Word: secularize
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Putin's crackdown, which began with a full-scale military invasion of Chechnya in 1999, has not only failed to deliver on his promise to eliminate the nationalist rebellion in the largely Muslim territory; it has altered the nature of that rebellion, hardening its fighters, narrowing the differences between secular nationalists and radical Islamists, and putting the Islamists in the driving seat. Having failed to drive Russian forces out of Chechnya via guerrilla warfare, the rebels have resorted to a wider offensive in neighboring territories such as Dagestan, Ingushetia and Ossetia, and have also placed a far greater emphasis...
...insurgency is, first and foremost, a nationalist struggle to secede from Russia, and the rise of a more extremist and Islamist element within that insurgency is, in part, an effect of the often indiscriminate brutality of the Russian crackdown, and Moscow's rejection of any political dialogue with the secular-nationalist leadership under Aslan Mashkadov, whom Moscow had previously recognized as the president of Chechnya...
...Civil funerals aren't new. They've been happening in Australia since the mid 1970s and for almost as long in New Zealand. But the proportion of people choosing them is growing fast. Acknowledging "a massive cultural shift" toward secularity in urban Australia, the Anglican Bishop of South Sydney, Rob Forsyth, predicts secular and religious funerals "will eventually reach a point of equilibrium." While that's probably some years away in most Australian and New Zealand cities and not even close in the bush, celebrants in the more liberal centers of Melbourne and Auckland already conduct substantially more than half...
...regularly feature in-flight ads, in French, for property in Israel. And according to Israeli press reports, tourist trips by French Jews - some clearly exploring immigration - have skyrocketed in recent years. The exodus reflects a genuine crisis in the French psyche. The national dream - in which membership in the secular republic is always more important than ethnic and religious identity - is waking up to an increasingly atomized reality. "A man like Chirac still lives in a republican world," says novelist Michaël Sebban. "When he's confronted by anti-Semitism all he can do is affirm the republican values...
...back with her next installment, Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return. Part one found Satrapi and her family facing and surviving war, revolution, religious oppression and the execution of several loved ones. Part two begins with Satrapi, 14, leaving religious Iran to attend school in "an open and secular Europe," which turns out to be less open than she had first thought...