Was Kabul Hospital Shooting Triggered by Proselytizing?

Yesterday, Dr. Jerry Umanos and two still unidentified US visitors whom he was greeting were killed outside the Cure International Hospital in Kabul, Dr. Umanos has spent most of each of the last nine years working at Cure International in Kabul while going back to the Chicago area for a few months each year to maintain his clinical practice there as well. The New York Times agonizes over the shooting this morning, noting that there is a “grim trend” in Afghanistan of ” a new wave of so-called green-on-blue shootings spurred by deepening Afghan resentment”. And yet, despite a recitation of the recent attacks on civilians both by the Taliban and Afghan security personnel, the Times ignores what could be a very large clue on just what might have provided the resentment for this particular gunman.

Here are the details of the shooting as recounted by the Times:

The shooting took place at Cure International Hospital, which specializes in the treatment of disabled children and women’s health issues. Afghan police officials said that one of the doctors there was hosting visitors from the United States who, after taking pictures together in front of the hospital, were headed inside when they were attacked.

Among the dead was a pediatrician from Chicago, Dr. Jerry Umanos, who had volunteered at the Cure hospital for almost nine years, treating children and helping train Afghan doctors. There were few details about the other victims on Thursday night.

Afghan officials identified the gunman, who was wounded, as a two-year veteran of the Kabul police force named Ainuddin, who had only recently been assigned to guard the hospital. Witnesses and officials said he fired on the Americans as they approached his security post at the building’s entrance, killing three and wounding a female doctor before entering the interior courtyard and seeking new targets.

The Times provides this description of Cure International:

Cure International, a Christian organization, was started in 1998 in Kenya and now operates hospitals and programs in 29 countries. The organization focuses on health issues for which treatment is difficult to obtain in the developing world, including club foot, cleft palate and untreated burns, according to its website.

A look at the Cure International website shows that the “Christian” part of the organization appears to be particularly strong. From a 2011 blog post by Cure founder Scott Harrison (original links within post retained):

CURE’s mission statement is:
CURE International, healing the sick and proclaiming the kingdom of God.

Those words come directly from Jesus’ own instructions to his disciples – first to the twelve and then to the seventy. The partnership of healing the sick and sharing the good news of “God with us” was linked in almost every facet of His life and work, and CURE strives to be a 21st century expression of Jesus’ 1st century healing ministry.

But what is the “kingdom of God”, how do we recognize it when we see it, and how can we partner with God to proclaim it? Fortunately, Jesus addressed many of these questions, and it’s the aim of this series of posts to humbly shed light on those answers through His own words.

Oh my. So just how enthusiastic is Cure International about its mission to proclaim the kingdom of God? Well, one clue comes from word about a new hospital that Cure will be opening later this year in the Philippines. Here is a snippet from their announcement of a search for medical director for the hospital:

CURE International has begun the search for the first Medical Director for the Tebow CURE Hospital in Davao City, Philippines. The hospital, built in partnership with the Tim Tebow Foundation, will open later this year. CURE is seeking an orthopedic surgeon with experience in a management role and a heart to heal the sick and proclaim the kingdom of God.

Although we have no information about how aggressive Cure International is in “proclaiming the kingdom of God”, their chosen partner for the hospital in the Philippines, Tim Tebow, has a clear history of such proclamations in a  very out-front style that often made other players uneasy.

But recall that Umanos had maintained a practice in the Chicago area as well. It was at Lawndale Christian Health Center:

Our mission is to show and share the love of Jesus by promoting wellness and providing quality, affordable health care for Lawndale and the neighboring communities.

Clearly, Umanos saw Christianity as an integral part of his medical practice. And yet the Times compares this latest spate of civilian killings to the green on blue killings aimed at Western trainers of Afghan security personnel without admitting to the cultural insensitivities that most often spawned the attacks (pdf). Ranking very high on the list of cultural incompatibilities that provoke these sorts of attacks are religious differences. And yet somehow, the Times never gets around to asking whether the Christian orientation at Cure International played any role in the shooting.

The Washington Post does at least hint at this as an issue:

Thursday’s shooting marks the second time in less than a month that a Christian charity has come under attack in this overwhelmingly Muslim country.

In late March, the Taliban assaulted a heavily guarded guesthouse in Kabul for employees of Roots of Peace, a San Francisco-based organization that focuses on agricultural projects. The hours-long standoff ended after Afghan forces intervened.

That guesthouse was next to a Christian charity and day-care center, which may have been the intended target.

If we go back to the opening of the Times article, this paragraph immediately precedes the first quoted passage:

After a campaign of Taliban violence aimed at foreigners raised apprehensions before the presidential election this month, the latest attack seemed to have nothing to do with the insurgency. Rather, officials said the gunman appeared to be a police officer who reacted in the moment when he saw a small group of American visitors outside his guard post, raising fears of a new wave of so-called green-on-blue shootings spurred by deepening Afghan resentment.

So the guard who shot Umanos and his visitors “reacted in the moment”. That is a very common theme in green on blue killings, and often comes in response to an action to which the shooter takes offense. We have no information on what they were doing in addition to taking photographs. We learn from the Washington Post that the visitors were a father and son who also were medical professionals. I can’t help wondering whether some sort of overt religious action may have prompted the guard. Was it a loud public prayer, calling on God’s blessing of the hospital, its patients and workers? Surely they weren’t handing out religious tracts, but was the group “witnessing” to Afghans as they entered or left the hospital?

Near the end of the Times article, we get this recounting of an incident in front of the hospital after the shooting:

A car pulled up a short while later, and the driver was told by the police to leave the area. When they explained that an officer had shot and killed three foreigners, the driver replied, “Good for him that he killed the infidels.”

To many Afghans, all Americans are infidels. And proselytizing infidels simply can’t be tolerated.

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69 replies
  1. der says:

    Davao is located in the southernmost Phillippine island and there has been at least for the past 40 years a battle between the Muslim population supported by Indonesia and the Phillipine government. In the early ’70’s while serving with the US Army our Davao team was giving particular instructions to use caution when traveling without Phillipine Army escorts. So why put a Christian hospital there when 90% of the rest of the predominantly Catholic country would benefit just as well and would likely be safer for hospital staff? Well…..

    *****Ann Coulter: “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”
    *****Jerry Boykin: Discussing the battle against a Muslim warlord in Somalia, Boykin told another audience, “I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol.”

    “We in the army of God, in the house of God, kingdom of God have been raised for such a time as this,” Boykin said last year.
    *****Seeing a world in the End Times and a belief of the coming Apocalypse (somewhat explains Climate Change denialism, that to a believer is turned on its head in their view as the rest of us live in the “false” realty of nature): In Kingdom Coming, Goldberg demonstrates how an increasingly bellicose fundamentalism is gaining traction throughout our national life, taking us on a tour of the parallel right-wing evangelical culture that is buoyed by Republican political patronage. Deep within the red zones of a divided America, we meet military veterans pledging to seize the nation in Christ’s name, perfidious congressmen courting the confidence of neo-confederates and proponents of theocracy, and leaders of federally funded programs offering Jesus as the solution to the country’s social problems. http://www.kingdomcoming.com/

  2. Don Bacon says:

    Thank you for this, Jim. Suggesting that practicing Christians may be causing problems isn’t seen every day.
    .
    The recent US wars on Muslims have had a strong Christian component and the Muslims know it. The is particularly a problem in the backward tribal society in Afghanistan.
    .
    Ironically, US actions in the Middle East and North Africa seem designed to replace secular governments with religious (Muslim) ones, which seems to be an indication of the US divide-and-conquer instability promotion policy in the world. ‘Us vs. Them’ is good for the MIC.

  3. Phil Perspective says:

    Jim:
    The Philly paper actually kinda looks at these killings in an article of their own today since Cure is based out of Pennsylvania. It doesn’t make the points you do so it leaves the reader to connect the dots. Still, it offers more dots compared to most of the rest of the stories about this.

  4. Anonsters says:

    Wow. I may be wildly misinterpreting this post, Jim, but on my first read-through, my first reaction was that this was the most offensive post I’ve ever read on Emptywheel, ever. In fact, the only post on Emptywheel I ever remember being offended by (given that I agree with EW’s stances on most things). So before accusing you of anything, I recognize that I’m running on very, very little sleep over the past few days, and I’m cranky at the moment, and I very well could not be understanding.
    .
    Are you actually insinuating (though that’s generous, because to me it looks like you outright state it, not merely insinuate it) that the doctor and the two visitors who were killed in the shooting were, in fact, to blame for the shooting, with the only evidence being their Christianity and their working for an evangelical hospital? Despite the fact that he had volunteered at this hospital for 9 previous years without incident (suggesting that he, in fact, had enough cultural sensitivity and awareness of his environment not to stoke a delicate situation with religious insensitivity)? Tell me, please, that you’re sitting on some firmer evidence than a hospital built in the Phillipines and an internet mission statement. Otherwise, just wow.

