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  • Religion and Violence

    Religion and Violence
    by A. J. Chien
    December 23, 2006

    ZNet, MA
    Dec 23 2006

    When Pope Benedict XVI quoted a 14th century Byzantine emperor
    attributing to Mohammed a command "to spread by the sword the faith
    he preached," Muslim and non-Muslim critics alike were quick to point
    out that the implied criticism of Islam applied equally to
    Christianity. The Crusades and the Inquisition stand out as obvious
    examples. It was appropriate to mention the Pope's own faith, but
    one could also cite, say, the murderous violence against Muslims by
    Hindu nationalists in Guajarat, the terrorism of the Stern Gang and
    other Jewish extremists inspired by visions of the biblical Israel,
    or Zen Buddhist complicity in twentieth-century Japanese war crimes.
    >>From a bird's-eye level of history at least, it's easy to undermine
    the notion that there is any link between Islam and violence that
    isn't shared by other major religions.

    But it's not as easy to say just what that link is. Consider two
    opposing stands. In his bestseller The End of Faith, Sam Harris
    argues that religion systematically leads to violence because it
    demands the suspension of reason: for "if history reveals any
    categorical truth, it is that an insufficient taste for evidence
    regularly brings out the worst in us." Further, much text held to be
    sacred explicitly sanctions violence, e.g. many passages in the Old
    Testament in which God demands the complete extermination of
    populations or the stoning to death of various sinners. The Bible
    also endorses slavery, collective punishment, and mass infanticide.
    True, most adherents of the major faiths are not violent and do not
    read their all their scripture literally. But Harris argues that
    these moderates provide a shield for violent fundamentalists, the
    real true believers, by insisting on "tolerance." Tolerance does not
    allow one to point out the underlying problem - "to say, for
    instance, that the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of
    life-destroying gibberish.~T Richard Dawkins' recent book is in a
    similar spirit.

    On the other hand, it's been well-argued that people tend to adapt
    religious belief to whatever nature they already have. On this view,
    religion is not the real driver even of violent fundamentalists. As
    Bertrand Russell commented: "Men tend to have the beliefs that suit
    their passions. Cruel men believe in a cruel God and use their
    belief to exercise cruelty. Only kindly men believe in a kindly God,
    and they would be kindly in any case." And William James: "The
    baiting of Jews, the hunting of Albigenses and Waldenses, the stoning
    of Quakers and ducking of Methodists, the murdering of Mormons and
    the massacring of Armenians, express much rather that aboriginal
    human neophobia, that pugnacity of which we all share the vestiges,
    and that inborn hatred of the alien and of eccentric and
    non-conforming men as aliens, than they express the positive piety of
    the various perpetrators. Piety is the mask, the inner force is
    tribal instinct." "Tribal" may sound anachronistic. But the fact
    that religions cluster geographically - so that we have e.g.
    Christian countries and regions rather than Christians distributed
    randomly - makes it clear that what usually determines one's religion
    is conformity to the community (as Russell elsewhere observed).

    When examples are viewed more closely than from bird's-eye, both
    these opposing stands can find support. Take the Crusades. It had
    long been thought that the zeal for crusading was motivated by a
    desire for land and wealth among Europeans in a rapidly growing
    society. But according to Eamon Duffy, more recent scholarship shows
    that the costs of crusading were immense, often requiring financial
    backing from one's family and mortgaging land. That makes it more
    plausible that many of those who responded to Pope Urban's call to
    "exterminate this vile race" of Muslim infidels from Asia Minor and
    Jerusalem really were motivated by religion. But there are other
    aspects such as the Fourth Crusade, which was first intended as an
    invasion of Egypt but ended in the pillage of Byzantium, i.e. a
    conquest by Western Christians of Eastern Christians. The former had
    long been resentful of the Eastern Orthodox Church and the
    civilization in which it thrived. (The word "byzantine," meaning
    hopelessly complex and obscure, reflects the historical perception of
    Byzantium by a more ignorant culture.) So here it seems "tribal
    instinct" more than scripture is at work.

    But in general, violent behavior is like anything else in having
    multiple causes. Let~Rs turn to the relation between Islam and
    contemporary terrorism, the mainstream concern underlying Pope
    Benedict's remarks. Maybe we can agree with Louise Richardson that
    "religion is never the sole cause of terrorism; rather religious
    motivations are interwoven with economic and political factors" and
    generally the "three R's": revenge, renown, and reaction. Picking
    out one from among multiple causes reflects subjective interest
    rather than objective reality. As philosopher N. R. Hanson once
    commented, "There are as many causes of x as there are explanations
    of x. Consider how the cause of death might have been set out by a
    physician as 'multiple hemorrhage', by the barrister as 'negligence
    on the part of the driver', by a carriage builder as 'a defect in the
    brakeblock construction', by the civic planner as 'the presence of
    tall shrubbery at that turning'."

    So rather than continuing to pursue the religion factor, we might
    consider a different issue: which causes of terrorism should we in
    the United States take most interest in?

