[I thought that this piece, from today's New York Times, would be of interest.]
September 8, 2004
School Siege in Russia Sparks Self-Criticism in Arab World
By JOHN KIFNER
BEIRUT, Sept 8 — The brutal school siege in Russia, with hundreds of children dead and wounded, has sparked an unusual round of self-criticism and introspection in the Muslim and Arab world.
"It is a certain fact that not all Muslims are terrorists, but it is equally certain, and exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists are Muslims," Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, the general manager of the widely watched Al-Arabiya satellite television station wrote in one of the most striking of these commentaries.
Writing in the pan-Arab newspaper Al-Sharq al-Awsat, Mr. Rashed said it was "shameful and degrading" that not only were the Beslan hijackers Muslims, but also the murderers of Nepalese workers in Iraq, the attackers of residential towers in Riyadh and Khobar, Saudi Arabia, the women believed to have blown up two Russian airplanes last week and Osama bin Laden himself.
"The majority of those who manned the suicide bombings against buses, vehicles, schools, houses and buildings, all over the world, were Muslim," he wrote. "What a pathetic record. What an abominable `achievement.' Does this tell us anything about ourselves, our societies and our culture?"
Mr. Rashed, like several other commentators, singled out Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a senior Egyptian cleric living in Qatar who broadcasts an influential program on Al Jazeera television and who has issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, calling for the killing of American and foreign "occupiers" in Iraq, military and civilian.
"Let us contemplate the incident of this religious Sheikh allowing, nay even calling for, the murder of civilians," he wrote. "How can we believe him when he tells us that Islam is the religion of mercy and peace while he is turning it into a religion of blood and slaughter?"
Mr. Rashed recalled that in the past, leftists and nationalists in the Arab world were considered a "menace" for their adoption of violence, and the mosque was a "haven" of "peace and reconciliation" by contrast.
"Then came the Neo-Muslims," he said. "An innocent and benevolent religion, whose verses prohibit the felling of trees in the absence of urgent necessity, that calls murder the most heinous of crimes, that says explicitly that if you kill one person you have killed humanity as a whole, has been turned into a global message of hate and a universal war cry."
A columnist for the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Siyassa, Faisal al-Qina'I, also took aim at Sheikh Qaradawi. "It is saddening," he wrote, "to read and hear from those who are supposed to be Muslim clerics, like Yusuf al-Qaradawi and others of his kind, that instead of defending true Islam they encourage these cruel actions and permit decapitation, hostage-taking and murder."
In Jordan, a group of Muslim religious figures, meeting with the religious affairs minister, Ahmed Heleil, issued a statement today saying the seizing of the school and subsequent massacre was dedicated to distorting the pure image of Islam.
"This terrorist act contradicts the principles of our true Muslim religion and its noble values," the statement said.
Writing in the Jordanian daily Al-Dustour, a columnist, Bater Wardam, noted a propensity in the Arab world to "place responsibility for the crimes of Arabic and Muslim terrorist organizations on the Mossad, the Zionists and the American intelligence, but we all know that this is not the case."
"They came from our midst," he wrote of those who had kidnapped and murdered civilians in Iraq, blown up commuter trains in Spain, turned airliners into bombs and shot the children in Ossetia.
"They are Arabs and Muslims who pray, fast, grow beards, demand the wearing of veils and call for the defense of Islamic causes. Therefore we must all raise our voices, disown them and oppose all these crimes."
In Beirut, Rami G. Khouri wrote in the Daily Star that while most Arabs "identified strongly and willingly" with armed Palestinian or Lebanese guerrillas fighting Israeli occupation, "all of us today are dehumanized and brutalized by the images of Arabs kidnapping and beheading foreign hostages."
Calling for a global strategy to reduce terror, he traced what he called "this ugly trek" in the Arab world to "the home-grown sense of indignity, humiliation, denial and degradation that has increasingly plagued many of our young men and women."
A Palestinian columnist, Hassan al-Batal, wrote in the official Palestinian Authority newspaper Al-Ayyam that the "day of horror in the school" should be designated an international day for the condemnation of terrorism. "There are no mitigating circumstances for the inhuman horror and the height of barbarism" at the school, he wrote.
In Egypt, the semi-official newspaper Al-Ahram called the events "an ugly crime against humanity."
In Saudi Arabia, newspapers tightly controlled by the government — which finds itself under attack from Islamic fundamentalists — were even more scathing.
Under the headline "Butchers in the Name of Allah," a columnist in the government daily Okaz, Khaled Hamed al-Suleiman, wrote that "the propagandists of Jihad succeeded in the span of a few years in distorting the image of Islam.
"They turned today's Islam into something having to do with decapitations, the slashing of throats, abducting innocent civilians and exploding people. They have fixed the image of Muslims in the eyes of the world as barbarians and savages who are not good for anything except slaughtering people," he wrote, adding:
"The time has come for Muslims to be the first to come out against those interested in abducting Islam in the same way they abducted innocent children. This is the true Jihad these days and this is our obligation, as believing Muslims, towards our monotheistic religion."
