When Your Pen Pal Is A Terrorist

Terrorism expert J.M. Berger reflects on the death of 28-year-old American jihadist Omar Hammami, who once live-tweeted an attempt on his life. Berger forged a mutual respect with Hammami, who was based in Somalia and eventually murdered by al-Shabab as a heretical foreign fighter:

I wanted to know more about why al-Shabab was trying to kill him, but I didn’t want to promote his clearly pro-al Qaeda Twitter account by engaging with him in front of the world. So I sent him a direct message (DM) using Twitter’s system for private communication and asked him to email me. His reply was the start of something — exactly what wasn’t clear at the time, and to some extent, still isn’t. Omar – and it was Omar, although he would not admit it for endless months – was suspicious at first. “You are too far on the dark side, buddy” was the subject line of his first email. …

Our conversations turned more ideological, pushing and pulling over terrorism and the intentional targeting of civilians, the significance of the Arab Spring, and Omar’s belief that the United States was oppressing Muslims around the world. We sparred over whether America had a national security interest in the establishment of an Islamic caliphate, one of his pet obsessions. He argued that the United States feared the caliphate; I argued that we wouldn’t much care as long as terrorism wasn’t the method for its establishment. Just when the conversation would start to get interesting, he would pull back. …

My complicated feelings about our relationship had been on a slow boil for some time. I continued to try to convince him to give himself up to U.S. authorities. He didn’t want to spend life in prison, he said. I told him he might be able to get a better deal than that, but he wasn’t interested. At one point, he said the only way he would come back to the United States was “in a body bag.”

The Best Of The Dish Today

This was a day the new Pope proved how remarkable he is – simply for speaking the way Jesus spoke. No ideologies, no rigid certainties, committed to community, engaged with the margins, speaking of mercy, mercy, mercy. Readers will, I hope, forgive me for some of the gushing. But those 12,000 words – after such a long, dark period of rigid enforcement of orthodoxy, after the hideous conflation of the great truths of the Church with the political agendas of the far right, after an American hierarchy obviously more interested in control than in love – came like a shower in the desert. All the intimations we had seen since his papacy began, the hints and guesses, emerged in language as powerful as it was accessible.

My immediate reflections are here; my parsing of the text is here. Responses from others can be found here. A Mozart piece by the Pope’s favorite pianist, Clara Haskill, is above.

Some tempers flared over the terrible tragedy of Matthew Shepard; and a new front opened quite clearly in Syria – now a war between Assad, the Free Syrian Army and the most brutal of Sunni Jihadists. John McCain’s stunt in the Russian online media was as buffoonish as it was deeply unhelpful to resolving the question of Syria’s chemical stockpiles. And Stephen Colbert had the last laugh on me in the editing room.

The most popular post of the day was “The Rebirth of Catholicism.” The second most popular was “This Extraordinary Pope.”

See you later tonight at 10 pm on AC360 Later and in the morning.

A Pope For The Millennial Generation

Michael O’Loughlin, a young gay Catholic, feels the impact Francis is already having on his peers:

At first, I found it odd, though admittedly pleasing, how the secular media covered Pope Francis with such obvious admiration. Reddit and BuzzFeed both featured the pope, often in a positive light, unusual for sites geared toward younger, agnostic-ish crowds. NPR and the New York Times were reporting on what the bishop of Rome had to say the economy, peace, and other issues of importance on a regular basis. MSNBC suggested he was the best pope ever. Even John Stewart couldn’t help but be moved.

But at second glance, it’s all so obvious. Pope Francis is so revolutionary, so engrossing, because he is living out Gospel values of love, mercy, and compassion. These values are often antithetical to those of the world, so it moves us when people in power embody them.

People sometimes ask how I can remain in the church when it’s so hostile to gay people. I explain that the church is simply an instrument I use to understand and attempt to live out the Gospel. Pope Francis recognizes this.

