Help.

Ruben and I, well, frankly...we're struggling. We have a research topic that about which we are extremely passionate and do not want to compromise the substance, but we're experiencing some "technical difficulties" formulating a specific research question and confronting the ethical restrictions.

We want to study how the interaction between religious institutions and politics, whether that be political mobilizations of people from the pulpit (through explicit calls to action or religiously-affiliated community events/involvement) or the way in which believers reconcile or construe their political and religious identity or even the way in which religious organizations use their physical space to interact with the larger community (see the last entry concerning the Western Mosque). We are fascinated by the intersection of religion and politics and feel that Amsterdam is a unique place to study this issue considering its long history of religious tolerance and intolerance and more current affairs. But within this broad framework we are unable to determine a specific question, and we have been encountering some issues while thinking about how to operationalize our subject.

Is a sermon technically public or private property? While it's clearly meant for an audience, it's technically intended to target the congregation.Same goes for religious publications. Beyond this, the social sciences are meant to be objective-- how can we analyze documents and speeches for political and social signals without drawing our own inferences? And how can we ethically question people regarding the two most sensitive issues--religion and politics? Is it appropriate to hand out blind surveys, and what kind of questions should we ask? "How do you construe your political identity: do you think of yourself as a) primarily ____ (Christian, Muslim, Jewish); b) Dutch; c) both equally; d) neither; or e) all/none of the above?" (Don't worry, we are not really thinking of using heinous questions like that, I was trying to illustrate our dilemma).

In short, we need some help. Jessica and Clifford-- what times are available on Friday?

The Western Mosque

Please refer to: The Religious/Political Significance of Physical Spaces

Thinking about the intersection of and interaction between socio-politics and religion in physical spaces (churches, mosques, synagogues) and more specifically the integration of a large Muslim immigrant population into Amsterdam (a topic I cannot seem to drop), it seems that the Western Mosque (pictured above) is a synecdoche for these wider themes. As Sunier says, "places of worship have constituted the most controversial and symbolically laden areas" with respect to religious issues--emancipation, integration, evangelism, etc. The Western Mosque was designed to combine traditional elements of Islamic worship with Dutch architectural styles in order to align itself with "the physical and social environment," and its construction was politically controversial. This mosque is more than just an example of cultural integration and the physical and spatial manifestation of politcial and social intent-- it actually stands in for a larger phenomenon of religious instutitions using their physical space to push a political and social agenda.

Internet Sources...

While doing the assigned readings, I thought that perhaps the best place to examine social interactions between site and readers and gauge reactions to Holocaust memorials and their relation to contemporary issues like the immigration debate (my research focus) would be personal blogs. However, after skimming several I realized this would not be appropriate-- they were too emotionally loaded and polemic. Instead I stuck to more mainstream sites:

Holocaust Memorials and Public Memory
Lists and discusses the Holocaust memorials and the role they play in commemorating the event, creating public awareness of the facts, and enhancing public empathy and memory.

List of Holocaust Memorials in Amsterdam
Lists and depicts existing memorials; this would be something to physcially follow up on while in Amsterdam. Basis for James E. Young-type work, I would want to gauge reactions to these.

The Virtual Jewish History Tour: Netherlands
Provides context and describes horror and scale of the Holocaust. This is an interesting social relationship to examine: how the site communicates the devastation of WWII to its viewers. This would be within the realm of my research interests...

Blog: Islam in Europe
Links to articles regarding the immigration debate in Amsterdam. Organized by topic...

Preliminary Research Interests...

Watching Fitna, I was struck by the way in which Wilders references the Dutch WWII experience as a tool to evoke an emotional response. Given the long history of the Netherlands as such a tolerant community (as Ran Hennes says,Amsterdam was known to Jews as "the City" and Murder in Amsterdam discusses theJewish synagogues built in the area) and the juxtaposition of this tolerance with the events of the Holocaust and the Dutch inability to integrate or protect the majority of its own Jews and Jewish refugees from Germany/Austria, the the Holocaust is especially relevant for the Dutch people.

In Fitna, Wilders first lingered on a "God Bless Hitler" sign and he made a point of emphasizing Muslim hatred of and violence towards Jews, which I felt drew on the collective Dutch experience in WWII and the inability to protect the Jewish people (perhaps he is suggesting that because the Dutch wereunable to save the Jewish victims of Nazism, they have an obligation to save theJewish victims of Islam? I don't want to draw unsupported inferences, I don't know whether that was his intent...) Beyond the role of the Dutch "tolerance" in the fate of its Jewish people, Wilders claims that like Nazism, Islam is an ideology to be defeated.Once again he evokes the communal memory of the terrible events of the Holocaustin order to rally support for his cause.

