The world is
too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.
Rev.
William Sloane Coffin, Jr., 1924 – 2006,
was
a liberal Christian clergyman and long-time peace activist with
international stature. He was ordained in the Presbyterian Church and later
received ministerial standing in the United Church of Christ.
In his younger days he was a superb athlete, a highly talented
pianist, a CIA agent, and later chaplain of Yale
University, where the influence of Reinhold Niebuhr's social philosophy led him to
become a leader in the civil-rights and peace movements of the 1960s and
1970s.
Have you thought about getting away, about being left
alone and leaving others alone? As
the population of our planet increases and the amount of land upon which we
can live remains unchanged—if not, in fact, decreases—this dream of many
people becomes a fading, wistful thought.
In the previous part, we
looked at an inspiring music program for poor children in
Venezuela
and asked whether the people behind such a program should have a larger,
permanent, voice in government. (Imagine
if people of goodwill, instead of people of strong will, ran the world.) In
this part, we look at an inexpensive way to win the hearts and minds of the
world’s young. Conceived by
people of goodwill?
Newsweek,
April 15, 2008
“Jihadi
Cool”
Comic
book action heroes may be better weapons against terror than bullets or
bombs.
Scott
Atran is an anthropologist who studies the kids who keep Al Qaeda and its
spinoffs going. They're young people like the ones who grew up to blow up
trains in Madrid in 2004, carried out the slaughter on the London
underground in 2005 and hoped to blast airliners out of the sky en route to
the United States in 2006.
Atran
has looked at whom they idolize, how they organize, what bonds them and what
drives them. And he's reached an unconventional but, to me, convincing
conclusion: what has inspired the "new wave" terrorists since 2001
is not so much the Qur'an as what Atran calls "jihadi cool." If
you can discredit these kids' idols (most notably Osama bin Laden), give
them new ones and reframe the way their families and friends see the United
States and its allies, then you've got a good shot at killing the fad for
terror and stopping the jihad altogether.
For
Atran, a senior fellow at the Center on Terrorism at
John
Jay
College
of Criminal Justice in
New York
, this is pretty much Public Diplomacy 101. But he's found that the battle
of ideas is not just hard to win in the field, it's a very tough slog at
home. In
Washington
last year he was briefing White House staffers on his findings when a young
woman who worked for Vice President Dick Cheney said in the sternest
tough-guy voice she could muster, "Don't these young people realize
that the decisions they make are their responsibility, and that if they
choose violence against us, we're going to bomb them?"
Atran
was dumbfounded. "Bomb them?" he asked. "In
Madrid
? In
London
?"
So
when Atran went back to
Washington
to brief National Security Council and Homeland Security staff in January
this year, he went armed—with comic books. He wanted to show that nothing
cooked up by the Bush administration's warmongers and spinmeisters comes
close to delivering the kind of positive messages you can find in a
commercial action adventure series called "The 99."
The
comics are the creation of Kuwaiti psychologist and entrepreneur Naif Al-Mutawa,
and—let me make a confession here—I've been reading them since my
colleague Florence Villeminot first wrote about them early last year. My
reasons for following the series are probably as atavistic as analytic. I
grew up with Marvel and DC comics, spending my impressionable pubescence
getting deep into the gothic drama of Batman, delighting in the athletic
insolence of Spider-Man, savoring the unsublimated sexuality of the women in
X-Men. And, yes, there's something of all of that in "The 99,"
with its hulking fighters and sultry enforcers. ...
For the rest of the
article, http://www.newsweek.com/id/132147.
June 12, 2008