What is happening between Iran and the West? And what is going to happen. Clearly we see increased sabre-rattling, warnings of war, mutual bellicosity. But why now? Who gets served by this? Is it likely that there actually will be some further military action? There’s already been a surprising amount. What does this look like from the points of view of Iran, the US, and Israel? And if push comes to fire, who wins?

There has been a huge push in Western media to demonize Iran. First we had last months farcical false flag fiasco, which claimed that Iranian secret service had hired an almost blind alcoholic and lover of prostitutes in Texas to hire a Mexican drug cartel to kill a Saudi Ambassador in Washington. As Stephen Walt correctly questioned, “If you are going to attack a target in the United States, wouldn’t you send your A Team, instead of Mr. Magoo?” It does continue, as Glen Greenwald noted “the FBI’s record-settingundefeated streak of heroically saving us from the plots they enable.” That issue seems to have gotten dropped quickly, but it’s worth noting that it came just before the publication of a UN report on Iranian progress towards nuclear weapon.

1) 9/11 is a tragic day. It was on on this day in history that a democratically elected government was attacked, the country’s capital was bombed, its president killed, a brutal military dictatorship installed that killed thousands and tortured tens of thousands. Remember Salvador Allende, killed with the support of the US government on 9/11/1973, a day that didn’t change the world, that was “nothing of very great consequence,” as Henry Kissinger assured his boss a few days later. (via Noam Chomsky)

2. Robert Fisk, in the Independent, points out that  For 10 Years, We’ve Lied To Ourselves To Avoid Asking The One Real Question

By their books, ye shall know them.

I’m talking about the volumes, the libraries – nay, the very halls of literature – which the international crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001 have spawned. Many are spavined with pseudo-patriotism and self-regard, others rotten with the hopeless mythology of CIA/Mossad culprits, a few (from the Muslim world, alas) even referring to the killers as “boys”, almost all avoiding the one thing which any cop looks for after a street crime: the motive.

Why so, I ask myself, after 10 years of war, hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths, lies and hypocrisy and betrayal and sadistic torture by the Americans – our MI5 chaps just heard, understood, maybe looked, of course no touchy-touchy nonsense – and the Taliban? Have we managed to silence ourselves as well as the world with our own fears? Are we still not able to say those three sentences: The 19 murderers of 9/11 claimed they were Muslims. They came from a place called the Middle East. Is there a problem out there?

3. Did Osama win? Andrew Sullivan (The Daily Beast) asks if we let Bin Laden win… but decides that we let our fear win, and concludes that, “Until we decide to grasp hope again, the war will live on. Within us all.”

The Canadian election is two weeks behind us in the rear view mirror of history, perhaps offering enough distance for a sense of perspective. There’s agreement on what happened, pending a few recounts, but questions of why it happened and the future implications are more complex. Start with what we know: this election was the most dramatic in memory, and no one is saying any more that Canadian politics are boring. Once it was only Québec which would swing dramatically from socially conservative to the liberal, or from the most religious to the least. This year Québec lead the way, but there were other changes everywhere.

The logical place to start is by looking at the results. Because there are five national political parties in Canada, it’s possible to win a seat with far less than 50% of the vote. The party with the most seats gets the first shot at forming the government, and the head of that party gets to be Prime Minister. Here are both the number of seats won and the popular vote in this year’s election, and in the 2008 election. There are some fascinating changes, for every party. Here’s the data; analysis after the cut.

We elect a new government next Monday in Canada after a one month election that began with a lot of whimpering, but seems to be ending with a remarkable bang. To the surprise of media, pundits, and most of the country, the NDP, the socialist party that has been forever mired in third place federally (behind the Liberals and Conservatives) has suddenly surged into second, closing fast on the governing Conservatives (3% behind at the last poll). The second place Liberals, who have been advocating that NDPers vote strategically for them on an ABC (Anybody But Conservative) rationale are catatonic with horror as the same rationale rolls round onto them.

