FULL ARTICLES

IRAN RETURNING TO THE DARK DAYS

Ahmadinejad clamps down on speech
The Washington Times
November 6, 2006

www.washtimes.com/world/20061105-102709-7736r.htm

Newspapers have been closed, intellectuals arrested, satellite dishes confiscated and Internet traffic disrupted in what is seen as a delayed crackdown more than a year after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became Iran’s president.

The trend is prompting some reformers and traditionalists to come together in an unlikely alliance to oppose the president.

The state-owned newspaper Iran reopened recently after a six-month closure prompted by a caricature that mocked ethnic Turks, Iran’s most powerful minority, which sparked weeks of rioting. But several reformist journals remain off the shelves.

Iran’s leading pro-reform daily, Shargh, was shut down in September, as was Nameh, a political journal with liberal leanings. On Oct. 19, a new moderate daily employing many of Shargh’s journalists was pulled from circulation and banned from publishing political news or analysis. Foreign reporters also have been expelled.

It is all part of a crackdown that many Iranian commentators have been predicting since the election of Mr. Ahmadinejad in June 2005. In recent months, several intellectuals and political activists have been arrested and a series of measures put in place to restrict Iranians’ access to information from abroad.

Moves to confiscate satellite dishes and increased filtering of Web sites, say many Iranians, are returning Iran to the dark days immediately after the Islamic revolution and before the eight years of gradual reforms implemented by President Mohammed Khatami.

“This government is growing like a cancer,” said a home painter, who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution. “They are slowly changing everything. It’s not that I’m depressed – I’m shocked and helpless.”

Last month, the government ordered Internet service providers to reduce the speed of Web access for homes and cybercafes. The slower connection speed will make it more difficult to access and download Western news, movies and television programs. It also will impede efforts by dissidents to upload information onto the Web.

As part of a process of gradually silencing opposition to a government that has yet to deliver on promises of economic reforms, dozens of followers of a charismatic Shi’ite cleric were arrested in late September. They are thought to have been taken to Section 209 of Tehran’s Evin Prison, which is run by the Ministry of Intelligence, according to Amnesty International.

One of those arrested was Kianoosh Sanjari, an activist sympathetic to Ayatollah Mohammad Kazemeni Boroujerdi who had been providing details of the detentions on his blog until the day of his arrest. Amnesty International reported that Mr. Sanjari is being held incommunicado and is at risk of being tortured.

A struggle also is taking place inside the Islamic republic’s power core, as the reformist and conservative officials band together to confront Mr. Ahmadinejad’s hard-line factions in coming elections for the Tehran city council.

The results of this contest will determine the direction in which Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader and ultimate decision-maker in Iran, will lean on issues such as the country’s nuclear program.

“Now people realize that [Mr. Ahmadinejad] is more right-wing than the [conservatives],” said an Iranian businessman who has known the president for several years. “That’s why an alliance is being established with the reformists, an alliance that I would not have imagined even in my wildest dreams” before Mr. Ahmadinejad came to power.

Cultural censorship also has increased, with the banning of Oscar-nominated Iranian director Bahman Ghobadi’s latest film, Half Moon. It features a woman singing, an act that is banned in Iran.

“Imagine my frame of mind when, having placed all my hopes in this film, after having done everything so that Iranians could see it, the government then decides it cannot be screened,” Mr. Ghobadi said in an interview.

(The byline is withheld from this story at the writer’s request for fear of official retaliation.)

HOW CAN YOU HAVE A REVOLUTION WHEN EVERYONE IS WATCHING TV?

Iranian Moolah
How can you have a revolution when everyone is watching TV?
By Farouz Farzami
The Wall Street Journal
October 29, 2006

opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009162

Killing time the other day on my way to meet my boyfriend, I walked through the long narrow passages of the House of Artists in the vicinity of the old U.S. Embassy, when I came upon a graceful exhibit of books published in America.

The books had been imported by a company called Vizhe Nasher (“special publication”), which is authorized, as it must be, by the government. Most concerned the visual and architectural arts, photography, sewing and cooking, and there was a wide variety offering weight-loss techniques, but I came across one I was startled to find: “The Daily Cocktail: 365 Intoxicating Drinks,” by Dalyn A. Miller and Larry Bonovan.

