Year: 2009
Petition to End Muslim Domestic Violence
The folks over at Muslims for Progressive Values have a petition up regarding domestic violence. Take a look. Sign if you are so inclined. Spread the word if it strikes you. No pun intended.
Parliament of World’s Religions – Call for Proposals
Join us to “Make a World of Difference” As-Salaamu `Alaykum! Many of us actively engaged in the interfaith movement share a passion for working toward the betterment of humanity and towards solutions to our most pressing challenges. The Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions invites you to direct some of that passion toward getting involved with the 2009 Parliament of the World’s Religions as a participant or program presenter. The 2009 theme is “Make a World of Difference: Hearing each other, Healing the earth.” Major sub-themes will include the environment, reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, interreligious dialogue, poverty, peace…
DHS don’t like them Swarthies
This article is almost a year old, so it’s part of the old pattern. My suspicion is that some agent just finished watching True Romance and was thinking about the Sicilian scene. Key lines for those who don’t know: So you see, way back then, uh, Sicilians were like, uh, wops from Northern Italy. Ah, they all had blonde hair and blue eyes, but, uh, well, then the Moors moved in there, and uh, well, they changed the whole country. They did so much fuckin’ with Sicilian women, huh? That they changed the whole bloodline forever. That’s why blonde hair…
Ismailis defend Salafis
An unlikely pairing: Tajikistan is banning Salafi groups because they may pose a threat. It’s the Ismailis who come out defending the Salafis. Of course, I’m wary of any reporting that talks of an Ismaili imam that is not the Aga Khan. An Ismaili imam, who did not wish to be identified, told Forum 18 that “Salafis do not constitute any threat for the country. It does not matter whether one is Sunni or Shiite, Ismaili or Salafi, we are all Muslims.”
Muslims in the Media Highlights
Highlights from a panel I was on in Sept. 2008 on “Muslims in the Media,” part of a series called “The Cost of War.” The full audio of the panel is available on this page.
Geert Wilder Hypocrite
We are surprised because …? Do we really expect ideologues and/or provocateurs (not artistes) to be anything other than intellectually inconsistent, self-aggrandizing blowhards? Money quote from the article: The lawsuit against Mr. Wilders has been hailed in the Netherlands as a good thing for democracy. I am not so sure. It makes him look more important than he should be. In fact, the response of Dutch Muslims to his film last year was exemplary: most said nothing at all. And when a small Dutch Muslim TV station offered to broadcast the film, after all other stations had refused, the grand…
ACTION ALERT: Support CBS
Recently CBS aired a piece on peace options in the Israeli-Palestinian debacle. I thought the segment was fair and universally irritating, doing the job our press is supposed to do: tell the stories, based on reality, that make-up conflict, not make-up stories, based on a desired reality, to tell a conflict. J Street is telling me that they are getting slammed for doing their job. You can see clips of the show and sign a petition supporting CBS on their site. I altered the language of their form letter, and have pasted my version below, for others to use. The…
Command the Good – Gaza
Haroon posted about a fundraiser at NYU a few days ago. Unfortunately, I was on the road. Give if you can. He says: We can look all over the world and find a lot of misery, a lot of suffering, a lot of deprivation; some of that is done in our name; some of that is done and defended in a language we really use to argue for the exact opposite. The most important thing is to focus on what can be done, pray very hard, work very hard; we should not be discouraged by the scale of the challenge…
Gaza Crisis [1/29]
This will most likely be my last major link round-up on the topic. There are individual threads of the cost of the crisis that I may develop, but with the current incursion over, the need for relatively quick, major round-ups has dissipated. One of the things I tried to communicate through my sourcing was that the conflict is not a religious issue. I consciously choose to limit the number of Muslim sources to indicate that there was opposition to Israel’s actions that was not based in a conception of a Cosmic War. I also wanted to highlight the number of…