Safer World: December 2006

The Top Ten Stories You Missed in 2006

Friday, December 22, 2006

You saw the stories that dominated the headlines in 2006: the war in Iraq, North Korea’s nuclear tests, and the U.S. midterm elections. But what about the news that remained under the radar? From the Bush administration’s post-Katrina power grab to a growing arms race in Latin America to the new hackable passports, FP delivers the Top Ten Stories You Missed in 2006.

10. Hackable Passports

In October, the U.S. State Department began issuing biometric “ePassports” that contain a radio frequency identification (RFID) tag under the back cover. The tiny chip holds the usual passport data, including a digital photo. The motive behind adding the chips is ostensibly good: to combat counterfeiting and illegal immigration.

But a German hacker quickly found a vulnerability. With a laptop and a chip reader he bought for $200, he was able to steal data from an encrypted RFID tag, potentially allowing him to clone an ePassport. And it’s not just Americans who are at risk. Twenty-seven countries (mostly in Europe) that participate in the U.S. Visa Waiver Program are required by U.S. law to issue the new electronic passports to their citizens. The Dutch and British media have already reported major security flaws in the new IDs.

So, what’s a security conscious citizen to do? Again, the answer may come out of Germany. A group of hackers there recommends that people microwave the new passports to destroy the chips. The State Department may want to go back to relying on a paper trail.

09. What’s Worse Than Bird Flu? The Cure.

In 2006, bird flu didn’t become the killer pandemic everyone feared. In fact, there were no confirmed deaths in developed countries from bird flu. But the alarm, stoked by Western media reports, led to an unexpected—and unfortunate—outcome: A rash of abnormal behavior, hallucinations, and even deaths attributed to Tamiflu, the medicine marketed as a key drug capable of fighting the disease. In November, the Canadian health ministry issued a warning on Tamiflu after 10 Canadians taking the drug had died suspiciously. And the U.S. Food and Drug Administration received more than 100 reports of injury and delirium among Tamiflu takers for a 10-month period in 2005 and 2006. That’s nearly as many cases as were logged over the drug’s five-year trial period. For now, the cure seems worse than the disease.

08. Petro Powers Drop the Dollar

If you thought record oil prices this year were a pain in your wallet, there’s more bad news on the horizon. The latest Bank for International Settlements quarterly report, which tracks the investment trends of oil-producing countries, indicates that Russia and OPEC countries are moving their holdings out of dollars and into euros and yen. OPEC cut its holdings in the dollar by more than $5 billion during the first and second quarter of 2006. And Russia now keeps most of its new deposits in euros instead of dollars.

That decrease is swift and significant—and helps to explain why the dollar recently fell to a 20-month low against the euro and a 14-year low against the British pound. Holding dollars while other currencies gain strength means less profit for oil producers. But if they rapidly divest themselves of dollars, it may weaken the currency and push up inflation in the United States. “This new trend may be bigger trouble for the United States than high oil prices and surging Chinese exports,” says Nouriel Roubini, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. If this year’s move away from the dollar is a sign of future thinking by oil producers, the pain felt at the pump may soon be the least of our worries.

07. The Gender Gap Gets Smaller

It was a good year for women in politics. Female heads of state took office in Chile and Liberia, and Hillary Clinton and Ségolène Royal set tongues wagging in Washington and Paris over their own presidential prospects. But it was also a great year for future female leaders, especially those in poor countries.

A report released in February by the Washington-based Population Reference Bureau found that the gender gap in secondary education is closing or has closed in most developing countries. Particularly in Latin America and Asia, girls are attending school at the same rate—or higher—than boys. In 1990 in China, for example, 75 girls attended secondary school for every 100 boys. Today, that figure is 97. In India, girls’ enrollment shot up from 60 percent to 81 percent. Though sub-Saharan Africa lagged behind the rest of the world, it too saw more girls in the classroom.

The shift isn’t due to an unexpected worldwide surge in favor of gender equality. The more likely explanation is that urbanization and economic development has boosted girls’ likelihood of attending school, as has a number of innovative government and private-sector programs. In India, for example, UNICEF credits basic sanitation and hygiene education programs in Alwar with increasing girls’ enrollment by 78 percent over a five-year period. Given the clear link between girls’ education and a society’s economic success, it’s good news everyone can celebrate.

06. Iran and Israel Hold Secret Talks

While Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spent the better part of 2006 denying the Holocaust and threatening to destroy Israel, his country was sitting down with Israeli representatives to settle old debts. The clandestine talks, first reported by Israeli daily Haaretz this month, concern hundreds of millions of dollars allegedly owed to Iran for oil it supplied to Israel before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, when Iran severed the two countries’ economic ties dating back to the 1950s. According to the report, negotiations over the debt have been on-again and off-again for nearly two decades, and the two sides met recently in Geneva in an attempt to reach an agreement.

It’s unclear why Israeli and Swiss officials are now willing to confirm that the talks are taking place. However, there is one leading theory: The leak was timed to embarrass Iran by publicizing its cooperation with a country it refuses to recognize. And the strategy may have worked. Iran swiftly and vehemently denied it’s secretly talking to the Jewish state. It just goes to show, money talks.

05. United States Funds the Taliban

The Taliban’s resurgence brought the ongoing war in Afghanistan back onto the front pages in 2006. From record opium production to suicide bombings, the outlook has only grown dimmer in the past 12 months. What you probably didn’t hear is that some of the money the United States is spending to combat the resurgence of the Taliban is winding up in the hands of . . . the Taliban.

As recently as November, the Institute for War and Peace Reporting revealed that villagers in Afghanistan’s war-torn south were handing over U.S. cash meant for reconstruction projects to Taliban fighters, who then use the money to purchase weapons, cell phones, and explosives. As part of an effort to stimulate economic development in the country, the United States had committed $43.5 million for reconstruction as of September. One Canadian officer charged with helping to distribute cash said that “millions” has already gone missing in the five years since coalition troops arrived. Why? According to the report, local mullahs have urged residents to fight the foreign occupation and hand over the money in the hopes of gaining back the security they’ve lost. Others say it’s simple extortion from Taliban thugs. Either way, the United States may inadvertently be aiding the enemy in a fight that will almost certainly become more costly in the year ahead.

04. Russia Fuels Latin American Arms Race

When Costa Rican President Oscar Arias spoke at a September conference sponsored by the Miami Herald, one sentence stood out: “Latin America has begun a new arms race.” He was referring to the sudden uptick in major arms deals in the region, largely between Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela, and their newest patron, Russia. The deals have left the region flush with shiny new tanks, fighter jets, and custom-built presidential helicopters.

The Latin arms trade is as much about politics as it is weapons. Not long after Brazil announced a deal to purchase roughly $300 million in Russian military equipment, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said he would back Brazil’s bid for a seat in the U.N. Security Council. It’s not just Brazil’s military that has a hard time saying nyet to Russian firms. Venezuela inked a more than $1 billion deal in July for Russian jets and helicopters. There’s even talk of Moscow relocating Kalashnikov gun and ammo factories to Venezuela, next door to Colombia’s ammunition-strapped FARC rebels. With Venezuela’s populist anti-American president Hugo Chávez seeking to dominate Latin American politics, U.S. officials are concerned, especially given the United States’ sliding popularity in the region. More dangerous, though, is Latin America’s militarization. More guns and less butter is the last thing the troubled region needs.

03. Bush’s Post-Katrina Power Grab

When U.S. President George W. Bush signed the $532 billion federal defense spending bill in October, there were the usual budgetary turf battles on Capitol Hill. But largely overlooked was a revision of a nearly 200-year-old law to restrict the president’s power during major crises. In December, Congressional Quarterly examined the changes, saying that the new law “takes the cuffs off” federal restraint during emergencies. Rather than limiting the circumstances under which a president may deploy troops to “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy,” the 2006 revision expands them to include “natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident.” In other words, it’s now easier for the federal government to send in troops without a governor’s invitation.

Ostensibly, the move aims to streamline bureaucratic inefficiencies that left thousands of New Orleanians stranded last summer. Yet the Insurrection Act that existed when Katrina struck didn’t actually hinder the president’s ability to send federal troops. He simply chose not to.

Critics have called the changes an opening for martial law. Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, one of the few to raise the issue in congress, says that “Using the military for law enforcement goes against one of the founding tenets of our democracy.” Is martial law more likely than before? Perhaps not. But the fact that the revisions were slipped into a defense bill without a national debate gives ammunition to those who argue the administration is still trampling on civil liberties five years after 9/11.

