Author Archives: Fred Yi

News Roundtable

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BOB ABERNETHY, host: Analysis and discussion of some of the week’s news now with Kim Lawton, managing editor of this program, and Kevin Eckstrom, editor of Religion News Service. Welcome to you both. Kevin, an obscure publicity-seeking pastor in Florida oversees the burning of a Quran, and there are deadly riots in Afghanistan.

KEVIN ECKSTROM (Editor, Religion News Service): Right. It’s a real challenge for this country because the more attention that people pay to him the more he’s sort of egged on to keep doing this kind of thing. But if we don’t pay attention to what he’s doing, the Muslim world thinks that we don’t care whether or not Qurans are being burned in the United States or that they think that maybe all Christians or all Americans are burning Qurans when that’s clearly not the case. But it’s a real pickle as to how much legitimacy you give this guy, because the more he gets, the more he’s going keep going.

post01-newsroundupKIM LAWTON (Managing Editor, Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly): And what actually happened was he had a mock trial where he put the Quran on trial, and he actually had an imam speak in defense of the Quran, but in the end the Quran was found guilty, and that’s when the burning occurred. That was put on the Facebook page, on his Facebook page. It was put on Youtube. But it happened on March 20. The riots happened quite awhile after that, in part because local leaders, Muslim leaders in Afghanistan, manipulated it. You know, people in the country there didn’t necessarily know about it. Most Americans didn’t know about it, except for the fact that people went through with loudspeakers in some of these towns, and there was also an allegation that hundreds of Qurans were burned here. So there was a lot of manipulation about what really happened as well, for a lot of different political purposes.

ABERNETHY: Another frustration: the ideological stand-off in Washington over the budget.

LAWTON: Well, Republicans this week unveiled—while Congress was talking about how are we going to fund the rest of this year, the Republicans also unveiled their blueprint for 2012 and beyond, and they proposed a very radical restructuring of Medicare/Medicaid, some of those other programs. The congressman who introduced it said it was a moral obligation to do something about Medicare/Medicaid, because it just is simply unsustainable in its current effect, and that has a lot of religious groups talking and debating.

post02-newsroundupECKSTROM: Right, and right now we are talking about, you know, a hundred million for this, two hundred million for that. It’s relatively small potatoes. What’s important about this Republican plan is that it’s a big-picture, long-term ideological blueprint for how we should fund the government and fund the services, and the bottom line is that it proposes taking in less revenue through lower taxes on corporations and the wealthy, at the same time cutting services to folks who really can’t afford to have those services cut. So a lot of religious groups say that it’s immoral budgeting to be able to try to balance the budget on the backs of the folks who can’t afford to.

ABERNETHY: And Kim, there was a Supreme Court decision this week that worried a lot of people interested in the separation of church and state.

LAWTON: Well, the justices in a very close decision rejected a challenge to a program in Arizona that gave tax credits that eventually got funneled to private schools, mostly religious schools in that particular case. Some taxpayers had challenged that, saying that’s an establishment of religion, and the court said those people didn’t have the standing or the legal right to bring forward that case, so it’s going to make these challenges to church-state cases more difficult in the future.

ECKSTROM: Right. Since 1968 Americans have had a right to challenge these sorts of cases when they think that the government is improperly funding religion. The Supreme Court has said that. And what’s happened in this case and then in a 2007 case, a challenge against the White House faith-based office, is the court is really tightening the screws on this, on making it harder for people to challenge these programs that they think are unconstitutional.

ABERNETHY: So looking around we have humanitarian crises all over the place, we have natural disasters, we have budget stand-offs.

LAWTON: Wars.

ABERNETHY: Wars.

LAWTON: And rumors of wars.

ABERNETHY: Maybe next week will be better.

ECKSTROM: Hopefully.

Pastors and Guns

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Protesters outside gun store: What do we want? Sign the code. What do we want? Sign the code.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: This is a rare site these days—protesters outside a gun shop. It’s called Delia’s, and it’s in North Philadelphia. The organizers are religious leaders from many different faiths. There are also people of faith protesting the protesters, like Bill Grumbine.

BILL GRUMBINE: Well, I am not here to demonstrate against the gun store. I’m here to show support for the gun store, and I always have a Bible with me.

