The Pope seems in more danger in Israel than he was in Lebanon

[Originally posted at NOW]

Around three years ago, while doing some desktop research on religious extremism, I signed up for the mailing list of the Christians United for Israel (CUFI) organization, an influential American fundamentalist outfit (boasting over a million members) that advocates the total colonization of historic Palestine by Jewish settlers, to whom God eternally granted the land in the Book of Genesis.

It’s been an invaluable window into the underworld of Christian Zionism ever since, regularly dispatching Christmas greetings from Benjamin Netanyahu; invitations to conference calls with Glenn Beck and Michele Bachmann and; above all else, reminders of the multiple options available to me for making tax-deductible cash donations.

What it takes great care not to disclose, however, are the actual realities of the Christian situation on the ground in the Holy Land today. There is curious silence, for instance, on the fact that Israeli troops occupy the land of the world’s oldest Christian community – the Palestinian one – whose access to religious sites in Bethlehem and, particularly, Jerusalem is subject to the whim of a foreign military authority. Nor is there mention of the steady rise of Jewish fundamentalist bigotry against Christians, which sees churches regularly defaced by fanatics (“Jesus is garbage” read a slogan sprayed on a Jerusalem church last week) and is officially represented in parliament: sent a copy of the New Testament by Christian well-wishers in 2012, MK Michael Ben Ari tore the thing up and threw it in the bin, calling it an “abominable book” that belonged “in the garbage can of history.”

These omissions of detail can often occur with unfortunate timing. Thus, my latest receipt from CUFI, sent six days ago, tells me that:

“The freest Christians and Muslims in the Middle East are the Christian and Muslim citizens of the Jewish state of Israel […] While Christians throughout the Arab world are being bombed, shot and decapitated, the Christian population of Israel can worship in complete safety.”

Which is rather odd, because the Israeli Haaretz newspaper reported last week that anti-Christian hate in Israel has grown so toxic that police fear a “massive hate crime” is being planned by Jewish fundamentalists to coincide with Pope Francis’ visit to Jerusalem later this month; something Christian patriarchates in the city say authorities are doing almost nothing to forestall. Indeed, the only discernible action taken by police so far has been the removal of a sign welcoming Francis to the Old City – lest the fanatics deem it a provocation!

Incidentally, this makes for an interesting contrast to Lebanon, where the Vatican flags erected all over the damn place in anticipation of Pope Benedict XVI’s 2012 visit still haven’t been taken down in some neighborhoods, and where – however contrived it might all have been – every one of the country’s twelve non-Catholic sects wore a smile and professed joy at His Holiness’ arrival (in a vulpine gesture, Hezbollah even sent its Mahdi Scouts to receive him at the airport). Is the Pope, then – and are Christians in general – at greater risk in Israel than in Lebanon?

Innocent Syrians pay the price for Aounists' bigotry

[Originally posted at NOW]

“I personally made the plan to encircle Tel az-Zaatar and liberate it […] The siege lasted 52 days, I think, and the Palestinians weren’t leaving […] Eventually, it was getting boring and irritating so they removed the camp. There might have been some transgressions […]”

That was General Michel Aoun’s casual description, as recounted to Al Jazeera, of his role in the famous 1976 siege of the Tel az-Zaatar refugee camp, the end result of which, David Hirst writes in Beware of Small States, was some 3,500 Palestinian men, women and children killed; “between 1,000 and 2,000 of them after the camp had fallen, crushed under bulldozers, shot and hacked to death, or finished off by militiamen.”

It’s the kind of anecdote that casts a perpetually ironic shadow over Aoun’s 2006 Memorandum of Understanding with Hezbollah, and is always worth recalling when you hear the MoU described as some kind of enlightened breakthrough for communal harmony – a “remarkable” example of “Christian[s] and Muslims working together for a united Lebanon,” as a hopelessly hoodwinked Terry Waite put it not long ago.

