The events now unfolding in the Middle East, which have been set in motion by Hezbullah’s takeover last week of much of Beirut, do not bode well for American or Israeli interests, warns one of France’s leading historians and journalists, Alexandre Adler.
Writing for France’s Le Figaro newspaper, Adler writes that Iranian President Ahmadinidjad, hemmed in by opponents at home and abroad, has turned to one of the last cards he holds in his hand: the Lebanese Hezbullah:
“Let us first turn to Iran, which is in a fever and where the most decisive threats originate. Iran’s President and his trusted accomplices - and a pro-Iranian faction of al-Qaeda - hope to recreate unity among all people of Muslim faith for a renewed jihad against America and Israel. Voices have been heard, notably among the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, who hope for such an outcome and support Iran’s nuclear program, which many Islamists - not only in Cairo - regard as a liberating force that should be immediately employed against Israel, whatever the risks.”
“Israel cannot tolerate a military victory for Hezbullah over its [pro-West] Lebanese opponents - any more than it can allow Ahmadinejad to pursue nuclear blackmail, especially in this very strange context: There is the probability that a Democratic candidate - indeed an Obama election victory - could bring to the White House a supporter of negotiations at all costs. … Clearly, this is a distressing 60th anniversary for Israel.”
This is a seminal article about what the United States now confronts, and it should be read by anyone interested in understanding this very important and hard-to-penetrate topic. Read the rest of this entry »
Some reports coming out of North Korea indicate that people are beginning to openly question the regime’s explanation of why once again, starvation looms.
This article from The Daily North Korea, a publication headquartered in Seoul dedicated to reporting on the regime and getting word into the Hermit Kingdom about the outside world, reports:
“It appears that North Koreans are expressing increasing doubt about government claims that South Korea and the United States are responsible for the latest food crisis.”
According to one source, located in the North Korean Province of Ryanggang reported on a party meeting held recently in the city of Hyesan:
“During the conference, a speaker is said to have explained the state of international and domestic affairs by saying, ‘the U.S. and the puppet regime (the Lee Administration in South Korea) have overridden peaceful agreements between North and South (referring to the June 15th Joint Declaration and the October 4th Agreement) in order to create a serious food crisis in our Republic.’ … there was an awkward atmosphere in the hall after the chairperson of a People’s Unit from Hyehwa-dong in the city of Hyesan asked forthrightly, “We understand that the Americans and Lee’s puppet faction aren’t helping us with rice, but why won’t China help us, since it’s our closest ally?” The speaker’s face turned pale at the question and a silent tension filled the hall.”
By Lee Sung Jin
May 8, 2008
South Korea - Daily North Korea - Original Article (English)
Yanji, China: It appears that North Koreans are expressing increasing doubt about government claims that South Korea and the United States are responsible for the latest food crisis.
In a telephone interview on May 1st, a source from Ryanggang Province told The DailyNK, “At a conference of the Union of Democratic Women, called to commemorate the founding of the Korean People’s Army on April 25th, one speaker humiliated herself by blaming [South Korean] President Lee” for the crisis.
One of a series of meetings now being held across the country to extol the military, this meeting was held at the conference hall of the General Federation of Korean Trade Unions in Ryanggang Province.
The source reported that, “A lecture was given, entitled ‘Our revolutionary weapons are an invincible force for building a strong military-first country.’ During the lecture, he said that the politics of putting the military first were, “praised even more highly than the People’s Army itself.”
During the conference, a speaker is said to have explained the state of international and domestic affairs by saying, “the U.S. and the puppet regime (the Lee Administration in South Korea) have overridden peaceful agreements between North and South (referring to the June 15th Joint Declaration and the October 4th Agreement) in order to create a serious food crisis in our Republic.”
Then our source reports that there was an awkward atmosphere in the hall after the chairperson of a People’s Unit from Hyehwa-dong in the city of Hyesan asked forthrightly, “We understand that the Americans and Lee’s puppet faction aren’t helping us with rice, but why won’t China help us, since it’s our closest ally?” The speaker’s face turned pale at the question and a silent tension filled the hall.
READ ON AT WORLDMEETS.US, along with continuing foreign press coverage surrounding American involvement with North Korea.
The Fox Movie Channel showed “Gentleman’s Agreement” last night, a preachy drama about anti-Semitism that won the Academy Award 60 years ago, and it brought into focus the realization that I may live to see a black man inaugurated as President of the United States.
