Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Calm in Iraqi Cities After Cleric Calls for Truce - New York Times, March 31, 2008

BAGHDAD — Iraqis returned to the streets of Baghdad after a curfew was lifted, and the southern port city of Basra appeared quiet on Monday, a day after the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr called for his followers to stop fighting and in turn demanded concessions from Iraq’s government.

Mr. Sadr’s statement on Sunday afternoon was released at the end of six days in which his Mahdi Army militia had held off an American-supported Iraqi assault on Basra.No serious clashes were reported in Basra on Monday morning. In Baghdad, which had been virtually brought to a standstill by protests and violence over the past week, life appeared to return to normal with the streets filling with traffic. A succession of mortar shells rocked the Green Zone. But in most neighborhoods, people went back to work and shopped for supplies that they were unable to buy during the curfew.

The strict curfew imposed by the government on Thursday was lifted at 6 a.m., but remained in effect for vehicles in the Mahdi Army stronghold of Sadr City, where fighting between militiamen and Iraqi and American forces had continued through the day on Sunday, and in some other Shiite neighborhoods of the capital.

The substance of Mr. Sadr’s statement was hammered out in elaborate negotiations over the preceding days with senior Iraqi officials, some of whom traveled to Iran to meet with Mr. Sadr, according to several officials involved in the discussions.

The negotiations with Mr. Sadr were seen as a serious blow for Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who had vowed that he would see the Basra campaign through to a military victory. He has been harshly criticized even within his own coalition for the stalled assault.

Tikun Olam-תקון עולם. March 29, 2008: Make the World a Better Place » Evangelicals: ‘Killing’ Jews With Christian Kindness

A group called World Evangelical Alliance bought a full-page N.Y. Times ad (at least $120,000) this week. A bigger waste of money I’d have a hard time conceiving. Nearest I can tell, the basic message is: “Jews, we love you. But we don’t love you enough to stop proselytizing you or converting you. In fact, we really don’t care what you think of that, since it’s more important to us to keep doing this than it is to respect your wishes that we not do so.” And the real kicker was the evangelical signatories who insisted that converted Jews like Jews for Jesus and messianic Jews are still authentic Jews who despite becoming Christian have a right to call themselves Jews for the purpose of insinuating themselves into the lives of unsuspecting Jews they seek to convert.

The ad is quite a performance. Full of fake love and respect attempting to conceal presumptuousness and condescension toward Jews. The odd thing is that the ad pretends it is directed as a friendly communique to Jews. I actually took it as a declaration of war. So if it was supposed to say anything positive toward Jews it failed miserably on that score. In truth, I think it was meant more for an evangelical audience to reconfirm their certainty that they are right in their efforts to convert the Jews.

The ad begins well enough:

As evangelical Christians, we want to express our genuine friendship and love for the Jewish people. We sadly acknowledge that church history has been marred with anti-Semitic words and deeds; and that at times when the Jewish people were in great peril, the church did far less than it should have.

We pledge our commitment to be loving friends and to stand against such injustice in our generation.

But it quickly goes downhill:

• At the same time, we want to be transparent in affirming that we believe the most loving and Scriptural expression of our friendship toward Jewish people, and to anyone we call friend, is to forthrightly share the love of God in the person of Jesus Christ.
• We believe that it is only through Jesus that all people can receive eternal life. If Jesus is not the Messiah of the Jewish people, He cannot be the Savior of the World (Acts 4:12).

الحياة - المالكي يعتبر أن «من يقاتل الحكومة أسوأ من القاعدة» … الصدر يأمر أتباعه بعدم تسليم السلاح ووحدات عسكرية عراقية لا تريد القتال
مع تواصل المواجهات بين القوات العراقية و»جيش المهدي»، امس، لليوم الخامس في أنحاء مختلفة في العراق، جدد رئيس الوزراء العراقي نوري المالكي اصرار حكومته على المضي في معركة البصرة ضد المسلحين الى النهاية، معتبراً ان «من يقاتل الحكومة اسوأ من القاعدة». ونقل عن الزعيم الشيعي الشاب مقتدى الصدر انه طلب من اتباعه عدم القاء سلاحهم، فيما رفضت وحدات في الجيش العراقي في مدينة الصدر مقاتلة «جيش المهدي» في سابقة لا يعرف بعد مدى تأثيرها وامتدادها على المواجهات بين الطرفين.

