politics

The Start of the End of America As We Know It

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It figures that it would take an egregious federal move to knock me off my footie soapbox. This bit of news happened sort of silently yesterday so here is the scoop: the U.S. Supreme Court made a landmark decision saying that police officers no longer must “knock and announce” themselves before entering a private home. Not surprisingly, such a charged issue featured a close vote – the court voted 5-4 – and also unsurprisingly, W’s two new appointees, Roberts and Alito, voted to do away with a “principle that traces back to 13th-century Britain, and a legal doctrine that dates to 1914, to let the government invade people’s homes.”
As the NY Times said, “This decision should offend anyone, liberal or conservative, who worries about the privacy rights of ordinary Americans.” I myself am deeply offended and am worried about the future America that my children will grow up in. After the jump feel free to read the editorial from the Times and be prepared for your blood to boil.
The Don’t-Bother-to-Knock Rule
Published: June 16, 2006
The Supreme Court yesterday substantially diminished Americans’ right to privacy in their own homes. The rule that police officers must “knock and announce” themselves before entering a private home is a venerable one, and a well-established part of Fourth Amendment law. But President Bush’s two recent Supreme Court appointments have now provided the votes for a 5-4 decision eviscerating this rule.
This decision should offend anyone, liberal or conservative, who worries about the privacy rights of ordinary Americans.
The case arose out of the search of Booker T. Hudson’s home in Detroit in 1998. The police announced themselves but did not knock, and after waiting a few seconds, entered his home and seized drugs and a gun. There is no dispute that the search violated the knock-and-announce rule.
The question in the case was what to do about it. Mr. Hudson wanted the evidence excluded at his trial. That is precisely what should have happened. Since 1914, the Supreme Court has held that, except in rare circumstances, evidence seized in violation of the Constitution cannot be used. The exclusionary rule has sometimes been criticized for allowing criminals to go free just because of police error. But as the court itself recognized in that 1914 case, if this type of evidence were admissible, the Fourth Amendment “might as well be stricken.”
The court ruled yesterday that the evidence could be used against Mr. Hudson. Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, argued that even if police officers did not have to fear losing a case if they disobeyed the knock-and-announce rule, the subjects of improper searches could still bring civil lawsuits to challenge them. But as the dissenters rightly pointed out, there is little chance that such suits would keep the police in line. Justice Scalia was also far too dismissive of the important privacy rights at stake, which he essentially reduced to “the right not to be intruded upon in one’s nightclothes.” Justice Stephen Breyer noted in dissent that even a century ago the court recognized that when the police barge into a house unannounced, it is an assault on “the sanctity of a man’s home and the privacies of life.”
If Justice Sandra Day O’Connor had stayed on the court, this case might well have come out the other way. For those who worry that Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito will take the court in a radically conservative direction, it is sobering how easily the majority tossed aside a principle that traces back to 13th-century Britain, and a legal doctrine that dates to 1914, to let the government invade people’s homes.

politics

America the Corrupt Part II

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The Center for American Progress said it better than I could:
SCANDAL-TIED CIA EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR RESIGNS
CIA Executive Director Kyle “Dusty” Foggo “announced his resignation in an e-mail message to agency staff” yesterday, leading to further speculation that the recent CIA upheaval is “linked to the broadening bribe probe centered on disgraced former California GOP Congressman Randall ‘Duke’ Cunningham.” Foggo’s connections to Cunningham-linked defense contractors Brent Wilkes and Mitchell Wade are the focus of an investigation by the CIA inspector general, first made public in March; yesterday, the Washington Post revealed that the FBI is also investigating contracts negotiated under Foggo. (One of Brent Wilkes’ companies, Archer Logistics, won a large contract to provide supplies to CIA agents in Afghanistan and Iraq despite having “no previous experience with such work, having been founded a few months before the contract was granted.”)
Meanwhile, an “authoritative senior FBI official” told Congressional Quarterly that resigning CIA Director Porter Goss has not yet been interviewed by the FBI. “We’re not at his door yet…not at his doorstep.” Foggo is also the highest-ranking CIA official to admit he attended the controversial poker parties thrown by Wilkes where prostitutes were sometimes present. (Foggo even “occasionally hosted the poker parties at his house in northern Virginia,” though he denies ever seeing prostitutes at the gatherings.) Over the weekend, Newsweek magazine revealed the identity of another former CIA official — previously known only as “Nine Fingers” — who reportedly attended the poker parties. The official, Brant Bassett, was the staff director of the House Intelligence Committee while Porter Goss was committee chairman.
Something smells and it isn’t the stench from the neighborhoods in N.O. that still haven’t been cleared…