Indeed, while it’s by no means straightforward to identify Lebanon’s most sectarian Christian party – recall that the dreadful Orthodox Gathering electoral law proposal had enthusiastic, bipartisan Christian support – the Aounists have certainly contended harder than most for the title in recent years (as even the likes of Asaad AbuKhalil are beginning to notice).

As if to seal the deal, on Sunday former telecoms minister Nicolas Sehnaoui and his comrade Ziad Abs – both of whom are often touted even by March 14ers as exemplifying the polished, respectable face of the Free Patriotic Movement – took to the mic to declare the era of playing nice with the Syrian refugees over for good.

Picking up where their colleague, the new Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil last left off (“Syrians already in Lebanon should be deported […] What is happening [is a plot] to change the demography of the country”), Sehnaoui and Abs explained that the refugees’ already-alarming designs on Lebanon had overstepped the final frontier of tolerability. From the “barracks” of their sodden tents, the job-stealing, gun-toting invaders have at last arrived, with their veiled wives and daughters, to – quelle horreur! – the doorsteps of Ashrafieh itself. His proposed solution, reports as-Safir, involves sealing the border, enforcing an 8pm curfew for all Syrians in the area, and creating a nightly security patrol force, “especially in the places Syrians gather."

It’s obviously pointless to note that no evidence exists linking the refugee influx with higher crime, or that the only major act of violence to have occurred in Ashrafieh since the outbreak of the Syrian crisis was the car bombing of the March 14 ally, Wissam al-Hassan – a brazen murder of a senior policemen for which Sehnaoui held no indignant press conference at the time.

Indeed, the tragic thing about this kind of crude incitement is it really works with the constituents (don’t be surprised if, feeling the squeeze, a March 14 Christian tries to one-up Sehnaoui’s act next weekend). But it ought to go without saying it’s also abhorrently inhumane. It isn’t just that sealing the border would be, as rights groups are often forced to repeat, a violation of international law. Innocent Syrians in Lebanon have already suffered far too many unprovoked physical assaults, fuelled by precisely the bigotry and misinformation peddled by Sehnaoui and Abs on Sunday. (Recall, for example, the torching of a camp in December after false allegations of rape, or the secret beatings in October 2012 of Syrian labourers by the army in Ashrafieh itself, as I witnessed with my own eyes while crouching next to NOW’s Raphael Thelen, who first broke the story.) It’s only a matter of time before more xenophobic violence occurs, and when it does, Sehnaoui and his friends will bear a part of the responsibility.

Another church scandal in Lebanon

[Originally posted at NOW]

The Catholic Church can breathe a sigh of relief this time: for once, it isn’t them.

Just two months after the Maronite priest Father Mansour Labaki was found guilty by the Vatican of sexually assaulting three minors (and given the typically severe punishment of “prayer and penitence”), the head of a Greek Orthodox monastery in Koura, Archimandrite Panteleimon Farah, has been discharged by Mount Lebanon Bishop George Khodr and sentenced to isolation inside his monastery for committing “practices contrary to Christian life and the monastic calling” – later revealed to be the molestation of youths.

As with Labaki, a crowd of demonstrators quickly congregated to protest the decision and proclaim Farah’s innocence. When LBC’s Dalal Mawad arrived – with permission from the church – to report live from the demonstration, the priest's sympathizers attempted to physically assault her and her cameraman, and were only prevented from doing so by the army. (As the blogger Gino Raidy cannily noted during the Labaki disgrace, these admirers of child rapists are precisely the same people who froth with pious fury when, say, a young Lebanese artist photographs her naked breasts.)

The intimidation of a woman journalist by a mob of religious fanatics is of course a scandal in its own right. Yet the ultimate tragedy is the fate of Farah’s victims themselves, and their families, who will never see the men responsible for their pain brought to real justice. Had it been an ordinary citizen who had molested them, he would have rightly spent a considerable portion of the rest of his life in a prison cell. But give any criminal, no matter how vile, a religious title and he becomes untouchable. Those who defend this notion of shielding wayward clergymen from the law might want to consider how they would feel if it were their children under attack – or, indeed, how they can be sure that it won’t be next time.

