Category: Islam

Keep calm and Nenshi on

On By Rick McIn government, IslamLeave a comment

In fiscally conservative, redneck Calgary, we love our Mayor. 🙂

World Mayor Prize nominee Naheed Nenshi emerged from the 2013 Alberta floods with folk hero status and a range of t-shirts and posters in his honour

Born to South Asian immigrants from Tanzania, Nenshi became the first Muslim mayor of a major north American city in 2010.

Famously approachable, compulsively communicative and a digital native, Nenshi ran an insurgent grassroots campaign that stunned Calgary’s political establishment, squeaking into office past more established political figures with just under 40% of the vote in a divided field. …

Nenshi

Three years later, Nenshi was re-elected with a crushing 74% of the vote, after winning almost universal support for leading Calgary through one of its most difficult episodes of recent times: a catastrophic set of floods in June 2013 …

U.K. – The Guardian – Keep calm and Nenshi on: how floods turned the Calgary mayor into a folk hero

related – Calgary’s Nenshi makes short list for World Mayor Prize

why the USA must QUIT the Middle East

On By Rick McIn economics, ethics, GOP USA, government, Islam, things getting worseLeave a comment

President Barack Obama said on Sunday the longest war in American history was coming to a responsible conclusion.

Obama was welcoming the end of US combat operations in Afghanistan, which was marked with a ceremony in Kabul. …

Obama honored the more than 2,200 Americans who have died in Afghanistan since the war started 13 years ago. Obama said those years had tested the US and its military. From a peak 140,000 troops in 2010, the US and Nato plan to leave just 13,500 behind. …

Obama heralds formal end of war in Afghanistan after 13 years

The Taliban immediately declared they’d ‘defeated’ Nato:

A Taliban statement said the US-led force had “rolled up its flag” without having achieved “anything substantial”. …

Like every other Afghan invader, the costs NATO paid far outweighed anything gained. 😦

Afghanis must decide their own fate.
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On December 12th, 2013 a wedding convoy, outside the town of Radda in the al-Baydah province of Yemen, was struck by a US drone.

Following the attack, Yemeni officials claimed that around ‘14 innocent civilians were killed, 22 injured and 9 were in critical condition.’

According to the US government, the attack had intended to strike a known AQ militant Shawqi Ali Ahmad al Badani. The US government denied the deaths of civilians, claiming that they had killed militants associated with al Badani.

3. The Wedding Convoy – Yemeni

drone strike

The U.S. government lied, as they do often.

Most of those killed were innocent.

This is an example of why so many people distrust and fear the U.S. military overseas. This is an example of an incident which inspires and motivates terrorists. Ultimately making the USA and the world less safe.

If the U.S., which claims the strike was clean and justified, didn’t pony up the $800,000 in cash and guns as reparations, then who did?

Nothing Says “Sorry Our Drones Hit Your Wedding Party” Like $800,000 And Some Guns

Update Dec 2014 – The Unspoken Truth Of The US War Against Terrorism in Yemen

Officially, the money awarded in Yemen came from the Yemeni government. But the human rights group Reprieve says the funds must have come from Washington …

Families of Victims of One Drone Strike in Yemen Paid more than an Entire Year’s Worth of Victims in Afghanistan

Homeland – season 3

On By Rick McIn Islam, TVLeave a comment

This is an important TV series. A fresh look at issues of the day.

homeland

Season 3 was BIG. Bombing of the CIA. Brody in hiding. Regime change in Iran.

The acting is good, though Claire Danes is painfully intense. “Emotionally wrenching” said Robert Bianco of USA Today.

Click PLAY or watch a trailer on YouTube.

On the other hand … the Season 3 plot was SO unbelievable I couldn’t suspend my disbelief. The writers should be fired.

