Glen Beck can't do arithmetic

He says there are 157,000,000 Islamic terrorists!

http://www.juancole.com/2010/12/fareed-zakaria-destroys-beck-on-lunatic-islamophobia.html

Europol Report: All Terrorists are Muslims…Except the 99.6% that Aren’t

Europol publishes an annual report entitled EU Terrorism Situation and Trend Report.  On their official website, you can access the reports from 2007, 2008, and 2009. 

One terrorist attack was carried out in 2009 in all Europe by persons of Muslim heritage (I do not say ‘by a Muslim’ because terrorism is forbidden in Islamic law).

http://www.juancole.com/2010/10/on-juan-williams-firing-for-islamophobia-and-how-most-european-terrorism-is-by-european-separatists.html

Games India Isn’t Ready to Play

October 2, 2010

By PANKAJ MISHRA

Mashobra, India

ON Friday afternoon, public spaces across north India were flooded with policemen and paramilitaries. Thousands of alleged “troublemakers” were arrested. The sending of bulk text messages from mobile phones was banned. These precautions had nothing to do with the opening on Sunday of the Commonwealth Games, the athletic competition among the nations of the former British Empire that so many Indians have hoped would be their country’s symbolic coming out as a world power.

Rather, the police were out in force because an Indian court had pronounced its verdict on the site in the town of Ayodhya that has been long claimed by Hindu nationalists as the birthplace of Lord Rama. The government did not want a repeat of the horrific mob violence that in 1992 had followed the destruction by Hindu nationalists of a 16th-century mosque standing on the land in question.

Shortly after the verdict, which split the disputed site unequally in favor of Hindus and to the detriment of Muslims, I went for a walk through the Himalayan village near my home. Even here, 600 miles from Ayodhya, people seemed to be playing it safe, the market partly closed, and shopkeepers clustered around television sets behind shutters.

Only the migrant laborers, who have come hundreds of miles from central India to the Himalayas, were still at work, men, women and even children carrying heavy stones on their heads at the construction projects that litter the hillsides.

Easily identified — the parents small and thin and dark, and the children with distended bellies and rust-brown hair that speak of chronic malnutrition — these migrant laborers have been a regular sight here for some years, building summer homes for the affluent of Delhi all day, and then huddling under tin shacks at night.

Read article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/opinion/03mishra.html

Pakistan's Troubles Stem From Misunderstood Past

Ayesha Jalal, a professor at Tufts University, just finished a semester teaching history at a leading university in Lahore, Pakistan. Jalal was the author of a noted book that reinterpreted Pakistan's birth. She tells Steve Inskeep that Pakistan was founded to protect the political interests of Muslims on the Indian subcontinent -- and not necessarily as an explicitly Islamic state or a theocracy. Pakistani governments have deliberately confused this issue for many years, encouraging many of the religious conflicts the country faces today.

INSKEEP: What's an example of the difference between a piece of history and a piece of ideology and how that warps people's thinking today?

Ms. JALAL: Well, I think a very good example is the reasons for why Pakistan was created. The ideologues would argue that it was created for Pakistan to become an Islamic conservative bastion, whereas the history tells you otherwise. The history tells you that Pakistan emerged out of an attempt to win a large share of power for Indian Muslims in India.

Listen to podcast of interview: 7 min 46 sec

Efforts Meant to Help Workers Batter South Africa’s Poor

NEWCASTLE, South Africa — The sheriff arrived at the factory here to shut it down, part of a national enforcement drive against clothing manufacturers who violate the minimum wage. But women working on the factory floor — the supposed beneficiaries of the crackdown — clambered atop cutting tables and ironing boards to raise anguished cries against it.

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• Times Topic: South Africa

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Greg Marinovich for The New York Times

Thoko Zwane, 43, who has worked in factories since she was 15, lost her job in Newcastle when a Chinese-run factory closed in 2004. More than a third of South Africans are jobless.

“Why? Why?” shouted Nokuthula Masango, 25, after the authorities carted away bolts of gaily colored fabric.

She made just $36 a week, $21 less than the minimum wage, but needed the meager pay to help support a large extended family that includes her five unemployed siblings and their children.

The women’s spontaneous protest is just one sign of how acute South Africa’s long-running unemployment crisis has become. With their own industry in ruinous decline, the victim of low-wage competition from China, and too few unskilled jobs being created in South Africa, the women feared being out of work more than getting stuck in poorly paid jobs.

In the 16 years since the end of apartheid, South Africa has followed the prescriptions of the West, opening its market-based economy to trade, while keeping inflation and public debt in check. It has won praise for its efforts, and the economy has grown, but not nearly fast enough to end an intractable unemployment crisis.

READ ARTICLE:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/world/africa/27safrica.html?_r=1&hp

September 15th: Viva Mexico!

