The poet Kazim Ali posted this to his Face­book page, say­ing that he thought it “had to be a myth,” and that is what it sounds like at first, but the Dove World Out­reach Cen­ter is indeed invit­ing peo­ple to burn a Quran on Sep­tem­ber 11, 2010. It’s easy to dis­miss this as quack­ery, as not worth giv­ing the atten­tion that it got through CNN’s cov­er­age, but the truth is that if we don’t pay atten­tion to it, if we don’t call it out for what it is – and it’s grat­i­fy­ing to see that the Face­book page protest­ing the event has close to twice as many fans as the Face­book page announc­ing the event – it will spread. More than that, though, it will become – it already has become, actu­ally, and this is kind of fright­en­ing – part of the way per­cep­tions of Islam are framed by our national rhetoric. Here’s the video:

Rick Sanchez, I think, proves him­self to be a par­tic­u­larly inept inter­viewer here – I don’t watch him, so I don’t know if he’s usu­ally bet­ter than this – but one of the things that dis­turbs me about the way he tries to respond to Terry Jones, Dove World Outreach’s pas­tor, is his but-there–are–moderate-muslims-out-there tone, as if those “mod­er­ate Muslims” – and more about that phrase in a moment – are some­how the excep­tion to the rule. Or as if they are, you know, out there, but really well hid­den, and so you have to know the secret code or some­thing to get them to reveal them­selves. Equally trou­bling to me, though, is the way the phrase “mod­er­ate Mus­lims” has taken on the same descrip­tive weight and author­ity as, say, Ortho­dox Jew or Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian, as if “mod­er­ate” were some­how actu­ally a sect of Islam. Well-meaning as it may be, the phrase actu­ally con­tributes to rather than decon­structs the way in which Islam is being defined as a pro­foundly hos­tile theologically-informed, we-want-to-rule-the-world polit­i­cal stance towards the West, broadly speak­ing, and the United States in par­tic­u­lar, rather than as a reli­gion. This is to me – and I’d be inter­ested to hear what other peo­ple think of this – very sim­i­lar to the way in which the anti­se­mitic rhetoric of Europe framed Judaism from the 18^th cen­tury, and cer­tainly the 19^th cen­tury on, and it is cer­tainly one of the under­ly­ing assump­tions – i.e., that the Jews want to rule the world – of the “World Zion­ist Con­spir­acy” theories.

It’s also worth not­ing that Jones and his group also declared August 2 “No Homo Mayor” day, a day to protest Gainesville’s openly gay mayor. Both groups – Mus­lims and homo­sex­u­als – are god­less accord­ing to Jones, a logic sim­i­lar to the one that cre­ated the asso­ci­a­tion between being Jew­ish and homo­sex­u­al­ity, to men­tion being com­mu­nist, Jew­ish and homo­sex­ual, that was an impor­tant point of anti­se­mitic rhetoric in this coun­try dur­ing 50s, 60s and even 70s.

It’s easy to dis­miss Terry Jones and his church as a bunch of nuts, espe­cially when his argu­ments for why Islam is a devil’s reli­gion, as quoted in the text accom­pa­ny­ing the Rick Sanchez video, include doozies like this:

“I mean ask your­self, have you ever really seen a really happy Mus­lim? As they’re on the way to Mecca? As they gather together in the mosque on the floor? Does it look like a real reli­gion of joy?” Jones asks in one of his YouTube posts.

“No, to me it looks like a reli­gion of the devil.”

The prob­lem is that Jones and com­pany are only giv­ing expres­sion to the log­i­cal con­clu­sion of what an awful lot of peo­ple in the United State., con­sciously or not, already believe. The term Islam­o­pho­bia may be rel­a­tively new, but the (often racial­ized and racial­iz­ing) hatred of Mus­lims has a long his­tory in this coun­try – and that is some­thing I will per­haps write about in another post – a his­tory that pre­dates the Sep­tem­ber 11^th attacks not by decades, but by cen­turies, and its assump­tions, its images, its rhetoric is/has been as much a part of our cul­ture as the assump­tions, images, rhetoric of, say, racism.

