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 was recently called to task, and rightly so, for not being specific about failed DOJ cases, and few come to mind: Yaser Hamdi (I seem to recall that a US citizen cannot be coerced by the gov’t into giving up his citizenship, and it strikes me that’s what happened here…. Detroit Sleeper Cell Brandon Mayfield (2, 3) James Yee (2) (Yes, I know this isn’t a DOJ case, but I’m working to establish a larger pattern in the gov’t in general) Terrorism Cases That Weren’t (but it doesn’t mean they weren’t guilty of something) Lackawanna Six (2, 3) Portland Seven José Padilla’s case is still pending, but I don’t know how much traction the gov’t will get with him.