Haaretz, “Toulouse shootings shows hatred has more than one source”
Jean-Yves Camus
“[I]ntelligence officials here have made a link between this cold-blooded murder, carried in a military style by a lone killer, and the assassination of three servicemen a couple of days ago from a paratroopers' unit who served in Afghanistan. ... What has sparked suggestions of a common ideological cause for these killings is that all the victims are from minority groups, whether Jews in the case of the school, or Muslim north African or West Indian, in the case of the soldiers.
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But so far the most important fact to emerge for the Jewish community in France is that they will have to learn how to live under threat from an enemy that is not necessarily a terrorist network with a leadership and cells, but one which follows the pattern of "leaderless resistance," a concept believed to be on the rise within a range of radical movements, both Islamist and extreme-right.
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The so-called "new" anti-Semitism of the post-Intifada era emanates mostly from radicalized (although not often observant) Muslim immigrants or long-standing citizens, and it is rooted both in religious prejudice and in anger emerging from support for the Palestinian cause. ...[But] as shown in the Breivik case, sectarian hatred and bigotry, a bigotry that kills, can equally emanate from the other end of the political spectrum, for neo-Nazis may not scale intellectual heights, but they do have enough brains to hate Jews and Muslims at the same time, and for much of the same reasons. They also have the brawn to turn their ideology into real events.”
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
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