I live in a country where alcohol is officially banned, but where the art of homemade spirits has reached new heights. Sharing my astonishment about the cocktail book with some friends with better connections to the Islamist regime, they explained the government has a silent pact with the educated and affluent in Iran’s big cities, who render politics unto Caesar, provided that Caesar keeps his nose out of their liquor cabinets.

In other words, the well-to-do Iranian drinks and reads and watches what he wishes. He does as he pleases behind the walls of his private mansions and villas. In return for his private comforts, the affluent Iranian is happy to sacrifice freedom of speech, most of his civil rights, and his freedom of association. The upper-middle class has been bought off by this pact, which makes a virtue of hypocrisy.

The accommodation runs both ways. A friend who has made a small fortune in the pharmaceutical business told me that recently that the enforcers of Islamist law appeared on the roof of his condominium in the northwest Tehran suburb of Sharak-e-Qarb to seize all the satellite dishes. Every household received an order to attend a hearing of the revolutionary court, where the magistrate – typically a mullah – will levy fines. The fines help feed the friends of the courts, while for my wealthy pharmacist friend, erecting another satellite dish is as easy as refueling his car – and even the inconvenience of replacing the dish will not be necessary for long. Technology is more than up to the challenge posed by the morals police. “I have heard there is a state-of-the-art dish made of invisible fiberglass that I can install on the window pane of my apartment,” my friend told me. “I’m going for it.”

Many Iranians believe the occasional crackdowns are being organized by corrupt officials who secretly own interests in the new generation of satellite dishes. The confiscations just create markets for newer products.

The issue illustrates the larger pattern. My friend’s luxurious apartment is worth more than four million tomans, equivalent to about $4,000 per square meter. He owns a pharmacy downtown and is in the comfortable upper-middle class. These are the kind of people who can afford mansions in Shahrak-e-Qarb or in Lavasan, up in the desirable hills where former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and his ilk live.

“I can afford yearly two or three months’ vacation in Dubai, Europe or even America,” my friend said. “Why should I bother to organize a protest against seizing our satellite dishes? We may be forfeiting our freedoms, as you say, but when the price of avoiding the authorities is so affordable, why would we risk everything to take on the regime? We have to wait until society itself is disillusioned, and the masses open their eyes.”

In this world, it is only the principled intellectuals of moderate means who suffer, like my friend Farid Nazari, who courageously speaks his mind on all occasions and who operates a stall that sells banned books. He has had his inventory seized several times in the last two years. “We live in a circus,” he said. “We, as the people of culture, are victims of official idiosyncrasy. The authorities act impulsively based on whimsical assessments of risk. Their actions defy common sense and logic, so are completely unpredictable. It is that unpredictability that leads to panic and intellectual paralysis. That’s the secret of the current Iranian despotism.”

That, and hypocrisy. The well-to-do are paying a price for their comforts, and I wonder sometimes if they understand what it is. How can you have a revolution when everyone is watching TV?

(“Farouz Farzami” is the pseudonym of a journalist who is forbidden to publish in Iran.)

THE OCCUPATION OF AN ARAB HOMELAND THAT NOBODY KNOWS ABOUT

Little-known Arab group in Iran faces persecution
Ahwazis call occupation of their land a plight worse than that of Palestinians
By Hugh Macleod
The San Francisco Chronicle
November 5, 2006

www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/11/05/MNG4LM6ECI1.DTL

For decades, the Persian shahs and ayatollahs of Iran have uprooted Ahwazi Arabs from their oil-rich region in the southwest corner of the country, forcing an estimated 1.5 million people off the land where their families have lived for generations.

The result, Ahwazi activists say, is the occupation of an Arab homeland in the heart of the Middle East that almost nobody knows about – an occupation, Ahwazis contend, that has stripped Arabs of more land than is at issue in the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians.

“They came at me like a pack of wolves,” said Abu Tarek, who asks that his family name be withheld out of concern for his safety.

Abu Tarek is a native of the region that borders Iraq, Kuwait and the Persian Gulf, once known as Arabistan after its ethnic majority but renamed Khuzestan by the Iranian government. As a campaigner for the rights and autonomy of Ahwazis, Khuzestan’s Arab-majority population, he was considered a grave threat to Iran’s national security.