I am not an alarmist, though I do think there is a com­par­i­son to be made between the way in which anti­se­mitic rhetoric was deployed so as to make the Nazi’s cam­paign against the Jews and the way Islam­o­pho­bic rhetoric has been more and more mak­ing its way into our pub­lic dis­course. Indeed, I think this com­par­i­son would prob­a­bly work with the rhetoric of any geno­ci­dal cam­paign, though I do not think and I am not imply­ing that this is the begin­ning of some kind of anti-Muslim gov­ern­ment action. Rather, I think, plain and sim­ple, that those com­par­isons should make clear to us how imper­a­tive it is not to let the actions and the rhetoric of peo­ple like Terry Jones go unanswered.

This is the title of a PhD the­sis writ­ten by Dr. Aman­ul­lah De Sondy, who has just accepted a posi­tion at Ithaca Col­lege. Accord­ing to Joan McAlpine, who pro­filed Dr. De Sondy for The Sun­day Times, sev­eral lead­ing pub­lish­ers are com­pet­ing to buy the the­sis and pub­lish it as a book and, if they do, I think they should con­sider the title she sug­gested: Men, Sex and Islam. I, for one, am very inter­ested to read it. In McAlpine’s words:

It chal­lenges assump­tions about what it means to be a Mus­lim man. The Koran does not, says De Sondy, demand a bearded patri­arch with sev­eral wives and dozens of chil­dren. There are dys­func­tional fam­i­lies in Islamic tra­di­tion, he says, prophets with­out father fig­ures and revered holy men who led “effem­i­nate” lifestyles. Most con­tro­ver­sially, he chal­lenges homo­pho­bia in Islam. “Homo­sex­u­al­ity is not incom­pat­i­ble with Islam. The two can and have co-existed. The impor­tant thing is to link it with liv­ing a good life and cre­at­ing a good society.”

Later in the arti­cle, De Sondy is quoted as saying:

“In the 16^th-century Pun­jab, there lived a Sufi  saint and poet called Shah Hus­sain who is greatly ven­er­ated. He fell in love with a Hindu boy. They lived together and are buried side by side in the same tomb. Pil­grims come to the tomb and shrine in Lahore dis­trict even today, but some peo­ple want to rewrite his­tory, say­ing the boy was in fact a girl.”

He also points to the pres­ence of “antin­o­mian Sufis in the Indian sub­con­ti­nent  — men who have pierced ears and dance in women’s clothing”.

In response to the story that De Sondy says most of the con­ser­v­a­tives who dis­agree with him use – that of God’s deci­sion to destroy the city of Sodom because of the sins of its inhab­i­tants – he says the story “is really about [God’s] dis­ap­proval of the rape of young boys that was hap­pen­ing in the place,” which is very dif­fer­ent from say­ing that God dis­ap­proves of homosexuality.

I am not a scholar of Islam, nor well-enough informed to know the com­plex­i­ties of what Islam has to say about homo­sex­u­al­ity, but I do know that schol­ar­ship like this, which at the very least high­lights the degree to which ideas about mas­culin­ity, man­hood and male sex­u­al­ity are con­tested ide­o­log­i­cal ter­ri­tory, show­ing that the tra­di­tional view is only one of the pos­si­bil­i­ties that exist, is very, very important.

I first read about the ADL’s state­ment sup­port­ing those who would stop the build­ing of Cor­doba House, a Mus­lim com­mu­nity cen­ter mod­eled on the YM/YWHA’s and CA’s you can find all over New York City over at The Debate Link. In read­ing the state­ment, I was struck by these two paragraphs:

How­ever, there are under­stand­ably strong pas­sions and keen sen­si­tiv­i­ties sur­round­ing the World Trade Cen­ter site.  We are ever mind­ful of the tragedy which befell our nation there, the pain we all still feel – and espe­cially the anguish of the fam­i­lies and friends of those who were killed on Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001.

The con­tro­versy which has emerged regard­ing the build­ing of an Islamic Cen­ter at this loca­tion is coun­ter­pro­duc­tive to the heal­ing process.  There­fore, under these unique cir­cum­stances, we believe the City of New York would be bet­ter served if an alter­na­tive loca­tion could be found.

