Informed Comment

Did you ever wonder how all that hysteria got going in August and September about mosque-building in the United States, in which Americans demonstrated themselves mostly ignoramuses about Islam and behaved often in an un-Christian manner toward their fellow Americans?

The Pew Charitable Trust has done a poll, the results of which demonstrate that most Americans don’t know very much about the world religions, and indeed very large numbers of them don’t even know very much about Christianity.

So there you have it. We could have that circus, provoked by rightwing politicians like Rick Lazio and Newt Gingrich, only because they and most of their followings did not have the faintest idea what they were talking about. Religion is important in America in a way it is not, in say, France. But I guess it is only the idea of religion that matters– it isn’t necessary to actually know, like, facts.

Only about half of Americans even know that the Quran (Koran) is the holy book of Muslims! Almost no one has ever heard of Maimonides or can place him as a great medieval Jewish thinker.

Less than half can name the four Gospels, or know that the Dalai Lama is Buddhist. Over a fourth don’t know that Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt or that Jesus was born in Bethlehem.

Among Christians, Evangelicals and Mormons scored highest on knowledge of the Bible and Christianity, but they didn’t know much about the other world religions (a.k.a. for many of them “works of the devil”).

Those who did best on the quiz across the board were Jews, atheists and agnostics. They didn’t know quite as much about Christianity as the Evangelicals and Mormons, but they knew as much or more than mainstream Christians, and then they knew way more about the world religions and about the place of religion in American life according to the constitution.

It isn’t odd that atheists and agnostics know a lot about religion. They’ve looked into it in order to come by their doubts honestly. People willing to inherit their religion and just quietly accept tradition typically don’t need to do much active searching or studying. Atheists and agnostics are more educated than the general run of the public, and so would know more about a lot of subjects. The same is true of Jewish Americans, who are typically highly educated. Moreover, since holding on to one’s religious beliefs as a minority is tough, according to the American Religious Identification Survey, [pdf] many Jewish Americans are atheists or agnostics, so that is another way that they overlap with those groups. (The number of self-reported believing adult Jews in the US has shrunk from an estimated 3.1 million in 1990 to 2.6 million in 2008, with many in the younger generation losing faith; there are about 6.5 million ethnic Jewish Americans).

The proportion of Americans in general who say that they have “no” religion [pdf] has gone from 8 percent in 1990 to 15 percent in 2008, so they are a growing group (though the growth slowed in the zeroes). So on the one hand Americans are getting less religious, and on the other hand the more irreligious they get the more they seem to know about religion.

Posted in US Politics | 18 Comments

Adrienne Redd writes in a guest column for Informed Comment

After remaining silent for the first month of the semester, a student in my seminar entitled “Understanding Global News” spoke up after I presented historical context pertaining to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He first acknowledged to the rest of the class that he is of Palestinian ancestry and then asked (regarding my optimism about peace in the Middle East) “What about Jerusalem? How can it be partitioned?”

What about Jerusalem? If frantic efforts on the part of the U.S. and the other three representatives in the quartet the European Union, United Nations, and the Russian Federation) persuade the Palestinians to remain at the negotiating table, Jerusalem is the next crucial hurdle to a peace accord. The city is arguably the plot of territory most ancestrally precious to the three Abrahamic religious groups—perhaps a billion Muslims, more than two billion Christians, and 13 million Jews.

In my new book, Fallen Walls and Fallen Towers: The Fate of the Nation in a Global World, I argue that that in order to successfully navigate international disputes, the conception of the nation-state must move beyond the 350-year old Westphalian principle of sovereignty. As a relatively recent political concept, its genesis lies in the principle of (religious) non-interference that ended the Thirty Years’ War of 1618-1648. Later, the word “sovereignty” came (problematically) to mean overreaching control of national interests and even pre-emptive self-defense. However, both the expansion and hardening of “sovereignty” have gotten the world into trouble.

Keep reading Redd: What About Jerusalem?

Posted in Israel/ Palestine | 19 Comments

Update: The plot is alleged to have been hatched by young Muslim-German men who had been attending the same mosque in Hamburg where the 9/11 hijackers attended. Some of them went to northwest Pakistan for training, and one of them was captured in Afghanistan in July.

A Mumbai-style attack is inexpensive and logistically unchallenging. If the attackers are willing to die, they can shoot up hotels and malls and set off some bombs. Doing several cities at once would spread panic and is an al-Qaeda MO. The whole thing seems perfectly plausible to me, and while I understand the GWOT fatigue among analysts and commentators, I don’t think it can be dismissed.

