Monday, September 04, 2023

Support grows for sustainable development, a ‘bioeconomy,’ in the Amazon

A shopper looks at Acai fruits on sale at the Ver o Peso market in Belem, Brazil, Aug. 7, 2023. Among leaders and advocates of the Amazon rainforest region, there’s hope for bioeconomy, a term that refers to people making a living from the forest without cutting it down. Examples include Acai fruits, Pirarucu fish and rubber tapping. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)

A rubber tree is prepared for the removal of rubber in the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve, Acre state, Brazil, Dec. 6, 2022. Among leaders and advocates of the Amazon rainforest region, there’s hope for bioeconomy, a term that refers to people making a living from the forest without cutting it down. Examples include Acai fruits, Pirarucu fish and rubber tapping.

BY DAVID BILLER
August 24, 2023Share

BELEM, Brazil (AP) — If all goes according to plan, in a few weeks people will be sipping a shake that Marcelo Salazar has been developing for three years, made from the Amazon jungle’s cornucopia.

His company Mazo Mana Forest Food has partnered with communities that live from the forest and gather the Brazil nuts, cocoa beans, acai, mushrooms, fruits and other ingredients that go into the drinks. They have received some backing from a business incubator based in Manaus that focuses on sustainable forest businesses, to counter an economy based on logging and ranching.

“To turn the game around, I think it takes a new generation of ventures that combine different business models,” Salazar said.

Some hope sustainable ventures like this will be part of a new “bioeconomy,” a buzzword at the Amazon Summit in Belem in early August, where policymakers voiced eagerness to protect the rainforest and provide a livelihood for tens of millions of rainforest residents.

But beyond general support for the notion, there was little consensus about what exactly a bioeconomy should look like. Salazar attended and spoke on a panel organized by Brazil’s environment ministry titled “The challenge of building an Amazon bioeconomy.”

The idea is not new. It is the latest term for sustainable livelihood, or sustainable development or the green economy. Small to mid-size examples of it exist across the Amazon.

Alcindo Farias Junior, who works in the production of acai, climbs a palm tree to extract the fruit, in an area close to his house, in the community of Vila de Sao Pedro in the Bailique Archipelago, district of Macapa, state of Amapa, northern Brazil, Sept. 11, 2022. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)

Besides the Brazil nuts and acai harvesters, people are making chocolate from native cocoa. A sustainable fishery for one of the world’s largest freshwater fish has given river communities an alternative to logging. Production of sneakers for fashionable Parisians has restored hope for a community of rubber tappers who labored on the verge of obsolescence with the advent of synthetic rubber.

“The challenge is scale,” Para state Gov. Helder Barbalho said in an interview on the sidelines of the summit. His state is believed to be the only one in Brazil that has an actual bioeconomy plan. Para is Brazil’s top producer of acai, yet its economy is far more dependent on iron ore exports to China. So much land in Para has been converted to pasture for an estimated 27 million cattle that it emits more greenhouse gases than any Amazon country besides Brazil.

But when it comes to larger sustainable enterprises, there are few success stories. The brightest example has been cosmetics company Natura, which two decades ago launched a product line using ingredients from traditional Amazon communities and family farms.

View of the forest in Combu Island on the banks of the Guama River, near the city of Belem, Para state, Brazil, Aug. 6, 2023.

Developing these relationships took patience and research, said Priscila Matta, sustainability senior manager at Natura.

When the company started, local people were felling ucuuba trees to make brooms. They tripled their income by leaving the trees standing and selling the seeds to Natura. That is just one among dozens of Natura’s bioingredients, helping the company contribute to the conservation of more than 2 million hectares (about 7,700 square miles) of forest.

About 8% of what Natura spent on raw inputs last year went for Amazon bioingredients. They come from 41 communities – home to 9,120 families – who in 2022 received about $9 million, some of it direct payments to keep the forest standing.

The bioeconomy pitch can also veer toward pie-in-the-sky. Speaking to reporters at the Amazon Summit, Brazil’s planning and budget minister Simone Tebet said that driving a vibrant economy while keeping the forest standing “is our dream, but dreams exist to be realized.”

“Banks are interested,” Tebet said. “Imagine big industries without smokestacks, industries for the good, taking root in Amazon states ... learning from the Indigenous people from whom everything comes.”

