Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Palestinian Christians praying at mass in Gaza on Sunday. (AP)

AP, Gaza’s Christians keep low Christmas profile after activist slain, Haaretz, December 23, 2007

Gaza’s tiny Christian community is keeping a low profile during Christmas this year, traumatized by the killing of a prominent activist after Hamas’ takeover of the coastal territory.

Few Christmas trees are on display, churches are holding austere services and hundreds of Christians hope to travel to the West Bank to celebrate the holiday in Bethlehem. Many say they don’t plan on returning to Gaza.

“We have a very sad Christmas,” said Essam Farah, acting pastor of Gaza’s Baptist Church, which has canceled its annual children’s party because of the grim atmosphere.

About 3,000 Christians live in Gaza, an overwhelmingly conservative Muslim society of 1.5 million people. The two religions have generally had cordial relations over the years.

That relationship has been shaken since Hamas seized control of Gaza last June and especially following the recent death of 32-year-old Rami Ayyad.

Ayyad, a member of the Baptist Church, managed Gaza’s only Christian bookstore and was involved in many charitable activities. He was found shot in the head, his body thrown on a Gaza street in early October, 10 hours after he was kidnapped from the store.

He regularly received death threats from people angry about his perceived missionary work, a rarity among Gaza’s Christians, and the store was firebombed six months before the kidnapping.

No group claimed responsibility for the killing, and no one has openly accused Hamas of persecution. But Christians fear that the Hamas takeover, along with the lack of progress in finding Ayyad’s killers, has emboldened Islamic extremists.

Gordon Lubold, Do U.S. prisons in Iraq breed insurgents? | csmonitor.com, December 20, 2007

Washington - American officials have detained thousands of insurgents in the months since the surge of forces began this spring, in an effort that most agree has improved security in Iraq. But now the commander of the American detention facilities in Iraq is wondering aloud if holding all those detainees is breeding a “micro-insurgency” and asking whether it’s time to begin releasing thousands of people.

The two main detention facilities operated by the US military in Iraq, at Camp Bucca near Basra and Camp Cropper in Baghdad, have swollen to hold nearly 30,000 detainees. That’s not the 40,000 individuals Army Gen. David Petraeus allotted for when American forces began to implement the Baghdad security plan this spring. But it may be too many, says Marine Maj. Gen. Doug Stone, who oversees detainees for the US-led force.

Holding thousands of “moderate” detainees runs counter to the notion of winning over a population in a classic counterinsurgency, he says….

He made an impassioned plea recently when Marine Commandant Gen. James Conway paid a visit to Bucca in November. General Conway came away impressed with the programs Stone has implemented there and is concerned that the growing number of detainees doesn’t make sense anymore.”If you roll up 150 guys in a village and you don’t have probable cause, you’ve just created 150 little terrorists,” says Conway, who says the US must review the process.

World Press Photo of the Year 2006
Spencer Platt, USA, Getty Images. Young Lebanese drive through devastated neighborhood of South Beirut, 15 August, 2006

Munson: The main reason for recording human brutality, in pictures or in words,  should be to induce humans to become more humane. It should obviously never be a form of “voyeurism.” Those who record the agony of others violate their privacy in a way that can only be justified if it induces others to recognize the need to eliminate or at least curb unnecessary violence. Violating people’s privacy simply to take a prize-winning photograph is wrong.  But if a picture portraying human brutality can both induce humans to become more humane and win prizes, that is fine. Indeed, the prize may well increase exposure to the picture and the basic message it is intended to convey.

Mai Ghoussoub, Beirut and contradiction: reading the World Press Photo award, openDemocracy

Four stylish young women, an open-topped car, the rubble of war-torn Beirut … but where is the real power of Spencer Platt’s prize-winning image, asks Mai Ghoussoub.

(This article was first published on 13 February 2007)

I am certain that Spencer Platt’s picture which won the World Press Photo prize for 2006 looked disturbing and even repellent to most viewers at first glance. I admit that it bothered me when I first saw it on my screen. But I also admit that I kept on looking at it. What was it that intrigued me in this picture despite my unexplained revulsion? Why did I feel that I had to write about what I saw in the picture?

…I went to a housewarming party and I overheard two young Lebanese arguing about the same photo. Both were in their 20s and very “cosmopolitan”. One said: I think this is a great photograph, it shows us as we are, not people associated only with war and destruction. The second one was appalled and said: this is the “new orientalism” - instead of the women depicted in Delacroix’s classic orientalist paintings, today we have these modern, model-type Lebanese women against a background of war and poverty….I believe that the photo is stunning in the metaphor it creates about war photography. It tells us about the voyeurism of the photographer, of the act of taking photos in tragic situations: if there is a contradiction, it is in the encounter between art, beauty and tragedy. Covering a disaster in order to create a striking image is what Robert Capa did best, he became an icon for it and we, the viewers are becoming addicted to this art form.

