Category Archives: International relations

Wronging rights and depressing the oppressed

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Last month, the PC(USA)’s Office of Interfaith Relations put out an excellent paper titled “Vigilance Against Anti-Jewish Ideas and Bias”; to the surprise of many, it was (and is) an excellent piece of work, searching and honest in its examination of the ways in which Presbyterians have been guilty of “anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish motifs and stereotypes, particularly as these find expression in speech and writing about Israel, the Palestinian people, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and steps toward peace.” Consequently, it garnered considerable praise from evangelicals in the denomination.Given the way things tend to operate in the PC(USA), the cynic in me is tempted to think that someone saw that praise and decided they must have done something very, very wrong; whatever the reason, the original paper has now been strangled in its bath and replaced by something very different under a revised title: “Vigilance against Anti-Jewish Bias in the Pursuit of Israeli-Palestinian Peace.” The actual concern for vigilance against anti-Jewish bias is, to say the least, much more muted in this new paper; there is, however, a great deal of concern for how awful Israel is. It’s also far more self-congratulatory, to the point of arrogance, as Viola Larson notes; where the first document was an honest confession of denominational sin, the new one is effectively a frontal assault on that confession. That’s a shameful thing for those who are called to follow the Way, the Truth and the Life. I think the Rev. John Wimberley, of Western Presbyterian Church in D. C., said it best in his letter to Presbyweb:

I simply don’t know how we can release a document, receive high praise from the Jewish community, withdraw it and release a new document which profoundly angers the Jewish community and all of us who have spent a lifetime trying to build trust between Presbyterians and the Jewish community. This is beyond bad process. This is bad ministry. Who will trust our words in the future? Why should they?

Further evidence that we’re winning the war on terror

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comes from Simon Fraser University (in Burnaby, BC, a suburb of Vancouver, across the metro area from where we used to live); as that doughty and perceptive observer Fareed Zakaria noticed (and most of the rest of the American media haven’t), if you drop the practice of counting civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan as deaths from terrorism—which is to say, if you count them as what they are, which is civilian deaths in a war zone, which aren’t counted as terrorist acts anywhere else—the international death toll from terrorist acts has gone through the floor (and that despite Israel, which has seen a rise in deaths from Palestinian terrorism since the withdrawal from Gaza). As regards the US, organized terror groups haven’t managed a successful attack on us since October 2003. There are a number of reasons for this;

the most significant, in the study’s view, is the “extraordinary drop in support for Islamist terror organizations in the Muslim world over the past five years.” These are largely self-inflicted wounds. The more people are exposed to the jihadists’ tactics and world view, the less they support them. An ABC/BBC poll in Afghanistan in 2007 showed support for the jihadist militants in the country to be 1 percent. In Pakistan’s North-West Frontier province, where Al Qaeda has bases, support for Osama bin Laden plummeted from 70 percent in August 2007 to 4 percent in January 2008. That dramatic drop was probably a reaction to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, but it points to a general trend in Pakistan over the past five years. With every new terrorist attack, public support for jihad falls. “This pattern is repeated in country after country in the Muslim world,” writes Mack. “Its strategic implications are critically important because historical evidence suggests that terrorist campaigns that lose public support will sooner or later be abandoned or defeated.”

In other words, going into Iraq and Afghanistan has been critically important to defeating al’Qaeda in that, by taking the war to them, we’ve provoked them to terrorist attacks not in the Western world but in Muslim countries, among Muslims, with Muslim victims; what their fellow Muslims could support or at least tolerate when it was out of sight, out of mind, with victims they didn’t know or particularly care about, becomes intolerable when it’s down the street and the victims are friends, neighbors, and relatives. (As a prominent Saudi cleric wrote last September, “Who benefits from turning countries like Morocco, Algeria, Lebanon or Saudi Arabia into places where fear spreads and no one can feel safe?” [emphasis mine]) Which is no criticism of Muslims—that’s very human, and exactly what we see in Americans and Europeans as well. But it appears to be something that never occurred to al’Qaeda.It might be worth noting one other reason why al’Qaeda specifically has lost a great deal of support: if you publicly declare, “Iraq is the most important of these fields,” then get your butt kicked in Iraq, you’re going to have a hard time convincing people you’re worth supporting. As bin Laden himself said, “when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.” At this point, al’Qaeda is pretty clearly the weak horse.

