Jonah Raskin : The First Amendment Sucks

Cartoon by Ramiro Zardoya / Cartoon Movement.
And it's not written in stone:
The First Amendment sucks

Once upon a time, I never would have said this. But I am saying it now: we have to watch what we say if we are to live at peace with one another.

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / September 20, 2012

In the wake of the murders of four Americans in Libya, including U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, media pundits have come back again and again to the First Amendment as though it was sacrosanct and inviolable, and as though the First Amendment protects the rights of Americans to say anything they want to say about the prophet Mohammed.

In point of fact, the First Amendment never was, isn’t now, and never will be sacrosanct and inviolable. There has never been absolute freedom of speech and the press in the United States, though some, like Chief Justice William O. Douglas, insisted on it from the sanctity of the Supreme Court.

But did anyone ever stand up before the nine judges, point a finger at Douglas or any of his fellow jurists, and call him a “pimp for the American plutocracy” and a “dirty old man.” I don’t think so. I think he would have bounced them right out of the courtroom.

To this date, they don’t even allow TV cameras in the Supreme Court. How’s that for freedom of speech? Moreover, more to the point, the court has ruled that corporations have freedom of speech, but that high school students who unfurl banners that say “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” don’t. How’s that for logic?

The founding fathers who drafted the First Amendment, which says that Congress can’t abridge freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the right to gather peacefully and demand change, never intended those freedoms to be enjoyed by everyone. To a man, the founding fathers were white and wealthy and didn’t want African Americans, women, or white men without property to enjoy the same rights that they enjoyed.

They were hypocrites, dear old Tom Jefferson, James Madison, and President John Adams who jailed newspaper editors who criticized him. Jefferson went after journalists, too, once he got into power. It’s all there in the history books -- some of them anyway, the ones that haven’t whitewashed our past.

For more than 100 years, Americans who were against chattel slavery, who denounced the subordination of women, and who condemned the system of wage slavery, were blatantly silenced, censored, arrested, jailed, deported, ostracized, and punished every which way.

All through the nineteenth and for much of the twentieth century, Americans took their lives in their hands when they spoke freely. If they were socialists, communists, or civil rights activists, they were spat-on, clubbed, bloodied, bombed, shot, even killed.

Beginning around the time of World War II, it was widely recognized that an individual couldn’t sue and collect damages if he got in the face of someone else and called him or her a fascist, or a mother------, and was punched. The legal concept came to be known as “Fighting Words” and for decades “Fighting Words” were not protected speech.

All of which brings me to words and images that express contempt for the culture, the religion, and the ethnicity of human beings. They are not protected speech, either. They are words that are tantamount to a physical attack.

For decades, too, we’ve had something called “Hate Speech” in the United States and that’s not protected, either. Call a Chinese woman, or a Congolese man a racial epithet and then beat him or her to a pulp and you’ll be charged not only with assault but with “Hate Speech” and find yourself in prison for a long time.

For too long, members of the dominant culture in the United States felt that they could call members of so-called minority groups whatever names they wanted to call them, such as n-----, as a way to keep them down, keep them in place, and give themselves a sense of superiority, however superficial.

Not surprisingly, members of those minority groups, whether they were Irish or Jews, African Americans or Japanese, didn’t like being called those derogatory names, because names hurt. They hurt more than sticks and stones.

Images hurt just as much if not more than names, and in today’s global world what we say and how we express ourselves travels as quickly as a guided missile all around the world. Images that originate in America have sped thousands of miles and have outraged people in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

This has been going on for decades now. To a large extent the mass media has demonized Moslems, Arabs, and whole populations that live in the Middle East. Is that accidental? It’s probably not.

The First Amendment, as I see it, ought to protect citizens against government censorship. I’m against censorship of all kinds including self-censorship, which is especially pernicious because citizens silence themselves. The state doesn’t have to do it to them.

But our words and our images have real consequences.

Once upon a time, I never would have said this. But I am saying it now: we have to watch what we say if we are to live at peace with one another and not incite violent attacks. Everyone deserves the right not to be assaulted by demeaning words and images and if that means that the First Amendment -- which has often been a fake anyway -- takes a back seat, so be it.

I used to teach a law class at Sonoma State University and one of the things I would say is that whether to speak or not, and what to say, is something that has to be decided and chosen almost day by day. One day, silence might be appropriate, the next day shouting, the day after that guerilla theater.

After more than 200 years of First Amendment history it’s definitely a thorny issue. It’s not static and never has been. It has evolved, changed directions, come to mean different things to different people. The answer to dangerous speech is not to blot it out, but to have more speech and to thoroughly discuss the issues.

That’s difficult in the United States today because on the major television networks and on a lot of cable stations the dialogue is very limited and very safe and rarely wide open, robust, and uninhibited. It looks to me like there are a lot of stations owned by a few major corporations and the stations don’t criticize or look critically at the American political and economic system.

Does any major station really come out and tell the truth about the war on terrorism, or the banks, or the lies of the major parties and their financial donors? I don’t think so. We have a society that gives lip service to the First Amendment and at the same time engages in First Amendment activities in superficial ways.

Yes, the First Amendment is already more than 200 years old, but it’s still in its infancy, learning to walk, and yes, learning to talk. It might help if we don’t think of it as something that’s written in stone, but rather something that needs to be reconsidered and perhaps rewritten.

Americans need to learn about the media, the laws, and the ethics in much the same way that they are learning about fat and sugar and diet and health. If we don’t allow bodies to be poisoned with chemicals, why should we allow minds to be poisoned by toxic messages?

[Jonah Raskin, professor emeritus at Sonoma State University and the author of biographies of Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack London, is a frequent contributor to The Rag Blog. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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Larry Ray : Our Schools, Their Madrassas

Graphic by Larry Ray / The Rag Blog.
Letters to Charlie:
Our schools, their Madrassas

By Larry Ray / The Rag Blog / October 1, 2010

Letters to Charlie is a collection of emails to a long time friend. He worked hard and did very well. To many of his wealthy conservative friends, Charlie is an anomalous dreaded liberal. He forwards many of their hateful and distorted right-wing emails to me and I frequently send Charlie my free-flow take on them. Education was the topic for a recent series... Islamic Madrassas versus American schools.

Imagine if all the glistening red white and blue was stripped from the history of America that is, or was, taught in our public schools. Americans just do not want to talk about or remember the darker history of this great country. But a mere 46 years ago black Americans were denied basic rights and could not drink from the same water fountains designated for use by white people. The same went for transportation, eating in restaurants, staying in hotels or motels, or voting without intimidation or paying a "poll tax."

1964 is not that long ago, Charlie. There was even great doubt that JFK could be elected as president because he was, gasp, a Catholic! Senator Joe McCarthy's Commie blacklist hearings and the actual existence of an "un-American activities committee" are well within your memory and mine.

The history of the American development of oil production in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East is a sorry tale of arrogance and complete disrespect for customs and religion in that region. Ancient tribal areas had been carved up into countries with boundaries drawn by colonial imperialists...

Great Britain and the USA have a shameful history of using our Christian badge of correctness to disregard any other religions as misguided and wrong. We still do that. Imagine Islamic missionaries roaming the cities and towns in rural America seeking to convert Christians.

Our public schools were wisely and purposefully made to be secular and apart from religious control or curriculum. There is no mention of setting up schools in the Constitution. We are constitutionally bound to respect and practice freedom of religion in America. That, however, mostly translates to freedom to be Christian of some stripe or another. Jews continue to fight antisemitism and did not easily build their Synagogues and other places of gathering without lots of ugliness. Muslims are having an even tougher time of it here being accepted as American citizens.

We invaded Iraq and blew up its already minimal, but functioning, infrastructure. People who suddenly lose their electricity, water, and sewer service and who have family members rounded up and even killed get pretty mad and disgusted. Americans would react the same way if some massive power invaded us for no apparent reason and crippled our basic infrastructure.

