Clash Of Civilizations? What Civilization?

Huffington Post headline: "Taliban Insurgents Behead 17 Afghans As Punishment For Attending Party, Dancing"

Clash Of Civilizations? What Civilization?

Islamists controlling northern Mali amputate an accused robber's hand:

“[A cutlass-wielding thug] held up the man’s hand for the people, like a sort of trophy,” [a] witness, a local teacher, said Thursday in a telephone interview from Ansongo. “He said, ‘God is great.’ It was barbaric.”

Clash Of Civilizations? What Civilization?

Adam Nossiter reports in the New York Times:

Islamists in control of a town in northern Mali stoned a couple to death after accusing them of having children outside of marriage, a local official who was one of several hundred witnesses to the killings said Monday.

The official said the bearded Islamists, armed with Kalashnikov rifles, brought the couple into the center of the town of Aguelhok from about 12 miles away in the countryside. The young man and woman were forced into holes about four feet deep, with their heads protruding, and then stoned to death at about 5 a.m. Sunday, the official said.

“They put them into the holes, and then they started throwing big rocks, until they were dead,” the official said, speaking by satellite phone from the remote desert town near the Algerian border.

“It was horrible,” he said, noting that the woman had moaned and cried out and that her partner had yelled something indistinct during the attack. “It was inhuman. They killed them like they were animals.”

Muslims' Conversion Therapy On Gaza

Just 1,500-3,000 Christians, mostly Greek Orthodox, live in Hamas-controlled Gaza. While Muslim extremists have been accused of violence against Christian institutions, for most Christians the pressure is more subtle, according to a report by Ibrahim Barzak and Diaa Hadid:

The informal social pressure can range from strangers on the street urging them to embrace Islam to colleagues at work or university persistently discussing their Muslim faith with Christian colleagues. Particularly vulnerable to the advances are youth wanting to join Gaza's wider society and gain greater opportunities for marriage and jobs – as well as unhappily married Christians, since conversion to Islam is one of the few ways to get a divorce from their Church marriages.

A House Divided (And Not Beelzebub's)

Covering this week's Christians United for Israel rally in Washington, D.C., Natasha Mozgovaya gets to the nub of the matter thanks to one of the speakers, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who's running for Congress in New Jersey:

Boteach [discussed] the notion that such Christians are interested in Israel only to bring about the second coming of the messiah. "Judaism is clear that action is more important than intention, it's not motivation that matters. I also don't buy it that Christians love for Israel is a pre-condition for the return of Christ. I do believe it's sincere. I think it's based on a true desire to connect to the origins of Christianity,” said Boteach.

While their love is undoubtedly sincere, I don't think there's any question that the main source of conservative evangelicals' relatively new-found passion for Israel's security is what they think the Book of Revelation foretells about Jesus Christ's return at the end of days. In pursuit of their vision, some have made common cause with ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel who are planning to rebuild the Jewish temple -- on the Temple Mount, that is. You can make a contribution to the non-profit organization in Jerusalem that is already manufacturing the furnishing and fixtures. Of course there's the small complication that building the Third Temple would require the destruction of two medieval installations to which the world's Muslims are considerably attached, the al-Aqsa mosque and Dome of the Rock, as well as the recommencement of ritual animal sacrifices by temple priests. These Jews are trying to set the stage for the return of the Messiah, too, though they don't think he'll look like Jesus, much as the Rev. John Hagee (who also spoke at the conference this week) may hope and pray otherwise.

The motive behind these Christians' devotion to Israel makes no sense to me, because I don't read the Revelation to John the way they do. Its author was an authority on the tyranny of late first-century Rome, not the geopolitics of the 21st century Middle East. Besides, it strikes me as the height of pride for a pastor, rabbi, or theologian to think that the LORD is going to bring all things to completion in our particular lifetime. It reminds me of believers in reincarnation who naturally prefer the idea that they were someone such as Cleopatra rather than a slave who died one afternoon while chiseling a stone for the pyramids. Nothing like putting yourself and your generation at the climax of the whole story of the universe.

