November 15, 2009 | 6:47 pm

‘Going Muslim’ the new ‘going postal’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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Varadarajan

Tunku Varadarajan is no journalistic lightweight. A former managing editor for the Wall Street Journal, the clinical professor of business at NYU made an argument in his Forbes column last week that probably left most Muslim Americans, not to mention many non-Muslim Americans, feeling really, really uncomfortable.

In the wake of the alleged rampage by Army Maj. Nidal M. Hasan at Fort Hood, Varadarajan suggests adding a new phrase to the American lexicon—“going Muslim.”

He wrote:

This phrase would describe the turn of events where a seemingly integrated Muslim-American—a friendly donut vendor in New York, say, or an officer in the U.S. Army at Fort Hood—discards his apparent integration into American society and elects to vindicate his religion in an act of messianic violence against his fellow Americans. This would appear to be what happened in the case of Maj. Hasan.

The difference between “going postal,” in the conventional sense, and “going Muslim,” in the sense that I suggest, is that there would not necessarily be a psychological “snapping” point in the case of the imminently violent Muslim; instead, there could be a calculated discarding of camouflage—the camouflage of integration—in an act of revelatory catharsis. In spite of suggestions by some who know him that he had a history of “harassment” as a Muslim in the army, Maj. Hasan did not “snap” in the “postal” manner. He gave away his possessions on the morning of his day of murder. He even gave away—to a neighbor—a packet of frozen broccoli that he did not wish to see go to waste, even as he mapped in his mind the laying waste of lives at Fort Hood. His was a meticulous, even punctilious “departure.”

We are a civilized society. One of our cardinal rules of coexistence is that we (try always to) judge people only by their actions and not by their identity, whether racial, religious or sexual. This is our great strength as a society, and also, in the present circumstances, our great weakness: How to address the threat posed by the fact that, of the hundreds of thousands of Muslims in our midst, there are a few (perhaps many more than a few) who are so radicalized that they would kill their fellow Americans?

Talk about fear-mongering. Just hammers home that the reaction of Muslim Americans to domestic terror in the name of Allah must be incredibly similar to the Jewish response to gonifs like Bernard Madoff.

Ali Eteraz shared one such example from a Muslim writer for the Daily Kos. The headline sums up the sentiment: “F**k you Nidal Malik Hasan.”

November 15, 2009 | 2:15 pm

A West Bank story: female football stars

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

It’s not the kind of football I’ll be watching later today. But footy is big pretty much everywhere outside of the United States. That’s definitely the case in the Mideast, from where comes this story about the first international home game for the Palestinian women’s team:

To put the match in context, as many as 16,000 people crammed in to watch Palestine and Jordan play. When the US women’s team last played at home, a 1-0 victory over Canada in New York last July, just 8,433 fans turned up.

But not everyone in attendance was there for football. Outside several thousand men who couldn’t get in clambered on to surrounding rooftops, others scrambled up nearby wire fences, whilst some even crowded on top of a parked bus. Although a different type of union was on their minds. “All these men are here to see the women and I’m here to see the chicks too,” admitted Abdullah Alawad, a 20 year old architecture student. “Maybe the girls are here to see the guys too,” he added rather hopefully.

The game itself was a surprisingly tetchy affair, with two players stretchered off after being on the receiving end of several crunching tackles, much to the anger of the Jordanian team’s (male) coach. His mood wasn’t helped when Palestine won two dubious penalties. A late Jordanian equalizer secured the 2-2 draw they deserved. But for the women watching, the result was less important than the game itself. After the final whistle both sets of players hugged and embarked on another lap of honor in front of an ecstatic crowd.

“We want to prove that we are better than the men at football,” explained Asala el Wazeer, an 18 year old student who stood with her friends in the crowd. “It has taken us years to get to this point. We are very proud of the [Palestinian] team.”

In a way, she was right. Palestine had played Jordan in the first ever men’s international exactly one year previously. They only managed to score once. But for Thaljieh, held aloft on the shoulders of her team mates in front of a crowd that included the Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Dr. Salam Fayyad, the match sent a powerful message to the outside world.

“This is important and shows the world that we don’t care about the barriers and the checkpoints,” Thaljieh shouted over the noise.

The story, either by design or coincidence, is bereft of politics or religion. Read the rest here.

