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Muhammad Musri, peacemaker

There are a lot of ways to look at what happened with Terry Jones, the
pastor from Florida who wanted to burn the Qur’an on Saturday but later
thought better of it. We can accuse the media, as Jason Linkins does.
We can blame a frightening wave of anti-Islamic rhetoric and action,
enflamed by people whose political interests it serves. We can examine
the dynamics of a small church and a big world. But there's another
story here.

Nonnegotiable

I used to sit on the front porch with my grandmother, otherwise the
gentlest, most unconditionally loving person in my young life, while
she regaled me with stories about what was going on under the dome of
the Roman Catholic cathedral one block away. They're storing guns in
the basement, Grandma assured me, and I imagined that the windows in
the dome were gunports through which "they" planned to fire on the rest
of the city.

Muslims wary of closeness between holiday and 9/11

(RNS) For this year's Eid al-Fitr, the Islamic holiday that concludes
the holy month of Ramadan, Nakia Jackson received an unusual present
from a Jewish friend: cab fare.

"She doesn't want me taking the bus," said Jackson, of Wichita,
Kan., whose headscarf clearly identifies her as a Muslim. "She recalls
not only violence against black churches during the civil rights era,
but the security that synagogues have needed for decades."

Islamophobia by the numbers

According to a Quinnipiac University poll, 54 percent of New York State voters agree "that because of American freedom of religion, Muslims have the right to build the mosque near Ground Zero." That strikes me as a shockingly small majority—almost half don’t feel that “religious freedom” by definition applies to all religions, even when the question’s put that way?—but hey, glad to hear of majority support for basic American principles, right?