Para state’s bioeconomy plan strikes a similarly utopian tone: “The Amazon Forest is like an enormous library of knowledge and wisdom that has yet to be discovered,” it reads.

The plan gets into specifics, naming 43 forest-compatible products that could be exported, including acai, cocoa, cassava, pepper, fish species and essential oils for cosmetics.

Fisherman pull with a Pirarucu fish at a lake in San Raimundo settlement lake, Carauari, Brazil, Sept. 6, 2022. (AP Photo/Jorge Saenz)

A man separates leather from the body of a Pirarucu fish at industrial refrigeration factory of Asproc, Association of Rural Producers of Carauari, Amazonia, Brazil, Aug. 31, 2022.

Para has started building a complex to serve as a bioeconomy incubator to house researchers and start-ups, scheduled for completion before the state capital of Belem hosts the 2025 global climate conference. Para’s public bank, Banpara, has launched a subsidized lending program for small farmers who want to develop agroforestry.

“We can balance the scenario of a living forest and people being cared for, being seen,” Barbalho said in the interview.

Neighboring Amazonas state is developing a bioeconomy plan with the financial support of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The federal government is also starting to move beyond mere words. This month, Brazil’s economy minister, Fernando Haddad, announced an Ecological Transformation Plan. It proposes using a climate fund to back sustainability projects and setting up rules for Brazil’s carbon market.

But some earlier efforts reveal pitfalls.

Baskets of acai are for sale at the Acai Fair at the Ver o Peso market in Belem, Brazil, Aug. 7, 2023.
A state condom factory in the Amazon city of Xapuri that opened in 2008 during President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s previous term was supposed to provide a market for hundreds of rubber-tapper families living in the region where the late environmental leader Chico Mendes was killed. The factory closed 10 years later, after federal subsidies came to an end. Locals resorted to cattle ranching and today the region ranks high for deforestation.

Cocoa beans are another cautionary tale. The trees can be a way to let forest grow back where it has been cut down but its appeal in places like the Ivory Coast and Ghana has meant massive deforestation to make way for the more lucrative trees.

Salazar, the CEO of Mazo Mana, the forest shake company, views his enterprise as both social-minded and market-savvy. It reserves nearly 10% equity for its partner community associations and, to the extent possible, production takes place locally to add value and develop expertise.

Salazar thinks the sustainable companies that succeed and grow big will be those with a mission to solve the Amazon’s problems, and they will drive a transformation toward an economy that recognizes the value of the forest.
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Associated Press reporter Fabiano Maisonnave contributed from Belem.
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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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Opinion

History tells us that burning sacred texts and other books never ends well

Those whose books are burned or banned are often erased from a country’s life and history.

A counterdemonstrator extinguishes a Quran on fire outside the Iranian Embassy in Stockholm, Aug. 18, 2023. A woman with a fire extinguisher raced toward the man who set fire to a Quran outside the embassy but was stopped by plainclothes officers. Swedish media said the woman, who was not identified, was detained, suspected of disturbing public order and violence against a police officer. Salwan Momika, the protester, was not injured. (Fredrik Sandberg/TT News Agency via AP)

August 29, 2023

Anna Piela

(RNS) — This summer in Sweden, Salwan Momika, an Iraqi refugee with reported ties to an extremist Christian militia group, burned the Quran in front of a Stockholm mosque on Eid al-Adha and outside the Swedish Parliament building. As a result of the burnings, Iraq expelled Sweden’s ambassador and recalled its charge d’affaires. Violent protests took place around Sweden’s Embassy in Baghdad.

The incident also briefly aggravated a long-standing diplomatic tension between Turkey and Sweden over Sweden’s bid to become a NATO member. The tension played into Russia’s hand, as it sees the NATO enlargement process as a threat to its geopolitical interests in Europe.

The government in Stockholm is caught between that country’s exceptionally liberal freedom of expression laws and a bubbling Islamophobia and racism from the right. After the Quran burnings, Ulf Kristersson, the Swedish prime minister, accused “outsiders” of abusing the free speech laws to spread hate. However, Kristersson’s own governing coalition depends on the support of the Sweden Democrats, an anti-Islam and anti-immigration party with Neo-Nazi ties. This irony has not escaped Swedish Muslims, who say they feel violated by both the Quran burnings and the state’s refusal to stop them.

