Archive for March 6th, 2016
A few excerpts of peoples opinions on Trump
UNBELIEVABLE: This is the CRAZIEST thing I’ve seen in Religion since the pope was here last week!
So-called Evangelicals praying blessings on Trump and pleading… with God to make him president!
They tell God he could bless America spiritually? What is it about this man that makes these false teachers think he, as a non-Christian could possibly bless America spiritually!?
(This is not what Biblical Christianity looks like. This is fake self-serving Christianity).
Apparently the people in the room don’t think God can hear their prayers unless half the people in the room are videoing them on their phones and uploading to the *cloud* – which is apparently where they think God resides!
Attending are the usual false teachers like David Jeremiah, Kenneth Copeland, Paula White, Robert Jeffress, Pastor Mark Burns and Rabbi Schneider.
Some “faith leaders” are so desperate for a seat at the king’s table, that they will prostitute themselves in this manner.
Trump really has them bamboozled into thinking he’s God’s man for the job of POTUS
Brian Murray shared this post
Mr. Trump as commander and Chief would force the military to obey his illegal orders. It is hard not to make the comparison to Hitler.
BAIER: Mr. Trump, just yesterday, almost 100 foreign policy experts signed on to an open letter refusing to support you, saying your embracing expansive use of torture is inexcusable.
General Michael Hayden, former CIA director, NSA direct…or, and other experts have said that when you asked the U.S. military to carry out some of your campaign promises, specifically targeting terrorists’ families, and also the use of interrogation methods more extreme than waterboarding, the military will refuse because they’ve been trained to turn down and refuse illegal orders.
So what would you do, as commander-in-chief, if the U.S. military refused to carry out those orders?
TRUMP: They won’t refuse. They’re not going to refuse me. Believe me.
BAIER: But they’re illegal.
TRUMP: Let me just tell you, you look at the Middle East. They’re chopping off heads. They’re chopping off the heads of Christians and anybody else that happens to be in the way.
They’re drowning people in steel cages. And he — now we’re talking about waterboarding.
This really started with Ted, a question was asked of Ted last — two debates ago about waterboarding. And Ted was, you know, having a hard time with that question, to be totally honest with you.
They then came to me, what do you think of waterboarding? I said it’s fine. And if we want to go stronger, I’d go stronger, too, because, frankly…
(APPLAUSE)
… that’s the way I feel. Can you imagine — can you imagine these people, these animals over in the Middle East, that chop off heads, sitting around talking and seeing that we’re having a hard problem with waterboarding?
We should go for waterboarding and we should go tougher than waterboarding. That’s my opinion.
BAIER: But targeting terrorists’ families?
(APPLAUSE)
TRUMP: And — and — and — I’m a leader. I’m a leader. I’ve always been a leader. I’ve never had any problem leading people. If I say do it, they’re going to do it. That’s what leadership is all about.
BAIER: Even targeting terrorists’ families?
TRUMP: Well, look, you know, when a family flies into the World Trade Center, a man flies into the World Trade Center, and his family gets sent back to where they were going — and I think most of you know where they went — and, by the way, it wasn’t Iraq — but they went back to a certain territory, they knew what was happening.
The wife knew exactly what was happening.
They left two days early, with respect to the World Trade Center, and they went back to where they went, and they watched their husband on television flying into the World Trade Center, flying into the Pentagon, and probably trying to fly into the White House, except we had some very, very brave souls on that third plane. All right?
‘NYT’ portrays Islam more negatively than alcohol, cancer, and cocaine: A study
A study released in November 2015 by 416 Labs, a Toronto-based consulting firm, reveals that the New York Times portrays Islam/Muslims more negatively than alcohol, cancer, and cocaine among other benchmarked words.
Based on a sentiment analysis of online and print headlines spanning 25 years of coverage, the study found “strong evidence that Islam/Muslims are consistently associated with negative terms in NYT headlines.”
Key findings pertaining to 2,667,700 articles include:
- “57% of the headlines containing the words Islam/Muslims were scored negatively. Only 8% of the headlines were scored positively.
- Compared to all the other benchmarked terms (Republican, Democrat, Cancer and Yankees, Christianity and Alcohol), Islam/Muslims had the highest incidents of negative terms throughout the 25-year period.
- Not once over the examined period does the aggregate negative sentiment of headlines related to Islam/Muslims go below the NYT aggregate (29%) for all headlines.
- The most frequent terms associated with Islam/Muslims include “Rebels” and “Militant.” None of the 25 most frequently occurring terms were positive.”
