A Bit Less Oppression: A Bit of Hope?

In the Muslim-majority countries of Middle East, life has long been difficult for those who follow Jesus. They’ve been beaten, jailed, and killed when times were bad. When times were good, they were merely confined to the lowest and least-paid jobs, and denied educational opportunities. They don’t even hope for freedom of speech.

Such conditions are not restricted to the Near East; they are found in places like Bangladesh and beyond.

Jesus followers were heartened in 2016, therefore, when at least one small aspect of this harsh oppression was moderated in Egypt. As historian Jayson Casper writes:

“Long live the crescent and the cross!” shouted Egypt’s parliament in joy. All 39 Christian members joined the two-thirds majority to vote to end a 160-year practice instituted by the Ottomans requiring Christians to get permission from the country’s leader before building churches. The long-awaited reform was promised by the 2014 constitution after the overthrow of Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi.

For nearly two centuries, Jesus followers had to ask permission simply to gather for prayer or worship. In practice, this meant that the answer was usually ‘no.’

In the late 600s and early 700s, when Islam expanded westward from Arabia across North Africa, in Egypt, as in the other lands conquered by Muslim armies, churches and synagogues were burned, and the construction of new ones was forbidden.

At various points in time over the intervening millennium, brief periods of leniency emerged, and a precious few such worship buildings were constructed, but often only to be again destroyed by a reinvigorated Islam which emerged after these periods of moderation.

Jesus followers are a small fraction of the population in Egypt. After centuries of suffering from Islamic hegemony, will they be allowed to quietly and peacefully gather for prayer? The events of 2016 seem to suggest that they will.

But over the centuries, they’ve seen such moments of toleration quickly evaporate. Will Islam reassert itself, or will tranquility prevail? The Jesus followers of Egypt have seen too much, and experienced too much, to naively raise hope. But perhaps there is cause for cautious optimism.

Assessing U.S./Russian Relations

The diplomatic situation between the United States and Russia decayed steadily after early 2009. Vladimir Putin, who has been alternately the President and the Prime Minister of Russia, managed to outmaneuver the Obama administration.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, using a firm diplomatic hand, had kept Putin within some manner of boundaries until January 2009, when she left office.

When Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State in 2009, her ambiguous use of the word ‘reset’ introduced an uncertainty in U.S./Russian relationships, an uncertainty which Putin was quick to exploit.

In short order, Russian behavior became noticeably more aggressive, e.g., in the Crimean Peninsula and in Syria.

One German newspaper, Bild, carried comments by German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeyer. Writing in the UK’s Independent newspaper, Caroline Mortimer reports:

In a piece for German tabloid newspaper Bild, Frank-Walter Steinmeier wrote: “It’s a fallacy to think that this is like the Cold War. The current times are different and more dangerous.”

Putin was able to use, for eight years, the equivocation of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to foster Russian expansionism. As Steinmeier’s comments reveal, other nations were disappointed that the U.S. had failed to continue managing Putin effectively.

Jews in Spain: the Best of Times, the Worst of Times

From the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 A.D. until the Islamic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, Spain offered more than mere tolerance to Jews: until 711 A.D., Judaism flourished in Spain.

After the end of Roman rule, Jews and Christians lived in a peaceful and even cooperative coexistence. Spain was governed by Goths, who'd set up a monarchy there. The Goths showed no interest in persecuting Jews.

The Muslim military leader Tariq ibn Ziyad led an invasion force which arrived by boat from northwestern Africa in 711. By 712, his army defeated Spain’s King Roderic at the Battle of Guadalete. Shortly after than, Islam controlled most of Spain, although small pockets of resistance remained in the Northwest.

Soon the Muslims would boast about having burned “thousands” of synagogues and churches. Whether the numbers were that large is not clear, but the fact that they would brag about arson reveals the nature of their occupational forces in Spain.

Conditions for the Jews became even worse in the 12th century. A new wave of Islamic military forces took over Spain. These were, according to historian Ken Spiro, the “cruel Muslim Berber Dynasty” known as the “Almohades.”

Ken Spiro also notes that the Jews “excelled in trade.” Because “the Jews became traders who covered the Far East,” they were directly impacted when Islam effectively blocked most or all land routes between Europe and places like India and China.

With Muslims controlling Egypt, Arabia, Syria, Persia, and the surrounding areas, the traditional caravan routes were blocked.

The great voyages of discovery, many of which launched from Spain or Portugal, were attempts to find alternate routes to connect Europe with India and China, bypassing the obstinate Muslims.

One of these explorers, seeking safer routes to the Far East, was, of course, Christopher Columbus. Many historians now consider it possible or even probable that Columbus was Jewish.

China’s Han Dynasty: Lower Taxes Bring Prosperity

After the collapse of the short-lived Qin Dynasty, a leader named Liu Bang took power as emperor, and took the throne name ‘Gao.’ He founded the Han Dynasty.

