Current Affairs Religion

Curbing

May God rest the souls of Jack Armstrong and Jack Hensley, the two Americans recently beheaded by Zarqawi, the slave of Satan. May give God give succor to the families of the two men. What constitutes the proper response to such violence? My first response was that Abd us-Shaytan and his men need to be curbed – in both senses of the word. However, the perennial question is does violence stop violence? For a very brief moment, I thought perhaps I was becoming like them, they have taken something from me – my religion – and I am powerless to…

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Current Affairs

The Result of Too Much Plane Time

A Roman Catholic on the Crusades. Past and present. If you didn’t know already, serving honorably in the military makes you suspect in the eyes of this administration. Make sure you vote. Make sure you CAN vote. A German paper reporting there is no conflict between Islam and democracy? Only the clear-thinking right can believe an Islamophobe who committed genocide against Muslims could write the true history of Islam. Too funny. Ouch! Wish I had written it. 9/11 has to be more than a symbol. My Boykin‘s back and you’re gonna be in trouble. Did you know on a standard…

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Current Affairs

Please Excuse Me

I need to go Zell Miller on my Muslim family for a second. Has to be done after reading this article. My dear Sisters and Brothers, Are you stupid? There are almost 1.3 billion Muslims in the world, but seems like every Muslim who comes to the US has a pedigree that includes generations of inbreeding. The US offers us unprecedented ability to worship, but we let a group of dubious credentials violate our souls be letting them tell us what Islam is. The group that literally defecates on the house of the Prophet (PBUH), we allow them to tell…

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Current Affairs

Clippings

I’m a big fan of the Independent Press Association of New York. The clippings they get from smaller news outlets, especially those not in English, are phenomenal. I’ve just been catching with my reading of their site, and, perhaps because I was reading so many issues in such a short period of time, and interesting narrative emerged to me about the state of minorities in NY, particularly with respect to political involvement. There seems to be such a distinct sense of disenfranchisement, by that I mean a distance from the political process, that it’s frightening. Even the South Asian American…

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Current Affairs Intra-faith

The Mahdi

Father Jake had a question regarding the Mahdi and the use of the name “Mahdi Army” by Muqtada as-Sadr. He’s gone out and done a fair amount of research, and I wanted to add my two cents. From a theological perspective, the idea of the Mahdi is incredibly ill-defined, because the idea of the end days are ill-defined in the Qur’an. While we have a sense that the mountains will crumble, stars will fall from the sky and the sky itself will tear, there is no equivalent to the Book of Revelations in the Qur’an. (For a wonderful discussion of…

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Current Affairs

Quotes

Dick Cheney on Kerry and al-Qaeda: (Apparently they can be that crass.) “It’s absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we’ll get hit again and we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States” Al-Qaeda on Bush: A statement from al-Qaeda following the Madrid bombings clarified this intent [to organize Muslims worldwide]. It said the organization hoped George Bush would win reelection, “because he acts with force rather than wisdom or shrewdness,…

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Current Affairs

Russia

Clearly the event was disgusting. I was searching for a way to respond when I found this post. The section on “Sophie’s Choice” is heart-breaking and I think conveys the abject hopelessness of the situation. From killing adults to making children acceptable and normal targets. How does anything justify this sort of barbarity?

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Current Affairs

Online with Tariq Ramadan

Last month the U.S. government canceled a visa that it had granted to Tariq Ramadan, a Muslim scholar in Switzerland. The visa, which had been approved in March and would have allowed him to accept a tenured professorship at the University of Notre Dame, was revoked at the request of the Homeland Security Department. No explanation has been given, but a department spokesman cited “public-safety or national-security risks” as the usual reasons for such an action. Tariq Ramadan, 42, is a professor of Islamic studies and philosophy at the University of Fribourg, in Switzerland. He will respond to questions and…

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