Persecution

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Washington Post digs into ISIS 'ideology' -- not theology -- and the lives of women

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No matter what else is going on in the world, the Islamic State is still out there attacking cities and seizing territory, constantly striving to create its new version of a heaven on earth, which in this case is called a "caliphate."

By definition, a caliphate is an Islamic state led by a "caliph." So what precisely is a "caliph"?

A typical definition offered by a Western dictionary defines this term as:

* an important Muslim political and religious leader
* a successor of Muhammad as temporal and spiritual head of Islam -- used as a title

So a caliph is both a political and religious leader, quite literally a man who is claiming to be a "successor of Muhammad."

Now, with that in mind let's look at a key passage in a new Washington Post story -- " 'Till Martyrdom Do Us Part" -- about the lives of woman inside the territory controlled by ISIS. This includes women who have volunteered to be part of the Islamic State, as well as those who have been kidnapped. This story is part of an ongoing Post series about life inside the caliphate.

Let me stress that this feature is quite well reported, which is amazing in light of the restraints under which reporters are working when attempting to cover the Islamic State. Much of the attributed information is based on ISIS social media and, I found this amazing, Skype conversations with people living inside the caliphate.

Then there is this summary material that serves as a kind of thesis statement:

In the Islamic State’s ideology, a woman’s place is in the home, tending to her husband and producing children.


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Ripple effect: Reuters finds Catholics aiding generic Iraqi refugees in Lourdes

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Drop a rock in a lake, and you'll see a splash, then ripples. Everybody knows that. But it takes seasoned news people to spot ways that a story on one continent shows up on another. That's what Reuters did, with a smart, sensitive newsfeature on Christians fleeing from Iraq to Lourdes, France.

Reuters, BBC and others have (appropriately) thrown tons of time and resources into the human river of hundreds of thousands who have walked, floated, and sometimes died on the way from the Middle East to Europe. The Lourdes story takes a quieter, more personal look at the phenomenon -- and how believers in one town have responded.

In telling about the 60 Iraqis in Lourdes (so far), the article also adeptly works the story into the site's history:

For Iraqi Christians fleeing Islamic State militants in their native land reaching Lourdes, the French town long synonymous with miraculous religious visions, feels little short of a modern-day miracle.
Arriving in the town where peasant girl Bernadette Soubirous is said to have had visions of the Virgin Mary in 1858, the refugees have also experienced real Christian charity through the efforts of some dedicated, Lourdes-based compatriots, an ex-soldier and the local parish priest.
"We are split between sadness and joy. But Lourdes is like a flower offering us her perfume. It is the town of the Virgin Mary, giving us our faith," said one of the refugees, Youssif, 48, a former teacher of the Aramaic and Syriac languages.

Reuters fills in background on the Middle East war, noting that the Christian community in Iraq has fallen from about a million in 2003 to 400,000 by July 2014. It notes that the Islamic State has killed not only many Christians but also "members of other religious minorities," including some fellow Sunni Muslims. (Should have mentioned the Yazidi, though; they’ve gotten more than their share of violence.)

We read shot bios of what the Iraqi Christians fled and how they found hosts in Lourdes. Turns out some residents, like Nahren and Amer, left the country years ago:


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Seattle Weekly uses Falun Gong as counterweight to Chinese President Xi

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While Pope Francis was leading a star-studded tour of three East Coast cities last week, there was another international visitor heading for Washington, D.C. -- Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Clearly, Francis won out in the media coverage sweepstakes. Bloomberg may have had the best headline about the junction of the two: (“China’s Xi Can’t Compete with ‘Rock Star’ Pope in U.S. Trip”).

However, if you happen to live in the Seattle area, Xi’s visit was a bit hard to miss, because that’s where he spent two days before heading off to DC.

While Xi was ferried from Everett to Tacoma with stops at Redmond’s Microsoft campus and business meetings in downtown Seattle, whole interstates were closed for his 130-car motorcades for his 1,000-person entourage. Last Tuesday, his arrival caused a 17-mile-long backup on I-5 south going into Seattle and his Thursday departure caused similar headaches. The area around Xi’s hotel (the Westin) in downtown Seattle was a no-go zone for ordinary folks, but protestors got as close as they could.

And the religion angle? One was a Falun Gong practitioner who’d been tortured for years in Chinese gulags. A Seattle Weekly reporter happened to find her .


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Pope wades into culture war; Washington Post avoids calling it

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The freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins, according to the old saying. The stickler, of course, has to do with how far you reach and whether I move my nose.

