Category: Politics

Terrorism Training Casts Pall Over Muslim Employee : NPR. Now, to understand why the accusations against Omari were so surprising, it is important to know that at the time he ran a key Muslim outreach program for the state of Ohio. What he was doing for the state’s Department of Public Safety was considered so effective, counterterrorism officials in Washington sent him overseas to talk about it.

My on-line chat with the PrepareNY community about religion and politics is now up on the site. PrepareNY is an interfaith coalition, convened to help NY around the 10th anniversary of 9/11. June 21st Chat with Hussein Rashid – Prepare New York. Hussein is an academic, activist and lecturer. He has an extensive background in theology, interfaith dialogue and political consulting. So we thought he would be the perfect person to talk to about the role of Religion in Politics today!

Jihad Against Islam | Southern Poverty Law Center. Rarely has the United States seen a more reckless and bare-knuckled campaign to vilify a distinct class of people and compromise their fundamental civil and human rights than the recent rhetoric against Muslims.  It would also be hard to imagine a more successful campaign. In the span of the two years since the start of Barack Obama’s presidency in early 2009, an astonishing number of people have turned into a kind of political wolf pack, convinced that 0.6% of the U.S. population is on the verge of trampling the Constitution and imposing…

Inbox Influence reveals your connections’ connections » Nieman Journalism Lab » Pushing to the Future of Journalism. A new tool from the Sunlight Foundation would seem to seek to tweak that paradigm. It’s called Inbox Influence, a Gmail plugin that requires exactly one step: installing it. When an email message arrives — from a company, a political candidate, a PR person, your aunt — you’ll see statistics about that entity’s political connections. The plugin detects names in body text, email addresses, and links.

“Four American vets stood up, men from Battle Company of the 173rd Airborne who had been under fire with Tim and me many times in eastern Afghanistan. They filed out of their pew carrying two folded American flags that had been sent by Senator John McCain, himself a veteran of Vietnam. The young men presented my country’s flag to the Hetherington family and then to Idil [Hetherington’s girlfriend whose parents emigrated from Somalia]. I missed most of that beautiful moment because I was crying too hard, but later I did savor one comforting thought: this may be one of the…

Readers on Andrew Sullivan’s site talk about the transition the Eastern European countries faced as their regimes fell in the 80s and 90s, and how that transition is incomplete. They then make the obvious connection with the “Arab Spring,” and the fact that we should not expectations of a quick transition there. “The Slow-Grinding, Boring Mill Of Justice” – The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

I just came from my 15th reunion, and while I did not see the same sort of public commemoration that Josh talks about, it was very much a topic of conversation as ROTC had just returned to Columbia’s campus. Josh is right, this is no longer history, but our present. I knew more people who served in Gulf I, but that doesn’t mean I’m any less aware of the loss we suffer everyday. Memorial Day | Talking Points Memo. Though there are many customary ways to observe Memorial Day, I’ve often struggled to figure out a way to do justice…

Matt Reed: What you didn’t know about Sharia law, privatization , GOP election ‘reforms.’ | FLORIDA TODAY | floridatoday.com. Since 9/11, authorities have identified an average of seven Muslim-American terror suspects a year in domestic plots or attacks, including those caught in the early stages of planning, according to tracking by UNC sociologist Charles Kurzman. Those bad guys (and gals) represent 0.0004 percent of the U.S. Muslim population.  Tip of the iceberg, you say? Even if we multiplied the number of known domestic plotters by 10, it would still mean that 99.996 percent of U.S. Muslims have had no link…