Related Posts

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…

Mahmoud Muhammad Taha

The New Yorker has a very good article entitled “The Moderate Martyr: A radically peaceful vision of Islam”, by George Packer. The article is about Mahmoud Muhammad Taha, a, Sudanese scholar who put forward a vision of Islam in its original, uncorrupted form, in which women and people of other faiths were accorded equal status and which the Quranic concepts of compassion, mercy, justice, and beauty, supersede some of the less tolerant passages of the Sunna. The Pope’s statements on Islam . The statement provoked the usual reaction of: How dare he call us intolerant. We must kill him. “Anyone…

ACTION ALERT: Title VI

Commentary coming. In the meantime, please distribute widely, and feel free to re-post on your own sites. [Disclaimer: We are not part of the Task Force. However, I believe the issue is important enough to get out the word.] ACTION ALERT: Title VI Funding Renewal Poses Dangers to Academic Inquiry, Integrity and Security Dear Fellow American Citizen: We are writing to alert you to proposed legislation, HR 3077, which poses a potential threat to academic freedom. Professor Rashid Khalidi has noted that this legislation creates “an ideological litmus test for academics” which could limit freedom of expression in the classroom…