Thanks to Christine Sleiman for help with translation.

Note to Turkey: Not everything has to be a mosque

[Originally posted at NOW]

With moderates like Turkey’s Justice and Development Party, I often wonder, who needs Islamists?

Having only last week referred to the UNESCO World Heritage Listed Hagia Sophia museum as a “mosque,” the ruling party is now turning its conversionary zeal on the 5th-century Monastery of Stoudios – or the “Imrahor Ilyas Bey Mosque,” as it will apparently soon be known. This follows the unpardonable Islamisation that has already been inflicted on other priceless Byzantine-era churches in the towns of Trabzon and Iznik.

This kind of thing has a long and ugly history, implicating Christians as much as Muslims. No less a structure than the Parthenon of Athens, the finest monument of all antiquity, was irreparably wrecked during its conversion in the 6th century into a Byzantine church (also named Hagia Sophia, as it happens).

Though the Ottomans later turned this too into a mosque, they had enough reverence for it not to make alterations beyond painting over the Christian mosaics, which were anyway disfigurements in the first place. One wishes one could say the same of the Istanbul Hagia Sophia, where the Ottomans placed lugubrious black calligraphy discs like crude stickers over the still-visible and colourful artwork with which the building had originally been decorated. Of course, to this day, a crackpot Christian fringe still dreams of knocking down the minarets there and restoring it as an Orthodox place of worship. Not for nothing did Ataturk decide to do away with the building’s religious significance altogether and make it a museum.

That his secularizing project looks to be under redoubled and fortified threat in today’s Turkey is already very clear. Yet the notion of purifying or “conquering” (fetih in Turkish) every last pebble of non-Muslim heritage is a much larger issue than the domestic secularist/Islamist debate. It is, in fact, nothing short of an aesthetic and cultural crime; the spoliation of unique and irreplaceable remnants of world history; and for these reasons demands the attention – and if, necessary, intervention – of the international community.

Don't be fooled by Francis

[Originally posted at NOW]

Desperate as they ever are to believe that inside every scrofulous and reactionary organized religion is a cosmopolitan beacon of enlightenment crying to burst out, liberals have once again allowed themselves to be taken for a ride by a shady cleric, this time the current Bishop of Rome and former friend of Argentina’s notoriously murderous military dictatorship of the ‘70s and ‘80s.

What’s seduced them is Pope Francis’ off-the-cuff remarks to journalists on Monday regarding homosexuality. “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” he asked rhetorically, adding that gays should not be “marginalized” but rather “integrated into society.”

Which is apparently all it takes to melt the more soluble hearts among us. “Pope Francis took a huge step forward for the Catholic church,”said The Atlantic Wire’s Connor Simpson. “[This] real blockbuster […] is a radical change of position from Francis’ predecessor.”

“May he next open the door on contraception,” cooed the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof.

Yet, as the merest flicker of skepticism should elucidate, the statements don’t amount to any tangible departure from orthodox Catholic doctrine at all. The first sign of this came from Francis himself, who rushed to explain that it was gay “lobbying” that was the real “problem,” a pronouncement sinister and plain weird in about equal quantities.

Besides, what constitutes “search[ing] for the Lord and [having] good will”? Refraining from having gay sex, presumably. Certainly no one with serious Vatican expertise seems to believe anything will differ henceforth. “I don’t know that we’ve learned anything new at the level of content,” said National Catholic Reporter John L Allen, who was present when Francis made the remarks. “Church stance will not change,” was Papal Adviser John Haldane’s rather blunter message for the BBC. Veteran LGBT activist Peter Tatchell perhaps put it best:

“Pope Francis has offered a change of tone in Vatican pronouncements on gay people but not a change in substance. The church’s hardline stance against gay equality and relationships remains intact. It opposes same-sex marriage. The Catechism condemns homosexual love using strident, inflammatory and homophobic language.”

As it will continue to do so long as it is safeguarded by a man who just three years ago declared the idea of gay marriage “an attempt to destroy God’s plan.” So far from showering servile praise on such characters, it’s high time the intellectual class recognized them for the contemptible bigots they are – and confronted them.