رجال شرطة يسلمون أمس أسلحتهم إلى رجل دين من أنصار الصدر في مدينة الصدر. ا ف ب

وبعد الغارات الجوية الأميركية لمواقع المسلحين في مدينة الصدر والبصرة تدخلت القوات البريطانية في المدينة الجنوبية، فقصفت بالمدافع مواقع للمسلحين في شمالها دعماً للقوات العراقية، فيما ارتفعت حصيلة المواجهات الى اكثر من 275 قتيلاً و500 جريح، بحسب مصادر رسمية.

A plea for peace from a bereaved Palestinian father by Bassam Aramin - Common Ground News Service, Feb. 15, 2007

ANATA, West Bank – I fought with my daughter on the day she was shot.

On her way out the door to school, Abir announced, in that way children have of doing, that she would be playing with a friend that afternoon rather than coming straight home to study for an exam scheduled for the next day. She was 10 years old, smart, dedicated to her schoolwork and still a little girl.

She wanted to play. I told her to not even think about it.

If I could tell her anything now, it would be: Go. Do whatever you want. Play.

Because now, she never will. She will never laugh again, never hear her friends calling her name, never feel the love of her family wrapped around her at night like a warm blanket.

Abir, the third of my six children, was shot in the head as she left school January 16, caught in an altercation between Israel Border Guard troops and older kids who may or may not have been throwing rocks. She died two days later.

I am Bassam Aramin by Rami Elhanan - Common Ground News Service

JERUSALEM—Last Thursday evening, my family was invited to dinner at the home of Bassam Aramin, in Anata.

Anata is a twenty minute ride from Motza, twenty light years away from Jerusalem.

We ate a mountain of maqloube with almonds and yogurt. Bassam told us about his meeting with the actor Shlomo Wizcinski who is slated to play Bassam in a new play. And my wife gave his wife, Salwa, a gift: a silver pendant with the name of her daughter Abir, may she rest in peace, made by a Jerusalem silversmith.

We laughed. It was fun. It was emotional.

And then, on the television screen, we saw the images of the attack on the Jerusalem Merkaz Harav school.

And again a cold hand seizes your heart, and again the blood freezes in your veins, again that sword twists inside you, knowing again there will be no rest until that blood is avenged. On the side of the screen, a news ticker of stark updates from Gaza: eight dead in one hour.

And beside the television, Salwa is bitter with tears for the mothers of the dead.

It was hard. Truly hard.

“Alright,” said Bassam when we parted. “At least we’ll see each other in Warsaw on Sunday…”

The two of use were invited by Warsaw television and HBO for the premier of a new documentary about the Israeli-Palestinian bereaved families organization, Parents Circle-Families Forum. I was glad. I knew that together we would be able to pass on a message of hope to people who, for the most part, had not the faintest idea about the conflict. I knew that by virtue of our shared grief people would listen to us—and perhaps even talk about peace.

LIESL SCHILLINGER reviews Tobias Wolff - Book Review - New York Times, March 30, 2008

To read a Tobias Wolff story is to sink into the soft seat of your grandfather’s strong, modest old Buick and let yourself be carried through an America of small towns, small joys, small struggles and small despairs — a landscape so familiar as to be invisible, the landscape of homeland. As each tale proceeds, unhurried, unjudging, the car slows, the turn signal makes its reassuring clicks, and the car glides without resistance into the drive, delivering you, consoled yet strangely disquieted, to the place you came from — a place you thought you’d left behind.