Determined to give his reign a reliable foundation, both for his personal popularity and for national prosperity, Liu Bang worked to reduce the intrusiveness of government. As historians Ebrey, Walthall, and Palais write:

Emperor Gao did not disband the centralized government created by the Qin, but he did remove its most unpopular features. He set up his capital at Chang’an, not far from the old Qin capital. He eliminated some laws, cut taxes, and otherwise lessened the burdens on the people. After a century of almost constant war and huge labor mobilizations, China was given several decades to recover. Responding to the desire to restore the old order, Emperor Gao gave out large and nearly autonomous fiefs.

Liu Bang introduced a measure of decentralization by creating these fiefs. In some ways vaguely similar to European feudalism, this system allowed for more local, and therefore more flexible, governance.

The Han Dynasty began, around 202 B.C., with tax cuts, deregulation, and decentralization leading to local control. These measures were wildly popular with the Chinese.

Ironically, the Han would eventually be overthrown, around 9 A.D., by a rebel named Wang Mang, because they had lapsed into high tax rates, regulation, and central control.

Wang Mang’s rebellion caused the Han to reform, and they were able to regain the throne in 23 A.D. by reducing taxes. Tax policy is the key to understanding the history of the Han Dynasty.

The World Discovers the Role of Women in Muslim Cultures

The first two decades of the twenty-first century have brought Islamic cultures onto the center stage of world history. Islam’s impact on history has been less about a personal faith and more about a political, military, and social agenda.

In late 2010, a wave of social unrest known as the ‘Arab Spring’ swept across North Africa and into the Middle East. Early the next year, this movement metamorphosed into political revolutions, rattling some governments, and overturning others.

Sadly, the revolutionaries were disappointed when the governments they’d overthrown were replaced by even harsher ones. The brief glimpse of an impulse toward a free society and toward individual political liberty was crushed by Islamic dictatorships.

Not only did the Arab Spring turn into an Islamic Winter, but it did so in the realm of civilization in addition to the realm of politics. As Kamel Daoud writes,

The Arab revolutions of 2011 aroused enthusiasm at first, but passions have since waned. Those movements have come to look imperfect, even ugly: For one thing, they have failed to touch ideas, culture, religion or social norms.

The reader should remember that not all Arabs are Muslims, and not all Muslims are Arabs. Arabic hopes were suppressed by Islamic absolutism.

In Egypt, a location known as Tahrir Square became the scene of repeated sexual assaults and rapes. This was a glimpse of how women would be treated after the ‘Arab Spring’ was extinguished.

This attitude followed Muslim immigrants as they made their way into Europe. On New Year’s Eve 2015, a coordinated and planned series of gang-rapes occurred in major cities across Central Europe, as groups of men randomly attacked women who happened to be walking by.

Kamel Daoud shows the underlying cultural connections between the ill-treatment of women in the Islamic nations and the assaults in Central Europe:

The attacks on Western women by Arab migrants in Cologne, Germany, on New Year’s Eve evoked the harassment of women in Tahrir Square itself during the heady days of the Egyptian revolution. The reminder has led people in the West to realize that one of the great miseries plaguing much of the so-called Arab world, and the Muslim world more generally, is its sick relationship with women. In some places, women are veiled, stoned and killed; at a minimum, they are blamed for sowing disorder in the ideal society.

As the data revealed the scope of the attack, and number of victims, a pattern clearly emerged. By mid-2016, police were increasing the official number of victim as more women came forth, and as more evidence was gathered from video cameras which caught attacks in public places.

Women in Muslim nations are largely depersonalized. They lack equality under the law, and are perceived as a source of immoral temptations.

They are allowed access to the public sphere only if they renounce their bodies: To let them go uncovered would be to uncover the desire that the Islamist, the conservative and the idle youth feel and want to deny. Women are seen as a source of destabilization — short skirts trigger earthquakes, some say — and are respected only when defined by a property relationship, as the wife of X or the daughter of Y.

Writing in the New York Times in February 2016, in the wake of New Year's Eve attacks, Kamel Daoud described a global encounter: how the rest of the world was learned about Islamic nations as waves of emigrants left those countries.

Daoud goes on to note that recent massive immigrations into Europe, and into North America, have brought this plight of Muslim women to the attention of the world:

Today, with the latest influx of migrants from the Middle East and Africa, the pathological relationship that some Arab countries have with women is bursting onto the scene in Europe.

For centuries, the degradation of women in Muslim countries was an unseen phenomenon and a rarely-studied topic. For the rest of the world, it was far away.

The transportation and communication of the postmodern era, however, have brought two different cultures in contact. The world is shocked to learn specific details of the way women are treated in Islamic nations, and horrified to learn that Muslim immigrants intend to continue this behavior even after they’ve immigrated into other countries.

Climate Change: Mixed Evidence

The many different claims made about the earth’s climate are confusing and sometimes even contradictory. The thoughtful reader will disentangle each claim from the mass of propositions presented by the popular press, isolate the claim, and evaluate it without reference to other claims.