    • P J Evans says:

      I think he’s saying that there’s a lot more to this than just the Afghans-shooting-allies that it is reported as.
      It’s quite possible that one or more of the victims was actively proselytizing, and that would anger the conservative Muslims. (I’ve met a number of people who think that if you’re not their particular flavor of religion, then you need to be converted. They can be very obnoxious about it. Doesn’t even have to be Christian; I worked with an evangelical vegetarian, and there are evangelical atheists.)

      • Anonsters says:

        Unfortunately, it’s not simply a matter of “there’s a lot more to this than just the Afghans-shooting-allies that it is reported as.” If that’s all it were, I would’ve nodded and moved on. If the post emphasized the wide range of cultural differences that people have to navigate in Afghanistan, that’s ok, too. This is narrowly-focused post insinuating that the people who died bear some responsibility, based on nothing more than supposition about their behavior (no evidence whatsoever) which supposition itself is based on mere assumptions about how a person must act because they’re Christian. And the only evidence proferred to support this theory of how this particular Christian behaved is: (1) the behavior of an NFL quarterback when he was in the NFL, (2) a blurb for a hospital in a completely different country, one that is in fact 93% Christian, and (3) a mission statement on a website clearly designed to attract financial and other support from Christians. (For example, when you read any of the actual posts on their blog about their Afghanistan hospital, the rhetoric disappears. The poster’s interpretation involves explicit religious statements, but the incidents the poster describes mention only medical interventions, not passing out Bibles and proclaiming Jesus the Son of God).

    • Phil Perspective says:

      Were the specific people targeted? Who knows!! The hospital in general probably was targeted because it was seen as the work of infidels. Is that so hard to understand?

      • Anonsters says:

        If that’s what Jim’s post said, then no, it wouldn’t have been hard to understand. But he was indeed speculating about those specific people being targeted because one or more them might have been proselytizing.

  5. Anonsters says:

    In hopes of finding a more substantial “dot” than what’s explicitly provided here, I decided to read the 70-page trust-incompatibility.pdf, which was fascinating. Jim says:

    Ranking very high on the list of cultural incompatibilities that provoke these sorts of attacks are religious differences.

    According to whom? There’s no evidence of that in this paper. In fact, religious insensitivity was only a “fourth-tier” issue for the Afghans, meaning it was raised by only 1-9% of the Afghan respondents (p. 10). Note that the paper bumped a grievance up a tier, despite where it would statistically fall, if the grievance stemmed from an incident that “included any exhibition of anger or agitation, or if it involved outright threats or mentioned risk of fratricide when it was recalled” (p. 10). Any grievance report involving threats were asterisked. Because all religious insensitivity-type grievances were in the fourth tier, none of them could have included even a mere exhibition of anger or agitation, otherwise it would’ve been bumped up to at least the third tier. None of the religious insensitivity-type grievances received an asterisk.
    .
    So it’s more than a stretch to say religious differences rank “very high.” Exactly the opposite appears to be the case, viz. that all sorts of other cultural differences are stoking the tensions, whereas religious differences have played a minor role. This is further supported by the fact that among the 58 recommendations, only two or three deal with any perceived need to train soldiers to respect religious differences. There are 50 or more recommendations dealing with the need to address other, non-religious cultural incompatibilities.

    And yet somehow, the Times never gets around to asking whether the Christian orientation at Cure International played any role in the shooting.

    Probably because that inquiry has no factual predicate warranting it.

  6. orionATL says:

    have you made a sweet little strawman to demolish.

    jim white, you claim, is engaging in victim blaming.

    i have no trouble at all understanding that members of an organization could suffer a range of mistreatment including death, as a consequence of what their tormenters from some competing organization BELIEVED the victims “guilty” of.

    a simple example is the assault on a western oil company and the killing of a dozen or so oil company employees in the sahara a couple or so years ago. they were killed not necessarily for their own behavior, but because of what the attacking and killing organization believed that organization “guilty” of.

    thinking this way (what someone whose beliefs you dislike is “guilty” of) is the basis of assassinations.

    that seems a reasonable guess here, though personal gripes, previous personal experience with injustice, and the like can be other motivations for “revenge”.

    about two years ago in rural afghanistan a medical group with religious affiliation that had worked in afghanistan for years was similarly attacked and murdered.

    it is not necessary to say in any of these cases that the individuals killed were responsible for their own deaths. it is only necessary to point out that the killers may have developed sufficient animosity toward the victims’s beliefs or affiliations to generate a rationale to execute them.

    why did you feel it necessary to to turn this obvious argument around.

    • Anonsters says:

      You say: “jim white, you claim, is engaging in victim blaming. [snip snip] it is not necessary to say in any of these cases that the individuals killed were responsible for their own deaths. it is only necessary to point out that the killers may have developed sufficient animosity toward the victims’s beliefs or affiliations to generate a rationale to execute them.”
      .
      So, you say, I’m raising red herrings and reverse-victim-blaming or something.
      .
      From the OP:

      I can’t help wondering whether some sort of overt religious action [by the doctor or one of the other two people] may have prompted the guard [who killed them]

      I do like that you apparently don’t even bother to read the OP before responding to my comments in a knee-jerk fashion, though, as though EW contributors need you to ride to their rescue, a gallant white knight to defend their honor against dastardly, crypto-fascist, Security State Apologist Anonsters.
      .
      FWIW, I’ve found the EW contributors to be far more able defenders of themselves than you, so you might want to let them take first crack at it. Especially since most of my comments are aimed at helping strengthen their arguments, or probe potential weaknesses, not because I want to discredit them, but because I believe pretty much as they do. This case notwithstanding.

  7. Anonsters says:

    And the reason I find this so offensive is that I am a Christian. I’m Catholic, not evangelical, granted. But I very much believe that part of being a witness to one’s faith is to love other people, to help them when they’re in need, and so forth, even if one doesn’t beat them over the head with the KJV whilst doing so. Perhaps even while never saying anything about Jesus beyond (if asked), “Yes, I’m a Christian.”

    • Garrett says:

      @Anonsters:

      I think a major problem in talking about Afghanistan, and trying to analyze events there, is that everything we read is of questionable accuracy and uncertain interpretation.

      But if an organization has religious proselytizing as its very mission statement, then yes, the organization is engaged in proselytization. They explicitly see that as their mission and their call.

      And of course Christian religious proselytization has been an issue in anti-western violence in Afghanistan.

      “Blame” isn’t good language. We certainly wouldn’t blame the January attack on the La Taverna restaurant, killing both internationals and Afghans, on the serving of alcohol there. But in trying to figure out the nature of the recent anti-western violence, it’s a relevant factor for discussion, I think.

      The issues are tricky, no doubt.

      • Adam Colligan says:

        @Garrett :

        I think there is are a couple of important distinctions here. One is between (a) noting two facts that coincide and (b) claiming causation. The other is between discussing causation and assigning blame. Jim White approaches both of these things pretty terribly here.

        When it comes to the first one, White does not support his causal insinuations with nearly enough evidence to justify the tone of the piece, and the “just asking questions”-type caveats are not enough to make up for that. This is especially because he doesn’t even identify the right questions to ask when it comes to proving causation. We know that Taliban-associated militancy is responsible for all kinds of attacks against all kinds of targets. Without other information, you could make up 10 interesting and contradictory stories about the reason for each target. So are Christian charities attacked with a frequency or intensity that is *disproportionate* in comparison to secular organizations doing similar work? Are spiritually activist Christian charities so targeted? All we are treated to is a snippet about how last month there was an attack against a building *next door to* a charity that was Christian, with no information about whether even that charity had been “proselytizing”.

        And when it comes to this attack itself, White selectively ignores facts in his own reporting rather than balancing them against his theory about some kind of public prayer by visitors. As noted above, among the victims was a nine-year veteran of this work. Perhaps more importantly, the guard was not a long-term veteran of the police (two years) and was only just recently assigned to the hospital. This opens up a whole necessary line of inquiry about whether this individual was simply waiting for an opportunity to attack and found that opportunity when there were additional visitors present, people were distracted by a photo-op, etc.

        The Philippines detour and invocation of Tim Tebow are awfully weak, paltry additions in keeping with the piece’s overall lack of rigor. Even the evangelical statement on the website itself is actually worded, somewhat carefully it seems, to be about exemplifying Christ’s work *by offering medical services* rather than by offering medical services and sermons, baptisms, conversions, etc. And that is another key misstep by White — he seems to use the word “proselytize”, which is about attempting conversions, interchangeably with just being identifiably Christian or with having a religiously-inspired basis for your secular medical activity.

