Policy Recommendations for Muslims in 2008 Election

For God or for Fame? The Making of a Teenage Bomber | Culture | Religion Dispatches. Ironically, while Mohamud lamented how unrepresented he was by American Muslims and Somalis, his arrest has become fodder for speculations about what it tells us about the nature of these communities.

Who Gets Paid to Make America Hate? The Roots of the Islamophobia Network | Religion Dispatches. We at Religion Dispatches have been covering this religious-political industrial complex, and its overlap with other elements of the far right agenda, for some time now.  (You must read Sarah Posner’s invaluable exploration, “Welcome to the Shari’ah Conspiracy Industry”.) But Fear, Inc. gives us a still-more exhaustive insight into the Islamophobia network’s leaders, strategies, and intentions.  With good timing.  We’re coming up on an election-year, in which major questions about the United States must be answered, or at least recognized.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: Anyone who now thinks Britain is too multicultural? – Yasmin Alibhai-Brown – Commentators – The Independent. On Friday evening, getting on to a tube in Victoria, I met a Somali family wearing so much Union Jack kit they looked like a mobile tourist stall. The mum had a red, blue and white band across her forehead under a tight, black head scarf; her sons carried flags and her daughter’s leggings were festooned with crowns, Big Bens, St Paul’s and colours of this nation.  They were coming back from a halal chicken restaurant after breaking an 18-hour fast for…