Western Diplomats Have Ignored Religion at Their Own Peril

Dec. 19 2018

Over the past century, neither the bureaucrats at the U.S. State Department nor scholars of foreign relations have ascribed much importance to religion, preferring to look to other motivations in explaining and predicting the behavior of peoples and governments. By ignoring faith, and assuming that the progress of modernity leads inexorably to greater secularization, they have consistently failed to understand the world as it is, argues Charles Hill:

This blinkered view of the world meant that diplomatic analysts could not accurately interpret the emergence, rise, and growth—in fervor and extent—of a radical Islamist movement determined to restore Muslim political-ideological-theological power that had collapsed in 1924 with the end of the Ottoman empire and the caliphate. The sudden violent shift by many supporters of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s goal of a “democratic socialist secular state” toward an extreme Islamist outcome was misinterpreted as no more than further evidence of actions carried out for strictly political purposes by people who had no other avenues of expression.

When Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1979 revolution overthrew the shah to establish the first Islamist rule over a recognized state in the [modern] international system, Foreign Service specialists on Iran hurried with assurances that nothing of serious religious significance had occurred and that the U.S. could “do business” with what would be just another pragmatic Middle Eastern regime. And when Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat was assassinated in 1981, the “political cone” of the U.S. Foreign Service (including this writer) considered it a purely political act carried out in support of the Palestinians.

Not until after the 1993 first Islamist bombing of the World Trade Center did a review of the old videotapes of the Sadat assassination enable diplomats to “see” for the first time that the imprisoned perpetrators were openly declaring the religious inspiration behind their actions. . . . In retrospect, the assassins’ motives become clear—they believed Sadat a tyrant and his murder justified in the name of their religion.

A revised interpretation of the modern centuries reveals an age assumed to be secular, but actually suffused with religious politics and aggressions worldwide—with America as “the leader of the free world” newly comprehensible as acting on an unacknowledged spiritual basis.

Read more at Caravan

More about: Anwar Sadat, Ayatollah Khomeini, Islamism, PLO, Politics & Current Affairs, Religion and politics, State Department, U.S. Foreign policy

Donald Trump’s Plan for Gaza Is No Worse Than Anyone Else’s—and Could Be Better

Reacting to the White House’s proposal for Gaza, John Podhoretz asks the question on everyone’s mind:

Is this all a fantasy? Maybe. But are any of the other ludicrous and cockamamie ideas being floated for the future of the area any less fantastical?

A Palestinian state in the wake of October 7—and in the wake of the scenes of Gazans mobbing the Jewish hostages with bloodlust in their eyes as they were being led to the vehicles to take them back into the bosom of their people? Biden foreign-policy domos Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken were still talking about this in the wake of their defeat in ludicrous lunchtime discussions with the Financial Times, thus reminding the world of what it means when fundamentally silly, unserious, and embarrassingly incompetent people are given the levers of power for a while. For they should know what I know and what I suspect you know too: there will be no Palestinian state if these residents of Gaza are the people who will form the political nucleus of such a state.

Some form of UN management/leadership in the wake of the hostilities? Well, that might sound good to people who have been paying no attention to the fact that United Nations officials have been, at the very best, complicit in hostage-taking and torture in facilities run by UNRWA, the agency responsible for administering Gaza.

And blubber not to me about the displacement of Gazans from their home. We’ve been told not that Gaza is their home but that it is a prison. Trump is offering Gazans a way out of prison; do they really want to stay in prison? Or does this mean it never really was a prison in the first place?

Read more at Commentary

More about: Donald Trump, Gaza Strip, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict