You have missed the point that I was making.

I assumed that your point was that in America we kowtow to political pressures as well, and shouldn’t be so quick to point overseas. Maybe I was incorrect in that assessment, I dunno.

My point was that I had my doubts as to whether or not any kowtow really took place, and that it looked more like good marketing.

——–

David – too busy to get into this one today. But I completely disagree with your comparison to the Holocaust, as there’s a profound difference between “downtrodden” and “systematically exterminated” – at least to me. YMMV.

But for now, I’m gonna cut & run!

Seth, what Walter clearly and unambiguously implied was that Islam was more “destructive” than the two other Western religions. I beg to differ. Without question, there are religious leaders fanning the flames. But the fires as best I can tell originate in oppression, in feelings of having nothing to lose, etc. The fact that many downtrodden Muslims are committing suicide bombings rather than taking a good antidepressant or just killing themselves without taking others with them is partly cultural/religious, partly an act of desperation. The fact is that such tactics are effective in the short term. These guys wouldn’t be doing it if it didn’t produce some gains, whether the US withdrawal from Lebanon in the 80’s or the recent defeat of Israel at the hands of Hezbollah. Sure, Seth, there’s a difference between Islamic terrorists and many other groups. But don’t you think it’s just a bit too simplistic to chalk it all up to Islam being at fault?

There is nothing in the Koran, as best I can tell as a non-Muslim, that urges Muslims to commit suicide bombings. To be sure, many religious teachers are interpreting this text to suit their own purposes and situations. But that doesn’t mean that the problem simply equals the Sunni and Shia branches of Islam; that’s like saying the problem with America lies with the Christians, since Bush is a Christian. Some Christians, perhaps, but you see how much of a generalization this all can become.

I suspect that had there been ammonium nitrate or other explosive material available to inmates at Auschwitz or Dachau, someone would have tried the suicide bomber thing. And it might have been effective, even desirable under the circumstances. If I were faced with either certain death anyway, or a miserable life under Nazi occupation that had no endpoint in site, I would have easily volunteered to take out a bunch of Nazis using myself as a bomb. Nothing to do with religion in that case, just a way to potentially change the imbalance of power in one’s favor. Indeed, one can speculate what this might have done to the Holocaust had the crematoria been taken out by several Jews with bombs, even committing suicide in the process.

Seth, the knee-jerk response to all that’s going on in Iraq, Israel, etc. is to see Islam as the root of all of it. That’s what many right-wing people like Michael Medved, Michelle Malkin, Jerry Falwell and a host of others preach on a daily basis. But while aspects of Sunni and Shia Islam do play into the actions of terrorists, they’re not doing all of this so much as a religious war as a political/nationalist one. Palestinians want a state and are living under occupation, so many of them resort to terrorism no less than the Irgun or Lehi did under the British Mandate (indeed, David Raziel of the Irgun brought the first bombs to Jerusalem, and there’s a town and a street in Jerusalem named after him). No less than Basque separatists have done in order to try to gain independence. There’s no excuse for any of this, of course. But it doesn’t have as much to do with religion as it does have to do with politics and nationalist aspirations.

That doesn’t mean that terrorism wasn’t present before Israel was created in 1948; it was very much present. That also doesn’t mean it will go away once a Palestinian state has been created, as it will be eventually. But 9/11 wasn’t an attempt to force the US to become an Islamic state so much as it was an attempt to force our troops out of Saudi Arabia. Lunatics like bin-Laden certainly would love to see another caliphate established in N. Africa and the Middle East. But that’s not the rationale for why so many Muslims commit terrorism. It has much more to do with the policies of several countries. None of them, as far as I know, are threatening to bomb Finland or Jamaica, for example.

Regarding Sharia—any fundamental set of religious laws tend to be bad news for women and freethinkers. I’m not seeing anything particularly unique here, only that there are states that actively apply Sharia despite its being rooted in a very outmoded and ancient jurisprudence. The Torah, were it applied to everything in Israel, would call for many things that you and I would find atrocious. Same with the Christian Bible, which is why I don’t think any state should follow religious laws.

