It was Sa’ad Eddin Ibrahim’s follow-up article, “From Vietnam to Algeria to Iraq,” that became a source of controversy, as it seemed to express sympathy for the Iraqi “resistance.” Following are excerpts:

“As I was traveling in Vietnam with my wife and son… I called to mind stories from the past. I remembered the biographies of the great historical leaders of this poor Asian country who led a popular resistance against three foreign occupying forces in the 20th century - Japan, France, and the U.S. - and was victorious over them all, despite the heavy sacrifice of its people’s blood.

John F. Burns, Man Cleared in 1998 Northern Ireland Blast - New York Times, December 21, 2007

LONDON — A judge in Belfast on Thursday cleared Sean Hoey, a 38-year-old electrician, of murder and all other charges stemming from the car bombing in 1998 that killed 29 people and wounded more than 200 in the Northern Ireland town of Omagh.

The long-awaited verdict left investigators in Northern Ireland without a single conviction in the Omagh bombing, which was regarded as the worst atrocity in 30 years of sectarian strife in the British province. Prosecutors had asserted that Mr. Hoey was the principal bombmaker in the attack, which featured a 500-pound car bomb that exploded on Omagh’s main street at the height of Saturday shopping.

The bombing came less than four months after the Good Friday peace agreement in 1998 that led, earlier this year, to the restoration of democratic rule in Northern Ireland, under a governing coalition of Protestants and Catholics. At the time, the police and politicians said the attack had been carried out by a group calling itself the Real I.R.A., a splinter group of the overwhelmingly Catholic Irish Republican Army, which opposed the peace agreement.

Mr. Hoey was found not guilty on all 56 charges he faced in connection with the Omagh bombing and a series of other bombings and killings involving police and military targets in northern Ireland that preceded the Omagh attack. The verdict brought cheers from supporters of Mr. Hoey, who was released after four years of pre-trial custody, but relatives of the Omagh victims, many of them women and children, appeared stunned.

Daniel Gavron, Start with the unmanned roadblocks! - Haaretz, December 21, 2007

This week’s request from French President Nicholas Sarkozy, made at the conference of nations donating money to the Palestinian Authority, that Israel remove the roadblocks in the West Bank is hardly new. World Bank reports have been saying for years that the roadblocks are a major impediment to Palestinian economic development. Tony Blair, the Quartet’s special envoy, one of whose briefs is to help develop the Palestinian economy, has also made the same point several times.

Sarkozy, Blair and the World Bank are not talking about the checkpoints between Israel and the territories. They are referring to the barriers that prevent Palestinians from traveling and transporting goods between Tulkarm and Jenin, Nablus and Ramallah, Bethlehem and Hebron, and between all of those places and East Jerusalem. They are also talking about those barriers that block entry to and exit from almost every village in the Palestinian territories.

According to a report in Haaretz last month, there are 572 roadblocks in the West Bank, 97 of them manned. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the manned checkpoints do prevent terror, inasmuch as people passing through them are searched and questioned. These checkpoints may stop a potential suicide bomber from attacking targets inside Israel by halting him early on, and certainly help to protect the settlements in the territories from would-be attackers.

But what on earth is the function of the 475 unmanned obstructions? Is it seriously contended by anyone that a mound of earth, a ditch or a series of concrete blocks can stop terrorists from moving around? Do these barriers serve any function other than embittering the lives of the Palestinians? The sick and the elderly, pregnant women and people carrying shopping baskets undoubtedly find it more difficult to get in and out of their barricaded towns and villages. Indeed both B’Tselem and the organization Physicians for Human Rights have documented cases of sick people being unable to receive treatment because they couldn’t reach their doctors or clinics - while anybody planning a terrorist attack can easily clamber over the mounds, traverse the ditches or circumvent the blocks.

Michelle Goldberg, Mike Huckabee, conservative golem, Guardian, December 19, 2007

Leading conservative pundits have discovered that the Republican electorate is dominated by Christian fundamentalists, and they are shocked, shocked! Aghast at the rise of the backwoods populist preacher-turned-governor Mike Huckabee, now polling first in Iowa with only two weeks until the caucuses, they’ve suddenly divined the value of secular politics, of knowledge gained by studying something other than the Bible.

“There is a sense in Iowa now that faith has been heightened as a determining factor in how to vote, that such things as executive ability, professional history, temperament, character, political philosophy and professed stands are secondary, tertiary,” an alarmed Peggy Noonan wrote in the Wall Street Journal last Friday. “But they are not, and cannot be. They are central. Things seem to be getting out of kilter, with the emphasis shifting too far.”

National Review’s Rich Lowry concurred. “[N]ominating a southern Baptist pastor running on his religiosity would be rather overdoing it,” he sniffed. “Social conservatism has to be part of the Republican message, but it can’t be the message in its entirety.” In the Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer’s column was titled An Overdose of Public Piety. “This campaign is knee-deep in religion, and it’s only going to get worse,” he wrote.

GRAPHIC: Gene Thorp and Dita Smith - The Washington Post - December 15, 2007

Changing Baghdad - washingtonpost.com

Paul Vitello, Small Town Cheers Huckabee’s Embrace of Faith - New York Times, December 21, 2007

DIKE, Iowa — He came to town this week dressed in a dark pinstriped suit and cowboy boots, advocating lower taxes, death to the Internal Revenue Service and restoration of the words “Merry Christmas” and “Jesus Christ” to the American lexicon.

And Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and Baptist minister who rose to the first tier of Republican presidential candidates on the strength of his Christian bona fides, was received by supporters as he returned to Iowa this week like the second coming of Santa Claus.At rallies, they posed their red-sweatered children on his knee for photographs, as if he were the man in the red suit at the mall. They gave him standing ovations when he said the words they wanted to hear.

“I know this is probably a very controversial thing, but may I say to you, Merry Christmas!” Mr. Huckabee told an audience of 200 in Marshalltown on Thursday morning, as the crowd rose to its feet.

Clearly delighted over a controversy set off by a recent campaign advertisement in which he says “what really matters” this time of year is not the presidential campaign but “the celebration of the birth of Christ,” Mr. Huckabee has missed no opportunity in his speeches to his core supporters of evangelical voters to utter those words, underlining the Christ part.

“What’s wrong with our country, what is wrong with our culture, is that you can’t say the name Jesus Christ without people going completely berserk,” Mr. Huckabee told a crowd in Dike, a tiny farm town about 80 miles northeast of Des Moines, where people also stood to applaud.