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  • Eboo Patel on Ayaan Hirsi Ali

    Eboo Patel, a Beacon author who blogs at the Washington Post/Newsweek website, has a a fiery post about the controversial author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose criticism of Islam and embrace of Western values are, in Patel’s view, based on misconceptions about what both Islam and the West stand for:

    To all those who claim Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the new face of the West:

    If your ulterior motive is to deepen a narrative intended to make Muslims in North America and Europe seem and feel forever foreign – to write an entire religion out of entire continents for the foreseeable future – I suggest you reflect deeply on your bedrock principles and your core identity.

    If you think the West is about marginalizing large groups of people and maligning their traditions, then Ayaan Hirsi Ali is defending it. If you believe, as I do, that the West is characterized by reason and pluralism, then Ayaan Hirsi Ali is attacking its essence.

  • ‘Eid

    by Laila Halaby

    Small or large.

    Here or there.

    That is ‘Eid.

    When ‘Eid (either of them—‘Eid al Fitr follows Ramadan and ‘Eid al Adha will be in December) is there, it is a celebration that involves visiting and eating and happiness. Stuffed cabbage and grape leaves, tender lamb, mountains of rice, all consumed in houses at their cleanest, homes whose occupants have pushed aside their troubles for a few days.

    When ‘Eid is here, it is all about the telephone and the children getting excited for their gifts, new clothes, and more good food.

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  • Taking Care of Out Teens

    by Kai Wright

    Book Cover for Drifting Toward Love
    The gay community has always been trapped by a damnable catch-22: our best weapons in the fight for sexual freedom are our individual choices to proudly declare ourselves queer; yet our greatest challenge is still the insidious pressure to hide.

    So it’s no wonder that, nearly forty years after the Stonewall uprising, so much of our politics still turns on delivering a single message to gay folks: come out and stand proudly as who you are. We march our Pride celebrations down main streets worldwide every June. We laud LGBT celebrities who refuse to obfuscate about their sexuality. And every Oct. 11 we celebrate National Coming Out Day.

    That urgency is surely appropriate, because the closet is a poisonous place. Those lingering in shame face life with both emotional and physical handicaps. And they harm others—history is littered with closeted gay men and women who have led self-destructive campaigns to demonize others who refuse to stay quiet or accept second-class status. From congressional offices to high school classrooms, people who are struggling to repress their own sexuality are often the most insistent about keeping everyone else in the shadows, too.   

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  • Entitled to an Opinion

    by Marcus Eriksen

    Two young soldiers, along with five fellow service members, penned a letter from Baghdad to the New York Times in which they vented their frustration and opposition to a war they knew intimately. A few weeks later, they were both killed in the line of duty. Despite marginal pundits like Rush Limbaugh referring to them as “Phony Soldiers” for speaking against the war, the rest of us should take careful note to acknowledge any message of dissent in the ranks that is delivered through a maze of complacency and conformity to our door step.

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  • “Compassionate Conservatism” and the “Undeserving Poor”

    by Annelise Orleck

    On Wednesday October 3, President George W. Bush vetoed a bill that allocated $35 billion over the next five years to expand the number of children eligible for the successful and popular State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) which presently provides the only access to medical care for 6.6 million of the nation’s poorest children. Both houses of Congress approved a bill late this September that would have added at least another 3.4 million children to the program, significantly reducing the number of children who presently have no medical coverage. The President’s veto threatens the survival of the program, as the legislation that originally created SCHIP has come due for reauthorization. If the veto is sustained, children currently covered under the program will once again be without insurance, and the number of children in the U.S. without access to a physician’s care and to vital medicines will continue to grow.

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  • Indigenous Peoples Day

    Today’s post is from Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, an historian, university professor, co-founder of Indigenous World Association, which lobbies the United Nations on behalf of indigenous peoples’ rights, and author of a number of books and articles on indigenous peoples of the Americas, most recently, Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico. She is at work on a history of the United States from the indigenous perspective, which is forthcoming from Beacon Press.

    “I’m convinced that indigenous peoples are the moral reserve of humanity.” Evo Morales, Aymara, President of Bolivia, Democracy Now! September 26, 2007.

    Every year as October 12 approaches, there is a certain sense of dread that can be felt in indigenous communities in the Americas. That it is a federal holiday in the United States is regarded as hideous, a celebration of genocide and colonization. However, beginning thirty years ago, indigenous peoples formed an international movement, demanding, for one thing, that October 12 be commemorated as an international day of mourning for the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas. Informally, the day has been appropriated as Indigenous Peoples Day.

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  • Fasting for Peace

    Religious leaders of all faiths are joining together this coming Monday, October 8th, for an Interfaith Fast to End the War in Iraq. Rabbi Arthur Waskow, co-author of The Tent of Abraham, forwarded this call to participate, which you can read in full at his Shalom Center blog:

    In grief we see that our culture, our society, our public policies, are honeycombed with violence. Daily murders in the streets of our cities, recurrent mass murders in our schools, violence in our families, on our television programs, our films, our computer games—and in Iraq.

    On October 8 we will gather to focus on the last and bloodiest of these. We must end the shattering of Iraqi and American lives by offering American generosity and support—but not control—for international and nongovernmental efforts to assist Iraqis in making peace and rebuilding their country, while swiftly and safely bringing home all American troops.

    Today we call for Americans to join in a fast from sunrise to sunset on Monday, October 8, to bring the spiritual renewal and empowerment of fasting to bear on healing ourselves.

    Of course, Monday is also a civic holiday—one with highly problematic provenance. Next week we’ll get an explanation of the alternative to Columbus Day, Indigenous Peoples Day, from Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. We’re also honoring National Coming Out Day next Thursday with thoughts from Kai Wright and Massachusetts State Representative Carl Sciortino. Remember to check that RSS feed!

  • Memories of Burma, 1998

    Free Burma
    Editor’s Note: Today, thousands of bloggers around the world are taking part in an International Bloggers Day for Burma. Instead of the usual blogging, they’ve put up just one post with a image (like the one here) showing their support for the peaceful revolution brought to the streets by thousands of Buddhist monks. We applaud these bloggers for their attention to this struggle, but instead of going dark today ourselves we wanted to share with you this story, from scholar and Beacon author Sarah LeVine, which gives some context to the great acts of courage we’ve recently witnessed and the vicious reprisals in their wake.

    by Sarah LeVine

    In mid-September when I began to hear news reports that thousands of monks—and a few days later, nuns as well—were out in the streets of Yangon and other Myanmar cities demonstrating against the government, I could hardly believe my ears.

    In April 1998 I joined a group of Nepalese Theravada Buddhists on a pilgrimage to Myanmar. Led by a nun who had been trained many years before in what was then Burma, we flew from Kathmandu to Bangkok, a veritable fleshpot, where we visited temples and hung out with Nepalese novices; and then we flew on to Yangon where, though it was a charming well-laid-out city and the people were strikingly attractive, the military were much in evidence and the atmosphere was palpably repressive and austere.

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  • The Disappearance of Burmese Monks

    Freeburma
    In a comment on yesterday’s post about International Non-Violence Day, one reader prodded us to address the alarming situation in Burma/Myanmar. Many of us are probably wondering what we can do to educate ourselves about the country and to help bring an end to the egregious human rights violations being committed there. Here’s a quick overview of some resources to help you learn more and take action.

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  • International Non-Violence Day

    October 2 is Gandhi’s birthday and also the first International Non-Violence Day. Does this mean that the headlines tomorrow will be devoid of murder, war, and oppression? Unlikely, but it does give us a chance to reflect of the teachings of Gandhi and what they mean to us today.

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