Dissecting Obama’s Message to Iran

Follow the link. Really good interview on the topic. The interviewer also clearly did his homework, and asked some good questions. The Gist: What the Protests Mean for LGBT Egyptians. Activist and scholar Rasha Moumneh, a researcher with Human Rights Watch who works with feminist and LGBT groups in the Middle East, including Egypt, spoke with me on the show from Beirut on Tuesday about what the protests might mean for LGBT Egyptians, who’ve long been brutally repressed by the Mubarak regime.Here is the full interview.

The man who said no. The day commemorates his defiance of Executive Order 9066, the government directive that incarcerated more than 110,000 of his fellow Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II. Korematsu’s decision to resist an unconstitutional edict led to his arrest, conviction and disgrace — and then, three decades later, set the stage for a personal vindication and the establishment of a historical precedent whose implications are more relevant today than ever.

Beyond the Clash of Civilizations – NYTimes.com. On the one side were the radicals, who would use more and more demonstrative violence to underline the weakness of the powers-that-be in an attempt to mobilize the masses on their side, and who would finally find themselves isolated and ostracized by those same masses, as the failure of Egyptian and Algerian radicals had proven in the 1990s.  On the other side, a growing amount of Islamists were converting to the creed of pluralism and democracy, as was already then the case in Turkey. That change would not take place without turmoil within…