The Obama Doctrine: Why Islamism Isn’t Like Communism – The Atlantic

Thoughtful:

In one of my recent conversations with Obama, he dilated on this point in an interesting way. (“The Obama Doctrine” contains many thousands of words of Obama’s thoughts on foreign policy. However, I could not, for reasons of space, include all of what he had to say. In the coming weeks, I will be highlighting some of the things he told me that did not make it into the original article.) Obama made these particular comments during a conversation about Ronald Reagan’s influence on Republican thought. His main argument here is that rhetoric that could legitimately be deployed against an ideology like communism cannot be similarly deployed against the world’s second-largest religion.

Obama first praised Reagan’s “moral clarity about communism,” saying, “I think you can make a credible argument that as important as containment was in winning the Cold War, as important as prudence was in winning the Cold War, that at a time when perhaps the West had gotten too comfortable in the notion that, ‘Look, the world is divided and there’s nothing we could do about it,’ Reagan promoting a clearer moral claim about why we have to fight for freedom was useful and was important.”

The danger comes, Obama told me, when people apply lessons of the struggle against communism in the struggle against Islamist terrorism.

“You have some on the Republican side who will insist that what we need is the same moral clarity with respect to radical Islam. Except, of course, communism was not embedded in a whole bunch of cultures, communism wasn’t a millennium-old religion that was embraced by a whole host of good, decent, hard-working people who are our allies. Communism for the most part was a foreign, abstract ideology that had been adopted by some nationalist figures, or those who were concerned about poverty and inequality in their countries but wasn’t organic to these cultures.”

He went on to say, “Establishing some moral clarity about what communism was and wasn’t, and being able to say to the people of Latin America or the people of Eastern Europe, ‘There’s a better way for you to achieve your goals,’ that was something that could be useful to do.” But, he said, “to analogize it to one of the world’s foremost religions that is the center of people’s lives all around the world, and to potentially paint that as a broad brush, isn’t providing moral clarity. What it’s doing is alienating a whole host of people who we need to work with us in order to succeed.”

Obama said that the manner in which a president discusses Islam has direct bearing on the fight against Islam’s most extreme manifestations. “I do believe that how the president of the United States talks about Islam and Muslims can strengthen or weaken the cause of those Muslims who we want to work with, and that when we use loose language that appears to pose a civilizational conflict between the West and Islam, or the modern world and Islam, then we make it harder, not easier, for our friends and allies and ordinary people to resist and push back against the worst impulses inside the Muslim world.”

Source: The Obama Doctrine: Why Islamism Isn’t Like Communism – The Atlantic

Liberals to let religious freedom office expire on March 31

Expected:

Mr. Dion confirmed the office’s closure at a global affairs conference in Ottawa on Tuesday.

“Our government shares the same conviction as the previous government, but it assesses the consequences of its chosen method of promoting this conviction differently. I am referring to freedom of religion or belief, which we will defend tooth and nail, but not through the office that the Harper government specifically set up for this purpose,” said Mr. Dion during a speech at the University of Ottawa.

The Liberals have previously indicated their intention to close the office. The office’s mandate expires March 31.

Last week, the Conservatives tabled a motion in the House of Commons to renew the mandate of the Office of Religious Freedom. The Liberals voted against the motion and it was defeated 225 to 90.

Prior to the motion, Religious Freedom Ambassador Andrew Bennett, who was appointed by the Conservatives in 2013, accepted a position as a senior fellow at Cardus, a leading Christian think tank. He will also serve as chair of the think tank’s Faith in Canada 150 program while he completes his term at Global Affairs Canada. His new position is voluntary and unpaid with support of Global Affairs Canada.

Mr. Bennett’s three-year term was originally set to end in February, but the Liberals extended it to March 31 to coincide with the expiration of the office’s mandate and $5-million in annual funding. While Mr. Bennett’s future at Global Affairs Canada is unclear, the minister’s office has applauded his work as ambassador.

The Conservatives first promised to create an Office of Religious Freedom during the 2011 election campaign. The office’s mandate is to “speak out and to protect and promote religious freedom around the world.”

