zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — fast cars, bumper stickers — and no mention of loose women ]
.

-- I'm not a member of the Baader-Mainhof gang

police would set up roadblocks and stop only BMWs in an attempt to root out the gang members from the general population.

That’s profiling for you, eh?

**

Here’s a longer excerpt, so you see where this comes from — and how it turned out, at least for as the makers of BMWs:

In the early 1970s, the extreme left wing Baader-Meinhof Gang terrorized the people of West Germany with a campaign of bombings and assassinations aimed at dismantling a capitalist system they considered no better than the Third Reich.

The terrorists’ ride of choice? BMW New Class sedans and coupes, according to this documentary from historian Richard Huffman, an expert on the Baader-Meinhof Gang.

Huffman says cars became so strongly associated with the group’s acts of terror that police would set up roadblocks and stop only BMWs in an attempt to root out the gang members from the general population.

People even started saying that “Bavarian Motor Works” actually stood for “Baader-Meinhof Wagen.” Some BMW drivers even had to slap bumper stickers on their cars specifying that they weren’t terrorists.

You might expect this to have been a major PR crisis for BMW, then a small and nascent regional automaker nowhere near as prominent as it is today. But it wasn’t. That’s because the Baader-Meinhof Gang, later known as the Red Army Faction, enjoyed a surprising amount of support from people in West Germany, especially among young people and members of the left-leaning counterculture. This went a long way toward making the car seem hip in German youth culture.

Then the gang stopped being theoretical revolutionaries and actually started murdering Germans and U.S. soldiers. When the body count began to rise, public support evaporated. As for BMW, they emerged unscathed from the crisis, and started growing into the luxury giant they are today.

**

Now, what kind of analytic model would predict a series of twists and turns and hairpin bends like that?

Friend of the blog, commenter L.C. Rees, likes to point out that one of the most important part of a grand strategy, particularly one that is maintained despite evidence of being a geopolitical failure, are the domestic political effects that work to the advantage of the faction supporting it.  In my view, grand strategy usually has a political or cultural evolutionary component and, human nature being unchanging, Rees’s cynical observation has merit.

Last year, a couple of JCS aides/field grade officers wrote a grossly overpraised paper that was pushed by Anne-Marie Slaughter, Thomas Friedman and assorted worthies, that purported to be about a new grand strategy with which America could navigate the world. Mostly it centered on a preference for an America being run by a vaguely EU-like, technocratic, regime under the rubric of “sustainment”, in which the authors wisely folded in a number of  shibboleths popular with the corporate-liberal upper class who write large donation checks to think tanks or make their living in public policy and academia.

The talk of this nature died down when the election cycle began, but the themes were recently revived by the New America Foundation’s Grand Strategy Project whose director had an op-ed in Foreign Policy to reintroduce this agenda to the chattering classes now that the pesky voters are out of the way until 2014:

A New U.S. Grand Strategy 

….Walkable communities: The first pool of demand is homegrown. American tastes have changed from the splendid isolation of the suburbs to what advocates are calling the “five-minute lifestyle” — work, school, transit, doctors, dining, playgrounds, entertainment all within a five-minute walk of the front door. From 2014 to 2029, baby boomers and their children, the millennial generation, will converge in the housing marketplace — seeking smaller homes in walkable, service-rich, transit-oriented communities. Already, 56 percent of Americans seek this lifestyle in their next housing purchase. That’s roughly three times the demand for such housing after World War II.

[ by Charles Cameron — on the cutting off of hands, the eternal life of martyrs, and the vast and petty nature of we poor amazing humans ]
.

As you know, I love apposite juxtapositions between religious texts – if you’re into cognition, it’s called pattern recognition, in Jung or Plato it would be familiarizing oneself with the archetypes, and in terms of creativity it’s “one swell foop” of analysis and synthesis, an oak in an acorn, insight in a nutshell.

At times, as here, the comparison presents a significant similarity that “sees things” from a very different vantage point from our everyday selves – a refreshing and salutary reminder, perhaps, from high altitude, even if it’s not the street-level view we require to navigate life’s many smaller obstacles and minor goals.

**

Here are two such comparisons that have served a somewhat different purpose for me –- showing me that aspects of another religion’s practice that I find shocking have echoes in my own tradition. I do not claim these correspondences to be exact — but if we allow them to be, I believe we may find them illuminating:

and:

My hope is that such examples can help us to approach the “other” with greater respect and understanding — where we agree, and even where we strongly disagree.

In the way of peace. For it is written in the Injil, in the Gospel (Matthew 5:9):

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.

**

But to return us to the high altitude view from which we began, I’ll give Shakespeare the final word:

   HAMLET: I have of late–but
wherefore I know not–lost all my mirth, forgone all
custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily
with my disposition that this goodly frame, the
earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most
excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave
o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted
with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to
me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.
What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me,
what is this quintessence of dust?