The Swedes share their predicament with other Scandinavian countries. In January in Denmark, the right-wing politician and anti-Islam Danish-Swedish provocateur Rasmus Paludan burned a Quran, reportedly under a public protest permit paid for by a journalist with ties to the Kremlin — and to the Sweden Democrats. This week, the Danish government introduced a bill that would outlaw the burning of the Quran or other religious texts.

There is nothing new about book burnings, even those that torch sacred texts. But their impact has changed: Before they became social media stunts, book burnings had two main functions — restricting access to texts and symbolically asserting power.

Scores of angry protesters burn the Swedish and Dutch flags after Friday prayers outside Mohammad al-Amin Mosque to denounce the recent desecration of Islam's holy book by a far-right activists in the European countries, in downtown Beirut, Lebanon, Friday, Jan. 27, 2023. Earlier this month, a far-right activist from Denmark staged a protest outside the Turkish Embassy in Stockholm where he burned the Quran, Islam's holy book. Days later, Edwin Wagensveld, Dutch leader of the far-right Pegida movement in the Netherlands tore pages out of a copy of the Quran near the Dutch parliament and stomped on the pages. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)

Scores of angry protesters in downtown Beirut burn the Swedish and Dutch flags after Friday prayers outside Mohammad al-Amin Mosque to denounce the recent desecration of Islam’s holy book by far-right activists in the European countries, Jan. 27, 2023. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)

To name just a few such recorded incidents: In 600 B.C., Jehoiakim, the king of Judah, burned the scrolls that recorded Jeremiah’s politically inconvenient (but accurate) prophecy that the Babylonian Empire would one day destroy the land of Judah. The Jewish historian Josephus recorded that in 168 B.C., the Seleucid monarch, Antiochus IV, ordered Jewish Books of the Law to be torn and burned in a series of persecutions that led to the Maccabean revolt. Antiochus prohibited the religious practices decreed in the Books of the Law in an attempt to Hellenize Jewish culture and effectively erase the Jews as a nation.

In an incident reminiscent of today’s Quran burnings, also described by Josephus, a Roman soldier nearly incited a Jewish revolt in year 50 by burning a Torah scroll in public. To head off unrest, the Roman commander Cumanus Ventidius had the soldier beheaded. In 303, the Roman emperor Diocletian ordered that the leaders of the Manichaean movement, as well as Christians, be burned together with their holy scriptures.

This tactic of physical violence and cultural devastation was taken up by Christians themselves after the empire’s conversion. In “The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World,” Catherine Nixey described at length the destruction of the Middle Eastern city of Palmyra by Christian zealots, as well as brutal lynchings of freethinking philosophers and scientists such as Hypatia. Nixey blames hateful propaganda against non-Christians disseminated by church fathers.

During the13th-century Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars of the Languedoc, an anti-materialist church reform movement, the church ordered all Cathar texts destroyed by fire before unleashing a murderous campaign against Cathars across France; estimates of the dead range from 200,000 to 1 million. Historian Mark Gregory Pegg marks it as the introduction of genocide in the West, “linking divine salvation to mass murder.”

In the final decade of the 1400s in Granada, Spain, the Spanish Inquisition’s Grand Inquisitor Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros oversaw the burning of multiple Torah scrolls and other Jewish books, as well as 5,000 Arabic manuscripts. In 1509, he followed by ordering the burning of libraries and archives of the northern African city of Oran as the Spanish forces began its occupation.

The powers that burn sacred texts understand that the violence is tantamount to violence against those to whom the texts belong, and is often prelude to it. Muslim and Jewish communities of Sweden sounded a warning earlier this year about the increasing intolerance against minorities, quoting the 19th century German Jewish writer and poet, Heinrich Heine. “Where they burn books,” Heine wrote, “they will, in the end, burn human beings too.” The quote, from Heine’s play “Almansor,” refers to the burning of the Quran as the Spanish eradicated the Muslim Moors from the Iberian Peninsula.

A Nazi book burning in Berlin's Opera Plaza on May 11, 1933. Photo by Georg Pahl/German Federal Archive/Creative Commons

A Nazi book burning in Berlin’s Opernplatz on May 11, 1933. Photo by Georg Pahl/German Federal Archive/Creative Commons

Heine’s books were burned by Nazis on Opernplatz in Berlin in 1933, as Nazi organizations, as well as ordinary Germans, engaged in burning books by Jewish and Nazi opposition authors. On a single day, May 10, 1933, students in 34 university towns across Germany burned more than 25,000 books by Jewish intellectuals such as Karl Marx, Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud. The Nazis raised book burning to a ceremony, giving the Nazi salute as they threw books on the flames.