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Figure 4 of the study showing percentage of NYT headlines with an overall negative score. (Image: 416 Labs)
To put these findings in perspective, the study notes that “despite causing more fatalities than violent acts by Jihadist groups [throughout the covered period], the negative sentiment for alcohol and cancer remains significantly below the sentiment shown in headlines for Islam and Muslims.”
In a phone interview, co-author Steven Zhou, who is in charge of Investigations and Civic Engagement at the recently established consulting firm, explained the reasons behind their inaugural study:
“Since 9/11, many media outlets began profiteering from the anti-Muslim climate. Though you could probably trace a similar trend back to the Iranian Revolution. We talk a lot about media and Islamophobia, but no body has done the math. So, we thought it is long overdue to have a quantitative investigation of an agenda-setting newspaper.”
Given that media organizations have a powerful role in influencing public perceptions, the study concludes that “the overwhelming sentiment associated with NYT headlines about Islam/Muslims is likely to distort perceptions,” suggesting “that the average reader of NYT is likely to assign collective responsibility to Islam/Muslims for the violent actions of a few.”
While the results may not be surprising to many readers, co-author Usaid Siddiqui who is in charge of Communications, Outreach and Partnerships said “when we went into it we didn’t think it would be surprising if Islam was one of the most negatively portrayed topics in the NYT…What did really surprise us was that compared with something as inherently negative as cancer, Islam still tends to be more negative.”
Though the study was published four months ago, it has received little attention.
Zhou explains this is because “it’s the first study of a recently established firm. You know, we all worked on it while also having different full-time jobs and obligations.”
Nonetheless, given the spike in vitriol against Muslims in an election year, these findings are a timely wake-up call.
Especially when voices like Robert Spencer’s, author and founder of the infamous Jihad Watch, a program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, blast the study as:
“A classic example of how Leftists are out of touch with reality…the insidious agenda here is to silence even the slightest (and the New York Times is about as slight as you can get) critical word about anything related to Islam and Muslims.
This would have the effect of silencing all opposition to the advancing jihad. It would be a recipe for defeat and surrender.”
Zhou said that he doesn’t “see [Spencer’s view] as an assessment of our substantial study, because it doesn’t address the raw statistical analysis and empirical evidence our work clearly highlights.”
Zhou’s defense of the study is not only grounded in empirical evidence, but also in light of a conversation surrounding what could only be described as the Ayan Hirsi Ali Problem: “fringe Muslim [and non-Muslim] Americans, pushing an anti-Islam agenda are promoted as legitimate experts, thus mainstreaming ideas that are both offensive and incorrect.”
Spencer is yet to “demonstrate his qualifications to explicate this topic,” said Zhou. In fact, according to a report by the Muslim Public Affairs Council, Spencer, along with many other so-called “experts” on Islam, lacks crucial qualifications on the subject matter, and “mostly engages in internet-based polemics that he tries to pass off as serious scholarship.”
In 2014, Carl W. Ernst, professor of Islamic Studies at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, said that Spencer’s views “have no basis in scholarship,” with “no academic training in Islamic studies whatsoever.” Incidentally, UNC-CH is where Spencer earned his Master’s focusing on early Christianity.
Though the study keenly recognized that its findings are not necessarily the result of intentional choices by decision makers at the Times, it clearly points to an institutional tendency by many agenda-setting newspapers and organizations to paint Islam and Muslims with a single brush: war, violence, and terror.
Zhou said the study’s empirical approach “sets an example” for many other topics because “critical rhetoric and slogans can only be effective with supporting evidence and crunching the numbers.”
One topic that undoubtedly serves as fertile ground is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The NYT is a standout case for several reasons: at least 3 sons of NYT editors assigned to cover Israel and Palestine served, or continued to serve, in the Israeli occupation forces, evident manipulation and biased coverage, as well as a trend of accommodating official Israeli perspectives far more than Palestinians’, all of which pose a serious conflict of interest to fair and balanced coverage, inviting a similar empirical investigation.
Several recommendations are offered by the authors of the study to “help represent Islam/Muslims in a more accurate way.”
1. These include educating reporters on the nuances of Islam,
2. engaging local Muslim voices, and
3. greater activism by Muslim organizations among others.
Zhou said the most crucial tool for these recommendations to be taken up by people is “through creating spaces for Muslims beyond the mosque and home to talk about and engage with civic life.”
Dorgham Abusalim recently graduated with a Master in International Affairs from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland. You can follow him
Why Teaching Poetry Is So Important
This oft-neglected literary form can help students learn in ways that prose can’t.
High school poetry suffers from an image problem.
Think of Dead Poet’s Society‘s scenes of red-cheeked lads standing on desks and reciting verse, or of dowdy Dickinson imitators mooning on park benches, filling up journals with noxious chapbook fodder.
