Religion Dispatches
…ual standing for such persons is itself quite telling. To my eye, the most significant thing that has happened between 1979 and 2012 has been the significant and at times studied erosion of feminist achievements in mandatory, state-sanctioned equality. I’m talking about the basics here, the principal First and Second Wave achievements: political equality, symbolized by a woman’s right to vote and to hold political office; and economic equality, sy…
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…ieved by the joint statement’s lack of specificity, and by my declining to sign a Muslim-drafted open letter to the new American president that names some difficult but necessary truths he will need to confront in relation to Israel’s behavior. A friend who until recently led the Progressive Jewish Alliance in Los Angeles once told me that his outfit was not in the business of changing Jewish views on Israel/the Holocaust/anti-Semitism (which he c…
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…a bit of a scandal, are already old news; now even military operations in Iraq and elsewhere have been massively outsourced to private vendors. Health care policy offers the supreme example of neoliberalism’s limits. Convinced that markets are always efficient even in cases where they plainly are not, today’s neoliberal ideologues have nothing useful to say about a bloated and dysfunctional privatized US health care system that increasingly makes…
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…arching Living With Hitler in the early 2000s, in the wake of 9/11 and the Iraq War, when many American (and British) liberals appeared to be making cynical concessions to the forces of nationalism, imperialism, and autocracy. I wanted to understand why liberal-minded German Democrats appeared to make even more problematic concessions in the 1930s and 40s. Hitler’s Monsters was inspired, similarly, by contemporary questions: namely, in what way di…
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…s want a two-state solution. Those I talk to generally want Israel to make significant concessions toward a just peace, but all the depressing facts on the ground leave them feeling frustrated, disheartened, and often tempted to give up. They can find nothing to be optimistic about. That’s usually a function of their time frame. Most arrived at their current position only some time in the 21st century—many in the last four or five years. Before th…
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…s. After high school, Peter became a U.S. Army Ranger, and was deployed to Iraq for several months with a special operations unit. Peter later returned to the Middle East as a medical relief worker. While delivering supplies to a town in Syria, however, he was abducted by ISIS. Peter’s journey to Islam began before his captivity, but he only formally embraced the faith while a hostage. Not that it mattered. ISIS, unlike Ben Carson, treated the Ame…
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…ow that Texas thing works, who those oil folks are and what they wanted in Iraq. I’m a born-again Christian too, but the longer I live, the more afraid I get of some of these religious groups that have so much influence on the Republicans and want to tell us how to live our lives. Haggard also took up for Obama in 2012: I don’t think it makes much difference who the president is. I think there was a big ball rolling before he came into the picture…
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…ave left many Muslim-majority countries devastated. The destabilization of Iraq and Syria (which has resulted in over one million refugees), the Saudi invasion of Yemen using weapons acquired from the U.S., and her uncritical view of the Israeli occupation of Palestine (especially when compared to Bernie Sanders’) are a few examples. Some point to the moment in which she reacted to Libyan leader Qaddafi’s extremely gruesome death by giddily exclai…
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…truthiness”? Here we are, 17 years after the devastating and destabilizing Iraq War was launched on false pretenses, in a U.S. whose Right wing is broken and has largely, including most white evangelicals, embraced the post-truth politics that are a hallmark of authoritarianism. Yet people want to celebrate Gerson for merely being anti-Trump? Sorry, not sorry, but it’s too little, too late. Commentary that attempts to downplay, obscure, or to some…
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…uslim-punk angle was unavoidable, especially in the context of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “However, I would hate to see Taqwacore stall in public discourse as a form of exotica,” he wrote. “Their songs are actually quite catchy, with interesting dynamics and a variety of sound textures, all of which are a testament to their musicianship.” The book now represents a new American exotic, a testament to the wide diversity of religious, immigran…
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