My initial thoughts on the Pope’s remarkable interview here; my longer take here. A roundup of reaction around the web here. An elegant response from a reader here.

The Danger Of Drone Assassins

Angela Merkel’s recent encounter with an UAV (seen above) was a bit of harmless political theater from Germany’s Pirate Party, but Sean Gallagher is worried:

While Merkel smirked off the drone in Dresden, even a small explosive charge or grenade aboard a similar drone would have been catastrophic—and defending against such attacks is difficult at best.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) researchers from TNO Defense Research, an organization in The Netherlands, recently showed the real risk of that sort of attack, demonstrating that terrorists and insurgents could effectively use current commercial and do-it-yourself drones as weapons in a number of scenarios, including one much like the Dresden event. … Because of their size, their low flying altitude, and their relatively low speed, mini-UAVs are particularly hard to detect—especially in an urban environment, the researchers found. Even if they are detected, identifying whether they’re a threat or not is still an issue, because it’s difficult to determine whether they’re armed or just carrying a camera.

And Gallagher notes that “just shooting down drones in a crowded urban environment could cause more damage than the drones themselves.”

Related To The Original

In an interview, the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, whose novel Seiobo There Below is about to be released in English, describes how he views translation:

The translated work, in my opinion, is in no way to be identified with the original in a different language. That is an absurdity. The translated work is the work of the translator, not the author. The author’s work is that which comprises the story as written in the original language. The translated work is a new work in the language deployed by the translator, a work of which the translator is the composer, and resembles – more or less, as members of a family resemble each other – the original work. The author simply looks on and reads: the text is familiar, occasionally very familiar, to him and he is delighted when it looks good, and rages when it looks bad.

Mission Accomplie?

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Hopefully Hollande didn’t just pull a Dubya, proclaiming, “We have won this war; we have chased out the terrorists” in Mali:

France has begun withdrawing some of the 4,000 troops it deployed to Mali last winter, and plans to pull more out as a U.N. peacekeeping force increases its presence in the country. Hollande is certainly winding down his war. But is it won, as he claimed today?

The jihadi rebels in Mali seem to have disappeared as much they were defeated. Some fled into the Central African Republic, where they’re accused of committing massacres. Others have fled to Niger, Algeria, and Libya, leaving behind weapons caches buried in the Sahara. “They absolutely refuse to fight us,” a French soldier told the Wall Street Journal. Now those combat-veteran jihadists are waiting in the wings, still staging occasional attacks — like the one that occurred right after FP’s Yochi Dreazen left Mali, when a roadside bomb killed two Malian soldiers in Gao — and waiting for their moment to stage a comeback.

(Photo: President Francois Hollande of France delivers a speech during the inauguration of Mali’s new president, on September 19, 2013, at the March 26 stadium in Bamako. Leaders from across Africa and France watched the inauguration of Mali President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita in front of thousands of his supporters today as the nation entered a new era of democracy after months of political chaos. By Issouf Sanogo/AFP/Getty Images)

Washington In Reruns

Waldman vents:

What … can I add about the latest twist in the pending government shutdown? How many different ways are there to say that the Tea Party Republicans are both crazy and stupid? How often can you point out that John Boehner is pathetically weak, quite possibly the most ineffectual Speaker in the history of the House of Representatives? How many times can you remind people of all the awful things that would happen if the government shuts down and/or we don’t raise the debt ceiling? How many times can you scream at Republicans that they are never, ever, ever going to repeal the Affordable Care Act so they should just give it the hell up already? How many times can you cry that this would be an insane way to run a junior-high student council, much less the government of the mightiest nation on earth?

The Rebirth Of Catholicism, Ctd

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A reader responds to the incredible interview with Pope Francis released today:

After reading the Pope’s remarkable interview, I noticed that James Martin, an editor at America and himself a Jesuit priest, had a short companion piece about preparing the interview for publication. This comment jumped out at me:

Our review process was somewhere between editing and spiritual reading.  One editor said that it was the first time she ever found herself in tears over a galley.