02. China Runs up African Debt

The debt-relief deal struck at last year’s Group of Eight (G8) summit, where rich countries promised to forgive about $40 billion in debts owed by poor countries, was supposed to be a turning point in Africa’s development, a chance to wipe its economic slate clean. Then came China. The rapidly industrializing country has emerged as a top lender to poor African countries, and that has many international development organizations worried that years of campaigning for debt relief will be set back by a new wave of bad loans.

The World Bank estimates that Chinese loans for African infrastructure already total more than $12.5 billion. In November, Chinese President Hu Jintao promised to provide another $5 billion in loans to Africa by 2009. Many of these deals are believed to be similar to commercial loans rather than the low-interest, long-term credits extended by multilateral development banks. It’s hard to know the full extent of the risk because China usually refuses to divulge the terms of the deals. Development experts now fear that aggressive lending by Chinese banks will land Africa back where it started—in the red.

01. India Helps Iran Build the Bomb, While the White House Looks the Other Way

The U.S. government usually takes a hard line against countries that assist Iran with its nuclear program. In 2006 alone, Washington sanctioned firms in Cuba, North Korea, and Russia for making it a little easier for Iran to develop weapons of mass destruction. But, when the proliferator is a close American ally, the United States seems to take a different approach.

Just after the U.S. House of Representatives voted in July to support a plan to provide India with nuclear technology, the Bush administration quietly imposed sanctions on two Indian firms for supplying Tehran with missile parts. Nor was the White House forthcoming with congress about other blots on India’s proliferation record: In the past two years, two other Indian companies have been penalized for allegedly passing chemical weapons information to Iran, and two Indian scientists who ran the state-run nuclear utility were barred from doing business with the U.S. government after they allegedly passed heavy-water nuclear technology to Tehran. Far from scuttling India’s nuclear deal, the United States seems to have rewarded the country by overturning 30 years of nonproliferation policy in its favor.

Labels: 2006, Bomb, india, Iran, Missed, nuclear, Stories, White House

How human rights always lead to human wrongs

Thursday, December 21, 2006

Jeremy Bentham described the Declaration of the Rights of Man by French revolutionaries as “nonsense on stilts”. Nice rhetoric, but ultimately unsuccessful. Since 1789 the idea of human rights has thrived. It now even has its own day. This year’s Human Rights Day, was dedicated to the war on poverty.

Bentham was right. The idea that we all enjoy certain rights, not because any legal system gives them to us, but simply because we are humans, is silly. But, in the 18th century at least, it was beneficial silliness.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are born equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that amongst these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” These statements are not self-evident. They are not even true. They are gobbledygook. Yet they inspired the Constitution of the United States, one of mankind’s great achievements.

Alas, once nonsense is up and running, it is hard to rein in. Initially, our self-evident human rights were simply protections against the abuse of power. Today, entitlements to all manner of goods are making themselves evident to human rights oracles. Louise Arbour, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, claims that we have human rights “to food, to work, to healthcare and housing”.
This inflation has changed the politics of human rights. Whereas human rights once supported limited government, they are now invoked in favour of the welfare state and the maximal government it requires. Which is why the human rights movement, although well intentioned, has become a malign force.

In an article to mark Human Rights Day this month, Ms Arbour claimed that poverty is caused by human rights violations. It is true, of course, that if people had food, healthcare and housing, they would not live in poverty. But it is absurd to say that lacking these things causes poverty. Lacking these things is poverty. Why do millions of people lack decent food, healthcare and housing? That is the question.

The human rights lobby sees poverty as an essentially legal problem. All humans are entitled to food, healthcare, housing and so on. But countries where poverty is common have failed to enshrine these entitlements in law. If they embraced human rights, poverty would be legislated out of existence.
If you are tempted to agree, perhaps you will also like this idea. The government should enrich us by passing a law that entitles all Brits to an annual income of at least one million pounds. The difficulty, of course, is that Britain’s GDP is considerably less than one million pounds per person. It is impossible to provide everyone with this income.

The same goes for the more modest entitlements that human rights enthusiasts claim to be universal. Providing every citizen with decent food, healthcare and housing exceeds the productive capacity of many poor countries. Mauritania’s annual GDP, for example, is only $400 per person. It would be nice if Mauritanians were richer, but declaring that they should be will not help. Entitlements to wealth do not create wealth. On the contrary, they hinder wealth creation.

To see why, consider a less absurd entitlement. Suppose Gordon Brown introduced a minimum household income guarantee of £40,000. This may appear possible, since British GDP is now £52,000 per household. In fact, the policy would soon defeat itself. Only dedicated Protestants would continue to work. Those whose efforts would earn them less than £40,000 would not bother, and nor would those who earn more, given the tax rates that would be required to fund this entitlement. With mass indolence, the average household income would soon fall well below £40,000, whatever the law said we were entitled to.

Poor countries are not exempt from the perverse incentives created by entitlements. In fact, they are more vulnerable to them. Where labour is less productive, even modest entitlements will undermine the incentive to work. In Britain we can guarantee all citizens food, healthcare and housing without destroying economic incentives. But this is because we are already rich. Such entitlements would devastate less developed economies.

The causes of poverty are debated by economists. Yet most agree that property rights are essential for wealth creation. Without them, wealth cannot be accrued. And if people cannot accrue wealth, they have little incentive to create it. Why invest capital and effort in a business if you cannot feel secure in your ownership of it, and of the profits that flow from it? Communism and anarchy create poverty in the same way: by undermining property rights.

Property rights are not universal entitlements. If I own some land then you do not own it. You lack entitlements that I enjoy, such as the profits made by farming that land. Such inequalities are inherent to property rights. Which may explain why human rights activists do not care for them. In an 800-word article on fighting poverty, Ms Arbour did not once mention property rights. Instead, she lamented “unequal access to resources” — something entailed by private ownership of them.
Tens of millions of Chinese have worked their way out of poverty in recent years. It was not achieved by extending human rights law in China. Nor is it an “economic miracle”. It is a predictable consequence of establishing property rights.

Labels: human rights, human wrongs

Foreign medics sentenced to death in Libya trial

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Libyan court has sentenced five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor to death for knowingly infecting hundreds of children with HIV in hospital in Libya. The verdict, reached on Tuesday, has been widely condemned by the international community.

The defendants burst into tears as the judge passed sentence, while the families of the children in the case started to celebrate what they termed "a just verdict", singing and dancing outside the Tripoli court.

Defence lawyer Othman Bizanti told journalists that an appeal would be filed before Libya's Supreme Court within the legal time-limit of 60 days, in the last recourse open to the medics.

The six accused had worked at Al-Fateh hospital in the coastal city of Benghazi, where it was alleged they had infected 426 children with HIV. All six pleaded not guilty, saying that they have been made scapegoats for unhygienic hospitals. Independent scientific analysis of the mutations in the viruses and other evidence supports their argument (see New evidence in Libyan HIV trial and Libya urged to free medical workers in AIDS retrial).

They are expected to have the right of appeal to the Supreme Court for a second time. But that will be the last appeal allowed under Libyan law, defence lawyers said.

Shocking decision

EU Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini called for the decision to be reviewed. "I'm shocked by this decision," he said, speaking outside the European parliament in Brussels, Belgium. "I strongly hope that the Libyan authorities will rethink this decision [which poses] an obstacle to cooperation with the EU."

The medics have been held since 1999, during which time 52 of the 426 infected children have died of AIDS. The nurses and doctor were previously sentenced to face a firing squad in May 2004, but Libya's Supreme Court ordered a retrial following an appeal in December 2005.

Bulgaria's parliamentary speaker urged Libya not to carry out the sentences. "We categorically and decisively reject the confirmation of the death sentences and express our deepest conviction that such verdicts cannot and must not be carried out," Georgy Pirinski said.

The case has strained relations between Libya and the west as the north African state works its way back into the international fold after renouncing in 2003 its efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction.

Scientific evidence

Defence lawyers argued that the children had been infected with HIV before the nurses began working at the hospital.

In November 2006, British medical journal The Lancet blasted the retrial as a miscarriage of justice with "no legal foundation". It cited independent scientific evidence that the infections were caused by bad hygiene at the Benghazi hospital, and reports from human rights watchdogs that confessions had been extracted under torture.

However, families of the infected children are pleased with the trial’s outcome. "I am happy with the verdict, which shows the impartiality of the Libyan justice system," said Abullah Moghrabi, lawyer for the families.

