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Press Release: A Dutch Appeal to All New Yorkers

This comes via a friend, and I thought the sentiment was quite nice. Please click on the PDF links. The images are funny. — Thursday, September 9th PRESS RELEASE REAL World Citizens A Dutch appeal to all New Yorkers to keep leading by example as the World’s center of diversity. In May 2010 a new initiative, REAL Dutch, was launched in anticipation of the controversial participation of Geert Wilder’s right-wing PVV party in parliamentary elections. A series of posters was spread on the streets and in the media to show how muslimas are just as much Dutch as any other…

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…

It was easier to hate Iran before we say their faces in #IranElection

[Apologies for the hashtags in the titles recently. However, my RSS feed goes straight to Twitter, so I need to keep track there.] David Bromwich writes: If you want to kill with a clean conscience, the faces of the enemy had better be blank. Start to see them as human beings and it becomes harder to blockade and bomb them, to mine, and pollute, and “destabilize.” President Clinton had no imagining of the disease he would bring to the innocent in Sudan by the “surgical” missile attack on the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in 1998. George W. Bush had a happy…