These words raise, of course, the obvi­ous ques­tion: Sup­pose the build­ing at stake were a Jew­ish com­mu­nity cen­ter and sup­pose the peo­ple opposed it were doing so out of “strong pas­sions and keen sen­si­tiv­i­ties” that were anal­o­gous to what the peo­ple who oppose the Cor­doba House feel, would the ADL argue that such a build­ing in a such a place was “coun­ter­pro­duc­tive to the heal­ing process” and urge that the cen­ter be built else­where? More than that, though, I found myself won­der­ing about whose feel­ings the ADL is being so con­sid­er­ate of here. As Michael Bar­baro wrote on July 30^th in an arti­cle on The New York Times web­site–the arti­cle was on the front page of the July 31^st edi­tion of the paper – attribut­ing the point to Oz Sul­tan, Cor­doba House’s pro­gram­ming direc­tor, “He said that Mus­lims had also died on Sept. 11, either because they worked in the twin tow­ers, or responded to the scene.”

Sul­tan was respond­ing to a state­ment made by Abra­ham Fox­man, ADL’s national direc­tor, to the effect that the peo­ple whose feel­ings his orga­ni­za­tion feels ought not to be hurt by the build­ing of cen­ter at its cur­rent loca­tion are the fam­i­lies of those who died in the Sep­tem­ber 11^th attacks. Mr. Sultan’s response, of course, is pre­cisely to the point, and I don’t think there isn’t much else to add to that. I do find Foxman’s rea­son­ing, at least as it is quoted in Barbaro’s arti­cle, pro­foundly trou­bling, though:

Asked why the oppo­si­tion of the [Sep­tem­ber 11^th vic­tims’] fam­i­lies was so piv­otal in the deci­sion, Mr. Fox­man, a Holo­caust sur­vivor, said they were enti­tled to their emotions.

“Sur­vivors of the Holo­caust are enti­tled to feel­ings that are irra­tional,” he said. Refer­ring to the loved ones of Sept. 11 vic­tims, he said, “Their anguish enti­tles them to posi­tions that oth­ers would cat­e­go­rize as irra­tional or bigoted.”

It’s hard for me to know where to begin tak­ing this apart. First, though, let me say that I do think Fox­man is right about this: peo­ple who have been through trauma are enti­tled to their feel­ings about things that may force them to return to or relive that trauma, and even when those feel­ings are irra­tional, the valid­ity of the feel­ings them­selves should not be ques­tioned, even when those feel­ings can rea­son­ably be cat­e­go­rized as “big­oted.” The rest of us, how­ever, should not be held hostage to the legit­i­macy of those feel­ings. More, pre­cisely because those feel­ings can be rea­son­ably cat­e­go­rized as big­oted, defer­ring to them in mat­ters of pub­lic pol­icy and dis­course can end up per­pet­u­at­ing that big­otry in con­crete ways. Wit­ness the ADL’s state­ment which, even grant­ing the most gen­er­ous pos­si­ble read­ing – and I am not sure what that would be – mar­gin­al­izes Mus­lims sim­ply for being Muslim.

Even more than that, though, I think it is cyn­i­cal beyond belief for Fox­man to enlist the moral author­ity that inevitably attaches to men­tion of Holo­caust sur­vivors, espe­cially because he is him­self a sur­vivor, to jus­tify the ADL’s posi­tion. It is insult­ing of my intel­li­gence; triv­i­al­iz­ing of the Holo­caust; it ren­ders Mus­lims invis­i­ble on all kinds of lev­els by equat­ing the Sep­tem­ber 11^th vic­tims’ fam­i­lies with the Jews; and it is, fun­da­men­tally, more about guilt-tripping the peo­ple who want to build the Cor­doba House and their sup­port­ers than it is about a search for heal­ing and that can be noth­ing but, to use Foxman’s own word, counterproductive.

I have not been fol­low­ing the Cor­doba House issue very closely and so I have not read much about the ques­tions that have been raised about some of the sources for its fund­ing, but I would like to say this: even if it turned out that Cor­doba House were being funded with money that could be tied back to the same peo­ple who per­pe­trated the Sep­tem­ber 11^th attacks, or some sim­i­larly objec­tion­able group, [ETA: the fact of that fund­ing would be the rea­son to pre­vent the build­ing of the Cor­doba House any­where in the United States; the fact of that fund­ing] would still not jus­tify the ADL’s posi­tion that would not jus­tify the ADL’s posi­tion. I hope that those ques­tions about fund­ing, if they have been legit­i­mately raised, are resolved pos­i­tively and that the Cor­doba House gets built. The con­tro­versy sur­round­ing it con­vinces me that we really, really need it.