While these Christians are entitled to their interpretation of Holy Scripture, which places Israel at center stage for the end of days, I wonder how much Christian compassion they have for Palestinians who have been living under military occupation on the West Bank since 1967. This population includes Christians whose perspective on Israel differs dramatically from Pastor Hagee's. Those we St. John's pilgrims met on our recent visit to Israel and the West Bank reminded us that Palestinians have been worshiping Christ longer than than anyone -- since the first Pentecost, they like to say, when the Holy Spirit anointed the faithful from all over the region as they gathered in Jerusalem. Scriptural interpretation aside, their two-millennial perspective helps them resist the idea that all things are coming to a head next year or next Tuesday.

Unfortunately, as theological lines are being drawn, so too are political ones. In the mainline denominations, a reflexive tendency to blame Israel is taking hold, in part the result of go-slow policies of the Netanyahu government when it comes to the peace process. Our conservative brothers and sisters seem to be reflexively opposed to the Palestinian perspective. That's not good for anyone. As in all situations where people of faith have the opportunity and indeed are commanded to make the world better, guess who wins when the body of Christ is working against itself to the almost comical extent on display in the Middle East. For extra credit, where did Abraham Lincoln get the idea for his "house divided" speech?

The "Patriarchal Bargain"

When it comes to women's rights in Arab and Muslim societies, Max Fisher argues that Mona Eltahawy paints with too broad a brush:

If that misogyny is so innately Arab, why is there such wide variance between Arab societies? Why did Egypt's hateful "they" elect only 2 percent women to its post-revolutionary legislature, while Tunisia's hateful "they" elected 27 percent, far short of half but still significantly more than America's 17 percent? Why are so many misogynist Arab practices as or more common in the non-Arab societies of sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia? After all, nearly every society in history has struggled with sexism, and maybe still is. Just in the U.S., for example, women could not vote until 1920; even today, their access to basic reproductive health care is backsliding. We don't think about this as an issue of American men, white men, or Christian men innately and irreducibly hating women. Why, then, should we be so ready to believe it about Arab Muslims?

And this:

Some of the most important architects of institutionalized Arab misogyny weren't actually Arab. They were Turkish -- or, as they called themselves at the time, Ottoman -- British, and French. These foreigners ruled Arabs for centuries, twisting the cultures to accommodate their dominance. One of their favorite tricks was to buy the submission of men by offering them absolute power over women. The foreign overlords ruled the public sphere, local men ruled the private sphere, and women got nothing; academic Deniz Kandiyoti called this the "patriarchal bargain." Colonial powers employed it in the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and in South Asia, promoting misogynist ideas and misogynist men who might have otherwise stayed on the margins, slowly but surely ingraining these ideas into the societies.

And finally:

The fact that feminism is broadly (and wrongly) considered a Western idea has made it tougher for proponents. After centuries of Western colonialism, bombings, invasions, and occupation, Arab men can dismiss the calls for gender equality as just another form of imposition, insisting that Arab culture does it differently. The louder our calls for gender equality get, the easier they are to wave away. 

So Arab men, like men everywhere, prefer being in charge. They justify their behavior by means of the literal dictates of medieval Islam and the traditions they learned from colonial oppressors. If western critics are too aggressive about pointing out that it is wrong to keep women down, the men will complain that an imperialistic foreigner is trying to dictate to them, giving them further warrant to dictate to women.

The problem with this kind of cultural and historical argument is that an oppressive class often comes to power for complex reasons and then offers equally elaborate justifications for maintaining the status quo. When the outside world begins to raise the issue and the ante, the oppressor can get away with playing the victim of the foreign interloper for a while, but not forever. No arguments such as Fisher's are considered acceptable anymore when it comes to justifying or defending, for instance, slavery in the American south or South Africa apartheid.