SEVERSON: Both sides say gun violence is a moral issue, and both rely on their religious views to support their opposing positions. Pastor David Tatgenhorst and Bishop Dwayne Royster say they’re not against guns or gun ownership but can no longer keep silent about gun violence.

PASTOR DAVID TATGENHORST (St. Luke United Methodist Church, Bryn Mawr, Penn.): Our coalition of pastors and rabbis and different religious leaders has just become so appalled that we’re so tired of burying young people and policemen. It’s just senseless what’s happening.

post02b-pastorsandgunsBISHOP DWAYNE ROYSTER (Living Water United Church of Christ, North Philadelphia): The numbers of handgun-related crimes and murders in the city of Philadelphia is larger than that of most industrialized countries.

SEVERSON: So these pastors who have preached against gun violence from the pulpit have joined an interfaith group called Heeding God’s Call in cities in Pennsylvania and Maryland, and they have taken their message to the streets. It’s aimed at gun store owners, and it asks them to sign a code of conduct designed to stop so-called “straw purchases.” That’s where a private citizen buys guns with the intent of reselling them on the street to someone who cannot legally purchase firearms.

ROYSTER: Whenever they sell a gun through a straw purchase, there’s potentially a body at the end of that gun.

SEVERSON: The same code of conduct was signed by Walmart, the largest seller of firearms in the country.

ROYSTER: What we’re asking the gun shop owners to do is to do something moral and ethical in terms of their behavior, by being responsible not just for making money for themselves, but to be responsible for the community in which they find themselves, to make sure that guns go to only those who legally have a right to own them and to be able to use them.

post03-pastorsandgunsSEVERSON: Heeding God’s Call staged regular protests, sit-ins, and prayer vigils at this Philadelphia gun store called Colosimo’s. The interfaith ministers were responding to a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms study showing that over 400 guns from Colosimo’s had been used in crimes. In fact, 12 interfaith ministers including Tatgenhorst were arrested for obstruction and conspiracy and spent a night in jail. Then they pleaded their case to the judge.

TATGENHORST: The judge listened to this, and she acquitted us. Our argument was that we were trying to prevent a greater harm by breaking a smaller law.

SEVERSON: A few months later, Colosimo’s lost its license to sell guns, a victory for Heeding God’s Call.

PASTOR RUSS TENHOFF (Safe Harbor Ministry, Baltimore): I already have the Glock. I already have the 1911.

SEVERSON: When the Baltimore chapter of Heeding God’s Call tried to close down Clyde’s Sports Shop after complaints of selling guns to straw purchasers, Pastor Russ Tenoff was there to defend the store. One of the owners, Bill Blamberg, says he won’t sign the code because it violates his customers’ privacy. But he knows some people get guns who shouldn’t.

BILL BLAMBERG (Clyde’s Sports Shop): And I’ve had this happen a couple times. A guy comes in, you know he’s got a police record. He can’t buy one, right? He looks at this gun. It’s $549. He says, “I’ll give you a thousand dollars if I can take it today.” Now I’m not saying some dealers don’t do that, but Clyde’s don’t do that.

post04-pastorsandgunsSEVERSON: Pastor Tenhoff leads the Safe Harbor Ministry in a rough Baltimore neighborhood. He opposes Heeding God’s Call’s mission.

TENHOFF: If we could eliminate all guns I would be all for that. But the fact of the matter is until Jesus puts his feet on the Mount of Olives and then peace reigns over the whole planet, we’re going to have to protect ourselves and even protect the people around us, and if the criminals have guns, then we need to have them.

SEVERSON: One thing is certain: there is no shortage of guns in the US—as many as 300 million at the latest count. In some circles, owning a gun appears to be the patriotic thing to do. For those who predicted a rash of gun control laws after the Tucson shooting—barely a whisper. A few weeks after the shooting, the governor of Utah signed a bill proclaiming the first official state gun, and the University of Texas is about to become the second major school after the University of Utah to allow students to carry concealed weapons on campus. Clyde Wilcox is a professor of government at Georgetown University and author of several books on subjects like gun control and the Christian right.

