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Haroon Siddiqui Speech

Just read this. Interesting. Three things come to mind: I find it interesting that Mr. Siddiqui has to qualify his statements with the idea that he is not the follow of the Aga Khan, even though he is in front of a “progressive” audience, where being an Ismaili, or Ithna’ashari, or Sunni shouldn’t matter. He critiques the term “extermist” but speaks to a group called “progressive,” which continues to reassert the binary, although from a different direction. He begins talking about how aware Muslims around the world are of prison abuses. I don’t dispute this, but I wonder how the…

Torturing America

Via Juan Cole, it seems that we’ve been holding innocent people and torturing them for fun. CNN is reporting from a different source that torture is being carried out by us. I say “we” because we are all complicit in this act. As Americans we should be holding ourselves to a higher standard, and demand that our representatives hold themselves to an even higher standard than that. Everywhere we turn we see how deep the wrong-doing done in our name has spread. We deny the truth, just as our representatives do. Every time one of these people is flogged, our…

What do these things have in common?

What do the movies The Passion of Christ and American Pie have in common? I saw a report on CNN the other day about a new DVD player that edits movies on the fly to remove objectionable material. The story was recently posted on CNN.com. I thought it was worth mentioning because they interviewed a spokesperson for the company, and he said something that caught my attention, but that didn’t make it into the print story. When the violence or language is integral to the story, it won’t be edited. So The Passion and American Pie have integrated the objectionable…