Is South Africa included in the narrative of ‘the West’?

Or only South Africans with European ancestors?

(I have no information about the individual killed, and am guessing.)

And what kind of headline have the editors chosen for this Peter Bergen article? Absurd.

Instead “a French judge has ordered two branches of the Church of Scientology and seven of its leaders to stand trial for fraud”.

Is talk of “Arab money” fair game unlike, say, talk of “Jewish money”?

It’s not hard to see how [Brigitte] Gabriel’s experiences might have shaped her views.

I don’t know who Brigitte Gabriel is. And to be perfectly honest with you, I don’t care. She appears to be just another ‘native’ informant on the jafi gravy train.

What I find interesting is the New York Times’ public editor acknowledging that her “experiences might have shaped her views”. This is not something that is typically explored in major news outlets when we discuss other ‘radicals’ or ‘extremists’ is it?

Meanwhile, the Jewel of Madina has divided Muslim opinion in Serbia.

Related posts: Read the views of Shahed Amanullah, Denise Spellberg, Sherry Jones, G. Willow Wilson, Johann Hari, Sunny Hundal and Salman Rushdie.

“Death” and “Furniture” are emblems for two very common (predictable, even) objections to relativism. When relativists talk about the social construction of reality, truth, cognition, scientific knowledge, technical capacity, social structure, and so on, their realist opponents sooner or later start hitting the furniture, invoking the Holocaust, talking about rocks, guns, killings, human misery, tables and chairs. The force of these objections is to introduce a bottom line, a bedrock of reality that places limits on what may be treated as epistemologically constructed or deconstructible. There are two related kinds of moves: Furniture (tables, rocks, stones, etc. — the reality that cannot be denied), and Death (misery, genocide, poverty, power — the reality that should not be denied). (pdf)

–  Edwards, D., Ashmore, M. and Potter, J., (1995). Death and furniture: The rhetoric, politics and theology of bottom line arguments against relativism, History of the Human Sciences, 8, 25-49.