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This weekend, while many Americans were wrapping up their last summer vacations, another American was seen on an Al Qaeda propaganda video. The video, featuring ex-Californian Adam Gadahn, warned Americans to convert to Islam before it’s too late.
WashingtonPost.com has a handy religion section that grabs stories from just about everywhere. From India to Dupont Circle to national politics, religion stories are appropriately all across the board. It’s no surprise that two very long stories dealing with Muslims in the Washington area (published on Monday and Tuesday) landed there. But unfortunately they are less about God and theology and more about life and culture.
The other day I received a blunt, fiery, angry email. It was from an anti-Semite who was mad at me for writing a Scripps Howard News Service column in which I quoted several Orthodox Jews discussing the meaning of repentance and forgiveness in Judaism and, in particular, why they thought that Mel Gibson — if he is a serious Catholic believer of one form or another — was going to need to do more than seek out a few good photo opportunities on a holy day or two.
Two Fox journalists who were kidnapped several weeks ago were released on Sunday. To some extent it’s the same old story with a happy ending: Muslim terrorists kidnap reporters. Media groups express outrage. Hostages released.
I was reading Seymour Hersh’s excellent New Yorker piece on the Bush administration’s interest in the Hezbollah-Israeli war when I stumbled across this paragraph:
Reader John Hoh sent us a note regarding a photo caption accompanying this Associated Press article. It describes snipers killing 20 people in Baghdad who were on their way to commemorate Imam Moussa Kadhim at his golden-domed shrine.
Like a gazillion other people, I’ve started reading The Christian Science Monitor each morning. That’s because former hostage Jill Carroll has been telling her story on its pages over the last week and a half.
On the terrorism beat, the big news of the day is that the phrase “martyrdom videos” is showing up in almost all of the leads written about the developments in London.
The New York Times ran a rather shocking article on British Muslim calls to violence. The hook is that the Antiterrorism Act of 2006 makes it a crime to glorify or encourage political violence but that some Muslim leaders are doing just that without government reprisal.
