Entries Tagged 'Religion' ↓

Muslim Girl magazine, published bimonthly since January 2007, targets the 400,000 women, ages 18-24, in the U.S. and Canada, who practice Islam. It’s the only beauty and lifestyle publication that does.

“It’s a huge, niche population that’s very underrepresented,” says Ausma Khan, editor-in-chief of Muslim Girl, and part of the original planning group that created the periodical. “And yet Muslims are in the media all the time, overrepresented in very negative ways, where their stories are constantly being told about them from the outside, and their own voices are very rarely added to the mix.”

Ausma Khan is the guest today on my WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM radio show, NONFICTION, this afternoon, Friday, August 8, 2 pm ET.

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It is a headline seemingly so odd that, upon reading it, one’s first thought is that it must be incorrect: “In Japan, Buddhism May Be Dying Out.”

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When I saw that the Smithsonian is running an exhibit ’til Nov. 8 on Rastafarianism—“Discovering Rastafari!” is the horrible title—my first thought was this: I’d have given my eyeteeth to have heard the ensuing comedy of errors when white, Ivy League-bred curators negotiated with Rastas for artifacts.

Then, it occurred to me that everything in the show is probably already owned by white Brits.

Then there’s this question, which The New York Times, itself, raises: Why is this exhibit in the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History?

the Rastafari exhibition does not really belong in the same museum as paleontological finds and collections of insects and gems. That placement is a relic of the 19th-century conception of the natural history museum as a temple devoted to exotic “natural” cultures and objects — evolutionary predecessors of the scientific West.

How unexpected.

Feds raided the nation’s largest kosher slaughterhouse last week when, after a six-month probe, they established that a crystal meth lab was being operated out of the plant, and that employees were bringing weapons with them when they came to work.

At Agriprocessors, in Potsville IA,

a former plant supervisor told investigators that some 80 percent of the workforce was illegal. They included rabbis responsible for kosher supervision, who the source believed entered the United States from Canada without proper immigration documents. The source did not provide evidence for his suspicion about the rabbis. …

At least 300 people were arrested Monday during the raid, for which federal authorities had rented an expansive fairground nearby to serve as a processing center for detainees.

Actually, no: Cartoonist Daryl Cagle underestimates white backlash

How has Oprah Winfrey’s standing with her overwhelmingly white audience been affected by her association with Barack Obama?

In her piece for The Root.com, “The Trouble With Transcending Race: Why the Double O’s are standing on shaky ground,” Majorie Valbrun expands on what most Black women probably long expected, even before Fordham professor Costas Panagopoulos’s Politico.com piece, which she quotes, below, made it explicit:

“Ten days after she went on the stump for Obama, Oprah’s favorability ratings dropped to 55 percent, the lowest level of favorability ever registered for Oprah in opinion surveys,” the article states. “Oprah’s negatives also spiked, with one in three respondents (33 percent) reporting unfavorable impressions of her.”

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Would you wash the feet of Saudi terrorist, supposed Al Qaeda founder, and alleged 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden?

That’s the question implicit in the above piece of Christian art titled Servant to the World. Created by artist Lars Justinen, the image depicts Jesus Christ, dressed in the manner described in his Last Supper of John 13, washing the feet of prominent world leaders: Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, former British PM Tony Blair, Manmohan Singh, prime minister of India. In His hands is the right foot of former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

In the implied sequence, bin Laden is next. He’s seated beside George Bush, President of the United States, the very man who has promised to hunt him down.

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Photo by ProtestShooter.com

“Hillary ain’t never been called a n-gger!”

Have you noticed that, of all Jeremiah Wright’s decontextualized quotes, this one has been completely dropped out of the mediated discussion of his statements?

When USA Today‘s Donna Leinwand, vice-president of the National Press Club, moderated the now-infamous Q&A with him on Monday, she asked him about Farrakhan, AIDS, “chickens coming home to roost,” etc., but not one question about this statement.

Why?

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As anyone whose read MEDIA ASSASSIN, or any significant portion of my two decades-plus writing about race, might venture, I probably agree with almost everything Jeremiah Wright, the former pastor of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, above, has said, in his oft-quoted and misquoted public statements.

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“He would not have been my pastor,” Hillary Clinton haughtily told members of the press Tuesday, speaking of Trinity United Church of Christ’s Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s beleaguered former pastor.

But, reports The Huffington Post, the senior pastor of the Foundry United Methodist Church in Washington D.C., where the Clintons went during their White House years, calls Wright “an outstanding church leader.”

“He has served for decades as a profound voice for justice and inclusion in our society. To evaluate his dynamic ministry on the basis of two or three sound bites does a grave injustice to Dr. Wright, the members of his congregation, and the African-American church which has been the spiritual refuge of a people that has suffered from discrimination, disadvantage, and violence. Dr. Wright, a member of an integrated denomination, has been an agent of racial reconciliation while proclaiming perceptions and truths uncomfortable for some white people to hear. Those of us who are white Americans would do well to listen carefully to Dr. Wright rather than to use a few of his quotes to polarize.”

Hillary, ducking sniper fire on the campaign trail, could not be reached for comment.