Did “Do No Harm” Do Harm?

The World Monuments Fund’s 2014 World Monuments Watch list warns that the following sites are endangered: the Cloisters in upper Manhattan; the Palisades in New Jersey; the Collégiale Sainte-Croix de Liège in Belgium; the gaslights and gas lamps of Berlin; and Syria.

That’s right, the whole country. At least that’s how the New York Times reported the story. The list itself indicates more prosaically that Syria’s “Cultural Heritage Sites” are endangered.

Whether or not all Syria is endangered, religious freedom in Syria certainly is. The Religious Freedom Project’s conference at Georgetown this week includes a panel discussion addressing the rhetorical question “Does Religious Freedom Undermine Terrorism and Conflict and Foster Secure Societies?” No matter how the panelists answer, it’s clear that the statement is true if turned the other way around: terrorism and conflict undermine religious freedom. Here’s one way. On the Atlantic's website Shadi Hamid of Brookings explains that the U.S.’s policy in Syria has served to empower the country’s Islamists at the expense of groups with other religious backgrounds:

In what could be the epitaph for America’s Syria policy, “do no harm” did harm: not doing more to support the rebels helped shift the balance toward Islamists, which, in turn, made the U.S. less willing to support the rebels. Of course, it’s not all bad news for the United States—assuming, of course, we’re willing to draw distinctions between different kinds of Islamists. Most groups in the Islamic alliance would be considered “extreme” by U.S. standards insofar as their commitment to applying sharia law and anti-minority rhetoric are concerned. But judging them in the context of Syria rebel politics, “extremist” makes less sense, since there’s a real qualitative difference between, say, Liwa al-Tawhid and the al-Qaeda-linked Jabha al-Nusra. It is not fashionable to make these distinctions in Washington, but that doesn’t make them any less real.

The Monuments Fund list also includes among the endangered Georgetown City Hall — in Georgetown, Guyana. That’s it in the photograph up top.

• 10 October 2013