What Barack Obama faces from now until November would be unimaginable to the people who made and saw that movie then, including a 23-year-old just back from World War II who had little audacity and even less hope of living in the rich, glossy world it portrayed.
Gregory Peck played a magazine writer who pretends to be Jewish. A decade later, I was an editor on one of those magazines, unknowingly hired by George W. Bush’s grandfather as the first Jew among thousands of employees, working with Laura Z. Hobson, who wrote the novel on which the picture was based.
‘Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice were in her whole aspect, and spite of all mortal men could do - the said solid white buttress of her forehead smite the ship’s starboard bow.’
(apologies to Moby Dick)
It seems that a global consensus against Senator Hillary Clinton is forming, after her razor-thin victory in Indiana and significant defeat in North Carolina.
This editorial from Lebanon’s Daily Star not only lambastes Hillary for pandering - pointedly in regard to her threat to ‘obliterate’ Iran - but it uses her bad example as a way of pointing out a glaring deficiency in Democratic government as it is presently conducted.
“Whatever she does in the future, nothing will erase her demonstration of the worst aspects of American politics - particularly her recent statement that she would ‘obliterate’ Iran if it ever threatened Israel with nuclear weapons … The context of her threatening statement is telling, in that it exposes the weak link in America’s democratic system - or any democratic system: the inclination of candidates running for public office to pander to the basest prejudices, sentiments and fears of the voting public.”
“The United States and Iran may disagree about many things; but for one to use threats of obliteration as a policy toward the other strikes us as a rather crude and offensive strategy, especially for a world power.”
One interesting question to ponder is whether Hezbullah’s takeover on Friday of much of Beirut, will also put an end the the independence of the pro-West Daily Star.
EDITORIAL
May 8, 2008
Lebanon - The Daily Star - Original Article (English)
In the coming days or weeks, Hillary Clinton’s fate as a presidential hopeful will be decided. But whatever she does in the future, nothing will erase her demonstration of the worst aspects of American politics - particularly her recent statement that she would “obliterate” Iran if it ever threatened Israel with nuclear weapons. The substance of the New York senator’s words are hard to evaluate due to the hypothetical nature of the damage she threatens to impose. Were she ever to become president and order such an attack, many other Americans would have to agree with the decision in order for it to be implemented, particularly the top military brass.
The context of her threatening statement is telling, in that it exposes the weak link in America’s democratic system - or any democratic system: the inclination of candidates running for public office to pander to the basest prejudices, sentiments and fears of the voting public. Clinton has been a particularly dynamic panderer this year, jumping on every opportunity to make her appear to be a woman of the people, whether drinking shots of whisky or calling for gas-tax holidays. In this case, she chose to play on widespread American opposition to Iran, which is in turn a function of several factors. In American politics these days, Iran is the bad guy par excellence, whether for its role in Iraq, its strategic ambitions in the Middle East, its nuclear policy, its rhetorical threats against Israel, or to its a general assertion of Islamist identity and politics. Americans also remain angry at Iranians for overthrowing the Shah in 1979 and then taking and holding Americans hostages for many months.
Ms. Vanderslice is part of a new wave of younger activists willing to reach across party lines for the causes they advocate. She has, for example, pushed legislation sponsored by a pro-life Democrat and a pro-choice Republican designed to reduce abortions by increasing support for family-planning programs (something Democrats like), and by increasing assistance for women who choose to keep their babies (something Republicans like). That puts her in the vanguard of like-minded activists who are starting to reshape the values debate…
A federal judge has ruled that the Georgia Institute of Technology had materials in its office to support gay students that amounted to unconstitutional support for some religious groups over others. […]
The ruling came in a case involving a range of issues over speech codes and support for religious groups at Georgia Tech — issues that mirror those being raised at other public colleges and many of which were resolved in earlier rulings or agreements between the parties in the case. The new part of the ruling, however, focused on a set of materials used in the “Safe Space” program at Georgia Tech, a part of the institute’s diversity office designed to support gay and lesbian students.
The case was filed on behalf of two Georgia Tech students, assisted by the Alliance Defense Fund, a legal group that has sued many public colleges accusing them of violating the rights of religious students. The portion of the suit about Safe Space argued that materials at the public university were effectively religious in that they endorsed some faiths over others — and that these materials were as a result unconstitutional. Judge J. Owen Forrester agreed.