Our massively superior military took over large parts of Iraq, kicked in doors of the homes of ordinary people, wildly looking for a relatively small number of Islamic extremists. Young American soldiers by and large speak and understand only American English, so just like in Vietnam, the Iraqi's became the "foreigners." Our ignorance of historic Sunni-Shiia religious sectarian hatreds just added to needless stirring up of an old hornet's nest.

Cumulative ancient local hatreds easily shifted to the American invaders. What had been a few extremist individuals, dedicated Islamic jihadists, became an easily organized resistance against the American invaders, and attracted extremists from other countries. Martyred suicide attacks by one sect against another expanded to larger and larger suicide attacks against the American invaders.

Now, a trillion dollars later with 4,500 dead American kids, and tens of thousands wounded, and hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis dead, we are still applauding our gift of bringing the first real Democracy to the Middle East. Except that has not happened.

"Freely Elected" candidates in Iraq are in a 50-50 standoff, each hewing to their tribal and sectarian power bases to get all they can for their side. Screw democracy. Screw America. Sharing is not part of the vocabulary in the ancient, tribal Middle East.

How much hatred does it take to pull off something as horrible and seemingly impossible as the 9-11 attacks? This relative handful of religious zealots not only triggered a fierce response by the American military, they also made it easy for this infuriated Christian nation to throw all Muslims into one big bad category.

So, what does a 234-year-old America teach in our secular schools? What do they teach in their ancient Islamic Madrassas? Should there be a threatening gulf between the two ways of educating our young?

You and I have traveled widely and lived in other countries, and have a sense of global diversity and inequity, Charlie. Most Americans never go abroad in their lifetimes, and for the past 40 years American students have not been taught much world or American history in public schools. A huge percentage of Americans have no sense at all of history, geography, or civics. We have been irresponsible in our materialism and now are pitifully lagging behind other developed nations in so many basic areas of education, health care, social responsibility, and even happiness.

And as if this was not enough, America, the land of the free, is now imprisoning itself with polarization, laziness, obesity, greed, denial, and indifference. Our roads, dams, and bridges are old and in disrepair, but there is a loud cry for no new taxes. And a loud conservative minority would do away with a strong, centralized federal government.

In past national times of crisis in America the young have taken up the banner of change and helped move this country forward. I don't see America's under-educated, over indulged, and seeming directionless young people being able to or even wanting to step up and face the challenge.

[Retired journalist Larry Ray is a Texas native and former Austin television news anchor. He also posts at The iHandbill.]

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Rabbi Arthur Waskow : Five Steps to Burning Books

“On Sunday evening, members of the Harvest Assembly of God Church in Penn Township sing songs as they burn books, videos and CDs that they have judged offensive to their God,” Butler Eagle, March 26, 2001. Photo from American Library Association.
Does burning people come next?
Five steps to burning books

How did we get to the point where some Americans would burn a sacred book, and many more oppose the building of a sacred mosque...?

By Rabbi Arthur Waskow / The Rag Blog / September 6, 2010

From a small right-wing church in Florida, there has gone out a call to burn copies of the Quran on September 11. Instead of being ignored as clearly cuckoo, this call won national media coverage.

As the German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine wrote almost two centuries ago, "Those who begin by burning books will end by burning people.” The theater piece for which he wrote those words, called Almansor, was addressing the Inquisition's burning of the Quran. In 1933, university students in Heine's own beloved homeland burned his books, along with many others. They burned people soon after.

Many American religious communities and organizations, as well as secular groups like Common Cause, have condemned this call for burning. The road to burning people is by no means so open here, now, as it was in Germany in 1933.

But still, we need to face the question: How did we get to the point where some Americans would burn a sacred book, and many more oppose the building of a sacred mosque in their own town -- not only in Lower Manhattan, but in many other neighborhoods?

It would be easy to start with the aftermath of the terror attacks against the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. But the spiritual chasm between Christianity and Islam goes back centuries. The hostility of Jews toward Islam, on top of the ignorance of almost all European and American Jews about Islam, goes back at least to 1948. And the economic dislocations and unwinnable wars of recent years also have their place in pouring out the fear and anger that provides the fuel for the spark of bigotry.

Anti-Islam blogger Pamela Geller. MSNBC image from Loonwatch.com.

Step 1: The old hostilities

There are perverse and paradoxical spiritual roots to the hostility between Islam and Christianity.

All the great religious traditions -- not only those we call monotheist, but Hinduism and Buddhism and Shinto and Wicca and for that matter what we call "secular" traditions like socialism and liberalism -- are rooted in the profound effort to make loving contact with the ONE. One God, one historical dialectic, one Web of life in soul and body on our planet––ONE.

Once a community has begun to reach out toward the ONE, it begins to create the metaphors, the rituals, the languages, the practices in daily life, the festivals to embody this searching toward the ONE. And then the community bumps into another community that also claims it is in contact with the ONE, and has its own quite different set of metaphors, rituals, languages, and daily practices, with which to make this contact real.

There are often two responses to this discovery:

One is to say with surprise and delight, "You have shaped a different path from ours! Of course there must be many ways of lighting up the Infinite, unfolding truth. How could the great Infinity reveal itself except through sacred diversity? Let us learn from each other!”

The other response is to say: "We have unearthed the one way to the ONE, and any other path must be a false one. And worse than false––since you claim falsely to have made contact with the ONE, you must be lying. Corrupt. Deceitful. Worth killing."

In the various British colonies that became the United States, this bitterly hostile response was embodied in the persecution of one or another faith community (e.g. Quakers, Jews, Roman Catholics), by one or another of the original colonial governments. The uncertainty of who might get persecuted in the nation as a whole was one of the factors leading to adoption of the First Amendment, and much of the hostile reaction was then muted by the existence of the First Amendment. If no religion could wield state power and violence against another, this reaction was less likely.

Native American religions and Mormonism did not "count" in this context; state power or pressure was used against these religious communities. And there was public pressure in the 19th century against Roman Catholicism, and in the 20th century against the "Nation of Islam" (a racially focused variant not accepted by any other Muslims as truly Islamic).


Step 2: The 9/11 attack

Until 2001 in America, both hostility and interfaith exploration were quiescent, in regard to classical Islam. Then a tiny proportion of the more than one billion Muslims of the world, claiming they were acting on behalf of Islam and God, murdered about 3,000 people.

Again, there were two responses:

There was a wave of rage against Muslims and anyone who looked as if he might be Muslim. Some were attacked, a few were killed. Officials arrested hundreds of Muslims out of fear, almost always utterly unjustified, that they were would-be terrorists. Some of them were held for months without access to families or attorneys.

And during the same weeks and months, some Americans -- often religiously motivated Christians and Jews -- rallied to protect Muslims and their mosques. Some stood guard to prevent attacks, some created vigils, some brought together Jews, Christians, and Muslims under " The Tent of Abraham, Hagar, and Sarah.”


Step 3: The wars with Islam

Soon after, the government of the United States began wars against two Muslim-majority nations. It quickly became clear that what began under the banner of "liberation” actually became conquest and occupation. Yet the wars dragged on, bringing death to thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilians. And meanwhile, there were deadly U.S. military attacks on Pakistanis, threats of war against Iran, and a continuing close alliance with the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and people in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem.

There is a process that researchers in psychology have uncovered and call "cognitive dissonance.” People who begin with one opinion but act in a way contrary to that opinion change their ideas more than their behavior. After almost a decade of American wars against a number of Muslim-majority societies, and several actual murderous attacks by self-proclaimed Muslims against civilians in various countries allied to America, some Americans who had begun with few opinions about Islam in general began to view it with anger and disgust:

"If we are killing lots of them and they are killing some of us, there must be something evil about them.”