While the Conservative initiative was criticized for mixing politics and religion, certain religious groups supported it. In a letter to Mr. Dion in January, Jewish, Sikh and Ahmadiyya Muslim organizations asked the Liberal government not to scrap the office.

On Tuesday, Mr. Dion reiterated the government’s thinking in determining how to best defend various rights.

“We believe that human rights are better defended when they are considered, universal, indivisible, interdependent and interrelated, as set out in the Vienna Declaration,” said Mr. Dion.

The remaining question is the degree to which future projects focused on religious freedom  will be funded within existing Global Affairs program funds. I expect not absent any declaration to the contrary.

Source: Liberals to let religious freedom office expire on March 31 – The Globe and Mail

Was Mother Teresa Really ‘Saintly’? – The Daily Beast

One of the counterpoints:

So Mother Teresa’s friendship was for sale—but that wasn’t the worst that could be said about her. Hitchens’s hostility to religion could cross over into hysteria, even idiocy: he once reproduced in print the urban legend that Orthodox Jews have sex through a hole in a sheet, so that their bodies don’t touch. But he got something essentially right about Mother Teresa’s theology when he noted that she wanted those in her care to suffer. Why else did she—despite the unaudited millions that her order brings in donations—provide her homes’ dying residents with thin cots, instead of proper hospital beds? Why did she deny them adequate narcotic pain relief? And why did she treat their pain as a beautiful thing? Because she believed that suffering brought the sick closer to Jesus Christ.

“The point,” Hitchens wrote, after adducing careful evidence, “is not the honest relief of suffering but the promulgation of a cult based on death and suffering and subjection. Mother Teresa (who herself, it should be noted, has checked into some of the finest and costliest clinics and hospitals in the West during her bouts with heart trouble and old age) once gave this game away in a filmed interview.” Describing a person in the last agonies of cancer, she “told the camera what she told this terminal patient: ‘You are suffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be kissing you.’ Unconscious of the account to which this irony might be charged, she then told of the sufferer’s reply: ‘Then please tell him to stop kissing me.’”

The Catholic Church, of course, does not canonize people for their moral perfection. For Catholics, all human beings are fallen and sinful in nature; canonized saints are not perfect beings but simply people who led lives worthy enough to receive special recognition in their afterlives (as a technical matter, saints are those whose names can be invoked in the liturgy). So Mother Teresa could be as bad as Hitchens said she was, and yet in relevant ways good enough to deserve sainthood. And therein lies a problem. For while the Church never claimed that saints are necessarily super-human, our popular perception of saints requires them to be, and so we develop historical amnesia about who they really were.

Some of the Catholic saints, even some of the real biggies, were perfectly dreadful. For starters, a startling number were anti-Semites. “How dare Christians have the slightest intercourse with Jews, those most miserable of all men,” asked St. John Chrysostom, the fourth-century church father. In Jesus’ time, the Jews’ “evil ways corrupted the morals of the people,” according to St. Thomas Aquinas. “Jews are slayers of the Lord, murderers of the prophets,” said St. Gregory of Nyssa. If it seems bit unfair to hold men ancient and medieval to our modern ideals of toleration—after all, to be a European Christian was, once upon a time, to be taught do despise Jews—then consider all the saints who were bloody crusaders, or cruel catechizers of unwilling native peoples. One begins to see that there’s something unnerving about the whole category. 

Of course, Wolf, the philosopher, would immediately recognize that Catholic saints were not supposed to be moral saints, not as she understands the term. The Catholic Church has historically looked to canonize people of grandeur—institution builders, martyrs, self-flagellators, mystics, and of course miracle workers—but not always men and women of particular kindness or generosity. Contemporary Americans have tacked on a third expectation of saints, the Winfrey expectation, that they publicly perform warmth and love, if possible after encountering, in their own lives, great suffering. By brushing against evil—Mother Teresa in the Calcutta slums, Wiesel in the Holocaust, Winfrey and Angelou in their own childhood abuse—and then emerging as beacons of love and optimism, they shore up our wishes for the perfectibility of the world.