“For a year, they blindfolded me, electrocuted my hands, beat my penis and smashed my head against the wall,” he said, describing his torture at the hands of Iranian security during 1987, a year before the end of the Iran-Iraq war. “One time, I fell unconscious for two days, and when I woke up, I couldn’t see out of my left eye.”

Like most Middle Eastern countries, Iran has a host of ethnic and religious minorities within its borders. The dominant group is ethnic Persian Shiites, and the government they control derives most of its wealth from oil.

Khuzestan’s oil fields produce about 90 percent of Iran’s oil, or nearly 10 percent of OPEC’s total production. To replace the autonomy-minded Arabs of Khuzestan, the Tehran government has sponsored a series of vast industrial projects, coupled with massive, organized influxes of Persian workers and their families to replace the Ahwazis.

The government accuses Ahwazi Arabs of plotting foreign invasions with everyone from the CIA to Saddam Hussein.

“The security agents said I was a spy for the Iraqi regime. I told them I didn’t want to change the Iranian occupation for an Iraqi one,” said Abu Tarek. Six years into his second stint in jail, he escaped earlier this year and fled to Syria, hoping for refuge from his persecutors.

He has not found it.

Although Syria, an authoritarian, Sunni-majority country where political Islam is outlawed, and Iran, a hard-line Shiite theocracy, make an unlikely partnership, their strategic alliance transcends founding ideologies.

Abu Tarek may be considered a political refugee by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, and the rulers of Syria may still pride themselves on backing the pan-Arab cause, but he nonetheless faces possible deportation back to Iran – and what would probably be a death sentence.

“I thought I’d be protected here in this Arab state. In the past, we used to ask Syria for help in our struggle; now I am asking Europe for help in escaping Syria,” Abu Tarek said. “I am afraid Syrian intelligence will hand me over. I am even more afraid here than in Iran. I knew my enemy in Khuzestan, and I knew where to run. Here I don’t even have a house, so at night I sleep in parks.”

His fear may be justified – other Ahwazis have been sent by Syrian authorities to Iran, even one who lived in Europe.

Dutch citizen Faleh Abdullah Mansuri, the 60-year-old head of the Ahwazi Liberation Organization, the Ahwazis’ leading political opposition movement, was arrested by Syrian security in April while he was visiting an Ahwazi friend in Damascus.

Syrian authorities recently confirmed that Mansuri was deported to Tehran in May at the request of Iran. He is now reportedly in prison in Ahvaz, the capital of Khuzestan, facing what activists say could be death by hanging for charges related to a string of bombings in Khuzestan last year that targeted public buildings and oil fields. Tehran authorities blamed the attacks on Ahwazi dissidents, although the main Ahwazi organizations denied responsibility.

Saeed Saki, a member of the Ahwazi Liberation Organization, had been recognized as a refugee by the U.N. agency. He was living in Damascus and was due to be resettled in Norway when he was arrested and extradited to Tehran. Only high-level intervention from international officials prevented his execution, and he remains imprisoned in Iran.

Three other Ahwazis – Abdullah Abdel Hamid, whose family has resettled in Norway; Jamal Obaidy, a university student; and Taher Mazra, whose family was prevented from leaving Syria for Sweden last month – were arrested in April, and are believed to be in a Damascus prison and facing extradition to Iran.

Laurens Jolles, acting representative of the U.N. refugee commission in Damascus, said that despite numerous requests, the agency had been given no access to the three men.

“Syria is aware that its own Constitution prevents the deportation of refugees to countries where they will face persecution, as do international laws,” he said. “There should be a clear understanding these men should not be sent back to Iran.”

A source at the Iranian embassy in Damascus, speaking on condition of anonymity, denied that any prisoners of conscience had been extradited from Syria to Iran. “There is an agreement between Syria and Iran that any Iranian who has been jailed in Syria for a crime can be transferred to complete his sentence in Iran. But no prisoners of conscience have been handed over to Iran by Syria.”

Before its annexation in 1925 by the British-backed shah of Iran, Khuzestan was an autonomous Arab emirate. Britain, France and Italy all had consulates in Ahvaz. Activists say about a third of the 5 million Ahwazis have been driven from the province since the 1979 Islamic revolution that swept the monarchy from power and installed the Shiite ayatollahs in power.