politics

America the Corrupt

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Today, Porter Goss, the head of the CIA, resigned suddently or abruptly quit (depending on how you view it) for no apparant reason. News sources are saying it might be because his role and importance have been diminished in the post 9/11 restructuring (as now the head of the CIA answers to the National Intelligence Director – currently John D. Negroponte) or because people who were going to resign at the end of Bush’s term were encouraged to do so now as part of the big “shakeup” that the WS is currently undergoing.
I call “bullshit” and instead would like to point everyone to the Center for American Progress’s report from yesterday titled “Sex, Lies and Government Contracts. It talked about how Congressman Duke Cunningham’s record 2.4 million dollars in bribes and his resulting 8 year prison sentence may be the mere tip of the iceberg in terms of Washington corruption. It also mentioned a Harper’s magazine report that said that “under intense scrutiny by the FBI are current and former lawmakers on Defense and Intelligence committees — including one person who now holds a powerful intelligence post.” The C for AP says that “CIA Director Porter Goss is perhaps the only individual who fits such a description.” And now he’s gone today? Something smells rotten to me.

politics

What Time is the Next Watershow? Someone should put up a sign…

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For a few weeks now, I’ve wanted to post video clips to my site like others have (Chris, etc) but thought I needed a plug-in. Silly me. Turns out there is object code at the bottom of each video clip page, at least on YouTube, and I just never happened to scroll before. I am an idiot.
It makes me think of my favorite Snickers commercial, the one where a mascot at a Sea World type water park answers questions about “what time the next watershow is it” standing next to a sign that answers that very question. I’m going to try and find that clip and post it – I’m sure its on some ad lovers site.
Anywho, Mr. Colbert has been getting lots of press about his recent roast of Le Prez and I thought that posting the first part would be a great way of taking this blog to the next level:

In related news, here is an NY Times article about the Blogosphere’s reaction to this occurance.

politics

Military Officiers Starting to Revolt?

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An article on Slate talks about how high ranking officials and former generals are fed up with Donald Rumsfeld and how their voices are starting to echo and gather weight behind them. You’ve got to love an article, and the state of our country, our military and our foreign policy, when said article starts with “It’s an odd thought, but a military coup in this country right now would probably have a moderating influence.” Here is a quote from the latest former General to finally publically air his views:

I now regret that I did not more openly challenge those who were determined to invade a country whose actions were peripheral to the real threat—al-Qaeda. … [T]he Pentagon’s military leaders … with few exceptions, acted timidly when their voices urgently needed to be heard. When they knew the plan was flawed, saw intelligence distorted to justify a rationale for war, or witnessed arrogant micromanagement that at times crippled the military’s effectiveness, many leaders who wore the uniform chose inaction. … It is time for senior military leaders to discard caution in expressing their views and ensure that the President hears them clearly. And that we won’t be fooled again.

