Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

New Bin Laden tape threatens EU, BBC, March 20, 2008

In a new audio message purportedly from Osama Bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader threatens the EU over the re-printing of a cartoon offensive to Muslims.

The voice on it says the cartoon, re-published recently in all major Danish newspapers, was part of a crusade involving Pope Benedict XVI.

The drawing, first published in 2005, depicts the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban.

The voice on the audio has not yet been verified as belonging to Bin Laden.

The message comes on the fifth anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq.

But the BBC’s Jonathan Beale in Washington says that the message was probably released to not to mark that anniversary, but rather the anniversary of the birth of Prophet Muhammad, which Sunni Muslims mark on Thursday.

It appeared on a Islamist website that has carried al-Qaeda messages in the past.

Over the audio is a graphic with a still image of Bin Laden holding an AK-47 and bearing the logo of al-Sahab, the media wing of al-Qaeda. There is a written translation of the message in English.

‘Crowd pleaser’

John Pike, director of the defence think tank GlobalSecurity.org, said bin Laden had chosen to talk about the cartoon in an effort to remain relevant and provide direction to followers.

“His judgement is that it’s a consistent crowd-pleaser, and that if he has any hope of getting people stirred up, this is probably a good way to try to do it.”

Last month, Denmark’s leading newspapers reprinted one of 12 cartoons that first angered many Muslims when they were originally published in September 2005.

Anger in the Muslim world peaked in 2006 as newspapers in other countries published the cartoons.

McClatchy Washington Bureau, 03/17/2008, Cheney cites phenomenal Iraqi security progress as bombing kills 40

BAGHDAD — Vice President Dick Cheney on Monday made a surprise visit to Baghdad, where he pledged that U.S. forces would “not quit before the job is done” and said that a massive troop buildup had achieved “phenomenal” improvements in security.

At sunset Monday, however, a female suicide bomber killed at least 40 people and injured more than 50 when she blew herself up in a crowded pedestrian area near a Shiite Muslim shrine in the southern holy city of Karbala, according to government and hospital officials. Among the victims were several Iranian pilgrims whod come to worship at the Imam Hussein shrine, one of Islams most sacred sites.

And the U.S. military announced the deaths of two soldiers who were killed Monday when their Humvee struck a roadside bomb north of Baghdad, bringing the number of American troop deaths to at least 3,990 since the war began.

Cheney told a news conference in Baghdad that the invasion of Iraq five years ago this week was a “difficult, challenging, but nonetheless successful endeavor.” However, he said that obstacles remain and that the decision on whether to begin reducing forces depends on political reconciliation and the ability to preserve the hard-won security gains of the past year.

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2006 — Page 2

Daniel Dennett, The Evaporation of the Powerful Mystique of Religion

I’m so optimistic that I expect to live to see the evaporation of the powerful mystique of religion. I think that in about twenty-five years almost all religions will have evolved into very different phenomena, so much so that in most quarters religion will no longer command the awe it does today. Of course many people–perhaps a majority of people in the world–will still cling to their religion with the sort of passion that can fuel violence and other intolerant and reprehensible behavior. But the rest of the world will see this behavior for what it is, and learn to work around it until it subsides, as it surely will. That’s the good news. The bad news is that we will need every morsel of this reasonable attitude to deal with such complex global problems as climate change, fresh water, and economic inequality in an effective way. It will be touch and go, and in my pessimistic moods I think Sir Martin Rees may be right: some disaffected religious (or political) group may unleash a biological or nuclear catastrophe that forecloses all our good efforts. But I do think we have the resources and the knowledge to forestall such calamities if we are vigilant.

Recall that only fifty years ago smoking was a high status activity and it was considered rude to ask somebody to stop smoking in one’s presence. Today we’ve learned that we shouldn’t make the mistake of trying to prohibit smoking altogether, and so we still have plenty of cigarettes and smokers, but we have certainly contained the noxious aspects within quite acceptable boundaries. Smoking is no longer cool, and the day will come when religion is, first, a take-it-or-leave-it choice, and later: no longer cool–except in its socially valuable forms, where it will be one type of allegiance among many. Will those descendant institutions still be religions? Or will religions have thereby morphed themselves into extinction? It all depends on what you think the key or defining elements of religion are. Are dinosaurs extinct, or do their lineages live on as birds?