It can be said that such operations are hard to forestall and that also they are a comedown for al-Qaeda, since they don’t accomplish anything at all. You will note that Mumbai is doing just fine and PM Manmohan Singh declined to take the bait and go to war with Pakistan, as the Lashkar-i Tayyiba had hoped.

The point of 9/11 for Bin Laden was to drag the US into Middle Eastern quagmires. Not everyone is as gullible as George W. Bush and fringe terrorist groups should be dealt with quietly and effectively, not with big multi-trillion dollar wars.

Posted in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda, Pakistan | 12 Comments

The FT reports that the intensification of US drone bombardment of suspected al-Qaeda positions in Pakistan’s tribal northwest in recent days appears to have been related to intelligence that the cells were planning to hit a number of Western European capitals with “Mumbai-style” random machine gun and bombing attacks.

One of the drone strikes is said to have killed the Egyptian, Shaikh Fateh.

There have been 20 such strikes since Sept. 1.

But CBS says the reason for the increase is that the US military in Afghanistan has come to the conclusion that Pakistan simply is not going to curb some of the insurgent groups (probably a reference to the Haqqani Network).

I am not entirely sure how drone strikes on North Waziristan would disrupt bombing attacks in the capitals of Western Europe. Presumably the cells have sleepers already in Europe who can be deployed even if the cell leader in Pakistan is killed. The drone strikes could interfere with planning meetings and travel to the region by European jihadis. But if the plan were advanced, there wouldn’t be that much of these activities any more.

No doubt more details will emerge.

Posted in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda, Pakistan | 5 Comments

Anti-government guerrillas attacked the convoy of the deputy governor of Ghazni province on Tuesday. According to Pajhwok, “Deputy governor of Ghazni province Mohammad Kazem Allahyar, his son, two of his nephews and a guard were killed in the attack in the provincial capital Ghazni, said Zamarai Bashary, spokesman for the interior ministry.”

In an address in Kabul on the occasion of the UN Literacy Day, Afghan president Hamid Karzai broke into tears at the thought that the next generation of Afghans might be forced into exile by the country’s increasing violence. Some AFghan observers, like this one writing in Persian, wondered if Karzai weren’t covering up his own failings by his histrionics. For more see this report in English.

Karzai also announced Tuesday the formation of a 68-member ‘Council of Peace’ charged with conducting negotiations with the Taliban and other insurgents in hopes of bringing them in from the cold. Karzai is banking on President Obama’s troop escalation and counter-insurgency project inflicting such pain on the guerrillas that they will come to the negotiating table. But the council may also be a palliative to prominent Northern Alliance Afghans who feel marginalized by Karzai’s government. Pajhwok reports, “Two prominent political oppositions of the government, Burhanuddiin Rabbani and Haji Mohammad Mohaqiq are also believed to be part of the council.” These old-time Mujahidin fought the Taliban and it is difficult to imagine them getting much traction with them. Though it is true that some of what Washington now calls Taliban are just anti-American Mujahidin, Ronald Reagan’s ‘freedom fighters,’ who object to their country being occupied, and someone like Rabbani could maybe do some negotiating with them.

It sounds to me less significant a development than some in the US press are making it. Karzai has been talking to some of the insurgents for some time, and occasionally when he feels too pressured by the US he threatens to join them.

US commander Gen. David Petraeus is more upbeat in his assessment, saying he supports Karzai’s outreach efforts. He maintains that more than 20 small insurgent groups have approached the Afghanistan government or NATO forces about a peace agreement. (But what about the big insurgent groups?)

The USG Open Source Center translated a Pashto article from the Afghan Islamic Press for September 28, 2010, denying Petraeus’s assertion.

‘ The Salafi mojahedin (Wahabi fighters) have rejected reports of talks.

The Salafi group which operates within the framework of the Islamic Emirate of the Taleban in a statement on Tuesday (28 September) rejected reports that they had held talks with the Americans.

The statement says that the Salafi Taleban who has declared strongly allegiance to the Islamic Emirate has neither held any talks nor will hold talks in the presence of foreign forces in Afghanistan.

The statement adds that when foreign forces leave Afghanistan, all sides will take this decision under the leadership of the Islamic Emirate and will accept the decision of Islamic Emirate in this regard. ‘

Of course, the Salafis (revivalists) could reject the talks without that disproving Petreaus’s assertions.

Operation ‘Cooperation’ (Hamkari) in the outskirts of Qandahar, an American and NATO attempt to pacify the environs of the major southern Pashtun city, has displaced 1,000 families in recent days. They have come flooding into Qandahar, where they are struggling.

Posted in Afghanistan | 1 Comment