I am interested in researching how the media/propaganda/other sources do this--how they use the memory horrible catastrophes--specifically those of WWII, the most relevant and horrific point in Dutch history-- to rally people, especially in the context of integration/immigration issues. Itseems like a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it seems like the memory of the Holocaust should make the Dutch MORE tolerant towards minorities and religious groups, but on the other it can be used as ammunition against another group. It's especially interesting to me because as Americans were/are so physcially removed from WWII--we did not live through it and truly experience its horror-- it is not as poignant/relevant for us (although perhaps it should be) and is not a tool used to evoke emotion and memory in our media.

This is obviously a very sensitive subject, and I am not sure how I would approach it. I would want to look at media sources (papers, movieclips, commercials etc.) but I would also want to look in less (or more) direct places-- street art, the Anne Frank museum and other formal commemorations/monuments of WWII, and other places in Amsterdam I do not yet know of. I would want to somehow gauge a reaction to this sources as well from a people and nation who had experienced WWII, but I am not sure how I would do this... And ideally I would want to study how the Holocaust/WWII experience is invoked in the current immigration debate, although this may be too political...

A Methodological Approach to Recycling Receptacles

Redirect to Fiona's blog.

Fitna: Sensationalism at its Worst and Situational Irony at its Finest

Quite frankly, I found Fitna atrocious. The choice of medium-- the internet and, of all sources, live leak (the original source to which Fitna was released)-- was not appropriate for political discourse, which to me suggests that Wilders did not intend to seriously contribute to the (non) integration debate but rather to incite unrest. The politics here are inexcusable-- how far will he go to misrepresent a population and terrorize the Dutch people unnecessarily in order to win seats in the Parliament? In my opinion, Fitna was an alarmist piece of hate and fear mongering, as perhaps best exemplified by the bar graphs of Europe and the Netherlands' Muslim populations that richocheted past the top of the screen, utterly removed from any context (the fact that there has been a simultaneous increase in European population as a whole, albeit not proportional to the number of Muslim immigrants but still enough to make these statistics less alarming).

Beyond the blatant lack of context provided for many of the "facts," I felt this collection of scences was an unfair and unrepresentative sample of Muslims. Many of the verses cited in the Qur'an have counterparts in the Abrahamic religions-- in the Bible's Old Testament, for example. While Wilders' footage shows passages of the Qur'an promoting the violent killing of "the enemies of Allah and your enemies," he neglects to inform us that the Old Testament promises a war-like Messiah to destroy the enemies of God's chosen people. The "uniquely Muslim" intolerance of homosexuality, adultery, and other religious faiths as portrayed by Wilders is in fact paralleled by Christian movements across the world, and in a twist of situational irony, immediately after watching Fitna I walked into Red Square only to hear a Christian evangelical screaming "Escape is folly, the only way to God is through our Lord. Convert or burn in the eternal hell fires." I feel I could reproduce Fitna in such an alarming way with insert religion here as the subject, perhaps featuring my teen daily devotional (which in today's breif explicitly declared that "Some people believe we should allow people to worship in their own way. They are wrong. We are meant to lead people to the ways of Christ," Jerry Falwell, some crazy televangelist and the guy from Red Square today in a slandering montage of Christianity. While it would be true that these people exist and are sincere in their radical beliefs, they would be no more representative of the entire Christian population that Ahmedinijad is of Islam. Wilders is simply exploiting (and I would argue causing) a growing fear of Islamic society in the wake of 9/11 and the context of increased immigration into Europe from the Middle East.

I noticed that Fitna did not only prey upon these contemporary insecurities (immigration and other political issues) but also the collective Dutch experience, or more specifically the memory of WWII. Footage lingered on a "God Bless Hitler" sign and emphasized Islamic hatred and violence towards Jews, thus targeting a sensitive spot in recent national memory and confusing group and individual feelings of guilt (for refusing to house Jewish refugees and cooperating with Hitler) and fear of Nazism with fear of Islam. I also noted the ending analogy-- like Nazism and communism, Islam is another ideology to be condemned and eradicated. Wilders has managed to tap into a wellspring of not only current unrest but bad past experience and a communal sense of guilt and fear; I can only hope that this badly-mad alarmist montage of radical, unusual, and unrepresentative scenes is poorly recieved in the Dutch community.

Who Superimposed Order? Shirley's Blog in Time and Space

Like last week I was surprised by the results of the blog analysis. While attempting to determine what sense of order was inherently present or purposefully imposed in Shirley's blog, I realized I could not differentiate between the Shirley's order and Emily's order. Was I correctly interpreting Shirley's use of space and content breaks as her intended order, or was I superimposing an order of my own in an attempt to understand the blog in my own mind?