A Polish Jewish lawyer, Rafal Lemkin, who was lucky to be granted asylum in the United States during World War II, coined in 1944 the term “cultural genocide” that he understood as a necessary component of genocide at large, committed for religious reasons,or for the purpose of conducting ethnic “cleansing.”

Today, as digital technologies allow us to preserve texts in archives, book burnings have largely lost their power to deny access to texts, but the same technology has increased their symbolic power as threatening acts aimed at communities represented in texts.

This dark history of threatening minority voices by destroying books is threaded through the increasingly common trend of book bans in American public schools and libraries. According to Pen America’s report, “Banned in the USA: State Laws Supercharge Book Suppression in Schools,” such bans in U.S. public schools increased by 28% in the first half of the 2022-23 academic year alone. Driven by conservative, white supremacist Christians, they have primarily targeted books that talked about race or racism (30%) or LGBTQ+ experiences (26%), mostly in Republican-governed states, mainly Texas and Florida.

Book bans function much like book burnings of the past. They express disdain for minority voices, while curtailing access to knowledge. School libraries are the primary source of book access for children from low-income and minority families, but they are also a way our society accommodates and recognizes the existence of those who are different. If children of color, children of immigrants, and LGBTQ+ youth cannot see themselves in the books they are offered at school, they are being erased from American history.

(Anna Piela is the author of “Wearing the Niqab: Muslim Women in the UK and the US.” She is also the senior writer at American Baptist Home Mission Societies and an ordained American Baptist Churches USA minister. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

White Christians think too many people see racism when it’s not there, new survey finds

THAT'S BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT WHITE

A new survey from Pew Research revealed once again how deeply divided religious Americans are when it comes to matters of race.

People demonstrate on the National Mall in June 2020 in Washington. Photo by Clay Banks/Unsplash/Creative Commons

August 28, 2023

Bob Smietana

(RNS) — Three years after a national racial reckoning that followed the death of George Floyd — and 60 years after the March on Washington — Americans remain divided on issues of race and discrimination. That’s especially true for religious groups, according to newly released data from the Pew Research Center.

In April, Pew asked Americans which was the bigger problem facing the country when it comes to matters of race: People overlooking racism when it exists or seeing racism in places where there is none.

Overall, just about half (53%) of Americans said people not seeing discrimination where it does exist was a bigger problem. Just under half (45%) said people seeing discrimination where is does not exist is the bigger issue.

Among religious groups, however, white Christians are most likely to say claims about non-existent racial discrimination is the biggest problem, including majorities of white Evangelicals (72%), white Catholics (60%) and white Mainline Protestants (54%), according to data provided to Religion News Service from Pew Research.

Few Black Protestants (10%), unaffiliated Americans (35%) or non-Christian religious Americans (31%) agreed.

Conversely, Black Protestants (88%), non-Christian religious Americans (69%), unaffiliated Americans (64%) and Hispanic Catholics (60%) were more likely to say that people not seeing racism when it exists is the bigger problem. Fewer white evangelicals (27%), white Mainline Protestants (44%) and white Catholics (39%) agreed.

While a majority of unaffiliated Americans, also known as Nones, say that not seeing racism is the bigger problem, there were differences when it came to race, according to Pew.

“Among White unaffiliated adults, 61% say people not seeing racial discrimination where it does exist is the larger problem for the country, while 39% say the opposite,” a Pew spokesperson said in an email. “Among Non-White unaffiliated adults, 71% say overlooking racial discrimination is the bigger issue, compared with 29% who give the opposite answer.”

Divides over issues of race have heated up among American Christians in recent years, as the so-called woke war has pitted those who do believe systemic racism is an ongoing issue against those who don’t. That divide has fueled conflicts in the Southern Baptist Convention and other evangelical groups, led to feuds in local churches and Christian colleges, become a major debate during school board meetings and been a major talking point in the current race for U.S. president. The issue of race also led to concerns about the rise of white Christian nationalism in churches.

Pew’s study suggests those divides are unlikely to go away.

“Views on racial discrimination differ by race, ethnicity and political party” Graphic courtesy Pew Research Center

Overall, more than half of White Americans (54%) said people seeing non-existent racism was the bigger problem. Eighty-eight percent of Black Americans, along with 58% percent of Hispanic Americans and 66% of Asian Americans, say people not seeing racism when it exists is the bigger problem.

