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Amr Hamzawy

By Amr Hamzawy, www.DailyStar.com (published in Lebanon, leading English language newspaper in the Middle East)

In Arab countries such as Morocco, Egypt, and Jordan, a burgeoning social crisis caused by out-of-control global inflationary pressures, a crippled welfare system, and persisting high levels of poverty and unemployment is further complicated by a broader political deterioration. Taken together, the social unrest and deteriorating politics call into question the prospects of stability in those countries.

Over the past two years, Egypt has come to be a case in point for the dangers inherent in that kind of development. In April 2008 a number of civil society organizations including independent unions, syndicates, and networks of young activists organized a national strike day to express their frustration with deteriorating social and economic conditions.

Workers’ strikes have become frequent in Egypt. Hundreds of strikes and protests have been carried out over the past two years, but none escalated to the levels of April’s. Inflation has been a problem for many years in Egypt.

The Mubarak regime has consistently tried to contain the situation through a combination of repressive and conciliatory measures. Yet the persistence of protest activities demonstrates the seriousness of popular discontent and the failure of both oppressive methods and minor peace-making concessions to mollify the public.

The Egyptian regime’s lack of an overall strategy to address the country’s enduring troubles extends far beyond the economic sphere. The regime seems to have abandoned the often-implemented option of using political reforms to defuse socioeconomic tensions.

Egypt is trapped in an unenviable position, characterized by growing social unrest and political deterioration. Choices made by the Egyptian regime will most likely determine whether the current social convulsions will be followed by more instability or, if matters are handled prudently, sustainable recovery. In all likelihood, the option of moderating the perilous effects of economic strain by orchestrating a new wave of political reforms is one that the regime will hesitate to embrace at this stage. The concern that such openings might make worse the odds of the approaching presidential succession (Mubarak turned 80 on May 4 and his fifth terms ends in 2011) seems to surpass any other considerations.

The current resurgence of protest activism constitutes the one promising development in Egyptian political life. But progress on the street needs to be complemented by real progress in the performance of organized opposition forces in the political process. Notwithstanding the fact that this progress is largely predicated on the regime’s willingness to welcome the opposition’s input, it is also dependent on the quality of the opposition. Only through active, disciplined, credible, and committed participation in the political process can organized political forces in Egypt effectively advance the reform agenda and push for sensible and comprehensive policies that address the socioeconomic exigencies at hand.

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Amr Hamzawy is a distinguished Egyptian political scientist who contributes articles in Arabic to various academic journals. He also writes regularly for the Arab daily al-Hayat and the Egyptian daily al-Masry al Youm.

By Michael Green , THE JERUSALEM POST

As the smooth asphalt road running through the Negev community of Ashalim comes to a sudden end, forklifts stir up clouds of dust on the uneven dirt path and a plain, whitewashed house sits on a stony patch of earth. Here, a few kilometers northwest of Sde Boker, seeds of green are beginning to sprout in an unlikely place.

Stepping into the building from the dry heat of the desert, the temperature drops to an unseasonably cool – and certainly more comfortable – level. REAL Housing’s chairman Hy Brown says the building’s microclimate owes itself to insulation from its structured integrated paneling (SIP), as well as to the fact that the building is raised a few inches off the ground, allowing air to circulate around the house, cooling it down. The 70-square-meter prefabricated houses also incorporate geothermal heating and, when they hit the production line, will come standard with solar roof panels.

Originally designed to provide affordable housing in Israel’s undersupplied real estate market, the first prototype home from the fledgling REAL (Renewable Energy for Affordable Living) housing company could also offer homeowners a more environmentally sustainable choice.

“I didn’t set out to build solar power for Israel,” says Brown, whose previous projects include the World Trade Center and Disney World. “Originally, the thrust was to design affordable housing that could be built fast, not the environment. We were afraid to add innovations because we didn’t think we could get approval; but now we’re going full throttle to make them as sustainable as possible because we are getting government support,” says Brown.

“There are lots of reasons why Israel needs to build green,” believes Yehuda Olander, chairman of the Israeli chapter of the International Initiative for a Sustainable Built Environment (IISBE). “Israel needs to be part of the international challenge to global warming, even though it is a small country and its effect will not be so [significant]. But it is not just about global problems. The country has its local problems, too. Israel is very poor in terms of natural resources, for example oil, and… we are talking about 10 million people living here by 2020,” says Olander, who is also the manager of the Sharon District’s Regional Division for the Quality of the Environment.

The these of World Environment Day 2008, an annual event coordinated by the United Nations Environment Program that is intended to raise awareness about global environmental issues – “Toward a Low-Carbon Economy” – urges households across the world to “Kick the Habit” of using fossil fuel in a bid to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and tackle climate change.

In Israel, private households consume 30 percent of the country’s total electricity production and a similar proportion of fresh water, according to the Environmental Protection Ministry. Therefore, what people do at home, not to mention how their homes are designed, has a huge impact on climate change.

“Buildings consume 50 to 55% of the energy used nationally in developed countries,” says Michal Vital, green building planner and consultant. “[Energy] is not just consumed by cars or industry, and people aren’t aware of this.”

Commercial buildings eat up an additional 30% of Israel’s electricity, mainly for heating, cooling and lighting. But advocates for green construction say that if buildings were designed with a little bit of ecological know-how, energy-hungry heating and air conditioning – and the huge bills they incur – could become a thing of the past.

It has taken a while for the idea of environmental responsibility to catch on here, but it’s one that architects and local municipalities are now beginning to take seriously when planning new communities.

REAL’s lone prototype house, standing out like a sore thumb amid the portacabins and caravillas that surround it, echoes the wider story of environmentally sound architecture now taking root locally. Green building is beginning to shift from the margins to the mainstream and could be the future. But despite Israel’s being a world leader in environmentally friendly technologies such as solar power, green building remains in its infancy here.

Advocates, however, believe that green building has huge potential.

“It’s taking its first steps in Israel, it’s really like a baby now,” says Vital, adding that the demand for green building has moved beyond what she calls “hard-core” green activists.

Not far from Ashalim, at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev’s Sde Boker campus, “greening” the desert has taken root in a different form. The Desert Architecture and Urban Planning Unit of the Blaustein Institute for Desert Research has been at the forefront of developing solutions for human habitation in the harsh desert environment, which comprises some 65% of Israel’s total land mass. In the early 1990s, the first residents moved into the campus’s Neveh Zin solar neighborhood, designed to take advantage of the natural properties of the desert climate, promoting the use of passive heating and cooling mechanisms and minimizing energy use.

Overlooking the breathtaking Zin Valley, Neveh Zin’s public gardens, featuring drought- and salinity-resistant plants, are kept to a minimum around the 80 carefully designed detached houses whose common geometry and character allow them to fit into the desert, both esthetically and ecologically. The single-family homes incorporate the concept of “solar and wind rights,” ensuring that they receive the maximum amount of sunshine possible when the sun is at its lowest altitude during the cold winter months, while maximizing the cooling power of the wind in the summer, explains Isaac Meir, chair of BGU’s Department of Man in the Desert.

