International Politics and Economy

Despite the US first amendment, which guarantees freedom of religion, the US has a long history of religious bigotry. Native Americans were forbidden to practice their religions for long decades. Catholic churches were burned by the militant Protestant ‘Know-Nothings.’ Buddhists and Hindus were disadvantaged. Jews were discriminated against. The latest paroxysm of religious hatred is […]

Andrew Kolin writes in a guest column for Informed Comment To understand how the U.S. government became a police state, look no further than how it freed itself from colonial rule. For the American Revolution was, by and large, the result of a mobilization of the masses by the elites to liberate the colonized from […]

Rep. Peter King (R-NY), the incoming chair of the House committee on Homeland Security has announced that he will hold hearings into the ‘radicalization’ of American Muslims. This, despite the fact that the Muslim Americans are pillars of the US community–disproportionately well-educated and well integrated into the country, and even though a third of tips […]

McSweeney’s is publishing Wajahat Ali’s important Muslim-American play: ‘ The Domestic Crusaders focuses on a day in the life of a modern Muslim Pakistani-American family of six eclectic, unique members, who convene at the family house to celebrate the twenty-first birthday of the youngest child. With a background of 9-11 and the scapegoating of Muslim […]

On his indispensable television news magazine, GPS, Fareed Zakaria demolishes Glenn Beck’s mind-numbingly stupid assertion that ten percent of Muslims are terrorists. Zakaria’s courage in standing up to the hate-mongers should not be underestimated, and he is among those few now standing in the way of a Rupert Murdoch plot to foment physical attacks of […]

German Chancellor Angela Merkel over the weekend declared “multiculturalism” dead in her country and demanded that labor immigrants be assimilated, through German language and German culture. Russia Today has video: This sort of discourse has a long and ugly history in Germany and it derives from a set of mistaken premises. An important strand of […]

The View stars Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar walked out on Bill O’Reilly Thursday when the right wing pundit insisted on blaming all Muslims for the September 11 attacks. They pointed out that a small group of extremists carried them out, not “Muslims” as O’Reilly was insisting. When he kept repeating his smear of the […]