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Gaza Crisis [1/29]

This will most likely be my last major link round-up on the topic. There are individual threads of the cost of the crisis that I may develop, but with the current incursion over, the need for relatively quick, major round-ups has dissipated. One of the things I tried to communicate through my sourcing was that the conflict is not a religious issue. I consciously choose to limit the number of Muslim sources to indicate that there was opposition to Israel’s actions that was not based in a conception of a Cosmic War. I also wanted to highlight the number of…

Columbia and Ahmedinejad

Here’s Stanley Fish’s take on the Ahmedinejad controversy at Columbia. I agree that there are other politics around Middle East Studies at Columbia that Bollinger needs to address. However, I disagree that Bollinger should have taken it down a degree. Columbia is a major world player from its overseas campuses, international fellowships, and just by nature of being in NY with an international student body. The World Leaders Forum functions because of Columbia’s proximity to the UN. I think Bollinger’s statement was poorly worded, his words ill-chosen. I think he should have expressed the sentiment, but expressed it better. Ahmedinejad…

Law and Cultural Purity

Not all fundamentalism is about violence. Sometimes it’s about using the law. Unfortunately, some of our elected representatives are aiming to use the law to define what it means to be “American” by excluding Muslims. They seek to turn back the clock on American inclusion, forgetting that when you can exclude one group, you can exclude any group. We must accept that we live in a global village. Without that basic premise, we miss many of the political patterns emerging both in the US and around the world. We can react to the “new” in two ways: embrace it or…