A quarter million have been displaced by the state seizure of more than 750 square miles of land for use in a huge sugar-cane project, while an additional 400,000 Ahwazis are set to be made homeless in the creation of a military-industrial complex along the Shatt al-Arab waterway, which borders Iraq. In December, Iran announced plans to build a nuclear reactor in Khuzestan, despite the earthquake-prone nature of the region.

Discriminated against in education and access to health care, Ahwazis are banned from speaking Arabic, and many students drop out of school early rather than receive an education only in Farsi. The result has been soaring unemployment and abject poverty: 80 percent of Ahwazi children are malnourished, according to the governor of Dashte-Azadegan, a district of Khuzestan.

Many Ahwazi towns were decimated in the Iran-Iraq war, and the government has made almost no effort to rebuild them. The land is riddled with millions of land mines left over from that war, which continue to kill or maim Ahwazi farmers. Chemical weapons used by the Iraqi military on Arab-majority cities have led to heart disease two decades later and continue to poison Ahwazi fetus, according to the British Ahwazi Friendship Society, an activist organization.

Since the Ahwazi intifada, or uprising, began in April 2005, Iran has detained more than 25,000 Ahwazis, at least 131 have been executed and more than 150 have disappeared, according to the Ahwazi Human Rights Organization in the United States.

The two-month campaign of civil unrest culminated in a bomb attack on an oil installation east of Ahvaz, prompting Tehran to call on Hezbollah to help quell demonstrations and strikes, said Abu Hisham, another Ahwazi fugitive in Damascus. He also asked that his family name be withheld for his safety.

Hezbollah, a militant Islamist movement based in Lebanon, is financed by Iran, and its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, became an Arab icon after he waged war with Israel last summer. Iran’s influence on the Shiite Arab factions in Iraq, its sponsorship of anti-Israeli Islamist groups including the Shiite Hezbollah and Hamas, the hard-line Sunni party that controls the Palestinian government, as well as its defiance of Western demands that it curtail its nuclear development program has gained the hard-line Iranian leaders popularity throughout the Arab world.

The Badr Brigade, the militia of the Iran-backed Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of the major parties in the Iraqi coalition government, uses training camps in Khuzestan. Abu Hisham said he was interrogated by Iraqi militants at one such camp.

Abu Hisham said he fled Khuzestan in 2000 after seeing his brother and most of his friends arrested. He, too, now lives alone and in hiding in Damascus.

“Iran occupies more Arab land in terms of square meters than Israel does,” said Hisham, his eye darting nervously as he talked. “Yet we get more attention from the Dutch than from all the Arab states. I wish the world would unite for our cause, like they did to liberate Kuwait, which is a third the size of Khuzestan.”

For Abu Tarek, however, it feels like the time for hope is running out.

“I am afraid. I feel like a bird trapped inside a cage, waiting to be slaughtered. I know I will spend the rest of my life without my family,” he said, the tears welling up in his one good eye.

“The best friend to me these long years has been sadness. All I ask is this: Do we have a land of our own, and will we ever be allowed to rest in peace on this land?”

CHRISTIAN CHARITY BANS JESUS & THE BIBLE

Christian charity bans Christmas themed children’s gifts
By Sam Greenhill
The Daily Mail (UK)
November 10, 2006

www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=415551&in_page_id=1770

Christian charity Samaritan’s Purse fears anything relating to Jesus may offend Muslims

It is a Christian charity bringing Christmas cheer to needy children abroad. So its decision to ban Jesus, God and anything else connected with its own faith has been greeted with little short of puzzlement.

Operation Christmas Child, run by the charity Samaritan’s Purse, sends festive packages to deprived youngsters in countries ravaged by war and famine. Donors are asked to pack shoeboxes with a cuddly toy, a toothbrush and toothpaste, soap and flannel, notepads, colouring books and crayons – but nothing to do with Christmas.

Stories from the Bible, images of Jesus and any other Christian literature are expressely forbidden – in case Muslims are offended.

Yesterday the charity’s policy of censoring its own faith was described as political correctness gone mad.

Last Christmas, Britons filled 1.13million shoeboxes for Samaritan’s Purse to send to children abroad.

But Barbara Hill, who works at the worldwide charity’s UK headquarters in Buckhurst Hill, Essex, said: “Anything we find in the boxes which has a religious nature will be removed.

