Is Paddy Ashdown right? Is it time for an end to Sykes-Picot?

Posted on August 16, 2014 by Gerry Lynch
ISIS blows up a border post on the Syria-Iraq border. From the ISIS propaganda video 'The End of Sykes-Picot'.

ISIS blows up a border post on the Syria-Iraq border. From the ISIS propaganda video The End of Sykes-Picot.

Paddy Ashdown had an unusually courageous article in the Guardian on Thursday calling for the West to accept that the 1920s-era boundaries of Middle Eastern countries should be redrawn. Courageous doesn’t mean sensible. How does his argument stack up?

“This is the start of a long conflict which could cross the entire Muslim world”, says The Guardian subheader, correctly, “The west’s strategy must accept the end of the old imperial borders.”
 

There’s much that’s sensible here, including the admission that the West neither has the men nor the money to think about remaking the Middle East through force of arms, even if that were possible. So Paddy is essentially calling for Iraq to be allowed to fall apart, for Southern Iraq to be allowed to fall into Tehran’s sphere of influence, for the West to arm the Kurds and for an end to Sykes-Picot.

This is might well happen whether or not “the West”, with its vaunted idea of its capacity to shape events, likes it. Iraq, as an entity, is currently in the last chance saloon. We should not forget that collapsing countries always leave some mess behind. In this case, it will be particularly bad as there is no agreement as to what the boundaries between the various successor entities might be. On off fighting over legitimate ownership of Kirkuk, for example, could last for generations in that context. In fact, I think Paddy knows this so maybe he’s just calling for us to accept that the Syrian Civil War is turning into the War of Syro-Iraqi Succession? Continue reading →

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Nobody loves themselves a conspiracy theory anywhere in the world like they love themselves one in the Middle East

Posted on August 14, 2014 by Gerry Lynch

The latest conspiracy theory doing the rounds in the Middle East: ISIS is a front established by the USA to legitimise a reinvasion of Iraq, and ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is actually a Jewish actor called Shimon Eliot. (Of course the actor was Jewish.) Here’s a sample from the Turkish twittersphere:

Of course, conspiracy theories are hardly unique to the Middle East, and some of the commenters in the comments zone on the Guardian website are hardly less convinced that ISIS is a convenient excuse for the Americans to reinvade Iraq: to be honest Fisk isn’t far off that sort of terrain this week.

But there is something spectacular about the sheer scale of the conspiracies that ordinary people in the region imagine are confected in the world. Provincial Turkey in the weeks after 9/11 was fascinating. Of course, the educated provincial secular élite scoffed at the theories and it was generally a fascinating time to hang out with them and talk about the world. But among the ordinary Mehmets on the Yenişehir omnibus, an awful lot happily believed that “Amerika kendini yaptı“ (America did it itself) and “Hiç Yahudi o sabah işe gitmiş“ (they say none of the Jews went to work that morning). Not all of them believed that sort of tripe, by any matter of means, but a lot.

Hussein Ibish has a brilliant piece, Baghdadi Denial Syndrome, on the atonishing unwillingness among Sunnis, across ethnic and national lines, to believe that ISIS can’t possibly be a real phenomenon. Many refuse to believe that Sunni Muslims could be responsible for the sort of maiming/crucifying/baby-starving antics that ISIS gets up to. In a way, that’s sort of sweet: it’s a counter to the Daily Mail coverage that mutters behind it’s hand, you know, they’re all secretly a bit like Abu Hamza. But it’s still nuts, and damagingly, self-righteously, nuts in that it transfers the blame for all problems to other people like Westerners, Jews and Shi’ites sets Sunni Islam on a non-tenable moral pedestal in the process. Continue reading →

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BBC News Report – Good Friday Agreement Referendum Results

Posted on August 12, 2014 by Gerry Lynch

BBC News report from referendum results day 1998. A very youthful me briefly appears in in the background 34 seconds in. Paisley being a bad tempered bad loser in denial is particularly choice.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORZDh30BYLw&w=560&h=315]

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Feast of the Transfiguration: Thousands Face Death on the Mountain

Posted on August 6, 2014 by Gerry Lynch

Mountains are somewhere apart from the mainstream of the world. They are often gorgeous, above the general fray of life, intensitying the beauty and hiding the ugly side of reality on the ground in the vistas they command. Approached wrongly, or in difficult conditions, they can be places of death.

Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration, when Christians remember the pilgrimage of Christ with Peter, James and John – up an unknown mountain, but probably Hermon or Tabor. The prophets Elijah and Moses appear to them, and Christ’s face and clothes are transformed, and begin to radiate light. God the Father’s disembodied voice pronounces Christ as his son, recapitulating his baptism in the Jordan, and the episode is often held to mark a turning point in Christ’s journey, where it begins to run towards its culmination in Jerusalem.

The mountains of Galilee, on one of which the incident took place, sit at one end of an arc from the mountains of Kurdistan. On a straight line, about 500 miles of flat Syrian desert separate them, desert which for three years, since the start of the Syrian Civil War, been one of the most violent battlefields on the planet.

Two months ago, Syria’s torment blew back across the border into Iraq with a vengeance. The self-styled “Islamic State” has proclaimed itself the resurrection of Sunni Islam’s Caliphate, in abeyance since the collapse of the Ottoman dynasty 90 years ago. In the past few weeks, ISIS has made a serious advance from the Sunni heartlands of West-Central Iraq into the ethnic and religious kaleidoscope of the Far North. Continue reading →

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Interesting posts: autism, WW1, threats to liberal democracy, Iran

Posted on August 5, 2014 by Gerry Lynch

Some great writing around at the moment, too much to keep up with sometimes. Here’s some of the best.

The Kids Who Beat Autism – New York Times

I always worry about articles like this giving false hope to people. Some kids develop quite normally after autism in early childhood. But most don’t. We don’t understand autism very well, or even if it’s a condition or series of entirely unrelated conditions masquerading under shared syndrome name.

Which means I love the way this piece ended, with words from a parent whose son remains, in adulthood, severely impaired in terms of communications and who will never live independently.

“At some point,” she told me, “I realized he was never going to be normal. He’s his own normal. And I realized Matthew’s autism wasn’t the enemy; it’s what he is. I had to make peace with that. If Matthew was still unhappy, I’d still be fighting. But he’s happy. Frankly, he’s happier than a lot of typically developing kids his age. And we get a lot of joy from him. He’s very cuddly. He gives us endless kisses. I consider all that a victory.”

As somebody said, being normal is overrated. Being happy and giving love to the people who care about you most is the most useful thing any of us can do. Matthew clearly lives a life of great worth, however ‘unsuccessful’ it might be by worldly standards.

How The Great War Razed East Africa – Africa Research Institute Continue reading →

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Iraqi Christians in Parliament Square

Posted on July 29, 2014 by Gerry Lynch

Parly Sq 2I attended the national demonstration on the persecution of Iraqi Christians in Parliament Square, London on Saturday 26 July. There was a large turnout of Iraqi and other Middle Eastern Christians, a healthy and welcome presence of Iraqi Muslims, a disappointingly small number of British Christians who looked like their ancestry was from these islands and I don’t think I met a secular liberal there.

One must be very careful not to play “my conflict is more worthy than your conflict” – the Middle East is full of tragic situations at the moment – but the limited media coverage and public awareness of the plight of Middle Eastern Christians is dispiriting.

I have a few cyber-artefacts of the day.

Full gallery of 38 photos on Facebook.

Audio of demonstrators praying the Rosary in Arabic on Tumblr – sorry, poor quality. This is probably the last time I’ll use the recorder on my old HTC One!

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Prisoners of Conscience on St John the Baptist’s Day

Posted on June 24, 2014 by Gerry Lynch

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gxMq7s0ELE

I always had a good appetite as a child, getting stuck into seconds and more whenever I had the chance. My mother, observing this, would often remark, “Son, you’d eat the head of John the Baptist.”

John the Baptist’s messy end is one of the best known of Bible stories. Like most Gospel stories, it is a short narrative and doesn’t go in for detailed descriptions of personalities and motives. As so often, much of the popular memory of the story doesn’t come from Scripture at all.

Oscar Wilde’s grotesquely brilliant play Salomé, later turned into the first true 20th Century opera by Richard Strauss and then into a Holywood epic by Columbia Pictures, has added much to the popular perception of John the Baptist’s death, even among those who have never seen any. Scripture does not record the nymphomaniac, borderline necrophiliac, Salomé of Wilde, Strauss, and Rita Heyworth, but instead a girl very much under the thumb of a ruthless mother with a personal grudge against John because of his uncompromising sexual moralism. Continue reading →

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Why is Cathedral Evensong Growing and What Does It Mean?