So what’s the answer, Seth—making Islam illegal? Jailing all the mullahs and imams? The best way to make their messages of hatred irrelevant to the young Muslims they are cultivating for terror is to create alternatives. If a Muslim youth has a reasonable probability of becoming educated and having self-determination and does not feel that countries like ours are able to commit offenses without being answerable to the world community, why would he or she commit terrorism? You are quite correct that many terrorists are well-educated and from better economic situations. But that’s why they are able to lead terrorist groups. Their underlying motivation, however, stems from what is happening to other Muslims, be they in the Territories or Iraq. No different than how many Jews from the US and other free countries contributed to the underground efforts at building the State of Israel in the 30’s and 40’s.

I understand where you’re coming from, Seth, I really do. I just think arguments that attribute terrorism strictly to religion miss the other underlying reasons for terrorist acts. If the US were more like Finland in terms of its foreign policy and relations with other countries, I doubt any of this would have happened on our soil. Except for McVeigh—that’s a different matter.

Nothing excuses acts of terror, whether committed by Jews trying to establish and maintain a nation, by Muslims who are lashing out at those countries and groups whom they feel have wronged them, or by Christians who want to keep American for white Christians only.

I think you’re making a big mistake in comparing what are fringe elements within a group (Kahane Chai, Aryan Nation, etc.) with a culture that at best accepts and at worst encourages terrorism as valid expression. Yes, sure, there have been terrorist acts committed by non-Muslims. And yes, there are a large number of Muslims who live in countries like Indonesia and Turkey which aren’t plagued by the same problems. But no one said that “most Muslims are violent, or that Islam is, on the face of it, inherently violent” – re-read Walter’s post. What he was pointing out was the undeniable fact that the majority of terrorism in the present day is committed by Muslims. There are examples of others, blah blah blah Timothy McVeigh blah blah blah, but that doesn’t change where the majority – not just a plurality, but an absolute majority – of terrorism comes from. It comes from men of Sunni and Shia descent.

Point being, you can point to all the “other” terrorism out there every time someone brings up Muslim terrorism, as if it somehow ameliorates it, or makes it seem less unique in context. As if terrorism is a problem in every community, and we shouldn’t look at the particularly Muslim brand of it as anything out of the ordinary, but part of some larger problem that includes the McVeighs and whotnot of the world. To that I say: Bollocks. You can’t lump it all together. No one’s shutting down operas in fear of the Aryan Nation. This “other” terrorism is so miniscule as not to be a concern to the world at large. But forget just the scope of it: it’s roots are very, very different than the kind of terrorism which beheaded Nicholas Berg and flew planes into the WTC.

There are disenfranchised Christians in the word, disenfranchised Jews. There are poor Britons, poor Americans, poor Spaniards, poor Israelis of all religious backgrounds. To suggest that perhaps the dispersion of wealth and power is behind terrorism is ludicrous. If that were the case, there would be an epidemic of terrorism everywhere. If that were the case, we would be worried about representing Moses’ (or Jesus’ or Buddha’s) head on a spike. But we aren’t.

I won’t deny it can add fuel to the fire. But fuel needs a spark. And sparks are flying from the mouths of Imams and other religious leaders throughout the Middle East. Sure, it’s certainly easier to get someone to go do something rash and violent when they aren’t particularly comfortable with their own position in life to begin with. But it’s also easier when violence and death are seen as natural parts of “religious” life.