“If a box was opened by a Muslim child in a Muslim country they may be offended so we try to avoid religious images.” The charity has also banned war-related items such as Action Man-type figures, as well as chocolate and cake.

Yesterday the policy was condemned as “bizarre”. John Midgley, cofounder of the Campaign Against Political Correctness, said: “It seems extraordinary that a Christian charity is so concerned about political correctness that it is banning itself from its own core values We have members from all faiths who would be appalled at this patronising sort of attitude.”

Mike Slade, the Rural Dean of Locking, Somerset, added: “Personally I think it is a great shame that we can’t share the gift of Christmas which comes from the Christian faith with children all over the world.

“I think a number of Muslim people would respect Christians sharing their faith as they would accept respect from us. Political correctness is increasingly creeping into many spheres of life. We are very sad to hear about this.”

A Church of England spokesman said: “We are very clear that in Britain, Muslims are not offended by Christians celebrating Christmas.”

But he added: “In other parts of the world, in Muslim countries, if Muslims have strong values that would regard this as a hostile act, it is different. Ideally, a child would receive a present with a Madonna and Child card, but if that is not possible, it is more important than the aid gets through than the Christian message.”

The appeal sends shoe boxes from Britain to children in countries including Azerbaijan, Armenia, Romania, Serbia, Sudan and Mozambique.

Although no Christian literature is included in the boxes, the charity does separately distribute Christmas stories from the Bible and encourages Bible study in areas where it gives toys out.

A spokesman for Samaritan’s Purse, which was introduced to Britain by evangelist Billy Graham and is run internationally by his son Franklin, said: “Christianity motivates many of our supporters to help children in need. We are a Christian charity and that’s about helping people.

“But it’s our policy not to put religious, political or military items in boxes which go to areas of different cultures. All shoeboxes are checked in the UK warehouses in case someone has ignored the instruction and put such an item into a shoebox and, if found, any such item is removed.”

Devoutly Christian MP Ann Widdecombe said: “Either this is being done in the name of Christ or it isn’t. This is Christmas, a Christian festival. If it’s being done for Christmas, there is no reason on earth why they should not have Christian symbols.”

Last year, Lambeth Council in South London renamed its Christmas street decorations ‘Winter Lights’ to avoid offending non-Christians, while several years ago, Birmingham City Council notoriously rebranded the Christmas holidays ‘Winterval’.

IN MUSLIM LANDS, CHRISTIAN POPULATIONS ARE IN DECLINE

Christian Exodus
By Brian Murphy
The Associated Press
November 12, 2006

The death threat came on simple white fliers blowing down the streets at dawn. A group calling itself “Friends of Muhammad” accused a local Palestinian Christian of selling mobile phones carrying offensive sketches of the Muslim prophet.

The message went on to curse all Arab Christians and Pope Benedict XVI, still struggling to calm Muslim outrage from his remarks on Islam.

While neighbors defended the merchant – saying the charges in the flier were bogus – the frightened phone dealer went into hiding, feeling less than satisfied with authorities’ conclusion that the Oct. 19 note was probably a harmless rant.

Now the dealer is thinking of going abroad.

Call it part of a modern exodus, the steady flight of the tiny Palestinian Christian minority that could lead, some predict, to the faith being virtually extinct in its birthplace within several generations – a trend mirrored in many dwindling pockets of Christianity across the Islamic world.

This is one of the major themes the pope is expected to carry to Turkey for a four-day visit beginning Nov. 28 – his first papal visit to a predominantly Muslim nation. The Vatican calls it “reciprocity:” Muslim demands for greater sensitivity from the West must be accompanied by stronger protections and rights for Christian minorities.

In some places, such as Pakistan, it means more safeguards from extremist attacks. In Indonesia and elsewhere, it touches on appeals to quell growing sectarian clashes. In Turkey, Iraq and the rest of the Middle East, it seeks to preserve communities dating back to the time when Jesus and his apostles preached.

But nearly everywhere in Muslim lands, Christian populations are in decline.