PROFESSOR CLYDE WILCOX (Georgetown University): The interesting thing is we’ve come to the point where the debate is over whether you can carry a weapon in a bar, in a church, in a gymnasium, which were the places in the past where we thought maybe you don’t want to have a gun because fights can break out or people can become inflamed. So it’s really on the edge that we’re having this whole discussion now.

post05-pastorsandgunsROYSTER: Jesus ministered to the most marginalized, and he didn’t do it with a gun. He didn’t do it with violence. He did it with love.

TENHOFF: I have been a man who has turned the other cheek. You’re talking to a man who has been jumped by gangs and beat. You’re talking to a man who’s been in several knife fights. You’re talking to a man who has been shot at, and you’re talking to a man who has grown up in the drug-infested violence of this area, and I have turned the other cheek and I have taken beatings. But I’m not going to let my little boy suffer violence. I’m going to act. I’m not going to let my wife be raped. I’m going to act.

SEVERSON: A number of mainline churches have had longstanding positions in favor of some kind of gun control, but for the most part churches have been noticeably quiet. In fact, an increasing number of pastors are now speaking out in support of the Second Amendment, saying it was inspired by God.

WILCOX: I talk to a fair number of pastors who kind of take a fundamentalist reading of the Second Amendment the way they take a fundamentalist reading of the Bible.

SEVERSON: Pastor Tatgenhorst says he understands why more religious leaders haven’t been more outspoken about gun control.

TATGENHORST: It happens, and I know that I have had colleagues who are scared to talk about guns. They’re afraid that people in the pews will object to that.

post06-pastorsandgunsWILCOX: Well, the mainline congregations are declining. Their populations are aging, and so the question is what issues do you want to take on that might possibly divide your congregation? Would you take a risk of losing 10 percent of your members in a declining church by taking the prophetic stand about gun control at a time when gun control laws are probably not going to be stiffened?

SEVERSON: Rick Hellberg is a member of Pastor Tatgenhorst’s church. He supports his pastor’s position against gun violence but, unlike the pastor, he sees the Second Amendment as sacred. His rationale is quite common among opponents of government-sponsored gun control.

RICK HELLBERG: If part of my right to hold a gun is to protect myself from the potential tyranny of a government or a standing army—if that’s the case, then I should probably be able to be armed almost as well as those standing armies are. The NRA [National Rifle Association] takes the position that if we give an inch Washington will take a mile.

SEVERSON: But this isn’t coming from Washington. It’s coming from faith leaders who are trying to do what they say Washington and state governments haven’t done—curb gun violence.

ROYSTER: We’re not trying to prevent their business. We’re not trying to prevent them from selling guns. We’re not trying to prevent people who have a legal right to possess guns from possessing them. We just want to make sure they don’t get into the hands of the wrong people.

SEVERSON: While religious voices against gun control are getting louder, so are those on the other side…

Protesters: Sign the code!

SEVERSON: …who think that something needs to be done to stop the killing.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly I’m Lucky Severson in Philadelphia.

Father James Martin, SJ: “Of Gods and Men”

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Father James Martin, SJ, culture editor of America magazine, shares his thoughts about the movie “Of Gods and Men,” the story of a community of Trappist monks in Algeria who have close relationships with their Muslim neighbors but who must decide whether to stay or leave when they are threatened by Islamic militants. The movie is based on the book “The Monks of Tibhirine” by John Kiser. Edited by Emma Mankey Hidem.

 

John W. Kiser: Christian-Muslim Love

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The recent opening across the United States of the much praised French film “Of Gods and Men” is an important event. As a fraternal love story wrapped in a horror story, it offers much reason for hope, as well as room for despair, depending on the lens of the viewer.

My lens is one of hope, based on six years of research and writing “The Monks of Tibhirine,” the book French director Xavier Beauvois called his “bible” for making his movie about Christian-Muslim friendship. My hope is also based on knowing the back story that goes untold in an otherwise excellent film focusing on the monks’ struggle to be true to their Trappist vows of poverty, charity, and stability when faced with their fear of a brutal death.

post01-christianmuslimlove

Some people today might say that Christian-Muslim love is an oxymoron. Yes, there are Muslims who preach hatred of the Christian West, even though fewer and fewer in the West (outside the US) are practicing or even professing Christians. There are no Muslims I have heard of who preach hatred or even disrespect for Jesus Christ, who is a much revered and sinless prophet in Islam.