Anti-Semite Father Coughlin in action. Photo from the Library of Congress.

Step 4: The Great Slump

Meanwhile, Americans experienced a disastrous economic slump. The last time that rates of disemployment and of home foreclosure had been this high, during the Great Depression of the 1930s, one of the reactions was a great wave of anti-Semitism across America. Father Coughlin on radio, Henry Ford through the Dearborn Independent, were reaching millions of Americans with fear and hatred of the Jews.

So now, in another time of economic trauma -- and now also of unwinnable wars and a deep sense of cultural dislocation -- there was seething not quite visible below the surface of American culture and society a current of xenophobia. Hispanic immigrants, legal and illegal, became suspect. And Muslims.


Step 5: Crystals of bigotry

And then into this hyper-saturated solution of fear, suspicion, and hatred came some who chose deliberately to drop the poisonous crystals of bigotry .

In December 2009, The New York Times -- a liberal leader of opinion -- and Laura Ingraham -- a conservative leader of opinion -- carried articles and interviews about plans of American Muslims to establish Cordoba House, a community cultural center in Lower Manhattan. There was no fuss, no fury.

Not till May 2010 did the ultra-right-wing anti-Islam blogger Pamela Geller and organs of Rupert Murdoch, the right-wing publisher who later gave $1 million to the Republican Governors Association, begin to carry inflammatory stories about what they call the "Ground Zero Mega-Mosque.”

And then, step-by-step, the crystal they sowed precipitated the super-saturated solution into a noxious brew. Right-wing blogs and talk-radio programs described the Cordova House as an insult to the dead of 9/11, a triumphal celebration by Islam of its victory in the attacks on the World Trade Center, anything to arouse fear and hatred of Islam.

Even Jewish organizations that claimed their mission was to prevent "defamation" not only of Jews but of all religious and ethnic groups, or claimed their mission was to promote "tolerance," spoke out against the planning for Cordova House. "Yes,” they said, "Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf and his wife Daisy Khan have every constitutional right to place their mosque or cultural center two long long New York City blocks from Ground Zero, but it is not ethically right or spiritually wise to do so. It would offend the sensibilities of the survivors of the 9/11 dead."

These assertions ignored both an important fact and a crucial principle. The fact was that hundreds of 9/11 survivors, in the organization called September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, had endorsed the placement of Córdoba House. The principle was that the constitutional right of freedom of religion has no reality if a wave of hostility from "private" citizens, sparked by great media empires and backed up by public officials, can prevent the fully legal placement of a house of worship.

Why then did the right wing media and right-wing politicians like Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich decide to light this conflagration? The spark would not have lit a fire if there had not been gallons of gasoline beneath the surface, but why light the spark?

I think the answer is that the right wing was and still is hoping to split the vote of progressive Americans by using not just Cordoba House but also broader fear of Islam as a wedge issue, just as they used the issue of gay marriage --which now has little bite. They have used the fear of Hispanic immigrants in the same way.

Fanning fear an -- may offer the possibility of splitting the Jewish vote, which is, next to the vote of African-Americans, the most progressive voting bloc in the country.

Indeed, many Jews, outraged by attacks on Israel that are sponsored by two Muslim organizations -- Hezbollah and Hamas -- and by Holocaust denials from some leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran, may be susceptible to an Islamophobic campaign. At the same time, of all American communities, Jews are perhaps the most likely to smell and taste the danger of bigotry against a religious minority.

So the American Jewish community is one of the crucial arenas of struggle over whether burning the Quran becomes a step on the path that Heinrich Heine prophesied toward burning people.

Out of this witches' brew of dark past and explosive present, there emerged not only bigotry but another wave of interfaith engagement. Those of many religious and ethical communities gathered to condemn the burning of the Quran and to affirm all sacred texts, all sacred gathering places.

This kind of affirmation is important. And if indeed the official wars against Muslim-majority countries and the great wave of disemployment and home foreclosures have been crucial to pouring the gasoline of fear and anger that have been ignited by sparks of bigotry, then working for economic healing, a peaceful foreign policy, and the transfer of war budgets into rebuilding America are also crucial.

The path America will take is still uncertain.

As for the Jewish community, in its possibly pivotal role: Let us hope that a story from my own childhood echoes so strongly the memories and sensibilities of other American Jews that overwhelmingly, we will walk the path toward freedom and diversity, peace and economic healing:

When I was about seven years old (1940), my grandmother interrupted other Jewish women in line at the kosher butcher shop who were talking contemptuously about "the shvartzes" -- that is, Black people. She challenged them: "That's the way they talked about us in Europe. This is America, and we must not talk like that!"

We must not act like that, either.

[Rabbi Arthur Waskow is the director of The Shalom Center. He is co-author of The Tent of Abraham: Stories of Hope and Peace for Jews, Christians, & Muslims; author of Godwrestling, Round 2 and Down-to-Earth Judaism; and editor of Torah of the Earth (two volumes, eco-Jewish thought from earliest Torah to our own generation).]

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Thomas Good : Hatred and Healing at Ground Zero

Photo by Bud Korotzer / NLN.
The objectification of Other:
Hatred and healing at Ground Zero

By Thomas Good / The Rag Blog / August 23, 2010

See photo gallery, Below.

NEW YORK -- Sunday was another rainy day in New York City, as two sides of the Ground Zero mosque issue squared off in dueling protests -- two sides who are responding to a catastrophe with two mutually exclusive answers: hatred and healing.

Lost

If volume validated an argument then the motorcycle contingent bound for Sunday’s anti-mosque protest would win, hands down. With loud pipes and shrill voices, the bikers from out of town who thundered down Broadway en route to the demonstration -- apparently going the wrong direction -- would have the final word in any debate whose outcome is measured only in decibels.

But it isn’t that simple. And just as the issues surrounding the proposed building of a mosque-slash-community center in the general area of Ground Zero aren’t so simple -- it’s too simplistic to write off all of the bikers as stereotypic toughs, incapable of compassion or human emotion

Some of them lost relatives in the September 11, 2001 attack on the Trade Center.

A short time after the loud cavalcade drove past this reporter, several of their number, now dismounted, emerged on a street corner looking confused, vulnerable, and maybe even a little embarrassed. It was hard to deny their humanity. We’ve all been lost before -- alone, wandering unfamiliar territory.

Us vs. them

To those who see the world from the vantage point of an “us versus them” perspective -- there is no middle ground, no room for freedom of religion, no Constitution to defend, no reason to wince at racist epithets hurled at the Other side. To those who embrace an ideology based on interpreting 9/11 as a clash of two cultures, as an apocalyptic harbinger of a holy war -- one protester’s angry outburst sums up the world view: “Islam is not a religion, it’s a cult.”

This was the statement one New Yorker hurled at another on Sunday.

And as if this statement was not sufficient to choke off discussion, to demonize and objectify an entire faith, the anti-mosque protester continued: “If you had a Qur’an here, I’d piss on it.”

The Others

The objectification of Other as evil incarnate, the demonization of billions of believers, is not a rational construct but it is one that has currency, perhaps because choosing hatred over healing, choosing to adopt bumper sticker slogans over calm dialogue is less threatening, less intimidating than attempting to grasp elusive nuances. There is no doubt that it is easier to hate than to love, to assimilate rather than to accommodate, to shout rather than to listen. This is the sad trajectory of terrorism itself.

The man who uttered that sad statement, who argued that Islam is not a religion, was eventually quieted by a white-shirted NYPD senior officer. The target of the protester’s venom -- who had responded angrily -- walked off to join the Other demonstration of the day: the group of civil rights activists, peace protesters, and interfaith clerics who support the Muslims looking to build the Cordoba House mosque and community center on 51 Park Place.

From NYC to Oklahoma -- and back again

At the anti-Islamophobia rally, Alan Stolzer of the Military Project asked me a question.

