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“On Monday, he (President Obama) announced an executive order that allows U.S. officials for the first time to impose sanctions on foreign nationals found to have used new technologies, including cellphone tracking and Internet monitoring, to help carry out grave human rights abuses.
“The order specifically targets companies and individuals aiding the Iranian and Syrian governments, but administration officials say it could be expanded to include other countries using technology to crack down on dissent.
“Under the order, the administration announced new sanctions, including a U.S. visa ban and financial restrictions, against Syrian and Iranian agencies and individuals. Those include the Syrian General Intelligence Directorate, the Syriatel phone company and Ali Mamluk, the director of Syria’s general intelligence services.
“In Iran, the sanctions target the elite Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Ministry of Intelligence and Security, the law enforcement forces and Datak Telecom.”
The logical next Middle Eastern country to be targeted by such sanctions is Bahrain, and in fact its absence from this initial wave is already conspicuous. However, I’m not holding my breath, and will be pleasantly surprised if it happens.
One attitude I often see is that Muslims are somehow uniquely intolerant of other religions. A Get Religion blogger named Mollie said in the context of the Saudi mufti’s call for mosque destruction: “Can you imagine the coverage if, say, the Pope or some other major religious leader called for similar destruction? Even if it were a minor Christian or Jewish figure using such rhetoric, one imagines it would receive tremendous coverage.” Actually, comments of foreign religious figures seldom receive any coverage regardless of their faith.
Last year the government of Moldova moved to recognize Islam as a religion in the country. The Moldovan Orthodox Church went ballistic. The metropolitan of the Moldovan Orthodox Church was among those critical, and the the prime minister finally pledged to review the decision, though I can’t find an indication it was revoked. On the specific issue of houses of worship, I read this: “For the time being, the Muslims are pleased that the government has finally recognized them and that Muslims in the nation’s capitol Chisinau can worship freely. Someday, they hope they might even be able to build a mosque. ‘Now we have a prayer room and for us this is our mosque. As for building a mosque in accordance with Islamic norms, with a minaret and all, maybe it is not the right time now, not now,’ a local worshhipper Ismail Wahab Wahab said.” Meanwhile, one Bishop Marchel said, “Our ancestors’ idea of cleansing the land of pagans is under threat now.”
Meanwhile, also in 2011, an Israeli Jewish publication called “Fonts of Salvation” called for death camps for “Amalekites.” In religious Zionist narratives, the Palestinians are usually said to be the new Amalekites, who attacked the ancient Israelites during the Exodus from Egypt. Two years ago, Rabbi Yitchak Shapira said it was permissable to kill babies if they might grow up to harms Jews. Shapira was supported by a rabbi named Dov Lior who said of Baruch Goldstein’s 1994 machine gun massacre of Muslims at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron: “He took action for no other reason than to sanctify the holy name of God.”
What I take from these stories, as well as the statements by radical Muslim leaders, is that your inclination be a violent and hate-filled fanatic has to do with lots of cultural factors of which religious background is but one, and I’m not convinced an important one.
Pope Shenouda III of the Coptic Orthodox Church has died. Although in the years immediately following his 1971 ascension he was a politically active critic of the regime, a house arrest from 1981 until 1986 seems to have led him to become more conciliatory, and he became more a voice for Coptic rights within Egypt’s existing political universe, even discouraging Copts from participating in the 2011 anti-Mubarak protests. His death comes at a time when many Copts are becoming alienated from a hierarchy they see as out of touch, especially in terms of Egyptian politics, but also when all Egyptian Christians face a time of uncertainty as individuals and as a community, one which in many areas faces persecution.
Shenouda’s successor will come from the monastic ranks, which have expanded dramatically over the past generation as part of the general Egyptian religious revival. Here is the election procedure:
“Under the church’s bylaw issued in 1957, the next pope shall be elected by bishops, former and current Coptic cabinet members and MPs, Coptic notables, and Coptic newspaper owners and editors. Once the vote is completed, a blindfolded child will choose the pope from the three candidates with the highest number of votes. Candidates must be at least 40 years old and have spent at least 15 years in monastic life.”
