Faith in the absence of Reason

Pol: NYPD Muslim Surveillance is ‘Un-American’ | Long Island Press. The sweeping surveillance of local Muslims is un-American, unconstitutional and spawns an atmosphere of mistrust, undermining the efforts of law enforcement conducting clandestine investigations of Muslim Americans in the New York metropolitan area.  These criticisms of the New York Police Department’s surveillance of Muslim Americans from New York City to Long Island were made by New York State Sen. Kevin Parker (D-Brooklyn) and Dr. Hussein Rashid, a professor of religion at Hofstra University during the college’s 11th annual “Day of Dialogue” event Wednesday.

According to Josh Marshall, the man who thinks I’m Satan is in charge of interrogations in Iraq. If you had Satan in your custody, what would you do to him? Abu Ghuraib is his answer.

These thoughts were actually not my first on the London bombings today. However, they have recently come to me, and I want to document them. The delay in my posting was due to the fact that I was waiting to hear from/about friends and family in London. (shukrunlillah, everyone seems to be OK). It dawned on me, that as much as I talk about being Muslim and American, about the search for shared humanity, and today really brought home the point that even to me, subconsciously, there is a distinction – the internalization of being the “other?” – between a…