The well-chosen title of Wolff’s latest collection, “Our Story Begins,” is also the name of one of his early works of short fiction, published in 1985 in “Back in the World.” That story (not included here), set in San Francisco on the “10th straight day” of heavy fog, forecast the writer’s long, seemingly preordained career. In it, a busboy named Charlie who wants to be a writer sits at a coffeehouse, eavesdropping on two men and a woman whose conversation dances around their true subject: two of these people have betrayed the third. As they finish their first round of drinks, one of the men begins a new anecdote, saying grandly, “Our story begins.” Wolff shows the lie from the start: their story precedes them. Leaving the cafe, musing on the nested tales he’s overheard, Charlie hears a foghorn in the night. Exhilarated, he imagines himself on a boat on the water, disregarding the sound of the “solemn warning,” angling toward the harbor in the dark, “too watchful to be afraid … eyes wide open, ready to call out in this shifting fog where at any moment anything might be revealed.”…

Here you’ll find the unforgettable “Hunters in the Snow,” in which three men, Tub, Frank and Kenny — friends of the bruise-leaving-shoulder-punch variety — go deer hunting on a miserably cold winter day, setting out in a truck with a broken window. The simplicity of the language and the brutishness of the men’s interactions resonate as disturbingly in 2008 as they did in 1980, the year the story appeared. A farm dog creates lasting, disturbing mental images: as the men tromp through the snow, they pass a barn, and “a large black hound with a grizzled snout ran out and barked at them. Every time he barked he slid backward a bit, like a cannon recoiling. Kenny got down on all fours and snarled and barked back at him, and the dog slunk away into the barn, looking over his shoulder and peeing a little as he went.”

In “Down to Bone,” a grown son sits by his dying mother’s bedside. Flipping through a photo album, seeing his mother at her first communion, the son recognizes “the very image of his own young daughter. The resemblance made him homesick; it was that close.” He knows his mother’s father was a bad man, a troubling, violent parent. But in her last confused moments, transported by memory to her earliest, most trusting childhood emotions, she grasps her son’s hand and asks for “Daddy.” “It’s all right,” the son says by reflex. “I’m here.” Realizing that “he no longer knew how to be a son, but he still knew how to be a father,” he tells her: “Everything’s fine, sweetheart. Everything’s going to be fine.” Soothed, she whispers, “Daddy. … You’re here.”

Tomgram: Mark Danner, Generals Bin Laden and Bush, March 25, 2008

To contemplate a prewar map of Baghdad — as I do the one before me, with sectarian neighborhoods traced out in blue and red and yellow — is to look back on a lost Baghdad, a Baghdad of our dreams. My map of 2003 is colored mostly a rather neutral yellow, indicating the “mixed” neighborhoods of the city, predominant just five years ago. To take up a contemporary map after this is to be confronted by a riot of bright color: Shia blue has moved in irrevocably from the East of the Tigris; Sunni red has fled before it, as Shia militias pushed the Sunnis inexorably west toward Abu Ghraib and Anbar province, and nearly out of the capital itself. And everywhere, it seems, the pale yellow of those mixed neighborhoods is gone, obliterated in the months and years of sectarian war.

I start with those maps out of a lust for something concrete, as I grope about in the abstract, struggling to quantify the unquantifiable. How indeed to “take stock” of the War on Terror? Such a strange beast it is, like one of those mythological creatures that is part goat, part lion, part man. Let us take a moment and identify each of these parts.

The science of religion | Where angels no longer fear to tread | Economist.com, March 19, 2008

BY THE standards of European scientific collaboration, €2m $3.1m is not a huge sum. But it might be the start of something that will challenge human perceptions of reality at least as much as the billions being spent by the European particle-physics laboratory CERN at Geneva. The first task of CERNs new machine, the Large Hadron Collider, which is due to open later this year, will be to search for the Higgs boson—an object that has been dubbed, with a certain amount of hyperbole, the God particle. The €2m, by contrast, will be spent on the search for God Himself—or, rather, for the biological reasons why so many people believe in God, gods and religion in general.“Explaining Religion”, as the project is known, is the largest-ever scientific study of the subject. It began last September, will run for three years, and involves scholars from 14 universities and a range of disciplines from psychology to economics. And it is merely the latest manifestation of a growing tendency for science to poke its nose into the God business.