“The great challenge in this decade . . . is social revival.”

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So says David Cameron, leader of the British Conservative Party, who has brought about a considerable transformation in the party of Thatcher, a transformation he describes this way: “We used to stand for the individual. We still do. But individual freedoms count for little if society is disintegrating. Now we stand for the family, for the neighborhood—in a word, for society.” It seems to be working, since the Conservatives (or Tories) mopped the floor with the ruling Labour Party in local elections held across Britain two weeks ago—Labour even lost in London.David Brooks certainly thinks there’s cause and effect here, and sees a lesson the Republicans need to take to heart. Brooks wrote in last Friday’s column,

The British conservative renovation begins with this insight: The central political debate of the 20th century was over the role of government. The right stood for individual freedom while the left stood for extending the role of the state. But the central debate of the 21st century is over quality of life. In this new debate, it is necessary but insufficient to talk about individual freedom. Political leaders have to also talk about, as one Tory politician put it, “the whole way we live our lives.” . . .These conservatives are not trying to improve the souls of citizens. They’re trying to use government to foster dense social bonds. . . .They want voters to think of the Tories as the party of society while Labor is the party of the state. They want the country to see the Tories as the party of decentralized organic networks and the Laborites as the party of top-down mechanistic control.

As Brooks notes, this isn’t an isolated phenomenon, as center-right parties have risen to power recently in Germany, France, and Canada, among other places; the question is, as he puts it, “whether Republicans will learn those lessons sooner, or whether they will learn them later, after a decade or so in the wilderness.” I don’t know if his analysis is right or not; but it needs to be considered. Carefully. Given that the direction he suggests is one that would suit John McCain well, I hope the McCain campaign is listening, and will give his analysis that consideration.

Explanations aren’t excuses

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The Atlantic has a piece up today titled “Burma’s Days,” which is essentially a thumbnail sketch of why the behavior of the military junta that rules Burma (and renamed the country Myanmar nine years ago), deplorable though it may be, makes perfect sense in light of Burmese history and culture. It’s a useful piece for the information in it (and a more useful one yet for the links to other articles), but it’s also an irritating example of the tendency among Western intelligentsia to look for excuses for foreign dictators. People who condemn the Israeli government for breathing will look the other way at Mugabe’s efforts to depopulate Zimbabwe or calmly explain how the Burmese military should be excused for diverting aid from cyclone victims because “they have reason to be suspicious about their neighbors and outside powers.” (And of course, those who wouldn’t make those particular mistakes may yet have a soft spot in their hearts for the corrupt rulers of Saudi Arabia, or be perfectly content with the generals running Pakistan; this is a game both left and right can play, and have.) Why is that?I suppose I can understand the Realpolitik approach that says, essentially, as long as dictators don’t give us any trouble, we should let them run their countries however they want; I don’t like it, and in the long run, I think it’s self-defeating (to borrow from Barack Obama on Pakistan, if we choose to promote stability instead of democracy, we tend to wind up with neither), but at least I can see the logic. But what on earth moves our journalists and public intellectuals to find excuses for these thugs? That, I just don’t get. (As you can see, I go with “Burma” over “Myanmar.” The latter is probably closer, as far as I can tell, to what the Burmese people call themselves—not that we let that bother us with places like Hungary—but I have two related reasons for not using it. One, the name change came from the junta, which is an illegitimate government, and therefore in my opinion is likewise illegitimate; and two, it’s not just my opinion. I had, for several months several moves ago, a landlord who was in exile from Burma due to his activities with the opposition; he called his country Burma and himself Burmese. He knew a lot more than I do, and had a lot more reason to care, so if it was good enough for him, it’s good enough for me.)

Old evils never die

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they just find new sewers to hide in; as long as our hearts continue polluted, there will truly be nothing new under the sun. Thus, for example, if you think slavery was a peculiarly American crime that basically disappeared in 1865, think again. If Logan Paul Gage’s article on E. Benjamin Skinner’s exploration of contemporary slavery (an exploration recounted in detail in his book A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery) doesn’t make you want to weep, your heart is as hard and cold as the Hope diamond.