What a testament to the power of the Pope’s words – “in tears over a galley.” I felt much the same way reading it, disarmed from the very start by the sincerity of his own declaration of sinfulness, and moved by how clearly he feels the mercy of Jesus in his own life. You can tell this was not a perfunctory concession, like saying, well, nobody is perfect. His humility, his hesitation to judge, his approach to the life of the Church – all stem from the posture established in the first question: “Who is Jorge Mario Bergoglio?” His reply? “I am a sinner whom the Lord has looked upon.”

There is so much to say about this interview – who knew he loves Dostoevsky and Hopkins? – but this passage in particular struck me as worth noting:

“I see clearly … that the thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds, heal the wounds…. And you have to start from the ground up.

“The church sometimes has locked itself up in small things, in small-minded rules. The most important thing is the first proclamation: Jesus Christ has saved you. And the ministers of the church must be ministers of mercy above all.

There is so much suffering in the world, so much pain – not just because of war and poverty, but through depression and loneliness, broken homes and strained families. The message of forgiveness and mercy brought by Jesus, the simple words, “God is Love,” seem more needed, more fresh and powerful, than ever. The pain I feel at seeing the Church, and Christianity more broadly, turned into an adjacency of the culture wars and mainly understood as the purveyor of backwards, spite-filled moralizing, is because, as Francis argues, the Church should be “a field hospital after battle.” The Church should be a refuge, a place for the walking wounded to stumble into and receive love and mercy and care, without preconditions or expectations. As he puts it, you heal wounds, then you can talk about everything else. You lead with love, not legalism. I imagine Francis, smiling as he does, holding his arms open and saying, “Jesus has saved you, you are loved, come join us!” People need to know that when they walk through church doors, they are loved unconditionally. That it is a safe place, a place where there only is grace, where they are met exactly where they are, joined not by their moral superiors, but by fellow sufferers and sinners – people as much the casualty of the battled called life as they are.

The world needs Christianity, the message of Jesus, more than ever. You can see and feel it everywhere – people, young people especially, are hungry for meaning, are desperate for kindness in a world of strife. I’m amazed at how Pope Francis has met this moment, has felt and responded to this need. I don’t know when, or if, the Church will shift its position on, say, homosexuality. I think the Church will change, and I think Francis knows you can’t change your rhetoric about the issue this drastically without eventually changing substance, too — the cognitive dissonance is just too great. But that, really, is a secondary issue. “We can talk about everything else.” Or, as Francis said, “You have to start from the ground up.” What is that ground? Jesus himself, Love incarnate, friend to the sinner and outcast. That is the real story of Francis – his recognition that first things must be put first, that if the Church becomes a hospital for the wounded, a place of love and healing, then everything else will come in time. How Francis beautifully puts it:

I dream of a church that is a mother and shepherdess. The church’s ministers must be merciful, take responsibility for the people and accompany them like the good Samaritan, who washes, cleans and raises up his neighbor. This is pure Gospel. God is greater than sin. The structural and organizational reforms are secondary—that is, they come afterward. The first reform must be the attitude. The ministers of the Gospel must be people who can warm the hearts of the people, who walk through the dark night with them, who know how to dialogue and to descend themselves into their people’s night, into the darkness, but without getting lost.

This is a man with his priorities straight – and the powerful response to that so far shows us, I think, just how much the message of Jesus, the “pure Gospel,” continues to fascinate and resonate, meeting human beings at the places of their deepest longings, needs, and hopes.

(Photo: Pope Francis smiles after his weekly general audience in St Peter’s square at the Vatican on June 12, 2013. By Alberto Pizzoli/AFP/Getty Images)

This Extraordinary Pope, Ctd

Thomas Reese declares, “I have never been prouder to be a Jesuit or prouder of my church or more surprised by the Spirit”:

For Francis, three words sum up the mission of Jesuits today: “Dialogue, discernment, frontier.” On the last point, he quoted Paul K43692CARAVAG 1VI’s speech about the Jesuits: “Wherever in the church—even in the most difficult and extreme fields, in the crossroads of ideologies, in the social trenches—there has been and is now conversation between the deepest desires of human beings and the perennial message of the Gospel, Jesuits have been and are there.”

