More Obama Rumors

Peter King’s Obsession – NYTimes.com. Not much spreads fear and bigotry faster than a public official intent on playing the politics of division. On Thursday, Representative Peter King, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, is scheduled to open a series of hearings that seem designed to stoke fear against American Muslims. His refusal to tone down the provocation despite widespread opposition suggests that he is far more interested in exploiting ethnic misunderstanding than in trying to heal it.

Joshua Stanton: The NYPD Should Build, Not Disrupt Faith. The very logic behind this NYPD initiative raises my hackles. Is a religious community really free to assemble when it does not feel safe doing so? Is the NYPD truly fulfilling its mandate by alienating one of America’s religious communities? My mind is as full of worry when contemplating these questions as the hearts of so many Muslim students, concerned about the safety of their campus communities.

Behind the Bars of Supermax, Contemplating Aristotle and Islamic Extremism – Document – NYTimes.com. Randall Todd Royer, 38, a Missouri-born Muslim convert known as Ismail, is nearly eight years into a 20-year prison sentence for helping friends go to an extremist training camp in Pakistan. In the highest-security prison in the United States, known as the federal Supermax, he wrote about prison life and his views about Islamic extremism in a year-long written correspondence with a New York Times reporter.