The materials in question dealt with issues that may be faced by religious gay students, or by gay students challenged about the sexuality by people from different faiths. One passage cited in the ruling says that “historically, Biblical passages taken out of context have been used to justify such things as slavery, the inferior status of women, and the persecution of religious minorities.” Such attitudes have led some religious groups to declare “that homosexuality is immoral,” the group’s materials state, while others “have begun to look at sexual relationships in terms of the love, mutual support, commitments and the responsibility of the partners rather than the sex of the individuals involved.”
On the 492nd day of Hillary Clinton’s quest to become the first woman president, one inevitability was rudely replaced by another.
That was the number of days that elapsed from January 20, 2007 when Clinton (photo) announced that “I’m in. And I’m in it to win,” something that few observers could seriously doubt, and Tuesday past when voters in North Carolina and Indiana delivered another message: Her defeat at the hands of Barack Obama in the political cage match of the young millennium was no longer a probability but an inevitability.
Sure signs of this seismic shift are the uproar from the hardest of Clinton’s hardcore supporters and flurry of kamikazee analogies from pundits shaking their heads over her stubborn refusal to bow to that inevitability.
These supporters declare that Obama is unelectable although more Americans may vote for him in November than any presidential candidate in history. And that Clinton should be gifted the Democratic nomination although she trails Obama in popular votes, pledged delegate votes, opinion-poll positives, contributions and endorsements, and any second in superdelegates, as well.
The hardcore ranges from big-time bloggers like Taylor Marsh, who will now have to return that lovely dress she bought months ago to wear to the inaugural balls (but at least is making noises about possibly embracing Obama) to some really pissed-off feminists (who are demonizing Marsh for seeing the light).
I’m going to focus on the Hell Hath No Fury Like a Feminist Scorned crowd, which is shaping up to be a bunch of especially poor losers.
May 9th, 2008 by DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, TMV Columnist
According to my contact in Yangon, what pitiful supplies are on the ground, have no distribution whatsoever to any of the thousands of villages and tributaries in Burma hit into utter devastation by the tsunami/ cyclone. The Burmese, most poorer than poor before the tsunami, are going on their 6th sunrise without clean water, food, or shelter or medicines.
Meanwhile, it is certain, while the military government gets down their fiddles, the infants and newborns and toddlers grow dehydrated. Without adequate water and food, their mothers’ breasts will have run out of milk, and the children will die from dehydration, an entire generation of young will be gone within a week.
Than Schwe: You cannot keep others from knowing about the mayhem of your country. Burma is on satellite. The floods and the people and the animals can be seen dead and floating and bloated. The living can be seen by satellite also, picking through ruins, entire villages wiped out with no survivors.
Than Schwe, delaying allowing aid workers in, makes you only look more and more unleaderly.
Than Schwe, animals survive by adapting. Animals who can learn new behavior, survive the unforeseen.
Than Schwe, animals who do as they have always done, die.
Than Schwe, open your heart, if not your mind. Be known as a ruler who took care of his people in every way possible, rather than going down in history as the leader who stood by paralyzed and allowed holy people and helpless people, his own kith and kin, to die in misery.
CODA
I hear from my contact in Yangon, that the people on the ground in Burma are begging that international aeroplanes please fly over and drop supplies.
Than Schwe, if they fly, let them fly unmolested. Add no more horror to horror. It’s within your power. Choose honorific over horrific.
Than Schwe, the new respect you would receive then, would be remarkable.
This is our deepest prayer for you Than Schwe, and for the people of Burma… the Central Buddhist Precept:
As the Bush era draws to a close, Europeans are anxious to know what about American policy will change when he’s gone - particularly if a Democratic victory occurs as planned.
“In view of the ongoing presidential campaign, the American exception seems as strong as ever. Where else but in America would a primary race go on for more than a year? Where else would candidates obtain tens of millions of dollars a month from their supporters? Where else would party foot soldiers have the chance to select the candidate for the highest post? … All three candidates take lyrical flight in discussing the American dream. Above all, none will hesitate to resort to force.”
“Clearly, a Democratic victory in November would undoubtedly open the door to a more left-wing America. But it would be a kind of American left, certainly not modeled on Europe. Both candidates have rejected a “single payer” system for health insurance, like the Canadian and European models. The change ahead will not mean the end of the American exception, but the end of American triumphalism.”
