Interfaith Dialog

I have a Facebook friend who is Muslim. Just one. I met her a couple of years ago when Lynne and I participated in a small interfaith discussion group, five Muslims and five Catholics. We formed the group after a friend and I called on the Imam at the mosque (they call it a masjid) near our parish to ask if there would be any interest. The Imam made no commitment but referred our inquiry to his outreach committee. A few months later we had our first meeting. We only met four times and didn't stay in touch but recently one of the ladies from the group invited me to friend her and I did. She is interesting. Most of her posts are pretty standard Facebook fare, pictures of friends and such. But after the San Bernardino shootings we had a serious exchange. She has a different perspective. She has college age children who are constantly reminded that because they are Muslims, people don't trust them. Everywhere they go people eye them with suspicion. Her daughter can't get summer retail work because she wears a hijab, the distinctively Muslim scarf covering her hair. My friend doesn't worry about her own children. They are happy and well adjusted, and they get a lot of support from the community at the masjid. She does worry about young people who are less observant, those who don't get the right kind of support from their masjid. She sees them becoming bitter and resentful, susceptible to the kind of distorted, violent, hateful, and suicidal brand of Islam (she wouldn't call it Islam) they might find on the Internet. She thinks it's an urgent issue their leadership, Imams, intellectuals, and public figures need to address. I don't know if that was a factor in the Sam Bernardino shootings but I think she has a point. I also think it an urgent issue we all need to address. Like it or not we have at least three and probably five million Muslims living among us. They are here to stay and millions more are coming. We need to get to know these people and to understand that most of them, like my friend and her family, are decent law abiding citizens. We need to stop telling each other that Islam is inherently a violent religion. It isn't and we need to be respectful. We have to find a way to live peacefully with our Muslim neighbors. Else we are in serious trouble.

Terrorism in Russia

It isn't clear what motivated the killers in San Bernardino yesterday. Terrorism is certainly a leading candidate given what little we know about them. President Obama was quick to repeat his call for stricter gun control measures, saying these incidents don't happen with such frequency in other countries. If it was terrorism the President is clearly wrong. It is worse in Russia, much worse. Walter Laqueur, a prominent historian who has written extensively about Russia, says 50-60 people are killed every month in terrorist attacks in the province of Dagestan alone. Attacks are far from unusual in other parts of Russia. In 1999 somebody bombed residential buildings in Moscow, Buynaksk, and Volgodonsk. In 2002 130 people were killed in a botched rescue attempt of hostages held in a Moscow theater. And who can forget the 330 people, mostly school children, killed in 2004 in another botched rescue attempt in Beslan. In comparison such incidents are rare in the United States. There are twenty million Muslims in Russia and the number is growing while the population of ethnic Russians is in decline. Mr. Laqueur doesn't think Muslims will be a majority anytime soon but with a steady influx of firebrand preachers, many of them trained in Saudi Arabia, the prospect is unsettling. The strategy of Mutual Assured Destruction which kept the Cold War cold might not work with a deranged fanatic in charge of Russia's nuclear stock pile. Even a sizable discontented minority has the potential to destabilize the country if the central government begins to lose its grip. With economic conditions deteriorating that could happen. Muslims aren't new to Russia. Islam came to the Tatars centuries ago. But the terrorism really only dates to the breakup of the Soviet Union. The wars in Chechnya were initially about separatism but the brutality exhibited on both sides spawned an ethnic hatred that will likely prove lasting. It has gotten new vigor with the example of first the Taliban, then Al Qaeda and now the Islamic State. By now the suicide bombings and mass shootings have taken on a life of their own. If we aren't careful it could happen here. The San Bernardino shooters included an American born Muslim and his Saudi wife. The Boston Marathon bombers were Americans. The Ft. Hood assassin was an Army psychiatrist. But with a population of more than three million American Muslims, terrorism isn't wide spread, not yet. And of all the countries with large and growing Muslim minorities we probably have the best chance at keeping it that way. American Muslims are well integrated. In a 2011 Pew Research Center poll 82% of Muslims surveyed said they are content with their lives. Their income levels are about that of the general population. They express positive feelings about the country. They consider themselves American. The Muslims I know want no part of Radical Islam. (They hate that phrase.)