Religion cries out for a biological explanation. It is a ubiquitous phenomenon—arguably one of the species markers of Homo sapiens—but a puzzling one. It has none of the obvious benefits of that other marker of humanity, language. Nevertheless, it consumes huge amounts of resources. Moreover, unlike language, it is the subject of violent disagreements. Science has, however, made significant progress in understanding the biology of language, from where it is processed in the brain to exactly how it communicates meaning. Time, therefore, to put religion under the microscope as well.

Heavy fighting in southern Iraqi oil hub | World | Reuters, March 25, 2008

BASRA, Iraq Reuters - Heavy fighting erupted on Tuesday in the southern oil city of Basra where Iraqi security forces launched a major operation at dawn against powerful militias, military officials and witnesses said.

A Reuters witness in the city reported seeing black smoke over northern districts and hearing explosions and machinegun fire. A hospital source said “tens of wounded” were arriving at hospitals with some too busy to accept more casualties.

Television pictures showed Iraqi troops running through empty streets and helicopters flying overhead.

“There are clashes in the streets. Bullets are coming from everywhere and we can hear the sound of rocket explosions. This has been going on since dawn,” resident Jamil told Reuters by telephone as he cowered in his home.

Military officials said “many outlaws” had been killed.

Two powerful factions of Iraqs Shiite majority, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council and the Mehdi Army militia of Moqtada al-Sadr, are fighting for power in Basra along with a smaller Shiite party, Fadhila.

Basra is Iraq’s second city and gateway to the Gulf. Its oil fields are the source of most government revenues.

Eric Foner, A Massacre and a Travesty - washingtonpost.com, March 23, 2008

Unbeknownst to most Americans, our nation’s history includes home-grown terrorism as well as attacks from abroad. Scholars estimate that during Reconstruction, the turbulent period that followed the Civil War, upwards of 3,000 persons were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan and kindred groups. That’s roughly the same number of Americans who have died at the hands of Osama bin Laden.

In the last generation, no part of the American past has undergone a more complete scholarly reinterpretation than Reconstruction. Once portrayed as a tragic era of rampant misgovernment presided over by unscrupulous carpetbaggers and ignorant former slaves, Reconstruction is today seen as a noble, if flawed, experiment in interracial democracy, an effort to provide free blacks with land, education and political rights. The tragedy is not that Reconstruction was attempted, but that it failed.

Media Matters - Buchanan on Obama’s race speech: “We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?”

In a March 21 syndicated column headlined “A Brief for Whitey,” conservative commentator and MSNBC contributor Pat Buchanan asserted, “America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.” Buchanan was discussing Sen. Barack Obama’s March 18 speech addressing race and controversial comments by his former pastor, Jeremiah A. Wright. He continued, “Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.” Buchanan then asserted that “no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans.” Later in the column, Buchanan added: “We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?”

Bin Laden in Palestinian call, BBC, March 21, 2008

“The nearest jihad battlefield to support our people in Palestine is the battlefield of Iraq,” the speaker said.

The message, aired on al-Jazeera TV, comes a day after the al-Qaeda leader threatened the EU over the reprint of a cartoon deemed offensive to Muslims.

The messages coincide with the fifth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq.

BBC defence and security correspondent Rob Watson says they follow a familiar pattern, with Bin Laden touching on an issue he knows resonates with many Muslims

‘Fire and iron’

In the second message in two days, the speaker dismissed attempts at reconciliation in the Middle East.

“Palestine cannot be retaken by negotiations and dialogue, but with fire and iron,” he said.

Tibetan exiles prayed as they took part in a candlelight vigil in Dharamsala, India. The Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, said he was willing to meet Chinese leaders, including President Hu Jintao, as Chinese authorities acknowledged that the unrest in Tibet had spread to other provinces.