British Christians: Assad's accidental friends

[Originally posted at NOW]

While Bashar al-Assad’s Western apologists have traditionally hailed from circles described (or at any rate self-described) as leftist, in recent weeks a new clique of apparatchiks has surfaced from a rather different quarter – the cobwebbed upper crust of British Christian conservatism. A series of reports for such august right-of-center publications as The Telegraph and The Spectator have combined shoddy journalism with vulgar appeals to the tribal emotions of their reactionary Christian readership to dangerously distort the narrative of recent events on the ground in Syria.

Take, for instance, Mary Wakefield’s dispatch from Lebanon for the Spectator in October. Wakefield drives to the border town of al-Qaa to interview Christian refugees from nearby Syrian towns, who recount lurid stories of mass atrocities committed by the Sunni rebels, including one execution with a syringe of diesel by a man muttering, “Die slowly, you Christian dog” (a quote appropriated by Wakefield for her title).

What Wakefield barely mentions, and doesn’t elaborate on, is that these interviews were conducted in the presence of one Dr Bassam El-Hachem, an academic and “big hitter in Lebanon’s FPM party”. As anyone who follows Lebanese politics knows, the FPM is the largest component of the incumbent pro-Damascus March 8 cabinet; a party whose leader has repeatedly described Syria as the most democratic country in the Middle East. And as anyone who has interviewed Syrian refugees knows, they would not dream of expressing pro-opposition sentiment in the presence of a senior party member of one of Assad’s major allies. (So consuming is their fear of the regime that I once saw a group refuse to give their names to UNHCR.)

Later, Wakefield pays a visit to the Melkite Archbishop John Darwish in Zahle (or, as she writes it, “Zhaleh”), who expounds on the rebel “jihadists” and their role in the Israeli conspiracy to partition Syria. More on him later.

Then came Terry Waite’s catastrophic effort in the Telegraph last month, in which he embarked on what he called a “mission of peace” to Hizbullah, his captors for five years during the civil war. He almost exactly emulates Wakefield’s itinerary: first the long drive to al-Qaa “to see for myself the plight of the many Christian refugees”, and then the chat with Archbishop Darwish in Zahle (which Waite proves capable of spelling).

Intriguingly, we learn that Darwish is a “strong backer” of the 2006 Memorandum of Understanding between the FPM and Hizbullah, described gushingly by Waite as “one of the most remarkable developments in Lebanon in recent years […] Christian[s] and Muslims working together for a united Lebanon”. The potential implications of this on Darwish’s opinions of the Syrian conflict are left unexplored by Waite, but it’s not difficult to see how he reaches the conclusion that the Arab Spring “has now been hijacked by extreme jihadists”.

This sentiment continued yesterday in a Guardian piece by Rupert Shortt, religion editor of the Times Literary Supplement whose latest book is titled ‘Christianophobia’. Taking a very dim view of the Arab Spring in general (apparently it has “given way to a Christian winter”), he asserts that Syrian rebels “want all traces of Christian life to be erased”, citing the murder of a priest in Qatana that, we are led to believe, was carried out by Sunni Islamists.

In fact, nothing is known about Father Fadi Haddad’s killers. The regime blamed “terrorists”; the opposition blamed the regime. Like so many of Syria’s “disappeared”, we may never find out the truth. Yet Shortt takes the regime line at face value and portrays the atrocity as typical rebel conduct.

Implicit in all of this is a grotesque form of sectarianism, which sees Christian Syrian refugees as more worthy of sympathy than their vastly more numerous Sunni counterparts (you don’t have to drive all the way to al-Qaa to meet a Syrian refugee). In turn, it insidiously breathes life into the false narrative of Assad as “protector” of the minorities (just as he’s the “protector” of the Palestinians, when he isn’t air-striking their camps) and the last bastion against an Islamist tsunami. This is both an intellectual disservice to readers and a moral insult to those risking death for a freer Syria.