There is, however, an active Christian minority that preaches hatred of Islam and regularly insults the Prophet Muhammad. Elements with political agendas on both sides benefit from blackening the other, and the media have been willing accomplices to this downward phobic spiral. “Of Gods and Men” is film that could help right perceptions.

Despite pleas in 1996 from both French and Algerian authorities to leave for a safer place when threatened by Islamic extremists, the monks remained at their remote monastery in Algeria’s Atlas Mountains out of deep sense of commitment to their extended family of villagers who depended on them for moral, medical, and material support. Like their neighbors, the monks trembled with fear at night. They argued among themselves: does the Good Shepherd abandon his flock when the wolves come? Does a mother abandon a sick, infectious child? Does their vow of poverty allow for them to flee to safer ground when their friends cannot?

When seven of the monks were kidnapped, it was not their neighbors who did it. Instead, it was a contract job that employed a group from outside the area to take the monks away from their dangerous situation—to be traded, in effect. But something went wrong along the way. Of one thing I am certain: killing them was not the plan. If that had been the case, they would not have been schlepped around the country for two months nor would negotiations for their release have taken place. Yet for some viewers, I suspect this will be seen as simply another “bad-Muslims-kill–good-Christians” story—exactly what the abbot of the monastery feared when he wrote his last testament, read at the end of the film.

The film works very well dramatically as a struggle between faith and fear. By necessity it leaves out important and broader story components. The tenacious commitment of Abbot Christian de Chergé (played by Lambert Wilson) to serve God in Algeria had been formed in him as a soldier serving in the French army during the Algerian war for independence from 1954 to 1962, when his life was saved by a Muslim friend, an Algerian policeman named Mohammed who faced down local rebels who wanted to shoot Christian one day when they were taking a walk—a time when they would discuss their faith.

That friendship cost the Algerian his life the next day. For Christian, Mohammed’s sacrifice was a gift of love reinforcing his belief that the spirit of Jesus Christ resides in all his children. For the rebels, the friend of my enemy is my enemy.

The film doesn’t have room to tell about the seventy-plus imams who, based on the same logic, were assassinated in the 1990s for denouncing what the terrorists were doing in the name of Islam. The terrorists themselves could show respect for the monks. In a dramatic scene in the film, Saya Attia, head of the terrorist group that intruded upon the monastery on Christmas Eve 1993 with demands for medical help, apologizes to Christian for disturbing their celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ. Left out are the leader’s final words to Christian when he extends a hand in friendship: “We don’t consider you foreigners…you are religious.”

Nor does the viewer know that the tiny hamlet of Tibhirine was inhabited by families whose homes in the mountains had been bombed by the French during the war for independence. They had fled to the protection of the monastery, a holy place where the Christian “marabouts” (Arabic for religious teachers) sheltered them until they could build their own homes.

I have one regret about the film. It might have ended on a more positive note for Christian-Muslim relations by showing the genuine remorse of much of the Algerian population. Archbishop Henri Teissier of Algiers received sacks of letters from ordinary Algerians after the monks’ deaths were confirmed. The letters expressed a deep sense of solidarity with the monks as well as a sense of shame that was captured by this one: “No matter what has happened, we truly love you. You are part of us. We have failed in our duty—to protect you, to love you. Forgive us…You must accomplish your divine mission with us. I believe it is God’s plan.”

Universal fraternal love is the essence of Christianity and all true religion. Otherwise, religion degenerates into celestial nationalism. Christian himself frequently said that if religion doesn’t help us to live together, it is worthless.

The idea may seem laughably naïve in a post-9/11 world. Love, however, has nothing to do with sentiment and everything to do with good will, justice, empathy, and respect for others. Like their Savior, the monks’ lives were not taken. They were gifts of love.

John W. Kiser is the author of “The Monks of Tibhirine: Faith, Love, and Terror in Algeria” (St. Martins Press, 2002).

Carlos Eire

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PROFESSOR CARLOS EIRE (speaking to class at Yale University): In 1517, something happens that has happened many times before…

BOB FAW, correspondent: Carlos Eire is at a pinnacle of the academic world. With an endowed chair at Yale, where he teaches religious studies, he’s also written six books, including the memoir “Waiting for Snow in Havana,” which won the National Book Award. But just as remarkable as his rise from Cuban refugee to professor of distinction is Carlos Eire’s spiritual odyssey.