“We want summer night winds because they are cool and permeate the built environment, flushing out the heat accumulated in the day. By taking into account the altitude of the sun, we can define the distance needed between two buildings to ensure they won’t shade each other in the winter,” says Meir, who is working with the Housing and Construction Ministry to develop an environmentally responsible housing cluster in Beersheba’s Ramot neighborhood.

“What we are doing with this specific cluster is trying to incorporate the same logic and environmental strategies from Neveh Zin [in] something much more urban, with [buildings of] five or six stories, the type of apartment blocks that developers like to market in cities,” he says.

With 1,000 housing units, a school, synagogues and commercial areas planned, the Ramot project marks one of the largest of its kind in Israel. But it’s still on the drawing board, lagging years behind the establishment of Neveh Zin.

“It takes time for new strategies to percolate down to professionals on the one hand and decision-makers on the other,” says Meir. “I think the Housing Ministry is realizing the importance of developing homes that are more environmentally friendly, user-friendly and less resource-intensive.”

Olander believes that the slow development of green building in Israel stems partly from the problem that, until recently, there had been no definition of what exactly constituted a “green building.” To help catalyze the relationship between architecture and ecology in the country, IISBE Israel was established four years ago and was a key player in getting the first official guidelines for green building in Israel off the ground.

In November 2005, the Standards Institute of Israel published the Israel Standard 5281 for Buildings with Reduced Environmental Impact (commonly known as the “Green Buildings” standard), which addresses energy, water, land and other environmental issues, including air quality and the building process. Homes and offices in Israel can now proudly wear the “green building” label if they score 55 or more out of 100 points (over 75 qualifies a structure as an “outstanding green building”) by meeting the standards’ conditions.

Vital believes it’s a good thing that Israel now has a green building standard but argues that much of the responsibility for ensuring progress in this field lies with lawmakers. “I don’t mean the Knesset. If municipalities put green demands into city plans, architects will have to follow them to have permission to build,” she says.

“Who’s interested in green building? Local governments, not [the] national government. Local governments are trying to bring citizens to… live in their cities and they want them to be happy living there,” says Olander, He adds that the Kfar Saba Municipality has already planned a 5,000-unit “green neighborhood” and that there is talk of building 10,000 green housing units in north Tel Aviv’s Sde Dov district. In addition, he believes there is interest in green building in Petah Tikva, Ra’anana and Jerusalem.

“In the United States, the national government didn’t take action to save energy or promote green building – the local governments did it instead.” Olander points out.

But one man’s palace can be another man’s pollution as the developers of Eden Hills, a new community under construction in the Elah Valley, south of Beit Shemesh, know all too well. The first building at the project, which is set to be the last new town built in central Israel, was inaugurated by Housing Minister Zeev Boim last month, following 18 years of delays and setbacks.

Developer Jake Leibowitz describes Eden Hills as his “vision of an ecological village,” which will include environmentally friendly innovations such as solar power, geothermal technology and water purification.

But Michelle Levine, spokesperson for the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, describes Eden Hills as an “ecological catastrophe” because it runs close to Israel’s primary wildlife corridor, a natural migratory path for flora and fauna. Following interventions from the SPNI and other green groups, the regional planning council ordered a reduction in the size of the development; but Levine argues that the development should never have been given the go-ahead in the first place.

“Eden Hills is extraneous, does not abide by Israel 2020, and is in essence a bigger disaster to the environment than their [water] and solar power schemes could ever hope to rectify,” she says, adding that the National Planning Council had mistakenly approved the community without waiting for the Environmental Impact Report. The “Israel 2020″ master plan for the country in the 21st century recommends that sustainable development be based on the “prevention of new settlements and increased density of existing ones… and emphasis on green buffers, open spaces and the preservation of heritage and nature values.”

“No new community can call itself an ‘environmental’ community. We have gone past the point where we can build more communities. There’s only so much green space we can take up in Israel,” she declares.

But what about residents of the rest of the country, who live in houses that have been standing for decades?

“It’s very important not only to make new houses environmentally friendly but also to improve existing homes,” agrees Olander, adding that Standard 5281 can also be applied when renovating houses. “Our association [IISBE Israel] is trying to get the information to everyone. To save important resources like energy and water, you don’t need to build a new house, you can be greener in your behavior too.”

Gil Peled, an architect and green building consultant, acknowledges that while it is much easier to design ecologically sensitive buildings if starting from scratch, constructing homes on a small scale could actually be less sustainable than building within existing urban areas.

“Detached housing is, by definition, un-ecological,” he argues, noting the additional roads, land and infrastructure needed, as well as its impact on wildlife. “Everybody wants a detached house on half a dunam (1.23 acres) – that’s the dream; but we just don’t have enough land,” says Peled, whose Eco-Housing Pilot Project has successfully “greened” the 10-family Jerusalem apartment building in which he lives without resorting to technological fixes. “Motivation is the most resource-saving device. If you have energy-efficient light bulbs but leave them on all day, you’re not saving anything,” he says. Since 2002, he explains, the use of energy and water in his building, as well as its production of waste, has been slashed by 30%-50% by initiatives that include recycling, energy-efficient appliances and rainwater collection.

But despite people’s best intentions, going green doesn’t come cheap. A typical Israeli family thinking of switching to clean electricity would have to invest at least NIS 70,000 in photovoltaic (PV) panels to harness the sun’s energy. Alon Tamari, CEO of SolarPower Israel, says that most Israelis using PV cells are doing so for ideological reasons. However, there could be a surge in demand following the announcement of a long-awaited government incentive program to subsidize households’ production of their own solar power.

The Greek firm Solar Energy Hellas has developed a prototype “Energy Autonomous Building” that aims to supply all a building’s energy needs from the sun alone. The firm is working with Israel solar power company Chromagen to bring the technology across the Mediterranean. However, the building requires a 30% to 35% higher capital investment than standard buildings.

Speaking last month at Bar-Ilan University’s Conference for Green Industry and Building, Dr. Alexis Faisis, a mechanical engineer at Solar Energy Hellas, explained that incorporating “passive measures” can eradicate the need to switch on energy-consuming heaters or air conditioners in the first place. Effective design of home insulation, walls and windows can slash the amount of energy needed to heat and cool by between 50% and 70%, he says.

“Passive systems save money, which can then be spent on the best possible active energy system. If you take the right measures, you can afford photovoltaics,” notes Faisis.

He believes that Energy Autonomous Buildings are “100% feasible” in Israel but is frank about the motives behind the development of such structures: “The designs are not based on a client’s ecological concerns; they are based on profitability. I’m sad to say that money drives the world, and ecological concerns are a by-product of economic benefits.”

In other words, saving the environment can also mean saving shekels. Olander, who predicts that the price of water will rise in the near future, says that homeowners who invest in making their property “green” can recoup their outlay in four or five years.

“In my opinion, to build a green building in the long term will not cost more than the price of an average building today,” he says. “Today we need to pay for experts or trained architects, but in the future it will be something that every part of the team will have knowledge of.”

If the predictions by Olander and others are to be believed, green housing in the future might not be for environmental activists or the wealthy alone.

