Opinion |
Switzerland after the minaret ban
Over a year after Swiss voters’ banning the construction of minarets and thus sending a shockwave throughout Europe, the small Alpine nation is back to business as usual. The minaret ban has all but disappeared from public discourse and the nationalist political parties advocating it went on to another anti-foreigner campaign.
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Towards religio-cultural pluralism
In our modern times, we are witnessing interesting changes in the world as religion is making inroads into our societies and into world politics. The resurgent role of religions is witnessed almost everywhere.
People talk about God all the time and how fundamentalisms of all kinds (including Catholicism, Judaism, and Islam) are growing and have been very vocal in their quest to express faith in the public sphere, believing that religion should rule every aspect of personal behavior.
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The Battleground called Media
"There are laws to protect the freedom of the press's speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press." – Mark Twain, author, 1873
The events of 9/11 introduced a new player in our media-dominated political culture. The attacks on American targets were staged for their dramatic effect, as a variant on what revolutionaries once called ‘armed propaganda’, an attack orchestrated to achieve maximum media attention by extremely media conscious terror groups.
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From Journalism to Jingoism
"Those guilty of Tuesday's attack should pay. But hunting monsters is risky business. The danger isn't that the monster will catch you, but that you won't know when you have become one yourself." - Robert Kirby, columnist, 9/16/01
The 9/11 attack, responsible for devastating the Twin Towers and the World Trade Center in New York, also claimed another casualty - American journalism, trapping it in a conflict between its duty to inform the public and its desire to be popular by promoting patriotism.
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The Fear We Trust
We have been down this road before. It’s always the same road, and as such, it always leads to the same place, a dangerous and unstable place. Along this newly paved road, the Muslim has become the new Communist in the West, but this time around the ‘enemy’ is ostensibly easier to define, easier to pick out of a crowd, easier to hate, and easier to target.
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Islam and the West: should we be hopeful?
The main conflict line in the world today is between the West and Islam – between countries mainly influenced by Christian culture with a democratic tradition, and countries mainly influenced by Islamic culture and without a democratic tradition. After September 11th, 2001, terror attributed to Islam has totally dominated the media image of the main threats in the world not only against western democracies but also against established Islamic theocracies. The terror ideology has found its base in a perverted interpretation of Islam though.
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