Obama announces the list of charities to receive his Nobel Peace Prize money. I’m particularly gratified to see Greg Mortenson’s Central Asia Institute on the list – of Three Cups of Tea fame.
Updates from azizhp RSS
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the subtext to this piece about western jihadis seems to be that radicalized converts are rubes, when drawn from lower/struggling social classes.
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Wajahat Ali on Jihad Jane and cartoon controversies. I love his closing point:
As an artist who relishes creative freedom, I resist calls that advocate artistic censorship or pander to political correctness. However, art – whether it be through words or images – has never existed within an isolated vacuum, and generally draws upon and animates the existing cultural context of the day.
Art can be used as a loaded cultural and political weapon to incite animosity amidst an already hostile climate dominated by foolish controversies–or it can be used wisely and bravely as a common language to bridge the divides.
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Jihad Jane wanted to murder another Swedish cartoonist for insulting Islam. Hopefully her arrest will finally murder racial profiling as a valid tactic for keeping us safe from terrorism instead.
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Syria wants in on nuclear power, too. Why not, after all?
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Rickshaw Run 2009: The Shaw Must Go On
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Aasiya’s murderer invokes a novel defense: “I’m not a good muslim”
Attorneys for Muzzammil S. “Mo” Hassan Friday said the media and public have misconstrued Hassan’s actions in the beheading of his estranged wife, Aasiya Zubair Hassan.
Many have wrongly come to regard Hassan as an Islamic terrorist, and the general public is suffering from “Islamophobia,” defense attorneys Julie Atti Rogers and Frank M. Bogulski said after a court appearance Friday.
Hassan is “a nonpracticing Muslim,” Rogers said, while Bogulski stressed that Hassan “doesn’t pray five times a day” as an obedient Muslim would.
To recap – he’s not a good muslim, he was actually abad one. And anyway its all his wife’s fault:
Bogulski recently claimed that the victim drove her husband into an uncontrollable homicidal rage,
I really want this guy to die.
Apparently he also thinks his kids are going to be “radicalized” in Pakistan by Aasiya’s family. Because beheading his wife was totally family values oriented?
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Idol Simon Cowell is Mezhgan Hussainy’s second husband – her first was a forced marriage at age 19 to a carpet merchant, after fleeing Afghanistan from the Taliban.
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Ever wondered where the antipode of Mecca was? Luckily, someone else did the math (though they kind of cheated)
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Car bomb in Najaf on eve of Iraq’s elections tomorrow.
I’d stopped clicking on these sorts of links, but realized that its a pseudo complacency to let news like this scroll past and not highlight it.
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Wajahat Ali interviews embattled Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim – awesome stuff.
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“The Accidental Jihad” – a very odd, praiseworthy but also frustrating, essay from a secularist married to a muslim. Here’s my take on it at City of Brass.
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Incredible discovery of the oldest known temple in existence – predating the Pyramids by 7000 years. It has the potential to invert the traditional narrative of how agriculture came first, leading to cities and then organized religion. Couuld this be the birthplace of revelation itself?
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Larison talks about Israel and the Dubai assassinations, making a key point about who is enabling Israel’s behavior:
lately, successive Israeli governments seem to act with impunity, and they are shocked when the rest of the world reacts with condemnation. Part of this is a function of what Leon Hadar has identified as the “moral hazard” created by the expectation of unconditional U.S. backing.
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Conrad reviews Standard Operating Procedure: A War Story by Phillip Gourevitch and Errol Morris, at our Read Islam book review journal here at Talk Islam.
If you’d like to review a book for Read Islam, drop me a line or leave a comment – we aren’t exactly the LRB, yet. But inshallah…
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this man is a true patriot to his country: “I envy the people who hate Israel”
Without asking its people, without a second thought, Israel, at its highest level, has taken an executive decision. Unable to beat the forces who want to see Israel as one of the world’s primary pariah states, it has resolved to join them.
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We should have known that something like the Dubai assassination debacle was going to happen. The process of de-legitimizing Israel from within was going too slowly.
