May 31, 2007 | 4:44 pm

Did religious differences lead to ghastly murders?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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Throughout history, the answer to that question has often been yes. But it’s not yet clear whether a bad breakup based on religious differences led to the gruesome murders of an OC Hindu family. It’s just what police are suggesting. From the LA Times:

She was a college freshman whose Hindu family didn’t believe in dating before marriage. He was a Muslim, which troubled her parents, and they convinced her that he wasn’t the one.

Their breakup, investigators said, might have played a role in a string of vicious crimes that unfolded in Orange County last week: Her Anaheim Hills home was set ablaze, her mother savagely beaten and her father and sister killed. The victims had been strangled, bludgeoned, burned and stabbed, according to court records.

The young man, Iftekhar Murtaza, 22, of Van Nuys, was arrested last weekend at the Phoenix airport in connection with the slayings. He had left Southern California after investigators questioned him and was carrying a one-way ticket to Bangladesh.

Murtaza today waived his right to an extradition hearing in Arizona and will be returned to OC and charged with murder.

Hindus and Muslims have a recent history of hatred. Before the partition of India and the creation of Pakistan, fighting between the two religious groups claimed about half a million lives.

May 31, 2007 | 10:05 am

Long Beach MSA leader: ‘Blowing yourself up not something everyone has the courage to do’ *

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Ahmed Billoo is the product of an upper-middle-class Alhambra home. He grew up going to the local mosque on Fridays and holidays, playing sports with friends and enjoying the blessings of a comfortable American childhood. Twelve months from completing a business degree at Cal State Long Beach, Billoo, 22, is fully Muslim and American, the two locked hand in hand.

And yet he believes the righteousness of suicide bombers needs to be evaluated on a “case-by-case basis.”

“Muslim or not Muslim, we all fear death. Blowing yourself up is not something everyone can do or something that everyone has the courage to do,” said Billoo, the outgoing president of Long Beach’s Muslim Student Association. “But don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying we should all go around America doing that; Palestine is a different situation. There is a huge difference between saying we should do it and saying I’m going to be a suicide bomber. I just think it is something that Islam justifies.”

Far from alone, according to a report last week by the Pew Research Center, its first nationwide survey of Muslim Americans, about 26 percent of American Muslims ages 18 to 29 share Billoo’s sentiment to varying degrees. “I would have to say it’s actually like 60 or 65 percent of the youth,” Billoo added. “It’s very rare that I meet someone who says suicide bombings in Palestine are not justified.”

That is the opening for I story I have in today’s Jewish Journal. Read the rest of the story.

The focus of the Pew findings were positive: most U.S. Muslims are “mainstream and middle-class.” But responses to a question about whether suicide bombings against civilians are ever justified in defending Islam has sounded some alarms, adding to the Muslim American PR problem. Fears of Islamophobia are higher now than in the months after 9/11, and in predominantly Muslim countries, the “war on terror” is perceived as a “war on Islam.”

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May 30, 2007 | 3:11 pm

L.A.‘s famous philo-Semite

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

That’s Mark Paredes, a leader in the Mormon Church and the national director of Latino outreach for the American Jewish Congress. Paredes once worked for the Israeli consulate, and I met him there my second day at The Journal when he emceed an interfaith event celebrating the reopening of BYU’s Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies.

Paredes was unaware he had been profiled in this week’s Forward. Here is what Jennifer Siegel had to say:

At the seat of one of America’s largest communities of both Jews and Mormons, Paredes, 39, is working to build bridges between two communities that have longstanding ties but also a history of distrust. For years, Jewish leaders have called upon Mormon leaders to halt controversial posthumous baptisms of Jews by church members. Despite years of progress, the issue flared up again last December, when leaders of the L.A.-based Simon Wiesenthal Center discovered that the name of Wiesenthal, Holocaust survivor and famed Nazi hunter, appeared on the church’s baptism roll a year after his death in 2005.

The son of a white mother and black father, Paredes is working to counter negative feelings in the Jewish community through outreach that stresses Mormons’ historic support for Israel, and by sharing the information gleaned by their extensive genealogical research.

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Rabbi Gary Greenebaum, the Los Angeles-based interfaith director of the American Jewish Committee, calls Paredes a “wonderful breath of fresh air” who is building on a history of Jewish-Mormon interfaith work in the West.

 

When Paredes went to work for the consulate five years ago, The Jewish Journal‘s Tom Tugend wrote about him for JTA.

LOS ANGELES—Without much fear of contradiction, Mark Paredes observes, “I think I’m the only biracial Mormon representing the state of Israel abroad.”

Paredes, a personable bachelor in his early 30s appointed earlier this year as press attaché at the Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles, has other claims to distinction.

He speaks seven languages fluently—English, Italian, Russian, Hebrew, Spanish, French and Portuguese—and served as a U.S. foreign service officer in Mexico and Tel Aviv. He studied at Brigham Young University, University of Texas—and the Moscow University of Steel and Alloys.

