By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – All Hallow’s Eve, contracted now to Halloween, became conflated with the Scottish and Irish pagan Samhain, the harvest festival marking the end of autumn and the beginning of winter. It was an in-between time, when the barrier between this world and the next shimmered and let […]
Archives for October 2016
“The Meaning of Peace in the Quran” – Juan Cole @ PBS
Juan Cole | PBS | Religion and Ethics Newsweekly (Video Interview) | – – Via Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, PBS On my new book, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires, coming out October 9 Available for pre-order at Barnes and Noble And Nicola’s Books in Ann Arbor And Hachette And Amazon “Juan […]
US Veterans’ Biggest Battle: Challenging Islamophobia
By Nate Terani | ( Tomdispatch.com ) | – – I’m not an immigrant, but my grandparents are. More than 50 years ago, they arrived in New York City from Iran. I grew up mainly in central New Jersey, an American kid playing little league for the Raritan Red Sox and soccer for the Raritan […]
Another Saudi War Crime in Yemen as 43 Prisoners dead in Airstrike
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Saudi airstrikes targeting a judiciary building in al-Hudayda, a port on the western coast of Yemen under Houthi control, have killed some 43 people and wounded dozens of others, most of them prisoners. The strike on the judiciary building, which had a prison attached, could have […]
Israeli squatter saboteurs cut down 18 Palestinian trees near Bethlehem
Ma’an News Agency | – – BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) — Israeli settlers on Saturday morning cut down 18 olive trees belonging to a Palestinian family in the village of Nahalin, west of Bethlehem in the southern occupied West Bank. Journalist Hani Fanun, whose family owns the trees, said his family went to harvest olives on their […]
Facebook Ad Option allows Discrimination Against Blacks, Latinos
By Julia Angwin and Terry Parris Jr. | (ProPublica) | – – Imagine if, during the Jim Crow era, a newspaper offered advertisers the option of placing ads only in copies that went to white readers. That’s basically what Facebook is doing nowadays. The ubiquitous social network not only allows advertisers to target users by […]
Humanitarian Crisis In Mosul as Half of Displaced are Children
By Golnaz Esfandiari | ( RFE/RL ) | – – . . . “There’s no question that, in the worst case, Mosul will represent the single largest, most complex humanitarian crisis in the world in 2016,” United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq Lise Grande said on October 18, hours after an Iraqi-led coalition launched its […]
10 Things Weiner did Worse than Storing H. Clinton Emails on his computer
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – WaPo is reporting that it was the FBI investigation of Anthony Weiner that caused new emails between Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin to come to light, which apparently might include forwarded State Department memos or correspondence related to State. Nothing produces upchuck in the throat like […]
60 Years later, Suez Crisis looks a lot like Iraq War
By Nigel Ashton | (The Conversation) | – – Does history repeat itself? Never perfectly or precisely, but some of the parallels between Anthony Eden’s handling of the 1956 Suez Crisis and Tony Blair’s role in the 2003 invasion of Iraq are worth pondering. In both cases prime ministerial decision-making dictated the course of British […]