Tajik Muslims praying, Alexei Vladykin, AP

John Gray, The atheist delusion, guardian.co.uk, March 15, 2008

‘Opposition to religion occupies the high ground, intellectually and morally,’ wrote Martin Amis recently. Over the past few years, leading writers and thinkers have published bestselling tracts against God. John Gray on why the ’secular fundamentalists’ have got it all wrong

Saturday March 15, 2008
The Guardian

An atmosphere of moral panic surrounds religion. Viewed not so long ago as a relic of superstition whose role in society was steadily declining, it is now demonised as the cause of many of the world’s worst evils. As a result, there has been a sudden explosion in the literature of proselytising atheism. A few years ago, it was difficult to persuade commercial publishers even to think of bringing out books on religion. Today, tracts against religion can be enormous money-spinners, with Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great selling in the hundreds of thousands. For the first time in generations, scientists and philosophers, high-profile novelists and journalists are debating whether religion has a future. The intellectual traffic is not all one-way. There have been counterblasts for believers, such as The Dawkins Delusion? by the British theologian Alister McGrath and The Secular Age by the Canadian Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor. On the whole, however, the anti-God squad has dominated the sales charts, and it is worth asking why.

The abrupt shift in the perception of religion is only partly explained by terrorism. The 9/11 hijackers saw themselves as martyrs in a religious tradition, and western opinion has accepted their self-image. And there are some who view the rise of Islamic fundamentalism as a danger comparable with the worst that were faced by liberal societies in the 20th century.

For Dawkins and Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Martin Amis, Michel Onfray, Philip Pullman and others, religion in general is a poison that has fuelled violence and oppression throughout history, right up to the present day. The urgency with which they produce their anti-religious polemics suggests that a change has occurred as significant as the rise of terrorism: the tide of secularisation has turned. These writers come from a generation schooled to think of religion as a throwback to an earlier stage of human development, which is bound to dwindle away as knowledge continues to increase. In the 19th century, when the scientific and industrial revolutions were changing society very quickly, this may not have been an unreasonable assumption. Dawkins, Hitchens and the rest may still believe that, over the long run, the advance of science will drive religion to the margins of human life, but this is now an article of faith rather than a theory based on evidence.

Chinese Police Clash With Tibet Protesters - New York Times, March 14, 2008

BEIJING — Violent protests erupted Friday in a busy market area of Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, as Buddhist monks and other ethnic Tibetans clashed with Chinese security forces. Witnesses say the protesters burned shops, cars, military vehicles and at least one tourist bus.

Cars were overturned cars and shops burning in Barkhor Square in front of the Jokhang Temple in central Lhasa, Tibet, on Friday.

Tibetans throwing stones at army vehicles as a car burns on a street in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, after violent protests broke out on Friday.

The chaotic scene marked the most violent demonstrations since protests by Buddhist monks began in Lhasa on Monday, the anniversary of a failed Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule in 1959. The protests have been the largest in Tibet since the late 1980s, when Chinese security forces repeatedly used lethal force to restore order in the region.

The developments prompted the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, to issue a statement, saying he was concerned about the situation and appealing to the Chinese leadership to “stop using force and address the long-simmering resentment of the Tibetan people”.

By Friday night, Chinese authorities had placed much of the central part of the city under a curfew, including neighborhoods around different Buddhist monasteries, according to two Lhasa residents reached by telephone. Military police were blocking roads in some ethnic Tibetan neighborhoods, several Lhasa residents said.

Shtrasler, Herzl is turning in his grave, Haaretz, March 14, 2008

Shas once understood that it was undesirable to impose its worldview on the majority, that it was preferable to use friendly persuasion. Today Shas wants to change the country’s image. Yishai has become an expert at extortion, and Olmert is willing to pay. He is buying Shas with money and benefits, as well as laws and regulations that are changing the country’s character.

About two months ago Olmert agreed to reestablish the Religious Affairs Ministry for Shas. A few days ago he transferred NIS 450 million to Shas, a political gift to fund the yeshiva students, and recently he gave Rafael Pinhasi, one of the Shas strongmen (a former MK, with a criminal conviction) the position of chair of the Tel Aviv cemeteries council. More power, more money and more appointments.

Recently there was a dangerous proposal made in cooperation with Social Affairs Minister Isaac Herzog of Labor - which almost passed in the cabinet - to expand the powers of the rabbinical courts, according to a demand by Shas. Recently a Shas draft bill to restrict surfing the Internet passed its first reading, and the Shas minister of communications, Big Brother Ariel Atias, will be the chief censor. Just like Saudi Arabia.