Most Republicans and those who lean Republican (74%) said that people seeing non-existent racism is a bigger problem, while 80% of Democrats say the bigger problem is people not seeing racism that exists.

A similar survey in 2019 found that 57% of Americans said that not seeing racism is the bigger problem, while 42% said that seeing non-existent racism is the bigger problem.

George Yancey, a professor of sociology at Baylor University, said that other surveys have shown similar divides when it comes to matters of race and discrimination, adding that attitudes changed little even after the protests that were sparked by the death of George Floyd.

Yancey said that churches have done little to resist the influence of politics among their members. “We have taken our overall polarization and we place it into the racial debate,” he said. Politics, rather than their religious beliefs, shape attitudes about race.

He believes similar approaches happen among more progressive religious people, and as a result there’s little listening going on when people talk about matters of race. “I don’t think Christians are the source of polarization,” said Yancey. “But I do think we have not fought against it. We have accepted in and put it into our ministries rather than trying to show concern and care for people who disagree with us.”

Sociologist Michael O. Emerson, who studies religion and public policy at Rice University and co-wrote “Divided by Faith,” an influential 2000 survey of religion and race in America, suspects the trouble is more than politics. In a new book, “The Religion of Whiteness,” due out in the spring, Emerson said he and his co-author argue that the idea of being colorblind — disregarding race as having any impact on life — has become theological.

“It’s not just a ruse for politics,” he said. “It is theological. It is a transcendent reality.”

Emerson said that the religion of whiteness — a distinctly American faith, he said — has a number of symbols, including a white Jesus, the cross, the American flag and firearms. “The only way to address this is a spiritual battle,” he said. “You can’t just use politics to change it.”

Derwin Gray, pastor of Transformation Church outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, and author of “How To Heal Our Racial Divide,” also worries about how race and religion have been intertwined. In recent years, he believes, it has become increasingly difficult to talk about matters of race in churches.

“Race and prejudice are a matter of idolatry in the American church,” said Gray. “As a pastor, I have to gospel that out of people.”

Gray said that almost every country in the world has issues of race, because human beings are by nature sinful. So, America is not unique in having to deal with the issue of race.

He said that the growing number of multiethnic churches shows that racial reconciliation can take place. About 1 in 4 congregations in the U.S. is multiracial, according to the 2020 Faith Communities Today study.

But being multiethnic means more than just people from different backgrounds worshipping together, said Gray. It also means multiethnic leadership and listening across political lines.

In his book about racial reconciliation, Gray recounts talking with a fellow Christian leader who argued that systemic racial injustice does not exist. Instead, the leader saw American media outlets as organized efforts to discriminate against American Christians.

Gray said that most of the folks who come to Transformation Church, a multiethnic congregation of about 10,000, embrace the idea of racial reconciliation and are open to dealing with America’s racial history. But not all — and those folks often don’t stay, he said.

“If we are truly allowing Jesus to shape us, and we’re truly growing in grace, we’re going to desire the best for our brothers and sisters,” Gray said. “We’re not going to deny the impact of the past. We’re not going to live in the past. We’re going to join hands together to move forward to a better future.”

California’s caste bill passes key hurdle with 50-3 Assembly vote

Senate Bill 403 exposed a rift among members of the South Asian American community over the prevalence of caste-based discrimination in the United States.

Califiornia state Sen. Aisha Wahab, center, stands with supporters after a news conference where she proposed SB 403, a bill that would add caste as a protected category in the state’s anti-discrimination laws, in Sacramento, Calif., March 22, 2023. (AP Photo/José Luis Villegas)

August 29, 2023

Richa Karmarkar

(RNS) — A contentious bill that would declare caste as a protected category under California’s existing anti-discrimination law was passed by the state’s Assembly in a bipartisan 50-3 vote Monday evening (Aug. 28), with 27 members abstaining. The legislation, which had already passed the state Senate, is expected to become law with the governor’s signature.

Known as Senate Bill 403, or SB403, the bill was originally introduced by Sen. Aisha Wahab in February and will revise California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act, education and housing codes by adding caste as a protected category under “ancestry.”

Senate Bill 403 became a national cause that exposed a rift among members of the South Asian American community over the prevalence of caste-based discrimination in the United States.

