Taxi to the Dark Side

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…

Nothing to Fear: Debunking the Mythical “Sharia Threat” to Our Judicial System | American Civil Liberties Union. There is no evidence that Islamic law is encroaching on our courts. On the contrary, the court cases cited by anti-Muslim groups as purportedly illustrative of this problem actually show the opposite: Courts treat lawsuits that are brought by Muslims or that address the Islamic faith in the same way that they deal with similar claims brought by people of other faiths or that involve no religion at all. These cases also show that sufficient protections already exist in our legal system to…

Gobsmacked. Lieberman, Collins: If Obama Won’t Do Something About Anti-Muslim Counterterrorism Training, We Will | TPMMuckraker. Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Susan Collins (R-ME) aren’t messing around when it comes to stopping federal dollars from flowing to anti-Muslim terrorism training. In a letter to Obama on Tuesday, the duo said that if the administration can’t develop criteria to keep bigoted information out of counter-terrorism training, they’ll “consider drafting a legislative mandate or even imposing standards by statute.”