Religion Dispatches
…ght such destruction at hypersensitive urban nodes in the rapidly changing Arab Muslim world. What seems more and more likely is that the video itself was simply the pretext for a pre-planned attack, likely by al-Qaeda operatives or sympathizers. But that still raises the question: how did a B movie get rendered into Arabic, then used to justify an attack on American sites overseas? The two principles—freedom of speech and protection of American d…
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…ic. And I don’t want to be standing near you when you confuse Persian for Arab. If anything, the late Ottomans faced rebellions by Arab nationalists in the 19th and 20th century because they stressed Turkish as a vehicle for modern education. How the Ottomans could be fairly characterized a force for Arabization escapes me, reality, history, and peer review. There is so much more such nonsense and it fills up hundreds of pages. If you ever com…
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…terrible assaults in Cologne as not the fault of several dozen youth, but Arab and Muslim culture entirely, the kind of conclusion we’d expect from a Pamela Geller, or a Tommy Robinson. Not a New York Times columnist. Speaking of the large numbers of mostly male refugees entering Germany and Western Europe, Douthat writes that “many of these men carry assumptions about women’s roles that are diametrically opposed to the values of contemporary Eur…
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…ntium and Sassanid Persia in the seventh century A.D., and Trumpism is the Arab-Muslim invasion that put an end to their long-running rivalry. What these great ancient powers thought was “a temporary problem,” namely the invading Arab Muslims, merely “an alien force that would wreak havoc and then withdraw, dissolve, retreat,” turned out to be anything but: “A new religion had arrived to stay.” The world was overturned. With Trump on television so…
Read More…e open-minded, really educated people that speak at least three languages, Arab gay guys who are actually not so far from the Western [way of] life and can talk at the same eye level as Western people… I identify with almost 80 percent of the Arab world because there is at least 20 percent that I cannot even relate to. I’m talking about fanatic Islam and I’m talking about Muslims that are homophobic. But 80 percent of the Arab world today are figh…
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…or providing service in Arab Israeli villages. Jews are afraid to shop at Arab stores or hire Arab employees. You never know, maybe they support terrorism? For Jewish Israelis, the myriad of reports carefully documenting Israeli apartheid, the Israeli army’s use of human shields, starvation as a weapon of war, and now a plausible genocide violate a basic principle of Jewish life in Israel: namely, that the Israeli Defense Forces are, at the end o…
Read More…ther traditions. They are navigating what it means to be modern, which the Arab world is having difficulties with. Because of the popular conflation of Arabs and Muslims, both in terms of number and authenticity, including at bodies such as the Council of Foreign Relations, the President needs to obliquely address the concern. I also believe that Obama was directing the speech to address domestic concerns as well. The key line is “individuals are…
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…: Independent justice reform group criticizes Aceh’s harsh anti-LGBT legal code The Jakarta Post reported on April 1 that the Institute for Criminal Justice Reform “has lambasted the Aceh administration’s Islamic criminal code bylaw, or Qanun Jinayat, saying it could potentially provoke discrimination and over-criminalization of LGBT communities and other vulnerable groups.” The Aceh province is governed by the conservative Islamist legal code. No…
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…m shifts. In this regard, comparisons to the Arab Spring are mistaken; the Arab Spring had clear demands (step down!) and focused on the key issues which united diverse constituencies (constituencies which, as in Egypt, are now busy fighting one another). Here, in contrast, there are no clear demands. And while there are some threads that unite everybody, there are also lots of split ends, digressions into issues which divide us. Working Americans…
Read More…” Miller writes that the article “has sparked a flurry of condemnations by Arab civil society, shining a light on a usually suppressed debate on gay rights.” Khatib’s comments quickly drew fire from Israeli Arabs on social media, who attacked both the style and content of his article. “Dear Kamal Khatib, how can any self-respecting person write an article titled ‘You make me sick?” wrote social activist and Arabic teacher Hanin Majadli to her 4,00…
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