I love this story. I love it because it shows how people can employ spirituality to transcend differences and make the veils of fear & mistrust fall away. Every tradition has this, but it gets lost in the dogmatic practice of religion. Haters are going to hate, lovers are going to love. The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on...
Apart from what we wish and what we fear may happen,
We are alive with other life, as clear stones
Take form in the mountain.
—Rumi
Miki Cohen is a 58-year-old college teacher who has 'discovered' the works of Jalal ad-Din Rumi, a 13th-century Muslim poet and Sufi mystic.
Attracted by Rumi's writings and philosophy, Miki translates his works into Hebrew and practices whirling in worship.
What makes Cohen's story so remarkable is that he is an Israeli.
The son of holocaust survivors and a veteran of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, Cohen found himself searching for answers to his spiritual identity.
"I was in the Israeli army in the '73 war. And the war mentality, the killing mentality, the feeling that we are on one side victims and on the other side we are the oppressors. So, what are we? So I started, you know, looking for bigger answers let's say or deeper .... For many years I was looking in many places," he explains.
Along with several other Israelis, he undertakes a spiritual search and is attracted by the mysticism of Sufism.
But Miki goes a step further. He travels to Konya in central Turkey, the resting place of Rumi and a city once known as the 'citadel of Islam' with a reputation for religious conservatism. It is the centre for the Mevlevi Sufi order of Islam.
Miki becomes one of few outsiders - and certainly the only Israeli - to be granted access to the inner sanctum of the whirling Dervishes. [...]
That people are still capable of love, hope, compassion, and kindness after suffering the brutally dehumanizing atrocities of war—abduction & rape, mutilation, torture, genocide, ethnic cleansing, etc.—is a testament to the human spirit. This beautiful, talented, loving little girl was a victim of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). Yes, that LRA, the same one Rush Limbaugh rushed to defend in his desire to try to make President Obama look bad when he sent 100 elite US troops to help stop them (see "Related Links" at the bottom of this page for more info).
Decent people everywhere should recognize that the haters among us—those who employ the subterfuge of things like religious righteousness and jingoistic nationalism to propagate vicious untruths for the sake of political expediency or financial gain—are humanity's mortal enemies in both a spiritual and temporal sense. With conscious ill intent they encourage the fear, bigotry, racism, ignorance, rapacity, and misunderstandings that divide us and have resulted in unspeakable horrors throughout history. They are a scourge, a malignancy, as is anyone who continues to associate with or assist them once they realize who & what they're dealing with.
NOTE: I had to use a bit of a hack/workaround to get the video to display in the page, so if you have trouble viewing it, just go directly to the source article at The Telegraph and watch it there.
She was the war orphan who brought a smile to the Queen's face with a simple but heartfelt gesture of affection.
As she was introduced to Her Majesty at a Windsor Castle reception, 10 year-old Lydia Amito broke with protocol and gave her a hug, saying later: "I was so excited about meeting the Queen."
Four thousand miles away, in her village home in northern Uganda, the excitement felt by Lydia, a member of the Watoto children's choir which is touring Britain, is still palpable.
Her foster mother, Mamma Santa, looks at a photograph of Lydia reaching out to the Queen in front of dozens of assembled dignitaries and says: "I was so happy when I heard about Lydia hugging the Queen.
"She is a very affectionate child and I have always taught my children to love people and to express their love by giving them hugs."
That Lydia is hugging anyone, never mind the Queen is a small miracle: during her short years she has witnessed an unbearable amount of suffering and misery.
But it is a miracle which came about thanks to the rehabilitation projects run by Uganda's Watoto Church for the victims of the war waged by the Lord's Resistance Army and its notorious leader Joseph Kony for 20 years from 1987.
There's more about Lydia and her spontaneous hug in this article, also at The Telegraph: Child's innocent hug brings smile to the face of the Queen
Related Links:
President Obama, Sandra Fluke, Rush Limbaugh, and the Lord's Resistance Army - Little Green Footballs
Rush Limbaugh, Defender of the Lord's Resistance Army - Little Green Footballs
Why did Rush Limbaugh defend Joseph Kony and Lord's Resistance Army (+video)? - Christian Science Monitor
Limbaugh Defends Lord's Resistance Army - The New York Times
Endign [sic] The Threat Of The Lord's Resistance Army - Voice of America
Lord's Resistance Army - Wikipedia
As many of you probably already know, Bruce Schneier is a well-known security expert. The following was written in response to an article by Sam Harris (live links at the source). The comments that follow Mr. Schneier's blog postings are usually interesting, so (unlike regular news/blog sites) I'd recommend actually taking the time to read them.