EIRE: It is an incomprehensible and in many ways an indescribable experience. What had been scary to me, what had been frightful, suddenly turned into the most beautiful thing.

post02-carloseireFAW: In pre-Castro Cuba, Eire’s was a life of privilege—the festive holidays and lavish birthday parties at grand estates befitting the son of a wealth and influential judge and a gorgeous mother. But their Spanish Catholicism terrified young Carlos.

EIRE: There was no place in the world scarier for me as a child than a church. Actually my worst nightmare was being locked in a church all night long, because the images were so frightening.

FAW: What tormented him most, Eire recalls, was his father’s collection of icons of Christ.

EIRE: The crown of thorns on his head bleeding. It was in his study, right near the Jesus plate with the eyes that followed you.

FAW: Eire’s comfortable life came crashing down when Fidel Castro seized power. Only 11, Eire knew his life had changed when the new regime prevented him from seeing a Walt Disney film, “20000 Leagues Under the Sea,” that he had already seen seven times.

post08-carloseireEIRE: That was the turning point for me. I really felt like someone was trying to steal my soul, not just invade but claim it as their own, some authority outside of me, and that’s when I just began to see everything in a different light.

FAW: Fearful, their world collapsing, Eire’s parents sent him and his brother, Tony, to the United States in 1962, two of 14,000 Cuban children airlifted from Cuba in an operation dubbed “Pedro Pan.” Like many of the other children, Carlos and Tony lived with foster families. Never again would they see their father, and their mother would join them only years later. When Carlos left Cuba, his parents gave him a book which they said would bring him comfort.

EIRE: It was “The Imitation of Christ” by Thomas à Kempis—for centuries had been a very popular text in Spanish-speaking cultures. It’s all about self-denial. It’s about not being part of the world. It’s very monastic in its outlook.

FAW: You wrote in the Miami book, “It scared me half to death. It is the most depressing book ever written by any human being in all of human history.”

EIRE: From a child’s perspective, yes, definitely.

FAW: But in Miami, living with foster parents who were Jewish but who made him go to a Catholic church every Sunday, Eire was unshackled for the first time from the Catholicism of Cuba and its troubling images of pain and suffering.

post05-carloseireEIRE: After I had come to the US and seen churches that were free of such images, I realized that Spanish Catholicism and Latin American Catholicism was very different from American Catholicism in that respect and sort of put a less scary pall over religion.

FAW: Later, when Eire and his brother moved in with his uncle in Illinois, there were no more gory images of Jesus.

EIRE: My uncle had this very Protestant image of Jesus above his armchair—totally unscary, a friendlier, more accessible Jesus.

FAW: Though liberated from the demons of his youth, Eire says he was still plagued, even crippled by what he calls “the void.”

EIRE: It attacked me, because it seemed to come from outside of me. it was a feeling of utter abandonment and emptiness and having no connection to anything or anyone, and having no one or anything beyond one’s self. Everything was turning dark.

FAW: But as Carlos Eire so movingly writes in his second memoir, “Learning to Die in Miami,” that overwhelming despair was shattered on Holy Thursday 1965 in a profound religious experience.

post06-carloseireEIRE: It was at that period when I started reading “The Imitation of Christ,” not just little passages, but actually getting into the meaning, and it brought me to this experience, a profoundly religious experience. I think it’s fair to call it a conversion experience.

FAW: “Everything changes,” you wrote. “Everything changes from top to bottom. A void rips loudly and light pours through.”

EIRE: Up until that point I always thought that spirit was insubstantial. It’s with that experience that I realized that spirit is more substantial than matter, because it is connected to eternity. Time stops. All there is is now, and this now is forever.

FAW: After experiencing what he calls “that presence,” Carlos Eire says religion became his salvation and he was able, he says, “to let go.”

EIRE: Thinking that there’s something beyond this life helps one immensely in letting go. Without some other dimension, letting go, to me, is too painful—impossible.

FAW: You wrote, “He who knows best how to let go will enjoy the greater peace, because he is conqueror of himself.”