The influence of laymen in Coptic politics dates back at least to the Middle Ages, when Christian government ministers under the sultans were often the community’s conduit to political influence. I wonder, however, if the role of former government officials in today’s Coptic Church could become a source of controversy, given that they will be tainted by connections with the Mubarak regime.
The best estimates for global poverty come from the World Bank’s Development Research Group, which has just updated from 2005 its figures for those living in absolute poverty (not be confused with the relative measure commonly used in rich countries). The new estimates show that in 2008, the first year of the finance-and-food crisis, both the number and share of the population living on less than $1.25 a day (at 2005 prices, the most commonly accepted poverty line) was falling in every part of the world. This was the first instance of declines across the board since the bank started collecting the figures in 1981.
“The estimates for 2010 are partial but, says the bank, they show global poverty that year was half its 1990 level. The world reached the UN’s “millennium development goal” of halving world poverty between 1990 and 2015 five years early. This implies that the long-term rate of poverty reduction—slightly over one percentage point a year—continued unabated in 2008-10, despite the dual crisis.
“A lot of the credit goes to China. Half the long-term rate of decline is attributable to that country alone, which has taken 660m people out of poverty since 1981. China also accounts for most of the extraordinary progress in East Asia, which in the early 1980s had the highest incidence of poverty in the world, with 77% of the population below $1.25 a day. In 2008 the share was just 14%. If you exclude China, the numbers are less impressive. Of the roughly 1.3 billion people living on less than $1.25 a day in 2008, 1.1 billion of them were outside China. That number barely budged between 1981 and 2008, an outcome that Martin Ravallion, the director of the bank’s Development Research Group, calls ‘sobering’.
“If China accounts for the largest share of the long-term improvement, Africa has seen the largest recent turnaround. Its poverty headcount rose at every three-year interval between 1981 and 2005, the only continent where this happened. The number almost doubled from 205m in 1981 to 395m in 2005. But in 2008 it fell by 12m, or five percentage points, to 47%—the first time less than half of Africans have been below the poverty line. The number of poor people had also been rising (from much lower levels) in Latin America and in eastern Europe and Central Asia. These regions have reversed the trend since 2000.”
“A week and a half ago, Khamenei gave a major foreign policy speech in which he said:
“‘The Iranian nation has never pursued and will never pursue nuclear weapons. There is no doubt that the decision makers in the countries opposing us know well that Iran is not after nuclear weapons because the Islamic Republic, logically, religiously and theoretically, considers the possession of nuclear weapons a grave sin and believes the proliferation of such weapons is senseless, destructive and dangerous.’
“Now, you could maintain that Khamenei is lying when he says he holds that possessing nuclear weapons is a grave sin. (You could also maintain that the Popes are lying when they say using birth control is a grave matter, but you’d have to explain why they put their papal authority on the line for a lie they weren’t forced to utter). But even if you think it is a lie, you have at least to report what he says. I guarantee you that Khamenei’s speech opposing nukes was not so much as mentioned on any of the major American news broadcasts.”
Khamene’i's consistent views on this matter may or may not be truthful, but Cole is right that they should be reported. They are credible given Iran’s victimization by weapons of mass destruction deployed by Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War, and the nuclear program is consistent with the desire of many nations to have nuclear power as a sign of national status.
Cole is also right that Khamene’i's views matter a lot more than those of President Ahmadinejad. From 1997-2005, when the reformist Muhammad Reza Khatami was president, conservatives compared the Iranian presidency to the head of a high school student council with the Supreme Leader as principal. That was an exaggeration, but the fact it was suddenly dropped when convenient villain Ahmadinejad came into office shows the duplicity of the rhetoric.