“Has anyone built a church near the Oklahoma City bomb site?”

His rhetorical question was pointed: Timothy McVeigh was a blond and blue Christian. A home grown killer. The analogy was not ideal. McVeigh did not profess to kill in the name of his religion. But in our history other Americans have killed in the name of their faith, some acting in concert with other true believers. And yet in these cases, it was the killers who were judged, not the professed faith, not the religion in its entirety. It could not be otherwise. And yet it’s different for Muslims in America.

Beyond binaries

Somewhere in between the 9/11 ideologues -- the Islamophobes and racists who look to burning books as a solution -- and the Muslim community left holding a fractured First Amendment are the families of 9/11. Their grief is not ideological in nature but their numbers, their “hearts and minds,” are the perceived prize for those who would market rabid xenophobia disguised as patriotism.

The Sarah Palins and other rank opportunists, none of whom have ever lived in New York, some of whom can’t spell xenophobia -- even if they can see it from their back yard -- are eager to profit from appeals to hatred and racism. But for those who lost loved ones, healing will have to be accomplished without hate. However this is done, whatever path is chosen, healing involves overcoming hate, not embracing it.

As the rain fell on the protesters who challenge the binary world view, those who want to heal and move beyond Islamophobia and the scourge of racism, as the mainstream media swarmed to get their soundbites from the “pro-mosque protesters” -- a man in a priest’s collar quietly held up a sign. It read: “Build and Learn Together.”

[Thomas Good is editor of Next Left Notes, where this article also appears.]

Photo by Thomas Good / NLN.
Photo by Thomas Good / NLN.
Photo by Thomas Good / NLN.
Photo by Bud Korotzer / NLN.
Photo by Bud Korotzer / NLN.
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Harry Targ : Religion, Politics, and War

Christians fight Muslims in illustration from medieval manuscript. Image from syllabus, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.
Sanctioned by a wrathful God:
Religion, politics, and war

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / September 22, 2010

Childhood remembrances

When I was a kid I had to go to Hebrew school to prepare for my Bar Mitzvah. I confess I would have preferred being in the school yard playing baseball to studying Hebrew. One of my few remembrances from days of religious study, aside from my resentment about time away from the ball field, was reading the stories of the tribes of Israel conquering or killing political/religious enemies. Acts of violence and hate seemed to me to be sanctioned by a wrathful God, my God.

Down the street from where we lived were St. Timothy’s Church and school. The building was an imposing broad red-brick structure. There was no contact between the children who went to school there and those of us who attended public school a few blocks away.

Ideology and the place of the United States in the world

When I grew up, began to study international relations, became an activist against the war in Vietnam, and started teaching foreign policy, I saw the power of ideology in mobilizing whole peoples to hate others. War, while a byproduct of economic interest, was facilitated by ideologies of hate; by creating “the other,” who were less than human and believed in the wrong God.

Millions died in the Crusades, the Inquisition in Spain, the taking of the lands of the Western Hemisphere and Africa, the occupations of China, Indonesia, Indochina, and the Middle East. Most of those deaths were justified by obedience to the Christian God.

In 1996 I was asked to give a talk at a church on “Is United States Foreign Policy Moral or Not?” I went to Ruth Sivard’s compilation of data on wars over the centuries, World Military and Social Expenditures, 1996. I counted up the war deaths of peoples in wars in which the United States was a direct participant, such as Korea and Vietnam, or in which the United States was indirectly involved such as Guatemala, Afghanistan, Angola, and Nicaragua. The number of those who died in those wars between 1945 and 1995 in which the United States had a role totaled 10 million.

Of course, participation in most of these wars and covert operations was justified by a mix of secular and sacred terms: democracy, markets, and God. President Reagan had reiterated the religious zealotry articulated by virtually every politician, banker, or theologian who called for U.S. militarism. The United States was “the city on the hill,” the “beacon of hope” for the world.

Lloyd Gardner in his recent book, The Long Road to Baghdad, A History of U.S. Foreign Policy From the 1970s to the Present, argues that there is a vision of global perfectibility behind United States foreign policy from its rise to great power status at the dawn of the twentieth century, to Woodrow Wilson’s vision of making the world safe for democracy, to Harry Truman’s announcement of our great struggle against communism in 1947, to John Kennedy’s “new frontier” and Lyndon Johnson’s war in Vietnam, to the Reagan Doctrine, and George W. Bush’s proclamation that nations are either with us or the enemy.

Underlying all this is the proposition, as Bob Dylan suggested, that “God is on our side.” Gardner writes that “Bush equates American foreign policy here with God’s will... God is on the side of justice; America has chosen the side of justice as its goal; therefore, God will bless American policy. Obstacles to this mission were only to be expected from forces on the wrong side of history.”

The campaign against Islam in the United States

Now politicians are demanding that the constitutional right of sectors of the Islamic community in New York to build a community center be denied because they offend the sensibilities of the Christians and Jews living in the city, indeed in the entire nation. They ignore the history of their coreligionists who have misused people’s faith to justify conquest and mass slaughter. They deny the fact that the presence of their religious institutions in other lands or located throughout communities in the United States create fear and anger among those of different faiths or no faith.

Perhaps most scurrilous of all is the way that the public mind is being manipulated and used for purposes of political gain at a time when joblessness, environmental devastation, and hatred spread across the land.

The little boy studying the Old Testament 60 years ago was uncomfortable about aspects of his religion that he could only partially understand. The great American writer, Mark Twain much earlier described the irony of religious fanaticism as he reported on a massacre of Muslim rebels fighting U.S. military occupiers at the dawn of the twentieth century in the Philippines:

Contrast these things with the great statistics which have arrived from that Moro crater! There, with six hundred engaged on each side, we lost fifteen men killed outright, and we had thirty-two wounded. . . The enemy numbered six hundred-including women and children-and we abolished them utterly, leaving not even a baby alive to cry for its dead mother. This is incomparably the greatest victory that was ever achieved by the Christian soldiers of the United States.

[Harry Tarq is a professor in American Studies who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical.]

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Michael Meeropol : Islamophobia and the 'Two Americas'

Muslims in America. Image from KUED / University of Utah.
'Islam in Two Americas':
Times piece reflects pernicious xenophobia

The implication... is that when Americans display anti-Muslim bigotry -- as in the past they had been anti-semitic, anti-Catholic, anti-Mormon, anti-immigrant -- it makes for a quick and more complete assimilation...

By Michael Meeropol / The Rag Blog / August 18, 2010

In The New York Times of Monday, August 16, 2010, op-ed columnist Ross Douthat has a particularly pernicious article entitled “Islam in Two Americas.”

You can read it here.

To cut to the chase, Mr. Douthat’s argument is that there are “two Americas” -- one that respects the idea that we are a nation of many religions, cultures, ethnicities, and beliefs and the Constitution permits us all to enjoy the blessings of liberty without fear of persecution.

There is another America as well, one that, in his words, “...understands itself as a distinctive culture rather than just a set of political propositions... [that] speaks English, not Spanish or Chinese or Arabic. It looks back to a particular religious heritage: Protestantism... It draws its social norms from the mores of the Anglo-Saxon diaspora and it expects new arrivals to assimilate themselves to these norms…”

He then goes on to admit that this second America persecuted Mormons and Catholics and shut the door on immigration in the 1920s. It is this second America that is offended by the so-called “Mosque at Ground Zero.”

Rather than decry this second America, Douthat goes into all sorts of contortions to suggest that it is just this second America that creates the unity symbolized by our motto, “E pluribus unum.” He suggests that Mormon persecution helped force them to give up polygamy. He argues that suspicion of and persecution of Catholics forced them to give up their “illiberal tendencies” and made the church recognize “the virtues of democracy.”