Paredes was born in Bay City, Mich., the son of a white mother and a black father, though he was raised by a Chilean stepfather. He joined the Mormon Church at age 11 and served as a missionary in southern Italy. In line with his religious upbringing, he has never drunk alcohol or smoked a cigarette, and he doesn’t swear.

 

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May 30, 2007 | 10:09 am

Christians fleeing Lebanon

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

In the June issue of Christianity Today, David Aikman, a former senior correspondent for Time and regular columnist for CT, writes about the coming exodus of Lebanese Christians. The article is not online, but here is some of what Aikman had to say:

A little noticed but sad news item appeared in London’s Daily Telegraph this past March. The report, based on secret Lebanese government information, said nearly half of the country’s Maronite Christian community (22 percent of Lebanon‘s 3.8 million people) want to leave the country. Of these, 100,000 have already requested immigrant visas.

Since Israel’s war last July with Hezbollah (a Shi’a Islamic militant organization), the trickle of Lebanese Christians fleeing the country has become a steady stream. Lebanon, once considered the Switzerland of the Middle East and the only Arabic-speaking country that ever had a Christian majority, is slowly bleeding to death.

Lebanon, which was ripped by civil war for 15 years ending in 1990, was a great experiment in Muslim-Christian co-governance, though the country has had no better relations with Israel than the Jewish state’s other neighbors.

Changing the tune of this post, I have a short piece in the same CT about Evel Knievel taking possibly his final great leap—this one of faith.

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May 29, 2007 | 7:53 pm

Transgender Methodist minister opens up

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

“A transgender United Methodist pastor has shared his story with other members of the denomination’s Baltimore-Washington Conference in the hopes of promoting a broader discussion about gender identity.”

That is from a United Methodist News Service article, via DMN’s religion blog.

The Rev. Drew Phoenix - formerly the Rev. Ann Gordon - spoke at both a closed clergy session and a general plenary session on May 24 during the annual conference meeting at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington. He is pastor of St. John’s United Methodist Church in Baltimore.

“I was very grateful for the opportunity to be able to share my story and who I am,” Phoenix told United Methodist News Service in a phone interview following those sessions. “I was very pleased at the number of people who were very honest in their reflections and questions.”

He said he has been undergoing medical procedures for the transition from female to male during the past year, with “a great team of medical people who helped me think it out.”

In his statement to the plenary session, the 48-year-old pastor explained that “last fall, after a lifelong spiritual journey, and years of prayer and discernment, I decided to change my name from Ann Gordon to Drew Phoenix in order to reflect my true gender identity and to honor my spiritual transformation and relationship with God.”

By sharing the story of his spiritual journey and relationship with God, Phoenix said he hoped the conference participants “will commit ourselves to becoming educated about the complexity of gender and gender identity and open ourselves to those in our congregations who identify as transgender.”

Phoenix, who was ordained in 1989 and previously served in the Bethesda area, said he joined the ministry because of “a calling to be in service to folk who are oppressed, who are poor, who are excluded, who are marginalized.”

Although he was named Ann and declared a girl, Phoenix said he always felt he was male and had trouble understanding “the disconnect I was experiencing between my physical, external self and my internal, spiritual self.”

“Fortunately, today, God’s gift of medical science is enabling me to bring my physical body into alignment with my true gender,” he told the plenary session.

 

More here from CBS2 in L.A. Not sure if such a scenario has occurred before, but the church’s Book of Discipline—the Methodist doctrinal bible, if you will—has “no specific policies regarding gender reassignment.”

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May 29, 2007 | 5:18 pm

Has Britney found religion?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Not sure. She was into Kabbalah for a little while, but that didn’t work out. Today, she posted this apology on her homepage for all her recent headline-grabbing behavior. Here’s what she had to say:

Dear Fans,

I just wanted to reach out to all of you and explain some of the things that I have been faced with recently.

It’s so funny how many stories are put out there about people. It’s like we all want our side of the story out there as well, but at the end of the day only a few people care to hear what is really going on since the bad is always so much more interesting than the truth. I don’t know why, but this is so weird to me. I used to be angry at the tabloids for printing horrible things about me, but now I try to just be numb to what I see. I saw Tyra Banks once get really upset and cry on her show because they made her look fat. We all want a certain image of ourselves out there, and at some point we all do really care what other people think or we wouldn’t be here.

Recently, I was sent to a very humbling place called rehab. I truly hit rock bottom. Till this day I don’t think that it was alcohol or depression. I was like a bad kid running around with ADD. I had a manager from a long time ago come in and try to direct me and my life after I got my divorce. I was so overwhelmed I think that I was in a little shock too. I didn’t know who to go to. I realized how much energy and love I had put into my past relationship when it was gone because I genuinely did not know what to do with myself, and it made me so sad. I confess, I was so lost.

