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Cycles of Terror

By on Jan 8, 2015 in Featured, Politics | 7 comments

I’ve said before that “If you want to find the truth, assume that everybody is lying, but if you want to solve a problem, assume that everybody is telling the truth.” Today, I find this relevant. We have what appears to be a recurring pattern. A terrorist attack takes place, whether it’s on the WTC in New York, or (with much lesser casualties) at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris, and the reactions have, by now, become fairly predictable; the world condemns the murder of innocent civilians, the attacks are labelled Islamic Terrorism, the Muslim world at large, for fear of being lumped in with terrorists are quick to condemn the attacks and the attackers in the harshest ways possible, making it clear that no such attacks on innocent lives can be considered Islamic at all, that Islam is a religion of love & peace like Christianity, the Western world gets...

Free Speech, Cartoons, and Terrorism…

By on Jan 7, 2015 in Politics | 2 comments

Americans, like citizens from other countries that have ‘absolute’ freedom of speech, do not quite understand that in France, things aren’t quite the same way. For example, in France, Roger Garaudy, a historian was sentenced to jail after he wrote a book. He was accused of ‘holocaust denial’ for his book “The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics”. Now I’ve read his book, and I can tell you this, he relied massively on Jewish sources, so much so that it felt to me like he had not so much written the book as ‘edited’ it. Previous to this book, Garaudy had written a book about Islamic Fundamentalism, and then about Christian Fundamentalism, in both cases, there was no state-sponsored backlash, no legal repercussions. It was when he wrote about Zionism that the hammer came down. Suddenly his ‘freedom of speech’ was seen...

Not Exactly ‘Two’ Sides in Egypt

By on Aug 20, 2013 in Politics | 0 comments

The Crisis of Mind & Morality in Egypt

By on Jul 10, 2013 in Featured, Politics | 7 comments

The Great Divide Recent events in Egypt have led to deep intellectual and moral fractures; Egyptians are both shocked and offended at the way media is handling things, and the media is shocked, and by turns disgusted and simply dumbfounded by how Egyptians are seeing things. The divides have been brutal; creating what appears to be vast moral and intellectual divides between people who, just two weeks ago, had considered themselves aligned. There are several things to consider, so I will try to proceed in some rational order. The Democratic Coup Paradox or Ceci N’est Pas Un Coup This issue has received the greatest deal of attention both locally and internationally. There are some facts; Mohamed Morsi got 5.7 million votes in the first round of elections in 2012, a number far outsized by those who protested to remove him on the 30th of June, 2013 – and in the days leading up to...

This Word You Keep Using…

By on Jan 25, 2013 in Politics | 1 comment

The Muslim Brotherhood lives in a Bizarro World. In their universe, the supreme authority is not the God of Islam, to whom all individuals have access through their hearts and innate moral compass (the fitra) but the Guidance Council. In their universe anybody who is not a member of the Muslim Brotherhood is not really a Muslim. In their universe, wisdom comes from Sheikhs who insist that Hindus worship cockroaches, and not from the Quran. In their universe, it is okay to marry for a Muslim man to marry a Christian woman, but not to wish her a merry Christmas. In their universe, it is moral to use electoral fraud to secure political power. In the summer of 2011, during the interminable Tahrir sit-in of July, I took it upon myself to converse with some of the Brotherhood members when they decided to come and invade the square one day while we were there. We were there for a month –...

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