Keep Hope Alive!

The New Yorker has a very good article entitled “The Moderate Martyr: A radically peaceful vision of Islam”, by George Packer. The article is about Mahmoud Muhammad Taha, a, Sudanese scholar who put forward a vision of Islam in its original, uncorrupted form, in which women and people of other faiths were accorded equal status and which the Quranic concepts of compassion, mercy, justice, and beauty, supersede some of the less tolerant passages of the Sunna. The Pope’s statements on Islam . The statement provoked the usual reaction of: How dare he call us intolerant. We must kill him. “Anyone…

I have been going back and forth on making a personal assessment about who is ultimately responsible for the abuse at Abu Gharib. Do I blame the soldiers, the military, the civilian masters of the Pentagon, the President or the American People? President Bush – below makes the arguement (in Al Arabiya that this is not a reflection of America: Q Mr. President, thank you for giving us this chance here in Al Arabiya. Regarding the alleged abuse of Iraqi prisoners, six U.S. soldiers are being reprimanded. Do you think that’s enough? THE PRESIDENT: First, I want to tell the…

What a headline! This whole A-Rod trade has got Boston in an uproar, so I thought I’d give them a win over New York (namely me as the officially designated representative of the state.) I was working on a post about inclusion in the state, one which will probably still appear in some form, when today’s Boston Globe ran this op-ed about the French and the Bay Staters.