LEADING ARTICLE
Translated By Kate Davis
May 8, 2008
France - Challenges - Original Article (French)
All countries are exceptional. But the United States gladly considers itself exceptionally exceptional, different from all other developed countries in its social organization and its fundamental values. The State is less extensive and the distribution of wealth more unequal. The United States is also more strongly committed to what Margaret Thatcher called the “Victorian values:” individualism, voluntarism, patriotism.
Thus the Bush government, which supports conservative values domestically and demonstrates an unlimited self confidence externally, is the most “exceptional” known in recent years. But at the end of Bush’s mandate, isn’t the United States entering a new cycle, characterized by the rejection of conservatism and a convergence with Europe’s standards?
In reality, three quarters of Americans believe the country is headed in the wrong direction and for example, vigorously support a system of universal health care. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both have promised to address that. They also want to improve their image in the world. The next government will certainly initiate significant reforms, such as closing Guantanamo or adopting a more rigorous environmental policy in order to address some of the country’s more aberrant characteristics.
Yet in view of the ongoing presidential campaign, the American exception seems as strong as ever. Where else but in America would a primary race go on for more than a year? Where else would candidates obtain tens of millions of dollars a month from their supporters? Where else would party foot soldiers have the chance to select the candidate for the highest post? John McCain won the nomination of his party despite strong internal opposition. Barack Obama is the leader of an uprising against the Democratic old guard.
All three preach a patriotism specific to the United States. John McCain boasts of his service in Vietnam. Barack Obama claims that there is no red or blue, but only one America united by common values. The three candidates take lyrical flight in discussing the American dream. Above all, none will hesitate to resort to force. John McCain sings, “Bomb, bomb [bomb, bomb bomb] Iran.”
READ ON AT WORLDMEETS.US, along with continuing translated foreign press coverage of the U.S. elections.
In his book, Schecter makes the case for why, although he supported McCain in his run in 2000, McCain no longer deserves support and in fact, his candidacy should be fought actively, without hesitation and on all fronts. Schecter outlines his reasons for these sentiments and fills in those reasons with more details than you may be able to absorb. Schecter draws a portrait of both McCain’s political trajectory and the parallel trajectory of how his political choices since 2001 are a thumbing of his nose at the very people who got him to the presidential precipice in the first place.
A couple of disclosures before I offer you my phone interview with Cliff: I’ve never been a McCain supporter. And I haven’t known of Schecter that long either - here’s the first post I ever wrote about Schecter. However, it was fascinating talking to someone with a seemingly vast knowledge base about someone whom I’ve never really studied.
JMZ: You argue on behalf of former McCain supporters who should be able to realize that McCain isn’t what he once was. Who, then, is the alternative and why?
CS: Well. There’s always, “What we have versus what we’d like to have.” I’m an Obama supporter and he has a lot of appeal to Independents. But he hasn’t done it the way McCain did it – by attacking his own party in big speeches. Obama has done it by standing up, not by splitting. Obama talks about rising above partisanship and reaching out to all people on all sides and getting past the muck where politics has gotten so nasty. Obama says, I’m going to talk to you like an adult. And that’s what McCain had called “straight talk” – but he hasn’t given us much of that [this election cycle.] Read the rest of this entry »
BOB GARFIELD: The FLDS community has been described as something like a tribe in Papua, New Guinea, that is untouched by the modern world. Are they really living in the middle of the 18th century?
BROOKE ADAMS: I think that’s a false perception of this group. They have a number of people who have been to college. They are quite Internet-savvy, as the world now knows with the websites that they have put up to spread their view of what’s happened to them in Texas. So I think the idea that they’re totally isolated is false.
BOB GARFIELD: I want to ask you about the websites that have popped up amid all of the uproar. Are they coming from within the Yearning for Zion compound itself?
BROOKE ADAMS: Yes and no. The FLDS that are there at the ranch have put up, as far as I know, two websites on which they have posted a number of the pictures they took during the initial days of the raid there at the ranch. But there are a number of other websites that have been put up related to the actions in Texas. […]
BOB GARFIELD: There is another issue, apart from the welfare of the children, that has emerged in all of this, and that is the women in the community, who have been occasionally portrayed as essentially being slaves, having to be utterly submissive to the men in the household. Read the rest of this entry »
May 7th, 2008 by DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, TMV Columnist
Photo I.D.’s were required in order to vote in Indiana in the primary yesterday. A strict new law.
But what if you can’t easily get a photo I.D.?