Oh, and you can follow him on Twitter: @schneierblog
Why do otherwise rational people think it's a good idea to profile people at airports? Recently, neuroscientist and best-selling author Sam Harris related a story of an elderly couple being given the twice-over by the TSA, pointed out how these two were obviously not a threat, and recommended that the TSA focus on the actual threat: "Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim."
This is a bad idea. It doesn't make us any safer -- and it actually puts us all at risk.
The right way to look at security is in terms of cost-benefit trade-offs. If adding profiling to airport checkpoints allowed us to detect more threats at a lower cost, than we should implement it. If it didn't, we'd be foolish to do so. Sometimes profiling works. Consider a sheep in a meadow, happily munching on grass. When he spies a wolf, he's going to judge that individual wolf based on a bunch of assumptions related to the past behavior of its species. In short, that sheep is going to profile...and then run away. This makes perfect sense, and is why evolution produced sheep -- and other animals -- that react this way. But this sort of profiling doesn't work with humans at airports, for several reasons.
Itamar Gelbman, an American-born Israeli is running for Rep. Joe Barton's (R-TX) seat in Congress. He has vowed to 'fight the Islamization of America.' What next, Pamela Geller runs for Senate?
Added emphasis mine.
Itamar Gelbman was born in New York 30 years ago and as a child moved with his parents to Herzliya, where he was raised. He studied business management and computer science at Tel Aviv University and served as an undercover reserve officer in the Tel Aviv Police District. [...]
Eight years ago, he moved to Texas. After US President Barack Obama was elected in 2008, Gelbman decided to get involved in politics. At first he wanted to volunteer for a politician, but he did not like the current crop of politicians where he lives. [...]
After Fox News's Bill O'Reilly and the television show Inside Edition ran critical reports of Barton receiving a car paid for by taxpayers, Gelbman said he is confident he could beat him. One of his reasons for optimism is that voters in the heavily Evangelical Christian district like his connection to Israel. [...]
Israel should be allowed to do whatever it needs to do.Gelbman said he believes American politicians need to give Israel the benefit of the doubt. He does not believe the US should involve itself in the settlement issue and he would work to block foreign aid to Islamic countries that act against Israel and the United States.'I would defend Israel and be their voice in the House,' he said.
'Israel should be allowed to do whatever it needs to do. The Palestinians need to change their education system and accept Israel as a Jewish state with Jerusalem as its capital.'
Gelbman said he would work to make sure a law requiring the US to move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem would be enforced.
He received national attention when Muslims in his district were offended by his campaign flyer in which vowed to 'fight the Islamization of America.' [...]
Gelbman recently came to Israel to spend Passover with family. While he was in the country, he met with MK Danny Danon and other Likud politicians. He said he's not a religious person but that he respects Jewish tradition. [...]
Most of us know that anything we share "privately" via social networking sites like Facebook could potentially be exposed, but are you fully aware of how much data is collected about you and when? Are you aware of how deeply apps you give access to can peer into your data? Are you aware that your friends' privacy settings can affect your privacy? Are any of your friends or family members one of the almost 13 million users who have never set, or aren't even aware of, Facebook's privacy tools?
Below is a short list of some of issues Consumer Reports found to be cause for concern. You'll see many others if you read the whole article, which is pretty long.
If you haven't already, you might also want to read RWC's recent page on the FBI's new lobbying efforts to have backdoors built into social-networking sites, VoIP, instant messaging, e-mail, Yahoo, Google, etc. If they're successful, disaster is almost guaranteed to follow at some point because if the FBI can use the backdoors, any security expert will assure you that back-hat hackers, cyber-criminals, and foreign government agents will be able to as well.
Speaking of hacking, have you ever taken a look at Google's the Web Application Security Consortium's Web Hacking Incident Database (WHID) to see how often web applications are hacked? And those are just the ones publicly known.
