Pope not passionate about ecumenism

The Pope is not passionate about ecumenism

Ghassan Rubeiz, September 19, 2006

Arab Christians are often asked by Westerners when did they convert to Christianity. Western Christians seem to have forgotten that Christianity was born in the Middle East and they act as if they are the source of the faith. Oblivious to the presence of ten million Arab Christians, Westerners act with minimal sensitivity to their future in the region. Rising political tension between Western Christians and the Muslim world often translates into trouble for Arab Christians. The support Middle Eastern Christians receive from the West in foreign aid and in ecumenical partnership is outweighed by repeated, albeit unintended, political undermining from Christians abroad. Last week’s attacks on Middle Eastern church buildings are an example of the unintended and indirect harm the Pope has caused to Arab Christians in his unfortunate rhetoric about Islam.

But Muslim leaders and politicians will hopefully exercise restraint over the Vatican provocation. By displacing their anger on innocent minorities, Muslims will possibly increase Western prejudice against them. It is hard to believe that in Gaza and the West Bank, where Christian-Muslim relations have been solid for centuries, some churches were attacked as a demonstration of anger against the Pope and the Christian world. Peaceful street demonstration of anger is not surprising, but public portrayal of mass rage against Christian symbols is not accepted in Islam and would give Western Islamophobics additional excuses to promote their inflammatory products.

Christians must also exercise discipline. This is not the time to calm down the Muslim crowds with an interfaith calculator in which Christians list their grievances against Muslims. Certainly, there are Christian grievances to be addressed to Muslims but there are also parallel Muslim charges to be addressed to Christians. To indulge in interfaith debt reduction now is poor taste and poor timing.

Pope Benedict XVI did not score highly on a pluralism ecumenical scale. His recent reference to Islam in his speech to German students was pejorative and unfair, regardless of its brevity, its context or its intent. Where were the Vatican advisors when His Holiness prepared his address on the threat of violence in Islamic Jihad and relativist secularism in the West?

Quoting a fourteenth century Byzantine Emperor, the Pope hinted that Islam is evil and then he stated that Jihad justifies easy resort to violence. For the Pope to quote a Byzantine ruler to make a theological point is rather strange. Muslims battled for seven centuries with the Christian Byzantine Empire. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries the Crusaders savagely murdered Muslim, Arab-Christian and Jewish communities in the Middle East. Catholic experts should also remember that Ottoman (Muslim) rulers had been rivals for centuries to the Holy Roman Empire. Since the end of the First World War, Muslims have suffered from colonial and neo-colonial politics of Western Christians. How could any Vatican historian exclusively link Islam with violence and dissociate Christianity from war and abuse of power politics? For instance, how did Constantine unite and expand his Christian Kingdom, Byzantium, if not by the sword?

Still today, while distinguishing Islam the faith, from “Muslim” the faithful, the Vatican could convey a justifiable concern about extreme politics of Muslims. Religion analysts understand that Muslims, as adherents, and not Islam as a religion, are responsible for interpreting Jihad spiritually or politically, positively or violently, personally or collectively, justly or unjustly. Similarly, it is Christians, not Christianity, that interpret their faith to wage war or make peace, to colonize other countries or to help them through foreign aid and to dominate world resources or to manage them with responsibility.

The many sided cultural and political sources of Islamic anger must be addressed. Is the Vatican adding its arsenal to other opponents of Islam? Islam has been and continues to be demonized by the Western Evangelicals. Muslims feel that the extreme Christian right has been waging a war on Islam through televangelism, has blindly supported Israel, and above all, has provided a moral cover to the US war on Iraq.

The role of personality is rarely appreciated in theology formation. The previous Pope, John Paul the Second, in contrast to Benedict, worked hard at showing Islam a friendly face, addressing third world issues and reinforcing a global network of solidarity. The provocative Catholic analysis of last week has given extreme Muslims an excuse to lump all Christians in one oppositional category.