Such issues are woven into the Washington Post's indepth on questions of freedom raised by Pope Francis' six-day visit to the United States, which he finished yesterday. The article's three reporters, with GetReligion alumna Sarah Pulliam Bailey as the lead writer, do a great job of covering the waterfront.

But they also take some perhaps unnecessary side excursions. And I get the sense that just maybe, they really, really wanted to make some definite conclusions.

The WaPo team quotes six well-chosen sources, including a pollster, two religious liberty experts, a philosophy professor, a constitutional law expert and a religion consultant with the ACLU. Yet they cover this broad topic in less than 1,100 words.

This story is cast in two ways. It drops in at three sites Pope Francis visited where freedom is especially important: Philadelphia, near the Liberty Bell; the White House, where Francis visited President Obama; and at the United Nations, where the pope called for an end to persecution of Christians.

The article also tries to weigh how much the pope was drawing on his own lights, and how much he was listening to American bishops. For the latter, of course, the battles swirl around gays and Obamacare:


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Muslim-Americans are uncomfortably yanked into center of new political storm

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Muslim-Americans are uncomfortably yanked into center of new political storm

Time for beat reporters to dig out their lists of good U.S. Muslim sources again.

Quite suddenly, the United States has tumbled into a major interfaith moment. The current episode began with a New Hampshire town hall question tossed at GOP candidate Donald Trump on September 17. In case you missed it, a man wearing a TRUMP T-shirt stated:

“We have a problem in this country. It’s called Muslims. We know our current president is one. You know he’s not even an American -- birth certificate, man. But anyway, we have training camps growing where they want to kill us. That’s my question. When can we get rid of them?”

 Note: Get rid of alleged training camps? Or get rid of American Muslims, who are the country’s “problem”?  

Either way it was an unusually perfervid attack, compounded by raising of the oft-refuted but persistent claims that President Barack Obama is Muslim and also wasn’t born in America so  is an illegal president. Trump’s fuzzy response didn’t address any of that and he was uncharacteristically silent the following day.

Meanwhile Washington’s Council on American-Islamic Relations was quick on the uptake, as usual. Its chief lobbyist Robert McCaw said that “in failing to challenge the questioner’s anti-Muslim bigotry and his apparent call for the ethnic cleansing of American Muslims, Donald Trump sent the message that Islamophobia is acceptable.”


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Christians and persecution: So the 4th Century meets the 21st Century?

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Christians and persecution: So the 4th Century meets the 21st Century?

In interpreting 21st Century religious conflict, newswriters might gain perspective from the bitter Christian schism by the 4th Century “Donatists.” These hardliners refused to recognize the validity of bishops who compromised in order to escape execution during the last wave of vicious persecution by the Roman Empire. That scourge lasted from A.D. 303 until Constantine became emperor of the West (312) and ordered religious toleration in the Edict of Milan (313).    
Today, Christians are likewise debating what to do amid the killing, rape, kidnapping, torture and thievery aimed at them -- and others -- by a radical faction within world Islam. Muslim traditionalists insist this mayhem violates teachings of the Quran and of the Prophet Muhammad.

The Mideast dominates the sorrow and the news coverage, but Christianity Today correspondents Jayson Casper in Cairo and Tom Osanjo in Nairobi draw our attention to the African continent.

Case study: During  those repellent beachfront beheadings, a Muslim advised a Christian friend named Osama Mansour to escape Libya by growing a beard, carrying a prayer rug and covering a Coptic tattoo on his wrist with a fake cast. Azar Ajaj of Nazareth Evangelical Theological Seminary said pretending to be Muslim was an ethical tactic because Mansour did not lie outright or deny his faith in Christ.

East Africa’s  al-Shabaab gunmen have allowed people to escape death if they can prove they are Muslims by recitations  in Arabic or answering such questions as the name of Muhammad’s mother. Since the Westgate Mall massacre at Nairobi,  Kenya’s Christians have been boning up on Muslim trivia and sharing online tips about pretending to be Muslim in life-or-death emergencies.


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Muslims fleeing to Europe: Yes, press can find religion angles in this ongoing tragedy

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Earlier this week, I wrote a post -- "Refugees flee ISIS: Maybe there is a religion angle in this tragic story? Maybe?" -- in which I complained that quite a few journalists are having trouble spotting some big religion ghosts in the life-and-death story of thousands of refugees fleeing Islamic State persecution.