What I want to know is where have you been Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold since you retired in 2002? Why only speak up now? Still, its better late than never.
In other political news, the latest flare-up about our president’s inability to listen to views that differ from his pre-conceived notion of what’s going on is picking up some steam. It’s about how when captured trailers were touted to the public as mobile WMD labs back in ’03, the Pres, Veep and everyone in the WH knew that intel was false but went with it anyway because everyone was wondering where all the WMDs were. My question is why is it taking so long for these lies to come to light? For those keeping score at home, here are 3 other instances where the WH didn’t care about what others in our government had to say:
1) The administration claimed an al Qaeda prisoner reported that Saddam had trained al Qaeda in bomb-making, but the Defense Intelligence Agency reported before the war that the prisoner was “intentionally misleading the debriefers.”
2) The administration claimed aluminum tubes in Iraq were irrefutable evidence that Saddam had a nuclear program, but the experts at the State and Energy Departments dissented from that view.
3) The administration claimed that Iraqi drones capable of delivering WMD could attack the U.S., but the experts at the Air Force dissented from the view.
I wish i lived in the same world that the WH does. It must be full of gooey gumdrops and lollypop lanes. It must be. Oh yeah, and Jesus is there too, kicking it with his righteous homies.

politics

Christian Politics

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Garry Wills, professor emeritus of history at Northwestern University and the author, most recently, of “What Jesus Meant,” wrote a great op-ed piece in today’s NY Times titled “Christ Among the Partisans.” Long story short, he goes point for point on how Jesus would not be happy with the way that Republicans, and maybe soon Democrats as they try to play catch-up, are perverting his teachings for their own moralistic and political ends. For instance:
>> [Jesus] avoided those who would trap him into taking sides for or against the Roman occupation of Judea. He paid his taxes to the occupying power but said only, “Let Caesar have what belongs to him, and God have what belongs to him” (Matthew 22:21). He was the original proponent of a separation of church and state.
>> Those who want the state to engage in public worship, or even to have prayer in schools, are defying his injunction: “When you pray, be not like the pretenders, who prefer to pray in the synagogues and in the public square, in the sight of others. In truth I tell you, that is all the profit they will have. But you, when you pray, go into your inner chamber and, locking the door, pray there in hiding to your Father, and your Father who sees you in hiding will reward you” (Matthew 6:5-6). He shocked people by his repeated violation of the external holiness code of his time, emphasizing that his religion was an internal matter of the heart.
The first thing I thought of when I read this was the Amazing Race of all things. On the Amazing Race Family Edition (last season’s incarnation of the show), one team extolled their “Christian values” at every chance they got and felt that when no one liked them, they are being persecuted for being the only “Christian” team. The obvious answer of “you are so damn annoying!” obviously didn’t get through their thick Christ loving skulls. Aside from praising Jesus anytime something went their way or praying to Jesus to help them complete challenges, they were probably the most un-Christian team in race primarily due to their poor sportsmanship and bad behavior. Their utter hypocracy bothered me to no end. They surely weren’t exhibiting Christ-like values when they sped by other teams on the highway and chucked food at their cars or when they insulted and mocked other teams or when they plotted their vengence on teams that “hurt” their chances. Where was the lovingkindness that Christ preached? When players thank Jesus at the end of a basketball game, I go crazy. I mean, the nerve to think that Jesus had nothing better to do than to sit around and ensure that your buzzer beater went in. He frankly doesn’t care. By the way, the same player praising Jesus’s love for his jumpshot will obviously think that Jesus isn’t paying attention to him when he is blowing lines with a hooker later back at the team hotel.
Unfortunately, being a good Christian to many in America simply means, “Jesus loves me, I’m going to heaven and I can do whatever the hell I want until then, which includes actingly like a total and utter prick, because I go to Church each week.” I’ve seen this in politics. I’ve seen this in the intolerance shown towards certain segments of the US population and when people vote against their own interests based on politicians playing on their moral fears. I even saw this on the Amazing Race. It all comes back to the fact that more people have been killed in the name of religion than for any other reason. America was founded on the principal of tolerance for all and unfortunately, religion when used incorrectly, breeds intolerance and hate, the old “My God can kick your God’s ass.” Don’t even get me started on how this relates to terrorism in its present fundamentalist incarnation. We’ll save that for another post.
The article itself is very interesting and shows how the true nature of WWJD is not being applied by those that say that they are exhibiting Christ-like values. Christ preached lovingkindness, tolerance and support for all. He didn’t preach the intolerance that many in the Moral Majority lovingly exhibit. As for the op-ed piece, I’ve grabbed it and put it after the jump for those that find this post after the NY Times archives it because I think its important for all to read it.
April 9, 2006
Christ Among the Partisans By Garry Wills (Op-Ed Contributor), Chicago
There is no such thing as a “Christian politics.” If it is a politics, it cannot be Christian. Jesus told Pilate: “My reign is not of this present order. If my reign were of this present order, my supporters would have fought against my being turned over to the Jews. But my reign is not here” (John 18:36). Jesus brought no political message or program.