To me, the point was obvi­ous. Bas­ing the Jew­ish claim to the land of Israel on the Jews’ own read­ing of the Hebrew Bible was ask­ing the over­whelm­ingly non-Jewish world to accept as objec­tive and incon­tro­vert­ible the truth that Judaism claimed as its own, never mind the impli­ca­tion that the dis­en­fran­chise­ment of the Pales­tini­ans was some­how the will of the monothe­is­tic god. To assert that line of rea­son­ing as an argu­ment for Israel’s right to exist, I sug­gested, was self-defeating at the very least – even if, as a believ­ing Jew, it was a cor­ner­stone of your faith.

“I never took you for an SHJ,” said one the col­leagues with whom I was talking.

“An SHJ?”

“A self-hating Jew.”

The other agreed. “My hus­band,” she said, “would say you were an anti­se­mitic Jew.”

I stared at my col­leagues across a sud­den gap of estrange­ment I did not know how to bridge. I had never been called self-hating before, but I under­stood it meant that, in their eyes, I’d revealed myself as a Jew who accepted an anti­se­mitic def­i­n­i­tion of Jew­ish­ness. It was a logic I had heard often when I was in yeshiva, though my teach­ers always used it to explain the anti­semitism of non-Jews who were crit­i­cal of Israel: To sug­gest that there might be a per­spec­tive from which Israel’s exis­tence as a Jew­ish state was not self-evidently valid, my rebbes would say, in many dif­fer­ent ways, over and over again, was to sug­gest that the Jews had no right to claim such a state in the first place, which was also to imply that the Jews as a peo­ple ought not even to be.

» Read the rest of this entry «

From the Every­One website:

Kiana Firouz, 27 years old, actress and les­bian activist from Teheran, Iran, has long been engaged in the bat­tle against the dis­crim­i­na­tion and per­se­cu­tion of homo­sex­u­als by the Ahmadine­jad régime. After pho­tograms of her video doc­u­men­tary on the con­di­tion of les­bians and gays fell into the hands of the Iran­ian intel­li­gence, agents began to fol­low and intim­i­date her. Con­cerned about her safety, Kiana left Teheran and sought refuge in the U.K., where she could con­tinue her work and studies.

She filed for asy­lum but her appli­ca­tion was rejected by the Home Office even though the Min­istry rec­og­nized her being per­se­cuted for her sex­ual ori­en­ta­tion and despite the fact that the Min­istry is well aware that under Islamic law homo­sex­u­al­ity is con­sid­ered a heinous crime pun­ish­able by hang­ing and that gays and les­bians are ene­mies of Allah. In Iran, pun­ish­ment for an adult con­sent­ing les­bian of healthy mind and is 100 whip­pings. If the act is repeated three times and pun­ished each time, the death sen­tence is applied the fourth time (Art. 127, 129, 130).

Hat tip: thef­bomb

If you have a mind to, please sign the peti­tion.

Unfor­tu­nately, I have not had the time to stay as cur­rent as I would like on the Pope’s alleged com­plic­ity, when he was a car­di­nal, in the Church’s cov­er­ing up and pos­si­bly enabling of the sex­ual abuse of boys by priests in Ger­many and the United States, and so I have not been able to write about it in an informed way. Nei­ther the sex­ual abuse of chil­dren nor its being swept under the rug such that per­pe­tra­tors are able to con­tinue abus­ing chil­dren is unique to the Catholic Church, of course, but, as a sur­vivor of such abuse myself, it is impos­si­ble for me not to iden­tify with the anger con­tained in this car­toon, which I found on Cagle Blogs.

ETA April 2, 2010: As Robert pointed out to me on Alas, the image of the priest on the right con­forms to neg­a­tive stereo­types of both priests and gay men and by post­ing this image with­out com­ment­ing on that fact I implic­itly endorsed that stereo­type. So let me say here that while I con­tinue to iden­tify with the anger in this car­toon, I think it is unfor­tu­nate that the anger found expres­sion in such a stereo­typ­i­cal image. Clearly the same point could have been made with a dif­fer­ent image.

