“Teachers and friends have been understanding about my decision to wear the veil for the past seven years, and I hope they will continue to be sympathetic … Maybe we will be able to compromise eventually on the acceptability of a small bonnet or a bandana, instead. If not, I risk missing the final and most important year of my education.”

Sania, a 17-year-old student in Strasbourg, worries that the French ban on conspicuous religious attire in public schools — which includes Muslim headscarves, Jewish yarmulkes, and large Christian crosses — will effectively curtail her education. Two French journalists, Christian Chesnot from Radio France International and Georges Malbruno from Le Figaro, are being held hostage in Iraq by a group demanding that the French ban on religious attire be rescinded. French government spokesman Jean-Francois Cope tersely and firmly told Canal Plus television station: “The law will be applied.”

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“The blood of our husbands and the body parts of our children are our sacrificial offering.”

Eager to capitalize on an expanding Internet audience, Al-Khansa, a new jihadist online magazine directed exclusively at women, incites women to participate in jihad. The BBC cautiously notes that “most of the articles are written as if by women, although it is not clear if they actually were.”

In recent months, governments and political organizations have joined the increasingly desperate scramble to gain a loyal Internet audience; in order to compete with and provide a counterpoint to Hezbollah’s satellite television channel, al-Manar, and the highly popular Qatar-based Al-Jazeera satellite TV station, America now airs the Arabic language Al-Hurra — which means “the free one,” — television network along with Radio Sawa. With Al-Khansa now joining the cacophony of voices, the propaganda wars are steadily escalating.  
  

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“Bush is a tyrant that puts Hitler into the shade and his group of such tyrants is a typical gang of political gangsters,” asserted a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman.

The North Korean ministry spokesman was reacting to a speech that President Bush delivered last week in Wisconsin, during which he stated: “There’s now five countries saying to the tyrant in North Korea, disarm, disarm.”

North Korea reasserted that it now refuses to participate in the working-level talks that would serve as the prelude to the six-nation discussion — which would include delegates from the United States, China, Russia, Japan, South Korea, and North Korea — which is scheduled to occur at the end of next month. The six-party conference will focus on nuclear weapons programs and will be a continuation of the recent round of discussions that took place in June.  

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“The proclivity toward apologetics for enemies of the United States are problems that scholarship on the Middle East shares with other area-studies,” hissed Daniel Pipes in the winter of 1995-1996. Mr. Pipes, the proud winner of this year’s “Islamophobia” Award, issued by the Islamic Human Rights Commission, and who has been called, appropriately, an “anti-Arab propagandist,” is busily threatening academic freedom in American universities. And we should all care.  

Mr. Pipes is the director and founder of the Middle East Forum, a think tank that claims that it “works to define and promote American interests in the Middle East,” which, in turn, established a sinister program which it benignly calls “Campus Watch.” The Middle East Forum outlines the deeply troubling and menacing big-brother mission of the Campus Watch program:

The program, established in September of 2002, monitors the often erroneous and biased teachings and writings of U.S. professors specializing in the Middle East, with the goal of improving the scholarly study of the region. A Campus Speakers Bureau provides speakers who can provide accurate and balanced information to American students in the classroom.

The goal of the Campus Watch program is as evident as it is reprehensible: to promote Mr. Pipe’s virulently anti-Arab approach to Middle Eastern studies and to blacklist those professors who refuse to share his vision.

Dissatisfied with merely blacklisting professors through the Campus Watch program, Pipes seeks to cut funding, doled out by the Department of Education under the Title VI program, for Middle East studies programs housed in universities. In his academically misguided but characteristically pert tone, he recently wrote: Middle East Studies: Wasted Money. If Middle Eastern studies cannot be taught according to Mr. Pipes’ often-discredited academic and political inclinations, they should not, apparently, be taught at all.

Lest time be overly kind to Mr. Pipes and wipe our memories of the fact that he wrote, in 1990, that “Western European societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene … All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most,” we should maintain our own watch on Mr. Pipes if we wish to safeguard the academic freedom and integrity of American universities and research institutions.  

