Peter Manning, Sydney Morning Herald, April 29: Australia’s a remarkable country. Cambodian, Yugoslav and Vietnamese Australians who once shot at each other now live in the same city, sometimes the same suburb. The same goes for Arab and Jewish Australians. There are Jewish fighters from 1948 who successfully established the state of Israel and there…
Showing all posts tagged Islam
Do we care about the women?
The face of Iraq in 2008, an explosion of honour killings: In the latest such case, it was reported yesterday that a 17-year-old girl, Rand Abdel-Qader, was stabbed to death last month by her father for becoming infatuated with a British soldier serving in southern Iraq. In Basra alone, police acknowledge that 15 women a…
Talking to each other now
Global Village TV, co-created by Baha’is and Muslims, aims to provide a forum for inter-faith understanding. One can never have enough debate between the major and minor religions.
A consistent war against Islam
Robert Fisk, in the Palestine Chronicle, discusses the similarities and differences between the war against Iraq and the 1990s battle in Bosnia: “Bosnia was in Europe, so eventually, we wanted to switch the war off. Iraq is a different matter – we’re in Iraq for oil. If the national product of Iraq was asparagus, we…
No tolerance here
Egypt is currently in political chaos – and this recent post by a Muslim Brotherhood member is revealing – but the following behaviour is utterly counter-productive: Egypt has ordered the seizure of a special edition of the German news magazine Der Spiegel after it was deemed to be insulting to Islam and the Prophet Mohammed,…
Spewing religious bile
Foreign Policy presents, “The World’s Worst Religious Leaders.” (Thankfully, a rabid, rabbinical racist is on the list.)
Being a good Muslim
Maryam Yasmin Hussain, Bitterlemons International, April 10: A very common example of western misinterpretation of Islamic terms is that of the word “fundamentalism”. Among the critics of Islam it is often used to describe faith-justified terrorism, the brutal treatment of women and abrasive behavior. But in an Islamic context, “fundamentalism” very simply means adherence to…
We must engage Hamas
My latest New Matilda column is about the need to talk to Hamas and speak honestly about Israel’s ever-expanding occupation: The international isolation of Hamas has failed. This is not merely the opinion of those who believe that the democratically elected Palestinian Government should be engaged, but includes a number of prominent Israelis, including Yossi…
Dirty work comes cheap
The OpenNet Initative recently reported the following disturbing development in relation to Google: YouTomb, a project of the MIT Free Culture group that studies takedown notices by the video-sharing website YouTube, has identified a mechanism used by Google to restrict video content in specific countries. This appears to be the method YouTube is using to…
Let the Brotherhood be heard
It takes a certain kind of Jewish publication – such as New York’s Forward – to publish an article by the Muslim Brotherhood’s political bureau chief. They should be commended for opening the lines of dialogue: The Muslim Brotherhood is not pushing for radical change in Egypt. Aware of political realities, we decided to contest…