Nieuws

9 december 2011

Een heel ander perspectief, conferentie-bijdrage Gied ten Berge namens Nederlandse Kairos groep.

Our frame: words and images of hope

My contribution to this discussion wants to put on the agenda the importance of an analysis of the modern communication techniques of framing and reframing, concerning the way the conflict in the Middle-East is reframed in the Netherlands today. Framing can be described as a technique to convince people of a point of view, not by arguments, but by just using words and images to which people are most susceptible. Reframing can be described as a method of changing the meaning of something and by means of framing thereby changing minds. Both are techniques that are skillfully used by the Dutch populist politician, Mr. Wilders, notorious for his provocative humiliating language. Let me begin with  the case, how Dutch politics are working today, to make clear why framing and reframing should be also object of theological reflection and analysis.
You must know that the present rightwing Dutch minority government depends on the support of a populist party in parliament. The government is actually held hostage by this party and the opposition has no recipe how to answer their provocations. Under the influence of the populists our minister of Foreign Affairs - and he is my first example of reframing - is changed from a moderate, liberal senator into a right-wing Likud-politician. He is reframing and condemning, in a populist way, all human rights activities within Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, as poor “Israel-bashing”.

The leader of the Dutch populists was in 2011 the special guest of Arieh Eldad, resident of the Israeli settlement of Kfar Adumim and reserve general in the IDF. At the time Eldad strongly opposed the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Eldad and his Dutch admirer oppose any surrender of Israeli sovereignty to the Palestinians on the Westbank. They share the view that the Palestinians ought to have the right to settle themselves in Jordan: “the Palestinian state” as Mr. Wilders said, “which already exists”. The Jordan government reacted furiously. But our government reaffirmed that the official Dutch view had not changed the desirability of a ‘two states solution’ and declared that this was exclusively the view of Mr. Wilders himself. But in his turn, the populist leader declared - without batting an eyelid - that he was recognizing the two state solution as well! Here we see a second example, how this kind of reframing confuses Dutch politics today.

Then Wilders made another reframing remark about the role of Israel: “Israel is not guilty for this situation [in the Middle East], but Islam”. This second reframing move has a deep theological impact: lifting the problem to a world-wide clash of religious civilizations, by transforming the state of Israel from a historical ‘safe haven’ for world-wide discriminated Jews, into a rampart against Islam, defended by Jews. In Wilders view, you must know, Islam as such equals fascism.

This third example makes also very clear what is at stake with the abuse of framing and reframing in Dutch politics. Islam and the Muslims were already used by different Dutch populists as a national scapegoat. By reframing Islam as an equivalent of European fascism, a complete world religion - and not only sectarian extremists ! - was associated with the extermination of the Jewish people by the national-socialists. This was a very malicious attack on the whole of values and the ethos of a religion and of religious people as such. I wonder as a Christian who tries to work on better relations with Jews and Muslims: who will be next?

Theologians are familiar with critically rethinking and reinterpreting texts, words, even dogmas. Actually framing and reframing is an important and normal activity within the theological profession. But I suppose the moment has come that also within the theological practice, this typical, vicious language-game of framing and reframing, must become an object of serious reflection and critical investigation. I make these remarks, because I want to put forward the question, how to react on framing and reframing as a humiliating activity. On the other hand I wonder: what kind of reframing deserves our critical dedication, just to save the true intentions behind dear words and concepts. Let me explain what I mean.

At the Kairos conference in Amsterdam in September 2011 Naim Ateek made an important remark on the so-called “unbreakable bond with Israel”: a well-known concept in the Dutch Protestant Church, dating from the sixties. It was at that time an understandable and even necessary concept because of the experience and feelings of responsibility and humility after the horror of the genocide on European Jews. It expressed that Dutch Christians, after this genocide, could never give up any more their special ties with Jews and Judaism. Even more: for the first time the Dutch protestant (but also Catholics) realized and acknowledged their ties to living, contemporary Judaism. Naim Ateek rightly emphasized that nowadays this concept of ‘the unbreakable bond’ is appearing in protestant discussions as a condensed theology, even as a new improper dogma. A dogma which is dividing Protestantism, because it doesn’t give any new contextual answer on old and new problems, like there are:

• the unsolved questions of the difference between Judaism and the state of Israel;
• the urgency of a social and democratic renewal - also of the Israeli society! - in the fast changing context of the Middle East;
• the inevitable common future of the peoples of Israel and the occupied Palestine territories, ‘living apart together’. Who are they?
• the suffering of people, our Christian brothers and sisters in particular;
• the challenge of interreligious encounter and dialogue with Jews, but also with the Muslims in the region of the Middle East and in Europe;
• and the fundamental theological question: to whom belongs the Promised Land?

