Category: Politics

As Rep. Peter King’s Muslim hearings approach, his past views draw ire. In 1985, the Irish government boycotted the St. Patrick’s Day parade in New York City, the biggest celebration in the Irish-American calendar. The cause of its umbrage was Peter King, that year’s grand marshal and someone the Irish government said was an “avowed” supporter of a terrorist organization, the Irish Republican Army.

National Security — The King’s (Islamophobic) Speech. King’s public statements have revealed a deeply Islamophobic and paranoid streak in his thinking, and his list of proposed witnesses has shown a brazen anti-Islamic slant.

How We Train Our Cops to Fear Islam – Meg Stalcup and Joshua Craze. There is only one problem with the Alligator Alley case—a problem Kharoba never mentioned to the class. The incident was a false alarm. The “terrorists” turned out to be medical students on their way to a conference in Miami. They were innocent. After thirteen hours of interrogation, the police released them. Kharoba, however, taught the class that Ayman Gheith was a “textbook case” of Islamic fanaticism.

Unfit for Democracy? – NYTimes.com. We Americans spout bromides about freedom. Democracy campaigners in the Middle East have been enduring unimaginable tortures as the price of their struggle — at the hands of dictators who are our allies — yet they persist. In Bahrain, former political prisoners have said that their wives were taken into the jail in front of them. And then the men were told that unless they confessed, their wives would promptly be raped. That, or more conventional tortures, usually elicited temporary confessions, yet for years or decades those activists persisted in struggling for democracy. And we…

Islam and the Lagging Economies of the Arab World : The New Yorker. But, before consigning a fifth of humanity to the dustbin of economic history, one might consider, more broadly, whether it makes sense to place such an emphasis on religion in explaining the underdevelopment of so many Muslim countries. To start with, it’s worth noting—and Kuran and Lewis, to their credit, do note it—that Islam, at least in its original formulation, was far from hostile to business. As the centuries passed, many Muslim regions fell badly behind the West, but the most immediate explanation involves not Islam but…

Peter King, Scholar of Islam – Jeffrey Goldberg – National – The Atlantic. Rep. Peter King’s scheduled hearing next week on the subject of Muslim radicalization is drawing criticism from one seemingly unlikely expert: Daniel Pipes, who no one (except possibly the lunatic Pamela Geller and her cadre of racists) could mistake for an apologist for radical Islam.

Political Islam is here to stay — US must accept and adjust – CSMonitor.com. 2. Political Islam is not hostile to the West, but to its policies. Many Westerners assume that Muslims “hate our freedoms,” but reliable surveys paint a different picture. Drawing sweeping inferences from sound bites or selective “alarming” data isn’t valid, because political Islam is less a monolithic ideology than an outgrowth of each nation’s society. Years of regular polling in the Islamic world suggest that the majority of Muslims hold in high regard core American values such as religious tolerance, meritocracy, individual liberty, freedom of the…

Support democracy, not dictators – 02/05/2011 | MiamiHerald.com. For decades we have allied ourselves with autocrats in the Middle East and looked the other way as they crack down on political expression, free speech and human rights out of fear of the unknown and the desire for stability in the region. We support these regimes because of the uncertainty of who may come into power if we press for democracy. But, we need to question whether this is good long-term policy.  If the objective has been regional stability, we have not succeeded. Recent events across the region show that the…