Related Posts

Prisoner Treatment, Morality, and #Torture

Juan Cole is brilliant in his analysis of how the US lost the moral high ground on prisoner treatment, in part because of our torture polices. But I fear that the argument that the public humiliation of prisoners is against international law won’t take the US very far after 8 years of Bush-Cheney. After the evidence surfaced that the US military took all those humiliating pictures of prisoners at Abu Ghraib to blackmail them by threatening to make them public, the US assertion of support for this principle of the Geneva Conventions will be met with, well, let us say…

The world was created by magic

I was intrigued by this article in CNN on the Kansas Board of Education. It seems that the faulty logic that ID people are trying to put forward actually puts them at a disadvantage in terms of curriculum design. If their wording goes through, it should be fine to suggest that a grand wizard (not the KKK kind, but the Gandalf kind) brought the world into existence. We are, in fact, nothing more than a magic school exercise. Or, how about that life on Earth is not unique, but we were seeded here by aliens to see how we would…

Gaza Crisis [1/21]

A Christian reflection on Gaza. We have to remember, this is not a Jewish-Muslim issue. It’s an Israeli-Palestinian one, which means Christians are involved. Ted Swedenburg gives us some must reads, many of which have already appeared on islamicate. However, he throws in a cool kufiya pic. MJ Rosenberg on the uses of “anti-Semitism.” He can’t wait for an end to the lobby. On Bono and Kristol. Laila points me to Sandy Tolan on Obama and Gaza. I don’t know how to describe this. In Doha, Darya Shaykh of One Voice said you can focus on the horror or you…