    Let's take Richardson's first "R", revenge. This past September, a
    man named Nabeel Jaoura was arrested in Jordan after opening fire on
    a group of tourists, killing one. According to a senior Jordanian
    security official, Jaoura was not an Islamist or a member of any
    terrorist group. But two of his brothers had been killed in a
    refugee camp in southern Lebanon during Israel's 1982 invasion, and
    he had intended to strike back ever since. With children at home to
    care for, he desisted for many years up through an arrest in Israel
    for overstaying his visa. Marwan Shehadeh, a specialist on Islamist
    movements, suggested that Jaoura "probably came out ready to take
    action. The US occupation of Iraq and Israel are generating anger in
    every Muslim who has begun to think about revenge. This man could
    not reach the US, so he targeted the closest thing he could get to."

    The case shows, if it were not already obvious, that revenge can be
    sufficient motivation with or without religious or other factors.
    Also obviously, it demonstrates why US elites might be interested in
    focusing on such other factors (including invented ones, such as
    "hating our freedoms") rather than this one. Analyzing revenge means
    revealing the events that prompted revenge. In this case, we have
    the US-supported Israeli invasion of Lebanon that killed 20,000
    civilians according to the Lebanese government. Following on
    Shehadeh's suggestion, the civilian toll of the US invasion and
    occupation of Iraq is in the hundreds of thousands according to the
    Lancet, with a declining but substantial portion (from a third to a
    quarter over a three-year period) attributable directly to US
    military strikes. Taking another known grievance, the US was the
    aggressive and knowing driver of sanctions against Iraq which were a
    major factor in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children
    according to several studies. It's not hard to imagine many people,
    fundamentalist or not, having motives like Jaoura's. On the Iraq
    war~Rs motivation of terrorists, the latest US National Intelligence
    Estimate agrees with Shehadeh.

    Neutral onlookers might not brush such matters aside. Impressed by
    the scale of the toll, they might even raise a different question
    entirely: rather than "What motivates terrorists?", "What motivates
    the US?" and not just taking the answer from US official statements
    and accustomed assumptions. In the case of our occupation of Iraq
    they might look, for example, at the Pentagon's longstanding desire
    to replace military bases in Saudi Arabia with a long-term forward
    presence in Iraq, applying pressure on Syria and Iran; and the
    postwar multibillion-dollar construction of massive US bases at
    Balad, Asad, Tallil, and elsewhere in Iraq, with scant public
    knowledge.

    Nothing of course justifies Jaoura's or any other terrorism. The
    point rather is that we ought first to understand our own
    transgressions because those we have responsibility for and can do
    something about. That holds whether or not there is "moral
    equivalence" between our transgressions and theirs. (I'll discuss
    the whether or not in a sequel.)

    Criticizing ourselves in this way is difficult and unpopular.
    Anywhere we can go for moral support? Why, yes. Harris's point
    about scripture is not that it is uniformly bad, but that you have to
    cherry-pick the good bits. Let's finish with a bit on which various
    religions seem to agree:

    Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment that you
    pronounce you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the
    measure you get. Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's
    eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can
    you say to your brother, "Let me take the speck out of your eye,"
    when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the
    log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the
    speck out of your brother's eye. (Matthew 7:1-5)

    Likewise from Hinduism: "The vile are ever prone to detect the faults
    of others, though they be as small as mustard seeds, and persistently
    shut their eyes against their own, though they be as large as Vilva
    fruit" (Garuda Purana 112). From Islam: "Happy is the person who
    finds fault with himself instead of finding fault with others"
    (Hadith). And from Buddhism: "Easily seen are others' faults, hard
    indeed to see are one's own. Like chaff one winnows others' faults,
    but one's own one hides, as a crafty fowler conceals himself by
    camouflage. He who sees others' faults is ever irritable--his
    corruptions grow." (Dhammapada 252-53).


    Sources:

    Karen Armstrong, Holy War. New York: Doubleday, 1991.
    Eamon Duffy, The Holy Terror, New York Review of Books, October 19,
    2006.
    Hassan Fattah, New Scourge Attacking the West: Personal Anger Compels
    Killers, New York Times, Sept. 6, 2006.
    Joy Gordon, Cool War. Harper's, November 2002 (and
    http://www.harpers.org/CoolWar.html?pg=1).
    Ch arles Hanley, Signs of a Long US Stay Ahead, Boston Globe, March
    26, 2006
    Sam Harris, The End of Faith, New York, W. W. Norton 2005
    Al Seckel, ed., Bertrand Russell on God and Religion. Buffalo, NY:
    Prometheus.
    William James, Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Modern
    Library, 1902.
    Louise Richardson, What Terrorists Want. New York: Random House,
    2006.
    Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt, Pentagon Expects Long-Term Access to
    Four Key Bases in Iraq, New York Times, April 20, 2003.
    Sabrina Tavernise and Douglas G. McNeil Jr., Iraqi Dead May Total
    600,000, Study Says, New York Times, October 11, 2006.

    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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