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Keywords: Jihad

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The past is prologue: Lewis Lapham’s enduring editorial vision

    • Warwick McFadyen
    • 30 July 2024

    Lewis Lapham's work was a rigorous autopsy of American culture, exposing the chasm between our pretensions and our realities. With a historian’s depth and a satirist’s wit, he illuminated the follies that sustain our collective delusions. 

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    They're not lone wolves, they're canaries

    • Rachel Woodlock
    • 14 November 2017
    7 Comments

    These lone-wolf terrorists are more like miners' canaries. Whether it is a paranoid loner, an enraged ideologue, a jihadist or a white supremacist, they are screaming out at the top of their lungs that something is terribly wrong.

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  • RELIGION

    Muslim forgiveness jars circle of prejudice

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 13 November 2017
    5 Comments

    Last week we saw the magnanimity and depth of Raeed Darwiche. While travelling in the hearse carrying the body of Jihad, his eight year old son, he pleaded for an end to the vituperation directed at Maha Al-Shennag, whose car had crushed his son. Darwiche appealed to his Islamic faith in explaining why he forgave Al-Shennag.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Ramadan: the fast and the flatulent

    • Irfan Yusuf
    • 29 May 2017
    12 Comments

    You need not believe everything you read in the Herald Sun or an ISIS press release. Islam isn't just about armed jihad and violence against infant genitalia. Islam does have a spiritual side, and Ramadan is inherently spiritual, full of prayer and fasting and hardly any horizontal bedtime action. The theory behind all this deprivation is that if you're hungry and thirsty and sex-deprived between sunrise and sunset for an entire month, you'll gain a spiritual high that should last you the rest of the year.

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  • RELIGION

    What the sharia is all the fuss about?

    • Rachel Woodlock
    • 24 February 2017
    29 Comments

    Once upon a time, a proud dad in Dandenong could name his son Jihad, with its ancient meaning of 'striving' in the path of God. Now he might choose a different name to avoid future discrimination. 'Shari'a' has come to mean the forced imposition of medieval punishments on cowering populations, while 'halal' is the torture of sheep and cows. These words have been stolen from ordinary Muslims, the vast majority of the world's second largest religion. I blame three groups for this.

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  • RELIGION

    Picking on Muslims is getting dull

    • Ruby Hamad
    • 12 September 2014
    22 Comments

    The readiness with which some westerners take the most violent and extreme groups as legitimate expressions of Islam betrays the racism that underpins perceptions of Muslims. Whether I like it or not, my religious background and my name tie me to these 'jihadists.' I feel the permanent weight of expectation to publicly apologise for their actions.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Problems with jihadi tourism

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 26 September 2013
    1 Comment

    Jihadi tourism is big business, oiled by a global recruit base from which various diasporas can be tapped. The attackers on the shopping mall in Nairobi were linked to a Somali based outfit calling itself al-Shabaab, a standing affiliate of al-Qaeda operating in the Horn of Africa. But the Somali case is far from unique. The Afghanistan and Iraqi conflicts netted their fair share of foreign recruits in the fight against US-led forces.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    A tale of two unsuccessful asylum seekers

    • Kerry Murphy
    • 19 June 2013
    6 Comments

    Comparison of these two cases is illuminating. One is the recruit to the Australia A cricket team, Pakistani born Fawad Ahmed. The other is, in Tony Abbott's words, the 'convicted Jihadist terrorist', Egyptian born Sayed Ahmed Abullatif. Ahmed will be the second Pakistani born cricketer in an Australian side that desperately needs a good leg-spinner. Abdullatif has possibly a more difficult road ahead.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    'Naked Jihad' sacrifices feminism to racism

    • Ellena Savage
    • 12 April 2013
    9 Comments

    The phrase 'white men saving brown women from brown men' derides the use of western feminist tropes to further colonial expansion. The anti-Islamic reaction of some feminist activists to the death threats suffered by Tunisian 'naked protestor' Amina Tyler does nothing to promote global solidarity among women.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Insanity rules after ten years of war in Afghanistan

    • Irfan Yusuf
    • 07 October 2011
    12 Comments

    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.

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  • RELIGION

    Myopic media's Indonesia 'jihad'

    • Herman Roborgh
    • 20 July 2009
    14 Comments

    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.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    'Jihad' evangelicals on trial

    • Saeed Saeed
    • 03 October 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.

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