Comments on: Lightness Versus Darkness

By: Joshua Foust

Joshua Foust — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 05:58:24 +0000

Little, to answer your point. I think, in light of the Beslan Massacre and the standoff at that theatre in Moscow, that calling elements within the Chechen resistance movement “extremist bandits” is not at all uncalled for.

By: Michael Hancock

Michael Hancock — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 06:46:25 +0000

“Zionist”
It’s one of those labels so emotionally charged, the fact that it’s in your vocabulary says something about you. It’s akin to labeling people fascists, niggers, or islamists – it’s going about politics looking for arguments and fights instead of answers and solutions.
I mean, sure, the NYT has a Jewish bias – could that be for a perfectly respectable reason, like they’re being a lot of Jewish people reading and writing the NYT? It’s like blaming Al-Jazeera for being so decidedly anti-Christian, anti-West. Doesn’t mean they won’t report otherwise, just that their perspective is going to be affected by their own cultural, geographical, political, economic, and religious world view.

While some Chechens may well be freedom fighters, I think their terrorist actions in response to Russia’s extremism warrants pointing their extremist Islamic ways. The only way, it seems to me, that religious extremism wins over the opposition in democracy [slowly but surely] is nonviolence. And sadly, “Turning the other cheek” is not something Isa [Jesus in the Qu'ran] is known to have said. Clay birds into real birds, sure, but no sermon on the mount. I tend to think that the greatest gift to Christianity has been a deeper understanding of the sermon on the mount as history has progressed…

but what has That got to do with Central Asia? [rhetorical]

By: johnnie b. baker

johnnie b. baker — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 03:49:26 +0000

The LA Times is a much better newspaper than the allegedly liberal but zionist NY Times. Of course it is not perfect, and stupid articles can be found (esp. when you look back 15 years) but it is consistantly the most liberal major newspaper in the US. Didn’t parrot the Bush line re: Iraq like NYT. Probably the last paper in the US I would trust regarding the Muslim world is NYT. Their bias is well known, even with Charlotta Gall, whose complete misunderstanding of Muslims was evident in her Chechen work, where she repeated the old “extremist fundamentalist Islamic bandits” line perpetuated not only by the Russians, and the ignorant West in general. Of course, she was writing for LAT then, but at least now she is working for a paper where essentializing Muslims is the accepted norm.

By: Joshua Foust

Joshua Foust — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 20:03:58 +0000

I love both that photo, and Carlotta Gall. That lady is ballsy. I’m also a big fan of Scott Peterson at the Christian Science Monitor — he does good work as well.