EIRE: Letting go of your attachment to things and even your attachment to your own will and your own attempt to make sense of the world your own way and kind of open yourself up to something higher.

post07-carloseireFAW: Not all those haunting images from his past have been excised. He anguishes, he says, over what is happening in Cuba today.

EIRE: I could not, in a sense, stop feeling the pain. The so-called free education and free medical care come at the cost of slavery. Cubans right now are no different than slaves in a plantation in the American South before the Civil War. Europeans and Canadians who go to Cuba to have a good time—I can’t understand it. It would be like vacationing in the Third Reich and having a good time and ignoring Auschwitz.

FAW: And while Cuba, he says, “is a wound that will not close,” the scars from his earlier religious trauma have healed.

EIRE: Yes, there is pain and suffering, but it can be transcended, and it can be redemptive. I was able to let go of everything I had lost, including my parents, and I was able to focus on what the purpose of life should be. Not as regaining everything I had lost, but rather giving one’s self to others.

FAW: Carlos Eire—a long way from Cuba, but waiting no more.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly this is Bob Faw in New Haven, Connecticut.

Civil Rights of American Muslims

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Three weeks after a congressional hearing was held on the radicalization of American Muslims, Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL) held a March 29 hearing on the civil rights of American Muslims. Watch excerpts from remarks made by Sen. Durbin, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Thomas Perez, President and Executive Director of Muslim Advocates Farhana Khera, and Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. Edited by Emma Mankey Hidem.

 

Howard Rhodes: Civic Nationalism and Intervention in Libya

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U.S. Marine Corps supporting Operation Odyssey Dawn

Photo: USMC/Staff Sgt. Danielle M. Bacon

When President Obama spoke last night about the military intervention in Libya, he confronted a public both stunned and skeptical.

The military action was the product of a complex set of political considerations undertaken at great speed. The rapidity of the political run-up to the initial attack rendered ordinary processes of democratic consultation confused and confusing. Despite the fact that the attack on Libya was legally authorized by United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973, thus sanctioning the action with the highest form of justification purportedly representing international consensus, many people in America and abroad continue to find the moral and political justifications for the act unclear or unconvincing. Many citizens are skeptical, in particular, about the extent to which protecting civilians represents the actual motive for the undertaking. While the president’s speech forcefully defended the humanitarian grounds for the Libya intervention, it also suggested other, arguably more powerful motivations for using force against the Gaddafi regime. Attacking Libya, the president suggests, is not simply an act of liberal humanitarianism, but of fidelity to America’s revolutionary origins.

President Obama’s principal justification for attacking the Gaddafi regime was to prevent a massacre in the city of Benghazi. Against the background of a history of foot-dragging and inaction by previous American regimes in the face of humanitarian crises, President Obama and his advisors determined that it would be better to use force early rather than “wait for images of mass graves” to flood television screens around the world.

This decision carries enormous risks. It justifies the use of force by reference to a plausible, but still hypothetical scenario in which the Gaddafi regime slaughters civilians by the thousands. It takes literally the hyperbolic threats of a dictator for whom hyperbole is a basic modus operandi and uses those words as proof positive of atrocious intent.

The president’s judgment may in fact have been correct. Perhaps Gaddafi’s treatment of the rebellious population would have involved massacre, mass graves, systematic rape, and other horrors of mass atrocity. But we will never know, and while it is better never to know such things, this not-knowing leaves the president—and the American people—with a situation in which the principal justification for using force is underdetermined.

A great deal of the president’s speech hinges on the extent to which his audience accepts his claim that civil war in Libya would involve “violence on a horrific scale.” The president does not clearly succeed in distinguishing the violence in Libya from the violence in other countries such as Yemen and Syria. This makes him vulnerable to claims that his administration is being inconsistent by attacking Libya but ignoring other situations. President Obama essentially sidesteps the issue by simply acknowledging that America cannot use force everywhere while asserting that this cannot be a reason for inaction in the present case. It is true that intervention in one case does not commit one to a perverse ethic of consistency demanding intervention in every case. But if Libya is not clearly distinguished by extraordinary violence, then the president’s claim that protecting civilians is the primary purpose of intervening in Libya is very weak indeed.

