It’s hard to keep the “peace on earth” and “goodwill” themes with the backdrop of news from the many battlefields in the Middle East.
Al-Monitor.com manages to provide ground-level, neighborhood views of the wars from several different countries, as does Al-Alarbiya and, of course, Al Jazeera. Juan Cole’s blog, “Informed Comment,” is, as the title suggests, always informative.
From a column this morning in Al-Arabiya, “The Arabs circa 2014: Despair and disintegration.”
Bad times have visited the Arabs before, but 2014 was a year from hell. The region stretching from Beirut to Basra continued to slowly disintegrate, with people clinging more than ever to their primordial identities as if the colonial constructs of the Nation-States that emerged after the First World War were only a passing moment.
The column goes on:
The fragmentation of the region, the unimaginable horrors of Syria and Iraq, the slow descent of Lebanon, Yemen and Libya into greater chaos, add to that Egypt’s continuing slouch towards greater autocracy, and you have the making of a dispirited region. It is impossible now to see how Syria, Iraq and maybe Libya and Yemen can be reconstituted as unitary states.
December was the fourth anniversary of the spark that exploded the season of Arab uprisings. An honest audit would have to show that the harvest of that season, with the exception of Tunisia, would show a worse than meager results.
Down at street level, there’s reporting that doesn’t enter into the American mainstream, like this one, “Scabies, lice ravaging Aleppo neighborhoods.”
From a more mainstream perspective, The Council on Foreign Relations website for regional comment and news, and its blog, “Middle East Matters.”
And I recently came across “Syria Comment,” a blog on Syrian politics, history, and religion by Joshua Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies who teaches at the University of Oklahoma.
Please add your suggestions of other good sources of diverse viewpoints on the Middle East.
Here’s hoping we will see hope emerging in the new year.
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Saturday, December 27, 2014
Writer referred to court for criticizing Islamic sheep slaughter
By: Mada Masr
The prosecution referred writer Fatma Naoot to the misdemeanor court on Saturday for religious blasphemy, after she criticized the ritual practice of sheep slaughtering during Eid al-Adha, the state-owned Al-Ahram newspaper reported:
The first court session is scheduled for January 28.
The liberal and contentious writer, who voiced her strong opposition to the former ruling regime of the Muslim Brotherhood, and is an adamant supporter of President Adbel Fattah al-Sisi’s military-backed administration, faces serious charges of insulting the Islamic religion.
During Eid al-Adha, Naoot criticized what she described as, “The worst massacre committed by humans for ten centuries whilst smiling,” on her Facebook page, in a post titled, “Happy Massacre.”
“Animals are being slaughtered and their blood shed for no reason, except to pay for this horrific nightmare,” Naoot said, referring to Prophet Ibraham’s prophecy, in which he saw himself slaughtering his child Ismail. Muslims celebrate the prophecy as God’s order to slaughter sheep every year and feed them to the poor.
In a statement, Naoot claimed she is paying the price of “enlightenment,” adding, “It was a random Facebook note, congratulating Muslims on Eid al-Adha and asking them to be good to the animals while slaughtering them, instead of viciously slaughtering them in front of kids.”
And in despair I bowed my head;
“There is no peace on earth,” I said;
For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2014/12/the_world_is_not_falling_apart_the_trend_lines_reveal_an_increasingly_peaceful.html
“The world is not falling apart. Never mind the headlines. We’ve never lived in such peaceful times.”
So says the linguist Steven Pinker, who wrote a book on the long-term historical decline of violence.
Scroll down to the graph on violence in Mexico. In 2007, there were 10 homicides per 100,000 people. Disturbingly, in just a few years, this homicide rate doubled. But this is a small fraction of the homicide rate in Mexico’s past; in 1940, the rate was almost 70 homicides per 100,000 people. This does not even mention the early 20th century (for example, the Mexican Revolution, from 1910-1920, during which up to 2 million Mexicans died).
This thesis is probably best articulated in Pinker’s book “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined”. Here is one reader’s summary from the comments in amazon.com.
What (little) I’ve read on such matters confirms Pinker’s views. I’ve read that the current homicide rates among men in the tribal areas of Papau New Guinea are 30%; that is, there is a 30% chance that an adult male will die of violence. That’s supposedly the consistent homicide rate in historical hunter-gatherer societies.
