The American agenda is promoting the rights of homosexuals … I am not against freedom of expression, but this abnormal phenomenon should not be presented as natural. Even if it has roots here, it is rejected by society. And by Islam.

— Mostafa Bakry, an Egyptian newspaper editor and member of parliament, quoted in today’s New York Times Magazine article about homosexuality in Egypt. The Queen Boat incident, in which police raided a floating nightclub on May 11, 2001, and subsequently detained and tortured 52 men, attracted attention in the western press about general human rights — and specifically gay rights — abuses in Egypt. Since campaigning for gay rights can be dismissed as yet another aspect of the West’s agenda of cultural imperialism, human rights groups, such as Amnesty International, have couched discussion of gay rights abuses in the broader context of human rights abuses. Despite local and international attention, raids, attempts at censorship (of scenes, for example, in the recent production of “The Yacoubian Building,”), and social trauma seem undiminished.

Mimi Hanaoka

To much fanfare and publicity, on November 14 South Africa became the first country in Africa to legalize same-sex marriage.  While the future for same-sex couples in South Africa is bright, their prospects elsewhere on the continent are grim. The Independent catalogues some of the statutes against homosexual rights in African countries, which includes up to 14 years imprisonment for homosexual activity in Kenya (although lesbianism is not banned), three years for the same offense in Ethiopia (for gay men and lesbians), and a sentence of up to a decade in prison in Zimbabwe for unnatural sex acts.”

While South Africa certainly is the vanguard for gay rights on the African continent, it faces precious little competition from its neighbors.

Mimi Hanaoka

Wherever communities believe they face persistent discrimination, humiliation, or  marginalization based on ethnic, religious, or other identity markers, they are likely to  assert their identity more aggressively. As long as the source of resentment persists, and  particularly when it is aggravated by increased humiliation or by despair in the normal  political process, moderate leaders will always struggle to match the allure of those who  stoke feelings of collective anger and offer fellowship and redress through exclusivist  ideologies, adversarial politics and violence. Effective counter-measures cannot rely  solely on attacking adherents of such ideologies — in fact such tactics are likely to inflame  the very sentiments they seek to eradicate.

— An excerpt from the Alliance of Civilizations report, which was presented today to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan at a ceremony in Istanbul. The report argues against a notion of a clash of civilizations and claims that politics, and not religion, lie at the source of conflicts which are sometimes couched in religious discourse. The report was written by the Alliance of Civilizations, which consists of international dignitaries — including Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu and former Iranian President Mohammed Khatami — drawn from a variety of faiths, who have met over the past year.

A full copy of the report can be found here.

Mimi Hanaoka

What difference is his execution going to make to chaos in Iraq?  I hate Saddam, but I can’t blame him for the current situation — my country has become the most dangerous place on earth. Where is the freedom the Americans promised?

— Aziz Majeed, a Kurd from Irbil, Iraq, alluding to the increasing chaos in Iraqi cities in the aftermath of Saddam’s sentence to death by hanging. Saddam will be hung, pending appeal, for crimes against humanity he committed in 1982 in Dujail, which is primarily Shia. He organized the slaughter of 148 men and boys in Dujail because there was assassination attempt against him in the city. Barzan al-Tikriti, Saddam Hussein’s half-brother, and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, Iraq’s former chief judge, were also sentenced to death.

Protesters — such as those in Tikrit, Saddam’s hometown — and celebrants — in including those in Sadr City, Najaf, and Baghdad — alike evidence the escalating violence and amplified factionalization that will result from the verdict.

Mimi Hanaoka

This could be the trigger for the grim spiral that produced riots in the north of England five years ago. Only this time the conflict would be much worse. We need to chill.

— Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality in the UK, writing in The Sunday Times about increasingly hostile race relations in the UK. Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, sparked the controversy by making a number of comments in which he expressed his reluctance about speaking with women wearing the niqab, more commonly known as the veil or the Islamic headscarf which only leaves the eyes uncovered. Jack Straw elaborated on his comments in subsequent interviews, explaining his belief that “Communities are bound together partly by informal chance relations between strangers, people acknowledging each other in the street, being able to pass the time of day, sharing just experiences in the street, and that is just made more difficult if people are wearing a veil…that’s just a fact of life.” Far from ushering in a polite debate, the veil — which Prime Minister Tony Blair has called “a mark of separation,” — is being blamed for widening the racial divide.

Mimi Hanaoka

“The [local] priest tells me if I was a good dalit in this life, then in my next life I can be born into a better part of society. [I say] why wait?”

