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.

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