The historical argument is that in older, simpler societies, there is constant, low-level violence. In contrast, in modern industrial societies, there are long periods of peace interrupted by terrible cataclysms of violence. This is because the potential for mass destruction in modern war has a deterrent effect – up until there is a war. But even the highest levels of violence in the modern age are still lower than the steady, cumulative violence of tribal societies. For example, it is estimated that 8 million Russian men died in combat in WW2. But looked at on the scale of the lifespan of the Russian soldiers in question, and taking into account the size of the male Russian population of the period in question, this is still only one-fourth the homicide rate found among men today in tribal Papau New Guinea.
Let me revise those Soviet casualty figures.
Perhaps 8 million Soviet soldiers were killed in action during WW2. But another 6 million seem to have gone MIA. (That’s an astonishing number of soldiers who simply vanished, probably captured by the Germans and ‘processed’.) In total, perhaps 25 million Soviet citizens perished in the war out of a population of 200 million.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the_Soviet_Union
The question is how all those Russians died. It could be famine and disease caused by the disruption from the war. But there might be some overlap of persecution of the population by the Soviet government under Stalin. But much of it was Germans systematically exterminating Russians.
Here is the 1985 Russian movie “Come and See”, about the German occupation of one state of the Soviet Union, Belorussia, in which hundreds of villages were eradicated by the Germans (with much enjoyment, apparently).
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xvgqu8_come-and-see-1985-pt-1_creation
I’m looking around the Internet to find how many people the Germans murdered in WW2. I keep finding the number 11 million, 6 million of whom were Jews. That bigger number does not get mentioned too often. The overall goal of the war – to conquer Eastern Europe and replace its people with Germans – was also the German goal of WW1 and even earlier, in the 19th century. Actually, I did not know that until I came across the following article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum
More unfamiliar facts: The Japanese murdered 14 million people in WW2, even more than the Germans murdered. Scroll down and look at the photographs. Notice how happy the soldiers are while doing their work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes
But we can look back in history further for this kind of behavior:
Conquest is not exactly something new.
Regarding the notion that human history has gradually grown less violent, let’s use the Charlie Hebdo shooting as a reference point.
If you look up “Paris massacre” on Wikipedia, you will be directed instead to the events of 1961.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_massacre_of_1961
The massacre seems to have been premeditated by the infamous police official Maurice Papon, who had been an official in France under German occupation.
The French had conquered Algeria in the 1830s, and it had administratively fully become a part of France.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algerian_War
Almost 175,000 people died during the Algerian War.
Subsequently, there was a civil war in Algeria from 1991 to 2002 between Islamist rebels and a secularist military, during which 44,000 to 150,000 people were killed.
Drawing a line from the number of casualties from the French conquest of Algeria in 1830, to its war of independence in the 1950s, then to its civil war in the 1990s, and finally to the recent Charlie Hebdo shooting, one traces a starkly declining arc in the number of lives lost from one event to the other.
One also finds a very short historical memory among Westerners, especially the French.
Speaking of Algeria….
In the West, we talk about the ‘Arab Spring’ that began in 2010. Wiki:
That’s interesting how Americans imagine that people in these countries are rebelling because “Deep down they want to be just like us!”; later, Americans feel betrayed when these societies spurn American-style values and institutions as universal ideals (same thing happened with American attitudes toward China after the Tiananmen Square massacre). It’s also interesting how Arabs and Muslims see these American hopes and understandings of Arab uprisings as part of a Western conspiracy to turn these rebellions away from their Islamic roots; it shows a real paranoia and, perhaps, a lack of confidence and vitality.
It’s been noted that Arab monarchies remained in power, whereas Arab presidents were overthrown. This is supposedly because people have lower expectations in a monarchy (the country is the king’s personal property), and because they feel a kind of personal bond with a ruler and his family who have been there for generations.
One thing that has not been getting much attention is that North Africa, where so many of the revolutions took place, is not really Arab. Historically, North Africa is Berber, not Arab. A sample from the wiki on ‘the Muslim conquest of the Maghreb’:
Hence the rise of Berberism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berberism#Algeria
Things are never as they seem.
I wrote that North Africa is Berber, not Arab.
That is not quite true of Egypt. Egypt is historically neither Arab nor Berber. This lady will tell you all about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rt6Rdnffpo
The Egyptians had their own language, ‘Coptic’, before it was swamped by Arabic. It still is spoken today ritually within the Christian community of Egypt (much like Hebrew was among Jews in Europe).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?x-yt-cl=84503534&v=aoGLK1ckRXo&x-yt-ts=1421914688
It turns out that Arabs and Muslims are among the great empire builders. They don’t talk about that, however.
Here’s a local variety of conquest and Holocaust denial.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menehune
Denial. It ain’t just in Egypt.
(Get it? “De Nile” is a river. Also, modern Egyptians deny they were conquered and colonized by Arabs.)
