Politics

American Muslims and the NYPD Trust Deficit

I’m quoted over on Patheos’ piece on the topic. American Muslims and the NYPD Trust Deficit. Do you feel comfortable living your life as a Muslim in America?   I do. I am firm enough in my faith and happy enough to be an American that I know what the NYPD is doing is wrong. They will not take my faith in either God or country. The NYPD may not believe in the constitution, the bill of rights, or civil liberties, but that doesn’t mean they are right.

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Politics

I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave | Mother Jones

Wow. Unbelievable. Seriously reconsidering where and how I shop. h/t Savage Minds. I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave | Mother Jones. “DON’T TAKE ANYTHING that happens to you there personally,” the woman at the local chamber of commerce says when I tell her that tomorrow I start working at Amalgamated Product Giant Shipping Worldwide Inc. She winks at me. I stare at her for a second.  “What?” I ask. “Why, is somebody going to be mean to me or something?”   She smiles. “Oh, yeah.”

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Art Books Inter-faith Intra-faith

Teaching Kids the Holy Quran…with Legos!

I’ve blogged on occasion about Legos. You might remember me mentioning The Brick Testament,which retells a number of famous (and in some cases shocking) stories from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Well, I appear to be the last person in the Islamophere to notice the wonderful blog Teaching Kids the Holy Quran, which aims to do the same for the Quran, but with some innovative twists. via akramsrazor.typepad.com

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Politics

The Dangers of Anti-Sharia Laws | Article | First Things

Article | First Things. Though popular with secularists and religious conservatives, anti-Sharia legislation does not defend against theocracy but calls into question our society’s fundamental commitments to meaningful religious liberty and meaningful access to the courts. These commitments have been relied on by generations of Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, and Jews, and to try to remove them for Muslims both is unjust to Muslims and sets a dangerous precedent for other religious groups.

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Politics

The Boy Who Cried Lone Wolf – By J.M. Berger | Foreign Policy

The Boy Who Cried Lone Wolf – By J.M. Berger | Foreign Policy. The Moroccan-American man arrested Friday for attempting to blow up the U.S. Capitol building, Amine El Khalifi, was also far from alone. He was in contact with men he thought were part of al Qaeda, and those men handed him a complete (but inert) suicide vest and an automatic weapon to carry out his attack. The fact that those men were FBI undercover agents is beside the point: If someone claiming to work for al Qaeda hands you a fully assembled bomb for your attack, you are…

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Politics

Joshua Stanton: The NYPD Should Build, Not Disrupt Faith

Joshua Stanton: The NYPD Should Build, Not Disrupt Faith. The very logic behind this NYPD initiative raises my hackles. Is a religious community really free to assemble when it does not feel safe doing so? Is the NYPD truly fulfilling its mandate by alienating one of America’s religious communities? My mind is as full of worry when contemplating these questions as the hearts of so many Muslim students, concerned about the safety of their campus communities.

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