“Any ethnic or religious group that is new to American politics is going to go through trouble,” he said, reaching next to his office desk to open a book called “Jews in American Politics.”

He read aloud a passage about how Jews were vilified and blocked from political office until their expertise in various fields proved crucial to the New Deal.

“It’s going to be the same way for Muslims,” he said. “It is just going to take a while.” "(NY Times)

What's unique about the US is that in every decade, there's different ethnic group or religion that get vilified or looked down upon, the poor Irish, the dirty Italians, Japanese, Chinese, the Lebanese, Jews, etc, etc but in the end, those people always manage to rise above and secure themselves in the mainstream strata of US society.

This reminds me of a joke, when a reporter asked whether a certain President whether a Christian can be a President of Egypt; and he answered "not even a Muslim".

 

Criticism is good but it is not helpful (even a constructive one) in the beginning of an idea development.

It is not easy to grow ideas and make it a reality. There are things that you have to worry about and most people know about them. Help your creative process by concentrating on what is possible and less about what is not perfect.

Repeat, refine, retry.

But spare the criticism, even the good intentioned one.

Wait until it is time.

Otherwise, the idea will have no chance whatsoever to become a reality.

A child will never able to walk if he/she was aware of the situation and being critical about it.

A child has no shame of failure - so she developed this amazing creation and development process that stopped somehow at the age of 13, when boys discover girls and girls realize their power over boys.

Find reasons why an idea would work and execute it ruthlessly. Ideas, like talk, are cheap. Execution is the secret of everything.

"Complete calm comes from complete certainty. In today's unnerving, globalizing, sometimes terrifying world, such religious certainty is a balm more in demand than ever. In the new millennium, Muslims are not alone in grasping the relief of submission to authority. The new Pope, despite his criticism of extremist religion and religious violence, represents a return to a more authoritarian form of Catholicism. In the Catholic triad of how we know truth--an eternal dialogue between papal authority, scriptural guidance and the experience of the faithful--Benedict XVI has tilted the balance decisively back toward his own unanswerable truth.

....

If God really is God, then God must, by definition, surpass our human understanding. Not entirely. We have Scripture; we have reason; we have religious authority; we have our own spiritual experiences of the divine. But there is still something we will never grasp, something we can never know--because God is beyond our human categories. And if God is beyond our categories, then God cannot be captured for certain. We cannot know with the kind of surety that allows us to proclaim truth with a capital T. There will always be something that eludes us. If there weren't, it would not be God.
" (Andrew Sullivan)

This is a good essay by Andrew Sullivan about the nature of faith. It is an arrogance of the highest scale when you are so sure that you understand and know the nature God.

And it is also dangerous.

Combine this arrogance with lack of reasons and humanity, what we end up is a world with perpetual conflicts - with God as our toy soldier.

What would happen if tomorrow we all wake up to the news that Mecca was hit by a nuclear bomb?

Will there be riots on the street? Will there be bloodshed?

Will Israel or the USA be accussed as the culprit behind it?

(the destruction of Al-Aksari Mosque)

Let's assume that Al-Qaeda is found later as the culprit behind it (after two months or so)

How would that change the world?

Let me introduce you to Black Swan Event.

"Taleb now focuses on being a researcher in the philosophy of randomness and the role of uncertainty in science and society ^[6] , with particular emphasis on the philosophy of history and the role of high-impact random events in determining the course of history, which he calls "black swans".

It is important to note that "black swans" may also be fortunate rare events and not just negative or catastrophic events.

