WhirledView

Where are the Steeples of Riyadh?

Patricia Lee Sharpe

The news story that voters, by a bare majority, have banned construction of new minarets  in Switzerland seems to have very strong legs.  Western liberals are appalled at the bigotry.  Muslims generally are taking offense. My first impulse, as one of those liberals, was to produce a satire, which I’ll stand by, but I’d like to pursue the matter more directly here.

Heated Rhetoric

Already the web abounds with vehement postings claiming that Christians are free to build houses of worship in various Muslim countries, with or without steeples, with or without permission to ring bells.  There are equally strident pieces to the contrary.  One thing should be clear. Bigotry in one country does not justify bigotry in return—and yet, religious sentiments and human emotions being what they are, tit-for-tat practices are bound to be advocated.

Most Muslim countries are not nearly so restrictive as Saudi Arabia which forbids the importation of a single  Bible for personal use.  But, in or out of the Muslim world, attitudes toward minorities’ religious rights vary so enormously, information touching on tolerance and intolerance is so anecdotal, practice so often departs from noble constitutional language and rhetoric serves mainly to lob verbal missiles across walls of willful misunderstanding and naked impermeable hostility. 

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Sorting out this mishmash is well nigh impossible, so let’s start from scratch, again.  Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which came into effect on December 10, 1948, contains the following language:

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

In many places today, constitutions written in consonance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights notwithstanding, there is in fact no freedom of religion or conscience.  In other places, law and practice hew fairly close to Article 18.  However, even in these very happy countries (from a liberal’s point of view), disputes arise over claims of unequal treatment.  Given the degree to which diverse people migrate from country to country and belief communities hive off into new neighborhoods, it might be wise to call an interfaith, interdenominational conference to define more specifically what those universal rights entail, not only on paper, but in practice.  As we all know, various sorts of red tape can and do frustrate many beautifully written, well meant laws.

Thoughts on South Africa, Zimbabwe, Israel and Palestine

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

I was mostly on retreat last week, which is why I wasn’t posting, but only as a commuter, so I was able to sneak a look at two PBS programs that turned out to be entirely consistent with what I was doing during the daytime.  I saw the Masterpiece Contemporary presentation of Endgame, an utterly compelling docu-drama about the secret negotiations that preceded the  official negotiations for the end of apartheid in South Africa and a Bill Moyers interview with South African jurist Richard Goldstone, who led the UN commission of inquiry into human rights abuses by Israel and by Hamas last year.  These are the thoughts that emerged.   They begin with Zimbabwe.... 

Banes of Zimbabwe

Robert Mugabe, I suspect, calculated that a power-sharing agreement with Morgan Tsvangirai would placate the West and bring in the big bucks he needs to provide food and rudimentary survival services to a population he has ravaged and terrorized.  Dutifully, his new prime minister set out on a begging trip, hoping to convince prospective donors that the shotgun marriage was cozy and legit.  When the would-be saviors, U.S. and European, saw through the ruse and refused to cough up enough to suit the white-baiting octogenarian president, Mugabe seems to have lost interest in the PR value of minimal cooperation with Tsvangirai, who is now more or less on strike.  So Mugabe has resumed his well-honed harangue: all of Zimbabwe’s current miseries can be traced to colonialism, even if Zimbabwe was in terrific economic shape when the British left in 1980.

Meanwhile, starving, sick, miserable and thoroughly desperate refugees finally began streaming into South Africa from neighboring Zimbabwe.  The result: murderous local mobs pushing back from South African townships whose residents have not prospered as they had hoped in the years since apartheid gave way to majority rule.  Their cry: how can we share when we have so little?  Although South African police managed to quell the worst of the violence, South Africa has continued its policy of not seriously pressuring Mugabe to reverse course or to resign, despite urging by the U.S. and others.  African nations, for obvious reasons, are very touchy about sovereignty. 

The good news is that South Africa itself has not been destabilized by spillover from disarray next door.  Nor has the post-Mandela leadership adopted the poisonous anti-White propaganda and policies of the Mugabe regime.  Whites continue to be a relatively prosperous minority in South Africa where they have a significant presence in urban and rural economies.  Whites also continue to be personally safe, as far as anyone is safe in South Africa’s crime-ridden cities.  This accord didn’t happen by chance.  Unlike Zimbabwe, where Mugabe is the black mirror image of the implacable white racist Ian Smith, South Africa has produced some remarkable leaders, men who saw that retribution, deserved or not, was no way to achieve stability and prosperity in a post-apartheid country.