Families of the dead children have demanded US$15 million in compensation for each lost youngster – a claim rejected by the Bulgarian government, which maintains that its nationals are innocent.

Welcome to the new holy land

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

They come to Britain in their hundreds of thousands, the poor of Africa, Asia, South America and eastern Europe, all seeking refuge, asylum or just a better life. And for many, the first port of call is the Catholic Church. Together they form a diverse new flock that is revitalising - and reinventing - the faith

On a brisk sunny Sunday morning in the maze of scrappy streets between Shoreditch and Whitechapel in east London, Holy Mass at St Anne's Catholic Church proceeds as it has for a century and a half: the proclamation of faith and Eucharist charged with mystery and tradition. Only things have changed recently - and dramatically.

The congregation that filled this church a century ago was predominantly Irish, and of late much depleted. Now St Anne's is full to bursting again, but the Mass is said and sung in Portugese - 'Creio em Deus Pai todo poderoso' - and the congregation is entirely from Brazil. Before the rite, under solemn Victorian Gothic arches, worshippers kiss statues of the saints as they would beside the cool, musky stone of Salvador. At the end of a Gospel reading, Father Xavier Osvaldo, from near Sao Paolo, raises the Bible aloft to rapturous applause. Passionate songs of (divine) love are performed with full band and 12-year-old Eduardo on drums; the 'sign of peace' - by tradition a series of handshakes - is an outburst of embracing; a couple stroke each other's hair and kiss before standing to wave their arms to the music. This is not a gathering of low-church 'happy clappers' in Tennessee or Pentecostalists in Harlem - this is the mighty Church of Rome, in Britain, this Christmastide.

Across the country, this and every Sunday, there are scenes not similar - dissimilar, in fact - but all assembled around the same Mass, a new mosaic from across the planet. Tens of thousands of east Europeans fill churches from west Wales to Inverness; worshippers from almost every country in Africa and South America take the host. Indians, Sri Lankans and Filipinos take part, either in English or their own languages - or, indeed, in Latin.

The burgeoning Catholic congregations are a sudden but barely discussed result of mass immigration and constitute a major moment in the complex history of the faith here. By tradition, British Catholicism had become a strange alliance - in counterpoint to, and often in defiance of, the Anglican establishment - between a refusenik aristocracy and intelligensia and the Irish masses, supplemented by a few Italians and Poles. But in the past decade, with European Union enlargement, British Catholicism has become a global village. The new faces of all colours not only revive the church but radically redefine it. Because the new communicants are strangers, mostly poor, often exploited and here illegally, the church becomes their home from home, obliged to rediscover that subversion innate to the faith here - for all its global power - since the crown and establishment split from Rome.

Though some are wary of this obligation, most are galvanised, including the faith's lay advocates. 'There was this nadir,' says Peter Stanford, writer on religion and former editor of the Catholic Herald, 'when people only heard about Catholicism when there was a debate about sexual ethics or Charles Moore converted, with pages about why in the Telegraph. But this church is based on waves of immigration, by definition subversive in Britain, and has now become the church I want to belong to, universal by nature.'

'The Tatler once wrote about how outre it was in high society to be Catholic,' says Catherine Pepinster, editor of the Tablet, 'but over 10 years we have become what we are supposed to be, a church which thinks and now comes from beyond these shores. I'm not suggesting it, but we've reached the point when there's a case for celebrating Mass in Latin as the nearest thing to a common language!'

The migration, posits Francis Davis, co-ordinator of a series of surveys on the new Catholic demography, 'presents British Catholicism with a major challenge. The hierarchy has to face the fact that the whole question of what it means to be a Catholic in Britain has been cracked open - it is a both a variation on old themes and a whole new experience'.

With Mass over, most Brazilians transfer to the parish hall for chicken, rice and beans and to exchange phone numbers. They come from all over, and all walks of life - Rodrigo the chef and Jaqueline, a caterer at the Guardian. There is a sense of togetherness but also one of alienation, heightened by the fact that Jean Charles de Menezes, shot dead by police at Stockwell station, worshipped here. The mention of his name invokes a frisson of non-belonging in this country.
Fr Xavier, who smiles as warmly over lunch as he does when addressing his flock, gives a funny imitation of how English priests are a bit like people on buses, uncomfortable with physical contact - 'we like to do things more freely,' he says - but it is not only a matter of style. 'This is a focal point for Brazilians here and mine is becoming social work too, help with immigration matters, documentation.' Asked why few of his congregation took communion, he explains how 'many come with religion inside them, but in search of money and a life which is not Catholic. Then they get homesick, maybe realise they are not living right; they feel alone, and come for comfort, guidance and to be blessed.'

Every Tuesday evening at St Anthony's church in Upton Park, east London, a remarkable ceremony takes place: a Novena to the saint, by the church's mainly Asian congregation - Indians from Goa and Kerala, Indian Tamils, Sri Lankan Tamils and Sinhalese Sri Lankans, 'among whom there are serious internal complications,' says Fr Denis Hall, the parish priest.

Fr Denis opens the box of parishioners' appeals to the saint that will form the basis of his prayers. They are a litany of tribulations of the migrant poor: 'safety for a journey home', 'problems with a work permit', 'attacks on the home', even 'protection against sorcery and witchcraft', and 'urgent help' for a sister-in-law with terminal cancer. 'Most of you have housing problems,' says Fr Denis from the altar, 'and once again we pray for those having a terrible struggle with housing. For many of you it is about getting work and papers, and we put that before the Lord tonight.'

What follows the Novena is a display of quiet and intense devotion. Crowds gather around the saint's statue, light a thicket of candles, touch and kiss the stigmata on an adjacent statue. One couple proceeds, on their knees, candles in hand, right down the nave to the altar.

The first Polish immigrants arrived in Britain as seamen in the 19th century; then came the partisans and fighter pilots during the Second World War, heroes of the Battle of Britain, and they went to church. Another trickle arrived as refugees from communism, equally devout. Now come the many plumbers, carpenters, builders and bartenders and the less visible, exploited migrant agricultural workers - some believers, others not. The Polish presence in west London is renowned, but Britain's new Polish Sunday extends way beyond the capital. There are so many Poles in northern Scotland that the Bishop of Aberdeen went to Poland to recruit priests. During summer, priests in rural areas where there are hardly any indigenous Catholics must give communion to thousands of migrant workers from Poland and other EU countries. The tax-haven of Jersey is serviced by workers from Poland and Madeira, many of whom want to attend Mass and regularly encounter a variation on the old refrain 'No Polish or Portugese need apply' when trying to find accommodation.

The valleys of south Wales are the heartland of Methodism; country in which, says the Archbishop of Cardiff, Peter Smith, 'you don't make too much fuss about being Catholic'. But on Advent Sunday the spacious chapel in Nazareth House, Cardiff, for years a place of empty seats, is packed for Mass, in Polish. They are mainly young, men with ponytails, girls in jeans or Sunday best; in this case, Bolek the meatpacker from Lublin next to me , and on my other flank Marija from Katowice, a cleaner and barmaid with a peroxide streak and child in national costume.

Polish priests in Britain diverge between those who elect to be part of a local diocese and those who answer to Warsaw, like Fr Edward Sopala in Cardiff. He was trained by the Society of Christ in Poznan, a vocation dedicated to ministry across the Polish diaspora. His work is unrelenting along the byways of Wales and western England. 'When I came here three years ago there were not many Poles; now they are everywhere, over a wide area. Most workers are Polish at Jones Slaughterhouse in Lampeter, which is hard, distressing work. They are in Llanelli, Porthmadog, everywhere. There's a bakery here where most workers are Polish. The old ex-combatants live alone and need visiting, while some young people come for six months but never return. In summer migrant workers come to Herefordshire and my ministry is to them.' Fr Edward is not interested in radical social activism - 'things are better in Poland because the right is in government,' he says. His work is his mission. 'Some are baptised, many not - children of Communist party members who don't know the religious life, or have fallen to temptations here. Many cannot take communion but come to Mass because they feel lost.'

As the 155 bus chugs towards Tooting, south London, on a Saturday afternoon, a crowd assembles outside Southwark Catholic cathedral. A car pulls up and out gets His Eminence Francis Arinze, Cardinal of Nigeria, to inaugurate the Nigerian chaplaincy in Britain. Men dressed in robes decorated with gold crowns and women with exuberantly arranged headgear pose for photographs with the cardinal, taken on mobile phones.