“A rich person can buy solar panels, but [the same goal can be reached by] reducing the size of windows, changing the directions or shading buildings with trees,” says Vital. “Not everything has to cost money. It’s possible to be green by being clever.”

By Abe Selig, THE JERUSALEM POST

‘They will beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.” Thus is the prophecy of Isaiah, the eighth-century BCE prophet who preached a message of universal peace, and whose lips, according to biblical sources, were divinely anointed with fire.

As the Jewish people mark Shavuot, the celebration of receiving the Torah from God, the Israel Museum is proudly displaying Isaiah’s scroll, one of the world’s oldest known scrolls, and the most complete Dead Sea scroll ever found.

Discovered by a Bedouin shepherd in the Qumran caves near the Dead Sea, the scroll dates from about 100 BCE, and is thus 1,000 years older than the oldest Hebrew biblical manuscript known prior to its discovery. Besides this initial manuscript, some 20 additional, but fragmented, copies of Isaiah were discovered at Qumran, shedding light on the details surrounding the Land of Israel during the Second Temple Period, among other things.

On a long, complicated journey from the hands of the Bedouin shepherd, the scroll, along with three others, passed through many hands, traveling the Middle East, from Israel and Lebanon to Syria, and on to New York. On June 1, 1954, an advertisement appeared in the Wall Street Journal under the category “Miscellaneous For Sale,” which read: “‘The Four Dead Sea Scrolls’ Biblical Manuscripts, dating back to at least 200 BC, are for sale. This would be an ideal gift to an educational or religious institution by an individual or group. Box F 206.”

Yigael Yadin, son of the great Israeli archaeologist Eleazar Sukenik, was in New York at the time, saw the ad and immediately began pursuing the scrolls through secret negotiations (the Jordanian government was claiming rights to all scrolls found at Qumran). After purchasing them for $250,000, the scrolls wound up at the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem, about 100 kilometers from where they had originally been found.

SINCE THEN, however, the scroll has been displayed to the public only once, from 1965-67, as part of the original design concept for the Shrine of the Book. Due to conservation requirements aimed at the scrolls’ long-term preservation, scroll sections are rotated on a regular basis in the shrine, limiting the time the parchments come into contact with light and oxygen.

The preservation efforts that have gone into the scroll have been intense, with experts conducting the process in a dark room with climate-controlled air.

“After you get used to the darkness, the eye adapts itself,” Michael Magen says of the work he does as head of the Paper Conservation Lab at the Israel Museum. He explains that his work is “preventive conservation,” aimed at facilitating the longevity of the scroll’s parchment, which is made from animal skin.

“This is different from active conservation, which aims to repair or patch an object,” Magen says. “The scroll does have some fractures, but we preferred to leave it in its state, and not change its condition at all.”

Magen and his team have identified the possible factors that might affect the scroll’s parchment, and they have come up with ways to block them.

“While on display, the scroll is subject to more light than usual,” Magen says. “We put it behind bullet-proof glass and installed a data logger to monitor the temperature and humidity inside, and we are constantly checking on it to keep the parchment stabilized.”

But the laborious efforts that go into the scroll’s preservation, and the possible damage that its display could cause, beg the question: Why? Why go to the trouble of displaying a rare and valuable artifact such as the Isaiah Scroll, when doing so might damage its condition and expose it to harm?

“I think when you are in front of the scroll, you can imagine the person behind the scroll,” says Adolfo Roitman, curator of the Isaiah Scroll exhibit at the museum. “You can imagine the person who was writing it 2,000 years ago.”

Roitman explains that through its display, the scroll is fulfilling its prophecy.

“The Isaiah Scroll plays such an important role in both Judaism and Christianity, I see the exhibit, and the Shrine, as a place of encounter for people from different denominations and races – a sort of institute for universal peace. It’s not just a display,” Roitman says. “It’s a ground from which we can build understanding.”

Accordingly, Isaiah’s words serve to promote their theme, so many years after they were spoken, hidden away and discovered again in the caves at Qumran. Possibly, through its current display, the message will take hold, and swords will be beaten into plowshares as the teachings of war become the teachings of peace.

Janet L. Folger, www.worldnetdaily.com

As I wrote about in my book, The Criminalization of Christianity, Jeffrey Satinover, who holds an M.D. from Princeton and doctorates from Yale, MIT, and Harvard, was on my radio program one day and I asked him about where we are in history. He explained that according to the “Babylonian Talmud” – the book of rabbis’ interpretation of the scriptures 1,000 years before Christ, there was only one time in history that reflects where we are right now. There was only one time in history, according to these writings, where men were given in marriage to men, and women given in marriage to women.

Want to venture a guess as to when? No, it wasn’t in Sodom and Gomorrah, although that was my guess. Homosexuality was rampant there, of course, but according to the Talmud, not homosexual “marriage.” What about ancient Greece? Rome? No. Babylon? No again. The one time in history when homosexual “marriage” was practiced was … during the days of Noah. And according to Satinover, that’s what the “Babylonian Talmud” attributes as the final straw that led to the Flood.

On my Faith2Action radio program, Rabbi Aryeh Spero verified this to be true.

Rabbi Spero spoke of God’s compassion before the Flood, in hopes people would repent and turn back to His ways. He showed patience for hundreds of years.

But, he said, the Talmud’s writings reveal that “before the Flood people started to write marriage contracts between men, in other words, homosexual ‘marriage,’ which is more than homosexual activity – it’s giving an official state stamp of approval, a sanctification … of homosexual partnership.”

In fact, he said, “the writings indicated that it wasn’t even so much the ‘straw that broke the camel’s back,’ but that the sin in and of itself is so contrary to why God created the world, so contrary to the order of God’s nature, that God said then and there ‘I have to start all over … to annihilate the world and start from the beginning. …’”

Rabbi Spero went on to say, “Even in ancient Greece they did not write marriage contracts between men. There was homosexuality, and it was wrong, but there was not an official ‘blessed’ policy. … Marriage is ‘sanctification’ (not simply a partnership).” He said to confer the title of sanctification and holiness upon this behavior is “probably one of the greatest sins of all that one does against God’s plan for this world.”

The one time it happened was: “During the days of Noah.” When I first heard this, my mind immediately went to a verse I’ve heard many times but never with such relevance. The verse is found in Matthew 24:37. It reads:

As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. – Mathew 24:37 (NIV)

I used to read this verse and think: It was bad at lots of points in history; it doesn’t necessarily mean now, but if these Jewish writings are true, we are uniquely like the “days of Noah” right now – and only right now.

But it can’t be yet, you say. You have a lot going on in your life? You’re getting married? Here’s how the New Living Translation describes that very sentiment in Luke:

When the Son of Man returns, the world will be like the people were in Noah’s day. In those days before the Flood, the people enjoyed banquets and parties and weddings right up to the time Noah entered his boat, and the flood came to destroy them all. – Luke 17:26-27

Happily going about as if everything was fine was what they did, too.