What if you are a citizen, have lived an exemplary life, have stood up for the lives of others, have agreed not to be paid for your work lifelong, have agreed to wear funny clothes and interfere in society’s gears when justice to the soul is concerned…
and you can’t get a photo I.D. to assert your right to vote?
What if it’s because you’re 98 years old and your comrades, sister nuns who also were not allowed to vote in Indiana yesterday because they too didn’t have photo I.D.s…. don’t drive. Like many nuns. They don’t drive because they live where they work, and their work is unending. There’s no 9-5 amongst nuns. They don’t have a lot of time to find someone to drive them to wherever they might get some sort of photo I.D., they’d be leif to ask anyone to take time from their own work to do so,
and nuns, even the most elderly ones, haven’t the same courtesy of ’step to the head of the line’ that we accord dignitaries.
12 nuns from St. Mary’s convent at South Bend (Sisters of the Holy Cross) were turned away from the polls, for not having the picture that said they were who they said they were.
Ironically, they were turned away by a sister nun who knew them, but regardless, and properly so, had no choice, as said sister was acting as a volunteer at the voting precinct.
The sisters turned away were in their 80s and 90s. Some brought their passports with requisite photo, but the passports were long expired. I don’t know about anyone else, but I just went through intense rigmarole to get my own passport reissued and I could have practically graduated with a degree in engineering for as long as it took the government to issue it.
Sister On Special Assignment as Voting Precinct Volunteer said the nuns “weren’t given provisional ballots because it would be impossible to get them to a motor vehicle branch and back in the 10-day time frame allotted by the law.” “You have to remember,” Sister McGuire said, “that some of these ladies don’t walk well. They’re in wheelchairs or on walkers or electric carts.”
I only have this to say: These nuns and others like them who are elderly and in many ways are naive about the world yet very sharp about the ‘other world,’ and yet have dedicated a lifetime to serving day in and day out, who have sacrificed so much, deserve to be treated far more decently than this. Far more.
And as for the photo I.D. law, I see the reasons behind it. But also,
there has to be reasoned application of such a law, so that when one casts huge nets meant to catch the common fish, they do not also catch dolphins… dolphins are mammals, not fish. Dolphins are disabled when stuck in nets underwater, not allowed to surface.
It makes no sense to deny the innocent their hard-won freedoms whilst trying to entrap the others.
Indiana, for your penance, that’ll be ten Our Fathers, twenty Hail Marys, and a passel of rosaries. And an apology to the sisters from the Governor would be nice, since Mitch Daniels (R) is the one who signed the law to begin with.
But then, nuns being nuns, they’d likely say, no apology needed. They’d rather just have the prayers… And the right to vote not made labyrinthine… et– in nomine Domine, hosanna, in excelsis, and in the name of God, with high praise.
———
CODA
from AP:
“Indiana’s photo ID law is the strictest in the country. The Republican-led effort was designed to combat ballot fraud, said supporters, who also have acknowledged that no case involving someone impersonating a voter at the polls has ever been prosecuted in Indiana.
“The state’s American Civil Liberties Union sued, calling the law a poll tax that disproportionately affected minorities and elderly voters, those most likely to lack such identification. On April 28, the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 that the law did not violate the Constitution.”
A Hoosier’s rights under the new law, include being able to cast a provisional ballot and obtain a proper ID within 10 days so that ballot would be counted later. But, in Indiana, as in many other states, the MVD takes far longer than 10 days to mail out the required key to the kingdom. So, no dice.
**Disclosure: The Sisters and Brothers of the Holy Cross, the group noted in this article, were traveler-teachers to a tiny school that gathered farmer-immigrant-merchant class kids from the boonies long ago. This order of priests, brothers and nuns taught me there, and at other proximate locations, for the better part of 12 years. Like many consecrated who live in other convents and seminaries across the world, they are some of the dearest, funniest, uncanny people you’ll ever meet.
“God wants me to be president,” George W. Bush told fellow believers before 2000. If the rest of us had known His intentions, we would have started building an ark.
After eight years of war and political plague from this faith-based presidency, most voters may be ready for some rational doubt and ambivalence in the White House. Yet the candidates still seem mesmerized by Bush’s breakdown between the separation of church and state.
After Barack Obama gaffed about “bitter” voters turning to God and guns, Hillary Clinton was quick to play the God card. “I grew up in a church-going family, a family that believed in the importance of living out and expressing our faith,” she is telling Indiana voters. “The people of faith I know don’t ‘cling to’ religion because they’re bitter. People embrace faith not because they are materially poor, but because they are spiritually rich.”
