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Torturing America

Via Juan Cole, it seems that we’ve been holding innocent people and torturing them for fun. CNN is reporting from a different source that torture is being carried out by us. I say “we” because we are all complicit in this act. As Americans we should be holding ourselves to a higher standard, and demand that our representatives hold themselves to an even higher standard than that. Everywhere we turn we see how deep the wrong-doing done in our name has spread. We deny the truth, just as our representatives do. Every time one of these people is flogged, our…

Federal Law and the Length of My Beard

I just finished re-reading an interesting article by Kathleen Moore, “Representation of Islam in the Language of Law: Some Recent U.S. Cases,” in Muslims in the West: From Sojourners to Citizens edited by Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad. I quite like this article because it talks about the works of the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in preserving the civil rights of Muslims. CAIR launches lawsuits on the behalf of Muslims who have faced some sort of discrimination because of their beliefs. This particular article focuses on a few cases of men who were fired/not hired because they had beards, and these…

Current events

Good for the Iraqis. Newsday.com is reporting that an estimated 1000 people have marched through the streets of Najaf urging Sadr and his army to leave town. A story on King Abdullah of Jordan on Slate reports other good news. “…On April 29 in Amman, Jordan’s capital, Abdullah’s wife Queen Rania led a march against terrorism. The Pan-Arab daily Al Hayat reported that close to 150,000 people turned out, some of them burning photographs of Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaida associate Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian national who had allegedly plotted a chemical attack against several targets in Amman. Jordanians…