You don’t like this possibility? Don’t even believe in the Flood? Doesn’t matter. Some things are true whether you believe them or not. How can you be sure? There’s a way. Did you know that about one-fourth of the Bible is prophecy? A quarter of the Bible is a lot – it’s a big book. And did you know God’s standard? Perfection. That means that if even one of those prophecies is wrong, you can discount the whole thing. Kind of like a prophet who makes a false prediction – that made him a false prophet and a candidate for stoning. Did you know that 4,000 prophecies in that Bible have already come true down to the last detail? That leaves about 1,000 left to be fulfilled – those are the ones regarding the last days before the return of Christ, which are being checked off the list right now.

If 4,000 out of 5,000 prophecies have already occurred exactly as the Bible predicted they would, you might want to pay attention to the rest.

Why am I sounding the alarm? Here’s why:

But if the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet, and the people are not warned, and the sword comes and takes any person from among them, he is taken away in his iniquity; but his blood I will require at the watchman’s hand. – Ezekiel 33:6

I’m praying and working to protect marriage not only because I care about marriage, but because I care about civilization. And, if we obey God, he just may spare us from the judgment we deserve.

www.iht.com

Archaeologists in Jordan have discovered a cave underneath one of the world’s oldest churches that may have once been an even more ancient site of Christian worship.

Archaeologist Abdel-Qader Hussein, head of the Rihab Center for Archaeological Studies, says the cave was unearthed in the northern Jordanian city of Rihab after three months of excavation and shows evidence of early Christian rituals.

The cave lies under St. Georgeous church, built in 230 A.D., making it one of the oldest churches in the world, along with one unearthed in the Jordanian southern port of Aqaba in 1998 and another in Israel discovered in 2005.

Hussein said there was evidence that the underground cave was used as a church by 70 disciples of Jesus in the first century after Christ’s death, which would make it the oldest Christian site of worship in the world.

He described a circular worship area with stone seats separated from a living area that had a long tunnel leading to a source of water. He said the early Christians hid there from persecution.

A mosaic inscription on the floor of the later church of St. Georgeous above refers to “the 70 beloved by God and the divine” who founded the worship there.

Thomas Parker, a historian at the University of North Carolina-Raleigh, who led the discovery of the church in Aqaba, said that while he hadn’t seen the Rihab site, any such claim should be taken with a degree of caution.

“An extraordinary claim like this requires extraordinary evidence,” he said. “We need to see the artifacts and dating evidence to suggest such an occupation in the 1st century A.D.”

Archimandrite Nektarious, Bishop Deputy of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese in Amman hailed the discovery, calling it an “important milestone for Christians all around the world and right here at home.”

“It confirms that Christians in this region are not strangers,” he said. “They are real citizens who have always had roots in this region from those days until the present.”

By Jamie Glazov, www.FrontPageMagazine.com

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Abul Kasem, an ex-Muslim who is the author of hundreds of articles and several books on Islam including, Women in Islam. He was a contributor to the book Leaving Islam – Apostates Speak Out as well as to Beyond Jihad: Critical Views From Inside Islam.

FP: Abul Kasem, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Kasem: Thank you Jamie. I am glad to be back.

FP: We’re here today to discuss how women are considered to be domestic animals in Islam and are to be treated as such.

Let’s begin with the origins of this value system in connection to women in Islam.

Muhammad’s last instruction to Muslim men was to beat women and treat them as domestic animals, correct? Can you tell us about this last instruction and its context?

Kasem: Sure Jamie. In AH 10 (Islamic calender), that is, in 632CE Muhammad made his formal pilgrimage to Mecca. This was the only, the first and the last haj Muhammad had done. Having taught his followers the rituals of haj, and having performed them himself, in the valley of Arafat, Muhammad addressed them in an impassioned speech. This was his last speech, and accordingly, in the Islamic annals it is recorded as the farewell (Hajjtul wida) speech. Sourcing a long chain of narrators, Tabari, the most eminent Islamic historian writes (the full text):

Ibn Humayd—Salamah—Ibn Ishaq—‘Abdallah b. Abi Najih:

Reference:
Al-Tabari, Abu Ja’far Muhammad b. Jarir. The History of al-Tabari. Vol.IX: The Last Years of the Prophet. Translated and annotated by Ismail K. Poonawala. State University of NewYork Press, Albany, 1990. (Pages 112-114. Bold emphasis is mine)

FP: Well I don’t really see how there can be any confusion over interpretation here, it appears pretty clear.

Kasem: Well yes, in the few words above, the most hallowed speech by Muhammad, he had clearly described women as domestic animals, and instructed their husbands to beat them if they suspect that their wives’ behavior are not to their satisfaction. Please note that those were Muhammad’s last decrees to Muslim husbands. Every Muslim husband is duty bound by those instructions of Muhammad.

FP: What have Muslim scholars said about these words?

Kasem: Let’s tale a look at what ibn Ishaq, the most authentic biographer of Muhammad, wrote about Muhammad’s last words on women during his farewell speech:

You have rights over your wives and they have rights over you. You have the right that they should not defile your bed and that they should not behave with open unseemliness. If they do, God allows you to put them in separate rooms and to beat them but not with severity. If they refrain from these things they have the right to their food and clothing with kindness. Lay injunctions on women kindly, for they are prisoners with you having no control- of their persons. You have taken them only as a trust from God, and you have the enjoyment of their persons by the words of God, so understand (T. and listen to) my words, O men, for I have told you. I have left with you something which if you will hold fast to it you will never fall into error—a plain indication, the book of God and the practice of His prophet, so give good heed to what I say.

Reference: Ibn Ishaq, Muhammad b. Yasr, Sirat Rasul Allah. Translated in English by A. Guillaume. First published by Oxford University Press, London in 1955. Fifteenth reprint by Oxford University Press, Karachi, Pakistan, 2001. (p.651. Bold emphasis is mine.)

FP: So what are we to gather from all of this?

Kasem: What we are to gather is that there is not much difference between Tabari’s version and Ibn Ishaq’s. In Ibn Ishaq, Muhammad considered women to be prisoners in the hands of men, quite similar to domestic animals who are prisoners in the hands of their owners.

Those words of Muhammad should not surprise us. In a few ahadith we note that Muhammad likened women to dogs, camels, asses…and so on, all domestic animals.

FP: Some examples?

Kasem: Here are a few sample ahadith:

Aisha complained that Muhammad’s followers made women like dogs and asses…Sahih Muslim, 4.1039

If there is a bad luck in anything then it is horse, the abode and the woman… Sahih Muslim, 26.5528, 5529

A prayer is annulled by a passing woman, a dog and a monkey…Sahih Bukhari, 1.9.490, 493,498

Women, houses and horses are evil omens…Sahih Bukhari, 7.62.30, 31, 32

An ass, a woman and a black dog annuls a prayer…Sunaan Nasai, 1.753

A menstruating woman and a dog cuts off a prayer…Sunaan Abu Dawud, 2.0703

Either a dog, an ass, a pig, a Jew, a Magian and a woman cuts off a prayer…Sunaan Abu Dawud, 2.0704

Women, slaves and camels are the same; must seek Allah’s refuge from all these…Sunaan Abu Dawud, 11.2155

A house, a horse and a woman is an evil omen; a mat in a house is better than a barren woman…Sunaan Abu Dawud, 3.29.3911

A black dog is satan; a black dog or a donkey or a woman cancels a prayer…Sunaan ibn Majah, 2.952

Beat your wives if they commit sinful acts; women are captives of their husbands…Sunaan ibn Majah, 3.1851

A woman is a property; a righteous woman is the best property…Sunaan ibn Majah, 3.1855 (Please note: a pregnant camel during Muhammad’s time was the best property)

Seek refuge from a woman, a servant and cattle—they are evils…Sunaan ibn Majah , 3.1918

Muhammad’s final sermon—beat women…Sunaan ibn Majah , 4.3074

Women are your prisoners, treat them well, if necessary beat them but not severely…Tirmidhi, 104

FP: I think it becomes clear what the roots are to the violent oppression of women in Islam. We welcome readers to watch our film on this depressing phenomenon. http://www.terrorismawareness.org/videos/108/the-violent-oppression-of-women-in-islam/

Abul Kasem, thank you for joining us today and for revealing to us some of the historical roots to Islamic gender apartheid.

