Hey Clive, why don’t you know any languages of India? “Why, if I had, I should not have conquered India; the black knaves would have led me astray by their cunning advice; but as I never understood them, I was never misled by them”. 06-29-2006, 04:37 PM BAGHDAD – The pen is mightier than the [...]
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Priyamvada Gopal, who previously brought the heat to Niall Ferguson, has a new piece up on Guardian’s blog, The story peddled by imperial apologists is a poisonous fairytale. No punches pulled. She calls Ferguson a “neoconservative ideologue” driven by “the messianic fantasies of the American right”. Now, I happen to agree with much of Gopal’s [...]
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In case you noticed, Iraq is kinda back in the news. The Chosen One is up 8-10 points in the polls. The Dems are finding every possible way to not think or act. In the annales of Iraq War, the following would get indexed as high comedy: Republicans say: Stay the Course; Democrats say: Cut [...]
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Philip Weiss has a short piece in the Nation on Cole, with a terrible pun for a title, that lays out how Cole’s potential appointment at Yale was scuttled. The concluding remarks by Cole, “I knew when I began to speak out that I wasn’t going to be hired. I knew my academic career was [...]
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On Time’s cover this week, I like how India, the perennial bride, is also the perennial call center employee. Also, it is the un-China. Oh, and in India, elephants dance. I don’t read Time or Newsweek so please fill me in here, what is the anthropomorphization of America in business-speak? Is it the eagle? Or [...]
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Kumuda kindly drew my attention to historians Eric Hobsbawm, Niall Ferguson, Priyamvada Gopal, Linda Colley and Robert Beckford’s appearence on BBC’s Start The Week. They were to be “examining how Britain and other countries around the world have been changed by their experience of empire…discussing whether Britain should apologise and make reparation for its imperial [...]
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In a shameless attempt to garner more content for CM [and also to recycle some oldies but goodies], I decided to sit at the cool kids table set-up by eteraz of eteraz-fame. “The Nomad Fatwas is an alliance of free-thinking blogs and a carnival simultaneously. Every two weeks myself and nine other blog-friends of mine [...]
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“dirka dirka muhammad jihad / Surpa surpa bakala / Shoulda known they were fucking with a Marine.” – A Marine sings about life in the Iraq lane. CAIR protests. Life goes on.
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Paris and Nicole trade in their designer dresses for traditional saris when they take over the responsibilities of a traditional Pakistani mom. With the patient help of their “husband” and Americanized fifteen-year-old “son,” the girls manage to dress, speak and dance like conservative Pakistani housewives… the mind, it boggles.
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A briefing… but not even an empty notepad for the CIC? Oh, wait. I remember. There is someone briefing the brief.
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I see that Amitav Ghosh had the misfortune of reviewing Updike’s The Terrorist in the WaPo. Ghosh has struck the pitch perfect note here: With innumerable lives at stake, when Jack Levy finds himself faced with the task of giving Ahmad a reason to live and let live, he says: “Hey, come on, we’re all [...]
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I am glad they got Zarqawi. Very glad. He was an evil terrorist who killed innocents in Iraq and Jordan. He was also a deliberately constructed and hyped one. Mary Ann Weaver’s The Short, Violent Life of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi – soon to be the most linked article of the month – in The Atlantic [...]
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Tony Karon’s excellent post should get you started on your path to world cup madness. Next, bookmark Soccer Blog and NYT’s World Cup ’06 blog or Guardian’s World Cup blog [what? no Weekly Standard World Cup blog?] and, via moacir, World Cup Blog – one for every team! Lastly, youtube has all the highlights you [...]
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1. If you, or someone you know, works* on the All India Muslim League or on Muslim nationalism in India more generally or on any thing related to the people or events featured in the Muslim anticolonial movement in India, please contact me as soon as possible. We are planning a colloquium in Novemeber and [...]
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Dawn reports that Pakistan Govt. has decided that “screening of the film [DaVinci Code], or possession of it on video cassettes or discs, was prohibited and unlawful” because it is “sacrilegious to all religions”. Apparently, there have been protests and demonstrations…though, I haven’t really seen anything in the Urdu press about it…and now everyone is [...]
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Go see An Inconvenient Truth. Pirate it. Distribute it. Watch it. I saw it yesterday and while Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change had already scared the living daylights out of me [well, her NYer version], I was still taken aback. It made me wonder, watching Al Gore, what [...]
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The moon is a very important and complex symbol in Islamic culture. The horse is a very important symbol in both Arabic and Islamic culture. There is perhaps no landscape in Islamic culture and tradition more evocative and recognizable than the desert. Palm trees, particularly date palms, are inextricably linked to Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and [...]
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What in tarnation is wrong with you? Forget the whole Clinton marriage thing that you just “covered”. Forget even the earth-shaking headline today, “Terror Fears Hamper U.S. Muslims’ Travel”. No Duh! Just explain to me this piece by Katherine Zoepf which is so over-the-top with inanities that the only response I have is a blogrant: [...]
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