By Mayanthi Fernando | The Conversation Commentators in France and elsewhere have taken the recent terrorist attacks in Paris as an occasion to reflect more broadly about Muslims in France. Many read the attacks as a sign of French Muslims’ refusal to integrate. They’ve asked whether Muslims can be fully secular and expressed doubt as […]
Archives for January 2015
2014 Warmest Year on Record; So much for the “Pause”: NASA
NASA | Goddard Center | — “The year 2014 now ranks as the warmest on record since 1880, according to an analysis by NASA scientists. Nine of the 10 warmest years since modern records began have now occurred since 2000, according to a global temperature analysis by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies […]
US Mission Creep in Iraq, Part Deux
By Peter Van Buren | (Tomdispatch.com) — The current American war in Iraq is a struggle in search of a goal. It began in August as a humanitarian intervention, morphed into a campaign to protect Americans in-country, became a plan to defend the Kurds, followed by a full-on crusade to defeat the new Islamic State […]
Top 7 Things to know about Belgium anti-terror Op that left 2 Dead
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) Belgian police launched a counter-terrorism operation on Thursday in the eastern city of Verviers (pop. 56,000) near the German border. Verviers is one of the towns in Belgium that has a large number of Muslims, with many of the young men in that community being unemployed. Belgium is a […]
Learning from Paris: Are you Charlie Hebdo? (Juan on Radio w/ C. Lydon)
Christopher Lydon | Radio Open Source ” Learning from Paris The story of the massacre at Charlie Hebdo has gone everywhere in the past week: into meditations on free speech and blasphemy, into declarations of cultural and actual war, and high-wire geopolitics. It’s a fresh attack, meaning high emotion and demands for ‘moral clarity‘ — […]
Muslim-Jewish Coexistence: Mark Cohen on its History and Relevance Today
by JOSEPH RICHARD PREVILLE for ISLAMiCommentary Professor Mark R. Cohen delivering a lecture to a seminar room full of professors and graduate students at King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. (December 2014)Cohen gave two lectures there: “What is the Geniza and What Does it Tell Us?” and “The Importance of the Geniza for Islamic History” […]
‘State of War’ & Surveillance won’t help Press Freedom after ‘Charlie’
By A. D. McKenzie | PARIS (IPS) – In the wake of last week’s attack on French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo that left 12 people dead, a heated battle of opinion is being waged in France and several other countries on the issue of freedom of expression and the rights of both media and the […]
Fox ‘News’ Schooled By French ‘Daily Show’ On Muslim ‘No-Go Zones’
AJ+ | — “The host of France’s “Le Petit Journal,” Yann Barthès, asked his audience to flood Fox News with claims about Parisian “no-go zones.” Since the Charlie Hebdo attack, several Fox guests have asserted that parts of England and France are Muslim-run, with non-Muslims and police not welcome. But Barthès did some fact-checking on […]
Sea Level Rising Faster in Threat to Coasts: Study
The Times of India | — “A study said on Wednesday that sea level rise in the past two decades has accelerated faster than previously thought in a sign of climate change threatening coasts from Florida to Bangladesh. ” Times of India “Sea Level Rise Quickens More Than Thought in Threat to Coasts”