“Edhi tells narrator Tehmina Durrani that he had received complaints about his foundation’s refusal to distinguish between Muslims and non-Muslims. “Why must you pick up Christians and Hindus in your ambulances?” he was asked. “Because the ambulance is more Muslim than you,” he replied.
The more I learn of him, the less I understand how a place like ( Read more... )

“This was the first major vote in the era of post-truth politics: the listless remain campaign attempted to fight fantasy with facts, but quickly found that the currency of fact had been badly debased.
- The Guardian

Originally published at oxalic. You can comment here or there.

“A story is a kind of biopsy of human life.”
- Lorrie Moore

Originally published at oxalic. You can comment here or there.

“My name is Dana,” she said.

“How old are you?”

“I am 9.”

“When is your birthday?”

Confused, she switched to Arabic.

“We don’t have that in Saudi Arabia,” she said. “That’s an infidel holiday.”

Shocked, her father asked where she had learned that, and she fetched one of her government-issued textbooks, flipping to a lesson that listed “forbidden ( Read more... )

“The people who consider themselves “cosmopolitan” in today’s West, by contrast, are part of a meritocratic order that transforms difference into similarity, by plucking the best and brightest from everywhere and homogenizing them into the peculiar species that we call “global citizens.”

From London to Paris to New York, each Western “global city ( Read more... )

“As New York Timess TV critic writes on the paradox of citizen videos that expose violence and injustice, there is an echo of our experience of watching videos of civilians getting attacked and bombarded in Syria year after year: you are “there” as a virtual witness but you are not “there” physically to help and your witness may not lead to change ( Read more... )

“Too often, the subject of Israel becomes just another way for Americans to refract their own views of America. Liberals tend to assume that right-wing evangelicals support Israel because of how it fits into their imagined apocalypse: only when God’s Chosen People reoccupy the entirety of their biblical territory will the Final Dispensation, the ( Read more... )

“Say, oh ye of little faith
I worship not that which ye worship
Nor will ye worship that which I worship
And I will not worship that which ye have been wont to worship
Nor will ye worship that which I worship
To you be your way and to me mine.”
- Quran, Surah Al-Kafirun

Originally published at oxalic. You can comment here or there.

“Social media has been described as “humanising” the Palestinian victims. . . If you are being “humanised”, you are already losing. To be “humanised” implies that your humanity is never assumed, but something you have to prove.”

“For every group that uses media to affirm its humanity, there is another group proclaiming that humanity as irrelevant, ( Read more... )

“Millennials” have become both a media scapegoat for, and a distraction from, widespread economic suffering. Having experienced no economy other than the recession’s false recovery, young Americans have arguably suffered the most. The remedy lies not in judging their lifestyle choices-or worse yet, perpetuating the illusion that they have money to ( Read more... )