        That carelessness brings us to the second issue: victim blaming. There is a lot of social discourse out there right now that sees victim blaming where it doesn’t really exist. I get frustrated by that, and it makes me wary of calling someone out on it. But I’m going to call White out on it. First to reiterate: he slips seamlessly between (a) describing an organization’s evangelical identity, plus making up a baseless story about how there might have been a prayer or somesuch visible in public; and (b) speculating about the violent consequences of this “proselytizing”, which is a whole different kettle of fish.

        But he does even more than that. He also very clearly equates the Christians’ existence and identity with “insensitivity”. Look how one slides into the other in his piece:

        “And yet the Times compares this latest spate of civilian killings to the green on blue killings aimed at Western trainers of Afghan security personnel without admitting to the cultural insensitivities that most often spawned the attacks (pdf). Ranking very high on the list of cultural incompatibilities that provoke these sorts of attacks are religious differences. And yet somehow, the Times never gets around to asking whether the Christian orientation at Cure International played any role in the shooting.”

        So violence can be prompted by “insensitivity”. Now, I’m not saying that White is saying that the Taliban are *right* to react so violently to acts of actual insensitivity. But insensitivity is actually a word describing something that we generally consider wrong, and the piece is obviously about how damn foreigners’ insistence on wronging Afghans is being ignored by Western media reporting on attacks. But then suddenly, in the next sentence, “insensitivites” become “incompatibilities”. That little rhetorical bridge allows you to take the condemnation that you were applying to people acting insensitively and pin it on people who might be very respectful of the local culture but are simply very different. It also carries the implication that there is something fundamental about Afghan society that cannot admit to otherness, even sensitive, respectful otherness, within its midst.

        In case you had any doubt, White then rounds that transition off by then naming “religious differences” as a class of “incompatibilities” and the hospital’s “orientation” as as the defining aspect of the “differences” of its personnel. So by the transitive property, you get to call “orientation” an active, visible “difference,” you get to call “difference” an “incompatibility”, you get to call “incompatibility” an act of “insensitivity”, and you get to use “insensitivity” as the presumed instigator of violent, targeted attacks whose motivations are only vaguely theorized here. This is, frankly, awful, not just morally but journalistically as well. And you can sort of tell how this mentality has gotten into White’s head when he starts speculating about what kind of insensitive behavior the staff may have committed. Firstly, he’s not reliably identifying insensitivity, but even if he were, he’s far too willing to speculate without real evidence because he has come to see the persons’ or organization’s mere identity as evidence of a pattern of insensitivity, a pattern that starts with their mere presence.

        I think that much of White’s work has not really been to the standard that we have come to expect from Emptywheel. And I don’t think I’ve read all of his posts. But this is probably a nadir for the site.

          • Adam Colligan says:

            Well, there’s this:

            In a statement Friday, the Taliban said it had attacked the Roots of Peace guesthouse because it was used by foreigners as a “church used to convert Afghans.”

            .
            Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/taliban-attacks-western-guest-house-afghan-officials-say/2014/03/28/d28af42c-b681-11e3-a7c6-70cf2db17781_story.html
            .
            But what do I know. I’m not worthy of posting here.

            .
            This is non-responsive. Firstly, as the article you linked points out:

            The nonprofit organization has no stated religious affiliation. Roots of Peace is a California-based group that has worked in Afghanistan for a decade helping local farmers cultivate vineyards and orchards. According to its Web site, the group has been working in Afghanistan since 2003 and has received millions of dollars in funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development.

            Secondly, also straight from the same article:

            In recent months, there appears to have been a shift in Taliban tactics resulting in a more concerted effort to target foreign civilians in Kabul.
            .
            After last week’s attack on the Serena hotel, which left nine people dead, two groups of election observers…withdrew their employees….
            .
            In January, an attack on a popular Lebanese restaurant killed 21 people, including 13 foreigners. It came as a shock to expatriates here who were accustomed to dining at Western restaurants and attending parties at guesthouses. Attacks against foreign civilians were not unheard of, but they happened only sporadically.
            .
            Then, this month, gunmen killed Swedish journalist Nils Horner as he conducted interviews on a busy Kabul street.

            .
            Thirdly, your original theory was based on the Times’ speculation that the compound next door, a Christian charity/daycare, was the target. Now, even if that were true, there is no evidence presented that that building was a church, that the Christian charity that ran it was proselytizing to Afghans, or that the people there had otherwise been “insensitive”. And the WaPo reporting on the Taliban spokesman’s statement seems to imply pretty clearly that the Taliban stood behind the attack and were calling the Roots of Peace housing a church, which seems even more ridiculous. So all we likely have here is (shock) the Taliban lying, with an unsupported accusation of foreign-induced conversions being a reliable standby cover for attacks driven by less PR-worthy motives.
            .
            Your reporting approach here seems to fit every new piece of evidence, even if it’s the opposite of what was originally expected, into the preconceived narrative. I think you should take a step back and ask yourself: “is there a way that a piece of the story could have come out that would have reduced, rather than reinforced, my confidence in this theory?”
            .
            Fourthly, as I said above, pointing to some other example where foreign Christians are attacked purportedly based on their Christan-ness is not good support for the insinuation in the OP. That is that either foreigners’ Christian character or their “insensitive” behavior — to the extent you are willing to draw any distinction — are really a significant driver of attacks. You will find examples if you look for them. That isn’t testing the theory — testing the theory means trying to look outside of those examples to see if they do not comport to the overall pattern of targeted attacks (i.e., you need at least some attempt at a control). Otherwise your hypothesis is not falsifiable and just becomes a Christmas tree on which you can hang every new fact. The articles to which you link specifically talk about anti-foreigner violence as a problem across the board. What could be interpreted as a sign that there is no special pattern here, you choose instead to interpret as some kind of conspiratorial omission by journalists who don’t want to tell their audience that Christians were provoking violence against themselves.
            .
            Fifthly, the main mechanism of the theory if your post is that Christians’ insensitivity (or the insensitivity of their existence) is sparking some kind of primal, spur-of-the-moment rage in Afghans who then open fire. And so the Roots of Peace example, whatever the intended target and however muddled the reasoning, is especially not applicable, as it was a coordinated assault and seige by four attackers followed by official Taliban talking points.
            .
            Of course, you haven’t really responded to any of the substance of my criticisms, and you have every right to refrain from doing so. But it is unhelpful and petulant to warp my low opinion of your work here into a straw man calling you as a person “not worthy of posting here”. Doing so is just a way of settinig a ridiculously low bar for yourself — by characterizing my criticism that way, all you have to do to prove me wrong is type something vaguely factual or link to something containing the kernel of anything informative.
            .
            Instead, I think you need to live up to a higher standard. I do not always agree with Emptywheel or Bmaz, sometimes they stretch, and sometimes they’re wrong. But they put on this site stories that contain a certain quality of research, fact-checking, perspective, and insight. This piece is a stark contrast to that, and I think that you have made other posts that also compare unfavorably to the standard of the site.
            .
            You don’t have to take that as a challenge to do better; you can wholeheartedly disagree with my opinion. But I would urge you to do so maturely rather than trying to substitute sympathy for good research by mischaracterizing my criticism as an ad-hominem attack, since it clearly wasn’t.

            • P J Evans says:

              Gee, I’m so sorry that Jim’s expertise doesn’t meet your personal standards for journalistic accuracy. Maybe you can start your own blog to write it up the way you think it should be done.
              He’s a helluva lot better than the ‘reporters’ who pass on press releases from the Pentagon as if they were actual news.

            • orionATL says:

              your #20 marks you as a pompous blowhard trying to disguise that he had stepped in shit despite the overwheling smell on his shoes.

              1. jim white was likely right on the facts. you were likely wrong. that makes the charges you made largely irrelevant.

              2. rather than concede even the possibility you were wrong on the critically relevant facts, you construct a long-winded-winding argument that is an embarrassingy tortuous self-justification for being dead-wrong (as it were).

              3. facts count.

              when may we expect you to conceed HERE the relevance of the facts in white’s #16?

            • orionATL says:

              “… This is non-responsive. Firstly, …”

              “non-responsive” ?

              who the hell do you think you are – the prosecuting attorney?

          • P J Evans says:

            It’s a bad idea to use doing good things, like hospitals or vaccination campaigns, as a cover for activities that are far more harmful to society, like spying or trying to change people’s religion. Too bad the people who insist on doing those things can’t see themselves as others see them.

        • orionATL says:

          the person doing the killing knows the motive – personal or philosophical. you and i do not.

          he was afghani; they were foreign and american.

          xenophobia exists (with very good reason) in afghanistan. killings of foreign nationals – soldiers and civilians – occur frequently. is it all that hard to accept that the dead were killed because they were some combination of foreign, american, medical, and religious missionaries?

          is it all that hard to further acknowledge that persistent doing good can be repaid suddenly and violently and can have as a trigger the victims’ political or religious philosophy? cannibals have been eating cartoon missionaries for a long time. taliban have been killing polio health workers for far too long.

          for me, the idea of missionary is welded to the idea of cultural arrogance and self-righteousness. before i have permission to discuss the possibility such factors as these, embedded in the beliefs of their organization, doomed the dead medical worker and his guests, must i compile a police report and parlimentary findings confirming that?

          and just to throw in a few more mights and maybes, what would you say if white were proven entirely right?

