Interesting Petition to help end #torture

I tend not to post on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because I do not perceive it as an issue of religious conflict from the Muslim perspective, and with the sizable number of Christians there, it is easy to make this obvious. However, the recent Gaza bombing, immediately following a blockade of food and certain medical supplies, is horrific. Haroon is covering, as is the excellent Global Voices. Mark Lynch, Abu Aardvark, posts some possibilities  for how this may destabilize the entire region. Not a good scenario. Brian adds more. Apparently the strike has been in the works since before the ceasefire. (h/t…

Lt. General Boykin is back in the news (1, 2). This time, the New York Times is calling him an embarrassment. Glad to hear that major papers are thinking this might not be right guy to be interrogating non-Christians, or to be involved in the War on Terror[ism] in any way. But for the record, what is an “Islamic American?”

Idea Lab – Why Are So Many Terrorists Engineers? – NYTimes.com. They say they believe in freedom and share our values. They say a few bad apples shouldn’t bring down judgment on their entire kind. Don’t be fooled. Though they walk among us with impunity, they are, in the words of Henry Farrell, a political scientist at George Washington University, “a group that is notoriously associated with terrorist violence and fundamentalist political beliefs.” They are engineers.