This is a truth that needs emphasis at a time when some Democrats, fearing that the Republicans have advanced over them by the use of religion, want to respond with a claim that Jesus is really on their side. He is not. He avoided those who would trap him into taking sides for or against the Roman occupation of Judea. He paid his taxes to the occupying power but said only, “Let Caesar have what belongs to him, and God have what belongs to him” (Matthew 22:21). He was the original proponent of a separation of church and state.
Those who want the state to engage in public worship, or even to have prayer in schools, are defying his injunction: “When you pray, be not like the pretenders, who prefer to pray in the synagogues and in the public square, in the sight of others. In truth I tell you, that is all the profit they will have. But you, when you pray, go into your inner chamber and, locking the door, pray there in hiding to your Father, and your Father who sees you in hiding will reward you” (Matthew 6:5-6). He shocked people by his repeated violation of the external holiness code of his time, emphasizing that his religion was an internal matter of the heart.
But doesn’t Jesus say to care for the poor? Repeatedly and insistently, but what he says goes far beyond politics and is of a different order. He declares that only one test will determine who will come into his reign: whether one has treated the poor, the hungry, the homeless and the imprisoned as one would Jesus himself. “Whenever you did these things to the lowliest of my brothers, you were doing it to me” (Matthew 25:40). No government can propose that as its program. Theocracy itself never went so far, nor could it.
The state cannot indulge in self-sacrifice. If it is to treat the poor well, it must do so on grounds of justice, appealing to arguments that will convince people who are not followers of Jesus or of any other religion. The norms of justice will fall short of the demands of love that Jesus imposes. A Christian may adopt just political measures from his or her own motive of love, but that is not the argument that will define justice for state purposes.
To claim that the state’s burden of justice, which falls short of the supreme test Jesus imposes, is actually what he wills — that would be to substitute some lesser and false religion for what Jesus brought from the Father. Of course, Christians who do not meet the lower standard of state justice to the poor will, a fortiori, fail to pass the higher test.
The Romans did not believe Jesus when he said he had no political ambitions. That is why the soldiers mocked him as a failed king, giving him a robe and scepter and bowing in fake obedience (John 19:1-3). Those who today say that they are creating or following a “Christian politics” continue the work of those soldiers, disregarding the words of Jesus that his reign is not of this order.
Some people want to display and honor the Ten Commandments as a political commitment enjoined by the religion of Jesus. That very act is a violation of the First and Second Commandments. By erecting a false religion — imposing a reign of Jesus in this order — they are worshiping a false god. They commit idolatry. They also take the Lord’s name in vain.
Some may think that removing Jesus from politics would mean removing morality from politics. They think we would all be better off if we took up the slogan “What would Jesus do?”
That is not a question his disciples ask in the Gospels. They never knew what Jesus was going to do next. He could round on Peter and call him “Satan.” He could refuse to receive his mother when she asked to see him. He might tell his followers that they are unworthy of him if they do not hate their mother and their father. He might kill pigs by the hundreds. He might whip people out of church precincts.
The Jesus of the Gospels is not a great ethical teacher like Socrates, our leading humanitarian. He is an apocalyptic figure who steps outside the boundaries of normal morality to signal that the Father’s judgment is breaking into history. His miracles were not acts of charity but eschatological signs — accepting the unclean, promising heavenly rewards, making last things first.
He is more a higher Nietzsche, beyond good and evil, than a higher Socrates. No politician is going to tell the lustful that they must pluck out their right eye. We cannot do what Jesus would do because we are not divine.
It was blasphemous to say, as the deputy under secretary of defense, Lt. Gen. William Boykin, repeatedly did, that God made George Bush president in 2000, when a majority of Americans did not vote for him. It would not remove the blasphemy for Democrats to imply that God wants Bush not to be president. Jesus should not be recruited as a campaign aide. To trivialize the mystery of Jesus is not to serve the Gospels.
The Gospels are scary, dark and demanding. It is not surprising that people want to tame them, dilute them, make them into generic encouragements to be loving and peaceful and fair. If that is all they are, then we may as well make Socrates our redeemer.
It is true that the tamed Gospels can be put to humanitarian purposes, and religious institutions have long done this, in defiance of what Jesus said in the Gospels.
Jesus was the victim of every institutional authority in his life and death. He said: “Do not be called Rabbi, since you have only one teacher, and you are all brothers. And call no one on earth your father, since you have only one Father, the one in heaven. And do not be called leaders, since you have only one leader, the Messiah” (Matthew 23:8-10).
If Democrats want to fight Republicans for the support of an institutional Jesus, they will have to give up the person who said those words. They will have to turn away from what Flannery O’Connor described as “the bleeding stinking mad shadow of Jesus” and “a wild ragged figure” who flits “from tree to tree in the back” of the mind.
He was never that thing that all politicians wish to be esteemed — respectable. At various times in the Gospels, Jesus is called a devil, the devil’s agent, irreligious, unclean, a mocker of Jewish law, a drunkard, a glutton, a promoter of immorality.
The institutional Jesus of the Republicans has no similarity to the Gospel figure. Neither will any institutional Jesus of the Democrats.
Garry Wills is professor emeritus of history at Northwestern University and the author, most recently, of “What Jesus Meant.”