It is our shortsighted, and very modern error, that we want Mother Teresa to be a saint by all these definitions. She was a shrewd operator, one of the great institution builders of our time. And she was a kind of witness to depravity. But she wasn’t always kind, and only by suspending our honest judgment could we find her easy to love. 

Source: Was Mother Teresa Really ‘Saintly’? – The Daily Beast

Why Canada should keep its religious freedom office: US advocates

More advocacy regarding keeping the Office of Religious Freedom, this time from US counterparts, Robert P. George and Katrina Lantos Swett:

This flurry of engagement is happening for good reason: Religious freedom conditions are deteriorating dramatically. According to a number of studies, at least three-quarters of the world’s people live in countries that perpetrate or tolerate serious religious freedom abuses, ranging from the denial of permits to build houses of worship to the imprisonment, torture and murder of the persecuted.

Persecutors include secular tyrannies such as that of China, which persecutes religious adherents from Christians and Uighur Muslims to Tibetan Buddhists and Falun Gong; and North Korea, perhaps the most world’s most repressive country. They also include theocratic states, such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, and violent groups, such as Boko Haram in Nigeria, Buddhist extremists in Myanmar, and the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq (among other places).

Thanks in part to the existence of USCIRF (United States Commission on International Religious Freedom), the U.S. House of Representatives recently gave unanimous approval to a resolution decrying the Islamic State’s horrifying violence against Christians, Yazidis and other religious minorities as religiously motivated genocide. Others have also deemed it genocide, from Pope Francis to the European Parliament.

For humanitarian reasons alone, silence is no option in the face of those who violate religious freedoms. QBut there is a further reason for concern. Speaking in 2014 about the Middle East, Jean Benjamin Sleiman, the Archbishop of Baghdad, said: “I do not think Europe will be calm. This … does not stop at territorial boundaries.” His words were prophetic: Five months later, in January, 2015, the same religious extremism that was plaguing his own country struck the office of the satirical Charlie Hebdo magazine and a kosher supermarket in Paris.

The lesson is clear. Standing up for religious freedom is not just a moral imperative but also a practical necessity for any country seeking to protect its security and that of its citizens. At such a time as this, Canada should not retreat from its leadership role in advancing this fundamental human right.

Religious freedom merits a permanent seat at the table of a great country’s foreign policy. Canada has given freedom of conscience such a seat through its Office of Religious Freedoms. May it retain this critical seat so long as religious freedom is threatened anywhere in the world.

Source: Why Canada should keep its religious freedom office – The Globe and Mail

Denmark may strip radical imams of citizenship

Charging them with hate speech would be appropriate:
Denmark might soon be able to strip radicalized imams of citizenship. The proposal is expected to be supported by a majority in parliament.

The initiative comes from the anti-immigration Danish People’s Party, and has received backing from the ruling Liberal Party, the opposition Social Democrats and the Conservative party.

“The Constitution says that one must practice his faith as long as it is not contrary to morals or disturbing to the public order,” Martin Henriksen, Danish People’s Party’s spokesman told the Berlingske newspaper on Monday.

“When imams endorse or recommend stoning or when an imam tells a woman subjected to violence by her husband, that that’s okay, then it [may be considered] subversive speech that disturbs the public order. Some of these imams are Danish citizens, and we think we should deprive them of their citizenship,” he said.

The proposal was made in particular to withdraw citizenship from Abu Bilal, a leading imam at the Grimhoj mosque in the city of Aarhus. A recent documentary, ‘Mosques behind the Veil,’ revealed that the imam advocated the stoning of adulterous women and the killing of apostates.

Danish Prime Minister Lokke Rasmussen urged MPs to come up with measures to counter the growth of radical Islam after the documentary exposed the activities of such radical mosques.

The Danish People’s Party is set to make two new proposals in the upcoming set of negotiations with the Danish PM. The party is to present a draft resolution on stripping Abu Bilal of his Danish citizenship and then to review the Constitution’s clause on religious freedom.

Rasmussen said that he will be willing to “push the limits” of the interpretation of the Danish Constitution when reviewing the proposals, the Local reported.

“We are open to all solutions that can stop the radicalized imams,” said Trine Bramsen, the Social Democrats’ spokesman, according to the Berlingske newspaper.