To demonstrate what I am talking about, I asked a rather basic journalistic question: Who are these refugees? Let's flash back:

They are the people who rejected the reign of ISIS. ... The answer is complex, but one fact is simple. It's impossible to talk about this refugee crisis without talking about the religion angle, because the refugees are either members of minority religions in the region, including thousands of displaced Christians, or centrist Muslims or members of Muslim-related sects that are anathema to ISIS leaders.

Sometimes, after making that kind of complaint, it is good to pause and find an example of a mainstream news report that GETS IT, that sees the ghost in this kind of story and tries to help readers understand what is happening. This brings me to a recent Associated Press "Big Story" feature about the phenomenon of Muslims converting to Christianity in Germany.

Refugees? To varying degrees, it appears.

Cynics are asking a blunt, and logical, question: If some members of oppressed minorities in the Middle East are converting to Islam to save, literally, their necks, might many Muslims in Europe be tempted to convert to Christianity in order to strengthen their cases for asylum? After all, can you imagine what would happen to Muslims who converted to Christianity if they are returned to Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan or some other troubled land?

You can see that logic unfold in the anecdotal lede:

BERLIN (AP) -- Mohammed Ali Zonoobi bends his head as the priest pours holy water over his black hair. "Will you break away from Satan and his evil deeds?" pastor Gottfried Martens asks the Iranian refugee. "Will you break away from Islam?"


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There's plenty of global religious freedom news beyond the Kim Davis case

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There's plenty of global religious freedom news beyond the Kim Davis case

If you read GetReligion even sporadically, you must know that mainstream news coverage of religious freedom issues receives a great deal of attention on this blog, for many reasons.

Perhaps the prime reason is that they play a leading role in the societal and political conflicts marking this era of rapid social change. That keeps them constantly in the news, and that can't be ignored when you're a blog devoted to media coverage of religion issues. Plus, issues of freedom of conscience are often linked -- globally -- to freedom of the press.

For Americans, the case of Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who cites religious belief for refusing to issue marriage licenses -- containing the endorsement of her name and/or signature -- to same-sex couples, has been the latest U.S. religious freedom headline hog.

What is her church? Here's a link to an interesting Reuters piece about her Apostolic Christian faith, via Yahoo.

 What comes next? Will the Muslim flight attendant for an American airline who says she was suspended from her job for refusing to serve alcoholic drinks be the next religious freedom cause célèbre? It will be interesting to see what sort of religious community support she, a Muslim, receives.

Look, I'm fully aware that Americans are most interested in issues that impact them as Americans.

But the rest of the world has its own melange of religious freedom issues  -- some a matter of life and death, literally.


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Global religious freedom: Watchdog is threatened, and only religious media notice

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Global religious freedom: Watchdog is threatened, and only religious media notice

It's a definite "Got News?" item when religious news outfits report the appeal of a major human rights watchdog to stay alive -- and almost no one else notices.

World magazine and Baptist Press this week wrote up a letter signed by 86 religious liberty advocate surging Congress to reauthorize the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. USCIRF, a semi-official organization that monitors how nations treat those of various faiths, was born by an act of Congress in 1998, but its mandate runs out on Sept. 30.

Both stories are spot-on in highlighting the need for such a voice. USCIRF is the group that releases an annual report on the state of religious freedom worldwide, red-lighting "Countries of Particular Concern." The reports, and interim statements, are often quoted in media reports on human rights.

The story by World, an evangelical newsmagazine, is the more political of the two:

WASHINGTON—A coalition of international religious freedom groups is urging the Senate to approve a six-year reauthorization for the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) and reject attempts to cripple the organization.
Eighty-six partners of the International Religious Freedom Roundtable this week delivered a letter to the top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which currently is weighing two drastically different visions for USCIRF. The letter noted the authors agree on “very little” theologically, but they agree religious freedom strengthens cultures, stabilizes democracies, and is “the ultimate counter-terrorism weapon.”
“The most effective way to ensure the continuity of USCIRF’s essential mandate to protect and promote religious freedom worldwide is for the Senate to pass, in a timely fashion, S. 1798,” the groups wrote to Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., the Foreign Relations chairman, and Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., the ranking member.

World's article also does us the service of linking to the International Religious Freedom Roundtable letter itself. And World identifies who filed S. 1798: Sen. Marco Rubio, a Republican candidate for president.

The Baptist Press version stars Russell Moore, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, part of the Southern Baptist Convention -- saying he "and his allies" with the Roundtable put out the letter:


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