Posted on June 5, 2014 by Gerry Lynch

This piece appeared in the May-June 2014 edition of Salisbury Cathedral News

I’ve always preferred the intimate parish church community to a cathedral’s grandeur. I came to mature faith in Belfast’s city centre parish of St. George’s, walking past the door of the Cathedral to do so.

Since arriving in Salisbury last summer, I’ve yet to attend a Cathedral Sunday service: the Lord’s Day finds me across the Ring Road, inhaling incense as an altar server at St. Martin’s.

But I’m addicted to weekday Choral Evensong. In a ‘bad’ week, I get to the Cathedral twice; in a good week, every night. And I’m not alone. The recent report on church growth confirmed that weekday Cathedral congregations are the fasting growing part of the C of E.

Some say the anonymity appeals; others that Evensong congregations want a free recital without ‘real’ religion. I think that’s true only in small part.

We Anglicans are reticent about celebrating our strengths. I see weekday Evensong as ecumenical, interfaith and vital for a growing, healthy, Church.

For many visitors to this country, Choral Evensong at one of our great Cathedrals is their only experience of the Church of England. Many come from countries where Anglicanism barely exists. It can be hard to explain our hybrid Catholic/Protestant identity to a Spanish Catholic or Latvian Lutheran with limited English. Evensong says all that is usually required.

That is just as true for people of other faiths or none. Choral Evensong has for good reason been described as ‘the atheist’s favourite worship’. It gives much and demands little. A Muslim or Buddhist can simply sit back and luxuriate in the glory of what our Creator has wrought in the world and in humanity.

As ‘success’ for the Church is often defined as convincing people intellectually of the truth of Christianity, Evensong is countercultural. It allows God to speak in beauty directly to people’s hearts.

An unacknowledged reason for weekday Evensong’s success is its time slot. Many young adults need to work on Sundays to fund their education. Divorced parents drive for hours to be with their kids on Sundays, getting home late and tired; kids want to hang out with Mum or Dad, not go to church. We may lament the end of the traditional Sunday, but these trends are here to stay.

Evensong is not necessarily undemanding. It gives tremendous space for daily study of Scripture, and disciplined prayer sustaining a life of Christian service.

Maybe Choral Evensong needs to grow in depth and geography. Can we help more parish churches provide a weekday Evensong, perhaps weekly in larger towns and monthly in rural areas? And can we help people grow in depth and knowledge of faith when we see them mainly across the choir on Tuesday nights, and never on a Sunday?

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The Good Samaritan Visits North Belfast

Posted on May 29, 2014 by Gerry Lynch

And, behold, a certain pastor stood up, and tempted him, saying, Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?

He said unto him, What is written in the law? how readest thou?

And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.

And he said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live.

But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?

And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down the Whitewell Road, from Bellevue to Greencastle, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead. Continue reading →

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In response to Owen Jones: In Defence of the Establishment of the Church of England

Posted on April 23, 2014 by Gerry Lynch

Owen Jones’ appeal for the separation of church and state showed a deep respect for Christianity in general and the Church of England in particular. But he failed to explain how and why disestablishment would be an improvement. Throughout the article, I only read one serious criticism of the status quo: that it is an ‘anachronism’.

Perhaps so – the relationship between Church and state in Britain is certainly illogical. The monarch swears in the Coronation Oath to maintain the “Protestant Reformed Religion established by law”, but Britain doesn’t have an established Church. England has one, and Scotland has a different one, more thoroughgoingly Protestant than the curious part-Catholic hybrid south of the border. No kirk celebrated Holy Week like we did at St Martin’s in Salisbury, with prostrations before the Blessed Sacrament and kissing of the cross. Wales, like Northern Ireland, gets by without an established church.

Indeed Northern Ireland argues against disestablishment as a means of promoting good relations between faith communities. The Church of Ireland was disestablished fifty years before Northern Ireland’s creation, and was in any case the minority Protestant tradition in the new state. That didn’t prevent a horrendous history of state-sanctioned anti-Catholic discrimination, nor a descent into thirty years of ethno-religious violence. Continue reading →

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