Now, let’s be clear, I’m talking about a few branches of Islam here – we’re not talking about Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and the Sufi mystics, we’re not talking about the Druze in Israel, we’re not talking about the Kurds – we’re talking about Sunnis and Shi’ite primarily, and a few other fringe elements. The fact is, that within societies dominated by either of these groups, death is looked at as a solution. Read Nat Hentoff’s recent piece on Sangsar and think about what value life has in a culture so ready to kill it’s own most disenfrachised – for religious reasons. The list of crimes punishable by death in Iran, Suadi Arabia, under the Taliban – and likely in Iraq, as soon as we’ve left – is so long as to boggle the mind. How any human being, let alone someone of liberal thinking who opposes the death penalty, can offer up caveats, can avoid the very specific problem of Islamic terrorism by pointing the finger at these “other” terrorists, is beyond me. There is not merely a disregard for life in Sunni and Shia culture, but an actual pervasive love of death. To wit:

Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah: “We are going to win, because they love life and we love death.”

Chief Palestinian Authority cleric Mufti Sheikh Ikrimeh Sabri: “We tell them, in as much as you love life, the Muslim loves death and martyrdom.”

…to say it’s not religious in nature is to know nothing of Islam. This has been part of the Islamic story for centuries, dating back at least as early as the mid-600s and Caliph Abu Bakr’s letter to Commander Khsoru of Persia: “You should know that I have come to you with an army of men that love death, as you love life.” – a statement one can find reprinted in many Muslim textbooks. The love of death / disregard for life is exacerbated by passages in the Koran which absolve the killer of responsibility by giving all credit for death to Allah, i.e. “So you did not slay them, but it was Allah Who slew them, and you did not smite when you smote, but it was Allah who smote.” (K 8:17, if you need to know)

You can blame it on their leaders, political or religious, sure – and I’d be right beside you castigating them. But lay people are complicit in these crimes too. Lay people are making the choice of strapping a bomb to their chest and blowing themselves up on buses full of innocents, in crowded markets, in discos… Lay people made the concious decision to board those planes and crash into the Twin Towers. Their own communities are kept in line by terrorism, when lay people pick up stones and beat women to death for the crime of having been raped (that’ll show women not to get get raped!) No one is forcing their hand. And the fundamental difference between the 19-year-old kid from Yemen and Timothy McVeigh is that there’s another 19-year-old kid from Yemen every couple of weeks. The Aryan Nation, for all their moronic evil, are 99.99% hat and .01% cattle.

Does that make Islam inherently evil? No, and though there are certainly passages in the Koran which don’t read so nicey-nicey, you can say that about pretty much any religious text – everything from the Old Testament to the Hsi-Yu Chi to the Book of Mormon has some degree of at worst violence or at best intolerance. But the culture of the Sunni and Shia that’s another matter. There’s something rotten there, and the sparks of modern day Islamic terrorism are to be found in Sharia, and the culture of hatred and death. While some early terrorism committed by Muslims can be accounted for with the traditional liberal keywords of desperation and downtrodden, sure – Algeria would be a case in point – that’s in the past. It wasn’t disenfranchisement that led to the death of Theo van Gogh. He didn’t represent the power structure. Of the four London bombers, only one came from a poor family. It wasn’t the gap between rich and poor that caused the riots following the Mohammed cartoons.

But all that said, I still think the Germans are woosies for cancelling the show. I say put it on, and station an IDF battalion outside the theater.

“while certain speech and displays may be offensive to certain religions, that does not excuse violence. And personally, the religions need to lighten up a little. That’s the problem with Western religions in general—their adherents are very easy to rile up, and the history of religion is marked by many episodes of violence.

That said, I really, really doubt that a scene with the heads of Moses and hundreds of Jews on pikes would lead to violence. At wo”

Its right and probably self understood that nothing can justify this outpouring of violence. Rushdie also said in an interview about the longtime fatwa on his head, that no culture can justify death for opinion just because it is part of their culture.
That being said, I should like to point out that the vast majority of violence we hear about in todays world, and I do mean vast majority, comes in the name of Islam. Although the history of Christianity is particularly violent, that is after all history. Although war rages in the middle east, Israel fights in the name of a nation before religion. Where are the Christian suicide bombers, the Jewish hijackers? The reason that a scene of Moses and his followers on pikes wouldnt cause a violent uprising, is because those religious violent uprisings seem to be reserved for Islam alone. In stricter parts of the Arab world, Christian churches are not allowed to exist. If this happened in the Western world, it would be an outrage, and surely violence would follow. If the UK banned mosques and deported the fire-spitting preachers preaching terror, they would be the victims of attack over and over again.
In this respect you cannot compare all the world religions and say they are equally destructive.

