Damascus Diary

A brilliant essay detailing the atmosphere in Damascus during the days leading up to the start of riots protesting the Danish Cartoons.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On Jinnah

An excellent article on Jinnah, debunking his secular credentials, in the wake of Advani's comments about Jinnah having wanted a secular Pakistan. Despite wiping out Hindus, Sikhs, Christians and Parsis, the Muslims of Pakistan have become more sectarian and intolerant about their Islamic faith than they were 50 or 100 years ago. Islam has assumed dangerously virulent forms today and Pakistan has come to be associated with terror and tyranny, rather than democracy and secularism. These developments are intrinsic to Jinnah’s ideology rather than unintended, unexpected by-products. Jinnah's legacy, says Madhu Kishwar, is a planted seed of hatred that consumes Pakistan and burns India in its wake. Another comment of note is about how the Sangh and Shiv Sena are but mirror images of Jinnah's politics. The Sangh Parivar hates Jinnah because Jinnah succeeded in his mission of dividing India by "uniting" Muslims into an ethnically cleansed state, whereas a whole century ...
Read more

Animal Rights

A very good article espousing animal rights. Not being a animal rights believer myself, it takes a lot for me to agree with such opinions. However, this article comes close, grabbing my attention with the very first powerful paragraph. In 55 BC, the Roman leader Pompey staged a combat between humans and elephants. Surrounded in the arena, the animals perceived that they had no hope of escape. According to Pliny, they then "entreated the crowd, trying to win its compassion with indescribable gestures, bewailing their plight with a sort of lamentation." The audience, moved to pity and anger by their plight, rose to curse Pompey — feeling, wrote Cicero, that the elephants had a relation of commonality (societas) with the human race. Interestingly, it also contains many ideas that can be applied just as well outside the context of the argument on animal rights. Sympathy, however, is malleable. It can all too easily be corrupted by our interest in protecting the comforts of a wa...
Read more