“Winning” doesn’t mean “easy”

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Unfortunately, our quick-fix minute-rice instant-oatmeal fast-food culture has largely lost touch with the fact that some struggles take a long time, and that even tough, long-term fights may well be not only worth fighting but necessary to fight. I think most of our churches have lost the stomach for that, which is why the long victory of discipleship, with the lifelong struggle to put sin to death in our lives and replace it with trust in Christ, is foreign to so many who consider themselves Christians; and I’m quite sure we’ve largely lost the stomach for it in our politics. We may talk the talk of long-term effort, but we don’t often walk the walk. That I’m sure is at least part of the reason (along with partisan opportunism) why the war in Iraq became so unpopular: it stopped being easy. Once it no longer looked like a cakewalk, a lot of folks stopped supporting it.

I’m glad, though, to see President Bush (finally?) call that attitude out:

I have to wonder (not originally, I know) what that reporter, and our press corps as a whole, would have made of World War II, or the Civil War . . . (According to Wikipedia, the American death toll of the entire Iraq War through the end of this month stands at 4,058 deaths, 3,320 in combat. In World War II, the Battle of the Bulge alone claimed 19,000 American dead.)

HT: Ed Morissey

Answering Islam on its own terms

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Though I know he’s out of favor these days, and I’ve learned not to trust his account of modern philosophy as much as I once did, I still must confess a great debt and greater admiration for Francis Schaeffer; though I might have learned the presuppositional approach to apologetics from Cornelius Van Til or other figures in my own Reformed tradition, I learned it from Schaeffer, and I’m deeply grateful for that.For those not familiar with this approach, here’s a very brief summary, taken from the Wikipedia article: “The goal of presuppositional apologetics . . . is to argue that the assumptions and actions of non-Christians require them to believe certain things about God, man and the world which they claim they do not believe. This type of argument is technically called a reductio ad absurdum in that it attempts to reduce the opposition to holding an absurd position.” I appreciate this approach both for its recognition that none of us ever really starts from a neutral position—we all begin with a particular point of view, from a particular standpoint—and for its understanding that we can’t “prove” the Christian faith simply by piling evidence on people; we need to take their standpoints, their worldviews, more seriously than that.This is, I believe, the best way to contend for the Christian faith in any context, but especially in the Islamic world, given the nature of the Muslim faith and its view of non-Muslims; which is why Fr. Zakaria Botros is such an amazing and critically important witness to Christ. A Coptic priest and Arabic TV personality, Fr. Botros challenges Islam in its own language, on the ground of its own teachings, from its own texts.

Each of his episodes has a theme—from the pressing to the esoteric—often expressed as a question (e.g., “Is jihad an obligation for all Muslims?”; “Are women inferior to men in Islam?”; “Did Mohammed say that adulterous female monkeys should be stoned?” “Is drinking the urine of prophets salutary according to sharia?”). To answer the question, Botros meticulously quotes—always careful to give sources and reference numbers—from authoritative Islamic texts on the subject, starting from the Koran; then from the canonical sayings of the prophet—the Hadith; and finally from the words of prominent Muslim theologians past and present—the illustrious ulema.Typically, Botros’s presentation of the Islamic material is sufficiently detailed that the controversial topic is shown to be an airtight aspect of Islam. Yet, however convincing his proofs, Botros does not flatly conclude that, say, universal jihad or female inferiority are basic tenets of Islam. He treats the question as still open—and humbly invites the ulema, the revered articulators of sharia law, to respond and show the error in his methodology. He does demand, however, that their response be based on “al-dalil we al-burhan,”—“evidence and proof,” one of his frequent refrains—not shout-downs or sophistry.More often than not, the response from the ulema is deafening silence—which has only made Botros and Life TV more enticing to Muslim viewers. The ulema who have publicly addressed Botros’s conclusions often find themselves forced to agree with him—which has led to some amusing (and embarrassing) moments on live Arabic TV.Botros spent three years bringing to broad public attention a scandalous—and authentic—hadith stating that women should “breastfeed” strange men with whom they must spend any amount of time. A leading hadith scholar, Abd al-Muhdi, was confronted with this issue on the live talk show of popular Arabic host Hala Sirhan. Opting to be truthful, al-Muhdi confirmed that going through the motions of breastfeeding adult males is, according to sharia, a legitimate way of making married women “forbidden” to the men with whom they are forced into contact—the logic being that, by being “breastfed,” the men become like “sons” to the women and therefore can no longer have sexual designs on them.To make matters worse, Ezzat Atiyya, head of the Hadith department at al-Azhar University—Sunni Islam’s most authoritative institution—went so far as to issue a fatwa legitimatizing “Rida’ al-Kibir” (sharia’s term for “breastfeeding the adult”), which prompted such outrage in the Islamic world that it was subsequently recanted.

