Religious extremists in 3 faiths share views: report

By Claudia ParsonsWed Jun 13, 5:49 PM ET

Violent Muslim, Christian and Jewish extremists invoke the same rhetoric of "good" and "evil" and the best way to fight them is to tackle the problems that drive people to extremism, according to a report obtained by Reuters.

It said extremists from each of the three faiths often have tangible grievances -- social, economic or political -- but they invoke religion to recruit followers and to justify breaking the law, including killing civilians and members of their own faith.

The report was commissioned by security think tank EastWest Institute ahead of a conference on Thursday in New York titled "Towards a Common Response: New Thinking Against Violent Extremism and Radicalization." The report will be updated and published after the conference.

The authors compared ideologies, recruitment tactics and responses to violent religious extremists in three places -- Muslims in Britain, Jews in Israel and Christians in the United States.

"What is striking ... is the similarity of the worldview and the rationale for violence," the report said.

It said that while Muslims were often perceived by the West as "the principal perpetrators of terrorist activity," there are violent extremists of other faiths. Always focusing on Muslim extremists alienates mainstream Muslims, it said.

The report said it was important to examine the root causes of violence by those of different faiths, without prejudice.

"It is, in each situation, a case of 'us' versus 'them,"' it said. "That God did not intend for civilization to take its current shape; and that the state had failed the righteous and genuine members of that nation, and therefore God's law supersedes man's law."

COMMON WORLDVIEW

This worldview was common to ultranationalist Jews, like Yigal Amir, who killed Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, to U.S. groups like Christian Identity, which is linked to white supremacist groups, and to other Christian groups that attacked abortion providers, it said.

"Extremists should never be dismissed simply as evil," said the report. "Trying to engage in a competition with religious extremists over who can offer a simpler answer to complex problems will be a losing proposition every time."

Harvard University lecturer Jessica Stern, the conference's keynote speaker, spent five years interviewing extremists for her 2003 book "Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill."

She said it was dangerous for U.S. President George W. Bush to use terms such as "crusade" or "ridding the world of evil."

"It really is falling into the same trap that these terrorists fall into, black and white thinking," Stern told Reuters on Wednesday. "It's very exciting to extremists to hear an American president talking that way."

Stern said to compare violent extremists from the three faiths was not to suggest that the threat was the same.

"These are not equivalent," she said. "The problems arising from Christian or Jewish extremism are not threatening to the world in the same way as Muslim extremism is."

Conference organizers say their aim is to develop a nonpartisan strategy to combat religious extremism.

The guest list includes representatives of the State Department, Homeland Security, the New York Police Department and the U.N. missions of Israel, Iraq, Britain and the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

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George W. Bush - The Salesman of Death

by Sherman YellenWed Jan 24, 9:47 PM ET

When I was young, my first major theatre experience was watching Lee J. Cobb in Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" on Broadway. It was a powerful melodrama about a man whose worship of success and whose false values lead to his ruin; a man who believed that all he needed was a ready smile, a dirty joke, and another chance to make that big sale that would keep him from failure.

The chances ran out for Willy Lohman as his dreams of glory proved to be dead-end fantasies, he ultimately lost his insecure hold on reality which lead to his suicide. "Attention must be paid," his wife Linda cries out, lamenting the ruin of her foolish, faithless, dreamer of a husband, when the world turns against him, but we all know that Willy has brought on his own ruin, step by step descending into failure and death. Willy had nothing to sell except a belief in the power of his own personality, a selfish egotism, and that was hardly enough to hold off his personal tragedy, the loss of his job and the loss of his son's respect, leading to the loss of his sanity.

Personality - the great overrated American virtue - divorced from substance equals tragedy. We should keep this in mind as we examine our candidates for '08. Willy was not merely the spoiler of his own life, but that of his sons' lives, sons whom he had infected with his worship of success at any price. If I recall that play properly, Willy never has a moment when he comes to an understanding of where he has gone wrong.

I thought of Willy Loman as I watched George Bush deliver his State of the Union address. Here was a man like Willy who was absolutely confident of his own charm, a personality man who had nothing of substance to sell; a man who brings ruin to all around him as he clings to his fantasies of success. Only unlike Willy, George Bush is our Salesman of Death. He stood there delivering his tired spiel, unpacking his tawdry goods; the misbegotten war, while peddling terror and no taxes as if they were shiny new stock.

He dragged out all the initiatives that he should have considered six years ago, which now seemed shopworn, threadbare, and counterfeit in his hands, new sources of energy, health care, and his disastrous No Child Left Behind and its destruction of our educational system. Never has America had a leader who is so incorruptible, because there is nothing in George Bush that could be corrupted. To corrupt someone implies that they begin with some virtue, and it was difficult to think of any virtue known to man possessed by this President. George W. Bush had death to sell to the Congress and the American people, the death of our young soldiers to be sacrificed to his desperate need for another chance, another big score, all part of his fantasy of success, and his dread of failure.

As even the Democrats in Congress bobbed up and down in response to his lies and banalities, I was a bit confused, and annoyed; then I realized that nobody was paying close attention to his words, this sign of deference may have been an effort to stay awake, like the snoozing John McCain (news, bio, voting record), or the jumping up and down of Nancy Pelosi (news, bio, voting record) to keep her foot from falling asleep. I expected Laura, like the loyal Linda Loman, to shout out from the balcony, "Attention must be paid," but instead she was playing a game of three card Monte, undoubtedly taught to her by Rove himself, exploiting the heroism of an African American working man, one who never enjoyed any of the benefits of Bush's America, to distract from her husband's failures and lend George some of this hero's aura.