Here's another one—an article about a weird incident with Twitter: The Sarah Phillips scandal exposes Twitter's spam, scam, and identity problem
I love the instant communication and interaction that the web & internet make possible as much as anyone else, but there are a LOT of things people need to consider when out there in the wilderness. Even if you're aware and cautious, what about your kids? What about other family members you may be connected to online? Are they being careful about giving out details regarding things like family vacations, illnesses, the new [insert expensive purchase] that uncle Joe just bought, etc.?
Anyway, on the to report:
Some people are sharing too much. Our projections suggest that 4.8 million people have used Facebook to say where they planned to go on a certain day (a potential tip-off for burglars) and that 4.7 million "liked" a Facebook page about health conditions or treatments (details an insurer might use against you).
Some don't use privacy controls. Almost 13 million users said they had never set, or didn't know about, Facebook's privacy tools. And 28 percent shared all, or almost all, of their wall posts with an audience wider than just their friends.
Facebook collects more data than you may imagine. For example, did you know that Facebook gets a report every time you visit a site with a Facebook "Like" button, even if you never click the button, are not a Facebook user, or are not logged in?
Your data is shared more widely than you may wish. Even if you have restricted your information to be seen by friends only, a friend who is using a Facebook app could allow your data to be transferred to a third party without your knowledge.
Legal protections are spotty. U.S. online privacy laws are weaker than those of Europe and much of the world, so you have few federal rights to see and control most of the information that social networks collect about you.
And problems are on the rise. Eleven percent of households using Facebook said they had trouble last year, ranging from someone using their log-in without permission to being harassed or threatened. That projects to 7 million households--30 percent more than last year.
Make the women in your lives aware of this.
A group of congressional Republicans is pushing a bill to put key health care decisions in the hands of the states, rather than the federal government. But language buried in the legislation would do the opposite on one key issue: abortion.
Rep. Todd Rokita's (R-Ind.) State Health Flexibility Act, also known as HR 4160, contains a provision that would force 17 states, including California, Massachusetts, and New York, to either discontinue programs that help low-income women pay for abortions, or spend a lot more money to purchase new insurance plans for those women. Thirty House Republicans have signed onto Rokita's proposal since it was introduced in March*, and the Republican Study Committee, a group of conservatives that includes over 70 percent of the GOP caucus, made HR 4160 part of its official budget plan.
If passed, the bill "would block the only avenue left to states that wish to make safe and legal abortions accessible to low income women," says Sara Rosenbaum, a health law expert at George Washington University. [...]
A follow-up debate on Monday's page, The Middle East's War on Women, which referenced an article written by Mona Eltahawy titled "Why Do They Hate Us?"
Rather than cherry-pick specific passages, I've simply provided the first paragraph of each respondent's commentary below, along with thier respective gender and their name hyperlinked to whatever background info I could find (where I was unable to locate anything definitive, I linked to their Twitter profile). They represent a wide latitude of opinion in reaction to Mona Eltahawy's piece, something most LGF members should be able to appreciate, even if they disagree.
Sondos Asem - Female, senior editor of Ikhwanweb.com (the Muslim Brotherhood's English language web site) and a member of the Freedom and Justice Party's foreign relations committee.
When I marched to Tahrir Square on Jan. 25, 2011, I was driven by the indignities and suffering endured by all Egyptians, men and women, from decades of corrupt and oppressive rule. Despite the oppression, I believed in my power to effect change. I believed then and I believe now that to bring about that change, we need lots of determination and hard work. [...]
Shadi Hamid - Male, director of research at the Brookings Doha Center and fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.
Unquestionably, the plight of Arab women is cause for considerable alarm. And it only seems to have gotten worse since the Arab uprisings began. For this reason, Mona Eltahawy's recent Foreign Policy essay makes for vital reading. But how and why did it get this bad? The answers to this question are perhaps just as troubling, and require far greater consideration than Eltahawy allows. In Egypt, women were at the frontlines of revolt. But when it came time to cast their votes, the majority of Egyptian women voted for parties that do not believe in "gender equality" as most Westerners would understand the term. Presumably, men did not force them to do so. The fact of the matter is that Arab women, throughout the region, are exercising their moral and political agency, but not necessarily in the ways we might expect. [...]
