This link has been bookmarked by 26 people . It was first bookmarked on 02 Mar 2006, by daleelama.
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At Cordoba House, we envision shared space for community activities, like a swimming pool, classrooms and a play space for children. There will be separate prayer spaces for Muslims, Christians, Jews and men and women of other faiths.
So if containing a Muslim prayer space makes any building a “mosque,” does that mean the Center will be a “church” and a “synagogue” as well?
It really is a lovely essay, and once again my impression is that the imam is a good-hearted, sincere man who means exactly what he says.Andy Sullivan:
As the far right seems to relish a clash of civilizations, his op-ed strikes me as so transparently constructive, so evidently in the interests not only of domestic peace but of strategic victory against Jihadist terror that I’m again at a a loss to understand why so many have reacted so ferociously to this project.
Because they are howling ignorant crazy bigots, that’s why.
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For the record, I oppose book burnings on general principle. There are much more effective ways to fight Islamization and creepin’ sharia in the West.
But it brings to mind a question my pal Greg over at Rhymes With Right raised a while ago: If you can burn a flag , why can’t you burn a Qu’ran?
The answer of course is that you can.
It’s revealing that the Left is absolutely bat bonkers about the Qu’ran barbecue but has always been totally supportive of burning the American flag as a matter of Constitutionally mandated free speech if nothing else.
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By the same token, Neville Chamberlain is the archetype of cowardly appeasement. Righties may know little else about the man except that he “appeased” Hitler — not an uncommon practice among right wingers of the 1930s, who considered Hitler and Mussolini to be swell guys who hated communism as much as they did.
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That’s the plan, isn’t it? The first step in the new road to serfdom is persuading people that it’s selfish — immoral, even — for people to expect government to do anything for them. Then, as quality of life erodes because old systems are breaking down, tell people that their problems are personal, not systemic. So, We the People are divided from our government — our government, notice — and from each other. And then the vultures move in.
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they are not talking about what actually happened in the past. Instead, they are evoking historical persons and events as archetype and allegory.
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Now and then we have a discussion in the comments threads about whether the Bushies know what they are doing. The “don’t know” argument points to the fact that everything the Bushies do gets bleeped. The “do know” argument says that allowing things to get and stay bleeped — New Orleans, for example — is part of the Master Plan to turn America into the sort of country the Right wants. And that country (ironically, considering the anti-immigrant hysteria on the Right) would be something like a big encomienda, in which the right-wing elite and its corporate cronies are the encomenderos and the rest of us are the peasants.
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Although the Iraq invasion for a time paid big political dividends for the Bushies, and allowed them to divert billions in tax dollars to its favorite contractor-cronies, I think it’s obvious they didn’t expect the war part to get so messy and complicated. Otherwise, they might have thought twice about the “mission accomplished” victory prance on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln. And management of the war and occupation has amounted to one mistake after another. But at this point they may have given up actually managing the war and are merely playing a policy shell game so that Bush can avoid admitting to failure while he’s in the White House. So far, they’ve been successful at that. Barring some miracle out of Congress, about the only factor that might trip Bush up is the fact that he’s running out of troops.
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I’m not sure religion is the cause of this ugliness as much as it is the excuse for it, however. If people didn’t have religion to justify their darker impulses, they’d come up with something else. As it is, for much of the world’s “faithful” religion has devolved into more of a tribal loyalty than anything resembling a spiritual quest.
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But then there’s Mathew 10:34 — “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.” — which is one of the Christian Right’s favorite verses. They may not know the Beatitudes from chickens, but the holy rollers can all quote that one verse. It’s an all-purpose justification for war against anyone outside the tribe. Conversely, I’ve seen anti-Christians quote it to show that Christianity is a religion of Evil.
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The crucial mistake here is to overlook Islam’s scholarly tradition called “tafseer,” which is the study of the meaning of the Koran. Tafseer has a basic rule: A single verse or passage can’t be understood in itself; it has to be evaluated according to the other parts of the Koran, the general goals and principles of the holy text, and the way it was implemented by the prophet. Yet most radicals — whether they be Islamist or anti-Islamist — don’t have the time to waste with tafseer. They rather copy-paste the divine words to make powerful slogans.
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For example, some Islamic revolutionaries, especially the ones who are inspired by the Iranian Revolution of 1979, used to find a political message in this verse: “Those who do wrong will come to know by what a great reverse they will be overturned!” (26:227) But in fact the verse speaks about the punishment that God will hand down to unbelievers on judgment day.
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Do the Bushies really know what they’re doing?
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From the famous plastic turkee to ducking shoes
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Bad news after bad news — the mortgage meltdown, the financial crisis, steroid use in professional baseball, that we went to war in Iraq over imaginary WMDs — are disasters some saw way in advance, Rich writes, yet most Americans were late to notice them and were caught completely off guard. Yes, but
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The anti-reproductive rights movement never will compromise, because they are fanatics.
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These attempts are always futile, because anti-reproductive rights people cannot be reasoned with and will not budge from their extremist positions.
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There’s a lot of petty meanness going on on the Right today, but I think I’ll ignore it. Let them stew.
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Righties have no idea what we lefties think, because they never listen to us. They listen to the straw lefties that live in their own heads, and then they explain to each other what we think.
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I care about progressive issues as much as anybody, but right now I’m not in the mood to work myself into a lather about what might happen next. This may be because I’m exhausted with being in lathers about one thing or another these past eight years.
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just stop and chill. Wait until the day after the inauguration to start parsing.
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inflamed emotions are not conducive to clear thinking and judicious action.
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Once again, I say we won’t know what the Obama Administration is going to do until it comes into existence and begins to do things. Then we’ll know. And even then, it may be several weeks before we start to see patterns and tendencies.
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Kunstler’s take doesn’t begin to capture the horror I felt, of living through these last eight years, of watching much of the country go mad. Like waking up one day in a coast-to-coast version of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, I remember the shock of seeing nearly everyone around me lose their minds, believing in ever more stupid things announced from on high. What was truly frightening was envisioning the trajectory of where this national insanity could take us. Didn’t we have a Constitution or something to protect us from this, or a media that would finally come forward and tell us what was really going on? The whole experience taught me how fragile the achievements of American civilization really are, and how easily and silently they can be lost (and in some cases are still lost). Fortunately the force of this madness eventually peaked, but not without huge, debilitating costs, that have yet to be fully reckoned.
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Regarding the Right — of course they’re going to continue their well-established pattern of using every lie and smear they can think of to discredit Barack Obama. And some of it probably will stick now and then. But it does seem to me the whole nation is in a very different place from where it was eight years ago, or even four years ago. I don’t think the same old tactics are going to work as well for the Right as in the past. I could be wrong; we’ll see.
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Hamas lives because Israel is feeding it. Until Israel figures that out, Hamas will thrive.
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It seems that nothing the American people really need the federal government to do can ever get done.
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Which means, basically, that Washington cannot govern.
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Because using the country’s power and resources to serve narrow partisan, ideological and vested interests is not governing. Responding to the needs of the people is governing.
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