Reading this interview gave me greater insight into my Jesuit vocation and into our Jesuit pope. What is clear is that he does not think like a classicist who sees the world in unchanging categories. He is a story teller like Jesus, not a philosopher. He thinks in narrative not philosophical principles. He thinks like a pastor understanding the history of the church but wanting to move with God’s people confidently into the future. He trusts that the Spirit is alive and well in the people of God.

James Martin nods:

Pope Francis is comfortable with gray.  In the interview, he speaks out against what he calls a “doctrinal security” and offers a gentle critique of those who “stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists.” Pope Francis asks Catholics to move away from a church that “locked itself up in small things, in small-minded rules.” Instead he invites Catholics, and invites the church, into the world of uncertainty, which is where most of us live anyway.

This is the world into which Jesus walked: the real world, in which people experience uncertainty and confront the need to make decisions.  It is the milieu of the everyday believer.  Jesus entered this world in the first century, and the church must be comfortable in that same world today.

Martin Longman feels odd praising the pontiff:

Pope Francis isn’t changing any doctrine with these kinds of remarks, but he is making a rather clean break with his two most recent predecessors, whose tone and emphasis was much more in tune with the Reaganite Right in this country. … I can’t say for sure how this new pope will influence American politics, but as a liberal I can say that it is a relief not to feel like the Vatican is fighting on behalf of my political opponents anymore. That’s not a comfortable feeling.

K-Lo glosses over the content and praises the tone:

The Francis factor, so to speak, is his focus on opening doors. How will anyone be open to Catholicism if they cannot get past knowledge of some of the prohibitions, without knowledge of the context, without invitation, without a love that compels them radiating from Christians? … That’s very much the Evangelical Catholicism George Weigel talks about, using that same Emmaus-road image, by my quick read. It’s the call of the Catholic to know Christ and make Him known, to set hearts ablaze. In this interview and by his daily witness and words, that’s what this pope is witnessing to, fascinating the world — which may misunderstand at times, as he reproposes some fundamentals and open doors of introduction and renewal.

Damon Linker throws some cold water:

[H]owever much those remarks signal a shift from the rhetorical style of popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, progressive Catholics need to understand that the change is, and is likely to remain, a matter of words.

Consider what the pope did not say. He didn’t say that homosexual acts are morally permissible. He didn’t say that abortion can be morally acceptable in certain (or any) circumstances. He didn’t say anything to indicate he was interested in revisiting Pope Paul’s 1968 reaffirmation of the church’s ban on artificial contraception. He didn’t imply that he’s interested in revising the church’s strictures against married priests. He certainly didn’t indicate an openness to permitting the ordination of women. The interview contains no sign that the pope is willing to budge on any of the items on the progressive Catholic wish-list of reforms.

Tim Stanley nods, adding, “Some will see this as rewriting doctrine, especially those who exist outside the Church and have absolutely no intention of ever joining”:

The Pope has called for a rejection of a focus on “issues”. But, ironically, it’ll be liberals obsessed with “issues” who pay attention and embrace his message – all those folks who for years have been campaigning for the Catholic Church to jettison Catholicism and embrace women priests, homosexuality, contraception etc. The folks who loathed Benedict – people who willfully interpreted his words as ultra-conservative and who now interpret Francis’ language and hopefully liberal. In particular, those who loathe the traditional Mass will thrill at his warning that it must not develop into an “ideology”. No it must not. It hasn’t. It never will. Frankly, on this issue, I genuinely don’t know what my Pope is talking about.

That last sentence rings true, doesn’t it?

