Textbooks of Hate

Boston Review — Jan-Werner Müller: Making Muslim Democracies. This suggestive analogy between Christian and Muslim Democracy is not lost on Western politicians and intellectuals, but many of them have been at pains to reject it. One line of dismissal, pessimistic in its conclusions, argues that European Catholics only turned to democracy under instruction from the Vatican. Because Muslims do not have anything resembling a hierarchy or central institution of faith, the Christian Democratic example is, according to these critics, irrelevant.

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…

The 9/10 Project – The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan. We have gone from being the first country that established the principle that prisoners of war should be treated respectfully to a country that operates black sites and sends prisoners to other countries to be tortured–when we don’t torture them ourselves.