NO PLACE IS THIS MORE STRIKING THAN THE HOLY LAND

For decades, it was mostly economic pressures pushing Palestinian Christians to emigrate, using family ties in the West or contacts from missionary schools. The Palestinian uprisings – and the separation barrier started by Israel in 2002 – accelerated the departures by turning once-bustling pilgrimage sites such as Bethlehem into relative ghost towns.

The growing strength of radical Islamic movements has added distinct new worries. During the protests after the pope’s remarks in September, some of the worst violence was in Palestinian areas with churches firebombed and hit by gunfire.

“Most of the Christians here are either in the process of leaving, planning to leave or thinking of leaving,” said Sami Awad, executive director of the Holy Land Trust, a Bethlehem-based peace group. “Insecurity is deep and getting worse.”

The native Palestinian Christian population has dipped below 2 percent of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Arab East Jerusalem, down from at least 15 percent in 1950 by some estimates. Meanwhile, the Muslim Palestinian birthrate is among the highest in the world.

Dire predictions abound. The Franciscan Foundation for the Holy Land said Christians could become “extinct” in the region within 60 years.

“It certainly doesn’t look good for us,” said Mike Salman, a Palestinian Christian who has conducted studies on demographic trends.

A WALK ALONG SHEPHERD STREET PUTS A FACE TO THE LAMENT

Hannah Qumsieh spends his days playing online poker, fretting about unpaid bills and trimming his lemon trees at his house overlooking the field where the Bible says an angel told shepherds of the birth of Jesus. Qumsieh retired from the Palestinian tourism office last year, but has received no pension checks since the militant faction Hamas won elections in January and the West slashed aid to the Palestinian Authority.

“If I had money to leave, I would,” he said, casting a glance at the newly built white-stone house next door in Beit Sahour, one of the last Christian-dominated enclaves in the West Bank. Bethlehem, just up the hill, is now less than 20 percent Christian.

A day earlier, Qumsieh’s eldest son turned over the house keys to tenants and took his family to Chile. Down the road, a Christian restaurant owner, Ibrahim Shomali, is selling what he can before he leaves with his wife this month. They will head for Flint, Mich., to join his brother and hunt for work in one of the most economically depressed areas of America.

Shomali also will leave a stack of paperwork for his lawyer, who is fighting a group that took control of land that Shomali insists has been in his family for more than a century. Christians claim Muslim gangs routinely try to seize Christian property using doctored documents, but Palestinian authorities say it’s random lawlessness in areas where land deeds are not registered.

“Here is where Jesus was born and over there, across the hill in Jerusalem, is where he was crucified,” Shomali said. “We Christians now feel like we are on the cross.”

SOME ARE TRYING TO CHANGE THE MOMENTUM

Groups dedicated to Muslim-Christian cooperation are active. During the protests over Benedict’s remarks, militiamen from Islamic Jihad vowed to protect a West Bank church. A poll released Oct. 18 by the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion found 91 percent of respondents opposed attacking churches to protest Benedict’s comments.

Fuad Kokali, one of six Christian deputies in the 132-seat Palestinian parliament, proclaimed there “are no religious divides” in the struggle against Israeli occupation.

But, after a while, he told another story. He spoke of how Muslims and Christians mixed freely at weddings and other events in the 1980s. Now, it’s a rarity, he said.

“The world is becoming a more unstable and frightening place,” he said. “In these times, people revert back to their core identity. That means closing yourself within your religion and looking out at the other with suspicion.”

These days Palestinian Christians – dominated by Greek Orthodox and Latin rite churches loyal to the pope – face questions about whether their hearts lie in their homeland or in the West. It gets even more complicated because of the strong support for Israel and Jewish settlers from American evangelical Christians.

“We are stuck in no man’s land,” said a leading Palestinian Christian activist, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of reported death threats. “In the eyes of the West, we are Arabs. In the eyes of Arabs, we are a fifth column.”

The choice is either stand up against Muslim radicals or doom Holy Land Christianity to a slow death, said Ayman Abuaita, a Christian leader who previously served in the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, which has waged suicide bombings against Israelis.

“This is our land. This is where our faith was born,” he said. “We cannot be weak and just fade away.”

BUT BEING BOLD CAN BRING A BACKLASH

On Oct. 12, Christians students at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank protested an exhibit by an Islamic group that included artwork mocking the pontiff and a poem deriding Christianity. The argument deteriorated into a brief melee with fists and sticks.