politics

Leaky Bush

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It seems that either Bush hasn’t been honest to the American public again or Scooter Libby, a man whose very career was founded on following orders and listening to his bosses, is now totally lying about those very same people to save his own skin. I somehow feel that is unlikely. While I’m not surprised, I’m certainly disgusted. How can one raise children to tell the truth when most leaders and role models they are told to look up to lie on a constant basis?

politics

Hero Of The Week: Dr. Wafa Sultan

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I am proud to give the first ever “We’re Going to Cover That in Phase 2” Hero of The Week [HOTW] award to a Syrian born Muslim woman psychiatrist who courageously has spoken her mind and has risked death by doing so. I learned about what she said from a NY Times interview with Dr. Wafa Sultan which I found incredibly enlightening and motivating. It gives me hope for the future instead of having me simply fear it like I usually do. Anything that can move me thus deserves to be honored.
There is a huge deal about her is because she said on Al Jazeera television on 2/21 that, “knowledge has released me from this backward thinking [meaning believing in super-orthodox Islam]. Somebody has to help free the Muslim people from these wrong beliefs.” Perhaps her most provocative words on Al Jazeera were those comparing how the Jews and Muslims have reacted to adversity. Speaking of the Holocaust, she said,

“The Jews have come from the tragedy and forced the world to respect them, with their knowledge, not with their terror; with their work, not with their crying and yelling. We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people. Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them.”

