Related Posts

Muslims don’t hate Macs

Via Jason O’Grady, I see that MEMRI is up to their usual business of inflaming anti-Arab feelings (for some background see these posts, here, here, here, and here.) Now, I have no reason to think that MEMRI is making up this posting, that’s not their MO, they cherry-pick inflammatory texts to translate. It is unfortunate that there is no further information as where the text they are translating came from, but I am willing to take it at face value. The material if factually inaccurate (the cube has already been built, the store has been open for several months, there…

Onward Christian Soldiers [update]

From TPM. If you haven’t heard, Donald Rumsfeld was using Bible quotations to justify what was going on in Iraq. No doubt, the big story starting off the week. In GQ, Robert Draper does a first look back at Don Rumsfeld’s tenure at the DOD, with a focus on internal briefing documents which wrapped the day’s military events out of Iraq with smoteful biblical quotations about the righteous conquering the wicked and the infidel. Here’s the slideshow. [From Onward Christian Soldiers] Dan Varisco from Tabsir shares his thoughts as well: The Bible is a big book with plenty of quotations…

Islam and the Lagging Economies of the Arab World : The New Yorker

Islam and the Lagging Economies of the Arab World : The New Yorker. But, before consigning a fifth of humanity to the dustbin of economic history, one might consider, more broadly, whether it makes sense to place such an emphasis on religion in explaining the underdevelopment of so many Muslim countries. To start with, it’s worth noting—and Kuran and Lewis, to their credit, do note it—that Islam, at least in its original formulation, was far from hostile to business. As the centuries passed, many Muslim regions fell badly behind the West, but the most immediate explanation involves not Islam but…