I have writ­ten before about the book of per­sonal essays deal­ing with man­hood, mas­culin­ity and male sex­u­al­ity that I tried, unsuc­cess­fully (even with the help of an agent) to get pub­lished in the 1980s. Evolv­ing Man­hood was the work­ing title, though my agent pre­ferred and used my sec­ond choice–What Kind of a Man Are You Any­way?–because she thought it might sell bet­ter. When my agent finally dropped me because it was clear that no one was going to buy the man­u­script – which I may one day make the sub­ject of a whole other essay – I put the mate­r­ial aside and went back to work­ing on my poetry, and then I was com­mis­sioned to do the trans­la­tions of Per­sian lit­er­a­ture that I am still work­ing on, with the result that Evolv­ing Man­hood receded into the back­ground of my writ­ing life, and this makes me sad, not only because I worked damned hard on those essays, but also because I think some of the writ­ing has held up pretty well, even though it is, some of it, 20 years old, and because I think the ques­tions I was try­ing to explore are still pro­foundly rel­e­vant. More, I am sad­dened by the fact that the odds are over­whelm­ingly against my return­ing to this mate­r­ial in any sub­stan­tial way. Time, both in the sense of what my com­mit­ments are now, per­sonal and pro­fes­sional, and of my dis­tance from what I wrote back then, is work­ing against me.

So, since I don’t want what I think is worth keep­ing to dis­ap­pear into my fil­ing cab­i­net for­ever, I have decided that I will start a series called Frag­ments from Evolv­ing Man­hood made up of just what the title says, though the posts may be edited if I think it is nec­es­sary. I decided to make this the first one because it is Passover, a hol­i­day that, broadly speak­ing, is (or should be) about social jus­tice but that is also about what it means to be Jew­ish in a world where being Jew­ish can get you killed.

***

A Full-Throated Protest Against Exis­tence and the World

As a Jew­ish man, like it or not, my iden­tity within the Jew­ish com­mu­nity as both a man and a Jew is defined by the fact of my cir­cum­ci­sion. Even though I am Jew­ish first because my mother is Jew­ish, at least accord­ing to the tra­di­tion accepted by most of the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ties in the world, I entered God’s covenant with Abra­ham, became fully a mem­ber of my own peo­ple, only after my fore­skin was removed, and for the first fif­teen or so years of my life, I roman­ti­cized the moment of that cut­ting. Imag­in­ing a blood­less cer­e­mony sat­u­rated with self-conscious majesty, I saw my boy’s body wrapped warmly and securely in a blan­ket, held peace­fully at ease in the lap of my Uncle Max, smil­ing drunk on the wine-soaked cloth I’d been given to suck on to dull the (as it was explained to me by my grand­mother) very small pain I would feel. Prayers were uttered over my flesh, and after the cut­ting was done, my mem­ber­ship in the covenant, not to men­tion into the com­mu­nity of Jew­ish man­hood, was cel­e­brated with food and drink. I pic­tured myself being passed lov­ingly among the guests, cud­dled and cod­dled as they talked about the man I would grow up to be.

When I turned six­teen, how­ever, I wit­nessed an actual brit milah, or cir­cum­ci­sion cer­e­mony. The house was full of peo­ple. I could see in the room beyond the room where I min­gled with the other guests the feast that had been laid out for after the cut­ting. Peo­ple were chat­ting, jok­ing, shak­ing hands with old friends, and mak­ing new acquain­tances, but when the mohel—the man who per­forms Jew­ish cir­cum­ci­sions — arrived, the atmos­phere became imme­di­ately seri­ous. As he shook hands with the boy’s father and with those other men who would par­tic­i­pate in the cer­e­mony, the women left and the room grew quiet. The boy, bun­dled tightly in a blan­ket, was brought in and placed in the hands of the man who had been cho­sen for the honor of hold­ing the child while the pre­lim­i­nary prayers were recited. Then, the boy was given to the sandek, the man upon whom had been bestowed the priv­i­lege of hold­ing the infant in his lap when the cut­ting was actu­ally done. My view was blocked as the older men crowded around so they could see, but I knew when the cut came because that lit­tle boy howled. A full-throated protest against exis­tence and the world, his scream filled my ears, the room, the entire house with his pain.