John McCain left it to a spokesman to do the piety pandering, decrying Obama’s elitism and disrespect for “the American traditions that have contributed to the identity and greatness of this country.”
Ironically, Obama may take his religion more seriously than either Clinton or McCain. What damaged him in the Jeremiah Wright affair was not rejecting his pastor quickly enough to suit otherwise pious voters who want a president with the “right” kind of religious belief.
In the century before Bush, politicians stopped having to “pour God over everything like ketchup,” as Gore Vidal put it during John F. Kennedy’s presidency.
JFK himself said it best: “I believe in a President whose views on religion are his own private affair, neither imposed upon him by the nation, nor imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office…
“I want a Chief Executive whose public acts are responsible to all and obligated to none…and whose fulfillment of his Presidential office is not limited or conditioned by any religious oath, ritual, or obligation.”
With that attitude, he couldn’t get elected today.
After six years at Guantanamo Bay prison, the only journalist yet to be incarcerated there, Sami Al-Hadj, was released last week. The case of Mr. Al-Hadj, who was a cameraman for Al-Jazeera, has sparked renewed outrage around the world.
It’s not easy reading for an American, but a good sampling of the emotion in the Arab world over the case can be found in this article from Algeria’s French-language Le Quotidien d’Oran.
“The United States is indeed a democracy: Within its own borders, the rule of law is enshrined. But beyond its walls, only the law of the jungle prevails. Read the rest of this entry »
May 4th, 2008 by DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, TMV Columnist
Barbaro. Now Eight Belles.
My father comes from a place where the old men and old women still consider horses to be gods who came to earth.
In Hungary, every tiny village had a council of elders: the old men in their szurs, long wooly white shepherd’s capes, the old women in their red boots with the black heels, the fine leather pleated and stitched with red thread all the way up to the knees… the old men who smoke pipes with drawing bows 18 inches long… the old women who if need be, could still swing up into the saddle of a stamping stallion…
These one of a kind people, these last-of-their-kind people in our family, say this about horses: “Never force a horse to run relentlessly, for a horse is made of Love and Courage on four legs …
…and the horse will literally love you so hard, it will run its heart out for you until it is dead.”
This is not just a saying. The old ones are serious. Descendents of the Huns and Swabians, the horse tribes of mountains and plains, they have their own ancient forms of knowing.
The old people have another saying, jokingly said…but not really:
–“You want to know the secret of the determination of the Hungarians? They are in all their dreams, fully human, and fully horse.”
–”You want to know the secret of the determination of the horse? They are in all their dreams, fully horse and fully god.”
In the United States this weekend, at the Kentucky Derby, a horse race of long standing… Eight Belles, a filly, was running against the boys.
Coming out of the race, she suddenly dropped her heavy body to the ground. Two broken ankles. She was ‘euthanized’ where she lay.
From a piece by Beth Harris: Louisville, Kentucky.
“Winning jockey Kent Desormeaux and Big Brown galloped by Eight Belles in her waning moments.
“This horse showed you his heart[Big Brown], and Eight Belles showed you her life for our enjoyment today,” he said. “I’m deeply sympathetic to that team for their loss.”
Big Brown, the favored horse, had won the race.
But so much was not won. So much that is not about horse races and horse owners, but about Equus, the god of the horses…
Those as ancient as the Greeks, but unrecorded by stylus, are said to have held that the god-horse, the king of the horses of heaven, arrived on earth when time was still only fog… that the godly horse arrived on earth with the silver reins made of nebula on him, and with the bit made of stars in his mouth.
He who is known by many ancient names, came in order to teach humans the beauty of the world beyond their small and squalid ways of life.
Thus, the oldest Hungarian horse people say the horse god came to earth out of
There is angst on North Africa - otherwise known as the Maghreb - over the second-class treatment meted out to the region by the Bush Administration.
And since this is where the Pentagon intends to headquarter its new African Command - and since it hosts a blossoming al-Qaeda presence - this is not an inconsequential matter.
In the latest in a series of articles WORLDMEETS.US has translated that one might call “we can’t get no repect,” Read the rest of this entry »
Could the Northern Alliance - America’s allies who helped bring down the Taliban Government in 2001 and bring Hamid Karzai to power - be behind the brazen attempt on his life during a military parade last week?