—Narasimha Cherlaguda, a member of the Dalit class (more commonly known as the untouchable caste) in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, explaining his motivation to convert to Buddhism. Although the caste system has been outlawed for more than half a century, Dalits, relegated to the lowest echelons of the Hindu religious social system, still perform menial jobs – such as handling human waste and sweeping streets – and face intimidation and abuse, particularly in urban areas.

Narasimha Cherlaguda will be joining scores of others in his village to participate in a mass conversion on the 60th anniversary of BR Ambedkar’s conversion, along with 100,000 of his supporters, to Buddhism in order to evade the social stigmatization he faced in the Hindu caste system. Anxious about losing its support base, the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) government reclassified both Buddhism and Jainism as sects of Hinduism in an attempt to deny Dalits dignity even in conversion.

Mimi Hanaoka

Muslims have noted with concern that the values of tolerance are eroding and there is now shrinking space for others’ religious, social and cultural values in the west… The running of the footage affected the sensibilities of civilized people and religious beliefs of one fifth of humanity.

— A statement issued by the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, an association which includes 57 member states, referring to footage recently aired on Danish television and on the Internet which showed members of the Danish Peoples’ Party (DPP) in a contest to draw cartoons mocking Islam. The members of the right-wing party who appear in the video were young, drunk, and at a summer camp over a year ago when the footage was taped. Martin Rosengaard Knudsen of the artists’ group Defending Denmark, which produced the video, denied charges of being needlessly provocative and defended the group’s reason for producing the video: “This is not an example of something that is meant to provoke. This is an example to show how things are in Danish politics.” And rightly so — to ignore the social and political milieu that contributes to this anti-immigrant racism in Denmark would only abstract and sensationalize the issue even more.

Mimi Hanaoka

Halloween season is conversion season for some Evangelical Christian churches, and seasonal shows that aim to very literally scare the hell out of unbelievers are being cobbled together in time to save the damned. The highlights at Hell House, New York’s spoof of the morality play that is being constructed in its various incarnations around the U.S., include the death of an AIDS-afflicted gay man, a lesbian committing suicide, and the gory outcome of a failed abortion. For $299 you can even buy your own kit and construct your own Hell House, courtesy of Colorado’s Reverend Keenan Roberts, the pastor of Destiny Church of the Assemblies of God.  If Roberts is to be believed, 13,000 have converted as a result of their visits to Hell Houses, but surely there are better reasons for conversion than being bullied by fear, gore, and bigotry.    

Mimi Hanaoka

Lost beneath the din of accusations of Islamophobia and anger directed towards the Pope during the past week was one of the more curious and tasteless specimens of racism: Dennis Mitsubishi had planned (and has now withdrawn) an advertisement declaring “jihad on the U.S. auto market. The auto dealer, as parts of its “jihad,” would offer  “Fatwa Fridays,” during which sales representatives would distribute toy swords to children.

The Ohio Chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations complained publicly and successfully to have the planned radio advertisement cancelled before it ran. Dennis Mitsubishi of Columbus, Ohio, offered a whimpering apology: “A large number of people have contacted us. Lots of them have seen the humor we were trying to convey, but far too many were clearly bothered by it. This was simply an attempt at humor that fell short.”

The Pope’s statement risked being misconstrued, divorced of its context, and mindlessly repeated for shock value; Dennis Mitsubishi’s planned ad would have simply propagated racism and bigotry.

Mimi Hanaoka

I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address at the University of Regensburg, which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims… These, in fact, were a quotation from a medieval text, which do not in any way express my personal thought… I hope this serves to appease hearts and to clarify the true meaning of my address, which in its totality was, and is, an invitation to frank and sincere dialogue, with mutual respect.

— Pope Benedict XVI, apologizing for the now widely publicized comments he made during a lecture in Germany last week.

The Pope quoted the 14th-century emperor Manuel II Palaeologus during the speech he delivered to scholars at the University of Regensburg, and he presented some of the Byzantine emperor’s comments about the relationship between religion and violence.  Critics, screaming accusations of Islamophobia, have leapt onto the Pope’s quotation of Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus, during which the emperor declared his belief that the promulgation of faith was incompatible with violence: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

Taken out of its academic context and bandied about piecemeal, the Pope’s comments have had a disastrous effect — churches were shot at in the West Bank and Gaza, a 70-year-old nun was shot dead in the Somali capital of Mogadishu, and livid protestors demonstrated in India, Turkey, and in the Iranian holy city of Qom, where cleric Ahmad Khatami addressed the massed protesters. While the Pope is certainly more than an a pure academic, to strip him of any claim to intellectual discourse would be to reduce him to an ineffectual figurehead.  

Mimi Hanaoka