No one was seriously injured, but political and religious leaders rushed to the college to try to keep the violence from spreading – as it did in 2002 when Beit Sahour was engulfed by street battles after a Muslim man took a surreptitious photo of a Christian woman in a changing room.

At the St. Theodosius Monastery, a site with a Christian history dating to the fifth century, the Greek Orthodox caretaker, Father Ierotheos, said he mostly remains behind the walls. He claims he was harassed by “Muslim fanatics” for speaking about Christian fears on a local television show.

“It’s a jungle for us now,” he said.

Every Friday, the noontime bells from the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem ring out during prayer calls at a mosque on the other side of Manger Square.

“You can hear the bells and think that it is a sign that Christians will never be pushed out of this land,” said Abuaita. “Or you can hear it as a cry for help.”

“THE UNITED STATES IS NOT FIGHTING ISLAM THE RELIGION BUT RADICAL ISLAM”

In 1796, U.S. vowed friendliness with Islam
By Daniel Pipes
The New York Sun
November 7, 2006

Has the United States ever engaged in a crusade against Islam? No, never. And, what’s more, one of the country’s earliest diplomatic documents rejects this very idea.

Exactly 210 years ago this week, toward the end of George Washington’s second presidential administration, a document was signed with the first of two Barbary Pirate states. Awkwardly titled the “Treaty of Peace and Friendship, signed at Tripoli November 4, 1796 (3 Ramada I, A. H. 1211), and at Algiers January 3, 1797 (4 Rajab, A. H. 1211),” it contains an extraordinary statement of peaceful intent toward Islam.

The agreement’s 11th article (out of twelve) reads: As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, – as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen, – and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”

In June 1797, the Senate unanimously ratified this treaty, which President John Adams immediately signed into law, making it an authoritative expression of American policy.

In 2006, as voices increasingly present the “war on terror” as tantamount to a war on Islam or Muslims, it bears notice that several of the Founding Fathers publicly declared they had no enmity “against the laws, religion or tranquility” of Muslims. This antique treaty implicitly supports my argument that the United States is not fighting Islam the religion but radical Islam, a totalitarian ideology that did not even exist in 1796.

Beyond shaping relations with Muslims, the statement that “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion” has for 210 years been used as a proof text by those who argue that, in the words of a 1995 article by Steven Morris, “The Founding Fathers Were Not Christians.”

But a curious story lies behind the remarkable 11th article. The official text of the signed treaty was in Arabic, not English; the English wording quoted above was provided by the famed diplomat who negotiated it, Joel Barlow (1754-1812), then the American consul-general in Algiers. The U.S. government has always treated his translation as its official text, reprinting it countless times.

There are just two problems with it.

First, as noted by David Hunter Miller (1875-1961), an expert on American treaties, “the Barlow translation is at best a poor attempt at a paraphrase or summary of the sense of the Arabic.” Second, the great Dutch orientalist Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857-1936), reviewed the Arabic text in 1930, retranslated it, and found no 11th article. “The eleventh article of the Barlow translation has no equivalent whatever in the Arabic,” he wrote. Rather, the Arabic text at this spot reprints a grandiloquent letter from the pasha of Algiers to the pasha of Tripoli.

Snouck Hurgronje dismisses this letter as “nonsensical.” It “gives notice of the treaty of peace concluded with the Americans and recommends its observation. Three fourths of the letter consists of an introduction, drawn up by a stupid secretary who just knew a certain number of bombastic words and expressions occurring in solemn documents, but entirely failed to catch their real meaning.”

These many years later, how such a major discrepancy came to be is cloaked in obscurity and it “seemingly must remain so,” Hunter Miller wrote in 1931. “Nothing in the diplomatic correspondence of the time throws any light whatever on the point.”

But the textual anomaly does have symbolic significance. For 210 long years, the American government has bound itself to a friendly attitude toward Islam, without Muslims having signed on to reciprocate, or without their even being aware of this promise. The seeming agreement by both parties not to let any “pretext arising from religious opinions” to interrupt harmonious relations, it turns out, is a purely unilateral American commitment.

And this one-sided legacy continues to the present. The Bush administration responded to acts of unprovoked Muslim aggression not with hostility toward Islam but with offers of financial aid and attempts to build democracy in the Muslim world.