The men smiled and laughed as if they did not hear the child’s voice. Above his wail­ing, they shouted mazel tov! — congratulations! — and shook hands with each other and with those who had par­tic­i­pated in the cer­e­mony. Some of them even began to sing. The boy’s scream­ing did not stop. I was taken to meet the child’s father. He smiled at me proudly, grip­ping my hand and, as his still shriek­ing son was car­ried from the room, steered me into the din­ing area where peo­ple were begin­ning to eat. This was not the peace­ful cer­e­mony I had imag­ined. This was hypocrisy, the sanc­ti­fi­ca­tion and cel­e­bra­tion through denial of the pain of the boy who’d just been cut, and also of the pain I had felt, and of the pain of every man in that house. I felt mocked, betrayed, and tremen­dously angry, but I had no words to express what I was feel­ing. Even now, hav­ing rejected cir­cum­ci­sion in my own fam­ily, it’s hard to dis­miss the rit­ual merely as the patri­ar­chal mark­ing that, at its roots, it is. Because what­ever else that rit­ual might be, the his­tory of the oppres­sion of the Jews has made it also a sign of defi­ance, a bod­ily affir­ma­tion of Jew­ish (male) iden­tity and Jew­ish (male) worth in the face of enor­mous persecution.

I put the word male in paren­the­ses in the last sen­tence because, while cir­cum­ci­sion marks only men and is there­fore prob­lem­atic from the point of view of gen­der equal­ity within the Jew­ish tra­di­tion, I do not want to deny the courage that it took for Jew­ish moth­ers to con­tinue to allow their sons to be cir­cum­cised, or for Jew­ish women to con­tinue to value cir­cum­ci­sion as a reli­gious rit­ual, a phys­i­cal mark and as a metaphor for the rela­tion­ship between the Jews and their god at times when forc­ing a man to pull down his pants was one way that anti-semites would iden­tify appro­pri­ate tar­gets for their hatred and vio­lence. In Hasidic Tales of the Holo­caust, for exam­ple, Yaffa Eli­ach tells a story that, whether it is com­pletely true or only an embell­ished ver­sion of the truth, illus­trates pre­cisely what I mean. In the midst of a “children’s Aktion,” a mas­sacre of Jew­ish chil­dren, the tale goes, a Jew­ish woman demanded of a Nazi sol­dier, “Give me [your] pocket knife!”

She bent down and picked up something…a bun­dle of rags on the ground near the saw­dust. She unwrapped the bun­dle. Amidst the rags on a snow-white pil­low was a new­born babe, asleep. With a steady hand she opened the pocket knife and cir­cum­cised the baby. In a clear, intense voice she recited the bless­ing of the cir­cum­ci­sion. “Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Uni­verse, who has sanc­ti­fied us by thy com­mand­ments and hast com­manded us to per­form the circumcision.”

She straight­ened her back, looked up to the heav­ens, and said, “God of the Uni­verse, you have given me a healthy child. I am return­ing to you a whole­some, kosher Jew.” She walked over to the Ger­man, gave him back his blood-stained knife, and handed him her baby on his snow-white pil­low. (152)

I am that boy; that boy was me. Had I been alive dur­ing the time of the Nazis, they would have tried to kill me pre­cisely for being “whole­some and kosher.” Yet while the vio­lence that mother did to her son absolutely pales in com­par­i­son to the vio­lence the Nazi intended to do to him, the story nonethe­less omits the boy’s pain, glosses over the blood that must have stained the pil­low, the mother’s hands and the German’s knife. It is that blood which haunts me, for my cir­cum­ci­sion is my con­nec­tion to that mother’s courage, to the courage of the men who cir­cum­cised and were cir­cum­cised at a time when a cut penis could have got­ten them killed. Yet that blood is also about the mak­ing of men, and as long as the mak­ing of men requires such blood­shed, man­hood will con­tinue to require the spilling of blood as its proof.

From ABC News:

The killers showed no mercy: They didn’t spare women and chil­dren, or even a 4-day-old baby, from their machetes. On Mon­day, Niger­ian women wailed in the streets as a dump truck car­ried dozens of bod­ies past burned-out homes toward a mass grave.

Rubber-gloved work­ers pulled ever-smaller bod­ies from the dump truck and tossed them into the mass grave. A crowd began singing a hymn with the refrain, “Jesus said I am the way to heaven.” As the grave filled, the griev­ing crowd sang: “Jesus, show me the way.”