The main subject in the Pope’s address to the Germans was not on Islam but on the growing threat of Western secularism. If the Pope is preaching active participation in religion he should be admiring Muslims rather than giving them a commentary on their religion. The basic problem is that His Holiness, unlike his predecessor, does not consider Islam on equal footing with Christianity. Observers tend to agree that Benedict XVI is not a strong pluralist, as he should be, given his position.

The Pope’s recent statements about Islam sent me searching for a primer on ecumenism. As I understand it, ecumenism is a religious movement that considers all people as children of one God, regardless of the character of their faith. Ecumenism is cross-cultural rather than ethnocentric. It is interfaith oriented rather than dogmatic. Ecumenism encourages people of all faiths to deepen their own roots and to bring up the best in their religious traditions. In sum, ecumenism builds bridges among people rather than walls that are made of superiority and exclusion. Ecumenism is concerned about the danger of growing religious fundamentalism in all corners of the world.

His Holiness’ expression of sorrow for how his words were misinterpreted and how it caused alarm in the Muslim world does not do the job of damage control. Benedict XVI ought to take some concrete steps of reconciliation with Muslims, to admit that he could be wrong in his interpretation of Islam and to express respect for all religions. The Pope can call for an interfaith dialogue meeting with Muslim leaders during his expected late November visit to Turkey. Turkey provides a good milieu of Christian-Muslim dialogue as it is a large Muslim country that is half Middle Eastern and half European.

The Pope’s negative observations about Islam and the global Muslim anger in response to it reveal a growing gulf of misunderstanding between the Muslim and the Western world. As long as each religious tradition is absolute in its conception of the truth, religion will continue to play a negative role in politics. There is a basic universal problem in religious education. Religion is imparted to children as a frozen product; God is conveyed as a private possession and the printed word is treated as a final truth. We do not need to sing John Lennon’s song about “imagining a world with no religion” to achieve world peace. It would be more reasonable to come closer to world harmony if we can teach our children, demand from our clerics and request from our politicians a respect for the validity of other faiths. Insisting on monopoly of truth in one’s personal faith is a formula for tension with others. The Pope’s potential leadership in promoting religious tolerance is unmatched and underutilized. Benedict may need to listen better to Arab Christians in his approach to Islam. They are in a position to facilitate dialogue.

The author, an Arab American commentator, is former Secretary of the Middle East for the World Council of Churches. He can be reached at grubeiz@adelphia.net. His blog is aldikkani.blogspot.com

Religion and Politics in Palestine/Israel conflict

Religion and politics in the Palestine/Israeli conflict

Ghassan Rubeiz, September12, 2006

Political Islam stands parallel to political Judaism and Christian fundamentalism. The three competitive religious forces are in some ways similar but they operate differently in relation to the state. Political Islam is the largest threat to domestic political regimes. In contrast, political Judaism supports it home state, Israel, and guides a global Diaspora around the home state. In its largest milieu, Christian fundamentalism supports the US government but attempts to passionately influence foreign policy in the direction of Israel. What is common among the” three” is the use of the Divine as a central actor in politics.

The United States follows a double standard on religion and politics in the Middle East. On one hand, it chastises Arabs for adopting political Islam, and on the other hand, it takes the Jewish state as a close ally.
The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, as a home for the Jews, is a religious development. Religion guides two contrasting views of the Middle East conflict that pertain to Israel and Palestine. The first view is Arab and largely Islamic and Arab-Christian, and the second is Western and largely Judeo-Christian.

Many factors underlie the role of religion in the origin of the Middle East conflict. The Jewish state of Israel was established within a largely Muslim region. Israel’s claim to the land in Palestine was based on divine promise to the Jewish people. The formation of the state of Israel led to a displacement of substantial Arab and largely Muslim population by Jewish international communities. A political home for the Jews was authorized by the British in 1917, when the Arab world was just transiting from an era of Islamic rule under the Ottomans to a semi-secular national rule under the (Christian) European colonial mandate system. Right or wrong, Arabs felt that Israel was a Western Christian creation designed to relieve the guilt of Europeans who discriminated against the Jews for centuries and assaulted them with a Holocaust during the Second World War. The Jewish population in Palestine around the turn of the century was a small minority, within a majority of Arab Palestinian Muslims and Christians. Finally, fair or not, the Jewish-Arab minorities that migrated to Israel due to pull and push factors, heightened religious tension. The establishment of Israel was thus perceived as a sectarian, demographic and political threat to the majority Palestinian society and the surrounding Arab Muslim region.

