Islamophobia

By Robert Huish and Patrick Balazo | – New technology can have profound impacts on society in ways never intended. The radio carried codes during the First World War, but later became a household fixture. Early telephones were leased in pairs but after Western Union, a telegraph company, adopted “exchanges,” it led to rapid long-distance […]

Islam

The Rightwing ‘American Spectator’ doesn’t Want you to read my ‘Muhammad: Prophet of Peace ‘

Juan Cole

The good news is that The American Spectator reviewed my new book about the beginnings of Islam and the centrality to it of peace, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires. The bad news is that Andrew Harrod, the reviewer, appears not actually to have read the book. He just attended a talk […]

Islamophobia

On How Everything Sam Harris Says about Islam is Wrong (1)

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Sam Harris’s error-ridden and bigoted “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Religion” (Norton, 2005) singles out Islam for special opprobrium. Although Harris lambastes politicians of the Religious Right for having no special knowledge or credentials, the fact is that he himself has no credentials to write […]

Featured

Hating Muslims in the Age of Trump: The New Islamophobia looks like the Old McCarthyism

Juan Cole

(Reprinted at Informed Comment courtesy Tomdispatch.com.) – These days, our global political alliances seem to shift with remarkable rapidity, as if we were actually living in George Orwell’s 1984. Are we at war this month with Oceania? Or is it Eastasia? In that novel, the Party is able to erase history, sending old newspaper articles […]

Donald Trump

Yes, Lou Dobbs, Mueller is Engaged in a Jihad–and that’s a Good Thing

Asma Afsaruddin

Is Robert Mueller carrying out a jihad? According to Lou Dobbs, host of Fox Business Network, he certainly is. On his show that aired on July 30, 2018, Dobbs described Mueller as being “on a jihad of some sort.” In the contemporary West, “jihad” is in the ears and eyes of the listener and the […]

Islamophobia

The Fake “Facts” of the Anti-Muslim Bigots and Fear-Mongers

Arnold R. Isaacs

New York (Tomdispatch.com) – Anti-Muslim activists in the United States were operating in a “post-truth era” and putting out “alternative facts” long before those phrases entered the language. For the last decade they have been spreading provable falsehoods through their well-organized network of publications and websites. A major theme of those falsehoods is telling the […]

India

Right Wing Hindu Gov’t of India Strips 4 mn Muslims of Citizenship

AFP

Guwahati, India (AFP) – India on Monday effectively stripped four million people in Assam of citizenship, sparking fears of mass deportations of Muslims from the northeastern state. A new draft register of citizens includes only those able to prove they were in Assam before 1971, when millions fled Bangladesh’s war of independence into the state, […]

Featured

Surprise! On how Muhammad never preached “Jihad”

Juan Cole

The word “jihad” has become pervasive in English. The Western Right wing is trying to use the term to replace the Communist Manifesto as the ultimate in the threatening Other. It figures prominently in FBI charges against militants. It is often glossed as “holy war.” People, especially those who dislike Islam, think that it means […]

Buddhism

Army of Buddhist Burma made ‘Systematic’ Crackdown Plan for Muslim Rohingyas

AFP

Bangkok (AFP) – Myanmar’s military engaged in “extensive and systematic” preparations for a bloody crackdown on Rohingya Muslims, a rights group said Thursday, in a damning new report that it says justifies a genocide investigation. A bloody military campaign that started last August forced some 700,000 of the effectively stateless minority over the border into […]