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In an impassioned but garbled and confused rant, Sam Harris argues in the LA Times that religion lies at the core of what appears, in his view, to be an inevitable and apocalyptic clash of civilizations. It is a shame, then, that Mr. Harris’ conviction is as firm as his understanding of history is shaky.

At best, Mr. Harris has made the extraordinarily unique observation that religion, like anything else, can be manipulated. At worst, he belligerently ignores history (forgetting the violent traditions of Christian aggression and Buddhist sectarian division), unproductively and ethnocentrically demonizes Islam (asserting that “a social policy based on the Koran poses even greater dangers” than one based on Christianity), and demands what is definitionally impossible (demanding that we accept faith only if it passes the litmus test of some vague sense of what constitutes “reason”).

Mr. Harris asks if it is not “time we subjected our religious beliefs to the same standards of evidence we require in every other sphere of our lives,” and in doing so he misses the point; by demanding “proof” of the validity of a particular religion, Mr. Harris only mires himself further in the morass of dogmatic mudslinging. To judge a religious adherent’s actions as proof or disproof of the validity of his faith is preposterous; if this were our standard of judging the validity of a religion, there would likely be no faith unscarred by the shameful acts of its believers.  

Furthermore, such an understanding of religion also blinds Mr. Harris to the political and social contingencies of our lives. Mr. Harris writes

“Why did 19 well-educated, middle-class men trade their lives for the privilege of killing thousands of our neighbors? Because they believed, on the authority of the Koran, that they would go straight to paradise for doing so.”

While religious belief may have motivated the Al-Qaeda suicide bombers, many other crucial factors contributed to their anti-American sentiment and the resurgence of politically Islamist movements that ultimately led to the tragedy of 9/11 — the Arab defeat in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war; the failure of “modern secular nationalism;” the Egyptian-Israeli war and Arab oil embargo in 1973; the Iranian Revolution in 1979; the Wahhabi-oil connection; and the concrete consequences of modernization in the Muslim world, such as rapid population growth, an increase in urban population, mass literacy, a large young segment of the population, and high poverty and unemployment rates. It is incorrect and unproductive to characterize an essentially political movement, such as Al-Qaeda, as a religious abnormality.

In calling for an undefined rationalistic scrutiny of religion, Mr. Harris merely digs himself deeper into a dogmatic quarrel. If we are to understand the rise in radically violent and politically Islamist movements, we should not focus our energies on close readings of religious texts; rather, we must come to a more complete understanding of the historical, social, and political contingencies that coincide with religious belief.  

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Fifty-nine years after Japan surrendered in World War II, several Japanese ministers took the anniversary of the defeat to visit Yasukuni shrine and pay their respects to, among other people, wartime prime minister and convicted war criminal General Hideki Tojo.

China was livid as it usually is when a Japanese politician visits the controversial shrine. Yasukuni Shrine, founded in 1869, is dedicated to the souls of the approximately 2.5 million Japanese war dead, and the souls of innocent children and war criminals alike are venerated in the shrine. Hundreds of thousands of visitors flock to Yasukuni every year, and the shrine functions as a symbol of both respectful patriotism and militaristic nationalism.  

Politicians visiting Yasukuni are certainly not unusual; several Japanese prime ministers have visited the shrine — the current prime minister Junichiro Koizumi has visited Yasukuni four times since he took office in 2001 — and cabinet ministers pay their respects to the souls of the dead at the Shinto shrine. The subtle nuance, which has never quite been resolved, is whether these visits can ever be completely personal and private. Prime Minister Koizumi has dismissed this nuance as rubbish, and stated “I’m both a public and private person.”

Prime Minister Koizumi has defended his controversial visits as personal trips during which he prays for peace and expresses his desire that Japan should never again go to war again since Yasukuni does, after all, translate as “peaceful country.” Given Japan’s recent and usually eager participation in the war and occupation in Iraq, let’s hope that the ministers’ purported desire for peace has not been complicated or compromised.

Mimi Hanaoka

The Indian censorship board’s final solution is, it seems, total censorship.