You wonder what those who erected the solemn Gothic vaults would have made of the Mass. The Intercession is sung in Efik, Hausa, Ibo, Urhobo and Yoruba. Catherine, a Nigerian midwife, who is sitting next to me, cannot understand much of it - there are 240 languages spoken in her country. This afternoon the Sanctus is 'Oroforon, Oroforon, Oroforon'. The candlelit procession is accompanied by drumming and lusty singing and followed by a swaying river of humanity in tribal regalia, dancing and joining in with the choir. The joint is rocking - Lagos come to London, while a statue looks on: that of St Frances Xavier Cabrini, patron saint of migrants.

When the cardinal speaks, though, he has a message: 'God did not make us like matches in a box - you are Nigerian, that is your identity. But we are happy for you to be part of your local church,' he understates pointedly. 'You must share and integrate with your local Catholic community.' Herein lies a challenge beneath the blessing of this church-packing wave of new arrivals to Britain: how to create a universal, integrated church when many people prefer to worship their way. After the faith ventured across the world and adapted to local customs wherever it went, that world has arrived on its doorstep.

The new Nigerian chaplain, Fr Albert Ofere, says: 'We are Nigerian but we are not in Nigeria and don't want to be a church within a church. I want our people to go to the different parishes, teach others how we worship back home and understand the way others worship. But they find it dull, so what we will do is hold monthly Nigerian Mass, at which I can nourish them and encourage them to go back to their parishes.'

But in some places the tapestry is already woven. 'If any of you standing at the back would like to sit in the sanctuary, feel free to do so,' said Fr Michael Scanlon to his congregation at St Peter's, Woolwich, south London, last Sunday - something he certainly did not say when he arrived 12 years ago with unemployment at 65 per cent and attendance at Mass sparse. Today even the vestibule is packed, as is the upstairs gallery. 'At Easter and Christmas we have to take communion into the street,' says Fr Michael.

St Peter's counts about 75 nationalities, mostly from across Africa but also South America, Asia and Europe, among its congregation. On Advent Sunday there was an extended Mass featuring music and later food from 34 of them. This is where Monya the Rastafarian from Zimbabwe, with his locks and tri-coloured beads, takes communion along with the Filipino ladies who work on the ticket counter at Tower Bridge and in local hospitals. This church is where Cliff Pinto from Uganda met Eva Krejcarova from the Czech Republic. 'We were married here, and soon our child will be baptised here,' says Pinto, patting Eva's stomach. This is where the local Ghanaian community does its business in the church hall, while Hannah Mulvihill, who cleaned the local library at 6am every morning for 25 years, reflects, in her Irish accent: 'It was a full church but then the Irish died or went back to Ireland and it emptied. Then they all started coming. At first it was a bit... er, well, I'm not very good at expressing myself... But now it's lovely, having the church full again and these people from all over.'
I take my place between an electrician from Cote D'Ivoire and a nurse from Manila. 'Thank you for coming to this country,' says Fr Michael from the altar, 'where you are bringing our faith to life.' Then come these entrancing moments during Mass when the congregation - some struggling with the English language they are supposed to have in common - recites another second tongue they learned way back: 'Agnus Dei, Qui Tollis Peccata Mundi, Dona Nobis Pacem ...'

Work proceeds on measuring the exact demographics of Britain's transformed church, by the Von Hugel Institute, a Catholic think-tank based at Cambridge University. One report commissioned by the diocese of Westminster is due out next month with another by the Archbishop of Birmingham to follow. A third report on migrants was for the East of England Development Agency, into which the church enters because East Anglia 'has become the largest centre for seasonal migration of people from the EU accession countries,' says the project co-ordinator, Francis Davis.

In the two big cities, however, Davis reaches the startling conclusion that 'despite the visibility of Mass-goers from the four main Catholic EU accession countries, especially Poland, there are probably more from South America, Africa and Asia than from eastern Europe'. Moreover, he adds, 'the Poles are of course legally in this country whereas in some churches large proportions of communicants - 85 per cent in one we found - are here irregularly. What does it mean to be priest to a congregation that is mostly illegal?' This, insists Davis, 'is a pastoral issue as well as an international political one. The church needs to respond to both, which entails protecting irregular migrants from the fact that in some places the police could probably reach their monthly target by raiding a single church.'
Davis's surveys encounter migrant communities in which 'some 30 per cent go to Mass at least weekly and sometimes three times a week'. Even among those who do not go, 'the church is the only institution in this country they trust as a point of support, practical help and education. Religion is the first port of call for poor migrants'. He estimates that for every Mass-goer in the Westminster diocese at least twice that number look to the church as their only ally. Outside London there are those 'exploited on farms - Latin Americans, Indians, Africans, Poles and others'. Davis then confides: 'I'm not actually sure I could be a Catholic in Poland or Argentina but it's different in Britain because we belong on the outside.'

The politics of Catholicism in Britain has a fascinating and, to secular eyes, ambiguous history, condemned by circumstance to radicalism, whether its upper strata like it or not. It can seem strange to secular people that an institution as powerful as the Vatican (with values deemed conservative in the secular world) should be represented in this country not only by romantic and crushed Jacobite rebellions but by underground Masses, by Guy Fawkes, social agitation during the industrial revolution, the experience of persecution by Anglican law and anti-popery riots, by Irish republicans and Irish trade unionists. The notion of political radicalism driven by doctrinal orthodoxy sits uneasily in a secular account of social conflict. And with Benedict XVI as Pontiff - regarded by the secular world as an ultra-conservative - it could seem all the stranger that this innate radicalism of Catholicism should be reignited here.

On a blustery Thursday evening in Bethnal Green, east London, the capacious York Hall is full for what feels like a 1980s left-wing political rally, with rhetoric about fair wages, unionisation, struggle in the workplace and 'sending the fascists back into the gutt er where they belong'. Except this is a 10th anniversary assembly of the East London Citizens' Organisation (Telco), inspired by American faith-based civic action, with a hydra-headed leadership spearheaded by a Quaker but driven by the involvement of Catholics. On the agenda are a Living Wage Campaign and - the meeting's climax - launching a Strangers Into Citizens' drive, agitating to regularise every illegal immigrant willing to work and abide by the law. Chairing the event is Monsignor John Armitage, whose forebears arrived in the East End because of the Irish potato famine. He is the nearest Britain gets to a red priest, despite his reputation for doctrinal orthodoxy.

Over a snack, he says: 'We insist that all human beings are equal before God and that every human being has the right to a fulfilled life. On that basis I'm happy to more than dabble in politics, without hoisting my flag to any party political pole, not that there is one I'd want to these days. The migrants are human beings living in a no man's land, exploited, and that's why we're here tonight'. He invokes Cardinal Manning taking up the mainly Irish dockers' cause in the great London dock strike of 1889. The evening's proceedings are punctuated by schoolchildren acting as past agitators, including Eleanor Marx and Cardinal Manning - the venerable, very white Cardinal played tonight, in red robes, by a schoolboy who happens, perhaps by design, to be black.

One of those helping organise the occasion is a young Lithuanian, Linas Danielus, who, through Telco and his church, has been mobilising his compatriots and others in the notoriously underpaid hotel trade, taking on and reaching the brink of a deal with the Hilton Hotel empire. There is a world between heiress Paris Hilton and those who clean the lavatories and change soiled sheets in the rooms in her father's chain. And that is the world in which Danielus - a political science graduate who worked as a porter when he arrived here 10 months ago - thinks the church should work. 'I want to be like the liberation activists in Central America,' he says. 'I'm jealous of them, and want to be like them in my parish.'

He continues: 'I left a country which exchanged communism for the worship of money and capitalism gone wild, destroying social relations with privatisation, deregulation and drugs. When you talk to our church about social justice, they turn round and say: "what are you, some kind of communist?" But our church for Lithuanians in London is independent, and the starting point for our work for social justice. Church cannot only be about praying to God; praying is not going to get decent living conditions.' Armitage takes the stage, promising to 'turn the light on the slavery in our midst ... to pursue justice for our deserving neighbours'.

