Culture

Pinkwashing, NYC Style: The LGBT Center Caves to Pressure

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Watching NYC’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Center succumb to pressure to cancel a kick-off party for Israeli Apartheid Week, I feel compelled to write an epilogue to my recent post on Pinkwashing. I am reminded once again that we must be vigilant in refusing to allow queer liberation to be pitted against Palestinian liberation because as we know from our queer Palestinian colleagues, the two struggles are intertwined. On February 22nd, Michael Lucas, a right wing Advocate columnist and gay porn entrepreneur, issued a press release calling on the LGBT center to cancel the scheduled “Party to End Apartheid,” which he called anti-Semitic. He threatened to “organize a boycott that would certainly involve some of the Center’s most generous donors.” Infamous for his attacks against Islam, Lucas argued that “Israel is the only country in the Middle East that supports gay rights while its enemies round up, torture, and condemn gay people to death…”

Islam

Ahmadiyya Muslims Attacked in Indonesia

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I watched in horror as the scene unfolded before me. My friend had contacted me on February 6th to tell me about a brutal attack against Ahmadiyya Muslim Community members in a village in Banten Province west of Jakarta, Indonesia. According to reports, hundreds of people descended upon a house in that village, began attacking the structure and setting vehicles ablaze, and then went inside. Lifeless bodies were soon dragged out of the house and beaten mercilessly by the crowd while police stood by and did nothing. My friend implored me to get the word out about the attack.

Healing Israel/Palestine

An Ancient Roadmap for a Challenge of Our Time: how the story of Isaac, Esau, and Jacob applies to Israel and Palestine today

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by Rosemary H. Hayes
How influential an ancient story can be is demonstrated in the State of Israel’s insistence on its right to Palestinian territory as “promised” by their ancestral god and recorded in the Hebrew scriptures. However, in our time, Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann, said the opposing Palestinian claim to its own existential homeland meant that here was hot a case of “right and wrong,” but a case of “two rights.” This was substantiated by the British in 1917 with Lord Balfour’s famous declaration: “His Majesty’s Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people … it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” The roots of this drama lie in archaic tales of the Arab and Jewish peoples, descendants of Ishmael and Isaac, sons of the patriarch Abraham.

art

Raw Form and Beauty: Communing with Allah in the Natural World

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by Akile Kabir

To see more of Davi Barker’s work, visit the Tikkun Daily Art Gallery and the artist’s website. The clarity of composition and richness of color in Davi Barker’s work were what struck me first. Then, as I began to reflect on his art, I noticed the serenity of his paintings, which juxtapose Islamic calligraphy and sites with beautiful, surreal panoramas. The paintings featured in Barker’s exhibit on Tikkun Daily are products of his experimentation with a combination of digital and fine art mediums. The scenes of nature or Islamic architecture may appear to be realistic landscapes or still lifes, but they also have a supernatural quality. Take for instance, the onion-shaped domes that dramatically emerge against cloudy skies, or the pristine smoothness of sand dunes, warmly bathed in sunlight.

Christianity

The Black Legend: Guy Fawkes Night and the Persecution of English Catholics

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In the Reformation, religious controversy and gunpowder mixed together on a large scale. Previous religious disputes involved swords, catapults, burnings at the stake, or sometimes just the pulling of beards and the smashing of wine bottles. In the 16th and 17th centuries, however, the whiff of sulfur, charcoal, and potassium nitrate became “the devil’s incense” for theological struggles. In the West, the blog posts have replaced cannonballs as tools of controversy. But in Great Britain on the fifth of November, Guy Fawkes Night keeps alive the memory of the era of “black powder theology.”

Christianity

Robert Spencer and Guy Fawkes: What about the original 9-11?

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Which makes one wonder what Bob Spencer thinks of Guy Fawkes. Fawkes’ plot, in relative terms, would have caused much more damage than 9-11 had it succeeded. Many today, including some Catholics, defend Fawkes, the way some “Polictically Correct” people defend Hamas and Hezbollah. So, I ask Mr. Spencer: What’s your position? Do you condemn “Gunpowder, Treason and Plot”, and the current pro-Guy Fawkes fad?

Gender and Sexuality

"Temporary Marriage in Islam is Sex for Hire": Fatemeh Fakhraie

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The GOATMILK DEBATES continue… The motion:”Temporary Marriage is a valid option for Muslims in the modern age”
AGAINST THE MOTION: “Sigheh Marriage [Temporary Marriage or Muta’a] is Sex for Hire”

Fatemeh Fakhraie
I support any way that two consenting adults can safely get it on. And so I don’t think sigheh marriage (temporary marriage also referred to asmut’a, or pleasure, marriage) is a bad idea. In a magical, lollipop-and-rainbows land. But in the reality where we all live?

Culture

Guest Post: “The artist formerly known as Molly Norris,” By Christopher Stedman

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Last week the atheist blogosphere lit up with reports that Molly Norris, the Seattle cartoonist who inadvertently inspired “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day” (EDMD), had been forced to change her identity and go into hiding due to death threats she received from extremists. How did these same bloggers who promoted EDMD respond to this news? They expressed sadness and frustration. And who wouldn’t? Poor Norris – imagine having to give up everything you knew because your life was in danger.

Empathy

Examining Islamophobia

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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…