Saturday, August 28, 2004
In a posting yesterday, Rick wrote:
"I wonder if Michael would mind providing, for MOJ readers and bloggers, a bit more about how it is that a liberal state may speak about its own legitimacy and fundamental norms in religious terms (something that Michael's book on Human Rights discussed in detail), and may even authorize mild 'establishments' of religion, without setting up what Wilmot fears, namely, a 'religious test on membership in the political community.'"
I've tried to do just what Rick has asked me to do, in an essay I recently contributed to a symposium honoring Judge John T. Noonan's work. The essay has now been published, but I've provided a link below to my pre-publication copy of the essay, which is available from SSRN. The citation: Michael J. Perry, What Do the Free Exercise and Nonestablishment Norms Forbid? Reflections on the Constitutional Law of Religious Freedom, 1 University of St. Thomas Law Journal 459 (2003).
Here's the link to my pre-publication copy:
http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=537543
Michael P.
Thursday, August 26, 2004
I think that many readers of this blog will be interested in the following essay--which, in my view, is excellent:
Stephen J. Pope, The Magisterium's Arguments Against "Same-Sex Marriage": An Ethical Analysis and Critique, Theological Studies, vol. 65, no. 3, September 2004, pp. 530-565.
Theological Studies, as many of you know, is published by Theological Studies, Inc., for the Society of Jesus in the United States. Stephen Pope is associate professor of theology at Boston College.
Michael
Tuesday, August 24, 2004
... in this review of my book Under God?--and in my response thereto. Both are forthcoming in the periodical Conversations in Religion and Theology, published by Blackwell.
Book Review
Michael
Tuesday, August 17, 2004
This week's COMMONWEAL, which many of you no doubt read, is particularly rich, I think. There are two excellent "Open Letters"--one to John Kerry, the other to the U.S. Catholic bishops. There are also two articles well worth our attention--one by MOJ's own Rick Garnett, on "the Supreme Court on religious freedom"; the other by Charles Morris, "Economic Injustice for Most: From the New Deal to the Raw Deal". Each is these four items is included in the attached PDF document:
Commonweal.pdf
Michael
Monday, August 16, 2004
[I thought that the following item, by Martin Marty, would interest readers of this blog.]
Sightings 8/16/04
The Missionary Position
-- Martin E. Marty
"Strange bedfellows: Paul Wolfowitz and Hillary Clinton, Donald Rumsfeld
and Michael Ignatieff, Thomas Friedman and William Safire" applauded the
last State of the Union Address (2002) with its claim (paraphrased
accurately here by anthropologist Richard A. Schweder) "that there are
non-negotiable demands for the design of any decent society;"
non-negotiable "because they are grounded in matters of fact concerning
universal moral truths" and that they can be defined "in ways that are
(a) substantial enough to allow the United States to lead the world ...
in the direction of reform, and also (b) objective enough to avoid the
hazards of cultural parochialism and ethnocentrism -- for, as [the
President stated] We have no intention of imposing our culture."
Schweder, a former colleague and lively skeptical questioner, calls this
triad "the missionary position." Advice: haste ye to the library and
read his "George W. Bush and the Missionary Position" in Daedalus
(Summer, 2004), as it would make an excellent charter for discussion in
church, state, school, town hall, or Great Books Club. I'm serious.
Reaction to the State of the Union's claims suggest a notable divide,
"not between Left and Right, liberal and conservative, Democrat and
Republican" but "between those who embrace universalizing missionary
efforts of either a religious (Christian, Islamic) or secular (human
rights, international liberationist) sort -- and those who react to such
missions with diffidence, doubt, distrust, indignation, and even fear."
Schweder, of course, is in the second group. For what it's worth, with
Isaiah Berlin, I would be ready to say that there are absolutes, but
that no one can be sufficiently sure of one's own grasp of any to impose
them on societies. Schweder's analysis is so tightly packed that I
cannot reproduce it here; he is not interested in promoting mere
relativism. But he does show that past attempts -- I'd say every past
attempt -- to live out, always by force (for states need force of arms
or capital or clout), this "missionary position" has been shown in later
times or by others to have been parochial, provincial, and
culture-bound. Exhibit A: when the British took the missionary position
in the 19th century, accepting "the white man's burden" to impose its
civilization on a savage world. Schweder illustrates by referencing the
different ways freedom of speech, freedom of religion, family privacy,
and respect for women have been lived with, often creatively, beyond the
scope of any missionary position and imposition.
My question, using his four illustrations: we "Bible believers" would be
hard pressed, would we not, to find Old or New Testament or Christendom
era (313-1776?) discoveries, claims, or supports for what the President
called defenses of liberty and justice "because they are right and true
and unchanging for all people everywhere." All people? Ancient Israel?