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor's tenure as Primate of the Catholic Church in England and Wales has emphasised the integration of the faith into British society. But last May Day he staged an extraordinary Migrant Mass at Westminster Cathedral after which he argued the case for the regularisation of undocumented migrants. One of the organisers was Austin Ivereigh, then the cardinal's communications director, who now drives Telco's Strangers Into Citizens' campaign.
'There are echoes of the late Victorian period,' he says, 'in a moment of globalisation, movement of capital, migration and the same exploitation and disparity of wealth. And this falls into the history of the British Catholic radical experience. But it's no longer a Catholic mission to the world, it's a global mission to a materialist society in which to go to Mass is a counter-cultural act.' When challenged on how an institution perceived to be as doctrinally conservative as the Catholic Church can argue for radical political change (and this before the grotesque notion of a funeral Mass for mass-murderer Augusto Pinochet), Ivereigh replies: 'We preach the dignity and sanctity of human life: whether that relates to abortion, the death penalty or the injustices of a secular system. We preach a universal good, while the market preaches only self-fulfilment.'

Such sentiment is echoed in cogent high places. Whereas Murphy-O'Connor has been known for a diplomatic approach to the establishment, the figure mentioned in Catholic circles as a probable sucessor uses more strident language. Next year, Murphy-O'Connor turns 75, the age at which he is obliged to offer the Pope his resignation; the cardinal is expected to remain for two more years, and the frontrunner to succeed him is Archbishop Peter Smith of Cardiff, whose previous post as Bishop of East Anglia put him in the front line ministering to migrants.

'It's a new springtime for us,' says Smith, sitting on the sofa of his study, and lighting a cigarette. 'We are seeing the universality of our church before our eyes; it's become like the United Nations, even around here in Wales. But when migrants arrive to earn a crust, they are dislocated and need to support each other with their church as the focus. Gradually we need to integrate them into the parishes, which means locating them, supporting them, helping them with registration. But the real priority is to get their children into our schools and educate them' - the Catholic bedrock that leads the Archbishop to his main point. He is genial and hospitable but the lexicon of the man likely to lead the new tapestry of British Catholicism through its next phase is one of steel, echoing that of Pope Benedict and his predecessor, John Paul II: 'This is now a battlefield,' he says plainly, 'in a materialist society where many young people have no moral values at all, a society which does not allow a child to remain a child and which transmits rubbish whenever I turn on the TV. We face an aggressive secularism, imposing its values on people while accusing us of trying to impose ours. We are not imposing anything, we are proposing a way of life that challenges secular materialism and leads to physical, emotional and cultural as well as spiritual well-being, a just life for the common good.'
British society at large notices Catholicism when a discourse arises over sexuality, over the calamitous impact of a contraception ban during the Aids pandemic and population explosion, scandals involving the clergy and papal elections. But over a month of immersion with Catholics and their priests, our conversations have inevitably spread to other matters that concern Catholics in a secular world. Like society's obsession with celebrity; like some vacuous political speech reported in the paper that morning; like the Trident missile, and of course the carnage wreaked by Bush and Blair's war in Iraq. On these issues and more, most speak more vehemently than any voice in the so-called political opposition, such as it exists any more. And you develop a sense that, in a country where dissent has been neutered by amoral, postmodern politics and consensual endorsement of greed and vainglory by all political parties, these people - despite what is seen as their doctrinal orthodoxy - have become, with their moral core, for their own reasons and by secular default, the real opposition.

If the Good Book is true, and the driving character of its New Testament did indeed come again, looking for signs that his word was alive in this country, I would recommend a visit to the traditional capital of British Catholicism, Liverpool. Not that the original reasons for that title are really there any more: many of the original Irish parish churches that made Merseyside the Naples of the North have closed. Even the lovely 19th- century Polish church has, in the spirit of my mother's native city nowadays, been converted into a snazzy bistro. But other things are happening. Attendance at the glorious modern lantern of a cathedral has doubled due to Filipino and Indian migration. Then there is the singular flock of Fr Peter Morgan.

Liverpool, along with Croydon, is where people register for political asylum in Britain. An intimate Mass on Thursday morning in a little room at the back of Fr Peter's church of Our Lady of Lourdes and St Bernard in rundown Toxteth is also attended by people the priest has invited to stay in his home. These include Martin, a man with a haunted expression who is seeking asylum after torture in Congo; and the wife and child of another torture victim recently deported to Togo (where he was promptly rearrested). This brief, private ceremony does, somehow and perhaps absurdly, recall days when Fr Peter would have been burned at the stake for performing it. His day with the outcast and untouchable, the asylum seekers, has only just begun.

Adjacent to Fr Peter's other parish, St Anne's, Edge Hill, is a large church property which he has given over for use by the Merseyside Asylum Link. It is populated by what must be the most traumatised collective memory within any building in Britain: those in flight and in terror of returning whence they came. And although he has regular communicants, native to the city, it is these people who have become Fr Peter's flock, which he, a clutch of lawyers and staff at St Anne's fight to protect from the nightmares awaiting them back home. Others are referred to Fr Peter as a result of his chaplaincy to Liverpool Women's Hospital and by a women's centre, Blackburne House.
They are people like the woman for whom a Scouse taxi driver called Neil, parking his cab to attend that little Mass, had requested special prayers: Charlie Happi Koameko, one of several mass rape victims from Africa to whom Fr Peter has been summoned. Ms Koameko was ordered to become the 18th wife of a tribal chief in Cameroon and refused. Her punishment was 17 months of incarceration, serial mass rape, whipping and cutting with chilli rubbed into the wounds. She arrived in Liverpool traumatised and pregnant by one of her rapists, only coming round when one of Fr Peter's communicants placed a French Bible beside her hospital bed.

'As she recovered and gave birth,' says Fr Peter, 'she kept her faith and was regularly at Mass. But her application for asylum was rejected and Ms Koameko was taken to Yarlswood detention centre in Berkshire for deportation last week. At the last minute a solicitor, Pete Simm, located an arrest warrant awaiting Ms Koameko on her return. New evidence obliges the Home Office to rule again, but, an hour before her flight, Ms Koameko knew nothing about this development until Fr Peter reached her at the airport by phone. On Thursday she was granted bail and returned to limbo in Toxteth. Fr Peter says: 'When four men and two women came to detain her, they watched as Charlie removed her nightgown and dressed. After that degradation, for 20 hours before her planned deportation flight, her baby had neither milk nor food. It is people like that mother and child who have become my calling.'

'Charlie was my best student,' says Fr Eamon Doyle, a Christian Brother and retired teacher from Dublin, who tutors those sheltered in English. 'Our inclination is to believe them, while the government's is the opposite,' he says. 'Not that we're so naive. I was woken at 12.30 one night and asked to help because one of my people had been arrested driving without a licence or insurance. "No", I said.'

His pupils gather round him and Fr Peter, their lives in the balance. Ali was an opposition activist in Iran, recently baptised into Fr Peter's church, terrified to return. Rebwar Zabari is also from Iran, partially paralysed after torture. Warda Dared lives in Fr Peter's house: an Iraqi Christian who fled after her husband was incarcerated by Saddam Hussein. She won her appeal to stay but faces a Home Office appeal against that victory, insisting that now her country has been 'liberated' it is safe to return.

'In 2003,' says Ewan Roberts, who runs the centre, 'there were 100,000 asylum applications, plus some 30,000 dependants, with 50 per cent granted status. Now there are 30,000 applications, plus some 6,000 dependants, with only 25 per cent granted leave to remain. Has the world really become twice as safe for these people?'

'It's been heartbreaking,' says Fr Peter, 'but an extraordinary experience which has made me a more committed person than I was five years ago. There is this shattering certainty: where else are we to find Jesus if not with the outcast and oppressed? He was, after all, the first asylum seeker. It began to feel different when I opened my home to share it, in close proximity with these people, every day.'

Fr Peter's initial mentor in Liverpool was a man ordained into the Catholic Passionist congregation, better known than any community leader in Toxteth and held in awe even by the rioters of 1981, with whom he entreated while Princes Avenue burned. Fr Austin Smith, from this city and assigned by Rome to work here in 1968, is elderly now and, surrounded by books on Wittgenstein and Marxism, gathers his thoughts carefully with the help of a strong cigar. What he says puts all I have heard in the context of the institution of the church, with its awesome history and formidable durability, hierarchy and power. And comes so much more cogently from an ordained Catholic than it would from an aetheist or agnostic.

'Oh, you can be as radical as you want, so long as it's all under control.' Under whose control, the Catholic or secular hierarchy? 'Well, both really. Yes, secular people can pat Fr Peter on the head, say he's wonderful then send those poor people back! But I was thinking mainly of the church. They can praise what Fr Peter does, so long as it doesn't become too central, doesn't challenge too far, or get out of control. With the likes of asylum seekers, we're asking probing questions about poverty and justice. Same with Iraq and nuclear weapons - you can say it, but don't make it too central. It was the same with St Francis of Assisi - if it sounds like trouble, incorporate it,' he says.
'I've always thought of Catholicism as a movement. But it is also an institution, which still has this terrible fear of facing up to the signs of the times and cannot face that uneasiness, that undercurrent. It addresses these issues in theological terms but has never really taken in the discomfort which is the essence of Christianity as a movement.'

