International News

Probing the mystery that is Sept. 11

First, a disclaimer: I expect that the following post will draw one or more comments that state the following theme, or variations on it: “The problem with this post is that this news story really isn’t an example of journalists failing to ‘get religion.’ This is just a messed up story. Period.”


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Reporting the hate in hate crimes

Last week I mentioned that I’ve become mildly obsessed with the murder of Shaima Alawadi, an Iraqi-American woman who was beaten so brutally at her home in El Cajon, California, that she later died.


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Fighting the fatwa

One of our most visited pages last month was a post about the lack of coverage of comments made by Saudi Arabia’s top religious official (Got news? Destroy all churches!). As I mentioned in that post, Arabian Business News reported:


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Dog days in the promised land

There’s a story about a book publisher being asked how to write a best seller. He said the title of it would be “Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog.” But I can’t help but thinking “The Conspiracy of Jesus’ Dog” would also rank high. (Memo to self: get on it.) Or maybe I could combine Jesus, Lincoln, dogs and conspiracy theories. Lincoln is reported to have said, after all, “I care not much for a man’s religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.”


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Define "Islamist;" give three examples

It is hard to read the recent Washington Post story about the rising power of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egyptian political life without concluding that the most important word in it is “Islamist.” After all, this term shows up 11 times in the text — including in the lede.


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