Fortunately, Ian Welsh is around to explain what this all means, who the players are, and who owns the teams on which they play. I’ve deeply admired Ian’s analyses (of politics both Canadian and International) over the years in the Agonist, in Pogge, in Firedoglake, and now on his own website. Here’s a taste of his explanation, which aligns with mine so precisely as to make any further comment of mine redundant. His whole piece is well worth reading!

The scourge of the NDP has been the perception that they can’t win Federally. As a result, in most Federal elections vote switching has often cost them at least 5% of their vote, and I’d argue up to 10%….As a result, parties that range from Center to Left (the Liberals, NDP and Bloc) have regularly pulled in about 60% of the vote, and yet the Conservatives have had minority governments for much of the last decade. This is also due to the fact that, like the US system, ours is first past the post, winner take all.

Twitter! Facebook! Discussion boards! All of these wonderful social media tools now enable the voice of the individual to be heard, facilitate political organization, foster the people’s revolution, and fight the Power of the Man. Oh brave new world, that has such communication in it! Blog after blog attributes the Arab Spring to new technology as through the Singularity, that anticipated moment of nerd rapture, were only a few upgrades away.

And perhaps that is one side of the story. But you need to know the other side as well. Ani Difranco said, “Any tool is a weapon if you hold it right.” And the governments of the world, those men (and a few women) who have their hands clenched on the mice of power all share a common desire not to let those mice get loose. So they’re using those same tools as well, because on the internet – as the old New Yorker cartoon has it – nobody knows you’re a dog. Or a mole. Or anything really.

We’ll start with Facebook, and link to a memorable piece from The Guardian‘s report on the SXSW computer conference that illustrates that point clearly:

Not long ago, according to the new-media guru Clay Shirky, the Sudanese government set up a Facebook page calling for a protest against the Sudanese government, naming a specific time and place – then simply arrested those who showed up. It was proof, Shirky argues, that social media can’t be revolutionary on its own. “The reason that worked is that nobody knew anybody else,” he says. “They thought Facebook itself was trustworthy.”

An excerpt from a wise and compassionate piece by my friend and teacher Oriah on the crisis in Japan, and how one might choose to respond to it.

…Here is where we get to practise what is needed and discover something truly amazing about how we are made. We are built for compassion. Yes, I know we are capable of insensitivity, cruelty and greed, susceptible to fear and bad choices. But we are built for compassion in a way that the mind barely grasps. How do I know this? Because I experience it in myself and in others. I am seeing it in the many stories of mutual assistance amongst those most directly effected in Japan. I hear it in the voice of the skilled health-care providers who are helping me with my parents. We really do have the capacity to be with situations and information that is heart-breakingly painful, that is about loss and destruction and suffering. We can hold the world in our hearts, we can follow the impulse to help, and we can do this without comforting platitudes or explanations, without knowing why something happened or how it will unfold.

We discover this capacity within ourselves by practising it, by grounding ourselves in the details of life, in our bodies, in the earth beneath us, in our communities of care, in doing what needs to be done to take care of those who need our help. We discover it by following our breath and praying however we pray- whether that is in a structured form from some tradition or simply in a willingness to focus on our hearts, feel what arises and hold those who are suffering with each breath. We do it by offering what material aid we are able to offer and choosing to be with those who are suffering in our awareness, sending our love and a silent, “You are not alone.” We do it by allowing a larger Heart to hold us- the Heart of community, of the Mystery, God, Life itself- when we are too tired and discouraged to do it alone.

“Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be….”
Ophelia (Scene 5, Act 4Hamlet)

I was sitting a few feet behind a friend last Friday, as the man at the other end of the room sentenced him to life plus five years.

I can’t say it came as a surprise, though the whole story still seemed unbelievable to me. His Honour had just told us the whole story, justifying the sentence he was pronouncing, and he clearly found it believable. He might not have been willing to bet his own life on it, but he was evidently willing to bet Shareef’s life on it. And that was the bottom line.