Ladies, don't expect God's help

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

It’s been harder than usual in Lebanon this week to escape the Lord’s omnipresence. In addition to the “normal” allocation of public space to the country’s religious celebrities, as well as the Papal paraphernalia still yet to be taken down (three months later) and the homages to politicians (each one boasting varying degrees of divinity), you might well have noticed the ubiquitous new billboards bearing the (mostly lugubrious) faces of the premier Maronite, Greek Catholic, Sunni and Shia clerics.

As those who have paused to read the text will know, these are actually not yet more expressions of sectarian devotion, but in fact an initiative by the Resource Center for Gender Equality, aka ‘Abaad’ (“Dimensions”), to combat misogyny as part of the “International 16 Days Campaign of Activism to End Violence Against Women and Girls”.

Thus each billboard bears the face of one cleric, along with a quote of his ostensibly condemning violence against women on religious grounds. The Sunni grand mufti Sheikh Muhammad Rashid Qabbani, for example, cites ahadith (saying of Prophet Muhammad) affirming that “None but a noble man treats women in an honourable manner, and none but an ignoble man treats women disgracefully” (see here for all four quotes).

This is all, of course, an outrage and insult to anyone who takes the cause of gender equality seriously. So far from being the torchbearers of equality, religious institutions in Lebanon – as in every country on earth – are bastions of patriarchy and Leviathans of misogyny: the gatekeepers of “traditional values”, keeping women firmly and permanently under the boot. How stupid do they think we are? Is this not the very same Qabbani who, in June last year, rejected a draft law criminalizing domestic violence on the grounds that it would “[harm] the Muslim woman and [deny] her of the rights granted [to her]”? Is this not the same Qabbani who described as “heresy” the idea of criminalizing marital rape, warning that to do so would risk “[a] mother threatening [a] father with prison, in defiance of patriarchal authority”? Are these not the cronies of the Jamaa al-Islamiyah MP who, last December, said “There’s nothing called rape between a husband and a wife. It’s called forcing someone violently to have intercourse”? Is this “treating women in an honourable manner”?

I don’t mean to impugn Abaad specifically – no doubt this campaign was well-intentioned. But asking for women’s rights from the religious establishment is like asking for Palestinian rights from a Zionist. The two are fundamentally antithetical. If women are ever to receive the justice they deserve, it will be by confronting and defeating the clerics, not collaborating in the whitewashing of their oppression.

Romney's frightening fundamentalism

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

I’ve watched this five times now, and I think what shocks me more than the Mormon beliefs themselves (which, though certainly crazy, are not much more ridiculous than “ordinary” Christianity) is the aggressive, almost thuggish manner in which Romney defends them when they’re challenged. The furious glare; the belligerent lurch forward; the rapid rise in speech volume and speed: all the classic symptoms of a quick-tempered confrontational character are on display. And to what end?

Clearing up the details of how Christ, when he returns, will divide his time between Jerusalem and the State of Missouri.

Interesting, and very useful, to know what matters most to the potential future commander-in-chief.

Lebanese Christian rivals finally unite - on need to oppose Muslims

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

When it comes to trivial issues – Hizbullah’s arsenal; the Special Tribunal; the thousands killed in Syria; etc. – Lebanon’s Christian politicians never quite seem able to agree how to tackle them. What a relief it is, then, to see that they can set aside their differences and unite on the question that really matters: the religious beliefs of state electricity employees.

As yesterday’s parliamentary session came dangerously close to resolving one of the country’s current crises by approving the full-time employment of Électricité du Liban contract workers, the ever-scrupulous Energy Minister Gebran Bassil noticed that some 80% of said workers were not in fact adherents to the Christian faith. This important finding quickly rallied lawmakers from the Kata’eb and Lebanese Forces parties to his side, bringing the arch-rivals together for the first time in what must be years. They subsequently agreed to boycott today’s session, swiftly resulting in its cancellation, a move described as “imperative” by Kata’eb sources and “the least we can do” by a Change and Reform source.