Reflecting on four decades in Toxteth, and recalling a recent exchange, Fr Austin says: 'You know, the inner city has changed my idea of God. I saw some boys I knew, smoking drugs, crack I think, behind Kwik Save . I said to them: "Lads, why don't you just cut it out!"

'"What do you mean?" they replied.

'"Look," I said, "let's just change this place, shall we?"'

Labels: Africa, Asia, asylum, better life, eastern Europe, refuge, South America

The A-Z of Atheism

Sunday, December 17, 2006

Heaven A word found in the lyrics of Cole Porter; a nightclub in Villiers Street, London WC2 (above); a word that designates a state of bliss such as might be found in the arms of a lover; a place on earth, according to Belinda Carlisle.

A

Agnostic Those who neither affirm nor deny the existence of a creator, a creative cause or an unseen world, believing them either unknown or unknowable. See also: Wanting all the options

Anti-theist An atheist in a rage.

B

Brights An American initiative that attempts to rebrand atheists by calling them "Brights" ("A Bright is a person who has a naturalistic worldview, free of supernatural and mystical elements... "), much the same way as the chinese gooseberry was rebranded as a "kiwi fruit". However, unlike kiwi fruit, "Bright" has yet to take on universally. Find out more at www.the-brights.net. See also: Spot an atheist, how to

C

Cathedrals Glorious cultural monuments; excellent acoustic chambers; unreliable places of refuge (viz Thomas à Becket); hospitable homes, especially during harvest festival, to mice and bats.

Conversions, spurious deathbed Stories are often circulated of atheists recanting their views before death, but these are just as often disputed. Charles Darwin (below) for example, was alleged by the Christian evangelist Lady Hope to have renounced his theories of evolution and called for Jesus; his daughter Henrietta, who was with him at the time, strongly denied this. "I believe he never even saw Lady Hope," she wrote in 1922.

D

Darwin Day 12 February, Charles Darwin's birthday. Currently celebrated with a lecture; some humanist campaigners call for it to be a public holiday.

De-baptism "After due deliberation, I,(insert name), having been subjected to the rite of Christian baptism in infancy before reaching an age of consent, hereby publicly revoke the implications of said rite and the church that carried it out. I reject its creeds and all other such superstition - in particular, the perfidious belief that any baby needs to be cleansed by baptism of alleged original sin, and the evil power of supposed demons. I wish to be excluded henceforth from enhanced claims of church-membership numbers based on past baptismal statistics used, for example, for the purpose of securing legislative privilege." This certificate of de-baptism can be downloaded free from the website of The National Secular Society (www.secularism.co.uk). It can be seen framed in the porch, loo, lean-to etc of many godless homes.Dedication The dedication of some atheists inspires awe. Free-thinking philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome in 1600; shortly before the faggots were lit he was offered a crucifix to kiss, but refused.

E

Epicurus As well as giving his name to a range of tinned condiments, the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270BC) was arguably one of the first great atheist thinkers. Here is his famous paradox of evil:

"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able, and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither willing, nor able? Then why call him God?"

F

Fundamentalism Adherence to strictly orthodox religions or doctrines. Richard Dawkins's adherence to the doctrine of evolution is not fundamentalist, because, he says: "I know what it would take to change my mind, and I would gladly do so if the evidence were forthcoming." (The God Delusion, 2006)

G

'God Is Not Great' The title of a forthcoming book by Christopher Hitchens.

Godless institution of Gower Street, the Slang term for University College London, founded in 1826 as a secular alternative to the then strictly religious universities of Oxford and Cambridge. See also: Surprising ways to affirm one's lack of faith, part one

H

Humanism "The thinking person's unthinking creed" - John Gray. Its principles, which are constantly evolving rather than fixed for all time, were refreshed at the Amsterdam Declaration 2002. Key points include:

Humanists have a duty of care to all of humanity, including future generations.
Humanism advocates the application of the methods of science and free inquiry to the roblems of human welfare.
Humanism insists that personal liberty be combined with social responsibility; it recognises our dependence on and responsibility for the natural world.
Humanism values artistic creativity and imagination. For the full text see: www.humanism.co.uk See also: Prose, workaday

Hymns Even atheists like a good hymn. Grudgingly, though. Interviewed by Jonathan Miller for his television series A Brief History of Disbelief, the journalist Polly Toynbee declared, "I loved the hymns we sang at school," with a warm fuzzy smile. Then she added: "Though their content was absurd, of course."

I

Infidel In Washington, one who does not believe in the Christian religion; in Afghanistan, one who does.

J

Jesus Christ "I feel about Jesus Christ much the same way as I feel about JB Priestley" - William Donaldson, author of Brewer's Rogues Villains and Eccentrics.

K

Katrina, Hurricane The Reverend Pat Robertson was reported as having blamed the hurricane on Ellen DeGeneres, a lesbian comedian who lived in New Orleans and had incited God's wrath by being chosen to host the Emmy awards. The story is now denied by Robertson, but he is on the record as saying, of an earlier Gay Pride march in Orlando, Florida: "I would warn Orlando that you're right in the way of some serious hurricanes and I don't think I'd be waving those flags in God's face if I were you."

Kindness An evolutionary imperative, according to Richard Dawkins, who cites four Darwinian reasons for individuals to be generous or "moral" towards each other: genetic kinship, reciprocation, and two types of ostentatious altruism. It is also a key part of the humanist outlook, which emphasises the innate goodness of humanity over its innate capacity for evil.

L

Language Atheism sometimes requires language to be remade. Examples include:

Vicar - celebrant/ officiant
Commandments - humanist actions
Act of God - natural disaster
Christening - baby naming
God parents - guide parents

Concomitant with this is the secular reclamation of words with strong Biblical resonances, eg charity.

Marriage ceremonies, humanist Legally binding in Scotland but not yet in England and Wales, where couples usually combine a visit to a Registry Office with a separate humanist ceremony. Ceremonies are tailored specifically to each couple, and officiated at by a humanist celebrant (fees vary but typically do not exceed £350). Some couples choose to stand facing their guests; some, if they have children, involve them in the ceremony; some perform ancient Celtic rites such as hand-binding, etc etc.

N

Nation under God, One The terms of a treaty with Tripoli, drafted under George Washington and signed by John Adams in 1797, indicate America was not always such: "... the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion..." See also: Unamerican

Naturalist Alternative term for "atheist" used by those who object to being defined by what they don't believe in. As the character Grace remarks in AC Grayling and Mick Gordon's play On Religion: "You don't call someone "a-goblin" or "a-fairy" if they don't believe in goblins or fairies, do you?" Indeed. But "naturalist" may not have been the best word to pick, being easily confused with the movement for outdoor nudity.

O

Oaths If the oath takes my God in vain it is punishable; if the oath takes your God in vain it is witty. It's a minefield.Omigod Expression of alarm or excitement, popular in the post-theist world. What it once meant is anyone's guess.

P

Pascal's Wager The French Mathematician Blaise Pascal applied decision theory to belief in God. If you believed and were wrong you got nothing; if you believed and were right you got eternal salvation. If you didn't believe and were right you got nothing; if you didn't believe and were wrong you got a fast train to hell. A no-brainer! In his words: "God is, or He is not. But to which side shall we incline? Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is." - Pascal's Pensées.Atheists are not the only people to point out that this is all a bit too William Hill to be proper theology. Atheists are probably the only people to point out, though, that if you don't believe you get a benefit he hasn't accounted for - a life lived more fully and more freely.

Prose, workaday Humanist texts tend to be matter-of-fact, clear, effortfully inoffensive ("mankind" is off-limits), lucid, unadorned by allegory and utterly characterless. The King James Bible they ain't.

Q

Quest, Camp Unlike most American summer camps, which offer religious instruction, Camp Quest encourages children to think sceptically.

R

Reliquary "A receptacle for such sacred objects as pieces of the true cross, short-ribs of saints, the ears of Balaam's ass, the lung of the cock that called Peter to repentance, and so forth. Reliquaries are commonly of metal, and provided with a lock to prevent the contents coming out and performing miracles at unseasonable times" - Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911.

