Islam in the News

This morning, my wife asked why a Florida crackpot pastor with a tiny congregation and a California (convicted felon) movie maker get worldwide attention. Why would anyone pay attention to such nonsense? That's the relevant question, and interestingly, the only major news source asking that question is Al Jazeera.

Is the reaction to anti-Islam film justified? - Al Jazeera 

At issue, the media's sensationalizing drivel from spectacularly inconsequential origins. These two have nothing significant to say to the world. There are millions with more relevant and beneficial contributions who are ignored by the media, perhaps because they lack the sensational splash that helps the stations ratings.

The movie trailer went viral after it was splashed across the middle-east by the news media. It wasn't news, just sensational trash, but it was given center stage as though it was the American stance on Islam. Shallow-thinking viewers believed the media and people died.

The Florida pastor, Terry Jones, has a dwindling congregation of about 50, the church has no mission statement, and Jones has an 'honorary doctorate' from an unaccredited school in California. Jones admits he doesn't know any Muslims, doesn't know the origin of Sharia law, and has never participated in any inter-faith discussions.

He has no knowledge of that against which he protests, he's never allowed his own position to be objectively examined, he has neither credentials nor peer reviewed work to support his philosophy or his actions. And the news media makes him world-known. Nonsense. (And as a friend pointed out today, this 'Christian' pastor seems to have abandoned Christian practices such as 'do unto others...'.)

Note to self; the major media outlets seem to be less than reliable information sources.  None of the major outlets seem to offer reliable investigative journalism. Often it seems that their content leans more toward eye-catching splash.

True? Are any of these media sources objective, unbiased, and legitimate journalism? Most are not most of the time, it seems, and perhaps none are all of the time.

While the originators of the slanderous and inflammatory film are fully culpable in the subsequent violence, the greater guilt rests with the news media that sensationalized and misrepresented the film as representative of U.S. attitudes.

Not all Muslims are so foolish. 

Fortunately.  In many places, citizens have been quick to condemn the violent behavior of the fanatical few.  Libya and Egypt today, both have seen spontaneous crowds of the peaceful protestors.

We have a couple of friends in the middle of all this violence and upheaval.  This, they say, this is not Islam, and this is not the heart of the people. 

Al Jazeera goes on to warn that the religious oppression, hatred and violence is "a toxic brew that inevitably begets more of the same"

Islamist Violence

There's a difference between Islam and Islamist extremists, just like there's a difference between Christian and Christian radical fundamentalists, perhaps.  Neither Christianity nor Islam support or endorse the indiscriminate murder and violence we've seen.

Christians and Muslims enjoy a

day at the beach - Djibouti

Interested in how it's supposed to work?

Just a few moments ago in Kenya, a pastor friend reports that "Had a wonderful home fellowship today in an Islamic village; the Muslims were very good to welcome us.  They even said praise the lord with us."

Kenya: Christians and Muslims Vow to Stay United

Religious leaders from the Christian and Muslim faiths
have vowed to remain vigilant on terrorists following twin
attacks on churches in Garissa.  The religious leaders said
those who attacked the churches were doing so as to create
animosity and hatred between the Muslim and Christians
who have been living harmoniously for decades.

Why do most Muslims and Christians live graciously side by side in Kenya?  And in Djibouti, it turns out.  And Egypt!

Why do we see such strange wickedness on both sides but among just the few, even here in the U.S.?

             "Do unto others...?"

Rev. Terry Jones, the leader of a small

Florida church which supports anti-Islam

philosophy says he is determined to go

through with his plan to burn copies of the

Qu'ran on September 11 in an international

'Burn-a-Koran Day', despite pressure from

the White House, religious leaders and

other people across the world to call it

off. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

has called the planned event 'distrustful

and disgraceful' means of marking the

9/11 tragedy. Muslim cleric Mohammad

Mukhtar in Afghanistan said that, if the

burning is carried on, Americans 'will be

killed wherever they are seen', while others

expressed similar fears that it could trigger

violence across the world.

    Law enforcement has identified
Nakoula Basseley Nakoula as the
man behind “Innocence of Muslims,”
the anti-Islam movie that is widely
blamed for riots around the world,
the AP reports.
    Nakoula had previously claimed he
had a role in the film’s creation, but
insisted he was not the director. Earlier
reports centered around a certain Sam
Bacile, but many doubts have been cast
on Bacile’s identity. Cell phones tied to
Bacile and Nakoula traced to the same
address.
    Nakoula ran afoul of the law in 2010, when
he pleaded no contest to federal bank fraud
charges after being indicted in a somewhat
intricate scheme involving fake bank
accounts created using stolen Social
Security numbers.  He was given a 21 month
prison sentence and had to pay $790,000.
    Actors in “Innocence of Muslims” say they 
were duped by the man claiming to be Bacile,
and that the film as they knew it was not
about Islam. One actress claims all the
offensive references were dubbed over the
lines the cast actually read. The movie was
originally titled “Desert Warriors.”

A crackpot Florida 'pastor' publicly burned copies of the Koran.  Why?  It's not like his congregation was going to read them.  It inflamed sentiment around the world.  He plans to do it again.

A California troublemaker with a criminal background made a movie which he later dubbed with anti-Islamic slander without the actors in the movie knowing about it.  He put words in their mouths, sacrilege to Muslims, and inflamed sentiment around the world.  

It's worth remembering, there's a difference between Islam and Christianity on one side, and Islamist extremism and Christian radical fundamentalism on the other.  

In the days following the brutal attack on
All Saints Church in Alexandria, solidarity
between Muslims and Copts has seen an
unprecedented peak. Millions of Egyptians
changed their Facebook profile pictures to
the image of a cross within a crescent, the
symbol of an "Egypt for All". Around the
city, banners went up calling for unity, and
 depicting mosques and churches, crosses
and crescents, together as one.

It's a heart difference, as our Kenyan pastor has pointed out.  Hate speech, a willingness to harm another, and a murderous heart accompany the latter.  It's perhaps the same as when Hitler and the Nazis took over the church in Germany and persuaded them that they were somehow superior to the rest of the world and justified in exterminating them.  Much the same, indeed.  

Dear Lord and Father of mankind,
Forgive our foolish ways;
Reclothe us in our rightful mind,
In purer lives Thy service find....

A Child's Walk

A child's walk through life is an easy one, isn't it?  Making a place in our community for a newborn isn’t difficult.  A home and family, doctors and medicine, schools and vacations, college and career; it’s an easy path, pretty much, isn’t it?

It is indeed easy for some, but certainly not for all. There's a huge and widening gap between those who 'have' and those who 'have not'.

No one chooses poverty for their family, but for many, it comes anyway.  None choose for their children to be fast-tracked to failure.  No parent chooses for their family to go hungry and slowly die from curable illnesses.  But it comes despite their attempts at escape.

Elias stands with his mother and baby brother before
leaving for school from their temporary home.  Mom
was forced to move into the shelter with her four
children when she lost her nurse's assistant job
two months ago.

Pointing at the poor in condescension, as though through some character flaw, poverty came from within them ...  speaks too truthfully about the one pointing.  We miss, perhaps, an underlying truth: poverty is a crime, and the poor are its victims.  Is that true?

This November, do we have a candidate in mind who understands the issue in our country?   

If a community exists just as a coalition of businesses and the families who own them, of homeowners and consumers; well then, it makes sense that they would provide for themselves to the exclusion of others.  No sense in diluting the value of resources by attaching too many teat-suckers to the udder, I suppose. 

Public schooling needn’t provide a quality education for the non-contributing members of society and their offspring.  They’re not in any position to make good use of it anyway.

Healthcare needn’t be made affordable, particularly.  Basic services should be enough for the masses.

Food distribution should follow the flow of money, naturally.  Just like every other commodity, food costs money to produce, to distribute, to buy and consume.  It’s natural that way.  Food, transportation, education, energy, water, roads, police, street lights, parks, libraries, shopping centers, all of them naturally follow the money because they all cost something.

If on the other hand, a community (or nation) exists for the sake of its citizenry, then the disenfranchisement of some is a troublesome circumstance.  If the lesser resourced among us are marginalized, then we at the center are the ones who have done them and their children a great disservice.

Thus arises the questions of what is to be done.  

Both the issue and its solution are structural, not partisan, not political party specific, and not addressed by one-line slogans.  Solutions, by the way, are many and easily incorporated into local and regional processes.  All the impediments to such ... all the impediments are political and cultural will. 

“The social contract is starting to unravel in many countries,” OECD Secretary-General
Angel Gurria said in a statement.   “This study dispels the assumptions that the benefits
of economic growth will automatically trickle down to the disadvantaged and that the
greater inequality fosters greater social mobility.”

The gap between rich and poor is a wide one and getting wider rapidly. In the 30-nation Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, only Turkey and Mexico have more unequal societies than the United States. “Nowhere has this trend been so stark as in the United States,” the OECD concluded in a 2008 study. In the U.S., the rich-poor gap has widened by 22 percent (1967-2015), more than in most developed countries.