Perhaps, however, the protection of civilians is only one reason for using force in Libya, one that is most acceptable legally and internationally but which is essentially on a par with other reasons for action in this case. The president mentioned the desire both to send a signal to other authoritarian regimes in the region that their violence will not go unanswered and to assist the self-determination of the Libyan people. This is where President Obama’s remarks about American political identity and revolutionary origins are relevant. According to the president, passivity in the face of the Libyan rebellion would have been a “betrayal of who we are” as a nation. America is a nation born of a revolution. Our revolutionary origins have left an indelible mark on our national mythos, our sense of ourselves in our grander moments. It inclines the American people toward sympathy with others who take up arms to fight for freedom and, in some cases, commits us to coming to their aid, through force of arms if necessary. For us, defending human dignity sometimes involves using force to support a rebellion. Or so suggests the president. If one accepts this as a plausible account of how Americans justify the use of force—an account focused more on notions of national identity and revolutionary values than on human rights or humanitarian protection—then one is presented with an account more in keeping with America’s ongoing efforts to shape the global environment according to its revolutionary values.

If America’s identity as a revolutionary regime is crucial to how the president justified the use of force in Libya, then the intervention could amount to a dangerous and destabilizing act of “exporting the revolution.” But America, according to the president, is not only an “advocate of human freedom.” It has also acquired a hard-earned identity as an “anchor of global security.” American revolutionary values, on this account, cannot be understood independently of the concern to preserve global order by supporting international institutions, securing cooperation and consensus, and observing the realistic limits of military force. From this point of view, what distinguishes Libya from other situations is not the severity of its violence, but the fact that the opposition to Gaddafi seems actually to have organized itself into a genuine rebellion. At the beginning of the debate over Libya at least, the Libyan rebels seem to have organized themselves sufficiently to promise both an effective armed resistance and a potential provisional government in the wake of Gaddafi’s demise. This perception of rebel organization seemed to answer the concern that any intervention not result in broader political destabilization. We know now that the Libyan rebels are poorly organized, untutored in the art of government, and largely unknown. Time will tell, then, whether the American administration’s support of Libya’s rebellion will cause harms disproportionate to the goods achieved.

Whatever the future brings, one cannot understand adequately the intervention in Libya without coming to terms with the dance between nationalism, liberal internationalism, and political realism in the president’s speech. When the claims about international consensus and humanitarian concern break down under critical scrutiny, only the claims about national values remain. These national values, and the national identity they presuppose, need not and should not be understood independently of humanitarian concern. Without vital notions of national identity and accompanying notions of honor and fidelity, however, humanitarian aspirations lack ways of actually motivating action.

None of this, of course, answers the question of whether the intervention in Libya was just. But any moral judgment depends upon first acquiring an adequate description of the act under question.

Howard Rhodes teaches at the University of Iowa College of Law.

Nicholas Fotion: No Good Comes from Not Intervening

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Operation Odyssey Dawn

It is helpful in assessing what is going on in Libya to put yourself in President Obama’s boots. If you put yourself there, you will quickly realize that you’re damned if you militarily intervene in some way or other and damned if you don’t.

If you intervene, you stretch an already overstretched US military even more. You spend tax dollars that could be spent at home instead. You support a group of I-know-not-who-they-are rebels, and you will bring about the deaths of lots of people.

If you don’t act, you will probably cause even more people to die and ensure that the rebellion against Qaddafi will quickly fail.

In Obama’s boots I find myself torn by indecision. I also find myself wondering how it is that those who don’t know how to put themselves in someone else’s boots seem to know immediately what ought to be done. Does their religious or political ideology tell them what to do automatically?

Not having an automatic appeal, I realize I must somehow overcome my indecision. I finally decide what I would have done if I had been in Obama’s boots by focusing on what good might come about by not intervening and by intervening. I find no good coming from not intervening. But there is some good on the intervention side. Very likely Qaddafi will go and possibly Libya will turn into a more liberal country (no assurances here given that Libya is still a tribal society). So reluctantly, realizing that I might be all wrong, I support military intervention rather than military inaction.

Nicholas Fotion is a professor of philosophy at Emory University and the author, most recently, of “War and Ethics: A New Just War Theory” (Continuum, 2008).