Islamic leaders have proven unable to challenge him, because he’s beating them on their own terms; combined with Fr. Botros’ presentation of the truth of the gospel, the result has been millions of conversions to Christianity every year. There have been threats against his life in consequence, but he will not back down, and so far, no one has been able to make him. A billion cheers for Fr. Botros, indeed.The success of Fr. Botros’ flank attack on the Islamic world, coming as it does at the same time as the frontal assault Pope Benedict XVI launched with his Regensburg address in 2006, highlights an important point: the West cannot answer Islam by purely political means, whether military or diplomatic. Indeed, Islam cannot be addressed on any sort of secular grounds, because the liberal secular mind does not understand religion. As Spengler argues and as the case of Magdi Allam demonstrates, the West can only respond effectively to the Islamic challenge by returning to its Christian (and thus Jewish, and thus Eastern) roots, because “one does not fight a religion with guns (at least not only with guns) but with love” (a point made also by Chuck Colson) The great struggle for the soul of the West against Islam, though it surely must involve military efforts at times against the likes of al’Qaeda and Hizb’allah, will most basically be a struggle for the souls of individual Muslims, and thus for the lives of those who seek to leave Islam for Christianity. To quote Spengler,

Where will the Pope find the sandals on the ground in this new religious war? From the ranks of the Muslims themselves, evidently. Magdi Allam is just one convert, but he has a big voice. If the Church fights for the safety of converts, they will emerge from the nooks and crannies of Muslim communities in Europe.

The parallel he draws to the conversion of the pagans who overran the fading Roman Empire is a compelling one; those tribes conquered Europe, and thus the Western church, but the church in turn absorbed them by conversion. Faith conquered where military power failed. The key, as Wretchard points out, lies in your presuppositions, the foundations of your life, and having a place to stand that you know is worth standing for.

Challenging Islam’s roots requires the challenger to have an irrational [or better, superrational] loyalty to roots of his own. Faith is a special kind of information that arises from providing answers to questions that are undecidable within our formal logical system; that lie beneath the foundations of our civilization rather than in a development of its precepts. It lies within our choice of axioms rather than the theorems that arise from them. And because axioms cannot be proved, “our way of life” will always rest on prejudice—or if you will—faith. Like Camus, we can never rise completely above all our attachments and still retain our capacity to act.

HT: Presbyweb, BreakPoint

Esteem for US rises in Asia, thanks to Iraq war

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Seems counterintuitive to an American ear, given the dominant strain of reporting around here, but so says The Australian, which is certainly closer to the issue than we are. The article’s actually based on the work of an American analyst, Mike Green, who specializes in NE Asia, but the article offers independent support (pointing out along the way that, against the narrative that “the world hates us because we’re in Iraq/supporting Israel/etc.,” the last couple years have seen the election of a new wave of pro-US leaders in countries like France, Germany, South Korea and Australia. It’s an interesting and encouraging piece.

HT: Power Line

Iraq rising

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However much the MSM tries to spin things to the contrary, the news from Iraq is good and getting better. It’s getting so if Obama wins, he won’t bring the troops home, he’ll just get more favorable coverage and take credit for the victory. The Washington Post declared Basra a victory for Moqtada al’Sadr, but in fact it was al-Sadr who lost and is now backing down; now, because Nuri al’Maliki stood up to his fellow Shiites, Iraq’s largest Sunni party has come back into the government, Iraqis as a whole have rallied around the Prime Minister, and the government has earned considerable respect around the Muslim world. The Iraqi Security Forces performed well on the whole, and al’Maliki is now stronger at home and abroad than he was before, with greater credibility in dealing with other internal challenges, such as al’Qaeda holdouts in the Mosul area. Meanwhile, as the Los Angeles Times points out, the Muslim world is turning decisively on al’Qaeda; in part, that’s the result of the heavy damage we’ve done them, and in part, they’ve done it to themselves trying to respond to us. Peter Wehner is right: though our struggle isn’t over, we’ve made “enormous and heartening progress.”