Rev. Danny Fisher

Courtesy of our dear friend Wanda Weinberger: the Los Angeles Times offers a sneak peek of Shepard Fairey’s latest campaign poster…

Both Amnesty International and Avaaz.org have new urgent actions about Iran, demanding that human rights defenders be released from detention and the government stop its crackdown. Please take a few seconds to do them.

I’ll be on the New Jersey Shore until Sunday, celebrating my paternal grandmother’s 80th birthday with all my family on that side. I might be on the computer at some point, but, in case not, I thought I’d give you all a heads-up.

I’m looking forward to seeing the family and being on the Shore. Good people there, as you might have heard…

Reuters reports that His Holiness the Dalai Lama recently “encouraged Tibetans in exile to embrace the democratic system of electing a leader, saying it was essential to keep step with the larger world and to ensure the continuity of their government.”

In a video clip shown to hundreds of monks, nuns and lay people in the northern Indian hill town of Dharamsala late on Saturday, the 73-year-old also said it was no longer essential to thrust spiritual and political leadership on one person.

“The Dalai Lamas held temporal and spiritual leadership over the last 400-500 years. It may have been quite useful. But that period is over,” the Nobel Prize winner said in the clip, according to a translated transcript.

“Today, it is clear to the whole world that democracy is the best system despite its minor negativities. That is why it is important that Tibetans also move with the larger world community,” he said.

The Dalai Lama has suggested before it is up to Tibetans whether they continue with the spiritual institution after he dies, and could order an election among Tibetans abroad.

The Dalai Lama could also choose a successor himself from members of his government-in-exile, or a college of senior lamas could pick someone from within its ranks, removing the mysticism of the traditional selection process.

“When we put the whole responsibility in the person of the Dalai Lama, it is dangerous … it is appropriate that a democratically elected leader lead a people’s movement,” he said.

“In reality, a change is happening in the responsibility of the Dalai Lama as the temporal and spiritual leader. This, I think, is very good … a religious leader having to assume political leadership, that period is over,” he said.

Read the article in full here.

[Photo by Jacky Naegelen for Reuters. "Exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama listens after his arrival at Roissy Charles de Gaulle airport near Paris on June 6, 2009."]

Our good friend and past interviewee Erick D. White commented recently on that Associated Press story I blogged about, which speculated that the growing number of attacks in southern Thailand might threaten a larger conflict between Buddhists and Muslims in the region. It seemed to me that what Erick said deserved more prominent placement, so I’ve reposted his comments here:

The majority of those who have died in the South are Muslims at the hands of the insurgency. While there are inklings of the conflict taking on a Buddhist vs. Muslim character – and this is a meme that the insurgency would like to spread – it is mostly just a poor, easy hook that the international press employs. The insurgents attack all who are opposed to their project, Muslim or Buddhist. It remains, as far as we can tell, a very local affair (i.e. no international jihad) and primarily an ethno-nationalist insurgency.

[...]

From the executive summary of the International Crisis Group:

“While Thai leaders are preoccupied with turmoil in Bangkok, the insurgency in the South continues to recruit young Malay Muslims, especially from private Islamic schools. These institutions are central to maintenance of Malay Muslim identity, and many students are receptive to the call to take up arms against the state. This is not a struggle in solidarity with global jihad, rather an ethno-nationalist insurgency with its own version of history aimed at reclaiming what was once the independent sultanate of Patani. Human rights abuses by the Thai government and security forces have only fuelled this secessionist fervour, and policies that centralise power in the capital have undermined a regional political solution. Changing these policies and practices is essential as the government tries to respond to the insurgents’ grievances in order to bring long-lasting peace to the region.”

“Policymakers should be cautious of quick fixes to what is a highly complex conflict. This struggle, nominally between a Thai Buddhist state and a Malay Muslim insurgency, targets civilians of all religions. More than 3,400 people have been killed since the violence surged in 2004. There are more dead Muslim victims than Buddhists, and many of the slain Muslims were marked as “traitors” to Islam. Insurgents draw on local culture to invoke traditional oaths to discipline their own ranks, though such practices alienate them from the religious purists attached to the global jihad. Ancient charms and spells are applied to protect fighters from harm, co-existing with YouTube videos and propaganda circulated on VCDs. Despite the leap into cyberspace, the insurgency has, for the most part, restricted itself to the geographic boundaries of the three southernmost border provinces.

As earlier Crisis Group reports have stressed, the movement shows little influence of Salafi jihadism, the ideology followed by al-Qaeda and the Indonesia-based regional jihadi group Jemaah Islamiyah. Some insurgents follow a mystical variant of Shafi‘i Islam and are actively hostile to the puritanism of what they term “Wahhabis”. Although a few Malaysians have been arrested in southern Thailand for trying to join the struggle, there is no evidence of significant involvement of foreign jihadi groups. While politically distinct, the movement uses the language of Islam and jihad to frame its struggle, as such words resonate with its membership and the constituencies it seeks to sway.”

It’s worth reading the whole executive summary, or even the report. It’s not clear the reporters did.

http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=6170&l=1