I’ve never been big on national pride, team pride, or school pride, until today, when my alma mater really earned it. This victory is part of the ongoing Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign.
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midwinterspring
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midwinterspring
Pictures from a demonstration against coups in İstanbul on the anniversary of Turkey’s 1997 “postmodern coup.” The signs say, “Never again,” and “Coup leaders should stand trial.”
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Update: It isn’t terrorism if you are a white guy with a plane or … pretty much anyone else who happens to be killing people in countries the US government doesn’t like.
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This article details Wajahat Ali’s epic battle to save a family’s home from foreclosure in the midst of the financial crisis. It’s a very interesting, and entertaining, read. I personally believe nothing short of the complete dismantling of our existing economic system will protect families from this kind of abuse. But, in the meantime, it’s nice to know there are some good people out there offering help.
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Hillary Clinton has been using her trip to Qatar to turn up the volume on fear-mongering against Iran. This probably shouldn’t be too surprising given the organizers of the US-Islamic World Forum, which Clinton attended.
Clinton told the forum, which is jointly organised by the Qatari foreign ministry and the US-based Brookings Institution, that “evidence is accumulating” that Iran is trying to build a nuclear weapon.
Of course, the evidence is quite clear about one regime in the Middle East that already has nuclear weapons and has shown it has no qualms at least using conventional weapons against civilian populations.
“We see the government of Iran, the supreme leader, the president, the parliament is being supplanted and Iran is moving toward a military dictatorship.”
… she warned while speaking in a state run by an absolute monarchy while trying to get backing from other various and sundry anti-democratic regimes for US aggression against Iran.
All in all, it’s reassuring to see the US maintaining its outstanding track record of principled foreign policy. Keep talking Hillary, while I take off my shoe…
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I was particularly heartened by the earlier news of France’s New Anti-Capitalist Party running Ilham Moussaid, a Muslim woman (who happens to wear the hijab), as one of its candidates for the upcoming elections. I’m always happy to see fellow Muslims on the far left.
But we should have known the defenders of French “enlightenment” couldn’t sit idly by in the face of the imminent threat posed to the Republic by a piece of fabric:
Today, in a sign of how deep concerns are running, a leading feminist group announced it would file an official complaint against the NPA’s list of candidates in the Vaucluse département to protest against what it called an “anti-secular, anti-feminist and anti-republican” stunt.
Moussaid’s reaction:
“It is with great sadness that I watch … my life reduced to my headscarf. It is with great sadness that I hear that my personal beliefs are a danger to others while I advocate friendship, respect, tolerance, solidarity and equality for all human beings.”
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Over at the leftist Web site Znet I happened upon an argument for Shariah in Egypt which caught my attention, frankly, for seeming rather out of place.
In the midst of the public debates involving secularists and Coptic activists, on the one hand, and Islamic political groups—especially the Muslim Brotherhood, which is often in the media spotlight when it comes to discussions on Islamic law—on the other, there is an alternative middle way. In this middle way the concepts of shari’a, democracy and secularism would exist alongside one another as part of a united political system, without compromising the fundamental tenets of any of the three concepts.
On the one hand, it is good to see something outside of the normal polarities in such debates. The future of social equality and justice in the Middle East (and everywhere else, for that matter) hinges on the organic development of equal and just social practices, not from the imposition of foreign political ideas on unique situations. Or, in the words of the great Billy Bragg: “I went out drinking with Thomas Paine. He said that all revolutions are not the same. They’re as different as the cultures that give them birth. For no one idea can solve every problem on earth”
On the other hand, I fear the article ignores the need for fundamental changes in contemporary conceptualizations of Shariah and its relationship to the political sphere. Dictators like Mubarak are certainly an impediment to the development of a genuinely democratic and pluralistic society, but they most definitely aren’t the only such impediment.
I also found the following rather troubling:
Copts should continue to fight for their rights, but without infringing upon the majority’s values by calling for the removal of Islamic principles from politics entirely.
Are the majority’s values so fragile they can’t stand up to debate in the public arena?
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Assalaamu Aleikum everyone. Aziz has generously given me the ability to post to Talk Islam’s front page. So, to test it out, I will shamelessly plug my latest side blog piece on al-Qaeda’s new-found fondness for leftist causes: