|
The easy, and obvious, answer to the question of can you be critical of Israel without being anti-Semitic is, “Of course.” But the waters are not easy to keep pure, and all too often legitimate criticism of Israel is mixed with anti-Semitic sentiments.
The American media is falling down on the job when it comes to reporting on Muslim communities both here in North America or world wide.
The conditions we created in Iraq present one of the greatest moral challenges facing the U.S. today. For decades the U.S. supported and armed Saddam, turning a blind eye to atrocities he committed. Then for ten years we put draconian sanctions on the country, sanctions that did not hurt the dictator they were aimed at, but which did make life hard for the average Iraqi, and which is said to have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths due to lack of medicines, food, and other basic necessities.
Finally, for reasons that remain largely unexplained, we decided Saddam had to go, and invaded in order to take him out. Despite huge public sentiment against the invasion, in the face of those who revealed the fallacy of the supposed terrorist and weapons of mass destruction connections, ignoring those who warned of precisely the kind of civil war we see today, we invaded and toppled a brutal regime we had been propping up.
The term cult has been used widely to discredit religions that are perceived as heretical, unorthodox, or, even, simply an appealing competitor for congregants. Thus we see it applied not only groups that could legitimately be described as cults, such as the Peoples Temple, the Branch Dividians, or Heaven's Gate, but also to significant religious groups such as the Mormons, the Seventh Day Adventists, or even Islam as a whole.
What Islam Really Says About Violence, Rights and Other Religions
Gomaa, Fadlallah, Mubarak, Khan, Siddiqi, Ellison, others | On Faith
Comments (225)