istanbul – Ashura procession

Read the following two articles from Campaign Desk: Article 1 Article 2 Does the White House really need to lie about this sort of thing? I mean it is incredibly easy to verify. Has lying become so ingrained in this administration that everything must make them look good? I’m utterly at a loss. With a track record like this, how can we believe anything about the prisoners at Guantanamo? or Iraqi WMD? The sad thing is, that they are losing credibility and that means our intelligence gathering abilities continue to suffer. Do they honestly think by denying a 14-year-old boy…

Even though categorization is a useful tool for analysis, and OBL is definitely a bad guy, I am curious to hear if people have any objections to the use of the term binladendism as described in this article in the Boston Globe by Abdul Cader Asmal.  I’ve heard some convicing arguments against the blanket use of the term Wahhabism and my sense is that binladenism is probably more accurate but flawed in its own ways.

CNN is reporting that al-Zarqawi has released an audio tape that justifies the killing of Muslim civilians based on the teachings of so-called Islamic scholars. Here is the intro from CNN: “A chilling, rambling audio file thought to be from the most-wanted man in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, says religious doctrine justifies the killing of innocent Muslims by insurgents. On the audio, the speaker says in Arabic: ‘The shedding of Muslim blood … is allowed in order to avoid the greater evil of disrupting jihad.’ The speaker defends suicide attacks, saying, ‘killing of infidels by any method including martyrdom operations…