After what Naim Ateek said, and what I have read lately about framing and reframing, I became more aware that without any review and actualization the condensed concept of the ‘unbreakable bond’ may be also in danger to be recycled in the resentful, rhetorical speech-frame of populist politicians and publicists.

Speaking - as our unchurched populists constantly do - about a supposed, exclusive ‘jewish-christian culture’, points in that direction. As an exclusive connection, this concept may be understood by Jews as a rather hypocritical denial of a long European history of anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism. But it also gives the floor to those people who want to reframe the state of Israel as such, from a safe haven for European Jews, into an anti-Islamic bastion and outpost of the West. So, if there was any intention of a Christian-Jewish reconciliation by using this concept, it has already been reframed into a fatal political, unreligious and resentful context.
I wonder why this reframing by populist politicians is so successful today. Probably we have to look for answers in three directions:

1. The Islam for Europeans is not so far away anymore.
   Because of old image-formation, illustrated with a flood of negative news - the Islam is often presented as a violent, primitive culture. Therefore many people are only accessible nowadays for negative images. They don’t see the truth, the beauty and goodness in the other anymore and they are blind for their signs of hope and change.
2. The success of blunt reframing in our society may be partly the effect of the very unsettling financial and economic crisis in Europe today. ‘Self-interest’, ‘no-nonsense’ and exclusion, poison therefore the political idiom in our country.
3. The populist success maybe also an effect of the crisis of values, joint with the acceleration of the process of secularization. Around the year 1900 2% of Dutch citizens was unchurched. In 1960 it was 18%; in 2011 it is around 50%. It is a Mene Tekel that the number of supporters of populism and exclusivism in areas which recently became unchurched areas - especially in the originally catholic south - is relatively high.
   
   “Development aid must return to zero”, the right-wing populists in my country demand. “Economic interests and not international human rights are the core-business of our department of Foreign Affairs”, our minister of Foreign Affairs repeated. It is, I fear, also a typical consequence of the declining moral voice of the churches, that this is the official Dutch sentiment today.

Once there was a time that Christians, in the footsteps of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, tried to interpret this process of secularization as a greater appreciation of the world in the light of Christian faith. They also followed Max Weber’s sociological interpretation that secularization meant an inevitable disenchantment of the world. But nowadays we see also the blunt effects of an apparent autonomy of the individual within a consumer-society that is in crisis. We are watching a lot of angry people with an amazing political and religious ignorance, a lack of identity and without strong values of solidarity and compassion, and who are easily manipulated. There is also some talk about a fear within the weakening churches to object to these developments, and there are even young pastors reported, who are speaking in favor of right-wing populism: probably shepherds who are following the flock, because there are too many lost sheep…

May I conclude? What to do?

1. As a Kairos group we have to initiate the public debate and participate in it. We must help people to overcome their negativity, for instance the blunt accusation of anti-Semitism when only the politics of the state of Israel are questioned.
2. Therefore we also need the empowerment of the people in our congregations to make them less vulnerable for such attacks and for the mental influence of false, populist prophets.
3. Asking churches and theologians also to focus on the problem of the false framing and reframing of our realities, by helping people to resist the hopelessness of our times, by evoking a prophetic hope which may open people’s hearts for the images of the Kingdom of God.

One last remark to finish my contribution

I want to believe anyway that it should be possible today, coming from various religious cultures in our world, to follow a steady course towards a common, intended universality. In his last pastoral letter Patriarch Michel Sabbah wrote: “The Holy Land is a land with a universal vocation. God wanted it thus, since he wanted to manifest himself here not only to one people, but to the whole of humankind. Still today, this land certainly belongs to all its inhabitants, but also to the whole of humankind“. In my opinion, these words express the deep meaning of Christian global thinking and reframing. We need to cultivate such words and images of hope as our frame for our lifetime and that of the next generations.

Gied ten Berge, 3-12-2011