‘Religious freedom is under attack’: How a Canadian agency [Office of Religious Freedom] teaches respect where it’s tough to find | National Post

While likely partly orchestrated to keep the Office of Religious Freedom in its current form (rather than programming being folded into the overall human rights organizational and programming structures, some of the examples are nevertheless compelling.

Ironically, had public servants under the previous government carried out similar activities (some did), they were accused of disloyalty and not ‘loyal implementation’:

It’s those deep-seated problems that the Office — amid speculation the new government will shutter its doors — tries to tackle, according to its ambassador, Andrew Bennett.

Courtesy of Forum for Development, Culture and Dialogue

Courtesy of Forum for Development, Culture and Dialogue Children and mothers take part in a nine-day camp on religious dialogue in Latakia, Syria, in January 2016, funded by Canada’’s Office for Religious Freedom. 

“We’re talking about long-term, multigenerational change. Nothing is going to change in this countries overnight,” Bennett says in an interview.

Bennett describes his office as an advocate both abroad and within the Foreign Affairs department, amid more immediate initiatives like refugee resettlement and aid.

“Within government, in a highly secular country like Canada, we tend not to be very comfortable talking about religion or religious faith,” he says.

“Part of our work is to educate and raise awareness about the role that religious faith plays in foreign policy, and more generally in how people see themselves.”

In one case, Bennett’s staff invited the Mennonite Central Committee, which already runs development projects in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, to submit a proposal in December 2014 — four months into Canada’s airstrikes in Iraq.

A Manitoba couple who oversees MCC’s regional work found groups in all three countries, and applied for $500,000 in funding. A fifth of that money supports the three Syrians’ projects, which teach youth to respect strangers. The couple helps the activists manage their budget, tallies their progress and offers moral support.

Laying a foundation for freedom

Though all three activists come from different religions, they all grew up with middle-class families and career goals. They’re now tackling the root of Syria’s conflict, and laying a foundation for when it finally ends.

Rami set up an interactive play that drew 1,200 people. The play starts with a Muslim and Christian neighbour who fall in love, and the end result is determined by the audience’s suggestions.

At one performance, a priest and a sheikh rose to give an impromptu speech on respecting others. At another, scores of displaced people who sleep in a nearby mosque talked about feeling alienated in their new city.

Despite sporadic water and electricity, for three days Rami got 400 people into the basement auditorium of a blown-out building last December.

Emma crisscrosses her country, including territory held by ISIL, to co-ordinate civil society groups.

“When the war ends, people will need to work together,” Emma says. “For peace to last, they have to trust each other.”

The 34-year-old trains groups in managing projects, securing foreign funding and evaluating whether participants are less likely to join terrorist groups. She’s abandoned her dreams of raising a family, and knows her work puts her life at risk.

Alex facilitated a nine-day choir camp in Latakia, one of Syria’s less dangerous cities, where many displaced people have settled.

His team taught 32 children and 22 mothers to respect people of different religions — almost all their fathers are on the frontlines — during the New Year break.

“At first it was difficult because they don’t have the concept of being together,” said the 28-year-old. “But at the end they were singing together.”

All three Syrians admit they won’t see any fruits of success for decades, but say they’re in it for the long haul.

The activists spoke with the Post during a recent regional conference in Beirut, which was funded by the grant. To get to there, each made dangerous taxi trips darting through rebel- and government-held territory toward the Lebanese border.

At the conference, the three learned from local activists who ran similar projects during the 15-year-long Lebanese civil war.

Looking at today’s Syria, Rev. Dr. Riad Jarjour recalls Lebanon crumbling in 1975 because adherents to 18 different sects lived parallel lives, building resentment and suspicion among neighbours.

“It’s so good to have children learn about living with each other, respecting each other, before they grow up and have something build in their minds because of no education,” says Jarjour, who founded the Forum for Development, Culture and Dialogue.

He believes Canada was ahead of the curve in opening the Office of Religious Freedom three years ago, modelled on a U.S. position created in 1998.