Shas is currently promoting a draft bill that will restrict the right to an abortion, and an arrangement to censor billboards so that “immodest models” will not be seen on them.

Olmert also agreed to establish a team of ministers headed by Yishai to examine an increase in child allowances, and recently the government decided to establish a state conversion authority. By demand of Shas, the government allowed it to appoint its own dayanim (rabbinical court judges) to the conversion courts.

We are gradually and systematically losing the modern Western country in which we were educated. Olmert is selling the principles of humanism, tolerance, freedom and civil rights to Yishai in a liquidation sale.

Sharlet, Teenage Holy War, The Revealer, April 12, 2007

This is how you enlist in the Army of God: First come the fireworks and the prayers, and then 4,000 kids scream, “We won’t be silent anymore!” Then the kids drop to their knees, still but for the weeping and regrets of fifteen-year-olds. The lights in the Cleveland arena fade to blue, and a man on the stage whispers to them about sin and love and the Father-God. They rise, heartened; the crowd, en masse, swears off “harlots and adultery”; the twenty-one-year-old MC twitches taut a chain across the ass of her skintight red jeans and summons the followers to show off their best dance moves for God. “Gimme what you got!” she shouts. They dance — hip-hop, tap, toe and pelvic thrusting. Then they’re ready. They’re about to accept “the mark of a warrior,” explains Ron Luce, commander in chief of BattleCry, the most furious youth crusade since young sinners in the hands of an angry God flogged themselves with shame in eighteenth-century New England. Nearly three centuries later, these 4,000 teens are about to become “branded by God.” It’s like getting your head shaved when you join the Marines, Luce says, only the kids get to keep their hair. His assistants roll out a cowhide draped over a sawhorse, and Luce presses red-hot iron into the dead flesh, projecting a close-up of sizzling cow skin on giant movie screens above the stage.

“When you enlist in the military, there’s a code of honor,” Luce preaches, “same as being a follower of Christ.” His Christian code requires a “wartime mentality”: a “survival orientation” and a readiness to face “real enemies.” The queers and communists, feminists and Muslims, to be sure, but also the entire American cultural apparatus of marketing and merchandising, the “techno-terrorists” of mass media, doing to the morality of a generation what Osama bin Laden did to the Twin Towers. “Just as the events of September 11th, 2001, permanently changed our perspective on the world,” Luce writes, “so we ought to be awakened to the alarming influence of today’s culture terrorists. They are wealthy, they are smart, and they are real.”

Luce is forty-five, his brown hair floppy, his lips pouty. On the screens above the stage, his green eyes blink furiously. “The devil hates us,” he exhorts, “and we gotta be ready to fight and not be these passive little lukewarm, namby-pamby, kum-ba-yah, thumb-sucking babies that call themselves Christians. Jesus? He got mad!” Luce considers most evangelicals too soft, too ready to pass off as piety their preference for a bland suburban lifestyle. He hates what he sees as the weakness of “accepting” Christ, of “trusting” the Lord. “I want an attacking church!” he shouts, his normally smooth tones raw and desperate and alarming. He isn’t just looking for followers — he wants “stalkers” who’ll bring a criminal passion to their pursuit of godliness.

Derfner, Rattling the Cage: Terrorism, theirs and ours, Jerusalem Post, March 12, 2008

If there were any reason to believe that deliberately targeting civilians in Gaza would stop the rockets on Sderot and Ashkelon, I’d be in favor of deliberately targeting civilians. If it worked, it would ultimately save both Israeli and Palestinian lives.

I supported Israel’s unstated policy of punishing the civilian population in Lebanon during the war two summers ago because I saw no other way to rein in Hizbullah, no other means of bringing pressure on those fanatics to leave us alone.

But unlike most of the Israelis at all levels who want the IDF to make ordinary Gazans suffer and die, believing that this will force Hamas and Islamic Jihad to stop their terrorism against us, I recognize that such a policy is itself terrorism. Deliberately targeting civilians for a political purpose is textbook terrorism.