It was four years and eight months since I had looked at the front page of the Toronto Star one otherwise unmemorable morning, and found that my ex-student of ten years ago, Shareef Abdelhaleem, was one of the “Toronto 18″, eighteen young Muslim men who were charged with planning to set off three tons of ammonium nitrate in downtown Toronto. Shareef had remained in touch with me, coming in to the high school in which we had met periodically after his graduation, so I returned the favour, going in to Maplehurst penitentiary to talk to him a few times as the first the months and then the years trickled by before his case, his conviction, and now his sentencing.

Here I am. Over there are my iMac, my iPod, and my iPad. Sometimes I find myself worried over the fact that I can no longer clearly tell where one ends and the other begins. My sense of who I am, and certainly of what I’ve done in the world, is accessed more easily on them than on me. McLuhan talked of media as extensions of our senses, and predicted that computers would become the extension of our central nervous systems. They certainly have, and at other times I get really excited by that. Many people certainly share one or the other of those positions, which means that neither of me feels alone, though I mostly learn about these other views through my iBrain or as Scott Adams, (Dilbert’s father) calls it, my exobrain. Adams had a wonderful column last week in which he argues that we have become cyborgs based on our increasing use of exobrains, brains outside our bodies. Here’s an excerpt:

Don’t protest that your cellphone isn’t part of your body just because you can leave it in your other pants. If a cyborg can remove its digital eye and leave it on a shelf as a surveillance device, and I think we all agree that it can, then your cellphone qualifies as part of your body….You’re already a cyborg. Deal with it.

Your regular brain uses your exobrain to outsource part of its memory, and perform other functions, such as GPS navigation, or searching the Internet. If you’re anything like me, your exobrain is with you 24-hours a day. It’s my only telephone device, and I even sleep next to it because it’s my alarm clock.

Last week I was walking past the Salvation Army store on my corner, when I noticed that someone had abandoned a box of books in front of the deposit bin. I assume that things left there are for perusal, so I perused, and found a book I’d always been curious about: Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail”. Andersen writes about how things change when scarcity of access is no longer a factor in what we purchase. He looks at books and music in particular, and at the changes that have occurred in our consumption of those media, now that we have unlimited choices of what to read or listen to. A half century ago, my reading source was my school or town library, and what they had was the limits of what I might read next. I read almost all the John Buchan novels, partially because I liked those prototypical James Bond adventures (if James Bond had been a Victorian upper class Brit), but more because those were the books which our library had.

Similarly, the music I bought was limited to the music that the record stores had; one of the reasons that music was such a bond in the 60s and 70s was that we all listened to the same music. We had to; it was a culture of hits and the hit albums were the only ones that could be found in the big stores. In Montreal, in 1964, I had been fond of a local band called “JB and the Playboys”, but when I moved to Toronto, and from there to Boston, I accepted I’d never get to hear their new music, and none of my friends would be interested in a band of whom they’d never heard and whose albums they couldn’t buy.

Now it’s a market of niches. The long tail (Think Amazon! Think iTunes!) means that stores carry all the books there are, or all the music there is. Since they’re in digital form, it doesn’t cost anything to add another thousand choices, and some of them will sell. Anderson cites that 99% of the books on Amazon sold at least one copy last year, which is all Amazon needs to make a profit. How different from the limited shelf-space bookstores had, on which a book that wasn’t selling (yet, or still) got sent back to the remainderers, its brief shelf-life over.

Some of my readers may have celebrated New Year’s under the balmy twenty-four hour sunlight of Antarctica, which would explain why they haven’t heard of “Angry Birds”. The rest of you don’t have an excuse for being so sadly out of the loop, but your being so does provide a fine reason for me to fill you in. Wikipedia, most useful as an elaborator on all topical phenomena, succinctly offers this summary: Angry Birds is a puzzle video game developed by Finland-based Rovio Mobile, in which players use a slingshot to launch birds at pigs stationed on or within various structures, with the intent of destroying all the pigs on the playfield…. Players may re-attempt levels as many times as they wish, and may also replay completed levels in an attempt to boost their score.

