Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Islamic guidance is part of eight new, free primary and secondary schools funded by a Shiite foundation in Najaf.
Sam Dagher

Rising player with a vision for Shiite Iraq | csmonitor.com, November 20, 2007

Free schools and mass weddings create support for a Shiite-run south.
By Sam Dagher | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

Reporter Sam Dagher discusses the role of martyrs in Iraq’s Shiite political parties.

NAJAF, Iraq - Ammar al-Hakim is presiding over an Iraqi Shiite building boom. His austere Shaheed al-Mihrab Foundation has raised 400 mosques in Iraq since 2003. It’s building the largest seminary here in the holy city of Najaf and opening a chain of schools. And it now has 95 offices throughout the country.

What’s more, Mr. Hakim’s foundation is winning over adherents to his party – the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) – through all-expenses-paid mass marriages along with cash payments and gifts for the newlyweds, free education and stipends at his new schools, and an array of other charitable projects such as caring for orphans and displaced families.

All of this is being done to promote ISCI’s core vision: a federation of nine provinces where conservative Shiite Islam would reign.

While opponents say that such a federation among central and southern provinces would only hasten the breakup of Iraq and create a ministate where Iran would hold great sway, Hakim and his party are making great gains.

For them, the plan would bolster security for Shiites and benefit the stability of the country as a whole. And, most significant, they are winning much support ahead of a national referendum on the issue by April 2008, as proscribed by the Constitution.

An aerial view of the separation fence, near Jerusalem. (AP)

UN: West Bank fence severs Palestinian farmers from fields, AP, Haaretz, Nov. 17, 2007

Only 18 percent of some 30,000 West Bank farmers who used to work the lands cut off by Israel’s separation fence now have Israeli permits to reach their fields, the United Nations said in a report on the lives of some 230,000 Palestinians in 67 communities close to the fence.

The report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs looked at 15 communities with about 10,000 residents trapped between the fence and Israel, and at 52 communities with 220,000 residents on the Palestinian side of the divider.

Those in the hemmed-in villages require permanent residency permits, while those on the east side of the fence need Israeli-issued visitors permits to reach lands or visit family in the enclosed communities.

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

ON EDGE A woman passes under the watchful eye of a member of Hamas’s security forces outside the Parliament building in Gaza City. In June, Hamas prevailed against its rival, Fatah.

Erlanger, Under Siege, Life in Gaza Just Shrinks - NYT, November 18, 2007

IT’S a miserable time to be a Gazan.

A Tightened Grip, Multimedia Feature, Photos by Ruth Fremson

Hopes were high in 2005, when Israel unilaterally withdrew its troops and 9,000 Jewish settlers, and the international community lined up to help the Palestinians make Gaza a model for their potential state.

But happy endings are rare in this part of the world. In the last year, life in Gaza has been plagued by criminal gangs as well as fighting among Palestinian groups. Some rocket barrages aimed at Israel fall on Gaza itself, and Israeli retaliation for the rest ranges from military strikes to economic quarantine.

Months of battling between the main political factions, Fatah and Hamas, culminated in a Gazan civil war in June, with 160 people killed and 800 wounded, many of them civilians. Hamas, which is classified as a terrorist group by Israel, the United States and the European Union, was the winner.

The struggle is hardly finished, with Fatah trying to consolidate in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza. Just last week, a large Fatah demonstration on the third anniversary of Yasir Arafat’s death ended in violence when Hamas police fired into a rock-throwing crowd and killed six people, while beating others.

Hamas is under siege, and with it, the people of Gaza.

It’s not just that Hamas is shunned by the West and Israel, which has declared Gaza “a hostile entity” and is moving to restrict supplies of gasoline, diesel fuel and electricity. Gaza is also shunned by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, who is a ready accomplice in the effort to punish and pressure Hamas.