Wow. I’m absolutely speechless. She might very well be killed shortly for uttering these strong words. Many have denounced her across the Dar al Islam but I for one am standing and applauding. Of course, I believe she’s totally right which helps. I have always been amazed at the ability for Jews to use our minds, and not just our might, to overcome adversity. For some it is a sign of weakness. It’s nice to see it recognized as a sign of strength as well.
Currently, she is working on a book whose working title is, “The Escaped Prisoner: When God Is a Monster.” She says that if its published, “it’s going to turn the Islamic world upside down. I have reached the point that doesn’t allow any U-turn. I have no choice. I am questioning every single teaching of our holy book.”
After the jump, feel free to read the whole article.
Via Phyl – a super strong woman in her own right…
March 11, 2006: The Saturday Profile
For Muslim Who Says Violence Destroys Islam, Violent Threats
By JOHN M. BRODER
LOS ANGELES, March 10 — Three weeks ago, Dr. Wafa Sultan was a largely unknown Syrian-American psychiatrist living outside Los Angeles, nursing a deep anger and despair about her fellow Muslims.
Today, thanks to an unusually blunt and provocative interview on Al Jazeera television on Feb. 21, she is an international sensation, hailed as a fresh voice of reason by some, and by others as a heretic and infidel who deserves to die.
In the interview, which has been viewed on the Internet more than a million times and has reached the e-mail of hundreds of thousands around the world, Dr. Sultan bitterly criticized the Muslim clerics, holy warriors and political leaders who she believes have distorted the teachings of Muhammad and the Koran for 14 centuries.
She said the world’s Muslims, whom she compares unfavorably with the Jews, have descended into a vortex of self-pity and violence.
Dr. Sultan said the world was not witnessing a clash of religions or cultures, but a battle between modernity and barbarism, a battle that the forces of violent, reactionary Islam are destined to lose.
In response, clerics throughout the Muslim world have condemned her, and her telephone answering machine has filled with dark threats. But Islamic reformers have praised her for saying out loud, in Arabic and on the most widely seen television network in the Arab world, what few Muslims dare to say even in private.
“I believe our people are hostages to our own beliefs and teachings,” she said in an interview this week in her home in a Los Angeles suburb.
Dr. Sultan, who is 47, wears a prim sweater and skirt, with fleece-lined slippers and heavy stockings. Her eyes and hair are jet black and her modest manner belies her intense words: “Knowledge has released me from this backward thinking. Somebody has to help free the Muslim people from these wrong beliefs.”
Perhaps her most provocative words on Al Jazeera were those comparing how the Jews and Muslims have reacted to adversity. Speaking of the Holocaust, she said, “The Jews have come from the tragedy and forced the world to respect them, with their knowledge, not with their terror; with their work, not with their crying and yelling.”
She went on, “We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people.”
She concluded, “Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them.”
Her views caught the ear of the American Jewish Congress, which has invited her to speak in May at a conference in Israel. “We have been discussing with her the importance of her message and trying to devise the right venue for her to address Jewish leaders,” said Neil B. Goldstein, executive director of the organization.
She is probably more welcome in Tel Aviv than she would be in Damascus. Shortly after the broadcast, clerics in Syria denounced her as an infidel. One said she had done Islam more damage than the Danish cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad, a wire service reported.
DR. SULTAN is “working on a book that — if it is published — it’s going to turn the Islamic world upside down.”
“I have reached the point that doesn’t allow any U-turn. I have no choice. I am questioning every single teaching of our holy book.”
