The effect of Fox TV’s “24″ on the execution of torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Gitmo:
Although reports of abuses by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, have angered much of the world, the response of Americans has been more tepid. Finnegan attributes the fact that “we are generally more comfortable […]
There is an important distinction to be made between Islam as religion and Islam as ideology.
The statement “Religion is a private matter” is only applicable in liberal, secular societies in some parts of the west. In muslim societies, religion is almost always made to be a public matter. Islamic religious authority is reasserting itself as […]
[Update 13Jan2008]
I have retained this post, but have excised the text I wrote about GMB Akash in view of the complaints made by GMB Akash himself in the comments. In fact I got the information from another blog which turned out to be factually incorrect. This is a bad thing. I have broken a blogging […]
File under Famous Fuck-ups in the Short History of the Iraqi Invasion and Occupation Humanitarian Intervention:
Under Paul Bremer’s stewardship, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq requested $12 billion in cash from the US treasury which the US flew into Iraq in shrink-wrapped $100 bills. The Guardian notes in an article titled How the US […]
It’s a dirty job but someone has to do it. And this time its George Monbiot. George takes a look at Loose Change, and takes a sledge hammer to this sharp, slick production of a conspiracy theory.
People believe Loose Change because it proposes a closed world: comprehensible, controllable, small. Despite the great evil that runs […]
The practice of giving tiny, unsecured loans in the developing world is being hailed as a breakthrough in the fight against global poverty. Adam Yamaguchi explores the concept of microcredit and its founder, Muhammad Yunus, in Bangladesh.
See the short film on CurrentTV.
Francis Fukuyama is a rare breed: a sensible and reflexive Neocon.
If anybody had been reading carefully what I said about the end of history, it was never that any given society today is capable of going through a democratic revolution … economic development matters, culture matters, and if you’ve got a society with these extremely […]
Are the Bangladeshi plains in danger of increased flooding as a result of Western carbon emissions alone?
The Times suggests that Western carbon emissions is one of many factors amongst many, all contributing to a “perfect storm” of environmental forces which will submerge a quarter of Bangladesh by 2100. In population terms, that means 30 to […]
Elham Manea pleads for a Humanistic Islam:
The re-Islamisation of Arab societies gave ground to the belief that there is indeed only one version of Islam, the one exported from the heart of Saudi Arabia: Najdi Wahhabi Islam [2]. People seem to have forgotten how colorful and diverse Islamic traditions were. Islam in Tunisia or Morocco […]