Day: March 8, 2011

What Unites Us. WhatUnites.Us calls on Americans to aspire to common values. The campaign brings together Americans from all walks of life to push back against anti-Muslim rhetoric and make it unacceptable for public figures of any kind, but especially elected officials, to espouse anti-Muslim hate. The campaign calls on Americans to focus on what unites us and to call out rhetoric and actions that divide us. The campaign is built around the American values of freedom, truth, fairness, justice and diversity. The site features video testimonials, blog content, campaign actions and more.

Setting the Record Straight on Sharia. Sharia is the ideal law of God according to Islam. Muslims believe that the Islamic legal system is one that aims toward ideals of justice, fairness, and the good life. Sharia has tremendous diversity, as jurists and learned scholars figure out and articulate what that law is. Historically, Sharia served as a means for political dissent against arbitrary rule. It is not a monolithic doctrine of violence, as has been characterized in the recently introduced Tennessee bill that would criminalize practices of Sharia.

Richard Cohen – Rep. Peter King’s hearings on Islamic radicalization: Fuel for the bigots. King is setting a dangerous precedent. The government has no business examining any peaceful religious group because a handful of adherents have broken the law. If it did, it would be past time to look into the Roman Catholic Church, which clearly was – or maybe still is – concealing the sex crimes of priests and others. The organization BishopAccountability.org reports that “perhaps more than 100,000 children” have been sexually abused since 1950 by Catholic clergymen of one sort or another. Nearly 6,000 priests have been…

Flailing After Muslims – NYTimes.com. On Monday, I spoke by phone with Colleen Kelly, a nurse practitioner from the Bronx whose brother, William Kelly Jr., was killed in the attack on the World Trade Center. She belongs to a group called September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows and is opposed to Mr. King’s hearings. “I was trying to figure out why he’s doing this,” she said, “and I haven’t come up with a good answer.”  She recalled how people were stigmatized in the early years of the AIDS epidemic and the way that stigmas become the focus of attention and…

Peter King’s Obsession – NYTimes.com. Not much spreads fear and bigotry faster than a public official intent on playing the politics of division. On Thursday, Representative Peter King, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, is scheduled to open a series of hearings that seem designed to stoke fear against American Muslims. His refusal to tone down the provocation despite widespread opposition suggests that he is far more interested in exploiting ethnic misunderstanding than in trying to heal it.

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.