S

Spot an atheist, how to You might want to go up and embrace him or her as a fellow non-believer, or you might want to cross the road. Either way, a piece of wearable kit would be useful. Suggestions for what atheists should wear include:

A badge of the double helix.
A knowing smile.
An "Atheist and Proud" T-shirt from The Secular Society, £14.99.
A "Bright" lapel pin. "A lapel pin is a great conversation starter," runs the rubric on the Brights' website. "You'll have many opportunities to respond to the curious persons who notice it. You can divulge/ discuss your naturalistic worldview in amiable and informative ways." (Don't you love that "amiable"?)

Surprising ways to affirm your lack of faith, part one Utilitarian philosopher and UCL leading-light Jeremy Bentham dedicated his mortal remains to his colleagues, whom he wanted to dissect him in the name of science. His final resting place was not a grave but a wooden display case or "auto-icon" in the lobby of UCL, where he remains to this day.

Surprising ways to affirm your lack of faith, part two While an Oxford undergraduate, Percy Bysshe Shelley (right) wrote a series of letters in which, in order to try to undermine the faith of the recipient, he masqueraded as a vicar. The letters, found in a trunk of papers in 2005, stated "Christ never existed... the fall of man, the whole fabric indeed of superstition which it supports can no longer obtain the credit of philosophers," and were signed "the Reverend Percy Bysshe Shelley." He was, admittedly, only 18 at the time.

T

Treats at Christmas, top atheist While friends and family are at Evensong or carol service, atheists will be found applauding:

What Would Judas Do? Written and performed by Stewart Lee (of Jerry Springer: The Opera fame) at the Bush Theatre, London, 9 January to 3 February (tel: 020 7610 4224 ).
On Religion, a play by sceptics AC Grayling and Mick Gordon based on interviews with Richard Dawkins, Rowan Williams and others at Soho Theatre, London, to 6 January (tel: 0870 429 6883; www.sohotheatre.com).

Teapot, celestial Bertrand Russell asked why atheists had to disprove Christianity, saying it was like trying to disprove a celestial teapot in orbit round the earth that was smaller than a telescope could see.

Twenty-six: nil The number of Anglican Bishops in the House of Lords compared with the number of humanist representatives.

Transcendence Atheists experience it too, you know, in the mundane, or in opera houses, theatres, museums, libraries, concert halls, hospitals, galleries and, admittedly sometimes, shops.

Unamerican "I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots," George Bush Snr was cited as saying in 1988
(Free Enquiry magazine).

V

Virginity A state of innocence; a state in which a woman is unlikely to become pregnant. Not, in the secular world, a condition that is unduly fetishised.

W

Warm signals "Ever since it took office in 1997 Tony Blair's government has been sending warm signals to religious groups, inviting them to consult with ministers, influence new legislation and run state schools in return for a paltry financial contribution" - Joan Smith, 22 November 2006. An Ipsos Mori poll published on 24 November showed that, of a sample of 975 nationally representative respondents, 42 per cent think the government "pays too much attention to religious groups and leaders."

Wanting all the options See: Agnostics

X

Xtrme unction A rarely seen text-message abbreviation.

Y

Young, right to exercise choice of the There is no such thing as a Muslim, Christian or atheist child.

Z

Zarathustra Nietzsche's prophet, who spake the words "God is dead". But was He ever living?

Labels: Atheism

Was Nixon Worse?

Saturday, December 16, 2006

Is George W. Bush the worst president in U.S. history? Or is it Richard Nixon? That question is being debated by historians ranging from Eric Foner and David Greenberg in the Washington Post to Sean Wilentz in Rolling Stone. Usually Bush is named worst because, although Nixon abused the power of the presidency, he also did some good things, like opening relations with China and approving the Environmental Protection Agency. Bush in contrast not only started the Iraq war; he also approved the use of torture; he claimed the right not to follow laws he disagrees with; and he abolished fundamental rights for the accused, including trial by jury.

There is, however, one extremely simple measure of who was worse, summed up in the question that antiwar demonstrators asked LBJ back in the 1960s: How many kids did you kill today? We can compare the number of casualties in wars that are unjust and disastrous. If we compare the death toll in Vietnam under Nixon with the death toll in Iraq under Bush, it appears that Nixon was worse. American deaths in war are counted carefully. For Nixon’s presidency, 1969-1974, the official Vietnam war total is 21,041. American deaths in Iraq (as of Dec. 10) total 2,932. By this measure, Nixon was far worse.

Of course the deaths of Vietnamese and Iraqis should also be counted. The U.S. is not counting Iraqi casualties, but the best estimate of Iraqi deaths (as of July 2006) is 650,000. That’s the figure Johns Hopkins demographers reported in The Lancet in October, using the most advanced survey research and statistical techniques.

Bush might defend himself by arguing that, according to The Lancet study, the majority of the 650,000 Iraqi deaths were not caused by the U.S. He’d be right about that—but Iraqis wouldn’t be engaged in a civil war now if Bush had not invaded in 2003.

For Vietnamese deaths, Robert McNamara, secretary of defense under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, gives the total for the war as more than 3 million. He got that figure from the Vietnamese. Nixon took office in January 1969 at what turned out to be approximately the midpoint of the American war. If half of the total casualties in Vietnam occurred after Nixon took office, the toll under Nixon was about 1.5 million Vietnamese deaths.

One and a half million is a lot more than 650,000. On the basis of this figure, Nixon was a lot worse. However, the figure of 3 million for Vietnam has been challenged. The Vietnamese have not made their sources or records available to independent researchers. American demographers using the most advanced survey research and statistical methods published their conclusions in Population and Development Review. They did a survey in 1991 of 921 Vietnamese, with interviews conducted by trained Vietnamese interviewers,. (That may seem like a small number for a country of 80 million people, but American political surveys are based on 1,200 interviews for a country of 300 million people.) This Vietnam survey concluded that the total number of deaths in the American war is closer to 1 million.

If Nixon was responsible for half of those, that means Bush’s 650,000 deaths is worse. But the Nixon death toll wasn’t limited to Vietnam. He ordered the bombing and invasion of Cambodia, and also a secret war in Laos. Cambodian civilian deaths from the B-52 bombing probably total 100,000 to 150,000, and Cambodian wartime deaths from all causes in the Nixon years (1970-75—pre-genocide) probably total 300,000 to 500,000, according to Ben Kiernan of the Yale Cambodian Genocide Program. If we take the lower figure, that brings Nixon’s total to 800,000, which makes him worse than Bush. And that does not include Laos, where the U.S. fought a secret war for many years.

Nixon would object that he didn’t start the war in Vietnam, and he’d be right about that. But he ran for president in 1968 promising that he had a secret plan to end the war. The Paris Peace Talks had already started when he took office. And yet the war continued for four more years, during which half a million Vietnamese died—along with 21,000 Americans. Nixon might also object that the Vietnamese dead include victims of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. He’d be right about that too. But without the Americans, there never would have been a Vietnam War. There never would have been a South Vietnam.

This comparison of war casualties in Vietnam and Iraq has one flaw: The war in Iraq is not over. Bush says he has no intention of ending it promptly. He wants U.S. forces to remain until “the terrorists” are “defeated.”

It took eight years to kill a million Vietnamese, while it’s taken only three years for 650,000 people to be killed in Iraq. And the rate there has been accelerating: In 2004 the total was only 100,000. At that rate—assuming a total now of somewhat more than 650,000— the death toll for Iraqis could top the death toll for Vietnamese by the end of next year. The Iraqi death toll could top the figure for all of Southeast Asia by the time Bush leaves office in January 2009.

Then there will be no more debate. Then historians will agree that, even under this most elemental measure, Bush is the worst president in U.S. history.

Labels: George W. Bush .Nixon, president

Do Arabs Speak the Same Language?

The most important underreported development in the Arab world is the increasing ability of Arabs to talk with one another. They did not used to be able to. Arabs in Casablanca speak a language in the Arabic family that is all but unintelligible to Arabs in Cairo, whose language is not understood by Arabs in Baghdad, and so forth.

Outsiders are blinded to these differences by our habit of calling all of these diverse languages Arabic. If is as though we called all romance languages Frankish and therefore expected a Sicilian to be able to enter into easy conversation with a Parisian. In reality, the two can communicate if one has learned the language of the other, or if both know a second language. Throughout most of European history, that common language was most likely to have been Latin.

