Mollie Hemingway

Breaking terror news from 2004?

On Saturday night, Taimur Abdulwahab al-Abdaly tried to murder as many Swedes as possible by blowing up his car and himself in crowded areas where people were busy shopping for Christmas gifts. Amazingly, and perhaps due to an inadvertent early detonation, he was the only person killed. Two others were severely injured. All signs point to radical Islam as the motivator for the deadly violence. It’s interesting to see how different media outlets lead their early stories on the terrorist once his identity was established. Here’s the Telegraph:


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Got news? Hate crime edition

This was the year when the media took a keen interest in what they termed “Islamophobia.” This was all the craze for a while, with Time running a cover story headlined “Is America Islamophobic?” The actual text of the story acknowledged no evidence to substantiate the charge, but had paragraphs like this:


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Why Muslims don't adopt?

Late last month, the Associated Press‘ Rachel Zoll had a really interesting and important story about Muslim adoption. Or, rather, a story about how Islam, while encouraging care for orphans, forbids adoption. Almost immediately we heard from readers — some of them adoptive parents, some of them Muslim or having Muslim family members. They said that they enjoyed what the story said but were very surprised about something very important that was missing from the story.


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Stimulating faith-based groups

Last week Politico broke the news that $140 million of $787+ billion stimulus last year went to faith-based organizations. Reporters Ben Smith and Byron Tau’s piece “Obama’s stimulus pours millions into faith-based groups,” begins:


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Survey says ... al Qaeda?

Pew Research Center published the results of a recent Global Attitudes Project survey of Muslims. Folks were asked questions about Hamas, Hezbollah, al Qaeda, democracy, the role of Islam in government, and other related topics. You can read the whole report here.


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Ghosts in the WikiLeaks

Each day brings forth new revelations from the WikiLeaks dump of diplomatic cables. As I’m writing this, I can read about tension between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Or about how Al-Jazeera, it turns out, isn’t independent from Qatar‘s government. And everyone is weighing in on whether WikiLeaks is the greatest thing to ever happen to transparent governance, or the worst. Even Umberto Eco.


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