On the subject of national amnesia over Japanese war crimes, here is the textbook case (pun intended). Japanese history schoolbooks have long been accused of glossing over the events of WW2.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_history_textbook_controversies
On the other hand, those who live in glass houses should not throw stones.
If a national culture represses its collective memory, perhaps the issue emerges in an unconscious form in popular entertainment. The 1999 classic Japanese psychological horror movie “Audition” is considered by many to be perhaps the scariest movie ever made. (It ranked 11 on Time Out’s list of best horror films.) What is fascinating is the way the film subtly moves between genres, and is only partly a ‘horror movie’. In fact, the two halves of the movie are really two different movies (in the first half, things are nice on the outside…). It does mirror the Japanese denial of Japanese war crimes.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x13y9gh_audition-1999-pt-1_creation
The 1997 Japanese thriller “Cure” is practically a study of war crimes committed by ordinary people, involving hypnotism and amnesia. (Interestingly, the wiki states that “In 2012, South Korean film director Bong Joon-ho listed the film as one of the greatest films of all time.”)
http://www.veoh.com/watch/v20989506QXmmKMyb?h1=Cure+%281997%29+*+aKa+Kyua
I vaguely remember seeing a documentary on the psychology of mass movements. In particular, it was explained how a human group will tend to idealize itself in proportion to group cohesion and its stringent demands. The stricter the group, the more it takes itself seriously. This is expressed in the reverence of a figurehead (who is actually a very ordinary person) on whom love is projected. At the same time, the flaws and failings of the group are denied and repressed, and are psychologically projected onto people outside the group. That is, outsiders are scapegoated and demonized. There are two BBC documentaries in which this might have been explained:
“The Nazis: A Warning from History”
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xq1ym0_the-nazis-a-warning-from-history-1-helped-into-power_lifestyle
“Century of the Self”
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-century-of-the-self/
Here is an interesting map of the Ottoman Empire’s reach into Europe centuries ago:
http://f.tqn.com/y/asianhistory/1/S/9/J/-/-/OttomanMap1700.jpg
Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Ukraine, Moldova, Slovakia, Croatia and Serbia were all under the rule of the Muslim Turks.
While the West was colonizing the world, Muslims were colonizing the West.
This is partly a story of technology. The Turks had an army with canon that rivaled the firepower of western armies, but they lacked the kind of ships that European nations had that could mount this heavy canon.
It is also a story about human nature. It seems that when people or nations have the same type of technology, their behavior is not so different from one another. Although the West might have considered itself manifestly superior to other civilizations by dint of the relative ease of acquiring colonies, the Turks disprove this general feeling of supremacy. Conversely, Muslims cannot be so self-righteous about how they were later colonized by the West.
And so this is also the story of selective amnesia. There is very little talk today about how Islam once colonized the West through military conquest.
Here’s another nifty map of Moslem Europe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestantism_and_Islam#Early_religious_accommodation_.2815th.E2.80.9317th_centuries.29
While Moslems were colonizing southeastern Europe, the rest of Europe was locked in religious warfare between Catholic and Protestant.
Moreover, Protestants were allied with the Moslems (at least initially). This is partly motivated by ‘ideology’ (to use the term broadly). Both Protestants and Muslims are opposed to idolatry, in which the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox faiths were perceived to indulge. But it is also motivated by strategic realism. “My enemy’s enemy is my friend.” If it had been Protestants who were on the borders of an Islamic empire, the Catholics might have been allied with the Moslems.
Also, the Moslems were quite tolerant, and did not force Christians to convert to Islam. Again, this is partly ideological. Moslems are required by their faith to tolerate their fellow monotheists of the Book, Christians and Jews. But it was also practical and economic, since Moslems in the Ottoman Empire were taxed at a much, much lower rate than Christians and Jews were, so that conversion to Islam would have undermined the Empire’s finances.
Yet another fascinating map:
https://bufordworld.wikispaces.com/file/view/BYZANTINE%20MAP.jpg/485046374/800×591/BYZANTINE%20MAP.jpg
It is the Christian (Eastern Orthodox) Byzantine Empire at different stages of its history.
It’s remarkably similar to the later (Moslem) Ottoman Empire.
Just how did this Christian part of the world become Moslem? It’s not just due to the superior military might of the Turks. The Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox faiths (IIRC) just did not like each other, and so cooperation between them eventually broke down. And so Islam spread. The same seems to have been true of Catholics and Protestants. People who are most similar often exaggerate their differences. This is not, strictly speaking, rational.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differences