Taleb believes that most people ignore "black swans" because we are more comfortable seeing the world as something structured, ordinary, and comprehensible. Taleb calls this blindness the Platonic fallacy, and argues that it leads to three distortions:

1. Narrative fallacy. Creating a story post-hoc so that an event will seem to have a cause.
2. Ludic fallacy. Believing that the structured randomness found in games resembles the unstructured randomness found in life. Taleb faults random walk models and other inspirations of modern probability theory for this inadequacy.
3. Statistical regress fallacy. Believing that the probability of future events is predictable by examining occurrences of past events. " (Wikipedia)

Nassim Taleb is a Lebanese philosopher of randomness that introduce this concept of Black Swan as random events that change the course of history. He thinks that 9/11 was a black swan, that all those after the facts of possible preventions would not work anyway because that event was a perfect storm (just like the big bang - on how if a variable was off, the universe would not have existed)

The next Black Swan would be a terorist nuclear strike anywhere - but especially at religious sites- be it Mecca, the Vatican or Jerussalem. The first nuclear strike in this century will have the potential of putting globalization in cardiac arrest, increasing the cost of connection dramatically and change the way we live tremendeously.

Would you support retaliating in nuclear if the terrorist claim their responsibility for the attack? A bomb in Tel-Aviv retaliated with another one or two in Tehran? One in Karachi for one in Bombay?

If Sharm el Shek turns into a parking lot tomorrow, would Egpytian demands the terrorists to be captured/killed or would half of Bedouin in Sinai be slaughtered in revenge?

This is why the power play between Iran and the rest of the International community is extremely dangerous - they heighten the possibilities of a black swan event - it's a gate to "you don't want to think about it" era where personal liberties would be curtailed in the name of security, where human would be abandoned in the name of preventions - to prevent a second attack.

And to achieve this nightmare scenario, all you need is the bomb - the target can be anywhere and we will all live in atmosphere of fear.

 

"WASHINGTON, DC—Led by a bipartisan group of senators critical of White House policy on suspected terrorists, the Senate passed a bill Thursday that prohibits interrogators from exceeding 100 amps per testicle when questioning detainees. "Even in times of war, it is counterproductive and wrong to employ certain inhumane interrogation techniques, and using three-digit amperage levels on the testicles of captives constitutes torture," said Sen. John Warner (R-VA), who has also supported reducing the size of attack dogs and the height of nude pyramids. "Using amperages of 99 and lower, with approved surge protectors on the jumper-cable clamps, are the hallmarks of a civilized society." The legislation did not address amperage restrictions on suspected terrorists' labia." (The Onion) You can't improve on The Onion.

Now the stupid Congress try to rubber stamp the outregous "terror bill" that will end the concept of Habeas Corpus (the right to face your accuser) - jezz, the War in Iraq has turned the US congress to a Saddam Parliament.

"

Here’s what happens when this irresponsible Congress railroads a profoundly important bill to serve the mindless politics of a midterm election: The Bush administration uses Republicans’ fear of losing their majority to push through ghastly ideas about antiterrorism that will make American troops less safe and do lasting damage to our 217-year-old nation of laws — while actually doing nothing to protect the nation from terrorists. Democrats betray their principles to avoid last-minute attack ads. Our democracy is the big loser.

Republicans say Congress must act right now to create procedures for charging and trying terrorists — because the men accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks are available for trial. That’s pure propaganda. Those men could have been tried and convicted long ago, but President Bush chose not to. He held them in illegal detention, had them questioned in ways that will make real trials very hard, and invented a transparently illegal system of kangaroo courts to convict them.

It was only after the Supreme Court issued the inevitable ruling striking down Mr. Bush’s shadow penal system that he adopted his tone of urgency. It serves a cynical goal: Republican strategists think they can win this fall, not by passing a good law but by forcing Democrats to vote against a bad one so they could be made to look soft on terrorism.

Last week, the White House and three Republican senators announced a terrible deal on this legislation that gave Mr. Bush most of what he wanted, including a blanket waiver for crimes Americans may have committed in the service of his antiterrorism policies. Then Vice President Dick Cheney and his willing lawmakers rewrote the rest of the measure so that it would give Mr. Bush the power to jail pretty much anyone he wants for as long as he wants without charging them, to unilaterally reinterpret the Geneva Conventions, to authorize what normal people consider torture, and to deny justice to hundreds of men captured in error.