While many South Asians agree that caste has an impact on many lives across the diaspora in the United States, some feel that explicitly outlawing caste discrimination only serves to reaffirm caste differences among, and prejudice against, the U.S. Hindu community. A vocal group who opposed the bill argued that the caste system has been unfairly equated with the Hindu religion in the American imagination.

As a result of monthslong protests from Hindu advocacy organizations that followed the bill as it moved through the California Legislature, SB403 now contains no explicit mentions of South Asia or Hinduism.

On Monday, Equality Labs, a civil rights organization dedicated to Dalit advocacy and the bill’s co-sponsor, released a statement celebrating the effort to raise awareness of caste-based discrimination to the legislative stage.

“SB403, at its core, is an anti-discrimination bill and does not target any religious or cultural groups; that would directly go against the bill’s very nature,” the statement says. “There is no underlying agenda or controversy surrounding the legislation. People of all faiths, backgrounds, and nationalities have peacefully united to advocate for SB403 — creating a truly stunning response to the international call for caste equity.”

The lights of the state Capitol glow into the night in Sacramento, Calif., Wednesday, Aug. 31, 2022. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

The lights of the state Capitol glow into the night in Sacramento, Calif., Aug. 31, 2022. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

The Ambedkar King Study Circle, named after the social reformer and drafter of the Indian Constitution, B.R. Ambedkar, posted a statement on X, formerly Twitter: “This monumental bill puts an end to caste discrimination, extending legal protection to all facing caste oppression. A huge step towards equality and justice”

The Ambedkar International Center called it “a defeat for the caste deniers.”

Hindus for Human Rights, a Hindu advocacy organization that is vocal about the issue of caste bias, said in a statement: “On the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington, Dr. King’s dream takes one more step into reality.”

But while many celebrated what they see as a win for marginalized South Asian communities, some opponents are still dissatisfied with the bill’s passage, especially in light of what they say is unsubstantiated evidence of caste discrimination in the U.S.

Suhag Shukla, executive director of the Hindu American Foundation, which led the charge against the bill, released a statement saying, “Fifty California legislators chose to side with anti-Hindu hate groups rather than showing moral courage and upholding the Constitution. When a state legislator pushes a law with the intent of targeting an ethnic community, it’s not only racist, it’s unconstitutional.”

The Coalition of Hindus of North America also bemoaned “the passing of a bill which is NOT facially neutral and written to specifically target Hindu Americans,” calling it “the latest in a long line of unjust bills, (such as the Asian Exclusion Act), which were popular at the time of their passing and were used to target minorities of color.”

In recent years, colleges and universities began adding caste to their list of differences, along with race and sexuality and gender identity, that were protected against bias. Brandeis University banned caste discrimination over complaints from some Hindus in 2019; the California State University system added caste to its nondiscrimination policy in early 2022.

In June 2020, an unnamed Indian-origin Cisco employee accused two of his managers of passing him over for a promotion. California’s Civil Rights Department sued the two defendants in a yearslong case that ended when it was dismissed due to lack of evidence.

More recently, 12 of the complainants in a 2021 lawsuit that alleged forced labor among “lower-caste” artisans on the BAPS Swaminarayan Temple of Robbinsville, New Jersey, retracted their claims, saying they were coerced into making false allegations of caste discrimination.

The amended California bill will now return to the Senate for a floor vote, then will be sent to Gov. Gavin Newsom.

“We will explore every option to protect the rights of Hindu Californians,” said Shukla.

Opinion

Attacks against Palestinian Christians deepens determination to stay on the land

Palestinian Christians are doing their utmost to encourage their cohort to stay put on their lands.

Palestinian citizens of Israel protest over the spiraling rate of violent crime in their communities, in Tel Aviv, Israel, Sunday, Aug. 6, 2023. More than 130 people have been killed in violent crime inside Israel's Arab communities this year, according to Israeli media, already surpassing the number of killings in all of 2022. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)

August 21, 2023

Daoud Kuttab

(RNS) — Palestinian Christians living in Israel or the occupied West Bank have been facing a slow decline in numbers over the past few decades. In the first half of the 20th century, their numbers ranged between 20%-25% of the overall Palestinian population. Today, they are fluctuating between 1% and 2%.

