The Semiotics of Islamophobia | Savage Minds

Book Review – Holy Ignorance – By Olivier Roy – NYTimes.com. Yule as we celebrate it today owes more to Charles Dickens than to Thomas Aquinas. Our major solstice holiday is what Roy calls a “cultural construct” rather than a sectarian ceremony, which explains why Muslims buy halal turkeys and Jews transformed Hanukkah into a gift-giving occasion. Mistakenly believing that Christmas is sacred, those who defend it find themselves propping up the profane. The Christ they want in Christmas is a product not of Nazareth but of Madison Avenue.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation Radio: The Sufi Spirit, with Reza Shah-Kazemi « Ismailimail. Prayer that brings a permanent awareness of the Divine Reality is the aim of Sufism first and foremost, which London based Sufi scholar, Reza Shah-Kazemi, believes is the key to its universality. Sufism’s mystical universalism is what interests Hebrew University scholar, Sara Sviri, who reveals the fascinating phenomenon of ‘Jewish Sufism’.

Michelle Goldberg Explains Why Jews “Recoil from the GOP” | NJDC Blog. Newsweek’s Michelle Goldberg published an article today in Tablet detailing why today’s Republican Party repels a majority of American Jews. In the article, Goldberg explained that the Republican Party’s coziness with radical Christian factions makes Jews uneasy. She criticized Republican claims that Jews are leaving the Democratic Party as one of the “perennial canards of American political commentary.” Using historical facts about Jewish voting patterns, she emphasized that the majority of Jewish voters are unlikely to vote Republican because many in the GOP define America as a Christian…