Fisher also objects to the use of the word "hate" to describe centuries of misogyny. Did white South Africans and U.S. southerners hate blacks? What do you call generations of relentless abuse? "Hate" came naturally enough to those opposing California's Prop. 8, which banned gay marriage. But when it comes to the oppression of women, Fisher claims, we still have to walk on eggshells. He's right that misogyny is part of being human. Like its near relation, homophobia, it seems to come from a darker recess of our nature than racism does. But eventually, even Arab women -- women everywhere -- will say, "No more."

Why Newt Gingrich Should Stay In The Race

His latest atrocity:

While campaigning ahead of Saturday's primary in Louisiana, Gingrich spoke with the American Family Association's Sandy Rios about the recent Washington Post story on Rick Santorum's association with Opus Dei, a devout Catholic group. Rios, who disapproved of the Post's story, asked Gingrich if he thought the media would similarly "hold their powder" on Mitt Romney for his Mormonism.

Gingrich said the media, which he believes is "in the tank for Obama," will "do anything that helps re-elect" the president.

"It is just astonishing to me how pro-Obama they are," Gingrich told Rios. "Do you think you are going to see two pages on Obama's Muslim friends?..."

Be sure to understand exactly what he said. The media had made an issue of the conservative Roman Catholic associates of Rick Santorum, a Roman Catholic. Gingrich's interlocutor asks if he thinks the media will do the same with the Mormon associates of Mitt Romney, a Mormon. In response, Gingrich predicts the media won't investigate the Muslim associates of Barack Obama, who is washed in the One Baptism as is Gingrich himself and is a member of the United Church of Christ but who many GOP voters in Louisiana still believe is Muslim. If you don't think Gingrich is purposely exploiting their confusion, here he is again today, resorting to the slimy ploy of taking Obama "at his word" that he's a Christian.

Yet I'm delighted he's still running. His sneering attacks on the frontrunner, combined with each new demonstration of his toxicity and near-irrelevance, reduce the likelihood that Romney, if elected, would feel any obligation to put him in the government.

The GOP And The Muslim Myth

Former Bush aide Peter Wehner on the persistence of the myth that Barack Obama isn't a Christian and Republicans elites' responsibility to say otherwise:

We live in a political culture that is so polarized that for some people, the worst thing that is said about one’s political opponent is assumed to be true. Being a Muslim shouldn’t automatically disqualify a person from being a president, of course; but for many people who (absurdly) assume that being a person of the Muslim faith and being a jihadist are interchangeable, it is.

Like the birth certificate issue, the claim that Obama is a Muslim [read: terrorist sympathizer] is a pernicious effort by some to discredit and disqualify him. It focuses on make-believe charges at the expense of real policy disagreements. But in some respects it’s even worse than the birth certificate issue, because it attempts to divide us on explicitly religious grounds, something that America at its best has always avoided.

I served a president who was at the center of crazy left-wing conspiracies. Ben Smith, then of Politico, reported: “More than half of Democrats, according to a neutral survey, said they believed Bush was complicit in the 9/11 terror attacks.” They asserted this not because there was a shred of evidence to support it but because they wanted to believe the worst they could about a president they had come to hate.

Those on the right shouldn’t replicate a similar tactic when it comes to President Obama. The GOP presidential candidates, if and when they’re asked about it, should do everything they reasonably can to discredit this belief which is, in some places at least, widespread. There are right ways and wrong ways to win elections – and Obama should not lose this election, or even a single vote, based on the false claim that he’s a Muslim.

The Peace Of Christ That All Understanding Passes

Mega megachurch angst reported today in Orange County. The Schuller family hopes to take part of the Crystal Cathedral congregation to a new church, while Saddleback Church is in the midst of a controversy sparked by this article in the Feb. 26 Orange County Register:

Abraham Meulenberg, a Saddleback pastor in charge of interfaith outreach, and Jihad Turk, director of religious affairs at a mosque in Los Angeles, introduced King's Way as "a path to end the 1,400 years of misunderstanding between Muslims and Christians."

