The Cambridge School Committee recently decided that, beginning in the 2011-12 school year, schools will close for one Muslim holiday each year. On the heels of two events that paint America as an increasingly Islamophobic nation, those being the controversial Ground Zero “mosque” and the lunatic antics of that pastor in Florida, the School Committee’s refreshingly tolerant decision couldn’t come ... Read More
This column was originally published in the Sept. 30 Harvard Independent. It responds directly to Max’s blog post from the previous week. Harvard’s position on the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, banning the group from campus until “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) is overturned, has always struck me the wrong way. It just doesn’t make sense to punish ROTC cadets for ... Read More
I was disappointed to read The Crimson’s editorial this morning regarding Martin Peretz and the Harvard research fellowship that is apparently going to be endowed in his name. Peretz, the editor-in-chief of The New Republic, recently wrote on his personal blog that “Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims” and that he could not “pretend that [Muslim-Americans] are worthy ... Read More
One non-bigoted case against the erroneously-named “Ground Zero mosque” seems to go something like this: “Religious freedom is legitimate and important, and the promoters of the planned community center have a constitutional right to build the complex in Lower Manhattan. But still, the community center should be built somewhere else, out of sensitivity to earnestly held objections, and out of ... Read More
The manufactured controversy over what has ludicrously come to be called the “Ground Zero Mosque” has a lot of depressing aspects. But easily the most surprising and, for me, upsetting development is that the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish human rights organization, has sided with Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, and the other opportunistic GOP pols who are exploiting this issue. A ... Read More
Apart from being an excellent excuse to boost web traffic with pictures of bikini-clad women (cf. The Huffington Post), you may not have seen Lebanese journalist Hanin Ghaddar’s very interesting article last week in Foreign Policy comparing American and Lebanese reactions to the Rima Fakih story. In America: Not many people — let along beauty pageant winners — have been accused ... Read More
HPR staff writer Eli Martin has a piece in today’s Crimson criticizing European “Islamophobia.” I don’t want to baldly disagree with Eli that “outright discrimination toward Muslims in Europe is becoming a reality.” But I do want to complicate things a bit. Eli implies that burqa bans and the like could only be products of Geert Wilders-esque prejudice, neglecting a ... Read More
I wrote this weekend that the contest was in poor taste, and that it was likely to attract extremely offensive submissions, but this seems to have surprised many of the people who publicized May 20 as “Draw Muhammad!” Day to begin with. LA Times reports: In declaring May 20th to be “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day,” Seattle artist Molly Norris created a ... Read More
In response to the South Park / Muhammad controversy, several bloggers with a libertarian bent have been pushing the idea of a “Draw Muhammad!” contest to retaliate against the New York-based Islamic extremist group Revolution Muslim. The idea originated with noted sex columnist Dan Savage, who has advertised it as a way to retaliate against Revolution Muslim’s “veiled threats” and “water down ... Read More