Walter Ramsey

None of this stuff should be prevented from being experienced by an audience.

Walter and David, apparently the whole scene with the paraded and shackled world religion leaders and later their heads on chairs is an interpolation by the German director Hans Neuenfels. According to the New York Times reports I read late yesterday, Mr Neuenfels and his lawyer may or may not have been approached by the new General Director of the German Opera about leaving out the offending scene. They may or may not have refused to do so, citing artistic license.

How do you think the ‘karma’ of New York City or Washington, D.C. would have been this September if either the MET or the Washington National Opera had opened their cosmopolitan seasons with Jesus Christ, Muhammad, and Buddha (and Poseidon) shackled and later beheaded before the eyes of their well-healed live and locally broadcast populist audiences. Peaceful riots by the Christian Right and Muslims in Times Square and Foggy Bottom?
Any chance of a comparable bomb threat, do you think?

And what if the head of Moses had been included in the line-up and beheading in New York City or Washington, D.C? Interesting that the head of Moses was not included by the German director, perhaps due to ‘sensitivity’, no? Nor is it clear whether the director would have had license to display the shackling and beheading of Adolf Hitler, even if the display was technically within strict German law on representation of Hitler era symbolism, as noted earlier. Do you think that if would be wise for the upcoming German Opera premiere production of GERMANIA to feature Moses’s head opn a pike and hundreds or thousands of additional Jewish heads?

In yesterday’s late New York Times reports, there were pictures of the four religion leaders before and after beheading. The reports also note that the director is apparently a ‘strict secularist’ who rejects the role of all religion in human life and civilization.

Why has nobody stopped to ask the most obvious question, why in Gods name is a Mozart opera staging featuring the severed heads of the most beloved world religious leaders? This kind of idiocy should be banned, just because.

Walter Ramsey

Du schlagst mich ja tod! Aber ‘betrachet’ ist der falsche Wort. Du meinst ‘überschäzt.’ Wahrscheinlich gibt’s auch irgendeiner ‘cooler’ Wort, etwas aus der Umgangssprache. Leider bin ich zu doof es zu kennen.

Well said, Zeno, on all points. Especially that about the hyper-sensitivity of contemporary (post-WWII) German culture, entrenched in a legal system that privileges human rights and human dignity above all other law. What is disturbing here, though, is that the given reasons for the cancellation of the opera seem to have nothing to do with human rights or dignity – and then it would force the uncomfortable question of whether censorship is a greater or lesser offense than religious parody, a question that most of us would probably answer on the side of the former – and instead deal with, as was said (pre-emptive!) security concerns. An open society should have debates about censorship, about state funding and sponsorship, about human rights and dignity. But those aren’t the issues on the table, and that’s what makes this such a mess of a situation.

Doch, der Papst gilt sicherlich als Deutscher. Du hast ja recht, daß die Aufregung auf beiden Seiten ist total blöd. Haben Wir nichts besseres zu tun? z.B., ein Film von Wim Wenders angucken. Wim und seine Filme sind doch spitze.

theo van gogh was dutch, not german. was weisst du, eigentlich, ueber das leben in deutschland?

And here I thought that severing heads made Allah happy… go figure. Guess there’s subtleties to this stuff I’ll never understand.

What makes this even worse is there haven’t even been any threats – this is a “pre-emptive surrender” of sorts. I think I actually hate both sides of this one equally. Like, okay, I could understand this kind of woosiness in France, but Germany? Cripes, it’s no wonder the Neo-Nazis are making a political comeback over there.

Personally, I think Germany should commission German artists to paint murals along the remnants of the Berlin Wall, all based around the theme of “Theo van Gogh sodomizing the Prophet Mohammed”