Confabulation

Confabulation It is the fabrication or distortion of memory about oneself or the world, a belief in the fantastic, maybe even the demonstrably untrue, usually without conscious intent to deceive. Donald Trump's slander of Jersey City Muslims cheering the fall of the twin towers on 911 is an example. I'll leave it to others to speculate whether Mr. Trump actually believes he saw film clips of Muslims cheering, I have no doubt that many in his audience sincerely believe they did. I'm old enough to know that memory plays tricks. I grew up in a small town that had, and still has, an annual peach festival. One year the festival included a concert featuring a gospel quartet called the Blackwood Brothers. It was held in a hanger at the municipal airport. The singers arrived in a private DC3, still in use as a passenger airliner at the time and a novelty for our town. They offered airplane rides for those interested and a number of people took them up on it. The DC3 has a tail wheel, which means it's center of gravity is behind the main landing gear. On landing it has a tendency to turn and go tail first down the runway. That's called a ground loop. The pilot has to be alert to prevent it and that pilot lost control on one of the landings. As the airplane turned one wing touched the ground. The airplane flipped over and caught fire. The passengers were trapped inside and burned to death. I'm pretty sure I didn't witness the crash but I did see the smoldering wreckage later and heard people talking about what had happened. I have a vivid memory of the actual crash and can hear the passengers screaming in pain. I also have an inordinate fear of fire. It terrifies me in the way some people are terrified of heights, or spiders. Confabulation can have damaging effects, intentional or not. It can also be used. Joseph Goebbels, the master Nazi propagandist, understood that. He wasn't the only one and Jews have been its victims for centuries. The blood libel, the lie that Jews sacrifice non-Jewish children in their rituals and drink their blood, has been a feature of anti semitism at least since medieval times. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Czarist forgery from the nineteenth century purporting to document a Jewish plot to control the world is still widely circulated, and widely believed. Clear minded people know none of it is true. We also know racism was not a factor in most of the incidents fueling the Black Lives Matter movement. But racial relations are worse than they have been in decades. One campus rape story after another has been debunked yet the myth of an epidemic has persisted to the point where basic rules of due process are being suspended. To be accused is to be convicted. As in my case, confabulation often begins with an element of reality. There is no question the 911 atrocities were carried out by men who were at least nominally Muslim. There is also no question that many Muslins, including more than a few American Muslims find the barbaric message from ISIS (I prefer the term Daesh) to be an attractive one. But Mr. Trump's Jersey City libel perpetuates the myth that all or most Muslims are cheering them on. There are a number of reputable fact checking web sites. Snopes may be the best known. They researched the Trump claim. There were rumors of Muslims cheering at the time and some documentation of cheers in the Middle East, but none in Jersey City. It is sheer confabulation and it ought to be quashed.

What do Muslims Think

Where are the Muslim voices condemning the slaughter of innocents by ISIS and other groups in the name of Islam? They are there, there are a lot of them, and they are loud but they are having trouble being heard. The news program I usually watch has covered the massacre in Paris extensively and featured numerous "experts" on terrorism trying to answer the questions, who are these people and why are they doing this? No expert I have seen has been Muslim. None have blamed Islam either though they don't shrink from the term "Islamic radicals." I would like to hear from Muslims. I understand why they don't like to refer to terrorists as Islamic but let them explain why. Why is this not Islamic? Why is it not in keeping with the passages from the Koran so often quoted by those who would condemn Islam as a violent faith? I think I know why but I would like to hear it from them. They are more than ready to speak up. They are on Facebook. They are issuing statements. Get them on television. Question them about it. Why? For four years I attended a Catholic Bible Study class at the University of Dallas. We went through every book. Some of it I found disturbing, none more than the book of Joshua, a book Catholics share with Protestants. I was warned at the beginning not to interpret passages from scripture literally. At least since Vatican II the Church has taught that scripture must be read in the context of all of scripture, when, why, and for whom it was written, in light of church teaching, and of what different meaning it might have today. Joshua's campaigns in the Promised Land were as brutal as anything any conquering army ever did. Did that justify the wanton slaughter of Muslims and Jews by medieval crusaders? They thought so. Almost all Christians today would say no. That is not the faith we share. There is no question the crusaders were Christians. At least one of them is a saint, Saint Louis, King of France, leader of the Seventh Crusade, and a man who believed the only way to talk to a Muslim or a Jew was at the point of a lance. Something like that is going on in the Muslim world today. The radicals may be a minority but there are a lot of them and like the crusaders they believe they are defending the faith. Some of them, like Saint Louis, are genuinely devout. And as in the Christian Bible, they can find support for it in their scripture if they look for it. Some of them truly believe that, as with Joshua, God has taken the field and will lead them to victory. That doesn't mean they are right. The Muslims I know say they are wrong. They are acutely aware that most of the victims are Muslim but regardless of faith it is always wrong to shed innocent blood. We need a serious dialog about it. Every horrific incident that makes the headlines reinforces the view that Muslims represent a dangerous segment of our population. I would like to think that view is wrong but I'm afraid it is not. It is affecting our national sense of charity and justice. Two governors have announced that Syrian refugees are not welcome in their states for fear that terrorists will be among them. That fear is likely to spread. This has been spiraling out of control for some time now and appears likely to continue. We heed to hear from Muslims what they think about it and, more important, what they think we should do about it.