The men presented a document they co-authored outlining points of agreement between Islam and Christianity. The document affirms that Christians and Muslims believe in "one God" and share two central commandments: "love of God" and "love of neighbor." The document also commits both faiths to three goals: Making friends with one another, building peace and working on shared social service projects. The document quotes side-by-side verses from the Bible and the Koran to illustrate its claims.

"We agreed we wouldn't try to evangelize each other," said Turk. "We'd witness to each other but it would be out of 'Love Thy Neighbor,' not focused on conversion."

The Register follows up today:

An outreach effort to Muslims initiated by Saddleback Church in Lake Forest has sparked a national uproar among evangelical Christians, with some accusing the Rev. Rick Warren, Saddleback's pastor, of betraying core Christian principles and Warren responding that his beliefs and intentions have been misrepresented.

Since an Orange County Register article published Feb. 26 detailed the outreach effort, evangelicals across the country have taken to blogs, social media and Christian news outlets to debate whether and how Christians should forge relationships with people of other faiths.

Longtime critics of Warren have published lengthy online accusations that the influential pastor, who delivered the invocation at President Barack Obama's 2009 inauguration, has gone too far in seeking theological common ground with Muslims.

Warren's critics accuse him of sending cunning coded messages to Muslims in his inaugural prayer and of being more interested in feeding people, preventing HIV-AIDS infections, and promoting justice than bringing souls to Christ. It's an age-old, tiresome attack on faithful Christians who happen to be called to make life better for all those whom God loves.

Warren does dispute the assertion in the original Register article that he believed Christians and Muslims worshiped the same God. “We worship Jesus as God. Muslims don't,” he writes. “Our God is Jesus, not Allah." This is also a wearisome debate. If we insist, as Warren's critics do, that Muslims worship a different God, aren't we making the fantastic claim that there are more than one? It's a commonplace of interfaith dialogue that the Abrahamic faiths share historical and theological antecedents, especially the monotheistic God of Abraham, Issac, and Ishmael. Islam's critics are really saying that Muslims worship God the wrong way. Whenever tempted to think that may be true, I remind myself that I'd take a different view if I'd been born in Jordan to Muslim parents rather than in Detroit to a mother who happened to write the newsletter for the Cathedral Church of St. Paul. I proclaim Christ crucified and risen, but humbly enough, I hope, to allow for the diversity of God's infinite mind.

Sharia And Atheism's Useful Idiots

Is the use of Sharia law in U.S. neighborhoods and communities a harbinger of Islamic despotism? A provocative article in the conservative religious journal founded by Richard John Neuhaus, First Things, raises a different specter: Laws aimed at banning Sharia could weaken First Amendment protections enjoyed by all faiths. The author of the article is law professor Robert K. Vischer:

Before Christian and Jewish believers support such measures, they should consider the way these laws not only misunderstand the faith of their Muslim fellow citizens but threaten their own religious liberty. Muslim Americans who seek to use Sharia are not asking the American legal system to adopt Islamic rules of conduct, penal or otherwise. Muslims have introduced Sharia in court not in an attempt to establish a freestanding source of law binding on litigants but rather in recognition of the norms to which the litigants have already agreed to be bound.

American courts do this every day—it’s called contract law. Even the literature being pumped out by anti-Sharia organizations shows that their target is not the threat posed by the imposition of Sharia on American society but rather the threat posed by the introduction of Sharia according to the same criteria of admissibility applied by courts to other religious codes.

In particular, the disputes implicating Sharia tend to crop up over the terms of the contract that constitutes the litigants’ marriage. (In Islam, the contract does not precede a marriage; the contract is the marriage.) The disputed terms often pertain to the distribution of property upon marriage and in the event of divorce or the husband’s death. Courts do not rubber-stamp all marital contracts, of course. But whether or not a contract formed in accordance with Sharia is enforceable should turn on whether it goes beyond the contractual conditions that would be tolerable in any other marital contract, not on the fact that it emerged from a particular religious system.