Some will no doubt argue the move is entirely in accordance with the country’s (largely unwritten) constitution. I’m certainly not qualified to disagree. But if correct, it’s worth taking a step back and marveling anew at the profound destructiveness of the entire sectarian edifice. A problem that exacerbates not only the country’s energy crisis, but its physical insecurity (EDL employees, if you haven’t noticed, have been among the more agitated tyre-burners in recent weeks) is moments away from being fixed, before being felled once again because some of the people involved subscribe to the ‘wrong’ religion. As we say in the UK: Christ Almighty!

US military tells recruits to wage "total war" on Islam

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

Here’s a thought experiment: suppose that an extremely sophisticated and well-equipped Muslim-majority army was found to be instructing its officers that a “total war” on Christianity was required; this war being waged on Christendom’s “civilian population wherever necessary”, with the “historical precedents of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima [and] Nagasaki being applicable” to Vatican City, Bethlehem and the Christian quarters of Jerusalem. None of us, I hope, would dispute that this was the most fantastic and wicked fanaticism; the sheerest and most abominable religious lunacy.

Yet switch the above religions around, and insert “Mecca and Medina” in place of the Christian cities, and you have – verbatim – the material with which officer recruits at the US Defense Department’s Joint Forces Staff College were being enlightened by one Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Dooley until April of this year.

What does one even begin to do with such a piece of information? No doubt it will do wonders for the claim – reiterated by al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri just this week – that US troops in the region are the twenty-first century’s “Crusaders”. It’s worth pointing out, therefore, that Dooley’s course was dropped after complaints from the students themselves, and that it was denounced by Chief of Staff Martin Dempsey as “totally objectionable” and “against our values”.

At the same time, this is but one in a long list of such incidents for the US army, whose ranks have been increasingly poisoned by a hideous Christian chauvinism for some years now. The late Christopher Hitchens – no dove on ‘War on Terror’ matters – wrote in 2009 of the “clique within the United States military that is seeking to use the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as an opportunity to mount a new crusade and to Christianize the “heathen””. And the intimidation and marginalization of less devout troops has grown so intense that nonbelieving soldiers have felt compelled to form groups, such as the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and the Military Association of Atheists & Freethinkers, whose websites enumerate in sobering detail the daily infringements of religious freedom that the American constitution is supposed to protect.

If the US is serious, therefore, about confronting dangerous religious ideology, it has plenty to be getting on with in its own armed forces. The dishonorable discharge of Matthew Dooley – who is at present merely “suspended” – would be a useful start.

Geagea assassination attempt proves existence of God, claims new party poster

For those of you who imagine that the crude manipulation of religious credulity for political gain is somehow an exclusively Muslim phenomenon, consider the new billboard I noticed this morning recently erected by the Lebanese Forces, the militia-turned-party that has its roots in Lebanon’s sectarian Christian far-right:

The text at the top has been variously translated to me as “If God is with you, then you’re safe”; “If God is with you, who is stronger than you?”; and “If God is with you, who dares to be against you?” The man pictured is the LF’s leader, 'Dr' Samir Geagea, extending his hand in a gesture probably not accidentally reminiscent of Michelangelo’s ‘The Creation of Adam’.

The line is an obvious reference to the recent attempt on Geagea's life, in which he narrowly evaded two sniper rounds fired at his Maarab residence. Evidently, for the LF, his survival cannot be put down to mere chance: nothing less than a genuine miracle occurred on April 4th, 2012.

I’m struck anew how infinitely fascinating are the methods of the Almighty. His omnipotence notwithstanding, He apparently couldn’t simply have had the assassins undergo, say, a last-minute change of heart. Nor was He interested in any of the arguably more exciting means available for thwarting their plan - lightning strike; spontaneous combustion; sudden encirclement by man-eating dinosaurs; etc. And, for all His moral pontificating, He curiously sees no reason to have the culprits caught and punished for trying to eliminate His earthly comrade. No, instead, He opts as always for a shabby half-measure; a mediocre cop-out that bears the stamp, in every detail, not of a divine intelligence but a common mammal. 