Kasem: Thank you, Jamie.

****************
Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine‘s managing editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in U.S. and Canadian foreign policy.

By Zafrir Rinat, www.Haaretz.com

The hoopoe, Israel's State Bird

The wait is over: after months of campaigning, the hoopoe has beat out nine other finalists to secure the title of Israel’s state bird.

The hoopoe (duhifat, in Hebrew) won 35 percent of the votes, beating out the warbler (ten percent) and the finch (9.8 percent).

The national bird selection process was sponsored by the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI). Voters chose from a list of 10 species on the SPNI website.

Surveys show that 46 percent of the votes for the winning bird came from Israel Defense Forces soldiers.

Dr. Yossi Leshem, the Tel Aviv University ornithologist who helped initiate the campaign to choose a state bird, said that the election of city birds is next on the agenda. Tel Aviv has already announced that it will adopt the swallow as its municipal avian mascot and set up nest installations around the city.

By Hana Levi Julian, www.IsraelNN.com

Close to 300,000 tourists streamed into Israel this past May, breaking all records, according to the Tourism Ministry. The number of visitors was 5 percen higher than the previous record, set in the year 2000.

The projected total tourism for 2008 will be almost 3,000,000 visitors to the Jewish State.

Tourism Ministry Director-General Sha’ul Tzemach commented that the rise could have far-reaching positive effects, noting that “with the continuing growth pattern, this contribution will be felt in all aspects of the tourism industry.”

Israeli Tourist Sites Uploaded to Tourism Ministry Website
New maps of Israel and major tourism sites and cities were uploaded to the Ministry of Tourism website, www.goisrael.com/tourism_eng. The new service allows for navigation and printing of the maps, which display major tourist sites marked in English.

Included are beautiful new maps of Israel, Christian sites, and the cities of Jerusalem, Tiberias, Eilat, Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Netanya. In addition, the ministry has uploaded another 200 photographs, adding them to the existing 1800 photos available for downloading from the site, which can be searched by name or keyword. More photos will be added in the coming months, said the ministry.

The Tourism Ministry’s website attracts more than a quarter of a million hits a month and is translated into 11 different languages, including English, Russian, French, German, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Italian, German and Hebrew. It is also in the process of being translated into other languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, Korean and Portuguese.

By Ruchama King Feuerman, www.aish.com

In Israel’s darkest moment, outnumbered and surrounded by enemies, an old woman sees what no one else can see.

The Six Day War had ended. The generals assembled the commanders and foot soldiers for a customary review and analysis of the battle. After the military questions had been asked, and the investigative committee was about to disperse, a commanding officer pointed to one of the soldiers. “Wait a minute. I have a question for you. Yes, you, the soldier who put up the flag on the Temple Mount.”

The soldier nodded.

“Where did you get an Israeli flag, and why did you put it up?”

The soldier spread out his hands and smiled, a gesture that indicated that here was more than just a one sentence response. He told the following story:

The night before the Old City was liberated, a contingent of soldiers fighting near the Old City took cover in a shelter in a Jerusalem neighborhood. Hordes of children, mothers, old men and women packed inside the bunker alongside the soldiers. People looked frightened and bereft. The government had imposed a news black-out so that the Arab countries wouldn’t be able to figure out their positions. And the news — originating from Jordan, Egypt and Syria — was enough to induce hysteria: calls from Saudi King Faisal for the total elimination of Israel, calls from every Arab country to push the fledgling country into the sea.

Things looked so bad, Israelis famously converted public parks into mass graves, in preparation for the expected casualties. (Israel’s Chief of Staff, Yitzchak Rabin, had even suffered a nervous breakdown.)

As the soldier sat there in the bunker, hopeless and uncertain, he saw an old woman slowly make her way over to him. “Excuse me,” she said, standing at his side. She held a satchel in her arms.

He lifted his eyes. “Yes, Doda. Tell me, what is it?”

“Tomorrow you’ll go to the Old City and you’ll go to the Kotel [Western Wall].”

He shook his head at the absurdity. He said, “No, we won’t.” There were no army plans to liberate the Old City. First, they were fighting just to hold their positions. Also, overtaking the Old City would entail hand-to-hand combat which was greatly feared: Many people would die. Moreover, any bombardment of the Old City might demolish even more of the holy sites than had already been destroyed by the Jordanians. He tried to explain all of this.

The old woman looked at him, steady-eyed. “No, you will go,” she said, not as if she were trying to convince him, but as if relaying simple facts.

He shrugged. An old woman’s delusions. He wasn’t going to argue with her.
Before he turned away, she said, “I have a favor to ask you.” She reached into her satchel and took out an Israeli flag. From the way she touched it, it was clear the flag had some personal meaning for her. Had she made it? Perhaps it had been draped over a loved one’s grave? But what was she now saying? “When you go, please take this flag, and when you get to the Temple Mount, I want you to hang it up there.” She held out the flag.

The soldier repeated, “We’re not going into the Old City.”

“You’re going,” she said. Again, she held out her arm.

A thought struck him. “I can’t take it,” he told her. “It’s against army regulations.”

“It’ll be all right. Just take it.”

“I’ll get in trouble. You’re only allowed to carry a few specified items.”
Please,” she said hoarsely. “Do me this favor.”

He shrugged again. Why was he arguing with this old woman? Let him take the flag, let him make an old woman feel good. He could always get rid of it later.

The next day, the Israeli army, contrary to everyone’s expectations, took the Old City. Sure enough, the soldier’s unit ended up at the Temple Mount. As he and the other soldiers came close to the Western Wall, he suddenly remembered the flag and the old woman’s words. Yes, he would do it, he would! He enlisted two buddies, and together they draped the flag over the grating on the upper left most side of the Kotel, and there they hoisted and hung the Israel flag.

The commanding officer conducting the investigation said to the soldier, “And what were you thinking when you put up that flag?”

The soldier said, “I was thinking that this was the answer to 2,000 years of Jewish suffering.”

And so ends the story of the soldier, our hero.