There’s also the tired lessons about iambic pentameter and teachers wringing interpretations from cryptic stanzas, their students bewildered and chuckling.
(Like this image of ) Reading poetry is impractical, even frivolous. High school poets are antisocial and effete.
I have always rejected these clichéd mischaracterizations born of ignorance, bad movies, and uninspired teaching.
Yet I haven’t been stirred to fill my lessons with Pound and Eliot as my 11th grade teacher did.
I loved poetry in high school. I wrote it. I read it. Today, I slip scripture into an analysis of The Day of the Locust. A Nikki Giovanni piece appears in The Bluest Eye unit. Poetry has become an afterthought, a supplement, not something to study on its own.
Poetry can give students a healthy outlet for surging emotions.
Reading original poetry aloud in class can foster trust and empathy in the classroom community, while also emphasizing speaking and listening skills that are often neglected in high school literature classes.
Students who don’t like writing essays may like poetry, with its dearth of fixed rules and its kinship with rap.
For these students, poetry can become a gateway to other forms of writing. It can help teach skills that come in handy with other kinds of writing—like precise, economical diction, for example.
When Carl Sandburg writes, “The fog comes/on little cat feet,” in just six words, he endows a natural phenomenon with character, a pace, and a spirit. All forms of writing benefits from the powerful and concise phrases found in poems.
I have used cut-up poetry (a variation on the sort “popularized” by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin) to teach 9th grade students, most of whom learned English as a second language, about grammar and literary devices.
They made collages after slicing up dozens of “sources,” identifying the adjectives and adverbs, utilizing parallel structure, alliteration, assonance, and other figures of speech.
Short poems make a complete textual analysis more manageable for English language learners. When teaching students to read and evaluate every single word of a text, it makes sense to demonstrate the practice with a brief poem—like Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool.”
Students can learn how to utilize grammar in their own writing by studying how poets do—and do not—abide by traditional writing rules in their work.
Poetry can teach writing and grammar conventions by showing what happens when poets strip them away or pervert them for effect.
Dickinson often capitalizes common nouns and uses dashes instead of commas to note sudden shifts in focus.
Agee uses colons to create dramatic, speech-like pauses.
Cummings of course rebels completely. He usually eschews capitalization in his proto-text message poetry, wrapping frequent asides in parentheses and leaving last lines dangling on their pages, period-less.
In “next to of course god america i,” Cummings strings together, in the first 13 lines, a cavalcade of jingoistic catch-phrases a politician might utter, and the lack of punctuation slowing down and organizing the assault accentuates their unintelligibility and banality and heightens the satire.
The abuse of conventions helps make the point.
In class, it can help a teacher explain the exhausting effect of run-on sentences—or illustrate how clichés weaken an argument.
Still, that quantifiable process of demystification is precisely what teachers are encouraged to teach students, often in lieu of curating a powerful experience through literature.
The literature itself becomes secondary, boiled down to its Cliff’s Notes demi-glace. I haven’t wanted to risk that with the poems that enchanted me in my youth.
Teachers should produce literature lovers as well as keen critics, striking a balance between teaching writing, grammar, and analytical strategies and then also helping students to see that literature should be mystifying.
It should resist easy interpretation and beg for return visits.
Poetry serves this purpose perfectly. I am confident my 12th graders know how to write essays. I know they can mine a text for subtle messages.
But I worry sometimes if they’ve learned this lesson.
In May, a month before they graduate, I may read some poetry with my seniors—to drive home that and nothing more.
Andrew Simmons is a writer, teacher, and musician based in California. He has written for The New York Times, Slate, and The Believer.
Hero and healer of south Lebanon: Shukrallah Karam
Thirty-nine years ago, on 17 February 1977, Shukrallah Karam, 63, the only resident physician in the south Lebanese town of Khiam, where he was raised, was doing what he did best — tending to the sick and wounded at his house-turned-makeshift-clinic.
Outside, Israeli tanks and troops were approaching on one of their many incursions into Lebanon.
Posted by Hicham Safieddine, a post-doctoral fellow of History at Rice University; he co-founded Al-Akhbar English and is online editor of The Legal Agenda’s English page
Feb. 17, 2016
Karam’s wife Wadad and their 6 children had fled to Beirut and pleaded with him to join them there. But Karam, a former mayor of Khiam, was determined to stay.
“How can I have peace of mind when I am surrounded by thousands of miserable people?” he wrote. “Who would take their temperature and listen to their heartbeat?” Later that day, Israeli agents shot him dead.
A year later, south Lebanon fell under Israeli occupation.
Karam’s town became home to the notorious Khiam prison, where hundreds of Lebanese and Palestinians were locked up and tortured. It bore witness to a brutal occupation that lasted until 2000.
