The Holocaust was perpetrated against specific groups of people. Is this fact a crucial part of every retelling?
Muslims
It starts off as a standard writeup of a protest and counter-protest of a mosque’s Friday prayers. An accompanying video portrays the two sides as polarized not just in rhetoric but in various cultural markers, starting with the fact that one side is packing the kind of firepower that would have shocked people not so long ago (and would still if the heat-packers weren’t so white). You know, just a slice of 21st-century American life.
TLC has a new reality show about American Muslims, set in Dearborn, Michigan. American Muslim Aman Ali has a spirited response.
Clash of cultures?
What happens when an anthropologist who happens to be a Pakistani, a former diplomat and a member of the Incident Management Team of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security shows up at 100 American mosques armed with questionnaires and a few white student research assistants? For the most part, nothing very controversial.
Nigeria is Africa's most populous nation, and nearly half of its people are Christians. They are often in conflict, sometimes violent conflict, with Muslims.
Some of the best coverage of the firing of National Public Radio news analyst Juan Williams has been NPR's own. But the broader conversation has quickly become a chorus of ridiculousness.
I travel to the Middle East at least once each year, often visiting multiple countries. I belong to an evangelical-Muslim discussion group which meets annually, and the participants include pious, brilliant, generous Muslim scholars whom I count as my friends. When a topic like "Islamophobic America" comes up, I share intense personal e-mails with them. But I came away from my trip to the Middle East this past summer with some new concerns.