Archive for the 'Religion' Category
Friday, May 23rd, 2008
Hazrat Darymple on Pakistan
Darymple writes about the possibilies of Pakistan in the NY review of books:
As you travel around Pakistan today you can see the effects of the boom everywhere: in vast new shopping malls and smart roadside filling stations, in the cranes of the building sites and the smokestacks of factories, in the expensive new cars jamming the roads and in the ubiquitous cell-phone stores. In 2003 the country had fewer than three million cell phones; today apparently there are 50 million, while car ownership has been increasing at roughly 40 percent a year since 2001. At the same time foreign direct investment has risen from $322 million in 2002 to $3.5 billion in 2006.
Sunday, May 11th, 2008
al-nakba?
14 May 2008 is Israel’s 60th. It’s difficult to imagine an anniversary that’s as divisive. And where else do politics, religion, and ethnicity conflict so violently? Have you been to Israel or the West Bank/Gaza Strip? I’d like to go sometime.
The story of Israel and Palestine is one our generation has grown up with. This is from before Kosovo, before Rwanda, before war was declared on terror. Is it really that unimportant? If there is a god, we’ll all be damned for watching two peoples massacre themselves. I’ll say it again: humans are foolish beyond our own comprehension.
On a related note, what do you think of the use of the term in the title? Al-Nakba — The Catastrophe. I hear that’s how Palestinians, and their supporters, refer to the creation of Israel. Should its use be discouraged? Or is it useful?