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf - Male, chairman of the Cordoba Initiative and author of Moving The Mountain.
As Islam has spread throughout the world, it has combined religion with native cultural practices. Many centuries later, separating the religion from the underlying culture has become difficult. That's why Islam as practiced in Egypt differs from, say, Islam as practiced in Malaysia. [...]
Hanin Ghaddar - Female, managing editor of NOW Lebanon and a journalist based in Beirut.
I was 16 when I first recognized that my father was terrified of me. We were at a grocery shop in my town in southern Lebanon when my classmate, a boy, came in. All I did was say "hi" and smile, but that was horrifying enough for my father to spend the night screaming and banging his head against the walls because he did not want to hit me. His little girl had turned into a woman with a natural sex drive that he could not put off. [...]
Naheed Mustafa - Female, freelance writer and broadcaster based in Toronto, Canada.
Let me just state right off the top: I have nothing against naked women. But as with all things, there's a time and place. When they appear out of context, naked women quickly become nekkid chicks. Now, granted, I'm hard pressed to point out exactly when -- outside of three or four very specific scenarios -- it's appropriate to plunk down a picture of a naked woman. But I'm certain it's not smack in the middle of a serious essay about gender-based violence in the Arab world. [...]
I don't understand how this can be acceptable. If someone does understand, kindly enlighten me. I wonder if this exemption has been applied to other 'tight-knit and insular' communities, because there are a bunch of them in NYC.
Added emphasis mine.
[...] Rejecting a Forward request under the state's Freedom of Information Law, the Brooklyn district attorney made the startling claim that Orthodox Jews deserve a blanket exemption from the usual public disclosure rules. Prosecutors claimed that Orthodox Jews are 'unique' in that releasing the names of suspects would allow others in the community to identify their victims.
'The circumstances here are unique,' Assistant District Attorney Morgan Dennehy wrote in an April 16 letter to the Forward. 'Because all of the requested defendant names relate to Hasidic men who are alleged to have committed sex crimes against Hasidic victims within a very tight-knit and insular Brooklyn community, there is a significant danger that the disclosure of the defendants' names would lead members of that community to discern the identities of the victims.' [...]
Hynes even refused to name 14 Orthodox people who were convicted of sex crimes, 10 of whom pleaded guilty.Dennehy cited the state's civil rights laws in denying the Forward's request for the names of 85 Orthodox Jews arrested on sex charges during the past three years. The Forward made its request in December 2011 after prosecutors announced that scores of Orthodox Jews had been charged under a special program designed to encourage the community to come forward with information.He did not explain whether prosecutors had concluded that there was anything specific about each of the 85 suspects that might make it possible for others to determine the identity of their victim from the identity of the suspect.
He also did not explain whether such a blanket exemption might be granted to other similarly 'tight-knit' communities in the borough. And there were no details about what criteria prosecutors would use to determine whether a particular group should be granted such preferential status. [...]
When Hynes last year trumpeted the arrests of 85 Orthodox Jews on sex crimes charges since 2009, he again refused to release the suspects' names.
He cited the need to protect the identity of victims. Yet that same week, Hynes issued a press release publicizing the name of a non-Jewish man convicted of raping his girlfriend's daughter. Hynes released the man's name, the neighborhood where he lived and the victim's age, enough information for any neighbor to identify the girl.
Hynes even refused to name 14 Orthodox people who were convicted of sex crimes, 10 of whom pleaded guilty. They were sentenced to between one month and 20 years in jail. Although some of those cases were covered in the media, several were adjudicated without public scrutiny.
Yesterday, Real Clear Politics published an article titled "Bashir Uses Book Of Mormon To Sentence Romney To Damnation".1 It was clear that the author, Ian Schwartz, felt Mr. Bashir was out of line. No problem, Mr. Schwartz is certainly entitled to his opinion.
What struck me as strange however, was the last sentence:
One wonders why Bashir dragged Mormonism into his condemnation of Romney when all religions, such as Islam, forbid the practice of lying.