These are some of the bill’s biggest flaws:

Enemy Combatants: A dangerously broad definition of “illegal enemy combatant” in the bill could subject legal residents of the United States, as well as foreign citizens living in their own countries, to summary arrest and indefinite detention with no hope of appeal. The president could give the power to apply this label to anyone he wanted.

The Geneva Conventions: The bill would repudiate a half-century of international precedent by allowing Mr. Bush to decide on his own what abusive interrogation methods he considered permissible. And his decision could stay secret — there’s no requirement that this list be published.

Habeas Corpus: Detainees in U.S. military prisons would lose the basic right to challenge their imprisonment. These cases do not clog the courts, nor coddle terrorists. They simply give wrongly imprisoned people a chance to prove their innocence.

Judicial Review: The courts would have no power to review any aspect of this new system, except verdicts by military tribunals. The bill would limit appeals and bar legal actions based on the Geneva Conventions, directly or indirectly. All Mr. Bush would have to do to lock anyone up forever is to declare him an illegal combatant and not have a trial.

Coerced Evidence: Coerced evidence would be permissible if a judge considered it reliable — already a contradiction in terms — and relevant. Coercion is defined in a way that exempts anything done before the passage of the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, and anything else Mr. Bush chooses.

Secret Evidence: American standards of justice prohibit evidence and testimony that is kept secret from the defendant, whether the accused is a corporate executive or a mass murderer. But the bill as redrafted by Mr. Cheney seems to weaken protections against such evidence.

Offenses: The definition of torture is unacceptably narrow, a virtual reprise of the deeply cynical memos the administration produced after 9/11. Rape and sexual assault are defined in a retrograde way that covers only forced or coerced activity, and not other forms of nonconsensual sex. The bill would effectively eliminate the idea of rape as torture.

•There is not enough time to fix these bills, especially since the few Republicans who call themselves moderates have been whipped into line, and the Democratic leadership in the Senate seems to have misplaced its spine. If there was ever a moment for a filibuster, this was it.

We don’t blame the Democrats for being frightened. The Republicans have made it clear that they’ll use any opportunity to brand anyone who votes against this bill as a terrorist enabler. But Americans of the future won’t remember the pragmatic arguments for caving in to the administration.

They’ll know that in 2006, Congress passed a tyrannical law that will be ranked with the low points in American democracy, our generation’s version of the Alien and Sedition Act" (NY Times Editorial)

"

I'm publicly calling out Michelle Malkin, someone whom I often disagree with but usually respect. I hope she will think about it and respond thoughtfully and not angrily or flippantly.

The following emblem is carved into the headstone of many brave Americans who died for their country, including some who are buried at Arlington National Cemetary, a place I have visited and been humbled by:

(More here.)"

(Dean Esmay)

""We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another," - Jonathan Swift."

That's when we use religion for morality in the small and not for morality in the large.

Chancellor Angela Merkel urged Germans on Wednesday not to bow to fears of Islamic violence after a Berlin opera house canceled a Mozart work over concerns some scenes could enrage Muslims and pose a security risk.

"I think the cancellation was a mistake. I think self-censorship does not help us against people who want to practise violence in the name of Islam," she told reporters. "It makes no sense to retreat."

Merkel's comments, which echoed those of other senior German politicians, fueled a row over the cancellation of Mozart's "Idomeneo" that overshadowed a government-sponsored conference to promote dialogue with the country's 3.2 million Muslims.

Berlin's Deutsche Oper said on Monday it had pulled performances of the opera, which features a scene depicting the severed heads of the Prophet Mohammad, Buddha and Jesus, after police warned it could pose an "incalculable" security risk.

(Reuters)

The response of institution such as Deutche Oper is very important in easing the tension between Muslims and the West. They should have said no to the threat and keep doing the show. Right now, Muslims in Germany have to deal with this  issue of some stupid anonymous threat.