It’s not true what the cliche says - that terror is terror is terror. When Israeli fighter jets and cluster bomb launchers act with deliberate disregard for “collateral damage” in Lebanon following a deadly, unprovoked attack by Hizbullah, or when Israel chokes off the delivery of basic supplies to Gaza in response to steady, unprovoked rocketing by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, that’s terrorism. That’s punishing and killing civilians to force the enemy leadership’s hand.

Brian Hendler
Mercaz Harav students at funerals on March 7, 2008 grieve for their slain classmates.

Attack cut religious Zionists deeply - JTA, March 9, 2008

TEL AVIV (JTA) — The one with glasses and a wide smile was the brother of a friend, the one with blue eyes and side curls the son of another.

In the close-knit world of religious Zionism, no one feels far removed from the grief for eight young people gunned down while studying Talmud in their Jerusalem yeshiva.

The images of blood-soaked prayer shawls and glass doors riddled with bullet holes, then the eight coffins lined up in a row, have horrified an entire country. But the pain cuts especially deep in the national religious Zionist community, which feels it was specifically targeted.

Its members now are searching for a way their faith can guide them through the mourning.

“Since the attack there is a sense that a darkness has fallen over Jerusalem when usually there is joy in our neighborhoods,” said Tal Weider, 17, a high school student and leader in the local Bnai Akiva youth group.

It was not by chance that the attacker targeted Mercaz Harav, the main yeshiva of national religious Zionism and a birthplace of the settler movement, many here believe.

Despite Landmark Changes in N. Ireland, Trust in Police Still Lags - washingtonpost.com, March 9, 2008

BELFAST — The two young men, in their teens or early 20s, one of them with fresh bruises on his face, walked up the Shankill Road on a busy Friday afternoon in January, carrying placards that read, “I’m a thief and a burglar.”

For an hour, people poured out of shops and pubs to watch the young men, who had been caught breaking into an elderly woman’s house. It had been a while since they had seen what is known here as a “walk of shame,” the kind of rough justice doled out by illegal paramilitary groups during Northern Ireland’s three decades of sectarian violence.

“I would love the paramilitaries to come back,” said Julie Lester, 42, who described watching with delight as the housebreakers were publicly humiliated. “There’s a rise in crime and drugs and we have nobody to turn to. I have really no faith in the police.”

Nearly 10 years after the landmark April 1998 Good Friday peace agreement, Northern Ireland is still struggling to create a police force fully trusted by the province’s divided Catholic and Protestant communities.

The Jewish Week News, March 5, 2008

Rabbi Hershel Schachter, Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshiva University’s rabbinical school, issued an apology today for a statement he made that appeared to advocate shooting the Prime Minister of Israel should the government “give away Jerusalem.”

The statement, part of a 39-second clip posted on YouTube this week, is from a discussion the rabbi had in Israel with American students learning at Yeshivat HaKotel in Jerusalem. It is not known when the statement was made.

In what appears to be a response to a question about serving in the Israeli army, the rabbi, a leading decisor in the Orthodox community, says: “First you have to know what the army is going to do. If the army is going to destroy Gush Katif, there’s no mitzvah to destroy Eretz Yisrael.

“If the army is going to give away Yerushalyim [Jerusalem], then I would tell everyone to resign from the army - I’d tell them to shoot the Rosh Hamemshalah [Prime Minister],” which prompted laughter from his audience.

The national-religious camp’s flagship yeshiva - Haaretz, March 8, 2008

The Mercaz Harav rabbinic college is the most prominent yeshiva in the religious Zionist world. It trained the movement’s leading rabbis as well as many yeshiva heads, city rabbis, and teachers in religious colleges and high schools.

The school was central in shaping the evolution of religious Zionism. As the flagship of national-religious yeshivas, the religious right is bound to attribute greater symbolic meaning to a terrorist attack here than anywhere else.
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Founded in 1924 by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, then chief Ashkenazi rabbi during the British Mandate, it is seen as the first yeshiva to be Zionist in spirit.

Rabbi Kook called it “the central world yeshiva,” wishing to set it as a model for a new yeshiva concept, integrating traditional Talmud studies with Jewish philosophy, Bible and even Jewish history, geography and literature. The last three subjects were never actually taught there.

After its founder’s death in 1935 it was named Merkaz Harav after him, and became synonymous with Rabbi Kook’s teachings.

In its first decades the college had few students and at times it was not clear whether it would survive. The turning point came in the ’50s, when graduates of Bnei Akiva religious schools and high-school yeshivas seeking higher religious education flocked to Merkaz Harav, the only Zionist yeshiva.