Arabs believe that the Palestine crisis has worsened over decades through erosion of social justice. For Arabs, the challenge presented by Israel started with the conception of statehood for world Jewry in Zionism around the turn of the century. The next threat was a declaration of Jewish homeland in Palestine through Balfour declaration in 1917. In 1947, the UN partitioned land for Jews and Arabs with unequal proportions. In 1948 war with defeated Arabs created Israel as a state. Arabs believe that the erosion of justice in Palestine continued through successive wars: 1967, 1973, 1982, 1987, 2000 and 2006.

Although the origin of the Middle East conflict was essentially riddled with religious undertones, for a long time the level of religious tension had been controlled and restricted to the Middle East. Later, religion, globally, assumed a leading role in the dynamics of the conflict.
Since the 198O’s, organized religion has surfaced in the Arab world as a central mobilizing political force. Political religious resurgence has emerged over several decades of failure of secular party politics. Other factors included the neutralization of Egypt, the leading Arab country, and Jordan through a top-down US funded peace with Israel. The fratricidal politics of autocratic regimes and the growing gulf between the rich and the poor also gave organized religion political fuel.

At the same time in the West, religion took on an invigorated role in politics, especially after communism was defeated. Across religions and cultures, fundamentalists have adopted violence or hatred in different forms and levels of visibility. Fundamentalists have used different historical perspectives, cultural symbols, dogmas and mythologies to define the good and evil, the right and wrong, the just and unjust, the believer and the infidel, the saved and the doomed. American Neo Conservatives, Muslim radicals, Christian Zionists and some Jewish religious settlers have developed an implicit morbid liberation theology. This fundamentalist theology too often demonizes outsiders, exercises spiritual ethnocentrism, resorts rapidly to military solutions, engages in ethnic cleansing, prays for end of time, waits for spiritual rapture and expects self fulfillment through selective divine salvation. Today many Arabs link Israel as a religious state with the two-century occupation of European Crusaders in the Holy Land.

While politics often guide religion, the latter is often falsely assumed as a root cause. Arabs do not search deeply for domestic political reasons for their political failures in Palestine: neo colonial politics, increasing distance between rulers and ruled, regime fratricide in search for political legitimacy and a growing technological deficit. However, religious factors of Arab failure in Palestine are important. External religious factors that have contributed to the conflict include a growing clerical ideological war within global monotheism, increasing military support of the Christian West for the Jewish state and an unrelenting and powerful Jewish lobby in Washington. But sectarian politics is also domestic; religiously indoctrinated suicide bombers have harmed the Palestinian cause and distanced the peace camp in Israel after years of hard reconciliation work on both sides of the conflict.

It is clear that Muslims, Christians and Jews see the question of Palestine through widely different historical, political and cultural frameworks. The Middle East conflict will not change for the better until both the Arab as well as Jewish American communities realize that the future security of Israel is tied intimately to the viability and security of a democratic Palestinian state. So far, unfortunately, sincere Arab- Jewish communication has been rare. Such dialogue tends to be theoretical and elitist.

Here are some conclusive thoughts:
1. There is no single and absolutely correct Palestinian or Jewish history and each side has enough strength for their case of secure and viable statehood
The Arabs must change their perception of Israel as a historical misfortune and plan for a future partnership with this nation.
Israelis should reconfigure their strategy to forge strong and genuine partnerships within the region. Financing peace through annual US grants to Egypt and Jordan is short-term planning and provocative
Palestinians and Syrians have been left to beg for peace in exchange for land for too long; dialogue for a new deal of land for peace is urgent.
The US can not continue to promote and arbitrate peace as long as it remains so symbiotic in its relations with Israel.

