NBC
29 August 2010

President Barack Obama speaksat
Xavier University of Louisiana in
New Orleans, Sunday, Aug. 29, 2010

NEW ORLEANS — President Barack Obama said Sunday he isn't worried about a recent poll showing that nearly one-fifth of Americans believe he is a Muslim. 

BBC News
29 august 2010

Pamela Geller Blogger: The callousness showed to the grief and the pain caused is ridiculously intolerant”

Protesters say the mosque is insensitive

There has been vehement criticism of a Muslim group's plan to build a cultural centre and mosque near Ground Zero, but what does the tone of the debate reveal?

The Washington Post
29 August 2010

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf

When you detonate explosives attached to your torso, simultaneously decapitating people on a bus or disemboweling little children at a kindergarten, do you go to heaven or to hell? Are you a martyr or a murderer? Heroic or heinous?

News busters

ABC News set out Monday night to rehabilitate the reputation of the iman behind the proposed mosque near Ground Zero, Feisal Abdul Rauf, trying to discredit criticism of him from the right as Sharyn Alfonsi portrayed him as a model of religious tolerance who condemns suicide bombers, terrorism and Hamas and who deserves admiration because he “eulogized Daniel Pearl.”

New York Post
29 August 2010

Soldiers at Ft. Hood salute the victims of a 2009 murder
spree

Last Sunday, this column accused much of the national TV news media of pandering to the bad guys, especially to Islamist radicals and Muslim mass-murderers to whom the M-word — murder — is never attached.

The Wall Street Journal
29 August 2010

Posters urging President Mubarak's son to run in next
year's poll have sprung up in Cairo. Above, a poster
promotes 'Gamal for all Egyptians.'

CAIRO—Two of the biggest opposition players in Egyptian politics have joined forces as unofficial campaigning kicks off for parliamentary polls later this year—though neither will be on the ballot.

The New York Times
29 August 2010

Luxury homes were being constructed at the Allegria subdivision in 6 of October
City in the dunes outside Cairo. One million people live in the new city.

6 OCTOBER CITY, Egypt — The highway west out of Cairo used to promise relief from the city’s chaos. Past the great pyramids of Giza and a final spasm of traffic, the open desert beckoned, 100 barren miles to the northwest to reach the Mediterranean.

Pajamas Media
26 August 2010

A response to Lee Smith, who says that the former House speaker is wrong to mention sharia, since it is a “hopelessly abstract concept” and an “Orientalist fantasy.”

Newt Gingrich

In a recent article appearing in Tablet, Lee Smith takes Newt Gingrich to task for the latter’s focus on sharia (i.e., Islamic law).  The thrust of Smith’s argument is that sharia is a “hopelessly abstract concept” and “a highly idealized version of reality that has little basis in fact”; that sharia is “a catchall phrase for legal principles that have rarely, if ever, existed in actual Muslim societies”; and that “the notion that something called ‘sharia’ was widely imposed throughout the lands of Islam is an Orientalist fantasy.”