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From Confusion to Kardashian: Misreading the Middle East

By Haroon Moghul

…untry in Europe plus the U.S., Canada, and Israel, against the rest of the planet (a world map only underlines this). Even Germany, a historically strong supporter of Israel, chose to abstain instead of voting no, as it was expected to. Hence an undisputed Israeli military victory was also a diplomatic defeat. Writing for the London Review of Books, Adam Shatz explained Israel didn’t win the short war. (How Gazans saw it deserves consideration.)…

Nonviolence, Muslim Style: From Ghaffar Khan to Tahrir Square

By Eric Stoner

…that people in the West hear so much about. To use a crude analogy: if one plane crashes in a day, it’s of course big news. Ninety-nine planes don’t and they don’t make the news. The episodes of mass peaceful protest within the Muslim world for the most part have not made the news, with the exception of what’s happened over the past six or eight months. Do you think the Arab Spring is changing this negative perception of Islam? Now, if you talk…

Rejecting Blood Sacrifice Theology, Again

By Peter Laarman

…tokrator sustaining the world and raising or exalting humanity to a higher plane, rather than descending into suffering and death among utterly corrupted humans. A few years back Rita Brock and Rebecca Parker did a stunning job of exposing the importance of this tradition, soteriologically speaking, in Saving Paradise. Tony Jones is not quite ready to take the Eastern view, let alone the Tillichian view that there is ultimately no conflict at all…

Why South Korea (and the US) Use Amusement Parks to Push Creationism

By Andrew Aghapour

…mething like an invisible hand, deferred to the Big Bang or some alternate plane of existence. Second, “myths” brings us back to South Korean amusement parks. They remind us that there is much more to culture than cold hard facts. (Otherwise, how could we have Fox News?) The popularity of a myth like creationism depends on social dynamics, publicity, and specific institutions of power. To combat it, evolution needs more than just the hard facts. I…

Clint Eastwood Upstages Mitt Romney with a Chair

By Anthea Butler

…vention is still at the woodshed, or riding in the cargo hold of Ryan’s VP plane. Eastwood was a reminder of the very racial animus in the campaign that the Republican Party is working hard to make us forget. And while we saw a parade of women and people of color on the platform, down on the convention floor, peanuts were thrown at a black camerawoman Patricia Carroll, with the unnamed perpetrators shouting: “that’s how we feed the animals.” Inci…

Can Twitter Be Used to Fight Islamophobia?

By Sarah Posner

…id Jihad at the airport. Can’t yell for him. #MuslimRage —Jenan Moussa (@jenanmoussa) September 18, 2012 Gawker shares chilling images of #muslimrage from AP.gaw.kr/OxBFcu —benwedeman (@bencnn) September 18, 2012 On a plane and people mishearing me when I say I am a *tourist*. #muslimrage —Welshy(@WelshInGaza) September 17, 2012 And don’t miss Paul Waldman and Gabe Arana’s terrific parody of Newsweek’s journalistic decline….

Citizens United’s Bad Religion

By Sarah Posner

…bama is depicted as a crafty beguiler of mass audiences; he emerges from a plane out of the heavens as thousands swoon, cry, and cheer. He’s smug and self-congratulatory as he misleads his admirers with lofty promises. He was “charismatic,” a “knight in shining armor,” he “really did seem to have a glow about him,” and to be “the one,” former Obama supporters tell us. The followers are giddy from the cult-like deception. A still from the opening…

When Religion Becomes a Trap Rather Than a Safety Net

By Holly Welker

…rs later, she meets Jerry Ricks, a handsome LDS missionary who sends her a plane ticket to Utah after he leaves Austria. Jerry’s stint as a missionary exacerbates his hatred of rules; he’s unhappy to find himself saddled with a wife who insists everyone pray six or seven times a day and get out of bed early each morning for an hour of scripture reading. His wife, for her part, is beyond disappointed to find herself married to a man who cheats on h…

Pam Geller’s Latest Subway Ad Inadvertently Attacks Hebrew Bible

By Hussein Rashid

…further insult our little village of five boroughs running an ad showing a plane smashing into the Twin Towers. No New Yorker would use this image. We were, and remain, deeply traumatized by that day. If a city could suffer from PTSD, NYC does. The text of the ad is ostensibly meant to reveal how, in her words, “savage” Islam is. The fragment of the verse she’s referring to reads in full: We shall cast terror into the hearts of the faithless becau…

The Myth of the Maya Apocalypse

By Evan Pondel

…while others believe that our world will simply be lifted up into a higher plane of consciousness. There are still others who believe that the poles will shift. Or, that there will be a solar storm of destruction. And then there is this notion that the planets are going to align; though December 21, 2012 is winter solstice and there is nothing apocalyptically significant about that phenomenon. There are also people who believe that spacemen helped…