Al-Muhajabah's Islamic Blogs: what he said

what he said

Date: September 20, 2004 | 5 Shaban 1425 Hijriah

Via Is That Legal, I found this from Michael Froomkin:

I find it shocking and horrible that anyone running the government, anyone running the Justice Department, could argue for torturing prisoners of war, or any other class of person. I find it frightening that anyone running the government, anyone running the Justice Department, could even entertain arguments that US Citizens should be held in solitary confinement, indefinitely, without charges or access to court and counsel. The assertion of this power strikes at the hear of our democracy. It is in my view many steps down the road to serious, genuine, good-old-fashioned tyranny, with or without raising the almost distracting issue of whether this is some nascent form of fascism.

(And the bankrupt-America policies of this administration, with many mainstream economists predicting a crash of the dollar or other economic disaster unless we change our policies doesn’t make me feel all that great either. Especially when I think about the political developments that often tend to follow an economic crisis.)

So, one reason I’ve kept on doing this is that I don’t want to look back in twenty years and discover that during the crunch time I was the modern equivalent of a ‘good German’—busy with the demands of family and career while ‘the great experiment,’ the USA, went down the tubes around me. Even bearing witness against these trends serves, I hope, in some small way to begin to roll them back.

I've felt that way too sometimes. There are things that I see happening in this country that are very disturbing to me, things that I feel go against all the ideals that America is supposed to stand for. When someone you love is doing something wrong, don't you try to speak up and let them know so they can fix it? The same is true of countries. Many people criticize the direction America is going because we love our country and don't want to see it do something wrong.

~ Posted by Al-Muhajabah, a member of the reality-based community, at 01:26 PM

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A Year Already?
Depending how you count, I’ve been blogging for a year now. The first post, such as it was, is dated Sept. 15, but I started in earnest on the 20th. And I still think that one of the early posts was one of the best; it certainly hit the kind of issues I ended up blogging most about. (My eldest son, however, says that this one is the best of the early posts and maybe all time.) I had thought when I began to take part in the life of the mind working out loud. There hasn’t been all that much of that here; my academic work tends to stay on academic pages where I can go on at sufficient length to be as precise as I feel a need to be. Instead, this blog ended up far more political than I originally imagined it would be. There’s a reason for this. I find it shocking and horrible that anyone running the government, anyone running the Justice Department, could argue for torturing prisoners of war, or any other class of person. I find it frightening that anyone running the government, anyone running the Justice Department, could even entertain arguments that......

veiled4allah: what he said

what he said

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