Erin M's Open Salon Blog

Reality series seeks new imam

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 15:07:48 -0400

This hunt for a new Malaysian imam is "not a reality show." No women are competing, though some say the Qu'ran doesn't strictly forbid it. The prize includes a Hajj and a scholarship to a Saudi Arabian university. Malaysians revere all things Middle Eastern, when it comes to Islam especially, but even if someone says you look like an Arab it's a compliment. I got that once.

Proposed Manhattan Islamic center has the power to heal

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 12:07:02 -0400

Look at what Sam Nunberg, Deputy Director of Government Affairs at the Center for Law and Justice, said about plans to erect Cordoba House, an Islamic Cultural Center, two blocks from where the World Trade Centers once stood: "It would be like removing the sunken ship from Pearl Harbor to erect a memorial to the Japanese kamikazes killed in the attack."

He is effectively calling Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and Daisy Khan terrorists. This husband-and-wife team co-founded the American Society for Muslim Advancement, devoted to "building bridges" between Americans and Muslims, and the Cordoba Initiative, founded to promote and provide "informed research and critical thinking regarding ways to improve the relationship between America and the Islamic world." Two people who have devoted themselves to healing the rift between the Muslim world and the West - called terrorists no matter their efforts.

At the 2009 Women's Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equality conference in Kuala Lumpur, I heard Khan and Imam Feisal repeatedly express their conviction that American democracy and Islam are in fact complementary. Islam grants property rights to women - the only religion I know of that explicitly does so - and encourages socially conscious lending, an individualistic and personal religious life, and the ethical slaughtering of animals, a flag many animal rights activists have taken up. The Qu'ran discourages proselytism, and historically, Muslim conquerors have followed this directive, unlike, say, the Crusaders.

Most of all, I just want to point out how incredibly dangerous this all is. Activists want to have the proposed site of the new center designated a historical landmark because shrapnel from one of the planes hit it during the September 11 attacks. They openly admit they're only interested in doing this to prevent the Cordoba House from being built. Blind hatred against any member of a despised group fuels their crusade. This sounds familiar.

Talk about a way to remember the victims of a horrifying tragedy.

No really, talk about it.

The consequences of deportation

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 21:07:12 -0400

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported an estimated 350,000 people in 2008, a record high at that time, and budgeted 1.4 billion Congress-appropriated dollars to do the same in the year 2009. For those whose solution to the immigration dilemma is to deport, deport, deport, this may look like a move in the right direction. But good solutions require a good understanding of their consequences.

You can start by asking yourself why so many people travel thousands of miles from their homes and families, in boxcars, buses and truck beds, bartering with drug cartels and half-starved along the way, just to get here. It is a difficult and even traumatic road, leaves these people heavily in debt. The 16-minute documentary "Guatemala: In the Shadow of a Raid" follows several hundred deportees home after a meatpacking plant raid that left the town of Postville, Iowa, almost as devastated as the twin villages of El Rosario and San Jose Calderas in Guatemala. After seeing this, you have to ask yourself: is human suffering our problem or isn't it?

Bear in mind that this is not even the worst case scenario: some come to America to escape towns overrun by gangs, and return to a death sentence.

When is a birthday no longer something to celebrate?

Sat, 19 Jun 2010 13:06:13 -0400

My birthday a few days ago felt like an unpleasant turning-point. From now one, my birthday can no longer be a cause for out-and-out celebration. Now it's starting to mark something else, and I can hear ever louder the scrape-scraping of time passing. I won't say how old I turned because I want to put the question to you: at what age does this turning point take place, and at what age should it?

Or for the trekkies, I'll term the question as Dr. Bashir of Deep Space Nine did: what year "marks the end of youth and the beginning of the slow march to middle age"? (He says thirty.)

Should Obama have been quick to anger?

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 16:06:56 -0400

Tom Shales in The Washington Post claims the media is shifting blame for the handling of the oil spill to President Obama to prevent viewers from getting all worn out at watching this disaster spread and spread. What interests me is the consensus that's been reached weeks after Deepwater Horizon collapsed into the Gulf - the message that Obama responded too slowly to the crisis.

Eerie how familiar it all is. George W. Bush was widely chastised for responding too slowly after Hurricane Katrina hit, but that criticism first appeared fairly early, once it was clear that the state of New Orleans and the Gulf coast was worse than anyone had anticipated.

Because of this, Obama has been exceedingly careful not to respond "too slowly" to any crisis, staying vocal on big events like the apparent North Korean torpedo strike, and making efforts to at least address the majority of his campaign promises - if not fulfill them - within months of taking office, rather than let them dissipate in the quotidian tides as most candidates-turned-elected officials do.

So why so slowly come to the conclusion that Obama's sluggishness somehow escalated this "spill" to what some people in the restaurant where I work call "World War III," "Armageddon," the blacking out of the entire Atlantic Ocean? It's a strangely unqualified accusation. What is it that he should have done? All I can find is a call to anger, a criticism of his apparent emotional detachment from the whole ordeal. But I want my president to be a means to level-headed action and solution, not a simple funnel for all of our fears. Leave the emotions to us; we're all hurting quite enough as it is over this tragic encroaching behemoth.

Given this request, however, Obama can be said to have been neither. The president's speech last night hardly offered any solid solutions for right now. Every moment results in innumerable deaths - unquantifiable losses that will affect us in ways we can't yet imagine. Let's plan for the recovery, let's find who to blame, but Obama, let's also get that cap on securely, find a better alternative to boom, crack down on BP's brash deafness to the EPA's nix on dispersants. (Echo of years of shadowy assurances and back-room pacifications?)

At least the president has put a hold on new drilling; maybe once we've found ourselves alive and relatively well after this experiment America will be more open to discussion on alternative energies. The promise for those, Obama hasn't lived up to yet, not so long as he opens up new drilling sites in areas environmentalists fought for years to protect. Time to act decisively, then. Let's start the prodigious and all-important project of capping them all. For good.