Photo: Gurinder Osan/Associated Press

Pictures of the Day, March 20 - The New York Times, Slide Show, Slide 2 of 16

Laurie Copans, Ex-Israeli generals denounce checkpoints, AP, USATODAY.com, Feb. 13, 2008

JERUSALEM — A group of retired Israeli generals has launched a campaign urging the army to remove West Bank roadblocks, warning on Wednesday that the travel restrictions sow Palestinian hatred of Israel and stymie the peace process.

The 12 top former commanders say the hundreds of checkpoints dotting the West Bank are excessive and other military means can be used to prevent suicide bombings in Israel.

The Palestinians have long demanded that Israel remove the roadblocks as a way to build faith in recently renewed peace talks.

The generals have written a letter to Defense Minister Ehud Barak in an effort to persuade him to gradually remove the checkpoints, which severely restrict movement of the some 2 million Palestinians who live in the West Bank and have crippled their economy. Israel maintains the checkpoints are vital for its security.

“You have to understand that there is damage in having the Palestinian people with its back to the wall, not seeing a light at the end of the tunnel, unable to improve their economy, unable to move from place to place,” Ilan Paz, a signatory of the letter and a former head of the army’s administration of Palestinian civilian affairs, told Israel Radio. “This creates a reality that creates terror, and we have to remember that.”

Understanding Checkpoints, Israel Policy Forum, March 19, 2008

One of the most onerous aspects of the situation in the West Bank is the system of checkpoints which block Palestinians from getting to work, school, hospital or even to visit friends a few miles (sometimes a few blocks) away without being stopped and delayed, often for hours. This is well-known here in the United States, especially because the Bush administration has made clear that it wants many of the checkpoints removed. Less understood is that very few checkpoints separate Israel from the Palestinian areas. The overwhelming majority of them are internal barriers which serve not to protect Israel from terrorists but simply to ease life for settlers and which, in the process, make Palestinian lives miserable. In fact, no one suggests taking down any checkpoint or border crossing that separates Israel from the West Bank or Gaza. The entire controversy is over the internal checkpoints and their harmful effects on Palestinians trying to go about their lives.

Terrible as the situation is, some people find humor in it, so ridiculous is the rationale for aspects of the checkpoint system.

Like this for instance: A “Hummous Hut” employee is stopped by a soldier who misunderstands “hummous” for “Hamas.” A woman driving with her dog is stopped at a checkpoint and explains that, while she does not have papers to enter Jerusalem, her dog does. These light-hearted vignettes—from the 2005 Oscar-winning short film A West Bank Story and Suad Amiry’s book Sharon and My Mother-in-Law, respectively—use humor to explain the physical barriers scattered throughout the West Bank in simple, human terms.

For Israelis, the reason for instituting roadblocks and checkpoints since the beginning of the second intifada in which over a thousand Israelis were killed is also simple and human—to stop suicide bombers from entering Israel. “The method of roadblocks has proven itself,” Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak told a group of soldiers on January 29th. “There is no way to effectively fight terrorism without actual daily control of the area,” he said.

However, according to a group of twelve retired Israeli generals, some of whom were involved in setting up West Bank barriers, the system of over 560 roadblocks and checkpoints, which increased by 50 percent in two and a half years, needlessly harms Palestinians and ineffectively protects Israelis. (According to the Israeli human rights group, B’tselem, as of November 2007 there were 99 permanent checkpoints, 36 of which were on Israel’s border and 63 within the West Bank. The remaining 486 barriers [as of November 2007] are roadblocks, such as dirt mounds, concrete blocks, fences, trenches, and gates.)

At a Van Leer Institute conference on February 13th, these experts, informally called the “checkpoint team,” presented a position paper, which they also sent Barak. In it they assert that, while some barriers stop terror, others damage the Palestinian economy, breed resentment, and, in turn, create more terror. According to Shlomo Brom, one of the group’s members and former chief of the army’s planning committee, quoted in Laurie Copans’ February 13th Associated Press article, “The feeling of humiliation and the hate the roadblocks create increase the tendency of Palestinians to join militant groups. . . .”