Illinois Sen. Barack Obama delivered a speech on Wednesday, June 4, before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The speech comes the day after he secured enough delegates to clinch the Democratic nomination and become the first African-American candidate for president. In these prepared remarks provided by his campaign, Obama tries to allay doubts that some Jewish voters have expressed about his candidacy. He talks about his great-uncle’s service in World War II, as a member of the infantry division that first liberated a Nazi concentration camp.

Another Bad Deal for Baghdad

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By KARL E. MEYER
Published: June 17, 2008

Michael Savage at the UK Independent has asked Is it time to talk to Al-Qaida? in which he compares them to the IRA in Northern Ireland and says:

           While the Bush Administration has, from time to time, done things which are – ahem – ethically questionable, it has usually made at least a half-hearted attempt to cover them with a veneer of legality.
           Occasionally, however, it will throw aside any such pretensions. Take Sami Al-Arian, a man who should never have been imprisoned in the first place, who has spent the last five years in jail under conditions decried by Amnesty International as “gratuitously punitive,” whose prison term ended on April 11th, and who is nevertheless still being held behind bars.

Yesterday, I was riding on the public bus, on my way to visit a very good friend of mine, and a pair of Mormon guys got on the bus. They were wearing the white shirts with the name tags—missionaries. One of them came back and sat near me, and started up a conversation with me. Now, I am from the Southern United States, the land of Christian evangelism, so I immediately knew what his goal was. We started by talking about the weather and the landscape of Boston and Massachusetts versus that of Utah (where he was from) and the South.

Karachi at dusk

We've had a lot of angst, and whatnot about the events in Karachi. Please do read the piece below. Kamal is a friend, too, but he's evolved into one of the most objective observers I know in the business--anywhere. [Yes, more so than I.]

I came across an interesting article in the Los Angeles Times concerning interaction between Mormons and Muslims in Southern California. Some Evangelical Christians in America have dubbed Mormonism the “Islam of America.” I remember even Tablighi Muslims would draw favorable comparisons between Mormons and mainstream Muslim beliefs. Like Islam, the Mormon faith was founded after the Gospels of Jesus by a Prophet who revealed a “revelation” that was seen as a compliment to the previous Revelations.

The case against Clevinger was open and shut. The only thing missing was something to charge him with.
                                                                                                               – Joseph Heller, Catch-22

           After a failed trial whose verdict was declared by Time Magazine to be “one of the Justice Department’s most embarrassing legal setbacks since 9/11,” the American government has been resorting to legal ruses and an outright manipulation of the judicial system to keep the high-profile Palestinian-American professor Sami Al-Arian imprisoned indefinitely. Now, after five years of imprisonment under conditions condemned by Amnesty International as “gratuitously punitive,” Dr. Al-Arian could be sentenced any day to at least five more years. His case has been powerfully presented in this gripping YouTube video.

The Western fascination with protesting monks from Myanmar, formerly known as Burma to the autonomous region of Tibet in the People’s Republic of China is usually told in the following scheme: open-minded peaceful religion under siege by autocratic authoritarian regime with ideological leanings derived from the West be it a military junta in Burma or a nominal Communist regime in Beijing.

I think I’ve finally found the phrase that identifies me, at least with regards to the kinda guys I go for. According to part 3 of the Gay Muslims documentary, I would be a “Mohammed queen”. (Similar to how a white guy who likes East Asian guys is called a “rice queen” and a non-white guy who likes white guys is called a “snow queen.”) I feel like my ideal lover and life partner would be a guy who identifies as Muslim and practices the faith (or, at least, shows some genuine love/affection for it).