Perhaps the real Linda Loman was Condi Rice whose face was a mask of tragedy. Medea or Medusa, take your pick, it was awful to behold in its desperation for Condi like Laura and the Cheneys the tragedy wasn't what they had done to America, but what they had lost for themselves, power, respect, and honor. Perhaps the material profits of war are not enough for some people.

Sadly, one knows that George W. will never have a moment when he understands how he went wrong, and what a disaster he has brought down on the American family. The big difference between that great play and this President is that you could weep for Willy Loman but never for this salesman of death.

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This do-nothing Congress did all the wrong things

At 4:35 a.m. last Saturday, Sen. Bill Frist (news, bio, voting record) performed his last act as majority leader. To the handful of members still there, he announced the adjournment of the 109th Congress "sine die" - that is, forever - leaving behind the most unproductive session in recent history. Congress has been in session only 103 days this year, compared with 110 for President Truman's "do-nothing Congress."

It did not perform its most basic constitutional duty - to vote the appropriations necessary to run the government. Of 11 departmental appropriations, it had managed to pass only two - defense and homeland security. The rest of the government was left to limp along on a stopgap resolution that was constantly in danger of expiring - the next deadline is Feb. 15.

In its last throes, the 109th did manage to pass legislation establishing permanent trade relations with Vietnam and a nuclear trade pact with India. And, yes, it renewed a cluster of expiring tax breaks. The Democrats, flexing their pending muscle, secured a bill blocking an automatic pay raise for Congress until next year, until after a vote to increase the minimum wage.

What this Congress did not do is more striking than what this Congress did. It took no action on real immigration reform. It did not enact a budget. It produced no basic reform in Social Security or Medicare.

It did, however, have spirited debates on matters such as flag burning, gay marriage, and Terry Shiavo's feeding tube, an issue that seemed to absorb Senator Frist.

What Congress also left undone was any serious effort at ethics reform. What we got instead was retiring speaker Dennis Hastert's swan song, saying, "We promised to protect this nation from further attack and, by grace of God and with the leadership of President Bush, we have been successful."

This could also be called the Mark Foley Congress - a leadership that for years did nothing about a Congressman who made e-mail advances to adolescent pages. Mr. Foley resigned. The House ethics committee said members of Congress were negligent about protecting the pages. But it said no rules had been violated.

It may be that Congress has become, like the title of a recent book by scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, "The Broken Branch."

* Daniel Schorr is a senior news analyst at National Public Radio.
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Chris Kelly: Stalag 9/11

by Chris Kelly

George Bush has done some iffy things since seizing power, but the one that really hit me where I live was ruining Billy Wilder's Stalag 17.

If you're not into old movies, you should know that Stalag 17 is a cynical, fast-talking dark comedy set in a prisoner of war camp, kind of a cross between Grand Illusion and His Girl Friday. Of course, if you're not into old movies, knowing it's a cross between Grand Illusion and His Girl Friday probably didn't help much. Let me start again...

Stalag 17 was a play written by two guys, Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski, who had been actual prisoners at an actual place called Stalag 17 in actual Austria during World War Two. (Think of Austria as kind of a cross between Switzerland and Triumph of the Will.) Billy Wilder made it into a movie in 1953 with William Holden and it's a really terrific piece of entertainment, full of interesting characters and snappy wised-up dialogue and cool plot twists and bravery and Nazis. And you don't have to take my word for it. Ask anyone else who's old.

Here's where
President Bush comes in. While Stalag 17's prisoners are planning their escapes, and the Germans are trying to stop them, both sides keep referring to this dopey sort of rulebook called "the Geneva Conventions."

These appear to be rules about the fair treatment of prisoners - I dunno, not torturing them, for instance - and even the Nazis obey them. Weird, huh?

A lot hinges on them, as a plot gimmick, but the characters seem to take them for granted. Even though it's a war, there are still things you don't do. Which, if only for story purposes, explains why the movie isn't two hours of Otto Preminger holding William Holden's head under water.

(Otto Preminger? Nothing? Okay, think of a cross between Erich von Stroheim and... no, this is getting us nowhere.)

This isn't supposed to take anything away from the Nazis as the villains of the piece --you can see it in the kommandant's beady little burgher eyes that he wishes he could get around the Conventions - but the rules are the rules.

Even if the rules are - how did the Attorney General put it? - "quaint."

But here's the thing. If you accept that the Geneva Conventions are just an annoying formality, like recycling - and I guess we do now - it ruins the whole movie. There's no drama in it. Because the Third Reich isn't even trying.

The prisoners get mail from home. They get visits from the Red Cross. They aren't even kept in cages. No one hoods them, or electrocutes them, or pretends to execute them, or places them in a "stress position" or walks them around on a leash. At one of the darkest points in the story, one of them is forced to stand for a few days without sleep. Like that even hurts.

Don't the guards want their country to win? These guys -- the prisoners -- are all members of an organization (The United States Army Air Force) that not only is thinking of using weapons of mass destruction, they actually are. Night after night. From planes.

They have information that could save German lives. But no one seems to have given their interrogators the tools they need to get it.

And now my stomach hurts. Because sometimes even sarcasm can only get you so far.

In real life, the Nazis did commit atrocities against American prisoners of war. At Malmedy. At Mauthausen. That's why we hate Nazis. Because they were bad.

In real life, bombing Germany killed a half million civilians, but interned American and British airmen were generally treated according to the Geneva Conventions. They weren't systematically tortured. They weren't deliberately humiliated. They weren't held in solitary cells. International organizations were given their names and their families were informed of their capture. Their mortality rate was less than 1%.

And they were being held by the worst government on earth.

It's almost like the hippies at MoveOn have it backwards. When it comes to protecting his country, Hitler isn't George Bush.
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