Truthfully, that sounds more like a bureaucratic problem than a tolerance one.

Run! The Vogons are coming! :D

It's an Islam problem, not a bureaucratic one. Where Islam and the two great religions are concerned, the problem is always existential. No doubt a new "presidential palace" can be built anywhere; no doubt there is a special delight in razing a Jewish synagogue to build the palace. The reality is that Muslims hate Jews and Christians and don't want them to have any places of worship in a Muslim dominated country. Muslims don't want Jews and Christians to exist, if they could help it. Tolerance is not part of Islam.

Helen, I'm going to have to disagree. I explored this more in depth with an additional post at my blog, so I'll be brief. Central Asia is not free of anti-semitism by any means, but the most vitriolic are more likely Russians than native Turks or Persians (adherents of extremist groups are the exception). Indifference and ignorance about Jews is much more common.

Muslims in Central Asia have been historically much more tolerant than Arabs. The survival of the Bukharan Jews as a distinct and successful community testifies to at least some degree of tolerance.

Governments in Central Asia could give a rats ass about any religion. Every leader is secular, and a former Soviet leader. Their primary concern is that all groups, religious or otherwise, submit. Islam gets a tiny bit of lip service, but certainly not a whole lot of encouragement. As it is the government doing this, it's important to look at their motivations and not cram ideological currents of the Arab world onto Sovietized Turkic & Persian Muslims.

I think it's also important to point out here that "Palace" is communly used in Russian for large, governmental or cultural centers. My small city in Uzbekistan had a few palaces, but no on lived in them. Same deal in this case. It's a government office building in some prime real estate (a mosque will also be destroyed--admittedly much less tragic in this context). It doesn't make me any less upset, but it's also not a case of a mad Muslim king trying to exterminate a minority.

I should also throw in that every Muslim Uzbek I spoke to about religion felt entirely cool about me being (nominally) Christian.

I think it is great that Nathan researched this situation and found that a mosque was also going to be destroyed. It makes it sound like some Meryl Yourish's news source is purposely leaving out detail to manipulate people and people in the field should note who's behind it so they can warn us about the group in the future.
However, this story brings up something of greater importance that you hear the US gov't echoing constantly about the future Iraqi government: civil rights. In the US the government cannot take other's possessions without complete compensation. I wonder if the thing is that the Tajiks are saying that the buildings belong to the government, since 1952, so they can do with them as they please, and the religions need to move any valuables inside that they want to relocate before demolishment. Sounds wrong to me.

Something I've learned from blogging, especially from blogging on Central Asia, where there's a lot of wrong or incomplete information, is that it's important to read at least two different versions of the same story, even if it's the same AP story on two different websites.

Meryl's story is from the Jerusalem Post and looks to be adapted from the AP story in the Boston Herald that I linked. It's perfectly fine for the JP to focus the story they way they did, but the Herald has more information that I think illustrates a little better that the Tajik government is made up of insensitive jerks, not anti-semites. The Herald story mentions that all of this is part of a grand modernization plan for Dushanbe. Their eminent domain laws, they seem to claim, disallow compensation to religious organizations for seized property.

That disallowing thing lacks civil right. That must be a holdover from Communism. They'll probably grow out of it if they regrow religion. Religion was discouraged by Communist ideology.

Actually, if you look at this issue from a post cold war, Russo-Sino diplomatic perspective, you can easily see the hand of Putin behind the whole thing. Clearly this is a move behind the scenes on his part to anger the Israeli State and her supporting western powers. This in turn leads to China reacting against those same powers, albeit in a very small way over a (globally speaking) very small issue. China will ALWAYS go against the west. This puts her closer to Russia. Better relations with a neighbor at the cost of a little bad publicity not even directed at Putin or even Russia, but just a behind-the-scenes slave puppet.

I'm having an extremely hard time following or buying that Eric, especially as Russia is becoming increasingly irrelevant to Tajik politics. The 201st Rifle Brigade will be leaving soon, to be replaced with Tajik soldiers.

China is incredibly quiet in its dealings with Central Asia to the point of almost seeming to be not there. That being said, the biggest potential source of Great Power rivalry in Central Asia is probably between Russia and China over who will have troops in places like Kazakstan and Kyrgyzstan. Sure, they're both in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, but that's a ridiculously China-dominated, and simply showcase, security organization.

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