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There are times when I envy the people who hate Israel. There is no sense of betrayal, not a tinge of loss. Only simhah la’ed, a vengeful joy in our sorrow.
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I have come to envy the people who hate Israel, because they cannot feel the tragedy in the phenomenal possibility, the depth and breadth of humanity that is going to waste here. -
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There was a “sit in” at a mosque in Washington DC – women sat to pray in the main hall. The mosque administrators called the police. What happened next? Read Asra Nomani’s article to find out.
Its a touch and sensitive issue. I dont fully buy the civil rights analogy because there is no “right” to sit somewhere in a private building. The analogy to Rosa Parks is tempting, but do we want the government imposing rules on our practice of faith?
Still, its hard not to be impressed. I would have been even more impressed if the women had followed through with the civil rights analogy in full… but thats spoiling the narrative. Go read it.
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I’ve penned my thoughts on the debate over milad al nabi and the broader issue of bottom-up versus top-down legitimacy in Islamic practices.
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A series of essays about Judaism’s moral incompatibility with torture. Much of these arguments can be made in an Islamic context as well.
(via Andrew Sullivan).
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Is it just me, or does that Roomba ad on eth sidebar look like it’s advertising a robotic lawnmower instead of a vacuum?
for a second I got really excited.
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major crisis in Turkey – between the government and the military.
The conflict is part of a power struggle between the military, at the head of the secular state establishment enshrined at the founding of the modern Turkish state, and Mr. Erdogan’s government. Most recently the struggle has taken the form of legal battles over what prosecutors portray as several plots to overthrow the government.
The struggle has caused deep political divides in Turkey, an 87-year-old republic whose military has ousted at least four governments. Rogue members of the military were accused in many extrajudicial killings before the A.K. came to power in 2002.
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worth repeating: a nuclear Iran is inevitable. Also, Ahmadinejad would LOVE it if Israel bombed Iran.
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Larison talking about US drone strikes and the Dubai assassination:
Reliable “pro-Israel” advocates cannot seem to grasp this, but almost all Western objections to this action have nothing to do with any sympathy for Mabhouh or his cause. Just as objections to drone strikes in Pakistan have nothing to do with sympathy for Al Qaeda or opposition to U.S. objectives in the region, Western protests over the manner in which Israel fights it enemies is almost always motivated by an interest in keeping Israel from making counterproductive blunders that empower its enemies and isolate it from those states that would otherwise be willing to support Israel. There is probably no better ally of genuine anti-Israel sentiment than the reflexive apologists for every mistake and crime the Israeli government commits. As the old proverb goes, “The yes-man is your enemy, but your friend will argue with you.”
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A man named Joseph Andrew Stack has deliberately flown his plan into an office building in Austin TX. His online suicide note blames the federal government, capitalism, and the IRS.
Its important not to rush to conclusions about political affiliations.
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superb review at altmuslim of “Can Islam Be French?
” by author John Bowen.
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“communislam” – a gem of a website discovered by thabet in the comments thread of my own blog (a wasteland into which I rarely tread).
Looking this over, I see that the author’s primary sources are Fox News and Glenn Beck. With such inputs such as these, we can rightly expect the GIGO principle to apply, and we are not disappointed:
- Communism and Islam are the same thing.
- America is China’s slave
- Obama is rooting for terrorists to win.
- Global warming is also a communist plot** by the associative property, we can conclude that global warming is a muslim plot. Or perhaps Islam is a global warming industry plot? No wait, that would be commutative and associative.
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Full text of Secretary Clinton’s remarks at the US-Islamic World Forum in Doha. To be honest I don’t think she was hawkish on Iran at all. But neither do I think that sanctions will make much difference – a nuclear Iran is inevitable.
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ISNA defends Louay Safi – in response to a hatchet job by the Dallas Morning News over Safi’s tangential involvement in the Malik Hassan case.
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SRK’s My Name is Khan is apparently very un-Bollywood. This makes me want to see it.
I’m also pretty curious about Three Idiots given the ubiquitous marketing campaign…