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November 13, 2009 | 1:14 pm

From ‘Children of Dust’ we are born

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Just in time for Friday prayers comes Ali Eteraz’s “Children of Dust,” a memoir about life in Pakistan and the Dirty South. Eteraz, a friend who followed the opposite career path, has been getting a good deal of attention for his first book. (Hopefully, now he’ll be able to get back to blogging.) Here’s what The Washington Post had to say:

Eteraz grew up attending a madrassa in rural Pakistan, where he spent his days memorizing the Koran and enduring harsh beatings for his mistakes. When his family relocated to Alabama during his adolescence, he struggled to fit in with his peers while adhering to the strict religious practices his family enforced. “I was too embarrassed to admit to non-Muslims that it was Islam—archaic, anachronistic, exotic Islam—that controlled me,” Eteraz writes. “Admitting that would lead me to be viewed as an outsider—and I wanted nothing more than to be American.”

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Amid all the soul-searching, Eteraz manages to amusingly describe his teenage antics and poke some fun at himself for all the superficial ways he tried to make friends envy him for his piety. These honest details make his story even more compelling.

“Children of Dust” also got blurbed in O—that’s Oprah’s magazine—and Eteraz appeared last week on “Fresh Air.” Definitely living the dream.

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November 12, 2009 | 3:20 pm

No proof of grave desecration at Jewish cemetery

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Mountain out of a mortuary?

Eden Memorial Park, which a few months ago was accused of desecrating 500 graves at the Jewish cemetery, is reportedly clean:

State regulators have found no evidence of grave desecrations at Eden Memorial Park as alleged in a class-action lawsuit against one of the nation’s largest Jewish cemeteries, officials said.

An investigation by the state Cemetery and Funeral Bureau has uncovered no evidence the Mission Hills cemetery disturbed up to 1,500 graves to make room for new remains, as alleged by plaintiff’s attorneys.

“We’ve never seen any evidence of stuff like this happening,” said Russ Heimerich, spokesman for the Department of Consumer Affairs, which oversees the bureau. “As a regulator, we have not received any complaints.

“Over the years we’ve inspected this place, the kind of things that are being alleged are not the kind of things that you can hide - excavated remains.

Read more here from my former Daily News colleague Dana Bartholomew here.

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November 11, 2009 | 10:54 pm

O’Reilly: ‘We can’t kill all the Muslims’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Why do I go to law school? Well, it’s not so I can spend the day off in the library basement outlining torts. But maybe it’s for the story tips. Like this one from Sara, who picked up on a clip from “The O’Reilly Factor” during which Big Bill said “Islam is the problem.”

The portion of the transcript in question:

“Now let me play Devil’s Advocate here. Barack Obama wants to win hearts and minds in the Middle East, in the Muslim world, which is a good thing. And you know that, as a soldier, we can’t kill all the Muslims. So we want to win over as many hearts and minds of as many good, moderate Muslims as we can.”

Yikes. And I thought the comment from an Ohioan on NPR two years ago, about keeping those Muslims out of America, was bad.

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November 11, 2009 | 8:42 pm

Islamophobia story of the year

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Reservist Jason Bruce

Think this guy took to call to arms in the war on terror a bit seriously?

Marine reservist Jasen Bruce was getting clothes out of the trunk of his car Monday evening when a bearded man in a robe approached him.

That man, a Greek Orthodox priest named Father Alexios Marakis, speaks little English and was lost, police said. He wanted directions.

What the priest got instead, police say, was a tire iron to the head. Then he was chased for three blocks and pinned to the ground — as the Marine kept a 911 operator on the phone, saying he had captured a terrorist.

Police say Bruce offered several reasons to explain his actions:

The man tried to rob him.

The man grabbed Bruce’s crotch and made an overt sexual advance in perfect English.

The man yelled “Allahu Akbar,” Arabic for “God is great,” the same words some witnesses said the Fort Hood shooting suspect uttered last week.

“That’s what they tell you right before they blow you up,” police say Bruce told them.

Pretty incredible story. May get 2009’s Islamophobia award. Read the rest here.

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November 11, 2009 | 2:30 pm

Jesus is My Friend

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Jesus is my friend, but I could never pull off that vest and open-collar shirt.

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November 10, 2009 | 1:52 pm

Where the Taliban fighters are buried

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Dexter Filkins, still a stud.

Here he brings us up to speed on a withering Taliban cemetery:

The graveyard, next to this tiny village north of Kabul, sits a few miles from what was once the front line against the rebels who fought the Taliban after the group captured Kabul in 1996. Those rebels, then known as the Northern Alliance, finally overran the Taliban and captured Kabul — with American help — in November 2001.