          “well, jim you nailed the motive, but your reasoning was so bad ( by my standards) that you had no right to be right. and besides, victim-blaming is not nice, no matter the truth.”

          • Adam Colligan says:

            the person doing the killing knows the motive – personal or philosophical. you and i do not.

            …which is why someone purporting to understand the cause needs to support that with serious evidence.

            is it all that hard to accept that the dead were killed because they were some combination of foreign, american, medical, and religious missionaries?

            Of course not (except for the “missionary” part, which probably is not a good word to use to describe them). But the whole point of White’s piece here is to single out one of those aspects and claim that it is much more important than the media are admitting. And he does this poorly.

            is it all that hard to further acknowledge that persistent doing good can be repaid suddenly and violently and can have as a trigger the victims’ political or religious philosophy?

            It’s very easy to acknowledge that such a thing “can” happen. This has little to do with whether White has put together any kind of worthy argument supporting the idea that that is what *has* happened here.

            for me, the idea of missionary is welded to the idea of cultural arrogance and self-righteousness.

            Then it is particularly important to examine claims that White is making about this organization before tagging them with the category “missionary” in your mind, thereafter attributing to them all of this baggage.

            before i have permission to discuss the possibility such factors as these, embedded in the beliefs of their organization, doomed the dead medical worker and his guests, must i compile a police report and parlimentary findings confirming that?

            White isn’t just “discussing the possibility”. He is overstating the relative weight of evidence suggesting that this is the case. And he is then taking that overstatement and using it to engage in a form of victim-blaming that would not be justified even if the underlying facts were well supported by the evidence.

            and just to throw in a few more mights and maybes, what would you say if white were proven entirely right?

            “well, jim you nailed the motive, but your reasoning was so bad ( by my standards) that you had no right to be right. and besides, victim-blaming is not nice, no matter the truth.”

            This is exactly what ought to happen in that case. If somebody throwing two dice asked you to guess the outcome, and you said anything other than “seven”, it would be foolish to praise you even if you lucked out. And the victim blaming in the original post is morally wrong completely separate from the factual dispute about the killer’s motives.

            Further, it seems more than a little silly that you defend White’s use of thin evidence by consistently downplaying the force with which he is making his argument. He is just “discussing the possibility” or “raising the question” or whatever when he has not done a good job weighing the evidence he has or gathering the additional evidence needed to test it. But when imagining that it may actually turn out to be a killing motivated by observing overt Christian worship, you switch into a mode where somehow White was heroically standing strong for this narrative and would be vindicated. It just doesn’t make sense.

            when may we expect you to conceed HERE the relevance of the facts in white’s #16?

            I feel like I addressed what was in that article at great length (in fact, such great length that you mostly just felt the need to criticise me for being long-winded). I don’t understand what substantive point your are making here — what “facts” you are referring to that I have somehow not addressed.

            • orionATL says:

              more evasion (“i don’t understand…”). like hell you don’t!

              more long-windedness.

              you pretend not to understand what would be embarrassing for you to concede, and is fatal to your argument.

              to repeat, when are you going to leave off your shuck-and-jive rhetoric and

              conceede HERE that white’s #16 is a critically damaging for your argument?

              • Adam Colligan says:

                I literally do not understand what you are taking about. #16 was a link to a WaPo article that included a probably ridiculous Taliban claim that the secular Roots of Peace staff house was a church performing conversions. I then wrote a number of reasons why I don’t think this actually supports the OP. (No evidence of proselytizing by either RoP or the neighbors, article specifically cites wave of anti-foreign attacks equally including secular organizations, not a spontaneous attack, which is the proposed mechanism, still no moral support for victim blaming). Twice now, you’ve just made this blanket assertion that there is some smoking gun in there that I left out. I genuinely, seriously, have no idea what you’re referring to. If you want a response, you need to identify and explain the thing you’re taking about.

                • P J Evans says:

                  Well, excuse us for reading Jim’s post and wanting an intelligent discussion of what’s going on in Afghanistan, instead of an attack on Jim.

                  • Anonsters says:

                    To be fair to A.C., he was responding there specifically to orionATL, and it’s often very difficult to know whether to take orionATL seriously–but as someone who doesn’t communicate very clearly–or as a troll.

      • Anonsters says:

        I think what bothered me was that it was suggesting some responsibility fell on the victims’ shoulders, and Jim specifically muses about whether the doctor or the visitors did something overtly religious that triggered this attack. The thing is, the doctor’s Chicago practice was at a place whose mission Jim quotes:

        Our mission is to show and share the love of Jesus by promoting wellness and providing quality, affordable health care for Lawndale and the neighboring communities.

        Note the absence of any notion of overt proselytization as part of the mission. This particular doctor very likely was motivated by his religious belief to help people, including in Afghanistan, but until we have some actual evidence of his engaging in proselytization (which would indeed be culturally insensitive and problematic), it just doesn’t sit well with me to rest any responsibility for the man’s own death on him.

    • Jim White says:

      I agree completely with “part of being a witness to one’s faith is to love other people, to help them when they’re in need, and so forth”. I’ve lived the gamut of US Christian experiences, growing up in conservative Southern Baptist churches, serving as Clerk of Session at a large Presbyterian (USA) church and now enjoying being a member of a United Church of Christ church where our compact states that we worship a God “however known”.
      .
      But the problem is that Cure International’s mission statement isn’t something along the lines of “We will demonstrate Jesus’ love by caring for the sick”. Their mission statement very clearly has the phrase “proclaiming the kingdom of God”. And that simply isn’t going to go over well in Afghanistan. Yes, Umanos survived nine years working at the hospital, so he must have had a lot of sensitivity. But we know nothing about his visitors. And keep in mind that random person passing by the hospital referring to “infidels”. We don’t know if that was aimed at Westerners in general or at people from the hospital in particular.
      .
      Going back to the document on the analysis of green on blue killings, it does the document a disservice to put religious differences only at the fourth level. Look at the section on ANSF responses. The first response relates to conducting raids on homes at night. The very first example given cites a citizen saying that when his home was raided, the first thing he did was to take out his Koran, put it in the ANA’s face, and plead for respect. The second response is that Western forces don’t respect women or their privacy. Both of these complaints relate, at root, to Afghan culture being built on a strict interpretation of Islam, where the home remains inviolate and women in the home generally are not in the presence of those who are not family members. So cultural differences that are rooted in religion play a huge role in the top level complaints from ANSF and Afghan citizens.
      .
      I’ve appreciated your contributions as a commenter here and I think you know from my previous writing that I don’t set out intentionally to disrespect anyone (well, besides Petraeus, McChrystal, Brennan and a few others). I just really felt that the question of what was going on at the time the guard snapped has to be raised and that it fit into the area of investigation in the study cited. That bit about “proclamation” in Cure’s mission statement and their choice of a partner who is very insensitive about his religious views were enough for me to raise the question. And I’m only raising the question. I’m not accusing, but instead am saying that this is a ripe area for investigation and introspection.

      • Anonsters says:

        Thanks for the thoughtful response, Jim. A few things back atcha, although I will address your thoughts on religious sensitivity in that 70-page report in a separate comment. I think your second paragraph (in the comment) illustrates what my issue with the post was. You’re more cautious in the comment, noting all the unknowns (all the known unknowns? unknown unknowns?), noting that we need more information about the visitors and so forth. I agree, there are a lot of questions about this attack that need to be answered. But the post initially struck me as saying: “We have the answer, and it’s because they were proselytizing.” With respect to Cure’s mission statement including “proclamation of the kingdom of God,” I think this 2012 blog post about Cure in Afghanistan should alleviate some of your concern. If “proclamation of the kingdom of God” were to be taken literally as overt proselytization, all the interpretive labor in that blog post would make no sense. Note this paragraph in particular:

        Talented ex-pats work alongside our dedicated national staff to serve the needs of the vulnerable and sick throughout the country, receiving patients from every province in Afghanistan. The hospital has trained and sent out dozens of surgeons and general practitioners from its residency program, slowly raising the national quality of care. It has established one of the finest NICU units in the country, saving the lives of hundreds of children a year. It has provided life-changing surgery to thousands of women and children who would otherwise have suffered or died from their conditions. It has restored thousands of families. Relationships are being built. Lives are being changed. All of this has been done because of CURE’s commitment to serve the people of Afghanistan in a way that glorifies God. The seemingly small influence of the kingdom of God is having its intended effect. If we take Jesus at His word, we shouldn’t be surprised; it can’t help but be a pervasive influence.