Source: ‘Religious freedom is under attack’: How a Canadian agency teaches respect where it’s tough to find | National Post

Religious freedom envoy joins think tank ahead of Liberals’ decision on office – iPolitics

Suggests that the decision to fold the religious freedom office back into the human rights division has been taken:

Religious freedoms ambassador Andrew Bennett has joined conservative think tank Cardus amid uncertainty over the future of his office under the Liberal government.

The Canadian Press has learned that Bennett has become a senior fellow at Cardus and chair of the group’s Faith in Canada 150 program, effective immediately, while he serves out the balance of his term as ambassador.

“I look forward very much to working with Cardus, the think tank best placed in my view to reaffirm the essential and foundational role of faith in our common life as Canadians,” Bennett said in a statement to The Canadian Press.

The Tories set up the Office of Religious Freedom in 2013, and appointed Bennett, a former public servant and Christian theologian, as its first ambassador.

Source: Religious freedom envoy joins think tank ahead of Liberals’ decision on office – iPolitics

How is Islam represented on the BBC? And in the New York Times

With respect to the BBC:

What the study showed is that the BBC news tends to reproduce dominant discourses about Islam, partly as a result of news-gathering and production processes. For example, there has been significant criticism of its use of extreme news sources, such as Anjem Choudary, on its flagship news programme Newsnight. However, due to its remit as a PSB, it is required to listen to audiences, and this is sometimes evident in its news reporting – where it has more recently included a wider range of Muslims voices and has been more careful in its use of language.

We were able to demonstrate that, when you step outside the news format, with its extensive focus on conflict and terrorism, there is evidence of more diversity. Sometimes, the BBC makes a point of including Muslims in programming unrelated to Islam such as Eastenders and The British Bake Off. Aaqil Ahmed has continued to commission series that challenge dominant tropes about Islam; Make me a Muslim (2014), Welcome to the Mosque (2015) and Britain’s Muslims Soldiers (2016).

But there is a long way to go. News images of Islam continue to dominate media coverage, and are more likely to be reproduced than the niche programming described here. The last BBC Annual Report (2015) showed a reduction in hours dedicated to religious broadcasting; given that 5% of references to religion came from within this despite only accounting for 1% of airtime, it clearly remains a significant resource for representations of religion.

Some commentators have suggested that, due to media fragmentation which has seen the BBC’s share of the audience drop in recent years, media representation no longer matters, particularly as younger people watch less and less television and consume distinct, personalised services. But the BBC has an influence beyond its television broadcasting and immediate audience. As a PSB, it has a responsibility to reflect national culture(s) and minority interests. And in an era of increased commercialisation and privatisation, it does this better than most providers.

Source: How is Islam represented on the BBC? | openDemocracy

By way of comparisons, another study looked  at the New York Times:

The New York Times portrays Islam and Muslims more negatively than cancer, cocaine and alcohol, according to a report that studied the newspaper’s headlines.

“Since 9/11, many media outlets began profiteering from the anti-Muslim climate. Though you could probably trace a similar trend back to the Iranian Revolution,” said Steven Zhou, head of Investigations and Civic Engagement and co-author of the study ‘Are Muslims Collectively Responsible? A Sentiment Analysis of the New York Times.’

“We talk a lot about media and Islamophobia, but nobody has done the math. So, we thought it is long overdue to have a quantitative investigation of an agenda-setting newspaper,” Zhou told the Middle East U.S. Policy watchdog Mondoweiss Friday.

The study, which was conducted by Toronto-based 416 Labs, looked at New York Times headlines from the period 1990-2014. Researchers found that Islam and Muslims were “consistently associated with negative terms,” at least 57 percent of the time, says the study. Only 8 percent of news headlines about Islam/Muslims was positive.

The most frequent terms associated with Islam/Muslims include “Rebels” and “Militant.” None of the 25 most frequently occurring terms were positive.

Compared to all the other benchmarked terms (such as Republican, Democrat, Cancer, Cocaine, Christianity and Alcohol), Islam/Muslims had the highest incidents of negative terms throughout the 25-year period by a long shot. The following were cocaine and cancer, with 47 and 34 percent of their coverage associated with negative terminology.

