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Today is the tenth anniversary of the war on Afghan jihadists. We civilised Westerners decided we’d had enough of barbarians flying planes into our skyscrapers, killing thousands of our civilians. And hence we sent our own planes to drop huge bombs on their villages and towns.
A soft toy. A restaurant menu. A business card. An agony so great it swamped the world. While America was busy hunting down Osama bin Laden, my son and his contemporaries, who were children at the time of the attack, grew up and inherited a world irrevocably changed.
Turkey has condemned the attacks on a flotilla carrying humanitarian supplies to Gaza as piracy. Branding activists as terrorists and denying the human situation in Gaza will not help an Israeli cause that is proving increasingly alienating.
Modern atheists in the West and modernist Muslims in Islam are both abusing religion. Their discourse about God has been influenced by the popular demand for scientific empirical verification, and they have lost confidence in the ability of figurative language to open a way to truth.
Visits by our senior politicians offering glib reassurances will not halt the turndown in Indian enrolments in our tertiary institutions. We need to revisit the days when we treated international students as people rather than statistics in an export industry.
Many in the media have labelled the bombings in Jakarta as the work of jihad. When we understand the Qur'anic verses that advocate jihad in their proper historical context, it is clear that the Qur'an expresses acceptance and respect for non-Muslims.
The scriptures of both Islam and Christianity are full of paradoxes. Some readers of paradoxes simply emphasise only one part of the paradox. (Full text of Herman Roborgh's Dialogue Australasia article, May 2009.)
Benny Morris, Israel's best-known revisionist historian, led more and more Israelis and Diaspora Jews in the 1980s to accept the legitimacy of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Morris has changed his spots. (September 2008)
The Catch the Fire Ministries religious vilification case was used for political means by both Muslims and Christians. Deen's account discusses wider issues such as the global rise of Islamaphobia, John Howard's identity politics and the Cronulla Riots.
Conventional wisdom tells us democracies are inherently stable, yet an extremist spirit has emerged in mainstream Indian politics. The silence among Australian Christians about the suffering of Indian Christians is as deafening as that of Australian Muslims towards Muslims in Darfur.
Benny Morris, Israel's best-known revisionist historian, led more and more Israelis and Diaspora Jews in the 1980s to accept the legitimacy of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Morris has changed his spots.
Imagine Kevin Rudd in a Batman suit, and soon-to-be executed Bali bomber Amrozi as the Joker. Would the caped crusader's 'rule' — that he not become a monster to stop one — compel him to intercede on the smiling assassin's execution?