Crossing the Crescent

(Published in Antiwar.com)

You are not terrorists. Your religion is not evil. Your project is not a monument to murder. But since some believe otherwise, I propose a compromise:

Get out.

That is the message adopted by some liberals and their allies in the wake of smoldering conservative rage over the Cordoba House proposal.

Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, New York → Read More: A Specious Compromise on Cordoba

A prominent Israeli rabbi whose party shares power in the Netanyahu government called for the extermination of Arabs in a recent sermon.

The 89-year-old Ovadia Yosef urged God to strike “these Ishmaelites and Palestinians with a plague; these evil haters of Israel.” He then singled out the Palestinian leader of Fatah, exclaiming that “Abu Mazen and all these evil people should → Read More: The Rise of Ultra-Semitism in Israel

Doubtless offended by the site’s proximity to Ground Zero, some patriotic conservatives apparently decided to torch equipment at a planned mosque in Murfreesboro, a suburb outside Nashville. Federal officials ruled today that the cause was arson.

Making some back-of-the-envelope calculations, the mosque’s proposed location was roughly 15,646 blocks from Ground Zero—clearly an insult to the families of September 11th and → Read More: Arson Ruled as Cause of Mosque Fire 15,646 Blocks from Ground Zero

(First published in Antiwar.com)

Almost 50 years ago, Frantz Fanon raced against death to finish his famous indictment of colonialism, The Wretched of the Earth. In that book, he wrote:

“Western bourgeois racial prejudice as regards the nigger and the Arab is a racism of contempt; it is a racism which minimizes what it hates.”

But there was → Read More: Christopher Hitchens and the Quest for Grade-A Muslims – Article Version

In his searing indictment of colonialism, The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon wrote the following as death approached:

“Western bourgeois racial prejudice as regards the nigger and the Arab is a racism of contempt; it is a racism which minimises what it hates. Bourgeois ideology, however, which is the proclamation of an essential equality between → Read More: Christopher Hitchens and the Quest for Grade-A(merican) Muslims – Blog post version

(Published in Antiwar.com)

American leaders are always trying to assess Osama bin Laden’s level of influence over Muslims.

They should look at his influence over their own countrymen.

The aversion to a proposed Muslim center near Ground Zero shows that it is Americans, not Muslims, whose thinking → Read More: Bin Laden’s Rising Influence In America: Opposition to Muslim Center at Ground Zero

“Muslims of Metropolis traces the experiences of three Muslim immigrant experiences in the West: a Turk in Germany, a Palestinian in England, and a Bangladeshi in the United States. They may share the same religion, but the experiences in their new countries are hardly the same. M. Junaid Levesque-Alam reviews the intimate portraits sketched by Kavitha Rajagopalan.”

Link → Read More: Book Review: Muslims of Metropolis

“Across Nation, Mosque Projects Meet Opposition,” read the headline of a recent New York Times article. The article appeared shortly after the paper ran a few pieces about angry opposition to a Muslim cultural facility proposed by Cordoba House at Ground Zero.

What does opposition to the Ground Zero proposal have to do → Read More: “No Mosque in My Backyard” Syndrome and the Perils of Tepid Tolerance

First published in Foreign Policy in Focus

As a child, I sometimes browsed magazines in my doctor’s waiting room. One day while flipping through the pages I came across a photograph of a beaming young woman enjoying a picturesque view of a meadow. Underneath the photo in a small box was a message in black and white → Read More: The Curious Case of Omar Khadr

Sunday’s WikiLeak deluge and the official response to it have reaffirmed my axiom for the digital age: too much information, not enough knowledge.

After the flood of more than 90,000 low-level classified documents splashed onto the front-pages of the Western world’s three leading newspapers, the U.S. government delivered a tongue-lashing to WikiLeaks, mainstream media wrote → Read More: The WikiLeaks are Not The Pentagon Papers 2.0