“Who was behind the April 27 attempt on the life of the President of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, and what did they have to gain? Read the rest of this entry »
On Wednesday delegates at the United Methodist Church’s General Conference voted that marriage should not include same-sex unions and that homosexual acts are not compatible with Christian teaching.
More than 200 Methodists attended a lesbian couple’s commitment ceremony Friday in defiance of a vote to uphold a church law that says gay relationships are “incompatible with Christian teaching.”
The ceremony was at a park across from the Fort Worth Convention Center, where some 3,000 people are meeting for the United Methodist Church’s general conference. It is held every four years to set church policy. […]
No clergy member presided over the commitment ceremony of Julie Bruno and Sue Laurie of Chicago, a couple for 25 years, although about three dozen ministers attended.
Officiating at a same-sex union ceremony violates church rules for clergy and would leave them vulnerable to being charged in Methodist church courts. In 1999, a senior pastor in Omaha, Neb., was defrocked after a church trial for performing a same-sex union.
Participants explain that “the message was less about upsetting people and more about being role models and for people to know that these ceremonies are going on.”
I want to draw TMV readers’ attention to the article earlier this week in the NYT about Debbie Almontaser. An Arab-American woman, she started a school in Brooklyn last fall known as the Khalil Gibran International Academy. The goal was to bring young people of Arab descent together with those of other ethnicities in order to create a cadre of students who would become “ambassadors of peace and hope.”
But Almontaser was forced out, as a result of a chorus of concerned voices who think she is bent on the imposition of Islamic law, the spread of radicalism, or the promotion of terrorism. As the article notes, “despite Ms. Almontaser’s longstanding reputation as a Muslim moderate, her critics quickly succeeded in recasting her image.” At the front of this campaign is the radical conservative Daniel Pipes, who has worked to paint Almontaser’s school as a danger to this country’s very foundation. The NYT article provides the following context:
In the aftermath of Sept. 11, critics of radical Islam focused largely on terrorism, scrutinizing Muslim-American charities or asserting links between Muslim organizations and violent groups like Hamas. But as the authorities have stepped up the war on terror, those critics have shifted their gaze to a new frontier, what they describe as law-abiding Muslim-Americans who are imposing their religious values in the public domain.
Mr. Pipes and others reel off a list of examples: Muslim cabdrivers in Minneapolis who have refused to take passengers carrying liquor; municipal pools and a gym at Harvard that have adopted female-only hours to accommodate Muslim women; candidates for office who are suspected of supporting political Islam; and banks that are offering financial products compliant with sharia, the Islamic code of law. The danger, Mr. Pipes says, is that the United States stands to become another England or France, a place where Muslims are balkanized and ultimately threaten to impose sharia.
Heh, those female-only pool times are making you nervous, aren’t they? Not to mention those Muslim-catering banks. Islamic law here we come! Matt Eckel, writing at his excellent blog Rational International (definitely worth bookmarking), argues that such fearmongering is is badly misplaced and that it misses the broader point.
…to act as though minor accommodations to a few Islamic cultural practices represent the first step toward imposing sharia law in the United States is simply absurd… A good rule of thumb to keep in mind when talking about American politics - one that goes all the way back to the Alien and Sedition Acts - is that whenever someone starts talking about vague, underground, conspiratorial movements to radically alter the face of American society, it’s probably bull$@#!. The fact that a few cabbies won’t give you a ride because you’re carrying booze, or that a few colleges have put foot sinks in their bathrooms so that Muslim students can wash their feet before prayer without breaking their necks, or that for a few hours a week some pools are restricted to women, isn’t a sign of some nefarious plot to islamicize American society. It’s a sign that institutions are making some reasonable accommodations to the cultural practices of the people around them. It’s the very definition of an appropriate, balanced, liberal response to cultural difference. Last time I checked, after all, Christmas was still a Federal holiday. I doubt we’ll hear Mr. Pipes complaining about that any time soon.
In highlighting the ongoing legal prosecutions at Siemens - the German mega-giant now mired in what some have called the greatest bribery scandal of all time, Klocks writes:
“What German courts were unable to achieve and even the Pope would have failed to accomplish, has now been done by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. … The capitalists themselves insist that the train of greed remain on the tracks - its tracks.”
Kocks then goes on to describe how the Pietists created the first capital markets - which leads him to what created the business powerhouse known as the United States of America: Read the rest of this entry »
On the 492nd day of Hillary Clinton’s quest to become the first woman president, one inevitability was rudely replaced by another.