More broadly, the religious terms of an agreement do not preclude its enforcement by courts. If the rules of a Baptist church provide that a pastor can be removed only by a vote of the entire membership, a court will uphold a pastor’s challenge if the elders dismissed him without the required vote. That the church’s rule expresses the Baptist commitment to the priesthood of all believers does not preclude a court from enforcing it.

To ban Sharia or any other form of religious law puts religious citizens at a tremendous disadvantage. The rules of secular groups like the PTA, ACLU, and Humane Society all have real authority because the legal system stands behind them when disputes arise. In the same way, American law rightly stands behind the rules adopted by religious bodies unless those rules conflict with important public policies.

Courts are not going to enforce a Mayan rule about child sacrifice, but in the vast majority of cases, courts enforce religious rules. When bankruptcy courts apply canon law in determining property rights for a diocese or when courts enforce arbitration agreements based on biblical principles pursuant to widely invoked rules of “Christian conciliation,” the rule of law is not jeopardized. Anti-Sharia legislation proposes an unconstitutional double standard. Canon law and biblical principles are not dirty words in the American court system, and Sharia should not be either.

Vischer is no raging liberal. He calls states' requirements that pro-life pharmacists dispense the the morning-after pill and religious organizations provide contraceptives to employees "violations of religious freedom." He doesn't address the partisan political dimension of the issue, but it's clear enough between the lines of his analysis. So-called friends of the First Amendment such as Newt Gingrich who compare Muslims to Nazis, try to create mosque-free zones, and denounce Sharia will make it easier for secularists to encroach on religious exclusions across the board. That makes Gingrich the atheists' useful idiot.

Innocent Bystanders For Christ

Responding to false reports emanating from a man of God that Jews were planning to desecrate Muslim holy sites, 50 Muslims stoned Christians tourists who were visiting the Temple Mount in Jerusalem on the LORD's day. Covering the incident, Israel Today magazine reports:

Because of the constant threat of Muslim violence, and despite the fact that the Temple Mount is the most holy place on earth to Jews and many Christians, the Israeli police comply with Muslim demands for harsh restrictions on non-Muslim visitors to the site. For instance, Jews and Christians are forbidden to carry Bibles atop the Temple Mount or to utter even silent prayers within its walls. Jews and Christians are regularly detained for violating these conditions.

Competing holiness claims about the Temple Mount create an unholy mess, including during arguments over where a new nation of Palestine's capital should be. It's the holiest place for observant Jews because of the First and Second temples, though some Palestinians argue, against all evidence, that they never existed. It's usually described as the third holiest place for Muslims because Muhammad is said to have ascended to heaven from the foundation stone, though some insist that Muhammad never ascended to heaven. As for Christians, Israel Today has overreached a bit. We do consider the Temple Mount a vital part of our narrative. Jesus was presented at the temple as an infant, studied there as a boy, preached there during his public ministry, predicted its destruction, and performed some housecleaning that helped get him killed.

If there's one site in Jerusalem that Christians agree is the holiest, though, it's the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, whose original structure was built in the fourth century over the place Jesus was and is thought to have been crucified, buried, and resurrected, perhaps in a quarry located outside the walls that Herod the Great built when he expanded the Second Temple in the first century before Christ. Christians have battled one another over that church, and still do, but they wouldn't go to war over the Temple Mount -- making their getting stoned for Jesus this morning weirdly ironic.

Clash Of Civilizations? What Civilization?

The Washington Post covers the reopening of the national museum in the Maldives (an island nation 250 miles southwest of India) after a mob of radical Islamists destroyed almost all of the museum's pre-12 century non-Islamic exhibits:

The items had been preserved since the museum opened in 1952. [museum director Ali] Waheed said the the attackers did not understand that the museum exhibits were not promoting other religions in this Muslim country.

Practicing or preaching any religion other than Islam is prohibited by the Maldives constitution, and there have been increasing demands for conservative Muslim policies to be implemented.

Last year, a mob destroyed a monument given by Pakistan marking a South Asian summit with an engraved image of the Buddha in it. Pakistan is an Islamic republic that also has a Buddhist history.