Raghuram Rajan, the IMF’s former chief economist, says countries with high levels of inequality tend to produce ineffective economic policies. Political systems in economically divided countries grow polarized and immobilized by the sort of zero-sum politics now gripping Washington, he said. 

Welfare, by the way, isn't a solution.  It began well, and even now is a safety net for many along the way, but it's often more of a problem for a given community than a benefit.  With billions invested each year, we've unintentionally rewritten the culture of the poor.  Taking advantage of the opportunity offered, the poor are often entangled and eventually trapped as they adjust to what's required for continued survival.  It's a dead end that kills every good thing along the way.

Simple solutions?  Can you think of a few?

“There is nothing inevitable about high and growing inequalities,” Gurria said. “Up-skilling the workforce is by far the most powerful instrument to counter rising inequality. The investment in people must begin in early childhood and be followed through into formal education and work.” 

A Child's Smile

Ever wonder why a child's smile might be so appealing?
         Or why children are so often delightful when grownups are so often not?
             

Kids; some possibilities:

• They're wide open to new information.
• They're excited to try things they've not tried before.
• They'll take the leap if you'll promise to catch them!
• They're inspired by a more distant horizon...

And they're willing to share it all with their friends.

Doing things together is an end in itself; they call it 'play'.

Then there's ...                                                                            

... of such is the kingdom of heaven ...? 

Was Jesus just being poetic, or is this instructive somehow.

Ready to go at a moment's notice ....

And, what's the message?

Go thou therefore and build a building with chairs where you may sit ...

Be like everyone else all the time, except go to this building on Sundays ...

Go, sit in this place which I have shown thee, and there sit til the trumpet sounds and the cows come home ...

Even teens can be retrieved from the edge of adulthood sometimes ...

Spend years getting ready to be useful.  ...  Years and years.  You'll probably want to still be in a class when you're really old.

NOT!        

Brought to you by Hope For Every Child and  TexasEx.Org 
Children pictured here are dear friends from Kenya and from Sao Tome & Principe, 2010-2012      

Go Where the Silence Is

... failing to engage the public in a fact-based discussion of the hard choices that will very soon be forced on Washington.

Getting to the bottom of things; I wish sometimes that I had the skill and guts to be a journalist.  Too many gaping holes in the news; sensational tidbits with no backing.  Can't help thinking... honest questions have been left behind, along with the facts, the objective truths we were trying so hard to face. 

Dear God, this is not what we need.

Spotlighting competitive spins on a controversial issue does not constitute good journalism. Facts coupled with a wide range of perspectives on those facts does.

Amy Goodman,
investigative journalist

For a non-provocative example from a few years back: a headline on NPR in '04 was “Bush's plan to reform Social Security.” The show aired a clip of Bush claiming that Social Security is in crisis and that our record budget deficits are caused by shortfalls in the program. Cut to next story—we heard no follow-up, no checking on whether there's any truth to the claim (in fact, the reverse is true—the Social Security trust fund is subsidizing the rest of the federal budget). It's as if there are no facts beyond what the president says. You'd never know by listening to Morning Edition's segment that there is a controversy over whether Social Security is really in crisis. Contrast that with a subsequent independent news program. After listening to guests debating the merits of privatizing Social Security, the host, Amy Goodman, asks a question that shows she's done her homework:

“… Every ... proposal acknowledges that private accounts by themselves do little to solve the system's projected shortfall ... Instead, these proposals rely on deep cuts in benefits to future retirees. ... The controller general of the Government Accountability Office … said that the creation of private accounts for Social Security will not deal with the solvency and sustainability of the Social Security fund. Your response to that?”

It's a straightforward question.  It assumes there's a world of facts that listeners have a right to know and that deserve the light. Spotlighting competitive spins on a controversial issue does not constitute good journalism. Facts coupled with a wide range of perspectives on those facts does. 

Goodman is a recipient of journalism's highest honors, including the Robert F. Kennedy Prize for International Reporting, the George Polk Award, and the Alfred DuPont-Columbia Journalism Award.

"Independent media can go to where the silence is and break the sound barrier, doing what the corporate networks refuse to do."

Which brings us to Presidential Campaign Politics '12

• Democrats and Republicans have spent hundreds of millions (actually) of dollars in talking about each other and in spinning the truth. 
•  Neither candidate has yet objectively or accurately portrayed either themselves or the other.  Each party has deliberately misrepresented the truth, and in some cases, lied outright.

  This isn't what we want or need!