The working title is, “The Escaped Prisoner: When God Is a Monster.”
Dr. Sultan grew up in a large traditional Muslim family in Banias, Syria, a small city on the Mediterranean about a two-hour drive north of Beirut. Her father was a grain trader and a devout Muslim, and she followed the faith’s strictures into adulthood.
But, she said, her life changed in 1979 when she was a medical student at the University of Aleppo, in northern Syria. At that time, the radical Muslim Brotherhood was using terrorism to try to undermine the government of President Hafez al-Assad. Gunmen of the Muslim Brotherhood burst into a classroom at the university and killed her professor as she watched, she said.
“They shot hundreds of bullets into him, shouting, ‘God is great!’ ” she said. “At that point, I lost my trust in their god and began to question all our teachings. It was the turning point of my life, and it has led me to this present point. I had to leave. I had to look for another god.”
She and her husband, who now goes by the Americanized name of David, laid plans to leave for the United States. Their visas finally came in 1989, and the Sultans and their two children (they have since had a third) settled in with friends in Cerritos, Calif., a prosperous bedroom community on the edge of Los Angeles County.
After a succession of jobs and struggles with language, Dr. Sultan has completed her American medical licensing, with the exception of a hospital residency program, which she hopes to do within a year. David operates an automotive-smog-check station. They bought a home in the Los Angeles area and put their children through local public schools. All are now American citizens.
BUT even as she settled into a comfortable middle-class American life, Dr. Sultan’s anger burned within. She took to writing, first for herself, then for an Islamic reform Web site called Annaqed (The Critic), run by a Syrian expatriate in Phoenix.
An angry essay on that site by Dr. Sultan about the Muslim Brotherhood caught the attention of Al Jazeera, which invited her to debate an Algerian cleric on the air last July.
In the debate, she questioned the religious teachings that prompt young people to commit suicide in the name of God. “Why does a young Muslim man, in the prime of life, with a full life ahead, go and blow himself up?” she asked. “In our countries, religion is the sole source of education and is the only spring from which that terrorist drank until his thirst was quenched.”
Her remarks set off debates around the globe and her name began appearing in Arabic newspapers and Web sites. But her fame grew exponentially when she appeared on Al Jazeera again on Feb. 21, an appearance that was translated and widely distributed by the Middle East Media Research Institute, known as Memri.
Memri said the clip of her February appearance had been viewed more than a million times.
“The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions or a clash of civilizations,” Dr. Sultan said. “It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality.”
She said she no longer practiced Islam. “I am a secular human being,” she said.
The other guest on the program, identified as an Egyptian professor of religious studies, Dr. Ibrahim al-Khouli, asked, “Are you a heretic?” He then said there was no point in rebuking or debating her, because she had blasphemed against Islam, the Prophet Muhammad and the Koran.
Dr. Sultan said she took those words as a formal fatwa, a religious condemnation. Since then, she said, she has received numerous death threats on her answering machine and by e-mail.
One message said: “Oh, you are still alive? Wait and see.” She received an e-mail message the other day, in Arabic, that said, “If someone were to kill you, it would be me.”
Dr. Sultan said her mother, who still lives in Syria, is afraid to contact her directly, speaking only through a sister who lives in Qatar. She said she worried more about the safety of family members here and in Syria than she did for her own.
“I have no fear,” she said. “I believe in my message. It is like a million-mile journey, and I believe I have walked the first and hardest 10 miles.”