The prominent Bnei Akiva rabbi Moshe Zvi Neria, a student of Rabbi Kook’s, encouraged students to go to Merkaz Harav, which was headed from 1952 by Rabbi Abraham Kook’s son, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, until his death in 1982.

The foundations for the religious settlements in the West Bank were forged in Merkaz Harav, whose student Hanan Porat set out to restore the Jewish settlement in Gush Etzion immediately after the Six-Day War.

The founders of Gush Emunim, a religious political movement that encouraged Jewish settlement of land they believe God promised the Jews, came from Merkaz Harav after the Yom Kippur War.

Ethnic Divide Worsens as Sri Lanka Conflict Escalates - New York Times, March 8, 2008

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — There are no eyes on this war. A truce between the Sri Lankan government and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam is over, and gone are the Nordic monitors who kept watch over it.

Security is tight, and tensions high, in Colombo. Some minority Tamils fear wrongly being arrested during checks like these.

The government has refused entry to United Nations human rights monitors. Independent journalists are not allowed anywhere near the front lines. Only occasionally does a glimpse of the war’s damage surface, as when the Red Cross confirmed that in the first six weeks of this year alone, 180 civilians had been killed, a toll it called “appalling.”

AP, Paisley’s aide seen as heir in N. Ireland - The Boston Globe, March 6, 2008

BELFAST - The favorite to become the new Protestant leader in Northern Ireland is Peter Robinson, who first gained international attention two decades ago by leading a mob attack on an Irish border village.

While he since has grown into one of Northern Ireland’s most polished and formidable politicians, many people wonder whether the likely successor to the charismatic Ian Paisley will be as willing - or able - to keep governing alongside Roman Catholics in the fledgling power-sharing administration for this British territory….

Britain and Ireland devised power-sharing as the best way to bring both sides’ extremists together in compromise and consign to history the 1968-98 conflict that left more than 3,700 dead. Robinson, 59, first grabbed widespread notice in 1986 when he led a mob that smashed up an Irish village and beat up two police officers.

Era Ends in N. Ireland as Paisley Says He’ll Retire - New York Times, March 5, 2008

LONDON — Ian Paisley, the 81-year-old Protestant evangelist who spent decades in implacable opposition to a compromise settlement of Northern Ireland’s sectarian violence before agreeing last year to join Irish nationalists in a power-sharing government, announced Tuesday that he will resign in May as the province’s first minister and as the leader of the Democratic Unionist party he founded.

The resignation was not a surprise; Mr. Paisley told associates months ago that he planned to leave office sometime this year. Political commentators in Belfast, the Northern Ireland capital, said the announcement was prompted partly by the approach in May of the first anniversary of the deal that made Mr. Paisley a partner in government with Martin McGuinness, the Sinn Fein leader who was previously a senior commander of the Irish Republican Army.

The I.R.A.’s campaign of armed resistance made it Mr. Paisley’s nemesis in the years when he barnstormed across the province condemning any deal that opened the way for power-sharing with the Catholic minority. For decades — first as the founder of a splinter evangelical church, the Free Presbyterians, and later as founder of the Democratic Unionists, who functioned as the church’s action wing — his style was characterized by his fire-and-brimstone rhetoric.

But aides who have watched as Mr. Paisley and Mr. McGuinness have governed together say there has been a remarkable absence of rancor between them. Though Mr. Paisley is first minister and Mr. McGuinness is deputy first minister, they govern as effective equals under the complex power-sharing arrangements reached last March. Mr. McGuinness, 52, has taken care to show deference to Mr. Paisley, reaching out a hand on more than one occasion to help steady him on public occasions.

Mr. Paisley’s announcement brought a flow of valedictory compliments from British and Irish political leaders. The former British prime minister Tony Blair told the BBC: “In the final analysis, he made it happen. The man famous for saying no will go down in history for saying yes.”

Ironically, Mr. Paisley’s resignation appears not to have been hastened by any disillusionment with the nationalists, who he has depicted as having accepted “British rule,” but by growing fractiousness within his own Democratic Unionist Party.

Powerful elements within the party have remained unreconciled to the deal with the nationalists, and its standing has slipped among Protestant voters, who gave the Paisley party its first election victory in 2003. In January, it lost an important by-election, and there was widespread talk in party ranks of a move to oust Mr. Paisley.