"... the deplorable tone of this particular campaign. Besides being marked by a cavalier disregard for facts on both sides, the campaign also has become bitter and trivial. It is failing to engage the public in a fact-based discussion of the hard choices that will very soon be forced on Washington."

... and I approved this message.

Triviality 1:  In Chicago, the Obama campaign for weeks has been consumed with the date (1999 or 2001?) of Romney’s departure from Bain Capital, the venture-capital firm he founded. The reason? The Obama campaign wants to blame Romney for management decisions made after Feb. 11, 1999, at a few of the companies in which Bain invested. 

Romney did retain ownership and corporate titles listed in routine SEC filings after February 1999, but no evidence has yet shown that he exercised any active control over Bain’s investment decisions during this time. Romney was working 12-hour days, six days a week, as president of the 2002 Winter Olympics committee and was not actively involved in Bain.

Factless claim 2:  Obama's team has even stooped to make a false claim that Romney favored banning abortion in cases of rape or incest, as though the contrast between their actual positions was not sufficiently clear.

 In doing so, the president mirrors the distortions of opponents who once accused him of favoring “infanticide.”

... and I approved this message.

• Neither party has been willing to concede their own mistakes, their expensive and ineffective solutions, their big ideas that didn't play out and got dropped.  

• Neither party is willing to note their own contribution to difficulties we now face.  And ...

Exaggeration 3:  For his part, Romney has claimed to have created as many as 100,000 jobs while at Bain, happily taking credit for hiring that happened long after he left, and offering no actual accounting for the figure. 

Groundless accusation 4:  Romney has accused Obama of waging a “war on women” based on job losses from a recession that started more than a year before Obama took office. 

Outright lies 5: Romney has falsely stated in a TV ad that an inspector general found stimulus contracts “were steered to ‘friends and family,’ ” when the IG made no such finding. 

Knowing misrepresentation 6:  Romney has repeatedly misrepresented Obama’s new health care law.

Pointed Slander 7:  Obama campaign aides recently suggested Romney was guilty of a “felony.” 

Groundless insult 8:  A Romney surrogate said the president should “learn to be an American.”

And as yet, there has been SILENCE on many things that matter.

• ... And neither candidate speaks candidly of what he would actually do if elected.  

Here's a route from facts to decision.

Skipped steps leave you foolish and

inadequately informed.  Decisions,

particularly the big ones, deserve the

care and study that brings wisdom to

the table.  In its absence, all we have is

an opinion that someone else has given us.

The choice of president deserves more than an

advertising campaign where the wealthiest
clique wins.

• Romney won’t say how he plans to cut taxes further without losing revenues. Cutting or eliminating the deduction for home mortgages or for state income taxes? 
• Obama says nothing about how Social Security is to be preserved. Raising the payroll tax, perhaps?
• Big deal? Well, we're left to choose on popularity instead of the candidate's offered content.

Neither has offered a coherent plan.  Neither dares talk about past performance in depth.  Promises to repeal this or balance that are unsupported and in many cases, somewhere between unsupportable and impossible.  Both sides are avoiding objective discussion, and major media is letting them do so. This is not what we as a country and as thoughtful citizens need.

 

 

More silence: ... and neither party has heard or responded to the vocal dissidents.  Now world wide, OWS protesters are being routinely abused, illegally detained, but none so far are being heard or answered.

We criticize the middle eastern countries for their violent response to dissent and protest.  In the west, we offer the same response only with a somewhat reduced level of violence.  A disappointing hypocrisy.

Rather than sincerely engage the protesters, government here is doing what it can to intimidate them, to silence them, to push them aside.  Federal, state, and municipal regulators are reshaping the law to preclude a public forum for the dissenters.



Much like the Vietnam War era protests, dissidents are classified as anarchists, traitors, anti-American trouble makers.

The establishment will probably have to kill a few before we realize that their protest belongs to us all.

How many times have we seen this same scenario?

Kayaking through alligators

"Today's kayak trip through the mangrove
tunnels was so fun and beautiful," she says.
A therapeutic reprieve from the weight of daily life,
"... when I'm on the move, my brain can finally
be where I am and no where else."

An Atlanta lawyer describes her furiously-paced life and her discovery.  "When you are kayaking through the alligators."

"People ask why I don't just sit and do nothing when I'm overwhelmed and exhausted. It's because when I sit I can still think, but when I'm on the move, my brain can finally be where I am and no where else."

She's right, of course. Whether it's an hour's walk around a park or a month's trek through the Omo Valley (I wish), it's a chance to (ctrl/alt/del) reboot and start fresh.

Simple stuff. Take a friend.  They could probably use the break too.