EVERY 100 years, Mexico seems to have a rendezvous with violence. As the country gathers on Wednesday night for the ceremony of the “grito” — the call to arms that began the war for independence from Spain — we are enduring another violent crisis, albeit one that differs greatly from those of a century and two centuries ago.

In 1810 and 1910, revolutions erupted that lasted 10 years or more and were so destructive that both times it took decades for the country to re-establish its previous levels of peace and progress. Both episodes furthered Mexico’s political development, however, and our collective memory centers on these two dates that have taken on such symmetrical and mythical significance.

READ ON: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/15/opinion/15krauze.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=mexico%20violence&st=cse

Top Ways 9/11 Broke Islamic Law

Top Ways 9/11 Broke Islamic Law
On the ninth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, it is clear that al-Qaeda was a tiny fringe terrorist movement, not a globe-straddling threat to Western societies. The organization has been decisively disrupted and now lacks command and control. Its leader, Usama Bin Laden, has not been seen in a video since 2004, and is either dead or horribly disfigured. Its number 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is dangerous only in the way that any other terrorist crank is, firing off crackpot messages to his dwindling band of followers from time to time. With the startling rise of anti-Muslim bigotry in the United States, fanned in large part by Republican Party fear mongering, it is worthwhile underlining the ways in which September 11 contravened Islamic values and Islamic law.
Read on...

What do you want to learn from this course?

• Team One, Four & Five: "What are the roots of this recession and how can we use history to help us fix the economy?" A total of 8 students asked questions about the economic crisis..

• Team Two "Would the world be different if 911 hadn't happened?" (Historians call this type of "what if" question a "counterfactual"--HS.)

• Team Three: What allowed the West to become so technologically advanced in the 19th century compared to the rest of the world?"

• Team Six: 

1. "How can we better the world around us (poverty, medical care, inequality etc.)?" 
2.  "Will America's international dominance continue to decline in the same fashion as the hegemons of the past?"
3. "How did China come to be the creditor and the US the debtor?"
4. "Will this class experience change our view of the world?" 

• Other Questions: 

1. What caused the "fall" of Mussolini?
2. What can we learn from world history (so as not to repeat the past?)
3. Where did most of our culture come from?
4. "Why can't we rewrite laws for mistake others made?"
5. "Learn more about dictators in Europe" 
6. "How did Europe dominate the globe in the past?"

Steven Emerson: A 'moderate Muslim' exposed

Someone (my Republican brother) sent me these quotations from Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the Imam of the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque" to prove that he was a radical. I have re-read them many times and still find them rather rational, defensible and, yes, "moderate"....What's going on here?


"The United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than al-Qaida has of non-Muslims, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the leader of the effort to build a mosque near the site of the 9/11 terror attacks in New York, told an Australian audience in July 2005.
In a taped speech, Rauf made a number of comments that would make anyone who is not concerned about the mosque at the Ground Zero site rethink their support for the man tasked with heading the "bridge-building" center. Among them [click on the play button to hear each one]:
"We tend to forget, in the West, that the United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than al Qaida has on its hands of innocent non Muslims. You may remember that the US-led sanctions against Iraq led to the death of over half a million Iraqi children. This has been documented by the United Nations. And when Madeleine Albright, who has become a friend of mine over the last couple of years, when she was Secretary of State and was asked whether this was worth it, said it was worth it."

READ or Hear all of these quotations:

Steven Emerson: A 'moderate Muslim' exposed

Part of what's going on here is that these quotes have been taken out of context to make them seem more inflammatory than they really were. Media Matters, a liberal press watchdog group has a good discussion on this (including the longer version of the quotations): http://mediamatters.org/research/201008230063

The Muslims in the Middle

NEW YORK TIMES 8-17-10
By WILLIAM DALRYMPLE

PRESIDENT OBAMA’S eloquent endorsement on Friday of a planned Islamic cultural center near the World Trade Center, followed by his apparent retreat the next day, was just one of many paradoxes at the heart of the increasingly impassioned controversy.

We have seen the Anti-Defamation League, an organization dedicated to ending “unjust and unfair discrimination,” seek to discriminate against American Muslims. We have seen Newt Gingrich depict the organization behind the center — the Cordoba Initiative, which is dedicated to “improving Muslim-West relations” and interfaith dialogue — as a “deliberately insulting” and triumphalist force attempting to built a monument to Muslim victory near the site of the twin towers.

Most laughably, we have seen politicians like Rick Lazio, a Republican candidate for New York governor, question whether Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the principal figure behind the project, might have links to “radical organizations.”

The problem with such claims goes far beyond the fate of a mosque in downtown Manhattan. They show a dangerously inadequate understanding of the many divisions, complexities and nuances within the Islamic world — a failure that hugely hampers Western efforts to fight violent Islamic extremism and to reconcile Americans with peaceful adherents of the world’s second-largest religion.

READ MORE