Why would the author would bring up Islam as an example when it had nothing whatsoever to do with the story?2 I didn't bother clicking the link at the time as I was busy multi-tasking, therefore I quickly forgot about it. It wasn't until this morning, when Mr. Bashir's comments came up in a discussion here at LGF, that I remembered it.
Upon returning to RCP to revisit the article, I made a point of following the link. I found myself at a site called Islam Review, which at first glance appeared to be an Islamic site. The title of the article, "Lying in Islam", stuck me as odd and set off my Islamophobia radar, but I decided not to jump to any conclusions since the author posted it under a Muslim name.
Unfortunately, my suspicions were confirmed by the third paragraph. I realized it wasn't an Islamic site at all, and was in fact propagating a great deal of misinformation, perhaps even disinformation. What the article covers, in large part and incorrectly, is the concept of taqiyyah, a subject I wrote about here at LGF almost two years ago.
As it turns out, the site is run by a Christian ministry that calls itself "The Pen vs. The Sword". It has a clearly anti-Islam agenda and uses a broad brush to paint all "Muslim activists" as deliberately duplicitous:
Our Mission
Muslim activists, in their attempt to spread their religion in the West, have been deliberately hiding a certain side of their religion. They carefully avoid, obscure and omit any negative teachings of Islam in order to lure converts. Our mission is to expose these teachings that are withheld from seekers in order to help people gain a more realistic insight of what it is like to live under Islam.
Again, no problem. There are numerous of anti-Muslim, anti-Islam web sites out there, many with much higher traffic than this one.The people running this site that purports to be all about "love" and "Christian ethics" are entitled to their opinion, however misinformed or ignorant.
What is a problem is a widely read site like Real Clear Politics—which claims to be a "non-partisan media company" and "trusted source" news—linking to a clearly anti-Islam site. Not only linking to it, but linking to it for no discernible reason while saying that Islam, like other religions, forbids the practice of lying. What gives?
Either the author of the article didn't pay sufficient attention to the type of site he was linking to, or he did know and linked to it anyway. In either case, it's troubling.
2. Mr. Bashir is a "committed Christian"—more on his background here.
Basic human rights—the House GOP is now against them for detained immigrant women. I'd like to know why the Obama administration exempted the centers from the Prison Rape Elimination Act.
What the hell? What sort of country are we becoming?
Added emphasis mine.
"It's outrageous that immigration detention facilities have morphed into college campuses," said Rep. Elton Gallegy (R-Calif.).On Wednesday, as most of official Washington was fixing its gaze squarely on the Supreme Court, the House Committee on the Judiciary convened a hearing on another issue: the supposedly posh conditions at the Department of Homeland Security's immigrant detention centers. The hearing, dubbed "Holiday on ICE" by chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas), focused on the idea that Obama administration rules intended to prevent sexual abuse and inhumane conditions at Immigrations and Customs Enforcement facilities made detention too fancy. "War on Women," meet "War on Immigrant Women."In 2008, the Washington Post published an in-depth investigation of inhumane conditions at ICE detention centers. As Bob Libal at Texas Prison Bid'ness points out, ICE was forced to cancel its contract with a detention center in Texas' Willacy County after it was "rocked by allegations of sexual assaults, immigrant smuggling, spoiled food, and protests." Those conditions, detailed in a 2011 Frontline report, were exacerbated by Obama administration policies exempting immigration detention centers from the Prison Rape Elimination Act. As far as accommodations go, Willacy was more Hostel than Holiday Inn.
"Under this administration, detention looks more like recess," Smith proclaimed.The new standards, unveiled in February, were meant to ensure a basic threshold of human rights at an agency marred by serial abuse, sexual and otherwise. As the Los Angeles Times explained, "Among other things, the new rules improve access to mental health care and legal assistance, and establish additional safeguards for reporting mistreatment." New rules set up a hotline for immigrants to report abuse, and require strip searches--a common source of sexual assault charges--to be conducted by guards of the same gender.If you think that sounds like a badly needed (if incomplete) fix, you're probably not a member of the House Republican caucus, though. "It's outrageous that immigration detention facilities have morphed into college campuses," said Rep. Elton Gallegy (R-Calif.). "Under this administration, detention looks more like recess," Smith proclaimed. [...]