After the Israelis pulled out in 2005, Gazans complained that they lived in a big prison, since Israel still controlled their airspace, sea coasts and principal border crossings. Such claims had an element of propaganda, but now, with the crossing into Egypt for people also shut, by Egypt, the accusation is much closer to reality.

A trickle of the 1.5 million inhabitants of Gaza can now leave their tiny coastal strip for any reason whatsoever. The streets are ghostly, with little traffic, and the private economy is dying, lacking needed imports and unable to export.

Gaza is a deeply conservative society, but Hamas’s growth has been reflected in the increasing number of women not only covering their hair, but also their faces. Israel says that it will ensure that no one starves in Gaza, and that the essentials of life will be provided.

But Israel also wants to see that Hamas suffers, by making Gazans suffer, to impress on them that the best path lies in accommodation and negotiation with Israel for a Palestinian state. Fatah backs that strategy, not the violent, religious and national struggle against Israel that Hamas advocates and practices.

Raji Sourani, director of Gaza’s Palestinian Center for Human Rights, is himself stuck in Gaza. No friend to Hamas, he has a new metaphor.

“At least in prison, and I’ve been in prison, there are rules,” he said. “But now we live in a kind of animal farm. We live in a pen, and they dump in food and medicine.”

AFP

John Micklethwait, In God’s name | Economist.com, Nov. 3, 2007

Formerly communist countries are also getting hooked again on the opium of the people. Russia’s secret police, the KGB, hounded religion: its successor, the FSB, has its own Orthodox church opposite its headquarters. In the Polish parliament the speaker crosses himself before taking his seat. Some of China’s technocrats think that Confucianism, which Mao condemned as “feudal”, is useful social glue in their fast-changing country. But they brutally repressed a Buddhist sect, the Falun Gong, and they are worried that Christian churchgoers may already outnumber Communist Party members.

In Western politics, too, religion has forced itself back into the public square. The American president begins each day on his knees and each cabinet meeting with a prayer. The easiest way to tell a Republican from a Democrat is to ask how often he or she goes to church. And although European liberals sneer about American theocracy, American conservatives claim that secular, childless Europe is turning into Eurabia.

Many secular intellectuals think that the real “clash of civilisations” is not between different religions but between superstition and modernity. A succession of bestselling books have torn into religion—Sam Harris’s “The End of Faith”, Richard Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” and Christopher Hitchens’s “God is not Great—How Religion Poisons Everything”. This counterattack already shows a religious intensity. Mr Dawkins has set up an organisation to help atheists around the world.

Part of that secular fury, especially in Europe, comes from exasperation. After all, it has been a canon of progressive thought since the Enlightenment that modernity—that heady combination of science, learning and democracy—would kill religion. Plainly, this has not happened. Numbers about religious observance are notoriously untrustworthy, but most of them seem to indicate that any drift towards secularism has been halted, and some show religion to be on the increase.

John Bazemore, AP

Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue and his wife, Mary, pray for rain for their drought-stricken state during a vigil in Atlanta Tuesday. “It’s time to appeal to Him who can and will make a difference,” Perdue said.

Georgia Governor Prays for Rain By GREG BLUESTEIN,
AP, November 13, 2007

ATLANTA (Nov. 13) — Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue stepped up to a podium outside the state Capitol on Tuesday and led a solemn crowd of several hundred people in a prayer for rain on his drought-stricken state.

“We’ve come together here simply for one reason and one reason only: To very reverently and respectfully pray up a storm,” Perdue said after a choir provided a hymn.Georgia and its neighboring states are caught in an epic drought that threatens public water supplies. Perdue has ordered water restrictions, launched a legal battle against the release of water from federal reservoirs and appealed to President Bush.

“It’s time to appeal to Him who can and will make a difference,” Perdue told the crowd.

The hourlong event was billed as an interfaith ceremony but only three Protestant ministers joined Perdue, who is a Baptist, and Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle.

Nearby, some 20 demonstrators from the Atlanta Freethought Society staged a protest against the holding of a religious observance at the seat of state government.