Early, medieval, or most "Reformation" Christianity? We had to borrow
from the Enlightenment (1776, 1789) to find the right and true things
that we have come to support.
One Christian "right and true and unchanging" virtue professed in the
biblical tradition is humility. Even with Bob Dylan's phrase, "with God
on our side," the "missionary position" always lacks that central motif.
Reference: Daedalus:
Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Volume 153, No. 2,
pp. 26-36. Schweder's essay is one of eight on "Progress."
----------
Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center
at the University of Chicago
Divinity School.
Saturday, August 14, 2004
The Church and JPII have an ally in Noam Chomsky, who wrote the following in his book For Reasons of State (1973) at page 404:
"A vision of future social order is . . . based on a concept of human nature. If in fact man is an infinitely malleable, completely plastic being, with no innate structures of mind and no intrinsic needs of a cultural or social character, then he is a fit subject for 'shaping behavior' by the state authority, the corporate manager, the technocrat, or the central committee. Those with some confidence in the human species . . . will try to determine the intrinsic human characteristics that provide the framework for intellectual development, the growth of moral consciousness, cultural achievement, and participation in a free community."
Michael
Tuesday, August 10, 2004
[A reader of this blog, who is also an alum of Notre Dame--Eric Kniffin--kindly answered the question I included in my most recent post. Here's the answer, from an online encyclopedia:]
Correlation implies causation, also known as cum hoc ergo propter hoc, is a logical fallacy by which two events that occur together are claimed to be cause and effect.
For example:
Teenage boys eat lots of chocolate.
Teenage boys have acne.
Therefore, chocolate causes acne.
This argument, and any of this pattern, is an example of a false categorical syllogism. One observation about it is that the fallacy ignores the possibility that the correlation is coincidence. But we can always pick an example where the correlation is as robust as we please. If chocolate-eating and acne were strongly correlated across cultures, and remained strongly correlated for decades or centuries, it probably is not a coincidence. In that case, the fallacy ignores the possibility that there is a common cause of eating chocolate and having acne.
For example:
Ice-cream sales are strongly (and robustly) correlated with crime rates.
Therefore, ice-cream causes crime.
The above argument commits the cum hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, because in fact the explanation is that high temperatures increase crime rates (presumably by making people irritable) as well as ice-cream sales.
Another observation is that the direction of the causation is wrong and should be the other way around.
For example:
Gun ownership is correlated with crime.
Therefore, gun ownership leads to crime.
The facts could easily be the other way round: increase in crime could lead to more gun ownership with concerned citizens. See: wrong direction.
Another example illustrating this fallacy was a study which found that British arts funding levels had an extremely close correlation with Antarctic penguin populations.
The statement "correlation does not imply causation" notes that it is dangerous to deduce causation from a statistical correlation. If you only have A and B, a correlation between them does not let you infer A causes B, or vice versa, much less 'deduce' the connection. In fact, if you only have these two occurrences, even the most powerful inference techniques built on Bayesian Networks can't help much. But if there was a common cause, and you had that data as well, then often you can establish what the correct structure is. Likewise (and perhaps more usefully) if you have a common effect of two independent causes.
But while often ignored, the advice is often overstated, as if to say there is no way to infer causal structure from statistical data. Clearly we should not conclude that ice-cream causes criminal tendencies (or that criminals prefer ice-cream to other refreshments!), but the previous story shows that we expect the correlation to point us towards the real causal structure. Robust correlations often imply some sort of causal story, whether common cause or something more complicated. Hans Reichenbach suggested the Principle of the Common Cause, which asserts basically that robust correlations have causal explanations, and if there is no causal path from A to B (or vice versa), then there must be a common cause, though possibly a remote one.
Reichenbach's principle is closely tied to the Causal Markov Condition used in Bayesian networks. The theory underlying Bayesian networks sets out conditions under which you can infer causal structure, when you have not only correlations, but also partial correlations. In that case, certain nice things happen. For example, once you consider the temperature, the correlation between ice-cream sales and crime rates vanishes, which is consistent with a common-cause (but not diagnostic of that alone).
In statistics literature this issue is often discussed under the headings of spurious correlation and Simpson's paradox.
David Hume argued that any form of causality cannot be perceived (and therefore cannot be known or proven), and instead we can only perceive correlation. However, we can use the Scientific method to rule out false causes.
An entertaining demonstration of this fallacy once appeared in an episiode of The Simpsons (Season 7, "Much Apu about Nothing"):
Homer: Not a bear in sight. The "Bear Patrol" must be working like a charm!
Lisa: That's specious reasoning, Dad.
Homer: Thank you, dear.
Lisa: By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away.
Homer: Oh, how does it work?
Lisa: It doesn't work.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: It's just a stupid rock. But I don't see any tigers around, do you?
Homer: Lisa, I want to buy your rock.