Environmental Priorities

Call me a denier if you like. I don't believe man made carbon dioxide emissions represent a serious threat to the planet. On the contrary, more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a net benefit because of its effect on plant growth. I do believe the earth is a warmer place than it was a hundred years ago, though not warmer than eighteen years ago, or than in the days when Rome was in its ascendency. Whether the world will be warmer or cooler a hundred years from now is a matter of some conjecture but we should be prepared for it either way. Here is my problem. If we pursue draconian measures to discontinue the use of fossil fuels, measures that even their advocates concede will have minuscule effects on climate change, mankind will certainly be less prosperous in the future and less able to deal with changes in the climate that will surely occur. We will have passed on an opportunity never before seen, a chance to eliminate extreme poverty. If we need to build dikes to ward off rising sea levels we will not have the where-with-all to do it It is the poverty issue that bothers me most. In the U.S. the EPA is implementing regulations designed to drive up the cost of energy, increase the number of citizens classed as poor, and further reduce disposable incomes for those least able to afford higher fuel bills. For those of us who live in Texas a return to the days of summers without air conditioning is not a happy thought It gets worse. President Obama has disapproved the Keystone XL pipeline to transport Canadian oil to U.S. Gulf Coast refineries, oil that will be shipped instead by rail, or by sea to Asia. It is a purely symbolic gesture to prepare him for a coming international conference in Paris where he will urge the rest of the world to follow suit. He will commit to a level of funding for the third world he and the world know the congress will not approve. If we spent a fraction of the political and economic capital he will propose, we could rebuild the electric grid in India and supply power to advance that country's move into the realm of the middle class. In the process millions of lives would be spared death from respiratory ailments caused by indoor cooking fires fueled with dung I am not a scientist but I know what the scientific method is and the climate models predicting catastrophic global warming aren't it. When a hypothesis proves wrong, a scientist changes his hypothesis. He does not fall back on the half truths, wild exaggerations, and outright fabrications that drive climate change alarm. That alone is enough to produce the healthy skepticism so many people have toward the argument. I would also argue, though Pope Francis would disagree, that a more prosperous planet would be a cleaner one. England is certainly a cleaner place than during the early days of the industrial revolution. The United States is cleaner than it was in my youth when many people heated their homes with coal. We can thank natural gas pipelines for much of that. And we are seeing the Chinese pay a lot more attention to their own smog problems, an issue much closer to them than carbon dioxide is likely to be any time in the near future. I would like to see us focused on projects with measurable benefits, projects we can actually do. We have made enormous progress in recent decades in reducing extreme global poverty. Why is that? How can we expedite the process? We are moving backward in the United States. How can we turn that around? And why don't we clean up the dead zone at the mouth of the Mis