At least 200 peo­ple, most of them Chris­tians, were slaugh­tered on Sun­day, accord­ing to res­i­dents, aid groups and jour­nal­ists. The local gov­ern­ment gave a fig­ure more than twice that amount, but offered no casu­alty list or other infor­ma­tion to sub­stan­ti­ate it.

An Asso­ci­ated Press reporter counted 61 corpses, 32 of them chil­dren, being buried in the mass grave in the vil­lage of Dogo Nahawa on Mon­day. Other vic­tims would be buried else­where. At a local morgue the bod­ies of chil­dren, includ­ing a diaper-clad tod­dler, were tan­gled together. One appeared to have been scalped. Oth­ers had sev­ered hands and feet.

Reli­gious vio­lence is not a new thing. Some of the most endur­ing images I have from my Jew­ish edu­ca­tion are descrip­tions of the vio­lence that has been per­pe­trated for cen­turies against Jews by Romans, Greeks, Chris­tians and, though per­haps less often, Mus­lims. One sub­text of those lessons was that the Jews, because we were so stead­fast in our reli­gious beliefs, because we refused to assim­i­late, have been made to suf­fer reli­gious per­se­cu­tion more than any other group; and, indeed, when I was younger, I often expe­ri­enced real cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance when I heard about reli­gious vio­lence that did not involve Jews. Over time, as my vision of the world and my place in it widened, that dis­so­nance dis­ap­peared. I came to under­stand as well that reli­gion was some­times merely the jus­ti­fy­ing veneer that one group would place over the vio­lence they wanted to do to another, a way of hid­ing their more polit­i­cal and mate­r­ial motivation.

The more I heard and read about reli­gious vio­lence, the more famil­iar the script­ing of it became – and it is remark­able how sim­i­lar the scripts are; how care­fully scripted the incite­ments to vio­lence are, if not the vio­lence itself, regard­less of the reli­gious denom­i­na­tions involved – and, even­tu­ally, the sto­ries I would hear left me feel­ing more numb than any­thing else. Yes, it was hor­ri­ble that peo­ple were killed, but, I would think, as long as reli­gion con­tained within it the pos­si­bil­ity for some­one to decide that he or she is fol­low­ing the one true path and that all those not on that path are morally and spir­i­tu­ally infe­rior and there­fore sus­pect, then the poten­tial for reli­gious vio­lence inhered in reli­gion, and there was no escap­ing it.

I con­tinue to believe that, I sup­pose, which is why I tend not to write about reli­gious vio­lence as such: I just don’t think there is all that much to say, or, rather, that I have much to say that would be use­ful. Still, this story, which has also been reported on Yahoo! News and other news out­lets – the New York Times puts the death toll at 500 – brought me up short. In part, this is because I have a very close friend from Nige­ria, and she has talked often about the ten­sion between Mus­lims and Chris­tians in her coun­try. Indeed, this mas­sacre is said to have been retal­i­a­tion for a sim­i­lar slaugh­ter of Mus­lims per­pe­trated by Chris­tians some time ago, and I can even imag­ine, from the way in which she talks about it, that my friend might have been among those Muslim-killing Chris­tians had she been in the coun­try and the cir­cum­stances been “right.” I feel, in other words, a per­sonal con­nec­tion to this story that I have rarely felt, not least because my friend might have been among those killed whether or not she had par­tic­i­pated in the prior massacre.