But why let all that ruin an opportunity to assert that God is not only on the side of your sect, but in fact your political party, while comparing the head of that party to the biblical father of mankind himself in the process?

Holocaust "mostly horseshit", says Mel Gibson

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

In what must surely count as one of history’s most tersely-phrased utterances of five-star fruitcakery and fanaticism, the actor Mel Gibson recently described the Holocaust as “mostly a lot of horseshit”, according to a letter penned by a Hollywood screenwriter with whom Gibson was working on a now-scrapped film about the Jewish historical figure Judah Maccabee.

Of course, this kind of bigotry is more or less routine for Gibson, whose previous outbursts include informing a Los Angeles police officer that “the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world” and telling his then-girlfriend that she deserved to “get raped by a pack of niggers”. Even so, one finds oneself whistling at the sheer variety of epithets in this latest trove.

As the letter says: “[Gibson] continually called Jews “Hebes” and “oven-dodgers” and “Jewboys” […] [He] said most “gatekeepers” of American companies were “Hebes” who “controlled their bosses […] [He] said the Torah made reference to the sacrifice of Christian babies and infants […] [He said] the mothers of the last three Popes of the Catholic church were Jewish [and] there was a Jewish/Masonic conspiracy to destroy the Catholic church […] [He] referred to Pope John Paul as “the devil” [who] “destroyed the church”” by implementing Vatican II, which famously repealed the charge of Christ-killing against world Jewry (a theme to which he repeatedly returns throughout the letter). “Perhaps most disturbing [was his comment that] “What I really want to do with this movie […] is to convert the Jews to Christianity.””

Indeed, what interests me much more than the crude insults and petty racism is his obsession with the supposed threat posed by Jews to his faith, which in its rank paranoia and delusion exceeds even the efforts of Osama Bin Laden. The religious underpinnings of Gibson’s habitual explosions are still poorly understood by the wider public. As the late Christopher Hitchens noted in a 2010 article titled ‘Mel Gibson Isn’t Just an Angry Narcissist’, Gibson is a member of a “schismatic crackpot sect” of Catholicism, “headed by [his] father, Hutton Gibson” that has “never forgiven the Vatican for lifting the charge of deicide against the Jews”. Seen in this context, Gibson’s latest remarks are yet another reminder – if anybody needed one – of the infinite ways in which religious ideologies nurture and cultivate, rather than restrain, the cancers of hatred and extremism.

Rowan Williams' worthless career showed exactly why religion must stay out of politics

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

Anglican Christians around the world – including Lebanon’s own few thousand – can pour themselves a hearty slug of London dry tonight in celebration of the news that Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury and ‘spiritual leader’ of England’s official state religion, is resigning.

Being the head of an increasingly irrelevant organization in an increasingly irrelevant country, Williams is often seen as a likeable and harmless enough character – an endearing relic, along with the Queen, the Tower of London and the Eton wall game, of what England used to be. The reality, unfortunately, is not quite so cuddly.

Here is a man, after all, who preferred to forbid the ordination of openly gay clergy than to lose the friendship of brazenly homophobic colleagues. Here is a man who took reactionary positions on such non-trivial matters as abortion and euthanasia, while never being able to give a straight answer on the question of creationism. Worst of all, here is a man who argued for the incorporation of the shari’a in the UK on the grounds that Orthodox Jews, too, had parallel courts of their own (when David Cameron cooed that he “sought to unite different communities”, he got it exactly backwards). In other words, since the system is already part-broken, there’s little harm in savaging it further. He went as far as to describe as “dangerous” the idea that “there’s one law for everybody and that’s all there is to be said”. But then, the principles of liberal democracy would naturally be anathema to a man whose unelected power and privilege are paid for by the taxpayer.

In summary, here is a man whose example tells us exactly why men of religion need to be permanently kept away from politics.