But there’s an unsung hero, too. What about the old woman who supplied the flag? One wishes the investigating officers had tracked her down. What did she have in mind as she entered a shelter with an Israeli flag in her satchel? And who was she, anyway? The only identifying feature is that she was old and carried a bag. But her advanced age already tells us plenty: that she knew something about Jewish history, probably having personally lived through it…World War I, Arab attacks, the Holocaust, the War of Independence, 1956. What hadn’t she seen?

There, in Israel’s darkest moment, outnumbered and surrounded by enemies, terrified that the next morning there will be no Israel, the old woman sees what no one else can see, what no one else is capable of conceiving. She insists on her vision, she practically browbeats the soldier into carrying out her plan. We’ll never know how she knew, only that, like many Jewish women before her — the Matriarchs, the midwives in Egypt, the righteous women in the desert — she just knew. There are two kinds of prophecy. One that predicts the future, and one that makes the future.

Ruchama King Feuerman, MFA, was the winner of the Christopher Isherwood Fellowship Prize for Fiction 2007. She is the editor of a brand-new collection: Everyone’s Got A Story – 41 short stories from a new generation of Jewish writers (Judaica Press).

By Daniel Taylor & Mark McCloskey, www.ChristianityToday.com

The President has taken this country to war and the war has not gone well. He has misjudged the spiritual strength of a militarily inconsequential but profoundly committed enemy. War was not even a distant issue when he first became President, and he is increasingly frustrated that this unsuccessful war is defining his presidency. Testy exchanges with journalists have caused him to almost abandon news conferences, he is openly mocked on television and on the street, and his popularity ratings have plummeted. Never one to seek wide counsel, he increasingly surrounds himself only with advisers who give him good news, who tell him what he wants to hear.

No, his name is not George Bush. His name is Lyndon Johnson.

“I am not going to lose Vietnam,” Johnson said. “I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.” It is significant that Johnson thought of the war in the first person—”I am not going to lose.” Johnson had a famously monumental ego and soaring ambition. Friends, fellow politicians, and historians consistently report that what motivated Johnson from his schoolboy days to his presidency was a pure lust for power and control unusual even for a politician. As Johnson’s biographer Robert Caro observes, “Johnson’s ambition was uncommon—in the degree to which it was unencumbered by even the slightest excess weight of ideology, of philosophy, of principles, of beliefs.”

Lyndon Johnson edited reality to suit his needs. Anyone who disagreed with him on Vietnam policy was a “knee-jerk liberal,” “crackpot,” “nervous Nellie,” or “troublemaker.” There was no such thing for him as loyal dissent. Lyndon Johnson was as politically competent as any President in history (and he used that competence for good in getting passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act). He lacked, however, the wisdom and moral courage necessary to keep this country from far deeper entanglement in a disastrous war.

Iraq is not Vietnam. George Bush is not Lyndon Johnson. Taking a country to war is not automatically wrong. But grave decisions of war and peace, life and death, prosperity and privation—on the domestic and international fronts—are made by Presidents during their time in office. At election time, we the people decide who our decision makers will be. And we too often decide poorly, because we ask the wrong questions.

We make the same mistake as one recent grumpy CNN commentator: “What we need from these candidates are details of how they are going to solve our problems. How are they going to stop the slide of the dollar? How are they going to get the troops home from Iraq? How are they going to fix Social Security? That’s what we need to know.” Grumpy and wrong. There’s value in hearing a candidate’s plans and proposals, but it’s of secondary or even lesser importance. Few if any of those plans and proposals will survive the political process intact. Voting for Obama’s health plan or Hillary’s economic scheme or McCain’s immigration policy is virtual-reality voting, positing an intriguing alternate world, but having little to do with this one. When it comes to picking a President, Gandhi had it right: “The obligation of accepting a position of power is to be, above all else, a good human being.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” one hears our CNN commentator saying. “‘Good human being’? Who’s to say what constitutes a ‘good human being’? I want someone competent to run the country.” Wrong again. Competence without virtue is poisonous. It simply makes one more effective at doing wrong. Furthermore, being virtuous is, in itself, an expression of competence. Since virtue is a requirement for leadership, a lack of virtue in a leader is a sign of incompetence and grounds enough for rejecting that leadership. Virtue is a personal matter, but it is never wholly a private one, certainly not in a President.

A suite of values-soaked abilities
The ancient Greeks created most of our vocabulary of virtue and saw virtue as central to politics. In fact, it was wrestling with the question of the kind of leader a community required that led them to investigate virtue, and that made virtue a practical, not merely a philosophical, consideration.

Virtue—moral and physical—was to the Greeks a force, a capacity to do something, a personal power that enabled one to influence and shape oneself and one’s community for the better. Virtue was practical, specific, and verifiable. The Greeks saw virtue as intimately connected with character, which can be defined as the working out of values in actual life—values lived—the intersection in the everyday world of stated values with choices and actions. For the Greeks it was meaningless to talk about values (think “family values” or “justice for the poor”) apart from concrete actions that render those values visible and useful. And such actions were only virtues if they were recurring, becoming so ingrained in a person’s responses to life that they were moral habits, reflexes, something that flowed almost automatically from one’s essential nature. Virtue was not a given of birth or instinct, but must be learned and reinforced (hence, education centered on training in virtue).

Virtue is a suite of values-soaked abilities that in active combination form a person’s character and give shape to a life. Our choices and actions both reveal and reinforce our character. You cannot judge whether a person will be a good leader—a good President—without knowing and evaluating his or her character—how life has stamped or marked them. A President is, among other things, a decision maker. Decisions flow out of values and experience, that is, out of character. The classical virtues, embraced by Greeks and Romans alike, are prudence (practical wisdom), justice (fairness), fortitude (courage), and temperance (moderation). They not only thought these desirable and useful, but also believed you could not be fully human without them. Each of the four virtues makes the others possible, and a lack of any one of them renders the others ineffective. Courage without wisdom is mere foolhardiness. Justice not backed up by courage is mere wishing. And any of the other virtues is vitiated if one lacks the self-control found in moderation. Virtue involves the whole person—intellect, emotion, will, values, actions.

The other great source of virtues was Judeo-Christian, especially the virtues of faith, hope, and love. The medieval period inherited both traditions, kept virtue at the center of education, and embraced these seven as “the cardinal virtues.”

So how does any of this help in choosing a President?

From courage to temperance
Let’s start with the virtue perhaps most universally acknowledged and admired: courage. In premodern times, the courage of a leader often had to be physical. In the last 500 years it is more often moral. Moral courage is the ability to do what’s right even when it is deeply unpopular, even dangerous. Courage is only found where there is the genuine possibility of loss—loss of friends, reputation, status, power, possessions, or, at the extremes, freedom or life.

It does not require courage to do what is popular or safe. Political leaders in a democracy must, by definition, be popular at election time or they will no longer be leaders. So it is even more difficult for a President, whose choices are not masked by being one vote among many, to be morally courageous than it is for other politicians. Ironically, to be morally courageous, a politician must be willing to forfeit the very position that gives him or her the power to make the morally courageous decision in the first place. Fail to be courageous and your country will suffer and history will criticize you; make the unpopular but morally courageous decision and we well may remove you from office.