And I don’t see what’s left for season 4. But one or two more seasons are in the works.

extremists

On By Rick McIn GOP USA, IslamLeave a comment

Holly Fisher is a right-wing online agitator who posted the photo on the left above last week after a similarly in-your-face image taken in front of a Hobby Lobby went viral.

extremists

Her pose was soon compared to the image at right of Reem Riyashi, a mother of two from Gaza who killed four people and herself with a suicide bomb in 2004. (It’s not clear who first put together the side-by-side comparison, which has been widely distributed on social media.)

Holly Fisher isn’t a suicide bomber, and the online commentary about her photo is—as far as I can tell—exclusively an unconstructive, sarcastic, ad hominem back-and-forth between extreme partisans. …

Slate – Defiant Hobby Lobby Supporter Inadvertently Recreates Iconic Gaza Jihadist Image

Bill Maher does not understand Islam

On By Rick McIn ethics, Islam1 Comment

Religious scholar and professor Reza Aslan actually knows what he’s talking about, unlike Maher and these CNN talking heads.

This is well worth watching. Reza Aslan nails it.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzusSqcotDw

Update: Michael Moore posted a very well crafted defense of Maher. Still, Bill Maher does not understand Islam.

He and others are demonizing the religion.

Bill Maher Isn’t the Only One Who Misunderstands Religion

On By Rick McIn dead to me, ethics, IslamLeave a comment

NY Times Opinion page:

Reza Aslan, a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, is the author, most recently, of “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.”

… On one hand, people of faith are far too eager to distance themselves from extremists in their community, often denying that religious violence has any religious motivation whatsoever. This is especially true of Muslims, who often glibly dismiss those who commit acts of terror in the name of Islam as “not really Muslim.”

On the other, critics of religion tend to exhibit an inability to understand religion outside of its absolutist connotations. They scour holy texts for bits of savagery and point to extreme examples of religious bigotry, of which there are too many, to generalize about the causes of oppression throughout the world. …

… The same Bible that commands Jews to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18) also exhorts them to “kill every man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey,” who worship any other God (1 Sam. 15:3). …

The same Jesus Christ who told his disciples to “turn the other cheek” (Matthew 5:39) also told them that he had “not come to bring peace but the sword” (Matthew 10:34), and that “he who does not have a sword should sell his cloak and buy one” (Luke 22:36).

The same Quran that warns believers “if you kill one person it is as though you have killed all of humanity” (5:32) also commands them to “slay the idolaters wherever you find them” (9:5). …

read more …

Well stated. Don’t blame all Christians for the extremist hate of the Westboro Baptist Church, for example.

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Bill Maher is dead to me. He’s not all bad, but I’ve never bought his schtick in the past. I’ll boycott anything Maher from here on in.

Maher

Malala Yousafzai, youngest Nobel laureate

On By Rick McIn IslamLeave a comment

In a year of rapidly proliferating conflicts, the Swedish Nobel Committee on Friday renewed attention on one of the world’s most durable and dangerous standoffs by splitting its annual peace prize between a teenage Pakistani activist and a graying Indian Gandhian. …

Malala Yousafzai, left, the Pakistani teenage advocate for female education, and children's rights activist Kailash Satyarthi, right, of India, are the co-winners of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize. Andrew Gombert / Martial Trezzin/European Pressphoto Agency
Malala Yousafzai, left, the Pakistani teenage advocate for female education, and children’s rights activist Kailash Satyarthi, right, of India, are the co-winners of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize.
Andrew Gombert / Martial Trezzin/European Pressphoto Agency

Malala Yousafzai, who at 17 became the youngest Nobel laureate, won the prize exactly two years and one day after she was nearly killed by a bullet to the head during a Taliban assassination attempt in her native Swat Valley. She was targeted for her outspoken advocacy of female education — a cause she has championed relentlessly ever since, in spite of further threats.

Speaking from the British city of Birmingham on Friday, she reveled in the committee’s decision to share her prize with an Indian, 60-year-old Kailash Satyarthi, who has spent decades crusading against child slavery. …

Washington Post