Meteorologists said earlier this week there was a slight possibility of rain Tuesday, but less of a chance of precipitation was predicted for the rest of the week.

“I believe in miracles,” declared Pastor Maurice Watson of Beulahland Bible Church. “How about you?”

Dalia Karpel, My god, what did we do? - Haaretz, November 10, 2007

One night, Tamar Yarom was awakened by one of the soldiers in her unit. He said he wanted to show her something in the basement of the abandoned building where they were staying. “Before we opened the door, I heard this awful noise from a generator and there was a strong smell of diesel fuel. I saw a middle-aged Palestinian detainee lying with his head on the generator. His ear was pressed against the generator that was vibrating, and the guy’s head was vibrating with it. His face was completely messed up. It amazed me that through all the blood and horror, you could still see the guy’s expression and that’s what stayed with me for years after - the look on his face.”

Yarom, now a film director, made two films following her army service as a mashakit tash (welfare officer) in an infantry company in the territories. She was drafted in 1989 and served at a basic-training base near Jerusalem until her unit was transferred to Gaza. She accompanied the recruits from their first day in the army and felt close to them, and they told her about what they did in the territories. “I tried not to judge them. Mostly I was glad that they were feeling good and finally had self-confidence.” That’s how it works, she adds: “When you’re told things that you don’t see with your own eyes, you can prettify them in your mind.” But then she was taken to that basement.

Why did the soldier take her there? “He wanted to share the horror with me,” she says. “Maybe he hoped that I’d do something, that I’d raise an outcry. I don’t remember how we left there or what happened afterward. The next day I asked one of the commanders what happened in the basement and he politely explained to me that I mustn’t interfere in things that were none of my business. That detainee I saw taught me something about myself that I would never have learned in years of university. And he’s imprinted in my memory, engraved in every cell of my being.

Leaving Vietnam, New York Times Blog, November 7, 2007

Leaving Vietnam

By Huong Sutliff

[The following entry, written by the author at 13 years old, recalls the day of her adoption at age 6.]

Dear Journal,

It was a cool breezy day in the fall of 1997. I remember the precise moment, sitting crouched in a chair, squeezing the suitcase in my hands. The room I was in smelled of freshly brewed tea. I sat there in the uncomfortable leather chair just gripping my suitcase. A young woman sat across from me scribbling away at her desk. From a distance I heard the sound of footsteps approaching the door. The knob slowly turned and in the doorway stood a man dressed in a navy blue suit holding papers in his hands.

He signaled for me to come with him. The expression on his face did not comfort me but I stood up and walked towards him. A lump grew in my throat. He looked at me and we both walked down the hallway in silence, When we reached the end of the hall, he asked me to wait. He said he would be right back. As he left, I saw two figures enter the orphanage gates. They were silhouettes. Minutes that seemed like hours passed, and the man returned. “They are here,” he said with a glint in his eyes. My heart began to beat faster and faster as we walked down the stairs. Our footsteps echoed throughout the building. When we opened the door my heart felt like collapsing.

There were people standing in a circle. I could not make out who they all were. I followed the man through the crowd pushing my small body through the towering figures. As we broke through a woman and a man stood side by side holding hands and whispering to each other. The woman had pale white skin and wore a white shirt and black pants. The man wore a shirt and khaki pants. The woman spoke but I could not understand her words. She looked at me and spoke again and still I had no idea what she was saying….

I didn’t know what to do, where to look, what to say. I gazed helplessly at my hands. The woman bent down next to me holding out her hands again. She waited for me to touch them. I slowly lifted my hands and placed them into hers. I sighed. It was a feeling of relief and I hugged her as she held me tightly. I wasn’t thinking. I just kept holding on. It seemed like a long time we both stayed holding on to each other. Finally, we let go.

All the other children at the orphanage peered through the windows. They waved as we made out way towards the gates to leave on our journey to my new home.

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