Eight years after the last fighter was buried here, the cemetery has fallen into decrepitude. Many of the gravestones are broken and smashed — the vandalism, the villagers say, of a marauding anti-Taliban militia. Weeds and rocks and tattered prayer flags obscure much of what is left. The villagers of Tarakhel, though Taliban enthusiasts, have given up trying to care for the place.

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And they are with them now. The Taliban cemetery may have fallen into disrepair, but the villagers say the Taliban are fighting the good fight, just as they were in bygone days.

“They’ll be back, you know,” Mr. Zahir said.

Read the rest here.

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November 9, 2009 | 9:06 pm

God and the Berlin Wall

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Thank God for this day. Really. Twenty years ago today, the Berlin Wall met its maker.

As Sarah Pulliam Bailey, my newest colleague at GetReligion, and a longtime colleague at Christianity Today, points out, God had a lot to do with the fall. It was prayer services that led to peaceful protests to led to the fall of the wall. Similar, I would imagine, to the Christian conviction behind the Solidarity movement in Poland.

From the Wall Street Journal:

These peaceful protests that eventually brought down the Berlin Wall, known as the Monday Demonstrations, were an outgrowth of prayer services that had been held at St. Nicholas’s Church in Leipzig since 1982. By Oct. 9, 1989, the demonstration at St. Nicholas had swelled to more than 70,000 people. Others in East German cities followed suit.

“Often these protesters were protected by the church. At the Gethsemane Church in a working-class district of East Berlin, recently, the church’s role in the protest was clearly evident: Politics and prayer marked the evening, and the walls of the church were covered with fliers promoting political causes,” the Journal wrote.

By the summer of 1989, “these groups began spilling into the streets, where their boldness caught the imagination of the public. Over the summer, their cause got additional impetus: Hungary opened its borders, creating an avenue for East Germans to escape to the West, and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev visited, counseling the East German government to heed its social unrest by changing.”

More here.

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November 9, 2009 | 1:18 pm

How to pick your religion

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

For all you seekers out there, here’s a pretty funny flowchart designed by Holy Taco to help you find your way. Christians, for example, believe in one God, love bacon and are not naturally annoying. On the other hand, atheists, like the Friendly Atheist, believe in none and are not both rich and insane.

Have fun, and don’t hold this one against me.

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November 8, 2009 | 7:59 pm

CBN’s Brody: Healthcare bill a ‘major pro-life’ victory

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Score one for the pro-life community. That healthcare bill passed by the House last night—CBN’s David Brody says it will prohibit federal funding of abortion in healthcare reform legislation:

First of all, if you just heard a loud thud well that was pro-choice liberals in the House plopping down in their seats dumbfounded and frustrated as can be. Not only does their healthcare reform bill not contain a “robust” public option but it now contains this new pro-life language. This is a horrible turn of events for House liberals. You can be sure they’ll be pressure on Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer to strip this language out in conference (if the bill makes it that far) but for now this vote tonight is something pro-choice liberals will lose some sleep over.

It should not be lost that the vote here was 240-194. This was not a 218-217 squeker. Far from it. This was a pretty resounding statement about where this country is at regarding abortion. Think about it. The Democratic Party controls the House and yet look at how well this pro-life vote did tonight. Remember 2006 when the Democratic Party took control of the House? Well one of the reasons for that was because the party was able to find moderate pro-life Democrats in the South and other parts of the country to increase their margin. Well those same pro-life Democrats came back tonight and had their say.

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November 8, 2009 | 5:02 pm

Israel blamed for Dodgers owners’ divorce

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The details emerging in the divorce filings of Frank and Jamie McCourt seem to have been cut and pasted from a soap opera script. Why else would TMZ be all over this one? I can assure you, it has nothing to do with what the divorce could mean for the future of the Dodgers.

Among the accusations from Frank’s lawyers: That Jamie was having an affair with her personal assistant, who had been the Dodgers “director of protocol.” You’d probably already heard that. But what about Israel’s role in the whole mess?

The documents filed by the team accuse Jamie McCourt of taking a trip with her bodyguard in early July to Israel on team business, but then heading to France for 2 1/2 weeks and billing the Dodgers for the trip.

That unholy escapade looks a lot like the time McCourt spent in the Holy Land for the Maccabiah Games, at which she threw out the first pitch.

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