        That suggests that they view their “proclamation” as manifesting, through concrete acts of mercy that benefit Afghanis in concrete ways, the kingdom of God, more than it suggests they think their mission to proclaim the kingdom of God means literally proselytize.

        And I’m only raising the question. I’m not accusing, but instead am saying that this is a ripe area for investigation and introspection.

        I very much appreciate the clarification.

      • Anonsters says:

        I recognized when I originally commented that it was a little more ambiguous than I was stating, because, as you say, their cultural praxis is rooted in a strict interpretation of Islam. And I completely agree with you when you say “cultural differences that are rooted in religion play a huge role in the top level complaints from ANSF and Afghan citizens.” But you raised the specter of anger over proselytization as motivation for the Cure attack. To me there’s a substantial difference between anger that would result from Christian proselytization and anger resulting from Americans’ (or anyone else’s) lack of respect for Afghan conservative-Islam-drenched culture. You used the latter in order to suggest the presence of the former, but to me that’s an unwarranted leap. Some of the more offensive actions in the report included soldiers’ endless cursing and soldiers urinating everywhere, including in front of women. These things are offensive to them in part because the interpretation of Islam informing their culture regards such things as particularly offensive. But, again, we’re now talking about things different in kind from proselytization. I don’t think one would need to be all that culturally sensitive to recognize that overt Christian proselytization in a conservative Islamic country isn’t going to go over well. Therefore, I don’t think we can take evidence of cultural insensitivity to be sufficient justification for speculation about Christian proselytization.
        .
        I’m not sure if I’m making sense at this point, so I’ll restate my point from the other direction (more positively). Muslims are enjoined by the Qur’an to command the right and to forbid the wrong. Indeed, one of the highly admirable parts of Islam, to me, is its extreme emphasis on justice (‘adl) in social and economic issues (well, in everything really, but the Qur’an does place special emphasis on social justice). But Muslims are also enjoined to “invite to goodness” in the very same breath as they’re enjoined to command the right and forbid the wrong (see, e.g., Q. 3:104). The verb that translates as “invite to goodness” is yad‘ūna (> dā‘a); hence “dawah” in Islam is essentially missionary activity, inviting people to understand Islam. [“Dawah”, the word, is the verbal noun (masdar) of the verb dā‘a.] All of which is just to say that Islam itself explicitly recognizes a conceptual difference between doing one’s religious duty by doing what’s right/good and doing one’s religious duty by proselytizing. Commanding what is right and forbidding what is wrong is not by itself dawah. The distinction I was emphasizing in the first paragraph above is native to Islam, too. Which means Afghan anger over insensitivity to Muslim beliefs and practices isn’t likely to be confused by *them* as anger over forbidden proselytization.
        .
        All of which is to say: evidence of anger over proselytization should be precisely that, not drawn from evidence of anger over insensitivity to cultural practices (even ones wholly rooted in religion).

    • P J Evans says:

      Put it this way – I’m in the US, and I don’t want to be taken to a hospital run by the RC church. They’ve made it very clear over the last several years that they will put their religious views ahead of the health and welfare of the patients. That’s a form of proselytizing that’s legal but not (IMO) moral or ethical.

      • orionATL says:

        me, too!

        and thank god we’re not women of child-bearing age in rural towns where the catholic church is buying up hospitals specifically for the opportunity to conttol contraception of all sorts.

        amazing is it not, just how disruptive and destructive in allergyallergy society that is half female (isn’t every society thus) a social institution made up exclusively of male clerics can be?

        why behave this way?

        just remember this, lots of noise about abortion means lots of recruits and lots more money for an otherwise failing institution.

        the catholic church is no different from falwell’s evangelical churches that initiated the anti-abortion crusade for strategic business readons (membersbip and money) in 1973.

      • Anonsters says:

        You’re shocked that a Catholic hospital would dare to do what it is required by Church law to do (viz., follow Church bioethical teaching)? And given that the conflict only arises in a tiny percentage of all cases, isn’t it a little hysterical to then leap to any conclusion about the quality of care, full stop, provided by Catholic hospitals?

        • valley girl says:

          You say in response to PJ Evans:
          You’re shocked that a Catholic hospital would dare to do what it is required by Church law to do (viz., follow Church bioethical teaching)? And given that the conflict only arises in a tiny percentage of all cases, isn’t it a little hysterical to then leap to any conclusion about the quality of care, full stop, provided by Catholic hospitals?
          ..

          She said this (which occasioned your response):
          Put it this way – I’m in the US, and I don’t want to be taken to a hospital run by the RC church. They’ve made it very clear over the last several years that they will put their religious views ahead of the health and welfare of the patients. That’s a form of proselytizing that’s legal but not (IMO) moral or ethical.
          ..

          Excuse me, but your response to PJEvans is way way out of line. Off the rails. And you introduce hyperoble- such as “You’re shocked” and “hysterical then to leap to any conclusion…” in responding to her comment. I don’t see anything in her comment that indicates she is “shocked” or “hysterical”.
          ..

          Oh my gawd, just one of those hysterical wimmen! That’s what she is, reading your quite insulting response to her. Pull out all the stops and use “hysterical”. = “hysteria”.
          ..

          from wiki (although I’m sure most wimmen know this w/o reading wiki)

          ..
          ~~~For at least two thousand years of European history until the late nineteenth century hysteria referred to a medical condition thought to be particular to women and caused by disturbances of the uterus..~~~
          ..

          Re: you saying “only rises in a tiny percentage of all cases” What is a “tiny percentage”? 1%? 2%? 5%? Okey dokey then, whatever the number, to you this “tiny percentage” of women don’t matter, and have no cause for complaint.

          ..
          On a further issue: You say: “what it is required by Church law to do (viz., follow Church bioethical teaching)”? Do you disagree with the idea of separation of church and state? It seems that you do. If so, please make your case.

        • P J Evans says:

          Thanks so much for telling me what you think I should think. /s

          Now look at it from the point of view of someone who may not have any other option – and remember that Catholic bishops and their tame hospital administrators have said, straight out, that they won’t provide all available (and legal) services because of their religious views. I’ve heard that they’ll even refuse to respect advance directives, because preserving life is more important to them than the quality of life preserved. They sure won’t put the health of the woman over the health of an embryo or a fetus.

  8. orionATL says:

    “…And the reason I find this so offensive is that I am a Christian. I’m Catholic, not evangelical, granted…”

    this is the source of your misperception and mis-reasoning. pray over it.

    you really did not need to confess, though. you wear your beliefs/prejudices on your shoulder. it glows in your antagonistic posts.

  9. orionATL says:

    “… as though EW contributors need you to ride to their rescue, a gallant white knight to defend their honor…”

    my how you can twist arguments to your favor, and then light the straw man. has it occurred to you that i have no interest in defending this cite’s posters (as them about that, if you doubt that). i was attacking your argument and your loopy, self-serving reasoning. funny you missed that; i thought it quite obvious.

    “… Especially since most of my comments are aimed at helping strengthen their arguments, or probe potential weaknesses, not because I want to discredit them, but because I believe pretty much as they do. This case notwithstanding…”

    lordy me, what pious, self-righteousness drivel- you only wanted to help (the benighted heathen souls) save themselves from their current beliefs.

  10. bevin says:

    Afghanistan, in reality, is occupied by the US. Oh, I know there have been “elections” and Karzai runs the government etc.

    But nobody believes that, least of all in Afghanistan.
    What this means is that the US should positively ban all proselytising organisations from coming to Afghanistan until the occupation is over.

    And Christian organisations ought to have more sense and more respect for Afghans than to allow themselves to appear to be operating under the special protection of the occupying power. Unless, of course, they wish to associate their God with that power and to infer, Boykin style, that their presence is a sign of Providence’s preference for the US military.

    Organisations which seek to impose themselves on the losers in military conflicts are, in effect, taking the victor’s side. This makes them targets and very soft ones at that.

    The US government should immediately order the evacuation of all NGOs religious or otherwise attempting to christianise, westernise, modernise or otherwise impose their beliefs and opinions on a population unable to resist them. Unless that is the said government is
    a/ looking for a fight
    or
    b/ in the business of turning misguided and tactless idealists into martyrs.

    Naturally, the deaths of these three people saddens us all. Their fate is lamentable and those responsible should be held to account. I very much doubt whether they will be: the poor bloody soldier will be killed or disappeared, something similar will happen again. And there will be murmuring about Islamists, savages and so on.
    In fact, this should never have been allowed. And would not have been by any student who had taken “Occupying a Foreign Land:101.”

    • Adam Colligan says:

      The US government should immediately order the evacuation of all NGOs religious or otherwise attempting to christianise, westernise, modernise or otherwise impose their beliefs and opinions on a population unable to resist them.
      -bevin

      .

      So cultural differences that are rooted in religion play a huge role in the top level complaints from ANSF and Afghan citizens.
      -White

      .