The national film board has banned screenings of Final Solution, a film that documents the riots that ensued in the western Indian state of Gujarat in 2002 when 59 Hindus died in an arson attack. Hindu mobs blamed Muslim mobs for the attack, the city was plagued by rioting, chaos, and vigilante justice, and over 1,000 people, mainly Muslims, were left dead.  

The arson attack polarized the community primarily because it occurred on a train carrying Hindu activists who were returning from the temple at Ayodhya, a highly contested religious site. In 1989, Hindus began a campaign to build a Hindu temple on the grounds of a 16th century mosque in Ayodhya. Three years later, Hindu extremists demolished the ancient Babri mosque. Gujarat was ripe for inter-religious violence, and the attack in 2002 set the powder keg aflame.  

Final Solution, then, should be welcomed as a documentary that both sheds light on the situation and calls critical attention to the strife and suffering that has been escalating in Gujarat. The Indian censorship board, citing the possibility that the film may incite yet more violence, has banned the film, which won both the Wolfgang Staudte award and the Special Jury Award at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, in addition to the Best Documentary and Critic’s Choice awards at the Hong Kong International Film Festival.  

Director  Rakesh Sharma appropriately stated that the “people who make hate speeches should be banned and not the film-maker who records it.

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“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful — and so are we … They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people — and neither do we,” President Bush announced to Pentagon officials during a recent signing ceremony for the $417 billion defense bill.  

While the assertion that the American government is hard at work trying to harm its citizens was a little surprising, perhaps we should be accustomed to President Bush’s blunders by now; the president has confidently claimed that “it’s the executive branch’s job to interpret law,” and he has also made the astute observation that “the illiteracy level of our children are appalling.”  

Jacob Weisberg, editor of Slate magazine, has delighted in collecting President Bush’s malapropisms and verbal blunders, and has written The Deluxe Election-Edition Bushisms: The First Term, in His Own Special Words, chronicling the president’s attempts to navigate the complex terrain of the English language. In his hilarious and vitriolic article about the president, Weisberg quotes Paul O’Neill, a former treasury secretary, as saying that “the President is like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people. There is no discernible connection.”

In Weisberg’s estimation, Bush’s inarticulacy — and many argue downright stupidity — is actually a selling point because it makes him a man of the people: “I think his inarticulacy is part of it, people identify with his problem. You know, it’s hard to speak in public — one makes mistakes, it can be embarrassing. And this bonds him to people.”

While Mr. Bush’s perpetual struggle with language has provided Americans hours of mean-spirited entertainment, let’s hope we’re not treated to another four years of such fun.

Mimi Hanaoka

“Just because he’s Israeli and I’m Palestinian, we’re not allowed to be together … And just because we choose to be together, now we have like some kind of curse, not to be around the people that we love: his family, my family.” Abir, a Palestinian woman married to an Israeli, is speaking about an Israeli law that may tear her family — which includes their new two-month-old son — apart.

The Israeli parliament passed the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law on July 31, 2003, and in so doing prohibited family unification for Israelis who are married to Palestinians from the Occupied Territories. The law, which is a temporary measure instituted by the Israeli government as a measure to protect its citizens, has been extended for another six months. The Israeli government views this law as both temporary and necessary; according to the Israeli government, 23 Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories who obtained residency permits during the past three years to live in Israel for the purpose of family unification have been “involved in providing meaningful assistance in hostile activity against state security.”

Amnesty International has condemned the law on the basis that it “institutionalizes a form of racial discrimination based on ethnicity or nationality,” and the UN Committee on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination has asked that Israel repeal the law.

While the law has significant political ramifications, it is the personal impact of the law that is the most heartwrenching. As Murad, Abir’s husband, states: “Here is our home, here is our land, and here is our family and our tribe and my people and my schools and my work. And I see myself here and not in any other place in the world.

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In 2002, an Iranian history professor asserted that Muslims “should not blindly follow” clerics. The result? He was accused of apostasy and sentenced to death for blasphemy.