Arabs were long in the same situation. The highly educated did know a second language, Classical Arabic. It was used, like Latin among Christians and Hebrew among Jews, for learned essays, for legal documents, and for correspondence among the intelligentsia. Scholars used these languages to converse with one another, but nobody scolded a child or bought groceries in Classical Arabic.

Nineteenth century intellectuals in the vanguard of Arab nationalism faced one of the standard dilemmas of ethnic groups under foreign rule. There was little literature in any of the sundry Arabic vernaculars. These languages varied over short distances and lacked vocabulary to deal with complex ideas. Only the highly educated could speak Classical Arabic, although even the illiterate heard it in the recitation of the Koran and prayers.

European nations tended to deal with this problem by making a local vernacular into a complex literary language. In England the language of greater London had already begun to develop into a literary language by the time of Chaucer, and steadily increased its dominance thereafter, extinguishing regional non-Germanic languages (such as Cornish) and regional Germanic vernaculars (such as Yorkshire) in the process. The particular Germanic vernacular spoken by Luther and, crucially, the one into which he translated the Bible, effectively eliminated the other vernaculars once spoken in the Germanies. Eighteenth century Czech nationalists successfully undertook a self-conscious program of developing their local Slavic vernacular into a standard national literary language. The process varied with each people – developments in cultural nations are always unique – but every European nation has a national language that developed out of a vernacular that was once spoken but not written. None uses Latin, Classical Greek, or Old Church Slavonic as a national language.

The development of Modern Standard Arabic has some similarity to the path taken by the Greeks. Two centuries ago, Greek speakers inhabited the Balkan Peninsula, the Islands, and much of the western and Black Sea coasts of Anatolia. All Greeks spoke Greek in the sense that all Arabs speak Arabic, but the language of the Pontic Greeks of the Black Sea Coast was not intelligible to the people of the large Greek city and region of Smyrna (Turkish Izmir,) whose language was not understood by the villagers in the Peloponnese, and so on across the map. An early Greek nationalist, Alexander Korais, attempted to unify the Greeks linguistically by creating a modern language based closely on Classical Greek. It was called Katharevousa (Καθαρε?ουσα,) which translates as clean one; one of Korais’ goals was to clean the Greek tongue by purging all of the vocabulary taken from Latin, Turkish and other foreign tongues. (Purifying the language of foreign words is a near-universal feature of national language reform.) Like the myriad national language reformers who followed him, Korais also simplified the classical grammar and created new words to describe modern phenomena unknown to Demosthenes.

Government documents were published in Katharevousa until 1976, when the final capitulation was made to Modern Greek. This language developed more or less on the model of modern French, a language based on the early modern regional vernacular of the Isle de France, and imposed on speakers of the other regional vernaculars of France. Modern Greek, Dhimotiki, is rooted in the nineteenth century vernacular of the Peloponnese, heavily influenced by the linguistic reforms of Katharevousa. It evolved in nineteenth and early twentieth century Athens as what had been an Ottoman backwater rapidly grew into the capital and largest city of the modern Greek State. Nineteenth century Arab nationalists began a process of modifying Classical Arabic for use in modern newspapers and other writing. The process was intensified in the 1920’s and 30’s by national language academies modeled roughly on the Académie française. Compared with Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic (also known as Modern Classical Arabic and, in Arabic, as fusha) makes less use of poetic structure, has discarded some Classical grammar, created new grammatical forms, and includes a greatly expanded vocabulary. Some of these new words are loans from other languages, others are carefully reworked forms of old usages - to take one particularly charming example, the word for “train,” is qitar, the old word for “camel caravan.” The effect has been to create a new form of Arabic that “can no longer be regarded as identical with” the Classical language.

This creates an ideological problem for some. No European speaks a language derived from Biblical Hebrew, and only the Greeks speak a language descended from New Testament Greek. Latin, the language of the Church, never had the sacred status that Arabic has. For these reasons, European demand for translations of the Bible into the vernacular was insatiable, even in the period when owning one was considered to be legal evidence of heresy, while Arabs have always preferred to have the Quran in Classical Arabic. Indeed a standard proof of the divine origin of the Quran cited by the pious is that the beauty of the language of the text proves that it cannot have been written by a mere human. The corollary to this, that Classical Arabic is a perfect language, led some of the creators of Modern Standard Arabic to maintain that they were not altering the language, but, rather, restoring it to the Classical purity it had before it was corrupted by use. Due to the extreme prestige that the Arabic language has in Arab culture, many Arabs who use Modern Standard Arabic prefer to call it Classical Arabic, while others minimize the differences among the regional varieties of Arabic, asserting that all Arabs speak Arabic. Modern Standard Arabic is also tainted by its association with the secular pan-Arab nationalism of the early twentieth century in the eyes of both the religious who identify as members of the Muslim ummah and of those secularists who prefer to identify themselves as members of an Egyptian, Syrian or other territorially-defined nation, rather than with an encompassing Arab nation.

The pretense that Classical and Modern Standard Arabic are one and the same is enhanced by the use of the term “literary Arabic” to refer to both Classical and Modern Standard Arabic. Wikipedia, where almost all articles on national cultures are the work of ardent nationalists, and attempts to insert objectivity meet with aggressive and immediate reversion to the nationalist version of history, states that “Literary Arabic refers both to the language of present-day media across North Africa and the Middle East and to the language of the Qur’an.”

The important thing to know about Modern Standard Arabic (fusha), however, is not that is as distinct from Classical Arabic as Modern Hebrew is from Biblical Hebrew, but that it is fast becoming a powerful force for Arab cultural unity. While it has been the language of instruction in schools across the Arab world for upwards of a century, this has become a far more significant fact as more children have come to attend school. An even more recent development is that whereas educated middle-aged people could write a letter in Modern Standard Arabic upon graduation from high school, they did not speak it and had little chance of hearing it spoken. This has changed, and the change was brought to you, in part, by Big Bird.

Sesame Street (Iftah Ya SimSim) began broadcasting in Modern Standard Arabic in 1979. State-sponsored television and radio broadcast in Modern Standard Arabic, since even within a single state like Egypt and Syria the local vernaculars varied greatly. The existence of Modern Standard Arabic has enabled Al Jazeera, launched in 1996, to broadcast to the entire Arabic-speaking world. Satellite dishes and electrification have increasingly brought these media to even remote hamlets. Men watching the news in a café will discuss it in the local Arabic vernacular, but from Aleppo to Fez they now largely understand what the newscaster is saying in Modern Standard Arabic.

The impact of the wildly popular Egyptian movies and soap operas has also been linguistically significant. A good deal of Modern Standard Arabic grammar and vocabulary has crept into the on-screen Egyptian vernacular (lahga masriya) of Egyptian movies, but their popularity of these media has also made vocabulary once peculiar to Egypt familiar throughout the Arab world. Despite the best efforts of the language academies, words made familiar by the on-screen use of the Egyptian vernacular have entered the Modern Standard Arabic lexicon. A similar process applies to the somewhat less popular Syrian television programs. The result is that an Arabic speaker in the Maghreb will understand vernacular Syrian or Egyptian far more readily than her grandparents could ever have done.

Even the highly educated continue to speak a local vernacular at home, not Modern Standard Arabic. In conversation, they mix Modern Standard and the local vernacular in proportions that vary according to the nature of the occasion. The existence of Modern Standard Arabic does, however, give every educated Arab the ability to speak with and to understand every other educated Arab.

To see how this plays out even for an American who is not a native speaker of any kind of Arabic, listen to the blog post of “Aboo Imraan al-Mekseekee,” who lists his occupation as, “inviting to Islam,” and who works among the “English/Spanish speaking Salafee community.”[5] “[F]or those of us who are practising sunee/salafee muslims then al-Fushaa (Literary Arabic) is sufficient enough. Many of the brothers who studied in the Islamic Universities in Saudi or even in Dar-ul-Hadeeth in Dimaaj (a village in Sa'dah, Yemen), got along just fine without having to learn any "Ammiyyah" (vernacular.)” This native English speaker was able to live and study in Saudi madrassas with no need of any Arab vernacular.

The introduction of Modern Standard Arabic has enabled the existence of media that reach the entire Arabic-speaking world, but these new media have simultaneously influenced the development of and spread the use of this new language. The result of this synergy between Modern Standard Arabic and the television industry is that an Arab national language has emerged. Ideas expressed in Modern Standard Arabic can instantly reach the entire Arab-speaking world, giving the Arabs a new capacity to converse and respond as a single cultural nation, with results that it will be interesting to watch as they play out.

Labels: Arabs, Language, Speak

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