It has been a very long time since I’ve encountered a game as addictive as this one, which certainly makes the question “why?” of personal interest. But Wikipedia’s explication adds that there are currently over four million hours per day worldwide spent playing “Angry Birds”, and that over 50 million people have downloaded the game for their iToys, Androids, or other similar platforms. So my addiction is not unique, which broadens that “why?” question. Two days ago the Mac App store opened, which allows Mac users to buy apps online from a single source. I checked it this morning, and not to my surprise, the top selling program across all categories, was “Angry Birds”. The addiction is real.

“There is a war between the ones
who say there is a war
And the ones who say there isn’t.” (Leonard Cohen)

“Even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable.” (Hillary Clinton, 1/21/10)

Wikileaks has raised a range of fascinating and related issues, starting with the extraordinary information that has been revealed. But should that information have been revealed? Is Julian Assange a hero, a rapist, both, or neither? What has the US done in response, and what should it have done? And what has “Anonymous” done in response, and who are they anyway? I’ve been trying to keep up with the unfolding answers to these questions, surfing as fast as I can, and getting further and further behind the wave. But the most fascinating story is the battle between Anonymous and the US government, a battle so one-sided that it makes David and Goliath look like an even money bet. But, as could only have happened in the 21st century, Anonymous has won at least the first few rounds.

In this corner in the red, white, and blue trunks, the US government. With an annual budget of 3.5 trillion dollars it has enough power that all it takes is for Joseph Lieberman, (whom the Guardian calls “the kind of politician who gives loose cannons a bad name”) to call Wikileaks “implacably hostile to our military and the most basic requirements of our national security,” and things happen. Amazon terminates their hosting of Wikileak’s account, spuriously claiming copyright violation. (As Juan Cole points out, “once a document has become public, no matter how, the government cannot sue for copyright infringement or demand its return on those grounds, at least in the United States” And how secure does your cloud computing feel these days?) Wikileaks domain name provider, Everydns, dropped wikileaks.org off the net (the cyber equivalent of having your phone disconnected). Visa and Mastercard stopped allowing their cards to be used to make donations to Wikileaks, (though you can use these same cards to donate to the Ku Klux Klan). Paypal not only dropped Wikileaks, but locked the account of users whose businesses had donated any money to Wikileaks. Then, feeling that a Wikileaks knockout had been achieved, on Dec 8th the US State department announced “World Press Freedom Day,” because they were “concerned about the determination of some governments to censor and silence individuals, and to restrict the free flow of information.” Oh the irony, it burns. As Al Jazeera accurately summed up the US response,

“what WikiLeaks is exposing is the way the Western democratic system has been hollowed out. In the last decade its political elites have been shown to be incompetent (the US and UK in not regulating their financial sectors); corrupt (Ireland, Italy; all other governments in relation to the arms trade) or recklessly militaristic (US and UK in Iraq) and yet nowhere have they been called to account in any effective way…. And when, finally, the veil of secrecy is lifted in a really effective way, their reflex reaction is to kill the messenger.”

But in the other corner, apparently wearing no trunks at all, was Anonymous.

A person reveals a lot by the website they choose for their home page. Some people want to have their own blog; others have Google news. There have been times when I’ve had both of those, but for the past four years I’ve been firmly linked to Reddit. Reddit is a community forum on which people post, either their own comments or links to sites, news, pictures, whatever. Users can comment on these posts, and discussions, sometimes heated ones, follow. There’s nothing unusual with that. The first element that lifts Reddit beyond the ordinary is that readers can click arrows to upvote or downvote both the news stories, and one another’s comments, so that the stories that people find the most interesting are the ones you see in the top 50, and the comments that people have found the most offensive sink to the bottom of the list. The people rule, or at least moderate the website .