“When we went into it we didn’t think it would be surprising if Islam was one of the most negatively portrayed topics in the NYT,” says co-author Usaid Siddiqui. “What did really surprise us was that compared with something as inherently negative as cancer, Islam still tends to be more negative.”

The New York Times Presents Islam More Negatively than Cancer and Cocaine

US election 2016: What does ‘Islam’ think of America? – BBC News

Useful summary of what some of the polling data indicates:

The Pew Research Centre, which surveys global attitudes, said anti-Americanism was strong around the word around the time of the US invasion of Iraq.

However, currently there is little evidence of profound anti-American sentiment except for in a handful of countries, it says.

Bruce Stokes, director of global economic attitudes at Pew, says sentiment towards the US varies widely between Muslim-majority countries.

“We tend to see more negative sentiment among Muslims in the Middle East, such as those from Egypt and Jordan,” he says.

Barack Obama meeting American MuslimsImage copyrightGetty Image
“But Muslims outside the Middle East generally have a more positive outlook,” he adds.

In Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, 62% of people hold a favourable opinion of the US, Pew’s latest data suggests.

That figure rises to 80% in Senegal, a country which is over 90% Muslim. Mr Stokes points out that this is a stronger approval rate than Germany.

“Attitudes have also been changing over time. We’ve seen a gradual rise in positive sentiment since President Barack Obama came to power,” Mr Stokes says.

“Even in the Palestinian Territories, where sentiment is 70% unfavourable, that’s an improvement on 82% in Barack Obama’s first year.”

The BBC World Service commissioned its own poll of global attitudes in 24 countries in 2014.

Among other things, it asked respondents if they thought the US “had a mainly positive or mainly negative influence in the world”.

Pakistanis generally held the worst view of the US, with 61% saying the US had a negative influence.

But both China and Germany were not far behind, scoring 59% and 57% respectively.

Turkey, almost 98% Muslim, was split between 36% positive, 36% negative and 28% neutral.

Source: US election 2016: What does ‘Islam’ think of America? – BBC News

My secret debate with Sam Harris: A revealing 4-hour dialogue on Islam, racism & free-speech hypocrisy – Salon.com

A very good long-read and effective take down of Sam Harris, a major figure in the anti-Muslim cottage industry, by Omer Aziz:

On that same podcast, Harris reflected with astonishment that I “didn’t even seem to be religious!” When I heard him say this, I burst out laughing. Unlike the charlatan Maajid Nawaz, I forthrightly admit that I am a skeptic and make no claims to being a “reformer”—such titles are for self-anointed prophets, not writers. Harris referred to me as a “young Muslim writer,” echoing his remarks during our debate where he referred to the same Middle Easterners he considers backward subhumans as “your fellow Muslims.” Imagine the grotesque stench of anti-Semitism if I called Sam Harris a “Jewish neuroscientist” or referred to Jewish terrorists in the West Bank as Harris’s “fellow Jews.” This is what white supremacy does: It reduces another person’s complex humanity to a two-dimensional stick-figure and allows the objectifier to remain so ignorant of how other people actually live that this ignorance becomes a privileged badge of honor rather than a mark of impoverishment. One should pity individuals like Harris, so blinded by arrogance that they live in a world removed from the struggles of every day people who they assume to be knaves and fools.

Harris ought to retire from the Islam industry altogether, or at least take a long vacation from spouting bile for a living. If this is too much to ask, he should at least have the integrity to admit that his attempted ambush on the “young Muslim writer” who “didn’t even seem to be religious” backfired and so he deprived his customers out of the truth.

For all of its shortcomings, this unpublished debate was not a waste of time. It illuminated one thing for certain: that Harris and his brigade of  reactionary pseudo-liberals are not at all interested in the questions they raise. It is about power for them, and maintaining a belief in their own superiority. No debate will rob Harris and his ilk of such a satisfying elixir, that they are civilized, while those people over there, in their ghettos and their mosques, they are barbaric, they are criminals, they are animals. Why escape Plato’s cave if you are the one holding the chains?

Source: My secret debate with Sam Harris: A revealing 4-hour dialogue on Islam, racism & free-speech hypocrisy – Salon.com