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Call me suspicious. Bound bodies found floating in a lake just don’t seem to me very likely to be the victims of suicide. Riad’s friend writes: ‘ A friend of mine, Austin middle-school teacher and pro-Palestinian activist Riad (also spelled Riadh) Hamad, was found gagged & bound in a lake. His death was declared by […]

Said Arjomand shared with IC this letter to the editor of the New York Times, which was not printed. It concerns Noah Feldman’s mid-March NYT piece, “Why Shariah?” In the spirit of open dialogue, IC is carrying the letter here. The Social Science Research Council also also put up a version of it, and there […]

The truce between the Mahdi Army and the US military has broken down, putting a question mark over the future of the ‘surge’. Al-Zaman reports in Arabic that members of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI, formerly SCIRI, led by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim); the Da’wa Party led by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki; and the […]

On Tuesday morning, major clashes broke out between government security forces and local Basra militias (including the Mahdi Army) that sent black smoke billowing in the air above the oil port. A strict curfew was imposed and schools were closed. Reuters reports: ‘ “Basra is half empty. There are no vehicles and no one is […]

Some readers have complained that occasionally postings are partially obscured when viewed with the Firefox browser. I haven’t seen this effect in Firefox myself, so I assume it is a setting problem. Or CSS formatting conflict? It can also occur in in I.E., apparently, and it positively does not in Safari 3.0. A reader has […]

On Thursday, Bush lied about Iran again: “President Bush said the Iranian government has “declared they want to have a nuclear weapon to destroy people . . .” The Iranian leaders have consistently condemned nuclear weapons as inhumane and denounced them and said that they don’t want them and it would be illegal in Islamic […]

William R. Polk writes: Cassandra and Yogi Berra are an unlikely pair, but I hear both of their voices today. Cassandra, like some of us, was cursed to be always disbelieved as she correctly predicted the future while baseballer Yogi Berra will be remembered for his penetrating insight into the flow of history, “This is […]

For my class, reports on Mubarak’s Egypt: Journeyman pictures clip on the Muslim Brotherhood and Kefaya in Egypt, 2005 Journeyman Pictures clip on Islamic Jihad and other oppositional groups in Egypt. Aljazeera: Inside Story, Hosni Mubarak, Nov. 2007 Part 1: Part 2:

I listened to Senator Barack Obama’s speech on race issues as a resident of the Detroit area. Barack Obama was talking about something very personal to him, about being rooted in family and community. He recognizes that race had shaped both and had wounded both. He refuses to give up on the communities in which […]