Most would credit Lincoln with moral courage in his handling of the Civil War. More contentious cases could be made for Franklin Roosevelt’s response to the Depression, for Reagan in his refusal to accept the inevitability of half the world living under Communism, and for Carter in his principled campaign for human rights in a political environment that normally only pays lip service to such things. Whoever your personal political heroes, it is likely that you admire them in significant part because they risked doing the right thing instead of the safe thing. Historian Barbara Tuchman observes, “Aware of the controlling power of ambition, corruption, and emotion, it may be that in the search for wiser government we should look for the test of character first. And the test should be moral courage.”

It is not difficult to see how prudence is valuable for any leader. In both Greek and Jewish traditions, prudence or wisdom is knowledge about how to live well and the ability to put that knowledge into practice. It involves right priorities and right choices. Intelligent people can be fools. Knowledgeable people can be impractical.

It is entirely appropriate to evaluate whether a person seeking public office has lived wisely in his or her private life. Too often we attribute the wisdom to lead to someone who has merely been resourceful enough to succeed in business or some other area. We have de-stigmatized many private failures in recent years (divorce, past drug use, sexual irresponsibility), but it is still relevant to expect that public leaders show wisdom in the choices they make in their private lives.

Practical wisdom, as opposed to intelligence or knowledge, is necessary to respond helpfully to the many political problems that involve competing goods or “no good choices.” The illegal immigration problem sets the reasonable need to control one’s borders against the pragmatic fact of what to do about the millions of illegal immigrants already here. The response to terror in the world requires a balance between the goal (security, certainly, and perhaps the extension of democracy) and the means to reach that goal (wiretapping? torture?). The political system perhaps never “solves” these issues to everyone’s satisfaction, but a leader needs the virtue of practical wisdom to move us forward.

No quality is more often invoked in contemporary political campaigns than justice—frequently under the umbrella of fairness. In fact we have trained citizens to present many of their demands in terms of what is fair and of injuries to fairness. The poor, the middle class, and the rich all contend that the tax system is not fair to them. Gays, women, and people of color each present themselves as victims of a society and political system that should, in the name of justice, offer them protection and redress. But so do corporations, lawyers, religious organizations, and many other social entities that by many measures are doing quite well. It is self-evident that a President must care about justice, but what does that mean and what would it look like? We should assess the nature and intensity of candidates’ commitment to justice and ask them to articulate both the foundations for their commitments and to give evidence that they have acted to make the world a fairer place. If that action was evident in their private lives even before they sought public office, so much the better. It means more than campaign platitudes and position papers about social justice and helping the poor.

Temperance, or moderation, might seem like both the least attractive of the classical virtues and the least significant for a political leader. The elder George Bush often used the vocabulary of moderation and caution and got himself satirized on television and in the comic strips as timorous and weak (“wouldn’t be prudent” was a laugh line for people whose main association with the word temperance is the benighted attempt in the last century to ban alcohol). But temperance is as crucial as any of the other virtues because its lack renders them less effective. Temperance is self-restraint, the ability to control (even say “no” to) harmful drives, impulses, and passions (one reason Aquinas thought it the most difficult virtue, even if the least lofty). It is an expression of discipline and self-mastery that allows a leader to function under pressure, including external pressure from extremists and ideologues to act rashly to accomplish immediate and simplistic goals.

Lincoln’s conciliatory attitude toward the defeated South is a marked example of temperance amidst extremists (think also of Nelson Mandela). Harry Truman was noted for temperate intemperance, writing many angry letters and memos (including one calling for the destruction of every major Russian city) but having the temperance never to send them.

Personal intemperance makes a politician more susceptible to debilitating weaknesses such as anger, lust, and an inordinate need for popularity. Many argue that Bill Clinton’s sexual appetites were irrelevant to his political leadership, but his famous overnight polling and use of focus groups to detect which way the popular winds were blowing suggest both an intemperate need to be liked and a lack of moral courage to make unpopular decisions. How much longer did Vietnam go on because of Lyndon Johnson’s vanity and penchant for ignoring unpleasant realities, or Nixon’s bitter, personal anger toward peace activists? Moderation matters.

Faith, Hope, Love—in a President?
Even those who acknowledge the relevance of the four classical virtues in evaluating presidential candidates might question the significance of the three biblical ones. And perhaps as virtues tied to a specific religious tradition they are potentially controversial. But to the extent that these too are universal qualities (as many social scientists and philosophers argue), they can be expressed in ways that both the religious and secular can affirm.

The ultimate expression of faith may be religious, but in nonsectarian terms it has to do with commitment to a larger story than one’s individual life. Politically, faith is commitment to the story of America—its fundamental worth, its potential for good, its ability to heal its wounds. In this sense, both Martin Luther King—a prophetic critic—and Ronald Reagan—a vocal advocate—demonstrated great faith in America. The key issue in assessing this quality in a candidate is not whether they engage in happy talk about the country, but whether they are capable of calling people to have faith in its essential worth and to work to better realize that inherent possibility.

Similarly with hope. Hope is not mere wishing. It is a reasonable expectation based on past experience. It is not reasonable for me to hope to win the lottery, because I have no experiential or mathematical reason to think it will happen. It is reasonable to hope that America will be more just tomorrow than it is today because we know from history and experience that America is capable of acting justly, even if it has never succeeded in being completely just. We know that people have worked and sacrificed for justice with significant success, and so we can rightly hope to go even further (or to recover lost ground) in that direction.

This ability to inspire hopefulness, of course, must be influenced by practical wisdom, and not be mere blinkered cheerleading. Hope is an expectation of future good that is mingled with the understanding that good is never guaranteed and that the obstacles are many. Ronald Reagan’s famous slogan, “It’s morning in America,” expressed perhaps his greatest virtue—the ability to engender hope. Again, Martin Luther King (“we shall overcome”) was doing the same thing. Both had to back up those words with actions in order to make such hope a reality. If Obama is the candidate most identified with hope today (as was Bill Clinton, “the man from Hope”), he will have to do more than talk about it—hope is not a plan—and that will be a test of his character, not just of his rhetoric or policies.

Love has its ultimate expression in the things of God and the Spirit, but it is relevant to our political and social lives as well. If love is the greatest of the biblical virtues, it is possibly also the ultimate home for all the virtues. We are courageous in order to protect people and things we love. We fight for justice for those we love (even at a distance). We exercise the self-control of moderation and seek to bring wisdom into the world for the sake of what and whom we love. Our earnest love for a certain kind of world gives us faith and hope that such a world can be brought into being.

It is very difficult to assess the quality of love in political candidates. Perhaps one manifestation of it is passion. Passion comes from the Greek word for pain or suffering. To say we love or are passionate about something is a declaration that we are willing to suffer for it. What are candidates passionate about? That is, what are they willing to suffer for? What have they spent their lives doing apart from jobs and political office? What loves or passions made them pursue political office?

Virtue trumps policies and ideology
It would of course be a false dichotomy to suggest that one must choose between assessing virtue and assessing policy or ideology. Virtue and character can and should express themselves in both policy and ideology. One’s virtue as a leader is inescapably revealed by ideological stances and policy decisions on, for instance, partial-birth abortion or the need for health care for all citizens. If so, why not let policy be the objective index to personal qualities and focus on such concrete things, rather than get into the messy subjectivity of virtue and character?