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I just hope this letter made some of you think a little bit more of me and where I am coming from. I just want the same things in life that you want…and that is to be happy. It is just so weird because everyone has their own perception of me and how they think I really am. It is so weird how stories are told. There is your side, my side, and the truth. Somebody has to figure it out. I guess we will never really understand or figure out life completely. That’s God’s job. I can’t wait to meet him…or her.

Love, Britney

BetUS.com has posted odds on what’s next for Britney, among them:

She will become a Hare Krishna: +5000

She will join a Christian cult: +2000

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May 29, 2007 | 1:32 pm

Wolfowitz for mayor ... of Iraq

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

That’s what one Republican lawmaker has recommended be done to keep the architect of the Iraq war off public subsidies, according to The Blotter.

“I would like to suggest…that maybe we give Paul Wolfowitz a new job and send him over [to Iraq] as mayor,” said Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., “since the neocons got us in over there.”

As deputy secretary of defense from 2000 to 2005, Wolfowitz helped develop the strategy and public rationale for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. He publicly stated that coalition troops would be greeted as liberators, and the nation of Iraq would be largely capable of financing its own rebuilding through oil revenues.

 

Wolfowitz, who like Richard Perle and so many other neoconservativees, often Jewish, saw war with Iraq as an inevitability, resigned two weeks ago as president of the World Bank.

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May 29, 2007 | 12:08 pm

Texas wants religion in school

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Texas Gov. Rick Perry has been sent a bill that would allow students to express religious beliefs in homework, artwork and other assignments without being penalized or rewarded because of their faith. Instead, their work would be graded on “traditional academic standards,” according to AP.

“We are allowing our young people to express their faith, whatever that faith is,” said Rep. Larry Phillips, a Sherman Republican.

Two months ago, Time magazine had a great article titled “The Case for Teaching the Bible,” that opened in Texas.  This new discussion of the Bible as literature—something I studied at UCLA—follows the failed attempt in Pennsylvania to teach “intelligent design” as a counterpoint to Darwinian evolution. (A little background here.)

All of this, of course, is part of the ongoing debate about how much God is appropriate in public schools, a constant battle since the Supreme Court outlawed school prayer and developed the Lemon test in 1971. As religion? As history? As artistic inspiration?

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May 28, 2007 | 4:18 pm

The God Blog gets a shout-out

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The Bible Belt Blogger, who I often borrow from here and here, mentioned The God Blog last week as one of his main sources of religion news. Cool.

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May 28, 2007 | 4:13 pm

A creation story

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

This story of a creation defiant of its creator isn’t that subtle. A friend of The God Blog sent this recently. It won’t embed, so you’ll have to click here.

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May 27, 2007 | 11:00 am

Grief continues in Sderot

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Another Israeli was killed today by a Qassam rocket launched from Gaza. Hamas took credit, as it did for a rocket attack that killed Shirel Friedman last week, further escalating tensions in the border town of Sderot and egging on Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to launch additional strikes on Hamas officials.

Israel is warning that Hamas leaders involved in ordering rocket attacks may be targeted, even if they are political figures. “We are not bound by any timetable in this matter,” Mr. Olmert said. “We will decide where, how and to what extent we act.”

He also told Israelis “to prepare for a long confrontation that does not depend on agreements” among the various Palestinian factions. “I will not commit to coordinating our behavior with Hamas actions,” he said, whether it “opens fire or halts its fire.”

JTA reported last week that Hamas’ rocket attacks across the border present Israel with a major military dilemma.

Should it target radical Hamas leaders and operatives from the air or move large ground forces into Gaza to push the missile launchers out of range? Involve the international community or go it alone? Declare Gaza an enemy state or keep open options for early accommodation? Try to smash the Hamas-led Palestinian government or negotiate with it?

Olmert, heavily criticized for taking precipitate action against Hezbollah in Lebanon last summer, so far has committed only limited air power. But other voices inside and outside his government are calling for more radical action, and the prime minister is under growing pressure to make a major move.

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May 25, 2007 | 10:10 pm

A Christian toast to Israel

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

They poured into the Beverly Hilton like young politicos at a national convention, in awe at the feet of religious icons and ready to go forth from the Jerusalem Prayer Banquet to promote the gospel of God’s love for Israel.

Talking last Thursday about God’s chosen people, comparing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hitler and lamenting the indifference others express about Israel, these 300-plus Christians each spent at least $125 to pray for peace in the Holy Land and commiserate with Jews about the seemingly never-ending threats to Israel’s existence.

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“God has ordained Israel as a favored nation, and it is important for us to support it,” said Fred Broling, a 72-year-old evangelical Christian who flew with his wife from Chicago for the dinner and donated $5,000 to Eagles’ Wings Ministries, the organization that hosted the event, placing the couple in the Guardian circle, alongside televangelist Pat Robertson. “God has told us we will be blessed by the fact that we support his people.”

Where do the Christian Scriptures say that?

“I don’t know,” Broling replied. “Somewhere, I’m sure.”

That’s from a story I wrote this week about the evangelical Christian love affair with Jews—or at least Israel. Read more about it here and here.

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