Things Falling Apart: The attacks in Nigeria remind us that faith is the problem

Jihadism, as any right-thinking liberal will tell you, is supposed to be in decline. The killing of the Saudi millionaire who financed it; and the withdrawal from Iraq of the American troops who fuelled it; and, of course, the unprecedented popular uprisings across the Middle East that now discredit it; have consigned it to the history books. To the extent that Islamists exist at all anymore, they are either legitimate ‘resistance’ guerrillas (Hamas, Hizbullah, the Taliban) or ‘moderates’ seeking to marry the Enlightenment with Oriental spirituality (Turkey, North Africa). And, as always, any violence perpetrated by Muslims is an essentially defensive, even ‘desperate’, response to the original sins of European and American imperialism.

I argued here a few days before the tenth anniversary of 9/11 that this was all perfect nonsense, and I now put it to my reader that subsequent events in Nigeria have found me in vindication. For those who haven’t been following, an outfit called ‘Jama'atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda'awati wal-Jihad’ (‘Group Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad’), more commonly known as ‘Boko Haram’ (roughly translated from the Hausa dialect as ‘Western education is religiously forbidden’), is currently waging an unrestrained campaign of violence against Nigerian civil society; bombing police stations, UN buildings, banks, alcohol vendors and, most recently, Christian places of worship in attacks that have killed 250 civilians in the first month of this year alone (and around 1,000 since 2009). Its stated aim since its formation in 2002 by the cleric Muhammad Yusuf has been to replace the pluralistic government in Abuja with a shari’a-based Islamist regime – a somewhat tough sell in a country whose population of 160 million includes over 60 million Christians. Yusuf, who was killed in an especially bloody week of clashes with security forces in 2009, was a man of unusually strong faith. The discrepancies between the claims of the Qur’an and the findings of modern science were for him a trifling matter to resolve: not only Darwinism, but the claim that the earth was not flat, and that rain was caused by evaporation, were abominable falsehoods that had no place in a pious and dignified society. His successor, Abubakar Shekau, appears to cut a similar figure: explaining earlier this month why exactly it was necessary to slaughter Christians, he placed the blame squarely on the victims: “Catastrophe is caused by unbelief, unrest is unbelief, injustice is unbelief, democracy is unbelief and the constitution is unbelief”. 

As against this broad-daylight fanaticism, I can almost hear Robert Fisk snorting. Don’t I know that Christianity was imported by the British colonialists, who enslaved Nigerians and killed them in a string of brutal imperial wars? As it happens I’m aware of this ugly history, about which far too little is known and said. And I’m an admirer of Chinua Achebe’s masterpiece, Things Fall Apart, in which the divisive and destructive effects of the white man’s religion are laid bare:

The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.¹

However, what Boko Haram calls for is not a return to the Nigeria described in the first half of that novel. Nor can it conceivably be described as an assertion of a national or cultural identity that is in any way Nigerian. Instead, it is a call for the culture of 7^th century Medina – in other words, something at least as foreign as Anglicanism, and ten times as backward and fascistic to boot. Look again at the Yusuf/Shekau manifesto: anti-democracy, anti-science, anti-education. To imagine even for a moment that this is what ordinary Nigerians want for their future and their children is to both slander and insult them in the extreme (and see for yourself how vehemently, and courageously, they oppose it). You may of course choose to believe if you wish that the minority of Muslims who do support Boko Haram do so because of the especial poverty of the northern region and the extravagant corruption of the central government. But then you’d have to tell me first how the persecution of women and homosexuals and teachers will end poverty, and then how a leadership known for its “extreme wealth” and “lavish” lifestyle is in any position to combat the cancer of corruption. 

So it doesn’t look like any of the standard leftist arguments will do here. On the other hand, for those of us who say that religion is the radix malorum, the horrific events in Nigeria are quite straightforward to explain. I for one feel that I could face the families of murdered Nigerian Christians with a clean enough conscience. The Noam Chomskys, Norman Finkelsteins and Robert Fisks, however, should be asked how exactly the corpses are Israel’s and America’s fault this time, and how many more such corpses need to be created before they will cease to wipe blood off the hands of killers. 

¹ Achebe, C., Things Fall Apart (1958, Penguin Modern Classics 2001 edition), p. 129