Smoot-Hawley-Trump

OK, now he's scaring me. There is a possibility that Donald Trump could become President of the United States. He was on the news yesterday in an interview saying that as president he would undo the trade arrangements we have negotiated over the years, starting with NAFTA. He would adopt protectionist policies reminiscent of the Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930, emblematic if not the primary cause of the Great Depression. Whether the rest of the world would follow suit as it did after Smoot-Hawley is doubtful. They recognize the importance of trade to their prosperity if Mr. Trump does not. But it would certainly retaliate, pitting the United States against the world and isolating us as we have never been before. Whether a President Trump could get the necessary legislation through congress is also doubtful but, oath of office not withstanding, presidents don't necessarily uphold laws they don't like. We live in dangerous times. The scary part is that so many of us are listening to this man. We are so angry we would fight fire with fire. Rather than insisting on a return to the rule of law we would fight lawlessness with lawlessness. Stick it to the Chinese, and the Japanese, and the Mexicans. That will show them. Deport the illegal immigrants, all twelve million of them. Don't ask how, just do it. Build the wall. Mexico will pay for it, even if we don't trade with them any more. We all need to take a deep breath, remember a little history, and do a little critical thinking. NAFTA would be a good place to start. Yes, there were winners and losers but most economists agree that Canada, the U.S., and Mexico all benefitted enormously from the agreement, as we have from the steadily improving trade environment generally since the end of WWII. Mexico is emerging as a middle class country. Net immigration from Mexico has been zero or negative for several years now, in part because of NAFTA. NAFTA can be improved but any improvement should encourage more trade, not less. The Trans Pacific Partnership, which includes Canada and Mexico and is currently awaiting congressional approval could be an enormous improvement if it does what it's backers say it does. One can only hope TPP gets a thorough and informed airing. Right now it is being heavily demagogued with Mr. Trump leading the charge and Mrs. Clinton joining in, if with softer language. It's not encouraging. The World Bank recently announced that global extreme poverty has declined in absolute terms to its lowest level in years, and in percentage terms to its lowest level in history. A huge new middle class has appeared, not just in Mexico but in much of what was once the third world. It is worth asking why. Improved governance, lower corruption, technology, globalization, and trade all play important roles. A Trump presidency could set that process back decades, though in fairness draconian measures championed by many democrats to reduce carbon dioxide emissions could do even more damage, perhaps stop it entirely. But my focus here is on trade. Interstate commerce has always been one of the principle drivers of American prosperity. The individual states cannot interfere with it. We can thank the founding fathers for including the commerce clause in the constitution. For more than seven decades, beginning with the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, international commerce has been a driver of the greatest economic boom the world has ever seen. The United States has been a prime mover in that. It would be a profound tragedy for us to turn our backs on it now. As I said. Donald Trump is scaring me.

Global Poverty

The World Bank made the news last week with a forecast that the number of people living in poverty, defined as subsisting on an income less than $1.90 per day, will fall to about 702 million this year. That is down from 902 million just three years ago and represents less than 10% of the global population for the first time in human history. The UN has also released new Millennium Development Goals including one to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030. With the kind of progress made in recent decades that almost seems achievable. Of course there are obstacles. Hundreds of millions of Indians and Africans will have to have access to cheap and reliable electricity they don't have today. All sorts of infrastructure will have to be put in place and paid for. We are in the midst of the worst refugee crisis we've seen since the end of WWII. And there there is a rising chorus demanding we all reduce our carbon dioxide emissions, with most proposals to do that making us less well off, not better. Frankly I don't see it happening in fifteen years. Turning the lights on all over India will require staggering amounts of fossil fuel to power them. All the alternatives together won't come close to satisfying the need, not in the near future. China's emergence as a world economic power was a miracle but it took decades. They did it in no small part with coal fired power plants and goods manufactured for export. Nobody wants to see the air in India or Africa choked with coal dust the way China's is. I doubt the international community would finance new coal powered electrical capacity anywhere in the third world, certainly not in the quantities needed. As for exports, the recently negotiated Trans Pacific Partnership not withstanding, protectionist sentiment is pretty high. TPP is in for a rough time in congress if it passes at all. Tens of thousands of protesters are expected in Berlin this week opposing the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Pact currently being negotiated. The Doha round of World Trade Organization negotiations is dead for the foreseeable future. There is lots of room for more trade and that is a good thing but it won't be an explosion. Then there is corruption. Where hunger and extreme poverty exist in the world today the problem is bad governance. With the exceptions of much of the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of Latin America a great deal of progress has been made there too. And before Iraq, Syria, and Libya descended into the chaos of civil war, even those basket case economies were showing promise. They are all salvageable but it will take some time. There are some ways we can help move things along. We can pass TPP. Every trade agreement we ever did faced stiff opposition. We can speed up the development of more modern, smaller, safer, and cheaper nuclear technologies and there are some that could be ready in ten years or so, maybe even sooner. We can influence the governance issues in Central America. We've done it before and that would at least begin to deal with the refugee problem at its source. And we can address some of our poverty issues here at home. We've been doing some pretty dumb things lately that have put a lot of people out of work and kept them out of work. We really need to take a sober look at that. So I don't think we will eradicate extreme poverty in fifteen years. But there is a better than even chance it will happen within the lifetimes of the generation currently coming of age. There are fewer people living in poverty today, there will be even fewer tomorrow and poverty becomes more manageable when there is less of it.