Strings attached to Lebanon aid

Strings Attached to Foreign Aid in Lebanon

Ghassan Rubeiz, September 9, 2006

Today, in Lebanon, Iran and the US fiercely compete in gaining the confidence of the people. The US and its allies channel foreign aid through the Lebanese government and Western private agencies. In contrast, Iran channels aid through opposition groups. As a result, the recipients’ best interests are not considered first and the disunity of the country is reinforced.
The US and Iran lead other donors in attaching strings to aid and set a charged political climate for social work. The fragile Lebanese government has no plans yet to coordinate aid and to harness it fully for nation building.
Lebanon’s fifty donor countries fall into six broad sources: The US, Europe, Iran/Syria, the Gulf countries, UN intergovernmental agencies and international private agencies. This is not to mention the Diaspora money, estimated at several billions that would go to relatives and home towns.
The US, Europe and the Arab oil countries support the current Lebanese government while pushing it to take steps that please the West and antagonize Syria, Iran and Hezbollah. The US has pledged US 230 million dollars. Although giving limited concrete assistance, the US is conditioning aid aggressively. In contrast, the US provides Israel with three billion dollar annually with few strings. The US administers its social service and infrastructure aid in Lebanon through private Western agencies and it prohibits their cooperation with Hizbullah.
Politically, the US is hyperactive in Lebanon during peace time and during war. Its delay of the cease fire is an example of its domination. Israel’s five week attack killed 1300 people, injured 4000 and displaced a quarter of the population. Infrastructure damage will cost Lebanon years of recovery and ten percent GNP loss. Air attacks spilled 10 000 tons of fuel oil on the sea coast and left thousands of unexploded cluster bombs and mines. It would take years to clear the unexploded cluster bombs and the East Mediterranean shores. All of this destruction was executed with US supplied weapons to Israel. For three weeks, Lebanon pleaded to the US and the UN Security Council to pressure Israel to lift the land and sea blockade. It is amazing how the Lebanese can simultaneously view the US as a donor as well as a symbiotic ally of Israel.
Politically, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia (and other gulf countries) are generous and less demanding of the Lebanese than the US. The Gulf Arab states follow the general political lines of the US and support the Lebanese government with two to three billion dollars. The Saudi government, a Sunni-minded conservative state, is highly interested in curbing emerging revolutionary movements in the Arab world and limiting rising Shiite power, which Hizbullah and Iran represent. The sheikhdom is also interested in protecting their massive Saudi business investments. The Saudi donations were delivered in cash to the Lebanese Central Bank and in contributions to the public school system, World Food Program and to UNICEF water projects. The Arab Gulf countries are sensitive about their eroding influence in the region as allies to the US.
Europeans have pledged to Lebanon over half a billion US dollars but more aid will come from Europe in cash and in kind. They are leading the 15 000 UN force for border security. France and Italy are active in the peace force and the Scandinavians are involved in fund raising and opening channels of peace negotiations. Europeans are on the side of the US in promoting Western policies in Lebanon. But they are less allergic than the US to Iran and to Hizbullah. The Europeans and the Arab Gulf countries soften US diplomacy in the region. They try to connect the Lebanon crisis to the broader Middle East conflict.
The UN agencies operate efficiently and with appreciable professional authority. UNICEF is busy with water projects, UNHCR is engaged with refugee and displacement work and the World Food Program provides food relief. There are other UN agencies offering significant services, such as UNDP.
The International humanitarian agencies are able to work with minimal political goals but many of those agencies are operating through western government grants that restrict their ability to work with Shiite groups associated with Hizbullah.
Iran, the new super power of the region, is the second donor magnet. Iran and Syria, which is not a cash donor, compete with the US and its allies in influencing Lebanon’s rebuilding and foreign policy. Iran has become the most important external player in Lebanon’s future. With money, ideology and training, Iran helped Hezbollah force Israel out of Lebanon in the year 2000, and again this summer supported Hezbollah in its fight with Israel. Through volunteers of Hizbullah, Iran is helping the victims of the war in funding a massive program of social welfare. Help includes generous cash subsidies for housing, medical relief and other needs. Iran aims to help Lebanon to become a state of “resistance” to “US and Western hegemony” in the Middle East. Iran has a special spiritual connection with the Lebanese Shiite community; Hizbullah’s political and social resistance, like Iran’s politics, has a shade of “Islamic liberation theology”.
As the US, Europe and the Gulf states, on one hand, and as Iran and its ally Syria, on the other, compete in winning the hearts and minds of the Lebanese, the country’s sovereignty is threatened, the economy is unravels and suffering augments. A cold war dynamics pull Lebanon in two opposite political directions. The Iranians and Syrians are behind a government opposition front that includes Hizbullah, Amal party and General Michel Aoun’s movement. The Americans and their allies support the Seniora government. The Lebanese opposition groups champion military confrontation with Israel, resistance to American policies and support of Arab-Persian politics. The Seniora government champions Lebanese autonomy, distance from Syria and open market policies. Considering Lebanon’s sectarian history, the silver lining in the domestic tension is that divisions are not along Christian- Muslim lines. The tension is ideological: state building (stability) vs. democracy (freedom). Aoun and Hizbullah think state security and stability first, whereas the current government thinks freedom and democracy first.
The Lebanese are confused about their external allies and their vision of the future. One side of Lebanon, the opposition, wonders how the US can be both, an enabler and a trouble maker, why unauthorized unlawful (militia) violence is considered “terrorism” but authorized unlawful (state) violence is considered “defense” and why are certain UN resolutions sacred while others are forgotten. The other side, government supporters, wonder why Iran and Syria who claim to love Lebanon so much are eager to delegate the fighting against the common enemy to the Lebanon, the smallest and the weakest country surrounding Israel. Most Lebanese wonder if their country can survive a suffocating international embrace, where aid is a tool for control.