Wars and conflicts have caused many to emigrate. The fact that they are generally located in the Jerusalem and Bethlehem areas, as well as the Nazareth and Galilee areas, has meant that they are generally in close touch with foreign tourists and pilgrims, relations that have fostered connections with Christian institutions — especially universities — abroad. Many have never returned.

The ascension of the most right-wing Israeli government in the history of Israel has made things worse for all Palestinians, but for Palestinian Christians the current regime has been a time of unprecedented attacks on churches, their leaders and their communities in Jerusalem and Haifa as well as cemeteries and other Christian locations. In addition, internal violence among Israel’s Arab communities has led to the death of some Christians since the beginning of this year through mid-July. Local leaders say Israeli police do little to stop this criminality

Further poisoning the atmosphere is the Israeli government’s refusal to even negotiate about the fate of the occupied territories and the appointment of convicted racist leaders as ministers of police and finance. The mixture of religious Jewish fundamentalists with extreme nationalism has made life for Palestinians toxic and dangerous. Deaths among Palestinians at the hands of Israeli forces in 2023 have passed 200, among them 35 children.

In addition, the Religious Freedom Data Center, which documents attacks on Christians, estimates that since January 2023 at least 60 incidents of attacks against Christians have occurred. Christians in the Old City of Jerusalem, especially near New Gate and the Armenian Quarter, have been targeted by radical Jewish hooligans. Priests are regularly spat on. In Haifa a radical Hassidic community has been showing up in force to pray at the Stella Maris Monastery, claiming it is a Jewish site built on the remnants of the prophet Elisha and forcing local Christians and supporters to stand up to the Jewish pilgrims.

Meanwhile, bureaucrats in the government have frozen zoning decisions, preventing Palestinians from gaining official permits to build homes. Since 1967, churches have funded a few small housing projects that have also allowed Palestinian Christians to overcome the prohibitive cost of living in Jerusalem, but no major housing developments in East Jerusalem have been approved in that time. Meanwhile Jewish Israelis are entitled to government-subsidized mortgages.

When they build homes illegally, Israeli bulldozers knock them down, and the owners are sent a bill for the cost of the demolition. According to the Israeli human rights organization B’tselem, in May 2023 alone and on orders from the Israelis, 46 structures, including 30 homes belonging to Palestinians, were demolished.

There are other slights. Israeli legislatures have tried to ban Christians from sharing their faith under the guise of preventing “proselytization,” and Israeli Interior Ministry officials have barred evangelical Christian volunteers from obtaining a work visa. A video of an Israeli official banning a priest from accompanying the German minister of education to the Western Wall because he was wearing a cross has gone viral.

Lay people from the Latin church — the Christians who are in full communion with the pope — have been putting pressure on their leaders to speak out against the escalating attacks against Christians. Church leaders have been been making public appeals about the escalation of attacks on the churches and Christians to the Israeli government, which has been doing very little to stop the attacks. The protests have not changed official policy but have brought some relief

In the Haifa case, media coverage and the advocacy of Palestinian Christians led to a visit by the Israeli president and the chief of police, which appears to have temporarily quieted the radical Jewish group.

While the situation looks dark for the tiny Palestinian Christian populations, many are doing their utmost to defend, protect and encourage Christian Arabs to stay put on their lands.

In Galilee, two Palestinian Christians, Botrus and Samar Mansour, and their spouses decided to renovate their grandparent’s home in the biblical village of Cana, where Jesus is believed to have turned water into wine, into a chapel for visitors. The Cana Wedding Chapel has attracted pilgrims and tourists wanting to renew their vows.

The uptick in tourism is helping such efforts, as tourists have flooded hotels and restaurants in Jerusalem and Bethlehem, providing Palestinian Christians with more money to overcome economic deprivation. But as with much in the Middle East, tourism’s effect is complicated, as the outmigration for education shows. Church leaders of all denominations have tried to fight the trend by setting up local higher educational institutions, including the Anglican Bir Zeit University, one of the best Palestinian schools, and the Catholics’ Bethlehem University.

It will be difficult to encourage the many Palestinian Christians who have emigrated to return, but the effort is underway to ensure that the tiny community stays put and has what it takes for sustainability.

But a longer-term fix would be to address the growing religious-nationalist threat, and sooner rather than later. The world community has supported Israel for decades by claiming that they have “shared values.” What is happening to Palestinians in general, and Palestinian Christians specifically, contradicts that claim.

(Daoud Kuttab is a Palestinian Christian journalist from Jerusalem and the former Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment