Today is Ethnic Cleansing Day in America. Or it would have been if a federal judge had not temporarily barred Arizona from enforcing parts of its Draconian immigration law. The law would turn undocumented immigrants into something like prey in Arizona, and other states plan to follow suit. If Arizona has its way it will [...]
Read More...(Deserted Memory, Christine and Dominique Fasse, 77 Books, UK, 2010) “The future may not be completely unknown to us.” These are the concluding words of Deserted Memory on the back cover of an extraordinary collaboration of father and daughter portraying a colonial Algeria that refuses historical segmentation. The words suggest that the bell cannot be [...]
Read More...I have been listening to the score of the 2005 epic Kingdom of Heaven. As usual with me, epiphanies start from my toes and take their sweet time climbing the stairs. It first dawned on me that there was a kind of Eurocentric oh shit! element in the score when I realized I had been [...]
Read More...This isn’t the first time militant Christendom and militant Islam have clashed by night. Not by a long shot. By night I mean immediacy, the human tendency to look at things through the wrong end of the telescope, making them smaller and meaner. The Crusades were an attack on Islam not unlike the attacks of [...]
Read More...“War on terror” is a cheap slogan. Try “war on fundamentalism.” Scary, huh? That would mean war on Christian and Jewish fundamentalists, too. Not just those awful Islamists. And it would be much more to the historic point, but heaven knows we don’t want to get to the point where we would actually have to [...]
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