The second remarkable element is the size of Reddit. Each month about two million different visitors, go to their selection of its 56,514 subreddits, or separate topics. So if you want people who share your interest in (lightly sampling the ‘p’s) pets, Poland, polyamory relationships, Phish, poetry, or programming there’s a subreddit devoted to that. (There are a number devoted to porn, but as with all subreddits, if you don’t sign up for it, you don’t see it.) To get a sense of the range, look at the current 912 most popular subreddits here, with the name written proportionally to the popularity: the most popular are in the biggest font size. Three weeks ago I wanted to find out the best cellular company for an iPhone in Canada, I posted the question in both the iPhone and Canada subreddits, and within two days had a hugely helpful and educated series of responses. (Consensus answer: it’s a trick question. There are no good cellular phone companies in Canada. Most useful answer: a link to a website that compares costs and plans for all iPhone carriers across the country.)

“Alas,” said the mouse, “the world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when at last I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into,”
“You only need to change your direction,” said the cat, and ate it up.

A Fable by Franz Kafka

Kafka’s story haunts me, as his stories always have. This one at first seems a simple enough eighty-seven words But while with many writers the ambiguities clarify as you go deeper, with Kafka they always get more complex. The mouse worries about his life having led him into a now inevitable trap. We have a sense of what mouse traps are, and a sense of how our own choices narrow as we age. But is the cat the trap that the mouse sees coming, or is the cat a trap not seen? But the cat is multiple: it’s both the one who knows how the mouse might escape from the trap and it’s the death from which the mouse cannot escape.

If the mouse had changed his direction, would he have escaped the cat? There are two reasons to think so: the cat is in the last chamber, so if the mouse had gone somewhere else he might not have run into the cat. And if the mouse hadn’t been worrying about the walls, worrying about the enormity of the world, he might have had more attention to devote towards worrying about things like cats.

My world too has gotten smaller, or so it seems to me.

One month ago I drank some extremely noxious laxatives, and went into a small room where a man stuck a camera up my rectum and took a series of photos. It was an invasive and unpleasant procedure, one which I repeat every five years, thanks to advice from my doctor and two friends who have survived colon cancer. I’d rather have a colonoscopy than colon cancer. Whether I want to go through a similar procedure every time I take an airplane is a related question, one we may face in our immediate future. The path that leads to that hypothetical question starts with a media scan of the new TSA (Transportation Security Association) scanners and the policy that comes with them..

The “naked-scanners” are now in place at many US airports, and the plan is to have a thousand installed by the end of 2011. A bill to make them mandatory at all airports by 2013 is currently before the Senate. But at present would-be air travellers have a choice: they can be seen naked by air agents or be “patted down”. There are some good reasons not to want either of them, but you won’t get on the flight without one. We’ll start with the scanners, which have three really basic problems: safety, privacy, and functionality.

When I was a teenager I believed that science was the route to all the best answers to the most important questions. I would have applauded Sir Ernest Rutherford’s dictum: “There is physics and there is stamp-collecting.” It took the sixties to loosen up my views, to help me recognize that there were things not measurable by science, but true none the less. Love and literature were two early examples; the power of spirituality came later. Today my views are closer to what Stephen Jay Gould called Nonoverlapping Magisteria , the perspective that there are areas of expertise over which science holds sway, and other areas over which it does not, and that wisdom can best be reached through exploring both. But as I have opened to ideas in the world outside science, I am horrified at how of increasing numbers of people are moving the opposite way, abandoning science, logic, rationality and embracing magical thinking.

Magical thinking is the idea that what you think changes the physical world directly. In a harmless form, I learned it when my family watched Saturday night hockey games, and my mother warned my brother and I that any premature celebration before the final siren would certainly cause the Canadians to suddenly lose the game. In a more dangerous form, it is promulgated through books like “The Secret” which teach that if you choose to believe that you will be successful, you will (and if you aren’t it’s your own fault for not choosing to be.) It is a belief which allows the rich to feel that they simply chose to be rich, and the people who were poisoned by drinking the effluent dumped into rivers from their factories chose that, so everyone gets what they wanted and no guilt is necessary.