The Rebirth Of Catholicism

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I am, I must confess, still reeling from Pope Francis’ new, lengthy and remarkable interview. I can barely believe that these words – so redolent of Jesus’ – are coming from the new Bishop of Rome, after so long an absence. Although the Pope is unfailingly respectful of his predecessor, let no one doubt the sharpness of Francis’ turn away from the dead end of Benedict. His message is as different as the context. Where Benedict, draped in ornate vestments, spoke from the grand edifice of the Vatican, Francis is in the same simple hostel in which he was ensconced during the Papal Conclave. Why?

Community. I was always looking for a community. I did not see myself as a priest on my own. I need a community. And you can tell this by the fact that I am here in Santa Marta. At the time of the conclave I lived in Room 207. (The rooms were assigned by drawing lots.) This room where we are now was a guest room. I chose to live here, in Room 201, because when I took possession of the papal apartment, inside myself I distinctly heard a ‘no.’ The papal apartment in the Apostolic Palace is not luxurious. It is old, tastefully decorated and large, but not luxurious. But in the end it is like an inverted funnel. It is big and spacious, but the entrance is really tight. People can come only in dribs and drabs, and I cannot live without people. I need to live my life with others.

An inverted funnel, which he now wants open to the world and to his fellow human beings. And there is throughout a premise of humility, doubt, mystery, openness to new things. How many times have you heard a Pope be as self-critical in retrospect as this:

My authoritarian and quick manner of making decisions led me to have serious problems and to be accused of being ultraconservative. I lived a time of great interior crisis when I was in Cordova. To be sure, I have never been like Blessed Imelda [a goody-goody], but I have never been a right-winger. It was my authoritarian way of making decisions that created problems.

And when at the outset of the interviews he is asked simply who he is, he replies

I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner.

He speaks of Carravagio’s painting ‘The Calling of St. Matthew” (see above):

That finger of Jesus, pointing at Matthew. That’s me. I feel like him. Like Matthew. It is the gesture of Matthew that strikes me: he holds on to his money as if to say, ‘No, not me! No, this money is mine.’ Here, this is me, a sinner on whom the Lord has turned his gaze.

But, for me, the most powerful argument Francis makes is about what Christianity is. It is not, in the end, about certainty. It is about faith as alive and open in doubt:

In this quest to seek and find God in all things there is still an area of uncertainty. There must be. If a person says that he met God with total certainty and is not touched by a margin of uncertainty, then this is not good. For me, this is an important key. If one has the answers to all the questions—that is the proof that God is not with him. It means that he is a false prophet using religion for himself. The great leaders of the people of God, like Moses, have always left room for doubt. You must leave room for the Lord, not for our certainties; we must be humble. Uncertainty is in every true discernment that is open to finding confirmation in spiritual consolation.

Our life is not given to us like an opera libretto, in which all is written down; but it means going, walking, doing, searching, seeing … We must enter into the adventure of the quest for meeting God; we must let God search and encounter us.

This profound mystery – that as soon as we claim certainty about the nature of God, we have lost the meaning of the nature of God – is at the heart of a Christian’s openness to the divine. Now think of this in contrast to the unrelenting fixation of John Paul II and Benedict XVI on enforcing total uniformity in even the tiniest details of sometimes esoteric doctrine, to banish debate entirely, to assert with more and more rigidity the impermissibility of dissent or doubt among the people of God. In the end, that rigidity is a neurosis, not a living faith. And to those who argue that a more open view of faith-in-doubt is tantamount to anarchy, to relativism, even to nihilism, Francis has a simple answer. No, it is not necessarily about these things, although they remain dangers. What makes all this work is what the Jesuits have long called “discernment.”

The wisdom of discernment redeems the necessary ambiguity of life and helps us find the most appropriate means, which do not always coincide with what looks great and strong. The Society of Jesus can be described only in narrative form. Only in narrative form do you discern, not in a philosophical or theological explanation, which allows you rather to discuss … The mystical dimension of discernment never defines its edges and does not complete the thought. The Jesuit must be a person whose thought is incomplete, in the sense of open-ended thinking.