      It’s a bad idea to use doing good things, like hospitals or vaccination campaigns, as a cover for activities that are far more harmful to society, like spying or trying to change people’s religion.
      -Evans

      .

      it was his first opportunity to express what HIS faith feels about these folks coming into town to supposedly help the sick – and then as an added bonus ramming that infidel nonsense down his countrymen’s throat.
      -Tom

      .

      Damn proselytizers!
      -bmaz

      .

      I’m neither a Christian nor a Muslim, and when someone converts from one to the other, it doesn’t inherently make the world a brighter or a dimmer place from where I’m sitting. I’m not in a position to be personally offended by a general condemnation of Christian proselytizing. But think there’s a current of thought here that is really concerning. It seems to condemn a very broad swath of Western religious practice and communication in Afghanistan as immoral rather than just foolish or strategically unwise. It is as if, having spent so long focusing on the need to avoid giving Taliban-related extremism any ammunition, we have internalized that intolerance as some kind of moral good.
      .
      It isn’t. We ought to stand for religious tolerance everywhere, including the right to freely preach and convert. It may be that ensuring free practice and promotion of non-Islamic religion just isn’t feasible in Afghanistan right now. But we should see this as a crying shame, not a victory for anti-colonialism or a victory for anti- Christian-fundamentlism.
      .
      There is being Christian, and being openly Christian, and practicing Christianity in public, and proselytizing, and insensitively proselytizing, and unfairly using power to proselytize. And they are all different things. All the way up through just proselytizing, there is nothing to fundamentally condemn, no matter what society we are talking about. When it comes to insensitively proselytizing — yelling fire and brimstone at me on the street or incessantly knocking at my door at dinnertime — there is room for scolding, but it’s hardly some great social crime.
      .
      You can condemn proselytizing through an unfair use of power in certain circumstances. In the case of a hospital, if getting treatment means submitting to repeated or “hard sell” conversion attempts, in the manner of a “free cruise”, then that’s clearly wrong. But if all that’s happening is that the people running the hospital feel motivated by their religious views and don’t hide that, it isn’t right to lump that in.
      .
      It’s also condemnable for religious viewpoints to be imposed at the point of a gun. But bevin’s characterization here is a real stretch. This “occupying army” can’t even impose a status of forces agreement on its own lame-duck local partner, let alone seek to reshape the religious character of society, and NGOs’ affiliation with the occupation is a lot more tenuous than he makes out.
      .
      But what’s almost impossible to deny is that religion is being imposed through the use of real power and violence in Afghanistan. Overwhelmingly, that is the power and violence of religious extremists and the male leaders who run society locally. It is a grave mistake for us to define a “powerless” in group of Afghans and a “powerful” out-group of foreigners, then define even the most benign foreign influence as oppressive…while embracing even the most oppressive local influence as being definitive of “their society”.
      .
      An Afghan is a person with the full measure of human dignity and the full set of rights to intellectual freedom. We may have to strategically accept that there is really nothing we can do right now — at least nothing that isn’t counterproductive — to break the power that forces that person’s religious practice to conform at the point of a gun. But we absolutely should not mistake that inability for some kind of blessinig, and we should not pretend that condemning Christian missionaries is some act of benevolence that protects a liberated space from coercion.

      • Anonsters says:

        This may take us too far afield from the topic at hand, but there’s an interesting and difficult issue lurking in your principles (which I largely share), so let’s get into it (happy to take it elsewhere/to e-mail/whatever, too).

        We ought to stand for religious tolerance everywhere, including the right to freely preach and convert. [snip] All the way up through just proselytizing, there is nothing to fundamentally condemn, no matter what society we are talking about.

        Religious tolerance includes the right to freely preach and convert. Yet the traditional view in Islam (in all four Sunni madhhabs, in the various branches of Shi‘a) is to condemn apostasy (indeed, apostasy is a death-penalty crime). Various modern Muslims and Islamic reformers have denied the traditional reasoning and have asserted that Islam has room for religious tolerance (including conversion from Islam). Whatever one thinks of their arguments, it’s still widely held and taught that apostasy merits execution. This raises two tensions with your broad tolerance principles:
        .
        (1) Should religious tolerance, including the right to freely preach and convert, countenance the preaching of a religion that condemns to death those who convert from that religion to something else? Preaching is just speaking, though, so perhaps that’s not an issue we need to worry about. Let’s skip ahead.
        .
        (2) “All the way up through just proselytizing, there is nothing to fundamentally condemn, no matter what society we are talking about.” What if the society is governed by Islamic law? That is, an Islamic society will condemn proselytizing, even if it allows a measure of religious freedom (i.e., allows Jews and Christians to discreetly worship together in their own houses of worship, etc.). Your principles of religious freedom demand we respect people’s right to worship as they will. Yet integral to some people’s worship is the prohibition of apostasy. Yet your principles require us to allow conversion freely, which is contrary to the tenets of Islam. I think you can see the tension.

        • Adam Colligan says:

          @Anonsters:
          .
          I think you are really identifying the heart of the issue here.

          (1) Should religious tolerance, including the right to freely preach and convert, countenance the preaching of a religion that condemns to death those who convert from that religion to something else? Preaching is just speaking, though, so perhaps that’s not an issue we need to worry about. Let’s skip ahead.

          Yes, depending on what exactly you mean by “a religion that condemns to death…”. The vast majority of religious belief systems are sprawling volumes of culture that have some violent components that can be identified. And yet the vast majority of religious people are not violent threats to anyone, and they should not be muzzled in their preaching because those components lurk within the history and literature of the religion with which they identify.
          .
          I think that calls for, or direct instigation of, actual violence against, e.g., apostates, should be universally condemned and actually outlawed by force. But I also think there is a high threshold for invoking that kind of action. People ought to be free to think, and to say that they think, that infidels and apostates are scum who don’t deserve to live. What they should *not* be free to do is to impose that belief on other people by force. And that brings us into your (2):

          “All the way up through just proselytizing, there is nothing to fundamentally condemn, no matter what society we are talking about.” What if the society is governed by Islamic law? That is, an Islamic society will condemn proselytizing, even if it allows a measure of religious freedom (i.e., allows Jews and Christians to discreetly worship together in their own houses of worship, etc.). Your principles of religious freedom demand we respect people’s right to worship as they will. Yet integral to some people’s worship is the prohibition of apostasy. Yet your principles require us to allow conversion freely, which is contrary to the tenets of Islam. I think you can see the tension.

          I don’t think this tension is quite as difficult to resolve as it seems. I believe that there should be broad and cross-cultural respect for the right of each individual to pursue his or her own religious ideas and to adopt new ones without threat of violence or official reprisal. What about the extent to which a person adopts ideas that call upon them to exert forceful control of *others’* religious practice?
          .
          I think people may be free to feel that way or to worship texts that contain such ideas, but they should not be free to act on those ideas. The idea here is that we need tolerance, and we can and should even tolerate intolerance, but only up to the point where that intolerance actually seeks to exert itself forcefully on others.
          .
          One way to express why I think the tension isn’t as serious as it often seems is to look at the phrase “their religion”, as in “you’re not tolerating their religion if you don’t tolerate their religion’s commitment to imposing itself on others.” Most people immediately focus on the “religion” part of that problem: “is Islam really fundamentally imperialistic or blah blah blah?”
          .
          But I think the more important word to focus on is “their” rather than “religion”. At the point where someone’s fundamentalism is being used to coerce the religious practices of another person, you’re no longer just talking about the ownership that Person A has over their beliefs, and the need to respect that ownership. You’re also talking about Person B, who has an equal right to freedom of religion, free of coercion from next door just as surely as from half a world away. To the extent that one person thinks their religion entitles them to violently coerce others’ spirituality, practicing that coercion lies outside the protected space of freedom of religion practice. This is because it *per se* intrudes on the protected space of other people.
          .
          So of course there is to possible way to protect the full measure of everyone’s religion if anyone makes the claim that their religion demands the coercion of others. But that inability does *not* mean that religious toleration is somehow arbitrary or fundamentally broken. It should *not* invite all the sketchy claims of equivalence that we see between levels of religious pressure that are very different. And it should definitely not be resolved the way that we far, far too often see it resolved today: by the racist claim that coercion is what happens when white or foreign ideas even subtly infect your culture. And defensible “your culture” is what happens when people who are the *same* color as you aim a gun at you and tell you how to pray.
          .
          Instead, it can and should be resolved by simply stating that one person’s space for freedom of belief end where another person’s begins. Afghan culture is the equal property of all Afghans. Say we come upon a situation where violent extremists enforce religious praxis through fear and intimidation. If we state that this system of coercion is “their culture”, we are abandoning and negating the equal rights that all of the non-gun-wielding people have to define what their culture is. We are handing over the keys to the definition of social norms to the loudest and most violent members of a society, throwing under the bus our otherwise-cherished idea that every individual should be able to speak for herself..
          .
          And then we have the gall to try to claim that the presence of, say, a Christian medical aid worker is a potentially dangerous, provocative, and immoral imposition on “their culture”? That, to me, is moral madness.