In my childhood, I wanted to know everything about everything, which I called “being a polymath”, because polymath was such an impressive word. I read omnivorously, and remembered almost all of what I had read. I was the star of my high school’s Reach For the Top team (short version: a Canadian high school Jeopardy). I knew all the songs on the top 30, every week, and could identify them from the first notes, to the amazement of my parents to whom all rock and roll sounded pretty much the same. Two long-remembered dreams from my childhood encapsulate this obsession. In the first, the happy dream, aliens come to destroy Earth (I was a big science fiction fan) but moved to pity, they choose one person at random and ask one question. If the question is answered correctly, Earth will be spared; if incorrectly, ZAP! They choose me; I know the answer. Everyone is awed and grateful. In the other dream, I go off to summer camp for two weeks, and when I come back I get a copy of the current top thirty. I look at it in disbelief. I don’t know any of the songs on it. I don’t even know any of the groups. I am in utter despair.

One of these dreams has come true, and – here’s a hint – it’s not the one with the aliens. I still read music reviews occasionally, and they’re about albums I don’t know by bands of which I’ve never heard. Even when they explain that the lead singer used to be in this important other band, I still don’t know him. Sometimes out of this vast ocean of ignorance there’ll emerge a familiar island, a new album by Paul Simon, or the Rolling Stones. But the waters of oblivion are rising, the islands are becoming fewer, and there are more and more column inches of reviews waving between them.

I intuitively feel that these experiences, mystical but also sensual and embodied, are the core of spirituality and the foundation that religions build their vast tottering edifices upon: these experiences that work for us, that we then work hard to name and explicate in full logical or fantastically elaborated detail. Naming is not only important but unavoidable … but once the naming develops into major exclusionary truth claims, … and once these get identified with the worldly power involved in religious organization then all the power of the experience gets harnessed to the groupthink and the powerplays (exclusions, repressions and crusades) and we have the worst of religion.

Dave Belden in response to How I Became a Pagan

Reading Dave’s comment, I was reminded of Deepak Chopra’s saying “God gave humans the truth, and the devil came and he said, ‘Let’s give it a name and call it religion.’” There is an inescapable tension between experience and the words we use to describe that experience, which cannot help but remove us from the experience itself. Ted Hughes warns us eloquently: “In a way, words are continually trying to displace our experience. And insofar as they are stronger than the raw life of our experience, and full of themselves and all the dictionaries they have digested, they do displace it.” Yet Hughes as a poet chose to use words to create extraordinary experiences for his readers. How do you communicate without words? How do you guide people on a spiritual path without names for the landmarks they are passing?

On the vision quest I wrote about, Oriah was certainly conscious of that tension. When we came back from the vision quest, we were not allowed to talk to anyone about our experience, because once we did it would become a story, and we would remember the story and how we had told it rather than the experience. After a day, we met as a group and shared the experience of our vision quest with one another, in mime. No words allowed. This was (radical understatement) a challenge, but it forced us to focus on the physical, emotional, and spiritual experience rather than moving into the intellectual world, which I at least certainly do all too easily. I remember one woman, who simply sat in the centre of our circle, and peeled an onion, layer after layer, as tears rolled down her face. When I go to sweat lodges in my tradition, we are always encouraged not to speak to any one for seven days about our experience in the lodge, so that we have time to process the experience before it becomes a story.

Paganism. The name itself has a certain wild and crazy sound to it, a sense of scribbling wildly outside the lines of the establishment. Much as I’d like to claim that aspect of the word, that sense of neo-medievalists dancing naked in the spring moonlight before they copulate in the furrows so that the crops will come again this year, that isn’t me, and it isn’t my paganism. I’m an urban middle-aged man, ex-school teacher, born and raised Jewish. What has brought me to a spiritual place where I can assert my religion is pagan, (or primal, to use Huston Smith’s more encompassing term) ?

