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…

He doesn’t get it

The article starts out so very promising on the varieties of interpretation that we call shari’ah. Then it so quickly devolves into conflating constitutional law with religious law, without really explaining how such conflations take place. The article also talks about the religious Shi’ah and the secular Kurds and Sunnis. What about the secular Shi’ah and the religious Kurds and Sunnis? There are huge varieties of interpretation even within the traditions. Finally, page 2 is mostly about cultural practices that the author makes sound like shari’ah. This is a blog, I can say things and pre-suppose knowledge, and get into…

Say it ain’t so

Brigitte Bardot believes in racial purity. [Thanks to Miamvi for the link.]