Headlines:
• Americans View Christians, Jews More Warmly Than Muslims
• Afghanistan’s Ongoing Nightmare
• Egypt Opens Border with Gaza to Allow Casualties Only
Americans View Christians, Jews More Warmly Than Muslims
A new Pew Research survey finds U.S. adults feel most warmly about people who share their religion or those they know as family, friends or co-workers. Americans give their highest scores to Jews, Catholics and evangelicals on a zero-to-100 “thermometer” featured in the survey, “How Americans Feel about Religious Groups,” released Wednesday. They’re nestled within a few degrees of one another: Jews, 63; Catholics, 62; evangelicals, 61. In the middle of the chart: Buddhists, 53; Hindus, 50; Mormons, 48. Trending to the chilly negative zone: atheists, 41 and Muslims, 40. Pew took the reading because “understanding the question of how religious groups view one another is valuable in a country where religion plays an important role in public life,” said Greg Smith, Pew’s associate director of religion research. [Source: Salt Lake Tribune].
Given the daily diet of Islamaphobia that is incessantly fed by the US media, the results are hardly surprising. And as long as America continues its war against Islam such results are bond to get worse for Muslims living in America. Therefore, it is important that the Muslims in America engage with the wider American society to explain the beauty of Islam, and mitigate any negativity before it is too late.
Egypt Opens Border with Gaza to Allow Casualties Only
Egypt says it has opened its border crossing with Gaza to allow the most critical casualties of Israeli airstrikes access to Egyptian medical care, following accusations that it has abandoned its usual role of mediating between the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships. The opening of the border accompanied statements by Egyptian officials that stressed Egypt’s active role in bringing the latest Gaza conflict, which Palestinians say has killed over 70 Gazans, to an end. The spokesman for Egypt’s foreign ministry, Badr Abdelatty, told the Guardian, “We have extensive and full contact with all parties concerned, either directly or internationally. Our main objective is to stop Israeli aggression. We are in full contact and pushing very hard to provide all humanitarian assistance to the Palestinians in Gaza.” Abdelatty’s comments followed statements from the office of Egypt’s president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, that he was communicating with key international figures – including the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. [Source: BBC]
A great injustice is being perpetrated by Sisi and his regime. Rather than sending in the Egyptian army to liberate Gaza and the whole of Palestine, Sisi’s regime is receiving ONLY critical casualties and making phone calls to the friends of the Jewish entity. Maybe now the people of Egypt will see Sisi for what he is— an absolute oppressor to his own people and Muslims, but a lowly coward and a friend to the Jewish entity!
Afghanistan’s Ongoing Nightmare
For the third time in five years, an electoral crisis faces Afghanistan. However, unlike the fraudulent Afghan presidential election in 2009 and the equally crooked parliamentary elections of 2010, the United States no longer maintains more than 100,000 troops in Afghanistan. The United States’ policy of artificially upholding political order with the presence of large numbers of soldiers and massive infusions of cash in order to prevent complete fracture across the nation of 30 million was never a sustainable course of action in Afghanistan and the inevitable breaking of that short-sighted policy now appears underway. This month, after no candidate achieved a clear majority in the April general election, the Afghan Independent Election Commission – of which there has never been evidence of its actual independence or objectivity – released preliminary results from the June 14 runoff of the top two candidates. Ashraf Ghani, an ethnic Pashtun, academic and World Bank executive who lived outside of Afghanistan from 1977-2001, had defeated Abdullah Abdullah, a Tajik-Pahstun. Sadly, for many of the Afghan people, a broken and illegitimate elections process is the least of their worries. The Afghan economy, despite the infusion of nearly $100 billion in foreign assistance since 2001, is incapable of supporting itself. Rewind the newsreels back over the last 13 years and you will hear praise from American politicians over “modern” Afghan leaders as Jeffersonian-Democrats, you will hear generals preach of counterinsurgency principles that were to vanquish an enemy by winning the hearts and minds of an occupied population, and you will marvel at the largess of the billions of dollars earmarked by our Congress for education and infrastructure programs for a faraway people. None of these noble imaginings ever became reality. Rather these dreams have manifested as a collective ongoing nightmare for the Afghan people. The current crisis in Afghanistan at the unrecoverable cost of far too many lives and limbs, is a tragic lesson on the true limits of American power. [Source: US News]
America’s failure in Afghanistan is so apparent that their very own people are writing about the limits of American power. However, the leaders of Afghanistan and Pakistan repeatedly fail to see America’s demise, and continue do their utmost to shore up America’s weakening rule in Afghanistan.