    • Tom in AZ says:

      I’m with you, bmaz. It is a shame that the doctor and whoever he was with was killed. Maybe he and the others were just the first Americans that guard noticed, and it was his first opportunity to express what HIS faith feels about these folks coming into town to supposedly help the sick – and then as an added bonus ramming that infidel nonsense down his countrymen’s throat.

      And citing Tim Tebow’s ties to this outfit is certainly NOT out of context in my view. Lord forbid building a hospital to just help the sick. As if God would pissed off if you didn’t sell his brand to everyone lying in bed.

  11. Garrett says:

    @bmaz

    Mine too, in one way. It’s a long multi-comment conversation about Afghanistan.

    You don’t see that every day.

  12. Don Bacon says:

    Blind hatred resulting from US-promoted wars on Muslims is widespread.
    .
    al Jazeerah, Dec 31, 2012
    Anti-Muslim violence spiralling out of control in America
    .
    Sen was pushed to death by a woman who “hated Muslims”, as anti-Muslim bigotry in the US sinks to violent new depths.
    …[snip]
    Menendez confessed to Sen’s murder and revealed as her motivation a desire to commit violence against Muslims. As she told detectives:
    .
    “I pushed a Muslim off the train tracks because I hate Hindus and Muslims… Ever since 2001 when they put down the Twin Towers, I’ve been beating them up.”

  13. Don Bacon says:

    White’s piece, including its title, lacks firm positions and is full of questions, a piece designed to inspire thinking and debate, which is are impossible tasks for some.

  14. qweryous says:

    How the reports would be handled if the police officer who did the shooting had used some surplussed US gear with cryptic markings ending in sequences like PSA27:1 or JN 8:12?

  15. Anonsters says:

    FWIW, I don’t endorse any of Adam Colligan’s personal attacks on Jim. I said what I had to say, and I appreciated Jim’s response (which, of course, I’m about to respond to :P). But just wanted to put this out there. I was offended (and got over it, after finally sleeping for a few hours), but I don’t find Jim to be offensive. :)

    • Adam Colligan says:

      I don’t endorse any of Adam Colligan’s personal attacks on Jim.

      Well, excuse us for reading Jim’s post and wanting an intelligent discussion of what’s going on in Afghanistan, instead of an attack on Jim.

      What personal attacks? I think this piece is bad. Everything I’ve written here is about why this is not good work, apart from mentioning that I think there have been other White posts that are not up to the standard otherwise seen on the site. I’ve objected before, above, to the characterization of my criticism of the piece as some kind of blanket rejection of Jim’s “worthiness”. I think there is a lot of bad work on this page, and I’ve been very specific about why I think that. Characterizing my criticism as personal rejection just seems like a way of shifting the conversation away from what’s important. “Proving me wrong” then just becomes about defending Jim as a person or Jim showing that there is anything at all worthwhile in his contributions. That is silly.
      .
      The closest thing to a personal attack in my criticism of this piece is — I guess? — my strong moral rejection of the victim blaming that I see contained in it. But I assume that this is not what you are referring to, since it is more or less the exact same position that Anonsters has taken here.

      • Anonsters says:

        So read it as “I don’t endorse any personal attacks on Jim, and if A.C. is perceived as doing so, I distance myself from that, even if substantively we have similar concerns.” Because we did have similar substantive concerns.

  16. JTMinIA says:

    Forgive me in advance for the risky aside, but a lot of this discussion reminds me of what usually happens when someone suggests that women might not want to do certain things (e.g., walk alone at night, in certain places, dressed in a certain manner) if they don’t want to be raped. If anyone is having problems understanding how folks who believe in a god often react to the suggestion that their religious behavior can put them in danger, try….

    On better thought, don’t try it.

  17. Garrett says:

    @Anonsters:

    This may take us too far afield from the topic at hand, but there’s an interesting and difficult issue lurking in your principles (which I largely share), so let’s get into it (happy to take it elsewhere/to e-mail/whatever, too).

    Despite the combativeness in some of the commenting, about an especially difficult issue, I’m just glad to see some extended discussion of our forgotten war in Afghanistan. And the discussion can definitely be extended to bring in larger related issues.

    The election results show, I think, a strong desire for an internationalist aid and development approach, and a rejection of Taliban violence. Because the election is not representative, and because of the fraud, we can’t know who actually won. But we can take a general interpretation from it.

    By contrast, harsh Islamic revivalism views also seem to be growing, among, for one thing, intellectual young people. The idea that un-Islamic influence needs purged. This is a wider set of values than just “Taliban.” It has considerable and complex intellectual roots.

    The high-profile attacks in the last year, directly targeting civilians, seem to have a new quality. “Crossing a line” is often said. They don’t come from a single identifiable direction. Taliban, other radical groups, security force members, and who-knows have variously been responsible.

    I take the attack on the Roots of Peace compound, and on the Cure hospital, to have a high similarity. They can be identified as alike, in the same way that last year’s attacks on the ICRC and the International Organization for Migration were identified as alike. And it’s a notable and worrying trend.

  18. JTMinIA says:

    And then we have the gall to try to claim that the presence of, say, a Christian medical aid worker is a potentially dangerous, provocative, and immoral imposition on “their culture”?

    Who here had the “gall” to claim that the presence of anyone, anywhere was an imposition of anyone’s culture? What I’ve gotten out of all this was the suggestion that being a Christian proselytist in the middle of Afghanistan is just asking for trouble. The only criticism that I can think of to fling at Jim is “well, duh!”

  19. Valley girl says:

    You say in response to PJ Evans:
    You’re shocked that a Catholic hospital would dare to do what it is required by Church law to do (viz., follow Church bioethical teaching)? And given that the conflict only arises in a tiny percentage of all cases, isn’t it a little hysterical to then leap to any conclusion about the quality of care, full stop, provided by Catholic hospitals?
    ..

    She said this (which occasioned your response):
    Put it this way – I’m in the US, and I don’t want to be taken to a hospital run by the RC church. They’ve made it very clear over the last several years that they will put their religious views ahead of the health and welfare of the patients. That’s a form of proselytizing that’s legal but not (IMO) moral or ethical.
    ..

    Excuse me, but your response to PJEvans is way way out of line. Off the rails. And you introduce hyperoble- such as “You’re shocked” and “hysterical then to leap to any conclusion…” in responding to her comment. I don’t see anything in her comment that indicates she is “shocked” or “hysterical”.
    ..

    Oh my gawd, just one of those hysterical wimmen! That’s what she is, reading your quite insulting response to her. Pull out all the stops and use “hysterical”. = “hysteria”.
    ..

    from wiki (although I’m sure most wimmen know this w/o reading wiki)

    ..
    ~~~For at least two thousand years of European history until the late nineteenth century hysteria referred to a medical condition thought to be particular to women and caused by disturbances of the uterus..~~~
    ..

    Re: you saying “only rises in a tiny percentage of all cases” What is a “tiny percentage”? 1%? 2%? 5%? Okey dokey then, whatever the number, to you this “tiny percentage” of women don’t matter, and have no cause for complaint.

    ..
    On a further issue: You say: “what it is required by Church law to do (viz., follow Church bioethical teaching)”? Do you disagree with the idea of separation of church and state? It seems that you do. If so, please make your case.

    • Anonsters says:

      Three things:
      .
      (1) Frankly, I thought P.J. Evans was male when I wrote that comment. I read orionATL’s comment in 29, “and thank god we’re not women of child-bearing age in rural towns,” as implying that P.J. Evans was male. And of course, I see that’s a misreading, since that’s not necessarily implied (P.J. Evans could be a woman of non-child-bearing age).
      .
      (2) You either completely missed the point I was making in referring to the tiny percentage of cases that will present controversy as between Catholic and non-Catholic hospitals, or you’re throwing bombs. The “ZOMGYOUHATEWOMEN” line makes me think you’re throwing bombs. If you’re interested, though, I’ll respond, because this really is a serious difficulty for me, and I don’t have a completely satisfactory resolution of it for myself.
      .
      (3) “Do you disagree with the idea of separation of church and state? It seems that you do. If so, please make your case.” Hospitals owned and operated by the Catholic Church are not state entities. They’re private. Yes, I would very much object if Catholics somehow managed to impose Catholic bioethical teaching on a publicly-owned hospital, because I think for the most part the procedures and practices (prescription of birth control, as an example of a “practice”) that are endorsed by non-Catholic doctors but are forbidden to Catholic doctors by Church bioethical teaching are so forbidden for theological reasons. Interestingly, that’s why it’s not sinful, in the eyes of the Church, for a woman to take birth control if the birth control is medically necessary for some purpose other than preventing conception. The woman’s health trumps the theology there. What’s not allowed is to claim it’s medically necessary, when it’s not, because one has the intention of preventing conception. All of which is to say that something like the Church’s stance on birth control has no place in publicly-owned/operated hospitals, because publicly-owned/operated hospitals have no place in allowing or denying procedures for theological reasons.