Ned Parker / Los Angeles Times
CHANGING ALLEGIANCE: Abu Abed, far right, with members of his paramilitary group. A former insurgent and officer in Hussein’s army, he helped drive Al Qaeda in Iraq out of Amiriya.

Ned Parker, Ruthless, shadowy — and a U.S. ally - Los Angeles Times, December 22, 2007

BAGHDAD — “Abu Abed, you’re a hero,” the retired Shiite teacher shouted from the home she had fled last winter, when the bodies of Shiites were being dumped daily in the streets of her Amiriya neighborhood.

The fighter, wearing green camouflage and dark wraparound sunglasses, kept walking, his hand swinging a black MP-5 submachine gun.

No more than 5 feet 6, with a roll of baby fat, this Sunni Muslim gunman is an unlikely savior of Amiriya: a former intelligence officer in Saddam Hussein’s army, a suspected onetime insurgent, a man who has photos of his brothers’ mutilated corpses loaded in his cellphone.

To many Iraqis, Abu Abed is a Sunni warlord whose followers have spilled the blood of Shiite Muslim civilians and U.S. troops. But to the people in Amiriya, he is the man who has, with ruthless efficiency, restored order to a neighborhood where the insurgent group Al Qaeda in Iraq held sway.

Hindu Nationalists Win State Elections - New York Times, December 23, 2007

AHMADABAD, India (AP) — India’s main Hindu nationalist party swept to an impressive election victory Sunday in the western state of Gujarat after a bitter campaign fought in the shadow of deadly 2002 anti-Muslim riots that still scar the state.

The Bharatiya Janata Party won 117 seats in the 182-seat state assembly, according to the election commission. The Congress party, which heads the federal government, won 62, while independents took three seats, it said.

Congress conceded defeat earlier Sunday as early results indicated success for the BJP and its contentious Gujarat leader Narendra Modi, in a poll that many view as a test of party strength ahead of national elections….

While the elections may have national bearing, the campaign was dominated by local issues, particularly the anti-Muslim violence that swept Gujarat in 2002 after 59 Hindus were killed when a train car burst into flames in Godhra, a town in the state. More than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed in the subsequent riots.Modi, who was in power at the time of the riots, has been accused of not doing enough to stop them. In the last elections, the BJP swept the polls with 128 seats after Modi fought the election on an aggressively anti-Muslim platform in the aftermath of the riots. Congress won 51 seats.

An Afghan man from the village of Yaka China carrying a child, injured during an Apache helicopter attack, for treatment by American medics. Tim Hetherington

Sebastian Junger, Into the Valley of Death, Vanity Fair, January 2008

By many measures, Afghanistan is falling apart. The Afghan opium crop has flourished in the past two years and now represents 93 percent of the world’s supply, with an estimated street value of $38 billion in 2006. That money helps bankroll an insurgency that is now operating virtually within sight of the capital, Kabul. Suicide bombings have risen eightfold in the past two years, including several devastating attacks in Kabul, and as of October, coalition casualties had surpassed those of any previous year. The situation has gotten so bad, in fact, that ethnic and political factions in the northern part of the country have started stockpiling arms in preparation for when the international community decides to pull out. Afghans—who have seen two foreign powers on their soil in 20 years—are well aware of the limits of empire. They are well aware that everything has an end point, and that in their country end points are bloodier than most.

The Korengal is widely considered to be the most dangerous valley in northeastern Afghanistan, and Second Platoon is considered the tip of the spear for the American forces there. Nearly one-fifth of all combat in Afghanistan occurs in this valley, and nearly three-quarters of all the bombs dropped by nato forces in Afghanistan are dropped in the surrounding area. The fighting is on foot and it is deadly, and the zone of American control moves hilltop by hilltop, ridge by ridge, a hundred yards at a time. There is literally no safe place in the Korengal Valley. Men have been shot while asleep in their barracks tents.

Munson: Zakaria should have foreseen that the outrage provoked by the occupation of Iraq would benefit the militant Islamists it was supposed to weaken. He did not. Moreover, he fails to mention that many foreign-born Americans bring with them the myopias they were born into. Some Indian-born Americans, for example, are supporters of militant Hindu nationalism. Zakaria is nonetheless right to stress that an understanding of how others see us is an essential ingredient of a sensible foreign policy.

Fareed Zakaria: The Power of Personality, Newsweek.com, December 24, 2007

I’ve spent my life acquiring formal expertise on foreign policy. I’ve got fancy degrees, have run research projects, taught in colleges and graduate schools, edited a foreign-affairs journal, advised politicians and businessmen, written columns and cover stories, and traveled hundreds of thousands of miles all over the world. I’ve never thought of my identity as any kind of qualification. I’ve never written an article that contains the phrase “As an Indian-American …” or “As a person of color …”

But when I think about what is truly distinctive about the way I look at the world, about the advantage that I may have over others in understanding foreign affairs, it is that I know what it means not to be an American. I know intimately the attraction, the repulsion, the hopes, the disappointments that the other 95 percent of humanity feels when thinking about this country. I know it because for a good part of my life, I wasn’t an American.