For example, the proposition that “the climate is changing” and that “climate change in anthropogenic” are separate. One might be false, and the other true, or vice-versa.

Phrases like ‘climate change’ and ‘climatic instability’ also need careful definition. Because the earth’s climate is essentially erratic and unpredictable, it is not clear what would constitute ‘change’ or ‘instability.’

Long before the Industrial Revolution and the widespread use of fossil fuels, droughts and floods appeared without discernable pattern, cause, or predictability. Mild winters and harsh winters arrived capriciously.

If one had unlimited access to data, and sufficient power to construct mathematical models, perhaps some of the historic climate events would have been predictable, or perhaps their causes discernable.

Given however, the data which researchers in fact have, there are at best vague hypotheses about what cause the Medieval Warm Period, an era from around 850 A.D. to around 1250 A.D.

During that era, exceptionally warm temperatures - outliers - are evidenced around the globe. Some data comes from direct observations: records of snowfall or lack thereof, glacial retreat, and harvests. Some of the data is indirect: tree-ring measurements and ice core samples.

Globally, droughts during the Medieval Warm Period seem to be greater in scope than anything observed in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) notes:

Compelling arguments both for and against significant increases in the land area affected by drought and/or dryness since the mid-20th century have resulted in a low confidence assessment of observed and attributable larges-cale trends. This is due primarily to a lack and quality of direct observations, dependencies of inferred trends on the index choice, geographical inconsistencies in the trends and difficulties in distinguishing decadal scale variability from long term trends. On millennial time scales, there is high confidence that proxy information provides evidence of droughts of greater magnitude and longer duration than observed during the 20th century in many regions. There is medium confidence that more megadroughts occurred in monsoon Asia and wetter conditions prevailed in arid Central Asia and the South American monsoon region during the Little Ice Age (1450 to 1850) compared to the Medieval Climate Anomaly (950 to 1250).

Likewise, the Little Ice Age represents a statistical outlier of lower temperatures than anything recorded in the last century or two.

In sum, change and instability seem to be the defining characteristic of the earth’s climate. It would be truly unusual if the climate were predictable or if it repeated its patterns from one year to the next.

This instability seems to predate the advent of the widespread use of coal, oil, and gas. The instability seems to be no greater after the introduction of fossil fuels, given the major outliers which antedate it.

The Katyn Massacre: Soviets Murder Polish Leaders

Until June 1941, the USSR was an enthusiastic ally of Hitler’s Germany. Stalin eagerly invaded Poland from the east, while Hitler’s troops attacked from the west.

After the Nazis and the Soviets divided the occupied Polish territory, Stalin’s socialists were eager to neutralize any potential leaders. Thousands of Polish military officers, policemen, and priests were rounded up.

The prisoners were taken eastward into Russia, into the Katyn Forest. In an infamous war crime, the Soviets murdered them. An estimated 22,000 victims were brutally killed.

The communists worked to keep the atrocity secret, but in 1943, when the German army entered the area, soldiers discovered the mass graves. The Germans informed the world.

By this time, the Soviets had changed their allegiance, and were now fighting against the Germans. The Germans had no motive to protect the USSR’s reputation by hiding the massacre. The USSR was eager to deny the event.

The Polish government-in-exile asked the Red Cross to conduct an official investigation. They documented the war crimes extensively.

The Western Allies - Britain, France, and the United States - were allied with the both Poland and the USSR. The Western Allies needed the USSR in the war effort against Hitler.

To avoid angering Stalin, and thereby to keep the USSR engaged against Hitler, the Western Allies downplayed the Katyn atrocities. The media in the Western Allies did almost no reporting on the topic. Diplomats from the Western Allies did not confront their Soviet counterparts with the murders.

During the remainder of WW2, and for several decades afterward, the USSR continued to deny that the incident ever happened. In some cases, they were joined by governments, media, and academics from the Western Allies. Historians Stan Evan and Herbert Romerstein write:

At the time of the Hitler-Stalin pact, to take an example earlier noted, the Soviets captured a million-plus Poles and shipped them off to Russia, some to become slave labor in the Gulag, a few recruited as agents, others who disappeared entirely. One vexing question was the fate of fifteen thousand Polish officers who couldn’t be found when efforts were made to form an army-in-exile to fight the Nazis. Nobody could get the facts about these captives, who had in fact been murdered by the Soviets and buried in mass graves in Russia’s Katyn Forest. The truth about the murders would be denied and covered up for years, not only by the Soviets but by Western leaders who knew the facts but kept discreetly silent.

When communism inside the USSR began to crumble in 1989, evidence surfaced, giving shocking details of how the Soviets carried out the massacre. With the communist government gone, the Russians were free to tell the truth about Katyn.

Scholars and researchers from both Poland and Russia have now extensively documented the executions. The priests, policemen, and military officers murdered in the Katyn Forest are officially recognized as victims of communism.