South African Treasures

South Africa was blessed with Nelson Mandela, who became the reincarnated country’s first president, with Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu who served as conscience for the reborn country, and with a Boer realist  F.W. de Klerk who knew when the game of white monoply on power was over.  South Africa was also blessed with a nationalist party whose millitant wing  was willing to lay down arms without preconditions and let the party leaders join in the process of writing a new constitution.   Long jailed lawyer and African National Congress leader  Nelson Mandela would have as Vice Presidents ANC activist Tabo Mbeki, who would succeed Mandela as president, and—yes!—that very same F.W. de Klerk.  Finally, instead of setting up a war crimes court, the new government chose to conduct a truth and reconciliation process: tell the world exactly what you did, however horrible, and you’ll be free to build a new South Africa with us. 

Confessing is hard.  Letting go of vengeance is equally hard.  By and large, the process seems to have worked. The new South Africa was made possible by realism and idealism, by mediation, negotiation and diplomacy, plus a willingness to live and work together and a disposition to try and trust one another.  The economics, however, have been a little disappointing. South Africa may be the most prosperous sub-Saharan country, but not all share equally in that GNP.  Some Blacks have become very very rich.  Others are hardly better off than they were under the Boers, which makes for anger.

The US, the P+5 and the Iranians: From Prelude to First Movement

By Patricia H. Kushlis

As I watched the ever higher leaps and increasingly complex pirouettes taking place over the past few weeks leading up to the P5+1 (The Five Permanent Members of the UN Security Council and Germany) talks with the Iranians that began October 1 in Geneva, Switzerland it seemed to me that much of the rhetoric, the last minute “revelations” over a previously secret/not-so secret nuclear site near Qom and the bombast – ending with an Iranian pyrotechnic display of mid-range missile prowess – were, in fact, part of a complex prelude, or overture leading up to the real event: the opening of serious negotiations between the US and Iran for this first time since 1979.

These actions were scene-setters, as it were, with the US and Iran jockeying for position before the serious stuff of which negotiations are made began.

Whether or not September’s 2009 overture was a 21^st century sequel to Tchaikovsky’s 1812 is another question – but in any event – everyone played his or her part to the hilt. This included Iranian “canon volleys” in the finale.

Now, would the US right and left wings and the Israeli "bomb-Iran-now" lobby please sit down, open ears and stuff cotton in mouths – because the Obama administration orchestrated this introduction to what portends to be difficult and complex negotiations - likely complete with starts, stops, sputters and carpet trading - masterfully. The Iranians clearly took note.

Lemon Trees, Olive Trees and Orange Trees: Israel Needs a Better Narrative

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

While both Hamas and Israel may be guilty of war crimes against civilians last winter, a U.N. fact-finding mission has concluded that Israel carried out “a deliberate disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize” the people of Gaza.  This, sadly, is not the first time Israel has been accused of gross disproportionality in response to violence originating in Gaza, which is one very important reason why so many people who used to be Israeli supporters are not very sympathetic anymore.

When I was growing up, we were taught in school to admire Israel because hard-working farmers had planted lush, well-irrigated orange orchards in a desert—an arid, neglected, largely uninhabited land that was Jewish by right of prior possession, to say nothing of the blood-bathed, guilt-inducing politics that had brought the modern state of Israel into being.

Those Other Trees

Only much later did I learn of the much-cherished lemon trees that were being burnt or uprooted when Palestinian houses were bombed or bulldozed by the Israeli army.  Or become aware of the countless acres of olive trees, some extremely ancient, that were being destroyed to build Jewish settlements on conquered and occupied lands—and more recently to make way for a wall routed so as to appropriate as much land as possible lest a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine stand-off actually be put into practice. 

Never in school did I hear about Irgun, the Jewish terrorist organization whose leaders, years later, would command respect, although evidently their counterparts in Hamas are never to be talked to.  Don't even think about respect!  Furthermore, much to my shame, I preserved for far too long my orange-orchard fantasy by not paying sufficient attention to some very ugly cases of what we now call ethnic cleansing—murderous operations to rid the newly born state of Israel of its inconvenient population of Arabs.  Evidently, the land had not been vacant!