Where can one begin to attack this incredible know-nothing-ism?

I tried with a sarcastic letter to The New York Times which I will share with Rag Blog readers if the Times doesn’t publish it.

Here, I want to treat Douthat’s “arguments” seriously -- if only to give readers of this blog some ammunition if they ever get into a discussion with someone who was seduced by Douthat’s piece.

The implication of Douthat’s argument is that when Americans display anti-Muslim bigotry -- as in the past they had been anti-semitic, anti-Catholic, anti-Mormon, anti-immigrant -- it makes for a quick and more complete assimilation of the group being targeted. In effect, in order to escape discrimination, the various groups become “more like” the Americans who are persecuting them – thereby earning “acceptance” as “real Americans.” (Read Douthat’s article and see if that’s not the clear implication.)

He then lectures Muslim Americans on how to be good Americans -- telling them they need leaders “whose antennas are sensitive enough to recognize that the quest for interreligious dialogue is ill served by throwing up a high-profile mosque two blocks from the site of a mass murder committed in the name of Islam.”

By the way, note that Douthat, after originally accurately describing the proposed building as an Islamic cultural center, has returned to the misstatement that this is a mosque. Though it will have two floors devoted to prayer, it is only a mosque if a hotel with a prayer chapel is a church.

Note also that in asserting that America does not speak Spanish he is denying “Americanism” to Puerto Ricans and the Chicano descendants of Mexicans who became citizens when the U.S. conquered the Southwest from Mexico.

The problem with Douthat’s argument, of course, is that persecution and discrimination often lead to insularity, the opposite of assimilation, and resentful blowback. Decades of anti-Irish discrimination coupled with anti-Catholicism in the U.S. did not produce democratic assimilated Irish Americans for many generations. In fact, in the 1960s, some Irish Americans were raising money and running guns for the IRA.

Decades of anti-semitism produced strong character and great American contributions on the part of some American Jews -- but it also produced a mistrust of the American government on the part of some others, who have sought to make American foreign policy conform to Israeli national security needs.

And of course Douthat studiously ignores racism and slides over the current wave of anti-immigrant xenophobia. Are we to assume that black Americans should be grateful for the second-class citizenship they endured after the Civil War ended de jure slavery? How did that make them “better” Americans? How did that create the “unum” out of many??

In fact, segregation and second-class citizenship created not only the forward-looking NAACP but the retrograde nationalism of Elijah Muhammed’s Nation of Islam -- a nationalism from which Malcolm X escaped only to be killed by members of that organization. The isolated hyper-ghettos created by the American system of Apartheid have led to a horrendous gap between poor, isolated, under-educated African Americans and both “average” white Americans and the rising achieving black middle class.

And how will demonizing and marginalizing “illegal immigrants” (who are all considered Latinos even though many are from Europe) make them better Americans? The isolation they experience due to persecution is a prescription for keeping them from becoming Americans.

And now, of course, some xenophobic nativists want to repeal the 14th Amendment granting citizenship to every baby born in the United States. Tell me, Mr. Douthat -- how will that “encourage” them to assimilate?

The whole argument is crazy.

I urge everyone reading this to do everything they can to push back in favor of the First Amendment to the Constitution and against anti-Muslim bigotry. The only way to beat loud, disgusting hate speech is with louder, forthright GOOD speech.

[Michael Meeropol is Visiting Professor of Economics, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York.]

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Ed Felien : The Holy War that We Can't Win

The Afghan jihad:
A war that we can't win

By Ed Felien / The Rag Blog / August 3, 2010

How can war be holy?

What righteous god would welcome the massacre of innocents?

And, yet, the origins and history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have their roots in war. The Old Testament and Talmud are catalogs of epic battles. Jesus, who brought the new commandment, Love thy neighbor, also told his followers, "Let him who has no sword sell his mantle and buy one. For I tell you that this scripture must be fulfilled in me, 'And he was reckoned with transgressors.'" (Luke: 22, 36-37)

Muhammad, not just a prophet and the founder of Islam, was a remarkable general. His continued battles with rival tribes eventually led to a consolidation of most of the Arabian Peninsula into an Islamic confederation during his lifetime. Much of the fire and intensity of the Qur'an is because Muhammad is encouraging his early Muslim supporters to fight to defend the faith.

Combining religious zeal with a sword is a lethal mixture, and, although there are many progressive developments that flow from early Islam: a more enlightened view of women; a rejection of feudal autocracy and privilege; and the development of a uniform code of justice; still, one of the dominant themes of the Qur'an is its effectiveness as a manual of war: "Fight and kill the disbelievers wherever you find them. Take them captive, harass them, lie in wait and ambush them using every stratagem of war." (Qur'an: 9, 5)

The community of the faithful in Islam is called the ummah. The community spread from the Arabian Peninsula in the Seventh Century to as far east as China and Indonesia and as far west as North and South America. There are now between one and two billion Muslims worldwide, 21% of the world's people. But, just as Italians feel a sense of ownership of the Roman Catholic Church, Arabs have a similar proprietary reaction to Islam. The major shrines are in Arabia or the Middle East. Devout Muslims are supposed to visit Mecca once in their lifetime. The Qur'an is written in Arabic, the language of Saudi Arabia.

The particular brand of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia is Wahabbi. This ultra-conservative variant was developed at the end of the eighteenth century as a reaction against the dominance of the Turkish Empire and its more liberal brand of Sufi Islam. Local tribesmen were more likely to fight against Turkish occupation if they felt it was blasphemous, thus skirting the prohibition in the Qur'an of Muslims fighting Muslims.

When the British joined the local rebels (most notably with Lawrence of Arabia), that sealed the fate of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. When oil was found in Arabia, Western countries found a good reason to continue support for the Saud family and all the other petty warlords they had made heads of state in the countries they had drawn on the map of the Middle East.

All this seemed like it would continue forever. The oil companies allowed the Arab countries to become rich, as long as the oil companies became richer. The conservative orthodoxy of Wahabbi Islam allowed the Saud family to rule with autocratic simplicity. They controlled their people and that allowed the British (and soon American interests) to get the oil and make everybody happy.

These fairy tale kingdoms continued in the Middle East until the Iranians threw America's Shah off the Peacock Throne in February of 1979. Unhappy at losing our perch in the Middle East, President Carter grew jealous of Soviet influence in Afghanistan. He reportedly gave over a billion dollars to the Pakistan ISI (a CIA equivalent) to support a religious group that was fighting to throw out the Soviets. So, the truth of the matter is that the U. S. was the original funder for al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden and the holy war or jihad against Western influences in the ummah.

When Osama bin Laden declared a fatwah against the U. S. and Western influences in the Middle East in 1998, he listed three examples of how the U. S. has attempted to destroy Muslim interests:

First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.

Second, bin Laden opposed the sanctions and then the war against the people of Iraq, and, third, he opposed the state of Israel and supported a Palestinian state.

But the principal focus of jihad today is the war in Afghanistan. This holy war to throw out the infidel has strong support among Afghan locals. They've been doing it for at least a thousand years. And it can draw on the support of millions of Muslims worldwide who see an attack on the ummah as an attack on Islam.

The most explosive ingredient in this already deadly Afghan stew is the influence of Pakistan. The ISI has supported the Taliban and al Qaeda with war materiel for decades. The Taliban are happy to please their benefactors with attempts to blow up the Indian Embassy in Kabul.

The only thing about Pakistan that you can count on is that they hate India and they want Kashmir. All alliances, agreements, treaties, etc. are just temporary steps to facilitate those two objectives. The recent release of military documents by WikiLeaks shows the duplicitous game ISI has been playing with the U. S. and the Taliban. They have no hesitation to sell out one side or the other in the pursuit of their own objectives.

