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Showing posts from July, 2016

Europe risks repeating past mistakes on Islam

http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/markaz/posts/2016/07/21-europe-islam-salafism-laurence Jonathan Laurence | July 21, 2016 10:54am Europe risks repeating past mistakes on Islam  Many have recently sought to understand and explain today’s crisis of legitimacy within Islam, with some analysts placing the blame for that crisis squarely on Islam itself. In my view, today’s crisis of Islamic religious legitimacy and the spread of Salafi ideology are a direct legacy of 20th century European empires. I don’t mean that as a moral cudgel, nor as a plea for political correctness. But to avoid making the same mistakes again, we need to understand both the contingency of that history and the vacuity of the term “Islamic fundamentalism,” which is used as a stand-in for everything from traditional views of gender roles and homosexuality to religiously-inspired mass murder. Europe’s 20th century mistake How did more rigi

Why European Islam’s current problems might reflect a 100-year-old mistake

http://www.economist.com/blogs/erasmus/2016/07/ottoman-caliphs Why European Islam’s current problems might reflect a 100-year-old mistake   EVERY time a European city is shaken by an act of mass violence, the continent's heavy-weight newspapers host agonised debates over what has gone wrong. In particular, debaters often ask, should European states have responded differently to the emergence of large, discontented Muslim minorities, either by accommodating cultural difference more generously or (as some advocate) by suppressing it? Even when it becomes clear that Islam was not really a factor at all (as seems to be the case with last week's killing spree by a maladjusted young man in Munich) the discussions go on.   One of America's leading authorities on European Islam has made a rather nuanced and unusual contribution to this conversation. Writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in response to a column asserting that "terrorism has a lot to

Want to Live? Stay Away from Semi-Trucks

http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/trucks/a22004/stay-away-from-trucks http://www.nhtsa.gov/Research/Crash+Avoidance/Heavy+Truck+Research After two race weekends in a row, I wasn't particularly shocked by the cloud of dust and debris that appeared without warning a few hundred feet in front of me. Nor was I surprised by the cars swerving left and right away from it like cockroaches exposed to a sudden flashlight. In fact, it took me almost a full second to process the fact that I was on the freeway, not the track. My race car was twenty feet behind me on an open-deck trailer, and I was about to have an interesting exercise in getting that trailer slowed down and out of the lane without losing control. Advertisement - Continue Reading Below So what was going on ahead of me to cause all this chaos, if it wasn't a car going off-track? The answer was in the air, flying towards my windshield: a five-foot long section of truck tire. When I was a teenage