politics

Why Not To Vote For Vernon Robinson For U.S. Congress

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Having helped run a congressional campaign, I would never have allowed this Twilight Zone commercial to run but it did and boy did it kick up some controversy. It is so bigoted its almost funny as Vernon Robinson is “unabashedly and unalterably opposed to racial quotas, special rights for homosexuals, the United Nations, the proliferation of frivolous lawsuits, women in combat, pork barrel spending, useless government programs and agencies, onerous regulations, and all tax hikes.” He’s a Republican. Couldn’t you guess?
Speaking of “The Twilight Zone,” after the jump read an interesting article about its creator, Mr. Rod Serling, and Binghamton, a city I hold near and dear to my heart.
Via Moeller
Our Towns; Submitted for Your Approval, a Homecoming
By PETER APPLEBOME (NYT) 921 words
Published: February 26, 2006
Binghamton, N.Y. – CONSIDER, if you will, one Rodman Edward Serling, a fortunate boy from a fortunate town, who grew up in a rambling stucco house a short walk from Recreation Park, where the music from the carousel wafted through the air every summer evening. It all seemed so perfect, as if it would last forever. Only, somehow, things took an odd detour, and then another — until he ended up instead in a place of shadows and smoke, a place we know as the Twilight Zone.
Or so might the opener go if Rod Serling ever did a ”Twilight Zone” episode on Rod Serling. But, then, as people in Binghamton know, he often did, returning time and again to the sights and sounds of his childhood as if coming back for something he had left behind.
So it’s not surprising that 31 years after his death, there’s a movement afoot to build a Rod Serling Museum in an old Victorian house on Main Street. It’s also not surprising that on April 21 and 22, Ithaca College, where he once taught, will offer what’s billed as the first academic conference on Serling’s work.
What is surprising is that it feels not so much like a memorial to a man whose work is long done but like a coda to an episode still playing out.
You don’t have to be someone who grew up with ”The Twilight Zone,” which was on the air from 1959 to 1964, to have been touched by Serling’s work. Thanks to endless ”Twilight Zone” reruns and voluminous Web and print scholarship, Serling seems more alive now than at the time of his death, at age 50. His surreal vision of the dread beneath everyday life — a critic once likened him to ”a living-room Bertolt Brecht” — has long since become a part of the American subconscious. To be reminded how contemporary he remains, check out ”Number 12 Looks Just Like You,” in which every girl is rendered perfect through mandatory plastic surgery in the impossibly distant year 2000.
Serling, whose writing credits also include scripts like ”Requiem for a Heavyweight” and the original ”Planet of the Apes,” has long been revered in his hometown. But only in the past few months has a local entrepreneur, Michael Weinstein, come up with the plan for a museum (www.rodserlingmuseum.com), which he hopes to open in fall 2007. The Rod Serling Memorial Foundation, in town, is on board, and his widow and others have expressed support, he said.
The plan is to house the museum in a Victorian building next to Mr. Weinstein’s eccentric Bundy Museum, dedicated to the workplace time clocks invented by Willard L. Bundy and to African art. Mr. Weinstein hopes to have exhibits on Serling’s radio and television work and his teaching, and would like eventually to recreate ”Twilight Zone” sets at a third Victorian he owns.
Mr. Weinstein has a long way to go to make this work, but it’s a safe bet that Serling would have approved.
For all his professional success, Serling had a difficult life. He was increasingly alienated from politics and culture and often caught up in a Hollywood life that probably didn’t deliver what it seemed to promise. But he loved Binghamton the way expatriates cling to the old country.
”Everybody has to have a hometown,” he once said. ”Binghamton’s mine. In the strangely brittle, terribly sensitive makeup of a human being, there is a need for a place to hang a hat or a kind of geographical womb to crawl back into, or maybe just a place that’s familiar because that’s where you grew up.”
His most famous homage to Binghamton was an episode called ”Walking Distance.” In it, a man returns to his hometown, where everything, even the carousel, is the same, and he sees himself as a little boy. He’s desperate to rejoin his family and childhood self, but his father, telling him there’s only ”one summer to every customer,” banishes him to the dreary adult present.
AND, in truth, Binghamton would be a hard place for him to return to. It was once so prosperous that even the Great Depression passed by like a glancing gust of foul weather. But most of the factory jobs, lumber and shoe making, defense and cigars are long gone, and the population has dwindled from a high of 85,000 in the mid-1950’s to about 47,000 now.
But then Serling, as ”Walking Distance” shows, probably already knew that. So he tells us at the end that his protagonist is successful at most things, ”but not in the one effort that all men try at some time in their lives: trying to go home again.” He may be seduced some night by the distant music of a calliope and sounds of laughter in the dark and think he can recapture the parks and merry-go-rounds of his youth.
But alas: ”He’ll smile then, too, because he’ll know it is just an errant wish, some wisp of memory, not too important really, some laughing ghosts that cross a man’s mind — that are part of the Twilight Zone.”

politics

From The Are You Kidding Me? Department

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Scholastic recently signed a deal with Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts to write a children’s book about his dog. Mr. Kennedy famously drove his car off a bridge in 1969 in what is know as the Chappaquiddick incident. He landed in the water. A young woman, Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned. His dog is named “Splash.” I am not making this up.