Mr. Obama Follows The Gingrich Precedent

Newt Gingrich, criticizing the Obama administration's policy change on Roman Catholic institutions and birth control, says that Mitt Romney had a weak record when it comes to respecting the church's prerogatives.

What a joke. Compared to Gingrich, Romney's holier than Benedict. In 2010, Gingrich compared Muslims to Nazis and argued that Muslim U.S. citizens shouldn't be permitted to worship as they chose within a certain distance of the World Trade Center. Gingrich, who ironically enough claims that Obama doesn't respect the Constitution, was proposing a blatant violation of Muslims' God-given, constitutionally-protected freedom while inviting reciprocal moves by anyone who resents the privileges religious institutions enjoy in our country. As I wrote at the time:

The case of the inconvenient mosque would be a useful precedent for harassing others with unpopular or controversial views such as Roman Catholics, orthodox Jews, Mormons, and even Rick Warren and his fellow Southern Baptists. Should that moment come, religion's enemies would smile as they remembered the day when Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin became their useful idiots.

Even imams have objected to the Obama ruling. Imagine that: Muslims speaking up for the letter and spirit of the Constitution, while Gingrich, the history professor, betrayed them all.

The War Against Christians

Ayan Hirsi Ali, writing in Newsweek:

[A] fair-minded assessment of recent events and trends leads to the conclusion that the scale and severity of Islamophobia pales in comparison with the bloody Christophobia currently coursing through Muslim-majority nations from one end of the globe to the other. The conspiracy of silence surrounding this violent expression of religious intolerance has to stop. Nothing less than the fate of Christianity—and ultimately of all religious minorities—in the Islamic world is at stake.

Antichrist? But Where's He On The Life Issue?

Rick Perlstein argues that Christian evangelicals are already getting over their worries about an LDS nominee and president:

[Their critical language was] strikingly similar to the way they characterized Catholics generations ago. As the Baptist college president quoted by the [New York] Times put it, they fear "the Mormon Church will use [Romney’s] position around the world as a calling card for legitimizing their church and proselytizing people." But they're getting over it. Here is Billy Graham's much more political son Franklin, for instance, speaking in December on the air of Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network: "the fact that he is a Mormon doesn’t bother me at all."

That's the way cultural change works in America: the rest of us discard a prejudice that the right still clings to; in the fullness of time, the right comes around too, deploying clever rationalizations to forget they ever bore the prejudice in the first place.

But it's not exactly a matter of discarding religious prejudice. The faithful have just realized that the purpose of political activism is obtaining policy outcomes. Perlstein notes the antipathy to Barack Obama shared by evangelicals and conservative Roman Catholics and shows how they first linked up over abortion and gay rights. Romney will probably win them if they're sure he's not squishy on social issues. But the most theologically conservative won't ever get over his religion. Untold thousands are saying to themselves even as they vote for Mitt: "Nice guy. Too bad he's going to hell."

Even more interesting than the demons of religious prejudice that conservative evangelicals and their political toadies are keeping under wraps for politics' sake are the ones they're proudly taking out for a walk. In 2010 Newt Gingrich and others in and out of government made constitutional history by arguing that U.S. citizens who were Muslims should not be permitted to worship as they choose within a certain distance of the World Trade Center. Just as insidious is the implicit conservative evangelical proposition that mainline Christians --such as Obama, for instance -- aren't Christian at all.

Clash Of Civilizations? What Civilization?

After 22-year-old Storai (her only name) is murdered by her mother and husband in northern Afghanistan for not giving birth to a boy, experts reflect on the status of women:

Manizha Naderi, executive director of Women for Afghan Women, which runs shelters for abused women, said that while she had seen cases in which women were bullied by their husbands through pregnancy, and that sometimes a husband even took a second or third wife if the first wife continued to have girls, murder was unusual.