I’ve always had an interest in the spiritual, in how we form a bridge from ourselves to something that is bigger than ourselves. Judaism is a community religion; the Talmud says that one cannot be Jewish in isolation, and there is no story I know of a Jewish hermit living in a remote cave by himself seeking G_d. But my family lived in a small French-Canadian town, and even when we moved to Montreal and later Toronto we were never part of a Jewish community. So perhaps that’s the reason that I never felt any twinges of spirituality around Judaism, never felt a personal connection to Something Greater when I was in the synagogue listening to people chant something in Hebrew, a language I was able to memorize enough of to stumble through the form of a Bar Mitzvah but never understood. I read the Bible, cover to cover three times in Grade 5, and while I liked the stories, and absorbed the ethic better than I realized, I was never a believer in the theology. But my spiritual need was still there. Had I been raised by Kabbalists, I might well have found the catalyzing power I was seeking there, but those were not the cards I was dealt.

Dear TDB readers,

I wondered if this description of my online magazine, Tikkunista, was inappropriately self-serving for a post on Tikkun Daily so I asked Dave if he thought it was worth posting. He asked that I share his answer, which follows.

I think this post would help a lot of people understand the appeal to the writer of online writing and blogging. We are looking for more people like you who want to do this on Tikkun Daily. We especially want people, whether they are generalists or not, who are able to take a “beat” that fits with our spiritual progressive mission. We are looking for people who will not focus so much on writing their own views (as most of my own posts do, for example), as on reporting to us – with a smart comment or three – on what is happening on their beat out there in the world. So what is happening in the progressive evangelical or Catholic worlds, in First Nations spirituality/politics, in progressive Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, in more “spiritual” or non-religiophobic atheism, and so on? Some of our best posts have been of this kind. Someone who wants a useful way to spend a few hours a week keeping us up to date on a specific area of their expertise could have as much fun as you have been having these last few years.

====================================================

Tikkunista is the online magazine I created. I describe it as my “weekly winnowing of links to politics, art, and culture”, though the weekly part is a slight exaggeration; it only gets put out about forty times a year. It consists of about 40-55 links, grouped together into about a dozen categories. The first and last two categories are definite: it starts with followups on topics from previous issues, and upcoming political actions (Toronto centric); it ends with Eyecandy (a collection of pretty pictures) and the quote of the week. The eight central categories vary, but always move from heavier political to lighter and more amusing topics, a structure that I adopted for the same reason that parents serve children vegetables before they offer them dessert.

Last week, for example, Tikkunista started with sections on Israel’s somewhat chaotic leadership style (Israel’s foreign minister had just attacked his own prime minister in front of the UN, which is unusual in politics) and on China’s economic expansion (starting from Mao’s “great leap forward”, currently estimated to have cost 54 million lives.) The two sections before Eyecandy’s autumn special were a collection of sculptural websites (Maori, landscape, wooden postmodern) and a look at the positive aspects of computers (which balanced the previous week’s look at their negative aspects.) Each section starts with “Bird’s Eye”, a paragraph or two in which I look at what ties the following set of links together and why it matters. I’ve been putting Tikkunista out into the world for seven years, and from time to time I wonder why I do.

We probably all start out prejudiced; having been brought up by people who look and act like us and believe the things that we learn to believe, we start by assuming that our way is the right way to do things, and if people do things differently they must be wrong. The need to grow beyond that childhood perspective is what led Mark Twain to optimistically claim that, “travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness.” But though we now live in a global village, in which the floods in Pakistan or fires of Russia are no further than a click away, an irrational fear of Islam or Muslims, Islamophobia, has been rising as fast as the floods, and spreading as fast as the fires.

The most obvious examples are the inchoate rage some have felt at plans to build a Muslim community centre two blocks from ground zero, and the proposal to burn Qur’ans sponsored by a fringe Florida pastor. But it goes a lot further: last week Martin Peretz, editor-in-chief of The New Republic, wrote: “Muslim life is cheap, particularly to Muslims… This is a statement of fact, not value,” and “I wonder whether I need to honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.” Two immediate points: imagine the reaction if such a statement had been made about Jews or Blacks, or any other minority group! But Peretz has not resigned, has not been pilloried in the main-stream media. Philip Weiss does a fine job of disproving the “Muslim life is cheap” canard, meticulously going through the world’s Islamic states and documenting the evidence, but that such desperate medicine is needed is pretty telling evidence of the extent to which the contagion has spread.