Monday, Feb 6th 2012
Olivier Roy - This is not an Islamic revolution
An excellent piece on Islam and the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions by Olivier Roy, one of Europe's foremost thinkers on Islam. He affirms that political Islam will have a role to play in the development of both countries but also argues that it is by now defanged [...]
Religioscope: Tunisia: the advent of liberal Islamism - an interview with Rashid Al-Ghannouchi
Rashid Al-Ghannouchi, the leader of Tunisia's Islamist party Ennahdha, returned home from his 22-year exile on Sunday. In this interview he lays out his view of a more pluralist, left-leaning Islamism and says Ennahdha is committed to democracy. He also notes his [...]
Cosmopolitan citizenship in the Middle East | openDemocracy
Superb piece by Sami Zubaida on Ottoman Cosmopolitanism and its sad decline.
'In the popular mind, international relations were conceived in communalist terms: European powers are Christian and in league with local Christians against Islam and Muslims. This communalist model, with umma nationalism at its core has been revived [...]
Endgame - Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News
Noam Sheizaf on the burgeoning support among the Israeli right and settlers for a one-state solution in the West Bank (though not Gaza). Though it doesn't quite converge with the binational state desired by Palestinians and sections of the Israeli left, there are similarities, particularly discontent with the [...]
CIA Man Retracts Claim on Waterboarding | Foreign Policy
John Kiriakou, the former CIA operative who affirmed claims that waterboarding quickly unloosed the tongues of hard-core terrorists, says he didn't know what he was talking about.
www.Syberberg.de
Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's work, including his masterpiece Hitler: A Film from Germany, available free to stream or download. A superb collection.
Is aviation security mostly for show?
Bruce Schneier is the United States' foremost security expert and also a voice of sanity and reason in the debate on anti-terrorism measures. Here he correctly argues that terrorism is rare while conceding the value of 'security theatre' in reassuring a concerned public. Schneier is also convinced that the best [...]
When newly elected French president Nicolas Sarkozy named Bernard Kouchner Minister for Foreign Affairs in May 2007 there were few eyebrows raised. It had been an open secret in French political circles for weeks beforehand and it later transpired that Sarkozy had offered Kouchner the job before the election – an election during which Kouchner [...]
John Greyson’s entirely reasonable decision to protest the Toronto International Film Festival’s City-to-City spotlight on Tel-Aviv (and the supporting letter from a group of activists, artists and intellectuals such as Naomi Klein, Jane Fonda and Slavoj Zizek) has been predictably distorted and misrepresented by Israel’s backers. Greyson cites the war in Gaza (for which both [...]
Count Me Out - Take a stand for church/state separation
Cormac Flynn, Gráinne O’Sullivan and Paul Dunbar have set up this site, which helps lapsed Irish Catholics who want nothing more to do with the Church, leave it. The site makes use of existing Church apparatus for defection. Its underlying aim, it says, is to prevent [...]