“Girls are looked down upon in Afghanistan,” Ms. Naderi said. “I have heard of many cases where the wife is threatened with violence and beaten up, but I have never heard of a woman being killed for having a girl.”

Heather Barr, an Afghanistan researcher for Human Rights Watch, said that there was a cultural tolerance for violence against women and impunity for men who committed it, and that recent efforts to protect women had had scant effect.

“What is most disappointing,” Ms. Barr said, “is that the 2009 Elimination of Violence Against Women Law was supposed to change this, and it has had very little impact so far.”

She said rules in the penal code specified that a husband could kill his wife for having had sex outside of marriage. Even the civil code has rules allowing a husband to take a second wife if the first one is not procreating satisfactorily, Ms. Barr said.

Gingrich's Failed European Policies

In 2010, Newt Gingrich compared Muslims to Nazis -- political hate speech, according to his former House colleague Joe Scarborourgh -- and argued that U.S. citizens who are Muslim should be banned from mosque worship in the vicinity of the World Trade Center. More recently, he said he'd insist on a religious test for Muslim citizens who wanted to work in government. If elected, would he try to make his anti-First Amendment beliefs the law of the land? Then he'd be leading the U.S. down the road he claims Barack Obama is taking, toward a militantly secular Europe. Besides being unconstitutional, it would be stupid. As Jonathan Laurence writes, Gingrichism has slowed rather than accelerated Muslims' integration into European society:

Europeans should not be afraid to allow Muslim students to take classes on Islam in state-financed schools and universities. The recognition and accommodation of Islamic religious practices, from clothing to language to education, does not mean capitulation to fundamentalism. On the contrary, only by strengthening the democratic rights of Muslim citizens to form associations, join political parties and engage in other aspects of civic life can Europe integrate immigrants and give full meaning to the abstract promise of religious liberty.

The rise of right-wing, anti-immigrant parties has led several European countries to impose restrictions on Islamic dress, mosque-building and reunification of families through immigration law. These policies are counterproductive. Paradoxically, people for whom religion is otherwise not all that important become more attached to their faith’s clothing, symbols and traditions when they feel they are being singled out and denied basic rights.

Officer? Non-Islamic Blow-Dry On Chair Three!

Journalist Carina Kamel compares this Christmas in Cairo to last year's and worries about what may be in store for Egypt's women and non-Muslims:

Perhaps one of the biggest changes this Christmas was that the perceived threat of Islamism shared by liberals and Christians is now all the more real as the once-banned Muslim Brotherhood are poised to control parliament.

This makes secular parties, liberal groups, activists and Christians very nervous. They are concerned about religious intrusion in private life and restrictions on civil liberties. Already, there have been local media reports of a self-appointed "religious police" barging into places like ladies' hairdressers and ordering patrons to cease what they describe as un-Islamic practices like getting a blow dry. That incident didn't go down well with Egypt's well groomed women, who, according to reports, beat up the extremists and kicked them out of the beauty parlor.

Newt's Defining Foment

Robert Wright recalls Newt Gingrich's 2010 demagoguery about Muslims and declaration of war on the First Amendment:

Gingrich said they shouldn't be able to build a mosque within a few blocks of the World Trade Center site just as "Nazis don't have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust museum in Washington." Surely Gingrich is smart enough to see the problem with this analogy. (Hint: The 9/11 attacks were organized by a terrorist group called al Qaeda, not by a religion called Islam.) But he knows that people who hate Muslims won't fuss over details--and if the Nazi comparison amps up their hatred, so much the better for the politician who champions their cause.

Time For A Hard Liberalism

As Islamist parties coalesce into a parliamentary majority in Egypt, Leon Wieseltier urges democracy's real adherents in the world to pay close attention:

The Islamists do not agree that a codification of rights is a condition of democratic life, and regard it instead as an outcome of democratic life that they wish to avoid. But rights are prior or they are not real. So a hard liberalism is needed now, respectful but suspicious, coldly resolute, undeceived by the bliss of passing solidarity, aware that the party of the open society has too often assisted in its own demise.