A further complication in the Afghan jihad is the Pashtun influence. The Pashtun are an ethnic group that date back at least to the 8th Century and the introduction of Islam in the area. Currently, they make up about 40% of the population of Afghanistan and 15% of the population of Pakistan. For many years it was the goal of tribal leaders to secede and form their own Pashtunistan. There is no question that tribal and Pashtun loyalties are stronger than national loyalties, and they have no respect for the Afghan/Pakistan international border.

So, what do we have?

We have a holy war waged against the U. S. by millions of Muslims that has as its principal focus a narco-terrorist state that produces 92% of the world's opium made up mainly of a population that has no interest in being Westernized and resents our invasion. It's a war that can't be won, and it is bleeding us dry in terms of the lives of our best soldiers and our national treasury. And, it's a holy war that we began 30 years ago.

Isn't it time to declare our prayers have been answered and get out?

[Ed Felien is publisher and editor of Southside Pride, a South Minneapolis monthly.]

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Rabbi Arthur Waskow : Fort Hood and the Prophetic 'IF'

These battle-weary troops from the 1st Air Cav had just staged a "combat refusal" at the PACE firebase in Vietnam. There were also countless instances of "fragging" against officers by Vietnam GI's. Photo from NAM - The Story of the Vietnam War (Issue 8).
How will the community respond?
Fort Hood and the Prophetic 'IF'

By Rabbi Arthur Waskow / The Rag Blog / November 25, 2009

One reader wrote me to ask: "What effect will the Ft. Hood shootings have on the American public's perception of Islam?" That question asks us to be foretellers, fortune tellers, to predict. But The Shalom Center has had the holy chutzpah to call ourselves a "prophetic voice," and that voice is about "forth-telling," not foretelling. About “If,” not “will.”

The Prophets spoke always with an "if" -- "IF the community chooses to oppress its workers into slaves, then the owners will themselves become slaves to Babylonia; IF the slave-owners will free their slaves, they will be freed from the yoke of Babylonia." (That was Jeremiah, as the Babylonian Army besieged Jerusalem, speaking forth a challenge, at once a warning and a promise, to the conventional practices and power structures of his society.)

From that perspective, the Prophetic question today should be a challenge to power and convention: "What effect should the Ft. Hood shootings have on the American public's perception of the Afghanistan War?"

For anyone who lived through the Vietnam War, Fort Hood recalls the epidemic of "fragging" late in the war -- that is, enlisted men throwing fragmentation bombs at the officers who were ordering them into hopeless, senseless battle.

In Fort Hood, if the reports and claims from the police and military are correct (we already know that a number of falsehoods were reported as facts), an officer, a physician, trained to heal traumatized people from the maiming of their souls, was refused an exit from the soul-destroying prison he begged to leave.

If the reports are accurate, it seems that he broke, choosing murder rather than the nonviolent forms of resistance he might have chosen. In that sense he replicated the violence of the war he abhorred and the violence that kept him in the Army against his will –- replicated the violence instead of resisting it in a deeper way.

One of the reasons that "fragging" came near the end of the Vietnam War is that the epidemic of fragging signaled to the higher officer corps that they had better end the war. Coming on top of more and more evidence that the U.S. and NATO military presence in Afghanistan is itself multiplying the violent resistance it claims to suppress, the Fort Hood murders should signal the American public and its military and civilian leadership to take off the hoods we have put over our own eyes, see the truth, and take our soldiers out from Afghanistan.

If -- IF, the Prophetic word -- If we seriously want to help grow a grassroots democracy there, we might send teams of women from American community banks to provide grassroots microloans to those who are prepared to use them, especially including women, while abandoning the self-destructive effort to impose democracy with Predators. Then Fort Hood might help Americans grow into a new relationship with the hundreds of millions of Muslims who seek to shape their own futures in peace.

IF instead the American public chooses to define Fort Hood as proof that Islam is a world of hatred, then the cage of violence that some Muslims, some Christians, some Jews, some Hindus are helping build will clang shut upon us all .

IF.

Shalom, salaam, shantih, peace,

Arthur

[Rabbi Arthur Waskow is director of The Shalom Center and is co-author of The Tent of Abraham; author of Godwrestling, Round 2, Down-to-Earth Judaism and a dozen other books on Jewish thought and practice, as well as books on U.S. public policy.]

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Juan Cole : Michael Jackson, Islam and the Middle East

Michael Jackson. Photo from Getty Images.

Michael Jackson was deeply hurt and humiliated by the experience [of his 2005 trial], and his withdrawal to Bahrain and search for a different tradition of spirituality may well have come out of that abasement.

By Juan Cole / June 26, 2009

See related videos, Below.

Michael Jackson's sad death at age 50 has provoked an outpouring of emotion around the whole world. Because of globalization, it is an event that affects fans in Asia and the Middle East, as well. In early 2007, his brother Jermaine, a Muslim, announced that Michael would embrace that religion. In November of 2008, just months before his death press reports said that Michael Jackson had formally converted to Islam.

Jackson was a man of multiple identities, which helped account for his enormous worldwide popularity. It seems clear that he was deeply traumatized by his rough show business childhood, and that things happened to him to arrest his development. Just as a stem cell can grow into any organ, Michael's eternal boyishness made him a chameleon. Increasingly androgynous, he expressed both male and female. A boy and yet a father, he was both child and adult. In part because of his vitiligo, he interrogated his blackness and became, like some other powerful and wealthy African-Americans of his generation, racially ambiguous. Toward the end of his life he bridged his family's Jehovah's Witness brand of Christianity with a profound interest in Islam. He was all things to all people in part precisely because of his Peter Pan syndrome. A child can grow up to become anything, after all.

Jermaine Jackson explained that it was the experience of touring the Gulf that brought family members into contact with Islam. Interestingly, he found that Islam resolved some dilemmas he had about Jehovah's Witness beliefs. Just as Malcolm X had been converted by his pilgrimage to Mecca from a narrow sectarian folk religion in America to Sunni anti-racist universalism, so Jermaine took a similar path.

We can only speculate about the attractions for Michael Jackson of Islam, but likely his 2005 trial in which he was acquitted of all charges was implicated in his desire for a change. The court psychiatrist confirmed his psychological innocence, saying he had been arrested at the stage of a 10 year old. Michael Jackson was deeply hurt and humiliated by the experience, and his withdrawal to Bahrain and search for a different tradition of spirituality may well have come out of that abasement.

Those who lived through the 80s will never forget the Michael of "Thriller" and other breakthrough videos.

But it seems to me that the iconic later Jackson is "Black or White," which powerfully makes the points above about the fluidity of identity in a globalized world, and underlines the common humanity of us all, something that the eternal boy could see through the ravages of hurt that clouded his never-ending childhood. Young children don't know about racial or religious prejudice. The great tragedy of Michael Jackson is that his childlike withdrawal from reality may have left him more vulnerable to himself and others, and never protected him from bigotry or, other human realities. After all, children shouldn't die.

Here are the lyrics of "Black or White":



Jackson is still enormously popular in the Middle East. Here is a Gulf tribute to the King of Pop. Given the stereotyping of Gulf Arabs as medieval and fanatical, and given the hurtful prejudice against their very form of clothing in the West, it is only right that they should have the last word here on Michael Jackson's universal appeal:



Source / Informed Comment

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Obama's Middle East Policy: Dependent on the All-Important Follow-Through

A souvenir shop owner displays a metal plaque for sale to tourists in Cairo, Egypt, on May 28, ahead of President Obama's June 4 speech. Photo: AP Photo/Ben Curtis.
Obama, Muslim-world rock star
By Juan Cole / June 3, 2009

They like him, they really like him! Well, maybe not so much in Egypt. But they're willing to give him a chance.