      • Valley girl says:

        Once again you resort to hyperbole:

        The “ZOMGYOUHATEWOMEN” line

        That is not what I said. I said:

        Oh my gawd, just one of those hysterical wimmen! That’s what she is, reading your quite insulting response to her. Pull out all the stops and use “hysterical”. = “hysteria”.

        Why, again, do you feel it necessary to put a “spin” on words that is not there in the original statement? Are you just so het up that you can’t see this “spin”?

        • Anonsters says:

          So, I hope you noticed the structure of my reply to your comment. It was numbered (1), (2), (3), because you raised three issues: (1) I’m a sexist who, a la Michael Hayden, dismisses women’s arguments or concerns by calling them emotional or whatever else; (2) I said something about a tiny percentage of cases, so “whatever the [exact] number [I think is “tiny”] . . . [to me,] this ‘tiny percentage’ of women don’t matter, and have no cause for complaint”; and (3) the separation of church and state.
          .
          Notice that my characterization of what you said as “ZOMGYOUHATEWOMEN” came in my numbered section (2). You defend yourself by quoting something that I would’ve responded to in numbered section (1). That’s not relevant, and that’s not why I characterized what you said as “ZOMGYOUHATEWOMEN.” What I was referring to was your statement that I must not care about x% of women, meaning that I have no concern for whatever happens to them. And yes, that is equivalent, in my view, to saying that I hate women, in rhetorical terms. It’s a common rhetorical strategy (“war on women”).
          .
          And yes, I would characterize as “hysterical” the inference that because in some small percentage of cases the Church requires different medical treatment, that therefore Church hospitals necessarily endanger the health and welfare of all their patients. And that is the inference I took P.J. Evans to be making. As to using “shocked,” that was meant to emphasize that people shouldn’t be even mildly surprised that Catholic hospitals will tend to follow Catholic bioethical teaching, because that they do is the thing that shocks the least. It’s a rhetorical device for emphasizing something through ironic reversal.
          .
          But no, really, this is fun. I can’t wait to see how you try to corner me again. I mean, I must be an insensitive sexist without sufficient regard for the intellectual capability of women, right? Because that’s how you read my comment at first, despite my explanation of why that’s a misreading of my comment (an understandable misreading if you thought I knew certain things that I did not know, like P.J. Evans’ gender). And you couldn’t have been wrong about me, so I eagerly await your next barrage. You’re running out of things to hang your hat on, so you’re going to have to step up the creative misreading a bit.

          • orionATL says:

            “.. Catholic bioethical teaching…”

            this p.r. phrase is a direct translation of “anti-abortion teaching…”

            this devious p.r. phrase does hide one thing though,

            it hides the fact that the catholic bureaucracy does not just want to stop abortions. they want to stop women from using almost all forms of contraception by using the specious device of a series of “medical” gates. this is how an all-male, increbibly arrogant, unchristian-to-its-core, catholic church bureaucracy tries to contol women’s lives in the 21st century.

            and you are one of those unchristian christians.

            • Anonsters says:

              Fair warning: I’m not going to be reading any of your comments in the future, so take my silence for what it is: utterly ignoring you.

  20. edding says:

    Marcy, I think you were right on target, especially since you reserved on your conclusion.

    Some of your readers, articulate as they seem to be in expressing themselves, or formulating an argument, seem clueless about the cultural sensitivities of other peoples, and in the case of the issues raised here, appear never to have lived in Afghanistan, or at least with Afghans, and long enough, to understand the culture and religion (and its diversity) to know what would trigger a response such as the killings. Furthermore, I find it instructive that it is this very type of ignorance that has fueled the neocons’ approach to the rest of the world.

    To most Muslims (and Jews and Christians), proselytizing another religion is offensive, and to a fundamentalist Muslim it would be a mortal sin. (And as an aside, it was not only Christian relics that were destroyed by the Taliban, but also historically important Buddhist statuary- this is not limit criticism to the Taliban; after all, Rumsfeld seemed not to care one whit when the priceless treasures of the Iraqi national museum were destroyed and/or looted.) Moreover, this is not merely an issue in Afghanistan. In Libya, proselytizing Christianity can carry the death penalty. See for example, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/17/libya-arrests-suspected-foreign-missionaries.)

    So, it might be a good time for Anonsters and his buddies to get a reality check and not just rely on some ‘statistical study’. The WAPO article with the quote from the taxi driver (posted above) should have also given them something more than a clue.

    • Anonsters says:

      First, Jim White wrote this post, not Marcy. Second, I think it’s fascinating that you accuse me of ignorance of Islam or Muslims, without knowing a thing about my background, merely because you think you disagree with me. (FWIW, I can read classical Arabic, and I’ve spent the last year or so studying (privately) classical Islamic jurisprudence and kalam. Why? In order to try to refute Islam, since I’m a Catholic? No. Because I think the three main monotheistic faiths all have things to teach each other, and I’m nothing if not eager to learn.) Third, in the ultimate irony of your comment, you say:

      So, it might be a good time for Anonsters and his buddies to get a reality check and not just rely on some ‘statistical study’.

      I need to get a reality check for relying on some “statistical study,” even though it was, in fact, Jim White, the OP, who relies on that statistical study as a piece of evidence in making his argument.
      .
      I really do find it fascinating when people like you comment. Did you not read the post very carefully? Or is that you sort of just skimmed my comments (which are, admittedly, tl;dr) and so don’t really know what exactly I was saying? If the latter, which I suspect, why then take shots at me? Why say I’m clueless or need to get a clue for reasons XYZ, when you don’t even know what it is I’m saying?

  21. Valley girl says:

    p.s. to above
    ..
    Or the necessity to put words in other peoples’ mouths that aren’t there in the first place?
    ..
    Did PJ Evans say that she was “shocked”? Did she appear to be “hysterical” in the tone of her comment? Did I accuse you of hating women?

    • P J Evans says:

      It’s probably a good thing I was elseweb following a troll invasion on another site. I’m more ticked at AC, who is an #$%^&* and deserves to get grief.

      • Adam Colligan says:

        PJ, the only things I can see you have posted here with regard to my criticisms of White’s piece are:
        .
        at 23, a sarcastic mockery of the fact that I didn’t think the piece’s standard of journalism was strong;
        .
        at 35, another sarcastic shot claiming that I don’t like intelligent discussion and was engaging in some kind of (unspecified) personal attacks; and
        .
        now, at 63, just calling me a string of symbols and saying I deserve grief.
        .
        If to want to take issue with what I have written here, please don’t hesitate to do so. But if you want that intelligent discussion you talked about, you’re not going to be able to get it unless you stop calling names long enough to make a contribution substantive enough that it can actually be engaged with.

        • orionATL says:

          “.. But if you want that intelligent discussion you talked about, you’re not going to be able to get it unless you stop calling names long enough to make a contribution substantive enough that it can actually be engaged with…”

          look, you arrogant, pompous little twit, you do NOT have the right to make up ANY rules about what constitutes a “substantive discussion” here.

          even more importantly, you do NOT have any right to make rules about what constitutes a “substabtive discussion” in an argument in which you are involved, when the rule you make up serves only to disadvantage an opponent with whom you are arguing.

          doing so is declaring yourself the referee of an argument in which you are a competito.

          i can say that p.j.’s contributions are as interesting and substantive a contribution as any of yours, and, mercifully, mercifully, not long-winded, obtuse, and slippery – as are many of yours.

  22. bmaz says:

    Alright folks.  I tried to make a joke yesterday to lighten the somewhat dark mood this comment thread has taken. That clearly did not work so well. The chippiness maintains.

     

    Let’s all pull back a little. For starters, not every blog post is intended as critical “journalism”, many are, but some are satire, some are quick hits, some are simply putting forth observations. I think this post falls in the latter category. And the question Jim poses about the hard Christian attitude being a possible trigger in some situations in the middle east is more than fair.

     

    Try to be a little kinder to your posting host and fellow commenters please.

    • Anonsters says:

      The problem is and has always been that this post cannot, in good faith, be characterized like you want to: as “the question Jim poses about the hard Christian attitude being a possible trigger in some situations in the middle east is more than fair.” This post was in response to one specific situation and was speculating about three particular individuals’ behavior being the trigger in this one very specific situation. If this post had been more general, not tied to a specific event, not speculating about specific individuals’ behavior, I would totally agree with you. But since Jim, you, and the entire universe knows well enough by now how I felt about it, I’ll shut up now. :)

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