I did not know about how deeply my friend’s fear, mis­trust, and hatred of the Mus­lims in Nige­ria ran until after our friend­ship was well-established. She says she feels this way only about Niger­ian Mus­lims, not about peo­ple who fol­low Islam in gen­eral, and I believe her, and she tells sto­ries about her own expe­ri­ences in Nige­ria and the expe­ri­ences of the peo­ple she knows to jus­tify her­self. The fact that she makes this dis­tinc­tion, of course, sug­gests that the issues at stake are not really reli­gious, but the fact that they are expressed reli­giously – in terms of spir­i­tu­al­ity and moral­ity and the one true path to God – makes it hard, even just between the two of us, to get at what those stakes really are; and then I think about the way our inva­sion of Iraq and oust­ing of Sad­dam Hus­sein made space for the Sunni and Shia to go at each other’s throats – check out this NPR inter­view with Deb­o­rah Amos about her new book, Eclipse of the Sun­nis: Power, Exile, and Upheaval in the Mid­dle East–and even the Israeli-Palestinian strug­gle over the sta­tus of Jerusalem, which is so often played out in reli­gious terms. And when I think about how may more exam­ples I could list, I can­not help but feel that maybe it’s all, always, polit­i­cal; maybe the god or gods all these peo­ple fight over is just a way of not hav­ing to take respon­si­bil­ity for their own pol­i­tics, their own desire for power, their own inabil­ity to share, their own fear of every­thing that makes them vul­ner­a­ble; maybe the need to make your reli­gion the only true one is noth­ing more than fear and cow­ardice, and we all know how thin the line is between the cow­ard who cow­ers and the cow­ard who becomes a bully.

It has been a very long time, since I was an under­grad­u­ate in fact, that I have known per­son­ally some­one who could place her or him­self so eas­ily, so firmly, so absolutely, on one side of this kind of divide and so thor­oughly for­get that the other side is also inhab­ited by peo­ple; and yet even as I write that, it would be dis­hon­est of me not to own up to the fact that I too once stood with Israel, as a Jew, in strictly reli­gious terms, in a way that denied the human­ity of the other side.

That we all have this capac­ity within us is by now a cliché, but how do you learn to accept that impulse in some­one who has become your friend? Because if you can­not accept it – which is not the same thing as approv­ing of it, or allow­ing it to go unchal­lenged – then there can no longer be a real friend­ship. This is the ques­tion that I am confronting.

Jef­frey Get­tle­man, in this New York Times arti­cle, writes about how three Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians from the United States–Scott Lively (click here to read quotes from his talk in Uganda), Caleb Lee Brun­didge and Exo­dus Inter­na­tional board mem­ber Don Schmierer – are now try­ing to dis­tance them­selves from an event in Uganda at which they spoke about “how to make gay peo­ple straight, how gay men often sodom­ized teenage boys and how ‘the gay move­ment is an evil insti­tu­tion’ whose goal is ‘to defeat the marriage-based soci­ety and replace it with a cul­ture of sex­ual promis­cu­ity.’ The rea­son for their backpedal­ing is that the event con­tributed to the cli­mate that led to the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009, which would make homo­sex­u­al­ity a cap­i­tal crime. In a rhetor­i­cal move that is remark­ably sim­i­lar to the ways in which the reli­gious right tries to dis­tance itself from peo­ple who mur­der doc­tors that per­form abor­tions, each of these men or their orga­ni­za­tions has issued state­ments about how their mes­sage is one of love and com­pas­sion, not hatred and vio­lence. Read the arti­cle and fol­low some of the links. Their hypocrisy speaks for itself.

I do have to share, though, my favorite quote from Gettleman’s arti­cle. Refer­ring to the Ugan­dan Anti-Homosexuality Bill, Schmierer says, “That’s hor­ri­ble, absolutely hor­ri­ble. Some of the nicest peo­ple I have ever met are gay peo­ple.” (Makes me won­der if any of them are Black.)

Writ­ing in the Jan­u­ary issue of Harper’s Mag­a­zine, Joshua Cohen wrote this at the end of his review of Laor’s book:

It often seems that the Israeli-Palestinian con­flict is just […] a tex­tual prob­lem. If so, then the mud­dle of mean­ing that must be ana­lyzed lies in pars­ing not Pales­tin­ian from Israeli, but “Israeli” from “Jew.” Only once those epi­thets have been dis­sev­ered can some sort of dia­logue begin, between two polit­i­cal enti­ties and not between two (or three) reli­gions or Peo­ples. Until then, “Israel” will con­tinue to be vil­i­fied as a word that means some­thing other than what it should, while all crit­ics of Israel will be accused of anti-Semitism.

It is not clear to me from the review how much of this is Cohen, how much of this is Laor and how much of it is Cohen putting into his own words what he agrees with in Laor’s book, but any book that leads to this kind of think­ing, to ask­ing these kinds of ques­tions, whether I ulti­mately agree with the book or not, is a book worth read­ing. Now, if there were only 36 hours or more in a day. Sigh.