Chief among the many reasons is that many crucial political decisions of the future will revolve around unpredictable events and issues. No candidate’s “policy” on terrorism foresaw or was adequate for 9/11. No candidate had a policy or ideology that would have made Hurricane Katrina greatly less painful (would even the most compassionate and competent President in 2004 have chosen, from all other needs, to spend many millions of dollars to reinforce the dikes in New Orleans?). No one in the 1970s was prepared for AIDS in the 1980s and ’90s. Few people clearly foresaw the collapse of Communism, or the rise thereafter of Islamic fundamentalism. A political leader must be able to respond to ever-changing and unprecedented situations. We should vote for a person whom we believe has the qualities—the virtues, the character—to decide wisely in situations where policies, positions, and ideologies will be of little help.

In addition, campaign policies are illustrative at best and deceitful at worst. Politicians offer proposals that they very well know can never be enacted in the form proposed or have the effects they claim. Are we really to believe that a President Obama could get troops out of Iraq as quickly as he is suggesting, or that a President McCain has the power—given Democratic majorities in Congress—to preserve all the Bush tax cuts, even if he truly wants to?

And if policies are not much of a guide, neither is ideology. Even foundational political philosophies work better in textbooks and tracts than in Washington. Are we to believe, yet again, that Democratic candidates can find the money in a real Congress for all the social equity promises they make every four years? Or that Republican candidates can actually, even if they want to, dramatically shrink the size of government? Or that anyone is genuinely revolutionary or powerful enough to invoke overwhelming “change” in Washington? There’s a systemic momentum to government and its bureaucracies that eats ideology for lunch. Simple realism indicates we have a better chance of making a generally accurate assessment of a candidate’s character—and hoping in that—than we have of using policy or ideology to predict their future actions or success.

The closer we are in time to a President or presidential campaign, the more likely we are to focus on minutiae of policy, platform, likeability, and style. But Hugh Sidey, longtime observer of Presidents, believed other things are more important: “The presidency to this day rests more on the character of the person who inhabits the office than on anything else. The founding fathers designed it that way. It was their idea to find a man in America with a great character and let him invest a tradition and shape a national character.” They found that man in George Washington, a President who refused to be king and who had the virtue to walk away from power when people were begging him to hold on to it.

The greatest fear we have regarding leaders is that they will misuse the power we grant them. The corrupting potential of power is well documented. But power need not corrupt and in a virtuous person it will not. Psychologist Erich Fromm distinguishes between power used for domination and selfish ends, and what he calls “potency” or “generative power.” Such power is strength for others (a definition of virtue), and it motivates creativity and service. All the proper policies and ideology and technical competency in the world will not protect a leader from using power corruptly. In fact, the greatest temptation for a well-meaning leader is to use power corruptly in order to accomplish seemingly benevolent ends. The best insurance against corrupt power is to choose leaders with the combination of virtues necessary to use power well.

Look at ordinary life
How, specifically, could one ever hope to discern these things in a candidate? There is no easy or foolproof way. But start with what they do when no one is looking. Pascal observed, “The strength of a man’s virtue must not be measured by his efforts, but by his ordinary life.”

There is nothing ordinary about being a President. Politicians are public performers, playing always to the watchful electorate. So look at what they did and how they conducted their lives before they went on the political stage. And look at what they do when they hope no one is looking after they are in office. It speaks well of Barack Obama that he worked extensively with the poor before he ran for office, and almost no one, including political opponents, questions the significance of John McCain’s courage and service to his country in the prison cells of North Vietnam. It may, however, also say something that Al Gore, as Vice President, was shown to contribute almost nothing to charitable causes out of his own pocket until he needed to position himself for a run for the presidency.

Look also for any record of willingness to speak and act from conviction when doing so has threatened their careers or self-interest. (It was said of George Marshall of Marshall Plan fame that “he told the truth even when it hurt his cause.”) That is, where have they shown moral courage?

McCain showed conviction and political courage in advocating for more troops in Iraq when most everyone else was either defending the status quo or screaming to throw in the towel. But is he sprinting away from his own proposals regarding illegal immigration because members of his party howled in protest? One should not evaluate these things only in terms of whether you agree with their positions or not, but also in terms of whether they are capable of doing what is broadly unpopular (not just unpopular with their political opponents) if they believe it is right.

Explore also how they treat their opponents. Are critics seen as people to dialogue with, work with, and perhaps even learn from, or as enemies to be destroyed? How inclined are they to vilify, demonize, and use dirty tricks? How often are they intellectually dishonest or jingoistic (for instance, any claim that automatically links opposition to a war to lack of patriotism)? Johnson and Nixon are the negative poster boys here, with both Reagan and Carter getting high marks for largely refusing to engage in slash-and-burn politics. Obama and McCain both claim to be able to heal divisions and work with political opponents, but we need to look closely to see if their legislative records support such claims.

Consider also how they respond to getting or losing power. Lincoln pointed out, “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” Or take it away. Virtuous leaders hold on to power loosely. They share it easily. They encourage it in others. They see it as invested in healthy institutions, not in themselves personally. Unvirtuous, and therefore dangerous, leaders accumulate power for themselves (and their causes), use it to intimidate and manipulate, to reward and punish, and never release it voluntarily. Lyndon Johnson’s abusive use of power as a senator—in which he made loyalty to himself more important than either morality or ideology—hurt the nation.

Yet another place to look is how candidates have dealt with adversity in their own lives. McCain survived torture with his honor intact (even while admitting he sometimes broke under torture), G. W. Bush had the fortitude and spiritual resources to defeat alcoholism. Franklin Roosevelt overcame the effects of polio. But of course all candidates have failures in their lives, too. If a candidate is given to private anger and pettiness, or has a history of broken personal relationships, does that tell us absolutely nothing about what kind of leader he or she might be? Is that none of our business, as some would say, or very much our business if that candidate is asking to be president?

The issue is not that candidates have failures, but how they have dealt with those failures. For they are certain to have public failures while in office. If in private life they run from failure or cover it up or rationalize it, are they not likely to do the same in public life? The goal of seeking virtuous people for high office is not to find perfect people, but to find people with the greatest potential to provide, despite their acknowledged limitations (humility being a prudent quality in a leader), the kind of leadership a community needs to flourish. We are not looking for saints to lead us, but we should be looking for people trying to live virtuously and largely succeeding.

It matters little that people will not agree exactly on a list of key virtues. The question of what virtues are most important, and how they should be defined and expressed, should be a fruitful part of an ongoing discussion. But it matters greatly that such a discussion take place. Recent polls indicate a broad recognition that we have a virtue deficit in this country and in its leaders that makes budget deficits pale in importance.

When we are choosing someone to lead us, we do best to look for a “good human being.” Such a person is not likely to be moralistic or pious or politically correct. But he or she needs to be virtuous. Because, over time, nations flourish only to the degree that their collective virtue sustains.

Daniel Taylor is professor of English at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota. Mark McCloskey is professor of Ministry Leadership at Bethel Seminary, St. Paul.