CHARLIE HEBDO. A month ago, no one had even heard of it here in North America. And now? The magazine is selling millions of copies, many of them States-side. I see that for roughly $16,000 you can buy the first… Read More ›
Islam
Dear Mr. God, It’s Me Charlie
In many places around this world, I would be killed just for posting this dumb letter THIS IS SLIGHTLY weird for me. I don’t believe that you exist, so it’s like writing a letter to Santa, except I’ve never seen… Read More ›
The Roundtable Podcast 70: War & Religion
• Week of 24.08.2014 Pastafarians | Ferguson, MO | Toronto Election 2014 | The Islamic Caliphate: past and present | Religion and War | Why Care What Goes on in the World? Download entire podcast (320 kbps mp3) | Visit… Read More ›
How Ethnocentrism Blinded the War’s Critics to the People of Iraq
SCANNING THIS WEEK’S renewal of the Bush and Blair trials, I wondered: do I alone notice the toxic ethnocentrism lurking in the belief that the world’s political disasters are the result of, and response to, America’s policies and actions?
Taking the Side of Malala Yousafzai
PERHAPS THE MOST remarkable thing about Adnan Rasheed’s defence of the Malala Yousafzai shooting (putting aside the fact it’s a defence) is how predictable and clichéd a performance it is, beginning with its disingenuous preamble “I’m sorry this happened, but… Read More ›
The Taliban Vs. Civilization
THE NEWS from Afghanistan has been nothing but bad, and every indication is of worse to come. By the end of 2014, the Afghan people will be on their own, as they were in 2001 before the arrival — at… Read More ›
Remembering Christopher Hitchens
I FIRST CAME across the writer Christopher Hitchens when he was a young Socialist contributing his “Minority Report” to the Nation. Very much yet in his soixante-huitard, Trotskyist phase, if not in possession any longer of his Socialist International card,… Read More ›
The Niqab in Living Colour
IN AZAR NAFISI’S book, “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” the act of removing the veil is a metaphor for transitioning from the world of black-and-white into colour, and of shedding the state-imposed self to be liberated into one’s authentic, willed identity…. Read More ›
Living in the Age of The Endless War
ON A WALL at the National Capital’s War Monument are inscribed these words, past which I walk each day and derived from the ninth book of Virgil’s Aeneid: “nulla dies umquam memori vos eximet aevo.” Here I shall provide some… Read More ›
