A Guy in the Pew

My wife lived and worked in Colombia for many years, including a stint at the U.S. Embassy in Bogata, and then spent a decade in Washington, D.C. working on Colombia policy, with a focus on cocaine and heroin trafficking. We met when we both worked at the White House Office of National Drug Control Strategy. (My wife and I jokingly tell people that we met doing drugs at the White House). One of our great frustrations has always been the assumption by many of our progressive friends that FARC (the major guerrilla group in Colombia) is a legitimate leftist revolutionary movement. It is is not. It is a group of thugs. (What else do you call an organization that kidnaps children?) I was therefore pleased to see that Ben Whitford wrote a commentary for the Guardian Comment is Free group blog that makes this very point. Some highlights: While the group's leaders still profess to share Chávez's leftist - and, increasingly, Bolivarian - ideals, the truth is that these days Farc is les...

Martin Marty has a very interesting commentary on the Economist cover story on religion: The Economist, our favorite weekly (still-)news magazine, published a keeper on November 3rd in the form of a sixteen-page "special report on religion and public life." As many of you know, our Center's early "public religion" efforts presumed that we would have to squint when searching for tiny, fine-print media references to religion. This week again, however, we are nearly blinded by the coverage. The editors drew on substantial figures, from old-pro sociologist Peter Berger, who provided the liveliest lines, to younger-pro Philip Jenkins, currently the most notable interpreter of what global Christianity means for the U.S. A key Berger line: "We made a category mistake. We thought that the relationship was between modernisation and secularisation. In fact it was between modernisation and pluralism." Because pluralism implies "choice," it becomes a ma...

Okay, this graphic is striking. It shows that the United States was the one nation listed most often as the closest ally and biggest threat in the 2007 Pew Global Survey. Here is the Pew analysis: The polling also underscores the lack of international consensus about the world order reported in this year's first Global Attitudes report. Notably, the United States is named about as often as a close ally as it is named the biggest threat by respondents in the 47-nation survey. No other single country or international institution was as frequently cited as a top ally or threat, including Iran. . . . The United States is singled out as a close ally by people in many African nations and in Israel and Kuwait, where the United States remains popular. The publics of two of America's closest allies, Great Britain and Canada, also regard the United States as their closest ally, despite their criticism of U.S. foreign policies. By contrast, the publics in many predominately Muslim cou...

Suggesting that our enemies may, in fact, be their own worst enemy, the 2007 Pew Global Survey, released today, is showing a significant decline in support for suicide bombing and other attacks on innocent lives. the sole exception appears to be among Palestinians: Among the most striking trends in predominantly Muslim nations is the continuing decline in the number saying that suicide bombing and other forms of violence against civilians are justifiable in the defense of Islam. In Lebanon, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Indonesia, the proportion of Muslims who view suicide bombing and other attacks against civilians as being often or sometimes justified has declined by half or more over the past five years. Wide majorities say such attacks are, at most, rarely acceptable. However, this is decidedly not the case in the Palestinian territories. Fully 70% of Palestinians believe that suicide bombings against civilians can be often or sometimes justified, a position starkly at odds with Muslim...

The American Association for the Advancement of Science has announced an innovative way of letting the Sudanese Government know that the world is indeed watching the action in Darfur. Here is the S cience Daily report : A pioneering AAAS program that provides technical expertise to human rights groups is helping Amnesty International USA with a new online effort to monitor threatened settlements in the war-torn Darfur region of Sudan and provide evidence of destroyed villages. High-resolution commercial satellite images, analyzed by AAAS researchers, will be posted after 12:01 a.m. U.S. Eastern Time Wednesday, 6 June to Amnesty International's new "Eyes on Darfur" Web site (http://www.eyesondarfur.org). The project is the first effort by a human rights group to use satellite cameras to help protect vulnerable populations. It will allow computer users around the globe to visually track the status of settlements Amnesty International considers possible targets of attack. ...