Faith is not in the head; it is in the soul and heart and body. It is our acting in the world, not our debating the finer parts of infallible doctrine in an “inverted funnel”. And look how Francis uses the term “infallible.” He uses it not to refer to the papacy, but to the people of God, you and me, and not in terms of possession of the truth, but rather the open search for it:

The church is the people of God on the journey through history, with joys and sorrows. Thinking with the church, therefore, is my way of being a part of this people. And all the faithful, considered as a whole, are infallible in matters of belief, and the people display this infallibilitas in credendo, this infallibility in believing, through a supernatural sense of the faith of all the people walking together. This is what I understand today as the ‘thinking with the church’ of which St. Ignatius speaks. When the dialogue among the people and the bishops and the pope goes down this road and is genuine, then it is assisted by the Holy Spirit. So this thinking with the church does not concern theologians only.

This is the core message of the Second Vatican Council that John Paul II and Benedict XVI did their utmost to turn back in favor of papal authority. The hierarchy is not the whole church, just a part of it, in community with all the faithful. And he uses the example of the Blessed Virgin to buttress his point:

This is how it is with Mary: If you want to know who she is, you ask theologians; if you want to know how to love her, you have to ask the people. In turn, Mary loved Jesus with the heart of the people, as we read in the Magnificat. We should not even think, therefore, that ‘thinking with the church’ means only thinking with the hierarchy of the church.

And how we live is the only true expression of what we believe. Here is the rebuke to the theocons and their project:

If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist, if he wants everything clear and safe, then he will find nothing. Tradition and memory of the past must help us to have the courage to open up new areas to God. Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‘security,’ those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists­—they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies.

And where is real faith?

I see the holiness in the patience of the people of God: a woman who is raising children, a man who works to bring home the bread, the sick, the elderly priests who have so many wounds but have a smile on their faces because they served the Lord, the sisters who work hard and live a hidden sanctity. This is for me the common sanctity. I often associate sanctity with patience: not only patience as hypomoné [the New Testament Greek word], taking charge of the events and circumstances of life, but also as a constancy in going forward, day by day. This is the sanctity of the militant church also mentioned by St. Ignatius. This was the sanctity of my parents: my dad, my mom, my grandmother Rosa who loved ​​me so much. In my breviary I have the last will of my grandmother Rosa, and I read it often. For me it is like a prayer. She is a saint who has suffered so much, also spiritually, and yet always went forward with courage.

My own beloved grandmother was a saint of a similar kind. I learned so much about Jesus from simply observing her. She lived a hard life, the seventh of thirteen children raising four of her own with no formal education and earning money cleaning the houses of priests. I can never forget her reaching down on the sidewalks to pick up cigarette butts and teasing the last tobacco out of them to make a new one for her disabled husband. I remember her simple warmth and love for me. I recall watching her get lost in the Rosary at Mass – and realizing that however much education I ever got – more than she could comprehend – none of it could give me the faith she had and lived so effortlessly.

I hear her faith in the words of this new Pope: a faith of simplicity and openness, a faith that caused her not to live in the past or future, but now. As Francis says:

There is a temptation to seek God in the past or in a possible future. God is certainly in the past because we can see the footprints. And God is also in the future as a promise. But the ‘concrete’ God, so to speak, is today … We must not focus on occupying the spaces where power is exercised, but rather on starting long-run historical processes. We must initiate processes rather than occupy spaces…  Our life is not given to us like an opera libretto, in which all is written down; but it means going, walking, doing, searching, seeing…. We must enter into the adventure of the quest for meeting God; we must let God search and encounter us. Because God is first; God is always first and makes the first move.

And it seems that God has again made His move in a world that desperately needs Him; and His new servant, his new prophet, is Francis.