“Now, just hours before the polls open on March 2, Khatami and many other Iranians for the first time since the 1979 Islamic Revolution will stage a boycott. This is the only election in which a major political faction will remain on the sidelines. All the ‘signs,’ as Khatami put it, are there — the only candidates allowed to compete are largely from three conservative factions among the regime’s shrinking cast of political elites. All others were banned from running candidates.
“But what is more significant than the rigged vetting process is what the election sadly reveals for many — a changed Iran. Gone is the euphoria that energized millions of Iranians before past presidential elections in 1997 and 2009 and parliamentary elections in 2000. Instead, this week’s elections will take place under the watchful eyes of 50,000 election ‘monitors’ nationwide, thousands of basij fighters designated just for Tehran, and the heaviest police presence since after the disputed presidential election of 2009…
“The scripted election also illustrates a political realignment that has occurred since 2009 and the consolidation of power around Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In addition to ensuring the reformists’ — and even quasi-reformists, such as Hashemi Rafsanjani — departure from politics, Khamenei’s loyalists have also paved the way for the demise of the ‘deviant’ faction, as it is called, which represents President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad…
“After this election, assuming Khamenei will succeed in eliminating Ahmadinejad’s faction, only two political trends will remain relevant inside the political system. One is the conservative traditionalists who are members of the old guard, such as Parliamentary Speaker Ali Larijani. The other is the far right, comprised of hardliners, grouped around Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, an aging revolutionary figure who proclaims to be committed to the ideological purity of the Islamic republic, at last as he interprets it.”
With regards to the last paragraph, Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi and Ahmadinejad actually represent the same movement. Mesbah-Yazdi’s political party, the JPEE, has expressed support for Ahmadinejad’s presidency, and the cleric’s son Mojtaba Mesbah-Yazdi has said that his 2005 election “revived the true Islamic discourse.” However, Mesbah-Yazdi would most like to ascend to the Leadership after the death of Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamene’i, and the Assembly of Experts, which will make that decision, was cleared of many of his supporters during those last elections.
Iran, in other words, is well along the way to becoming a clerical monarchy, one in which Khamene’i may even be succeeded by his son Mojtaba. In the minds of those running them, these elections aren’t for the people to choose, but rather to ratify choices already made.
The most recent prominent sectarian incident in Egypt began, as so many do, with allegations of an affair in which, given the patriarchal culture, the male is seen as dishonoring the female. Christians were attacked, some Muslims protected them, and property was destroyed. Then then this happened:
“A ‘committee’ of local figures — Muslim and Christian religious leaders, Mussolini and others — gathered in what is known as a ‘reconciliation session’ in an attempt to diffuse and resolve the situation. They decided that eight Christian families, including Abu Suleiman and his relatives, would be made to leave the area.
“These sessions are common practice in Upper Egypt, where state law is frequently superseded by tribal justice. But their use in sectarian crimes during the Mubarak years led to strong criticism. Critics say that these ‘customary law’ solutions failed to hold perpetrators to account and created an atmosphere of impunity that encouraged more violence.
“The use of a reconciliation committee, the involvement of Salafi figures and the decision it reached has proven particularly controversial as Egypt’s majority Freedom and Justice Party (the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood) holds a majority in Parliament with the Salafi Nour Party in second position. There is growing speculation, and on occasion concern, about the possibility of the Islamic conservatism that is the ethos of these two parties translating into law, and what this might mean for Egypt’s religious minorities.”
The whole affair goes with what I’ve said before: that violent anti-Christian prejudice in Egypt is primarily found in rural areas and the poor neighborhoods in Cairo filled with recent rural migrants. Where Islam was invoked in these proceedings, it was far more cultural identity than belief system, and the expulsion was carried out by local tribal custom.
That said, Christians are clearly suffering as a community in post-Mubarak Egypt. As a religious minority, they are vulnerable when law and order is weak. I don’t expect the Egyptian government to get a handle on this quickly, but imposing a standard of law and order that protects human rights throughout the country should become a priority as soon as government institutions are established, whenever that turns out to be.
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