President Barack Obama is famously much better at playing basketball than at bowling. But to succeed in the Middle East, he needs to be good at a different game altogether: golf. There are no fast-paced victories to be had here, no dunks, no three-point shots. As in golf, the sand traps and roughs are treacherous and the course is slow, and there is time for players to quarrel and throw their irons about petulantly. Above all, as in golf, the secret of a good swing is a strong follow-through.

Obama, who begins a trip to the region Wednesday, starts his term much more popular in the Middle East than his predecessor, George W. Bush. Last year, in many Muslim-majority countries, including U.S. allies such as Turkey, Bush often had favorability ratings in the single digits, neck and neck with Osama bin Laden. In contrast, a new opinion poll released by the Brookings Institution shows that in six Middle Eastern states, Obama comes in at 45 percent favorable, and if Egypt is subtracted, the proportion soars to 60 percent. As Obama prepares to make a major address to the world's 1.5 billion Muslims, can he capitalize on his rock-star status in Riyadh and Beirut to go beyond celebrity glitter to concrete achievements that would benefit both the United States and the Muslim world?

The Brookings poll shows that just three issues are cited by most Arab respondents as determinative of their view of the United States. In order, they are Iraq, the plight of the Palestinians, and attitudes toward the Arab and Muslim worlds. Interestingly, the war in Afghanistan, democracy promotion, and the issues around Iran have very little resonance among Arab publics. Iraq was cited as the key issue by 42 percent in six countries polled, so it is fair to conclude that Obama's stock in the Arab world, at least, is likely to rise or fall on how well he handles his planned military disengagement from that country.

The truth is that Obama's task in the Arab world is more difficult and more important than elsewhere. He is wildly popular in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, where he spent some of his childhood and from whence hailed his stepfather. Likewise, West African Muslims overwhelmingly supported his presidential bid last year. The U.S., however, does relatively little trade with either region, and they have not traditionally been central to its foreign policy. The 325 million Arabs are a minority of Muslims worldwide (and not all Arabs are Muslim), but Arab Muslims are disproportionately influential among their co-religionists and, because of their energy resources and strategic position between Europe and Afro-Asia, are especially important to the United States and its allies. They are the Muslims who are most skeptical about Obama.

Obama will begin his Middle East tour with a visit to Saudi Arabia, a move warmly greeted by Saudi Op-Ed writer Abdul Malik Ahmad Al-Sheikh. The latter noted that Saudi Arabia is the holy land for Muslims, the site of the sacred cities of Mecca and Medina, while Egypt has been a center of pan-Arab nationalism. Obama's itinerary thus honors both the key religious and political symbols for Arab Muslims. Al-Sheikh glowed, "The step you are taking also comes to honor what you promised the day you were sworn in as President of the United States of America, a day on which you extended your hand to the Islamic world, something which was not done by any American President before you." Pleading for an end to the oppression of the Palestinians, he quoted Alexander Hamilton to the effect that "the sacred rights of mankind" cannot be found in old parchments, but are rather "written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself." Al-Sheikh concluded that the American founding fathers agreed that rights are "Allah-given."

His next stop, Egypt, is perhaps the toughest room for the president to work. Obama faces the difficult challenge of convincing the sullen Egyptian public that the U.S. does not covet Arab land and resources, and that it can be an honest broker between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Along the Nile, anger toward Israel, in the wake of the Lebanon and Gaza wars and ever-expanding Israeli settlements in the West Bank, is probably higher than at any time since the 1970s. Public opinion is even more negative in Jordan, but there are 20 Egyptians for every Jordanian. Egypt is the most populous Arab country, with a third of the total Arab population, and it is an important political and cultural center. These are the reasons Obama chose it as the venue for his speech.

Washington has a poor track record when it comes to listening to its Arab allies about the realities of their region, and Arabs know it. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had warned George W. Bush against invading Iraq and predicted that such a rash action would produce "a hundred Bin Ladens." Despite being a putative American ally, Mubarak praised the Iraqi army that fought invading U.S. troops as brave defenders of their homeland. Many Egyptians see the U.S. presence in Iraq as a Western occupation of Arab land, and they take it personally.

Egyptian political commentator Nael M. Shama spoke for many of his countrymen when he warned that good intentions and sweet talk would not take Obama very far. He wrote, "The Arab world is expecting concrete steps on the part of the world's only superpower to address the region's real problems, particularly the six-decade Arab-Israeli conflict. Thus far, the change in U.S. foreign policy has been in style, not substance." Seventy-five percent of Egyptians said last winter in a BBC poll that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be Obama's No. 1 priority (the Gaza war had just begun as the poll was being conducted). More recently, Egyptians see the withdrawal from Iraq as even more pressing. Shama concluded that most likely, the U.S. special relationship with Israel would derail new peace moves and further sour U.S.-Egyptian relations, despite the best of intentions on Obama's part.

Al-Sheikh, the Saudi opinion page writer, is more hopeful than his Egyptian colleagues, despite recognizing the profound obstacles to progress. He said, "The peoples of our region dream that their area will be free of weapons of mass destruction, and free of the reasons for violence and counter-violence." Recognizing that any steps Obama initiated along those lines might not be accomplished in one term or even two, he nevertheless urged that a beginning be made. Among persons of good will, "according to a new vision, the motto of which would be your motto, 'yes we can.'" He concluded, "We say welcome to the President, Barack Obama, in the land of Islam and of peace."

Whether Shama's pessimism or Al-Sheikh's optimism proves more warranted depends on whether the president has that all-important follow-through.

Source / Salon

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The Explosion at the Shrine of Rahman Baba

The explosion badly damaged Rahman Baba's Shrine. AP Photo/Muhammad Sajjad.
Uprooting Flowers on Pakistan’s Frontier
By James Caron / March 14, 2009

Some time before dawn on the 5th of this month, there was an explosion in the main building at the ziyarat, or shrine, of ‘Abd-ur-Rahman in Hazar Khwani village, North-west Frontier Province, Pakistan. While explosions have become despairingly common in this general region, with Taliban-inspired networks proliferating among the majority Pashtun ethnic group, this particular explosion shocked many commentators. It did so not only because the village was located in a fairly secure area, but also because Rahman Baba, as the saint was better known, was something of a symbol of peace in the Pashtun regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and his poetry continues to be one of the sturdiest foundations of Pashtun cultural heritage.

Since the bombing a variety of commentators – some in Pakistan and especially western observers – have read this event as a war between two cosmically separate factions of Islam. In a piece in The Observer on March 8th, William Dalrymple’s headline claimed that "Wahhabi radicals are determined to destroy a gentler, kinder Islam." The article argued that a wholesale Saudi-funded importation of “madrasa student” ideology threatens a somehow more authentic Pakistani Islam based on a tolerant Sufism.

I disagree with both the reifications of pundits such as Dalrymple and those of certain sections of the critical Pakistani intelligentsia, at least in part. In my recent experience living in and around Peshawar and the NWFP, I sensed that one major social fault line in Frontier Islam is something more basic. In many cases, working-class and service-industry people belonging to the Deobandi school of thought, which casual commentators often conflate with “radical Wahhabism,” proved to be among the gentlest and most generous people I met in Pakistan. In my extended interactions with certain such people, even though they belonged to proselytizing groups such as the Tablighi Jama‘at this membership did not color their interactions with me as a person.

I noticed, instead, a split between those who focused on the social role of their Islam as an analytical and activist tool to create social movements; and those for whom Islam was a humanist experience. Simply put, it was abstracted social-centric Islam versus concrete people-centric Islam. Social-centric Islams of all stripes, moderate or radical; their largely middle-class propagandists, and their populist adherents tend to say a similar thing. That is, they hold that reform of superstitious customs – including shrine pilgrimage – will help poor people better their material lives and create a more just social order. In seeking to forcibly enable an abstract vision of purist religious and social reform for people in a highly unjust political and economic environment, paradoxically the radical faction responsible for this blast probably never stopped to think about actual people.

