The following review by James Grieve appears today: FOR GOD’S SAKE By Jane Caro, Anthony Loewenstein, Simon Smart and Rachel Woodlock. Macmillan. 314pp. $32.99. Here is the latest contribution to the debate on organised religion and the existence of God, started about seven years ago by the so-called new atheists, notably Richard Dawkins and Christopher…
Showing all posts tagged Islam
Talking For God’s Sake on Weekend Sunrise TV
What an interesting morning. Today all us writers of the For God’s Sake book appeared on Channel 7’s Weekend Sunrise program. It was strange watching this segment back and noticing that under my name on the screen it read, “Jew”. It was a unique opportunity to explain that Judaism and Zionism aren’t the same thing…
How much does religion cause violence and war in the world?
This week sees the official launch of a book I’ve co-written, For God’s Sake. Today the Guardian runs extracts from one of its chapters, Doesn’t religion cause most of the conflict in the world?, by all four contributors: Rachel Woodlock (Islam) Religion is powerfully motivating and belligerent humans fight over it. Heck, religion has caused…
The last thing Syria needs, or the Middle East, is more Western “engagement”
Stunning Simon Jenkins piece in The Guardian that explains why Western imperialists, of the liberal and conservative kind, just need to butt out of the Middle East: There could no more dreadful idea than to pour more armaments into the sectarian war now consuming Syria.… Yet that is precisely what Britain’s coalition government wants to do.…
Getting the dissenting Jewish message into the Muslim world
My first book, My Israel Question, was updated and released in an Arabic edition early this year. I can now happily report that the first reviews and coverage are coming in and positive. Here’s one leading review (yes, in Arabic, use the less-than-perfect Google Translate) and a short piece here. One of the key reasons…
Murdoch and Netanyahu make love so please don’t interrupt
Care to imagine what an editorial meeting is like at Rupert Murdoch’s… Australian? No, me neither – “look, over there, a Muslim country the West hasn’t bombed, let’s fix that immediately!” – but there’s a weird obsession over supporting the Israeli government. There’s a direct line from the Israeli PR department to the writers at the…
Glenn Greenwald explains role of constant US violence on world
From this week’s HBO Real Time with Bill Maher:
We kill, drone and bomb Muslims and we wonder why some hate us?
Powerful column in the UK Independent by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: First, read this unconditional acceptance of facts that cannot be denied nor excused. Islamicist terrorism has inflicted atrocities and diffused panic and amorphous, long-term anxiety from east to west, south to north. Citizens of Nairobi and Baghdad, Madrid and London, Bamako and Dar es Salaam, New…
Endorsing “My Isl@m” book
Last year I was asked by New York publisher St. Martin’s Press to read and endorse a book, about to now be released, by Amir Ahmad Nasr called My Isl@m. It’s an interesting read about Muslims, rejecting fundamentalism in all ways and being open to a more inclusive religious belief. Here’s the book’s website and…
How anti-Semitism became normalised in the British Muslim community
Mehdi Hasan writes in the New Statesman about an issue that receives far too little coverage: Growing up, I always assumed that this obsession with “the Jews” was a hallmark of the “first-generation” immigrants from the subcontinent. In recent years, I’ve been depressed to discover that there are plenty of “second-generation” Muslim youths, born and…