Part 1

In a post titled “Why Johnny Can’t Google,” Rafe Colbun blogs about John McCain’s indifference to computers: “It’s tempting to. . . assume that. . . old guys just aren’t computer users. [But] in 1997 I worked for an IT consulting firm [among whose] clients was the George [H.W.] Bush Presidential library. [Part of our job was] setting up email accounts for President Bush and his friends (folks like Brent Scowcroft), generating PGP keys, and teaching them how to use them. President Bush has a good 12 years on John McCain, and he had his own laptop, email account, and PGP key ten years ago.” Full Story »

History has returned from the dead. The idyllic future, once considered inevitable by Western leaders in the early 1990s, is dead instead. The dreams of a liberal, all-men-are-created-equal world are dead, too.

So says author Robert Kagan in his new book The Return of History and the End of Dreams, a sober, realistic evaluation of the world today.

But while it may be sober, Kagan’s take on the world is not necessarily sobering—at least not in a slap-in-the-face, really-bad-news-from-the-doctor kind of way. Kagan rationally and dispassionately looks at the world stage and the actors currently playing major roles, as well as the actors who wish they were playing major roles. Full Story »

Hint: It’s not just upbringing and culture.

Back in 2005 James Wolcott wrote of torture: “Women may take part — though I imagine it’s rare, and under duress — but only men could devise the intricate and cruel tortures and torture devices that have been inflicted over the centuries.”

This is one generalization about women that feminists let slide. Lynndie England of Abu Ghraib fame was a blip on torture’s radar screen and women would like to keep it that way. But what infuses men with the urge to torture? Full Story »

How do we welcome him into the US? Why, detain him and confiscate his passport, of course. What else do you do with a Muslim, even if he is a Nobel Peace Prize candidate?

The Guinness Book of World Records has no category for World’s Nicest Man. Imagine trying to create the metrics for that? But its 2000 edition features an entry that points us in the right direction.

Titled “Biggest Volunteer Ambulance Organization,” it reads: “Abdul Sattar Edhi began his ambulance service in 1948 by ferrying injured people to the hospital and has since developed a service that attracts funds of $5 million per year with no government assistance.”

Curious, we did some research. Turns out that Edhi’s ambulance corps is just one of a wealth of services his foundation provides. But his Nobel Peace Prize-caliber work flies below the radar of most in the US. Full Story »

Pastor Dan has an absolutely must-read piece on faith and politics over at Street Prophets, and while I feel wholly inadequate for the task of matching the depth of his analysis, he raises a number of issues that got me to thinking. So to use a sports analogy, he’s just crushed an overhead at me, and I’m going to see if I can get a racquet on it in hopes of lobbing something weak back over the net.

For starters, his thoughts on the history and function of civil religion are spot-on, and as I consider how dramatically our culture is changing, they lead me to an obvious conundrum. Full Story »

First off, let’s not shed any tears for Gillian Gibbons, the British teacher sentenced to 15 days in a Sudanese prison for naming a teddy bear “Mohammed.” Any woman who chooses to go live in a nation with Sharia Law, where you can be jailed for allowing yourself to be raped, deserves no sympathy.

More interesting to me are the curious responses from a couple of prominent Christian spokespeople. First, the Archbishop of Canterbury condemns the Sudanese court’s decision: Full Story »

In December 2006 Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad kicked off a two-day conference dedicated to examining whether the Holocaust took place.

In October 2008 he addressed the audience the International Congress on the 800th birth anniversary of Rumi.

Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi-Rumi, of course, was the Sufi teacher whose wildly ecstatic poetry has achieved as profound a resonance in readers and listeners down through the centuries as any poet who ever lived.

Ironic, isn’t it, that, as his most successful translator Coleman Barks pointed out in 2001, an Iranian was America’s bestselling poet. His popularity, especially with those who consider themselves hip, has only grown since. Full Story »

Now that the U.S. can declare an agency of a foreign government a terrorist organization; now that deposing a political leader for crimes against humanity is an accepted reason for war; now that fundamentalist religious governance is recognized as a threat to world order, the Bush administration can step up and take a hard line on this:

Saudi: Why we punished rape victim

I’ll be waiting right here.