"Trusting my skills of observation to inform what I saw in the blog content," I found the structure of Shirley's blog at once predictable and peculiar. The socially-mandated aspects of blogging and constructing space and order followed a consistent and logical pattern, and were thus predictable. Examples include the blog titles, which encompassed almost every aspect of the post as a form of social courtesy or socially-constructed norm that writers must indicate their subject in a headline (Bijlmermeer + Exploration + Lectures or Interview + Exploration Wonders, in which the addition signs immediately stand out as an indication that in Shirley's mind, these subjects are linked within the post), the use of paragraphs to clearly demarcate different topics (and the use of spaces in between those paragraphs to clearly demarcate and spatially seperate the text itself, further emhasizing to the reader the distinctness of each subject), the use of bullet points to breifly outline ideas rather than jamming unrelated observations into a single blob of text (and furthermore the space in between these bullet points), and the use of a single phrase and a colon before these bullet points to establish the context for the reader. I wonder the extent to which Shirley made these spatial and formatting choices intentionally (to clarify the content for the reader), and which aspects of formatting were not choices at all but rather unconscious conformation to socially constructed norms (as I notice I have thoughtlessly done now by seperating these paragraphs).

What I found peculiar is the chronological and topical mixture Shirley used to order the content within her posts. She usually began by detailing the early events of the day, but rather than adhere to a strict chronological order (at 3 we counted head scarves, at 4 I met this man, at 5 I interviewed this woman), it seemed that certain events as subjects led better into other events as subjects (at 3 we counted headscarves, I later interviewed a woman about her headscarf, I also met a man today about a completely different subject). I'm not sure this example made sense, but the point I'm trying to communicate is that Shirley's order is not necessarily time-oriented but rather she allows one subject to flow into a similar one. I think the reason she always begins with the earliest activity is due to a social norm of blogging, that the order of events is easier for a reader to interpret chronologically.

Close Reading Surprise...

Close reading is peculiar-- what at first seemed like a perfunctory "check-in" email from a research team manager now appears to be slightly aggravated. I percieve a sense of irritation in the clipped sentences and punctuation (her "See you Wednesday. " seems less friendly and more matter-of-fact than a "See you Wednesday!") and her "Sound good?"seems short and harsh in comparison to the longer, alternate "Does this sound good?" I also note how the sign off comes immediately after a question-- obviously she is not asking us if this sounds good because she wants an answer, she is asking either for added emphasis (this is how it is, it better be ok with you now) or in attempt to make the message more student friendly.

The phrase "forty minutes should be adequate most weeks" strikes me immediately. Obviously she does not believe forty minutes will be enough time, as denoted by the "SHOULD" (as opposed to "will"), the "ADEQUATE" (vs. "plenty"), and the qualifier "MOST WEEKS," which indicates that there will be weeks in which we do not finish in the allotted time. Following this she adds that "when we need to go over into the noon hour those who have other obligations can leave early." The word "NEED" jumps out at me, these two phrases subtly scream (is that an oxymoron?) that the time slot is too small.

This phrase brings up a second issue with the word "those." It seems to be a deliberate attempt not to incriminate any individual (as opposed to "Emily can leave early") and yet expresses her displeasure by its stiffness and formality. Instead of directly addressing each of us with the word "you," she has chosen the word "those," which signals distance. This sentence also includes the phrase "other obligations," an interesting choice of words. I now wonder what constitutes an obligation in her eyes? Another class? A doctor's appointment that could be rescheduled? A lunch I've planned with a friend before recieving this email?

I also note the bolding of the meeting times and the way she has including the two zeros after 12:00 rather than 12 or the word noon. I feel this double emphasis (the bolding and the detail of the numbers) conveys a sense of exasperation and a sharp insistence that we understand the times and the restrictions these start and end times place on our meeting...The way in which she writes it, it appears every minute in between 11:20 and 12:00 has a particular significance and should be maximized.

Another formatting issue is the way she has spaced the "See you Wednesday" from the rest of the email. The content of the message is essentially over with the "Sound good," is the purpose of the Wednesday comment a) to remind us that we do in fact need to meet on Wednesday (thus further emphasizing the fact that our meetings start this week); b) to indicate that the "Sound good?" was rhetorical and she does not want us to answer it, we will be seeing her Wednesday and that is final; or c) to fulfill some societal norm of politeness, or the idea that every message needs a sign-off? Or is it possible the intention of that phrase was all three of the above?

In a way I now feel like this interpretation is oversensitive. Perhaps this was a routine logistics email, and dissecting it I lost the context and focused on unintentional slants in the writing. But I must say, it's interesting how noting the formatting and certain word and punctuation choices changes how I feel about the message.