Middle Class Dub: Islamophobia and Antisemitism: Same message, different minority.

Bigotry on the Playing Field – NYTimes.com. Intolerance seems to be part of the message sent to student-athletes on the sporting fields of Texas. Only under legal pressure and public criticism did the Texas Association of Private and Parochial Schools, which organizes competitions for more than 200 schools, recently agree to accommodate an Orthodox Jewish school and reschedule a basketball game that would have violated the Sabbath.

This article in IHT provides some encouraging news about the open debates taking place in Mecca during Hajj: The two-hour presentation "Mecca: The Cultural Capital of Islam" was dry, but things got rolling in the question and answer session in a way quintessentially Meccan. One by one, audience members – a surprising number of them women – came to the microphone with questions that few others would dare ask publicly. .ism," asked one woman. . "Why do we look only into the past and not to the future," another woman demanded. . The session soon grew into a raucous series…