If you haven’t heard of Harun Yahya yet, you may sometime soon. Yahya (don’t you love that name?), whose real name is Adnan Oktar, is a Turkish apologist for Islamic creationism. He’s recently sent copies of his book Atlas of Creation to prominent scientists, academics, and members of Congress.

His avowed purpose is to show, not that Earth is only 4,000 years old or that The Great Flood accounts for mass extinction at one point in paleontology’s history, but instead argues that creatures haven’t evolved at all. Full Story »

In a move that seems slightly out of character (at first glance) for the Bush administration, chaplains in federal prisons are culling prison libraries of books on faith.

Notice I said “at first glance.” This is the Bush administration. So there’s got to be an agenda, right? Full Story »

I was just coming back to my office at the university from teaching an 8 AM class. As I passed the department offices, I noticed a TV had been brought in and that the chair, the secretaries, and a couple of professors were gathered around it.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“A plane crashed into the World Trade Center,” someone said. “They’ve been on with coverage since about 8:30.”

I turned to go, then suddenly there was a gasp from the group. The second plane had hit the south tower. I went into the office and watched the coverage with everyone else for a stunned half-hour or so.

Then panic set in. My son Josh was a freshman at Columbia University. New York was under attack by terrorists. Full Story »

With a recent article, “The List: The World’s Stupidest Fatwas,” Foreign Policy, of all publications, manifests a lack of political correctness that’s not only surprising, but borders on the giddy. In the process, it provides us with a glimpse into how difficult it is to convince Americans that Islam is not the black sheep of religions.

A fatwa, of course, is a legal ruling issued by an Islamic scholar. An example of one singled out in the byline-less Foreign Policy article is banning the polio vaccine on the grounds that elements in the West had tinkered with it to sterilize Muslims. (Hey, don’t give our intelligence agencies any ideas.)

Others include outlawing Pokemon to banning sex while naked. Of course, Muslims themselves often laugh at what might be called the lighter side of Islam. (Yes, it exists. Nothing can ever take away from the wonders of the Mulla Nasrudin, as made famous by Idries Shah.) Full Story »

I don’t usually do drive-bys, but Joss Whedon (he of Buffy and Firefly fame) has an impassioned take on the much under-publicized “honor killing” of Dua Khalil, and some of our readers might want to have a look.

Also check out the emerging Nothing But Red movement here.

Feel free to refer back to this case if you ever hear me say something un-PC about how no, all cultures are not equal…

Several months ago Vanity Fair ran an absolutely scathing and incisive expose of SAIC, one of the largest government/military contractors in operation. The author went deep into the ranks of this shadowy, low-key corporation, and came out with a disturbing tale of how career military and intelligence officers go through a “revolving door” from creating expensive new systems, outsourcing them to companies, and then going to work for those selfsame companies as lobbyists to Congress.

Today Salon has upped the ante with a study of how the intelligence-gathering arm of the government has also been outsourced to private contractors: Full Story »

AP is reporting that Hamas militants have suspended a TV program aimed at children that featured a Mickey Mouse lookalike encouraging Palestinian kids to fight against Israel.

The character, named Farfour, or “butterfly” is a black and white rodent who talks in a high squeaky voice. Sound like a cartoon character you’ve heard of before?

Full Story »

Have a look at this chart on how older vs. younger Muslims in Britain view Islamic issues.

I’m not sure exactly how British generational dynamics map onto the US model or how religious cultural issues complicate things, but to the extent that there’s some parallel to America that’s not just young people - those are Millennials. And if you study that cohort as much as I have, this is exactly - exactly - what you’d expect. Full Story »

“If I was a non-Muslim travelling by plane I would always ask for the halaal meal,” says Saliegh Salaam. “Not only will the meal be prepared to a significantly higher standard than other airline food, but …” he pauses dramatically, “you get fed first.” And he laughs uproariously and contagiously.

Salaam is the head of equities at Futuregrowth, a South African-based asset management firm. The Albaraka Equity Fund, of which he is the portfolio manager, was started in June 1992 and is South Africa’s first, and one of the world’s oldest, Shari’ah compliant funds.

We are at lunch at a Jimmy’s Killer Prawns, celebrating the fund’s recently passing the R 1 billion (US$ 140 million) benchmark of equities under management. It is also Jimmy’s first fully halaal restaurant and the Muslim brokers and fund managers at the lunch are celebrating their community’s success and invigorated self-confidence.

Full Story »