The Eye for an Eye Fallacy

There’s a reason for my willful blindness.  My family was not Jewish, but my political consciousness was pricked to life by the mistreatment of Jews in my own country as well as by what my childish eyes saw in the news reels toward the end of World War II.  As a little kid, I saw the bodies of the dead piled like firewood and the equally skeletal bodies of the barely living clustered at the gates of liberated concentration camps.  At the same time, I also saw signs in America saying “Gentiles only.” I heard neighbors worrying about the neighborhood “going Jewish.” I read about “Jewish quotas” at Princeton and Yale.  And I saw a connection. 

Reform in Iran: Let It Be

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

It would help if we [Americans] could learn occasionally to let things seek an indigenous solution.
                                                                                                        Barbara Tuchman                                                                                               
Often, during the run up to the recent Iranian presidential elections and since, U.S. President Barack Obama has been criticized by Republican hawks for not more robustly injecting himself  into the process.  No one who accesses WhirledView will be unaware of the vigorous campaigning of the Iranian opposition to Mahmud Ahmedinejad’s re-election, the numbers and enthusiasm of voters, the charges of a rigged election, the prolonged public protests, the arrests, the mass "trials" of reformists big and small now underway.  Always, it seemed,  Obama’s comments, were a little behind the curve, responding to events, not orchestrating them.

In fact, the Obama approach was inspired and just right.  At various times during the hard fought Iranian election campaign, defenders of the Ahmedinejad regime attempted to dismiss the reformers as tools of the U.S. or, more often, of Britain, home of the BBC, that very annoying purveyor of trustworthy news. (Would that VOA were still respected for its hard news!)  But the charges never stuck.  The opposition wasn’t bought.  It was heart-felt.  It was home-grown.

Not so, insisted the prosecutors in Tehran's four (so far) “show trials,” although the Arab Press is evidently not buying that line.  The Arab News ran a prescient pre-election piece, but has run no commentary since, a prudent wait-and-see stance, no doubt.   An article on Al Arabiya’s web-site features reformists’ charges of “mass burials” of murdered protesters and other alleged hard-liners’ abuses.  It also ran another long article headlined “Reformists and Khatami Aids on Trial,” in which charges and denials of Western interference are both mentioned more or less in passing.  Other Arab sources make no mention of the government’s charges, discounting them by silence.  This is true even of Aljezeera, that supposedly anti-U.S. TV operation.  Now it may be that Sunni Arab sources might not be all that deferential to a non-Arab government run by Shi’ite ayatollahs.  And yet, nationalism runs strong in the Middle East. If the evidence were strong enough, the Arab press would find it hard not to jump on the bandwagon.

There is, of course, pretty good reason for Iranian hard-liners in control of the government to suffer from some paronoia.  The Islamic Republic was founded on, among other things, a rejection of American influence in Iranian affairs.  The notorious embassy hostage situation was really just pay back in spades.  

But old habits die hard.  Back in 2006 the Bush administration was, quite noisily, planning to spend $85 million “to promote democracy” in Iran, while by mid 2008 “Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran,” according to the usually well informed Seymour M. Hersh. 

Yet, even then, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were reporting that

prominent activists and political opponents of Iran’s hard-line administration are warning that U.S. funds designated to help civic groups in Iran could backfire.  In fact, even reformers would resent foreign attempts to push Iran in this direction or that.  What’s more, “if activists were to accept U.S. aid, they would immediately be branded U.S. spies and accused of endangering Iran’s national security."

The Ali Al Magrahi Case: Compassion Plus

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

I’ve a wee bit of Scots blood in me, and I’m a wee bit proud of Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill.

Ali al-Megrahi is dying of prostate cancer.  Since he has only a few months to live, he has, in effect, served a life sentence.  Why isn’t this a time for compassion? Why can’t he die in the arms of his mother?  So what if he devotes the enfeebled last months of his life to trying to prove that his conviction for involvement in the Lockerbie bombing was unjust?  Either he comes up with convincing evidence, in which case we can rejoice that a wrong will be minimally undone. Or he comes up with nothing, which means he’s still guilty in the eyes of most of the world. 