The author is an Arab American commentator. Send comments to grubeiz@adlephia.net. Rubeiz blog is http://aldikkani.blogspot.com/.

Lebanese politics impacts humanitarian aid

Lebanese Politics impacts humanitarian aid

By Ghassan Rubeiz -- The Arab American News:

In Lebanon, the ceasefire is holding, the majority of the displaced population has returned and the emergency needs are being met efficiently. Lebanon has not turned into the humanitarian disaster some feared it would become.

But the recovery will take months or years. The U.N. estimates Lebanon's economic war loss at 15 billion dollars. Refugees International estimates that 70 percent of the displaced are out of jobs. Of the million displaced, 250,000 remain away from their homes due to destruction or fear of the future. Unexploded mines are now major causes of death and impediments to farming. The oil spill on the sea shore will be a long lasting environmental disaster. Lebanon's projected economic growth will rapidly decline from six percent in 2006 to zero percent in 2007.
Serious political hurdles between Lebanon and its neighbors remain unsolved, problems that have direct impact on aid. Israel is slowing the process of Lebanese recovery by its air and sea blockade. Syria is threatening to close its borders with Lebanon if international forces are deployed on its frontiers.

There are funding issues. Iran and oil-rich Arab countries are starting to pour money into Lebanon without sufficient attention to the absorbing capacity of social services. The U.S. has pledged 230 million dollars for Lebanon's emergency but the Congress is debating how to politically condition assistance. Tom Lantos, a key Washington legislator, is trying his best to block U.S. aid to Lebanon until UNIFIL troops are deployed on Syrian borders.
In Europe foreign aid is less tied to politics than it is in the U.S. Sixty international agencies will attend the Stockholm donor agency meeting on August 31, where 500 million dollars in pledges are expected. A second meeting will take place in Beirut for further funding at a later stage.
Aid can help or hurt. As an international aid specialist, I humbly suggest the following observations for aid to Lebanon:

First, address the misery belt of Beirut. The massive destruction of South Beirut deserves innovative planning. With money available for large scale reconstruction, the urge to replace poor neighborhoods with cheap reconstruction is great. Ponder that the people of South Beirut have been displaced from South Lebanon as a result of repeated cycles of Israeli incursions and invasions over the last thirty years. It is reasonable to raise the question of reintegrating the many times displaced South Beirut residents to their communities of origin in South Lebanon. A comprehensive community development program in the South should provide adequate and planned housing, resourced neighborhoods, modern farming facilities, small rural industry, eco tourism, work opportunities, job-related education and social and health services. A community empowerment program in the South may attract thousands of South Beirut residents. However, many may choose to remain in Beirut suburbs holding on to their jobs and social setting. In South Beirut, housing, jobs and services should also be improved significantly to reduce youth alienation and help integrate the community in the capital city.

Secondly, focus on family and community-based services. Social services to the disadvantaged should be community-based. There are many sick and injured, many orphans and out-of-school children, people with disabilities, broken families, angry youth and unemployed adults. Will these victims receive care in a family and community context? For example, the temptation to place children of poor or broken families in orphanages is compelling. It is not uncommon in Lebanon to place poor children (euphemistically called social orphans) in crowded sectarian residential institutions that have minimum sensitivity to the rights of children. These dependent children should be helped to live in their own families, with relatives or in other family substitute environments. Lebanon, regrettably, has one of the highest numbers of orphanages in the world, largely due to a misguided public welfare policy.

Thirdly, aid should be viewed within the context of reconciliation and cultural exchange
What goals foreign policy makers could not accomplish through war they should not pursue in foreign aid. Winning the hearts and minds of the Lebanese can only occur through creative engagement of aid agencies with local Lebanese partners.
Sound foreign aid offers opportunity for learning about the adversary, for healing wounds, correcting misunderstanding, building cultural bridges and dispensing with unworkable preconceived ideas. The growing enrollments at foreign universities in Lebanon, of which the American University of Beirut, the Lebanese American University and the Ste. Joseph University are a few examples, illustrate the positive multiplier effect of sound foreign aid.
Fourthly, there must be a coordinated and transparent state plan.

The government of Lebanon should establish a national plan for emergency, rehabilitation, reconstruction and development. While the management of the humanitarian crisis provides an opportunity to enhance the sovereignty of the Lebanese state, corruption in public service poses a real challenge. Nevertheless, the Lebanese state should lead recovery, set up policies and decide priorities. The state should also define objectives, describe the program, support partnerships and encourage agencies who intend to build long term relations with the people of Lebanon. There is a way to limit corruption. Allowing private local and international agencies to participate collectively in planning, implementing and evaluation of the recovery program should enhance and validate the government leadership. Setting an interagency council for Lebanon recovery would help team work and transparency.

Next, listen to the local people. Effective agents of social change are expected to work with local leaders. Lebanon is rich with indigenous experience and human resources for reconstruction. International agencies tend to overuse foreign experts and to offer them superior authority over local specialists. Regional consultants with minimum on-the-ground experience in the Middle East or with little cultural understanding should not be in leadership roles in Lebanon. International agencies with religious affiliations must be extremely cautious that their administration of aid is free of evangelism, politics or cultural indoctrination.

International peace keeping forces could also be used in rebuilding. As the French president observed, the anticipated 15,000 international peace keeping body may be too large of a military force. There will also be 15,000 Lebanese soldiers in the same area to establish border security. Organizers of the international peace force should consider using a segment of the deployed troops in the humanitarian recovery program. Border deployed soldiers would implement what civil authorities plan for activities such as road building, bridge construction, agricultural extension work, vocational training and housing repair. Military personnel should not lead the aid campaign but it can support it. The ethics of selective use of the military in social work has been debated internationally, and as a result, there are helpful guides for civilian practice that can be followed.

Here is a final word. While the world's compassion index for Lebanon is high, the country's future remains in critical condition. Sound application of humanitarian work will not only help the Lebanese. This small and fragile country has always been a regional and international laboratory of social change. Lebanon's recovery process is an international experiment harmonizing politics and human development.
The author is an Arab American commentator. His new blog is www.aldikkani.blogspot.com. His email is grubeiz@adelphia.net.