Karam’s assassination marked the end of a distinguished career of public service to the residents of Khiam and surrounding villages. The poor people’s doctor, as he was known, was a community leader who used medicine and social activism as a weapon against local injustice and foreign oppression.
His story sheds light on the largely neglected fight of the ordinary people of southern Lebanon at a time when armed struggle was far from the unified and formidable force that it has turned into today under Hezbollah.
Karam’s actions and beliefs embodied the secular politics of national unity and economic development that animated progressive forces in Lebanon prior to the civil war in 1975, before they were gradually replaced by virulent sectarianism.
Karam obtained his medical degree in surgery from the American University of Beirut in 1937 when Lebanon was still under French mandated rule.
Unlike most of his peers, who sought success in Beirut or other Lebanese cities, Karam decided to return to Khiam and attend to the needs of southerners, who were marginalized by an indifferent central authority.
He helped improve the health and welfare of southerners, operating from his home, or roaming the region, initially on a horse loaded with medicine and later in his car, to treat peasants and workers.
By the early 1950s, Karam had become a household name.
In 1956, Ali Hamdan, 15, had been tilling at nearby Shebaa farms when his pickaxe hit a rock and a thin metal shard split off and settled in his right eye. “I lost vision in my eye and when I used a primitive treatment with tea drops things got worse,” he remarked decades later. After a two-hour trek, the doctor had operated on his eye: “He refused to charge my parents a penny for the visit or the operation and told them to use the money to buy eye drops and a cream. As you see, I am okay and I don’t wear glasses.”
Karam’s public service blurred the lines between private and public life.
This left a strong imprint on his eldest son, also Karam, who became an accomplished physician in his own right and then health minister in 1998.
As a child, Karam Jr admired his father’s vocation but lamented the price: “Rare were the meals that we did not share with patients, who frequently showed up in our private quarters and bedrooms. [My father’s] complete devotion, like taking no vacations, supplying the needy with medications, tending a dying patient for hours on end, made any later sacrifices of my own seem trivial.”
In times of war, Karam was no less committed to saving lives.
Before Lebanon’s independence he had opposed French occupation. Even so, during WWII, his willingness to treat the wounded of all stripes on the battlefield earned him an accolade from the allied forces.
He turned it down and suggested donating the money to those in need. During the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948 and 1967, Karam, staunchly opposed to Zionist plans in Palestine, was on the frontline.
In 1948, he turned his house into a field hospital and welcomed Palestinian refugees fleeing Israeli attacks and wounded Syrian soldiers stationed in Lebanon.
In 1967, he headed to Mount Hermon where he supplied medical aid to Syrian fighters.
Following the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war in 1975, Karam tried to prevent Khiam from getting caught up in the internecine conflict between Lebanese and Palestinians. But the Israeli authorities tried to win the support of the Lebanese by setting up a “goodwill wall” on the borders which offered free treatment to Lebanese citizens.
Aware that this move aimed to sow divisions, Karam drove to the border crossing and offered free treatment to stop people seeking Israeli aid.
According to his son, Karam’s presence hindered Israel’s plans to divide and conquer.
“He was the only physician in Khiam. People solicited his medical services but also his social advice. He was widely known as a warrior for all national causes and a stout opponent of the occupation of Palestine. His political influence on the region’s youth and ordinary citizens was all too obvious. So they decided to take him out.”
Karam’s influence came from his political understanding of humanitarian work.
“His struggle for citizens’ rights, freedom from oppression and social equality were part of his beliefs,” his son says.
Karam avoided party politics but advocated popular political causes.
In the 1950s, he was a proponent of the pan-Arab nationalism of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser. In Lebanon, he forged a strong relationship with the progressive leftist leader Kamal Jumblatt.
In the village, he helped found the Khiam Cultural and Social Club in 1974, a project ahead of its time, before civil society had become a popular concept. But then civil war broke out, and three years later Israeli invasion nipped the club’s potential in the bud.
The liberation of Khiam in 2000 revived interest in the project and people were finally able to openly celebrate the doctor’s legacy.
And in 2012, following fundraising efforts by Karam Jr and others, a new complex was built, named after the doctor. It boasts dozens of annual cultural activities including poetry sessions, painting exhibitions, and foreign language classes.
Almost 40 years after the doctor’s death, Karam Jr reflects on his father’s decision to stay behind in Khiam: “It saddened me to no end [but] I did not expect otherwise.”
He recalled how, before his death, the father used to listen to Adagio by Albinoni on the radio: “Whenever I hear that music, I see him holding his head in his palms and following the news.”
Karam Moushka shared this link
Adonis Diaries 