Hashem Aghajari, a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war and a member of the Islamic Revolutionary Mujahidin Organisation, a left-wing reformist political group, stated in 2002 that Muslims were not “monkeys” and that they “should not blindly follow” the clerics that lead Iran, a nation that is a mélange of an Islamic theocracy and a democracy. He was promptly handed a death sentence and has spent the past two years in jail. Thanks to popular protest and indignation, however, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has ordered a review of his case, and Aghajari has been freed on bail.

Overwhelmed with joy at his provisional freedom, Aghajari stated: “I hope there will come a day when no-one goes to prison in Iran for his opinions, let alone be sentenced to death … I hope that all prisoners of conscience who have committed no crime will be released soon.”

Iran may not be the glorious Islamic republic that the revolutionaries envisioned in 1979 — indeed, this year hardline clerics abused their power and excluded approximately 2,500 pro-reform candidates from this year’s election — but this event speaks to the power of popular protest to effect change. While American foreign policy has tended to regard Iran — or any theocracy — as anathema to democracy, we should see this event as heartwarming evidence that popular opinion can have a voice in a democratic theocracy.

Mimi Hanaoka

The latest installment of despotism and insanity has been revealed in a poem: “The New Turkmen Spirit.”

The poem, written by President Saparmurat Niyazov of Turkmenistan and presented to his nation, begins with conceit and crescendos to a tone of authoritarian caution. The poem opens with the declaration that “I am the Turkmen spirit, reborn to bring you a golden age,” and includes the unambiguous and ominous warning: “My sight is sharp – I see everything … If you are honest in your deeds, I see this; if you commit wrongdoing, I see that too.” The spirit of Stalin is alive and well, it seems, in President Niyazov.

President Saparmurat Niyazov of Turkmenistan — a Central Asian nation sandwiched in the region between Afghanistan, Iran, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, and which sits on the fifth largest reserves of natural gas in the world — is well-known for his hubris and his tyranny. Since he became president of the republic in 1991, President Niyazov has renamed some months of the year after himself, inscribed words from his own book next to verses of the Qur’an on a mosque, and has imprisoned over 40 opposition activists since November of 2002.

Given that Robert Templer, the Central Asia Division Director of the International Crisis Group, warned in March of 2003 that Turkmenistan could “become the next Afghanistan … and … a danger to the rest of the world,” we might do well to keep a wary eye on President Niyazov.

Mimi Hanaoka

Beheading, lethal injection, the firing squad, and being beaten to death by sweet-smelling wood (a method of dispatch reserved for royals) have been used variously as methods of execution in Thailand, but the same nagging question persists: Can the death penalty ever be humane?

Until January of 2004, when lethal injection was introduced as the official mode of execution, criminals in Thailand were executed by firing squad (and until the 1930s, they were beheaded). As part of this transition, the director of the Thai prison system sent prison officials to Texas on an educational trip to study the process of lethal injection. Nathee Chitsawang, Director General of Prisons, explained: “It is more humane than when we used the firing squad … With the old method, sometimes they were crying and shouting … and sometimes they did not die immediately, so we had to take them and shoot again.” Nathee Chitsawang’s statement should sustain a tired but crucial aspect of the debate about the death penalty — whether execution can ever be humane.

There are legal, social, and moral arguments made for the death penalty, and there are deeply rooted religious convictions that undergird concepts of just punishment, including the death penalty, in the American and British criminal justice systems. In his 1996 book “God’s Just Vengeance,” Timothy Gorringe dissected Western concepts of penal strategies and asserted that Christian theology has been and continues to be the powerful undercurrent that lies beneath the legal system. The question of the humanity of the death penalty, however, cuts across cultural barriers and the issue of racial inequity in the administration of capital punishment and applies to the issue in all regions.  
  
Amporn Birtling, one of the 883 inmates on death row in Thailand’s Bangkwang prison, will only receive two hours warning before he is executed.  He states: “I have no clue when I will die … they could inject me today or tomorrow.”

While his execution will no doubt be horrific, the waiting process has created a hell unto itself in the prison that is notoriously known as the “Bangkok Hilton.”

Mimi Hanaoka