This for me is the real tragedy of the symbolic attack – for there was little real damage – on Rahman Baba’s ziyarat. For me, an American Muslim academic who has studied the Pashto language, it was my favorite place in Pakistan exactly because of its people-centrism.

One of the Masters students in the Pakistan Studies program at Peshawar University lives in Hazar Khwani village where the tomb is, and in 2005 he invited me to visit his family there. I’d prefer not to mention his name, since association with Americans is no longer something that people would wish others to know about. After several languorous hours of the legendary Pashtun hospitality, a sizable group of us went to the shrine to say a fatiha prayer for Rahman Baba.

One reason I love the shrine is the personality of Rahman Baba himself, as reflected in his poetic work. A couple of lines that illustrate well a social religion grounded on a genuine love for individuals and personalized devotion are the following. The version sung by Qamar Gula, an Afghan woman singer in the 1970s, is my favorite:

Dwa yaran da ranga cha na de lidali / Che yaw da bal khkandzal kral; bal du'a kra

Che me mina Khdae pa ta bande payda kra / Tarka ma pa hagha wradz khpala riza kra

Who ever heard of two lovers like this / Where one cursed the other; while the other prayed for the first

When God created love for you in me / On that day I gave up my free will

The following lines may be among the most widely known bits of Pashto poetry anywhere. A fair number of Pashtuns I have met know this passage by heart:

Kar da gulo ka che sima de gulzar shi / Aghze ma kara; pa pkho ke ba de khar shi

Kuhi ma kina da bal sari pa lar ke / Chere sta ba da kuhi pa ghara lar shi

Plant flowers where you live, so that your region is a flower garden / Don't plant thorns or they will stick in your feet

Don't dig a pit in someone else's path / Your path might sooner or later end up leading into that pit

The shrine is located where Rahman Baba and his disciples used to meet. And whether or not he planted the garden himself, Rahman Baba's shrine complex sits in a grove of deciduous trees – sycamore, poplar, and eucalyptus - interspersed throughout an ancient graveyard. Rahman Baba purportedly had the ability to communicate with animals due to his gentleness, and even now, when people have birds that are suffering from any form of ailment, they bring them to Rahman Baba's forest to recuperate. There is a special very large aviary constructed in and among the trees for this purpose. I imagine these innocent creatures were spared on the dawn of the 5th. There were a few buildings in between the aviary and the main mausoleum which might have sheltered them from the blast.

Writers, civili society workers and lovers of Rahman Baba observed vigil on the Shrine of Rahman Baba.

Rahman Baba's shrine complex had none of the ostentation of most South Asian shrines. The sober austerity struck me as very “Pashtun” – not at all like the stereotype of a sensuous, mystical “Sufi Islam” as opposed to some other essentialized “strict Islam”. The shrine complex consists of a number of small cube-shaped whitewashed buildings, and a large marble mausoleum structure sponsored by the Saudi government in 2001 or 2002. If there was much beauty, it was mainly located in the trees and the sunlight filtering through, and in non-visual adornments granted not by wealthy donors but by the participation of everyday visitors.

Instead of visual ostentation, the main decoration was verbal. Much like the Persian poet Hafiz of Shiraz, Rahman Baba of Hazar Khwani wrote poetry that is still used daily by people today for inspiration in coping with their problems. People do a niyat – meditate on their problem – and then open Rahman Baba's diwan, or poetry collection, to find a couplet at random. Almost invariably it helps (and the couplets above give only the most rudimentary sense of the gentle sorts of "advice from beyond" that the diwan contains). I myself have kept a copy in my office. It got me through a difficult year of teaching full time and advising students for the first time. In any case, after this exercise, if the couplet has been helpful, supplicants often visit the shrine complex and commission that couplet to be painted in green lettering on the whitewashed walls of the small boxlike buildings there.

My inlaws from the lowlands of the (ethnically very different) Punjab province sometimes gently poked fun at me, a historian, visiting the NWFP for research. I remember one asking incredulously, "What are you going to see there? There's nothing but Pashtuns!" His point was that unlike the Punjabi city of Lahore, for example, Peshawar and the surroundings offer little in the way of glorious monuments or iconic cityscapes (with a few notable exceptions). For him, and for too many others, those things are what history is all about. Ergo, in this view, Pashtuns have no history. But personally, I draw the most inspiration in my work from reflecting on various modalities of verbal culture. And there are few societies on earth that have produced the sort of oral-historical, poetic patrimony that Pashtun society has – language-based monuments so socially intimate that most outsiders will never appreciate them, or even see them. “Wildflowers blooming, ignored, in the wasteland” is the analogy used in the title of a mid 1980s poetic anthology, as well as a paraphrase of words that the legendary peace activist Khan ‘Abd-ul-Ghaffar Khan once used to describe his people. For this other reason the shrine struck me as a very "Pashtun" monument, stripped of everything but those beautiful green words on white, words which meant the world to someone in an hour of need. It is this people-centric Islam that was under attack, an Islam that cuts across sectarian divides and invites Wahhabis and all other Muslims alike to imagine each other as fellow humans above all else, complex and unique. Though this was not true of everyone, many so-called ‘Wahhabis’ I knew answered that invitation with a soft and understated “yes”, and coexisted with the more socially marginal figures who managed this space full-time.

After our group paid our respects in the mausoleum, we met a large group of malangs, or ascetics/hermits. They were chopping wood at the time, in preparation to cook lentil soup for the evening charity kitchen. There was already a fire going, and I detected hashish fumes mixing with the mesquite smoke. The malangs put down what they were doing and made us some milky tea, without any request on our part. It was the first time I'd ever had a substantive discussion with malangs. It mainly pivoted on my telling one of the malangs that even in the US, some of us study the poetry of Rahman Baba. The malang I was speaking to – in true ego-denying form, he never offered his name – was not surprised. He said, “Of course, he is a great friend of God. Even in America he must be famous.”

One photo I took of the main mausoleum is my favorite among all those I took in my entire time in Pakistan. Quite by chance, I hit the camera button at the exact moment when two friends were greeting each other in an embrace, which is exactly the feeling I get when I open Rahman Baba's diwan. Looking even more closely one notices two women in brown burqas, mostly obscured by shadows, between two flags off to the left. This almost unnoticeable presence is part of what so outraged the new crop of 'religious students', the literal meaning of the word ‘taliban’. Superstition and saint veneration was objectionable enough; but according to what I’ve read of the event, the thought of women engaging in these activities, in public, appears to have been the trigger for this bombing. The act, therefore, consisted of two parts. The perpetrators viewed women as a social category to be reformed, not as individual people with individualized spiritual needs; and they viewed individualized Islam, grounded in actually-existing people, to be beside the point. In attempting to destroy this shrine, or to discourage attendance at it, they saw no value in the relationships expressed here.

For me at least, Rahman Baba the man is not the object of veneration; Rahman Baba the tradition is. To me Rahman Baba was a geographic focal point which communicated all the individual desires and hopes that passed through society. The saint is immortal because of his words; and his words are immortal partly because their presence in that concrete physical space engenders a personal connection to other individuals regardless of sectarian or socioeconomic or even temporal boundaries. For this reason, an attack on Rahman Baba’s ziyarat hit me especially hard. Despite all the distance between my life and that of Hazar Khwani village, I felt that I had added my own presence to that of countless other specific individuals. When I saw the news of this bombing, I felt as if I was seeing the participatory history of unique people, with individual pains and individual dreams, being replaced by dogmatic abstraction. For this reason, it would be a true shame in my eyes if popular and critical analyses of this, and other such, events also replicated a typology-based worldview, with ideological labels like “Deobandi” or “Barelvi” or “Wahhabi – not actual people – at their core.

[James Caron is in the Ph.D. Program of S. Asia Studies at the Univ. of Pennsylvania.]

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