[ by Charles Cameron — disentangling religion / politics braids in Pakistan and elsewhere ]
.

image credit: Pakistani cartoonist and artist Sabir Nazar

Blog-friend Omar Ali writes:

The state will make a genuine effort to stop this madness. Shias are still not seen as outsiders by most educated Pakistani Sunnis. When middle class Pakistanis say “this cannot be the work of a Muslim” they are being sincere, even if they are not being accurate.

The “madness” he’s discussing is the extensive killing of Shia Muslims by Sunni Muslims in Pakistan, and I’d recommend both his own article on 3 Quarks Daily and Bahukutumbi Raman‘s on Raman’s strategic analysis as offering detailed background for a topic I addressed from a different angle in Ashura: the Passion of Husayn.

**

It’s Dr. Ali’s final sentence in the quote above that interests me, though, as you’ve probably deduced already from the title of this post:

When middle class Pakistanis say “this cannot be the work of a Muslim” they are being sincere, even if they are not being accurate.

I haven’t quite known how to say this succinctly before, but I think Dr Ali hits a whole array of nails on the head.

Religions are mostly preached to whoever listens — and those who listen can be a pretty diverse lot, particularly across continents and centuries. The upshot is that religions generally wind up being interpreted in a variety of ways to suit the wide variety of human temperaments and situations.

Et voilà! Members of a religion who see it as a force for peace will tend to say of those who dismay them by using it as a cover for violence, “this cannot be the work of a member of my faith” — and they are being sincere, their understanding of their own religion is as peaceable as they say it is.

They are being sincere — even if they are not being accurate, and their religion as a “big tent” across cultures, classes, continents and centuries, also includes sincere people whose views are radically and violently opposed to theirs.

**

If Walt Whitman can say it, you’d better believe it can be said of religions with a billion or more adherents:

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

[ by Charles Cameron — today’s “shout it from the rooftops” is “advertise it on the bus” — the wars of sound-bite religion, plus special extra, the perils of dehumanization ]
.

.

I am pretty sure that when Sojourners puts up an ad saying Love your Muslim neighbors” (above, right) it’s a religiously motivated act with political implications, but not quite so sure when Pamela Geller puts up an ad that’s certainly anti-Hamas and likely anti-Muslim (below), whether to consider it religiously or politically motivated: the two things aren’t always easily untangled.

*

But hey, at least in Portland according to this AP article, the Pamela Geller ads were posted in response to this one, which I’d tend to characterize as politically motivated, with a plausible religious undercurrent:

**

Of course, there are other maps.. including this one, from American Trial Attorneys in Defense of Israel:

**

Okay, I’ve been on about ads as a medium for religious dispute for a while now [1, 2], and frankly I don’t know why we need seminaries in Oxford, Qom or Dharamsala if all you need to know about a religion can be found on the side of a bus…

But it does get confusing, eh?

For instance, when Mona Eltahawy defaces one of Pamela Geller’s ads, is she erasing freedom of speech, or hate speech — or freedom of hate speech?

**

Look, here are a series of ads that CAIR has just put out, using the term “jihad” in a way that’s both a legitimate meaning of the term within Islam and compatible with western democratic ideals:

**

And here are Pamela Geller’s reworkings of the same series of ads, using the term “jihad” in a way that’s both a legitimate meaning of the term within Islam and entirely incompatible with western democratic ideals.

The thing is, there’s an enormous spectrum of beliefs and nuances of belief within Islam, and even within Salafism…

And buses and subway ads aren’t the go-to places to understand that spectrum.

**

But they’re worth watching to get a sense of how the public is being swayed.

Ironic, isn’t it, that as the New York Times reports, Erika Menendez told the cops:

I pushed a Muslim off the train tracks because I hate Hindus and Muslims ever since 2001 when they put down the twin towers.

Hindu, Muslim, Sikh..

**

For what it’s worth, Sojourners could have posted an ad that said, Love your enemies rather than Love your neighbor — both are equally biblical:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.

Matthew 5. 43-44

But then, that’s a bit long for an advertisement, isn’t it?

**

Somewhere between Christ‘s command “Love your enemy” and Sun Tzu‘s “Know your enemy” we can surely find a place for “Honor your enemy” — and that, it turns out, may be of considerable importance. Describing the work of Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, Lin, Mehlman and Abney write in their Greenwall Foundation report, Enhanced Warfighters: Risk, Ethics, and Policy:

Grossman has interviewed many US veterans of the Vietnam War. Not all of his subjects, however, were those with lingering psychological trauma. Grossman found that some of the men he interviewed had never truly achieved emotional distance from their former foes, and seemed to be the better for it. These men expressed admiration for Vietnamese culture. Some had even married Vietnamese women. They appeared to be leading happy and productive post-war lives. In contrast, those who persisted in viewing the Vietnamese as “less than animals” were unable to leave the war behind them.

That, more generally, may be key to understanding why demonizing Islam and Muslims is such a bad idea. In Grossman’s own words:

It can be easy to unleash this genie of racial and ethnic hatred in order to facilitate killing in time of war. It can be more difficult to keep the cork in the bottle and completely restrain it. Once it is out, and the war is over, the genie is not easily put back in the bottle. Such hatred lingers over the decades, even centuries, as can be seen today in Lebanon and what was once Yugoslavia.