As for that brilliantly choreographed welcome home in Libya, maybe it was a promise breached.  Gaddafi père lies low, a bow to decorum, allowing Gaddafi fils to do a little politicking with the nationalist masses, since he hopes to succeed his father as leader of Libya.  Outside Libya, however, only the unredeemably anti-West will not see the wheels-down extravaganza as ungratefulness incarnate and in bad taste, too.  However, in so far as anything else was expected, that was a little naive, it seems to me. 

To the relatives of those who died so horribly at Lockerbie: would you not be willing to consider that this gesture of mercy sends a powerful signal to the Muslim world—a gesture that honors your lost ones in a most noble way?  How wonderful (indeed, how clever) to send a message of compassion to a Muslim population of which the majority do indeed worship God as “the Compassionate.”  Might it not inspire Muslims to respond in kind?  Might it not pull the rug out from under the mass murderers whom the generality of Muslims do not in fact applaud?   Might it not give support to this too silent majority?

Now, I am not naive.  I do not dismiss out of hand the real politik speculations about doing business with Libya that might have played a role in al Megrahi's release, though adequate proof of such possibilities has yet to emerge.  However, Scots being Scots, I could also imagine another non-sentimental consideration, which might be adopted by American prison reformers.  A man who is dying of cancer can do no significant harm.  A man who is dying of cancer has, as I noted above, served out a life term for all practical purposes.  So why not free him, assuming there are loving hands to receive him, and save on the huge cost of keeping a sick man alive?

Let USAID be USAID – Not Let Confusion Reign

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Whatever happened to the U.S. Agency for International Development? Wasn’t it supposed to play a key role in the Obama administration’s accent on diplomacy as a major tool of US foreign policy? Didn’t Hillary Clinton emphasize development as a crucial part of diplomacy – in fact, as important as traditional diplomacy and defense – in dealing with the world? Didn’t Robert Gates support this enthusiastically? Or am I missing something.

After learning last week from an NPR broadcast entitled Diplomacy Under Fire that new State Department Foreign Service Officers should be agronomists, counter-terrorism experts, civilian development, anti-narcotics and democratization specialists rather than masters at traditional State Department skills like political and economic reporting and analysis, negotiation or even running embassies or consulates and dealing with host governments, I wonder what the development officers at USAID are supposed to do. Or, for that matter, if anyone’s home there?

Who is supposed to do traditional diplomatic work?

And if the State Department Foreign Service Officers don’t do the traditional work of running Embassies and Consulates and interacting with host governments and peoples – who is supposed to do it?

I guess this might be one way to eliminate the need for those unsightly fortresses that have sprung up like mushrooms after the rain beginning in 1984.

Just fire – or pension off - the political, economic, administrative, consular and public diplomacy officers who currently staff them or alternatively turn these people into USAID officers who set up shop in remote corners of a country. Then send in demolition squads in a kind of “cash for clunkers embassy” program. This would not only provide work for those proficient in the use of dynamite and nothing better to do with their dubious skills. It might also change America’s face abroad. Who knows, this might just be for the better.

What happens to Consular Services and Public Diplomacy?

That doesn’t address, however, the ongoing need to issue (or not) visas, passports and look after Americans abroad in trouble. This, by the way, is a full time occupation of State Department Consular Officers.

Or, heaven help us, what about those few FSOs who still engage in public diplomacy, e.g. interact with foreign media on a regular basis (and those few American correspondents still abroad), administer educational and other exchange programs, English teaching programs, run the few libraries and cultural centers that still exist and support and enhance visits by American cultural figures? This all used to be done by the US Information Agency before those tasks and staff were slurped up by State and shrink-wrapped and diluted big time.

But back to the USAID crisis and it is a big one.

The problem begins with the lack of leadership. No, I should write LACK OF LEADERSHIP – all caps.

Rafsanjani on Radio!

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Iranian state radio broadcast Friday’s Rafsanjani sermon.  It’s very significant that authorities (including, no doubt, the Supreme Leader) allowed this very carefully constructed, even wily discourse to be heard throughout the country, even though presidential candidates opposing Mahmoud Ahmedinejad had limited access to the public during the elections whose validity is now under fire.  No doubt the text of the sermon has been recorded so that it can be replayed, minutely analyzed—and used.