Jews are more strongly opposed to the Iraq War – and have been since before it began – than any other American religious group, according to an analysis of Gallup polls conducted since 2005 that was released over the weekend by The Gallup Organization. Asked if ‘the United States made a mistake in sending troops to Iraq,’ 77 percent of American Jews said it had, while only 21% believed the deployment was not a mistake. This figure is in marked contrast to the American average, where only 52% indicated opposition to the war and 46% indicated support. The Jewish opposition to the war, according to Gallup figures, is not new, and preceded most Americans turning against the war. In the first two years of the war (2003 and 2004), when 52% of Americans supported the war, 61% of Jews opposed it. Even before the beginning of hostilities in 2002 and early 2003, US Jews supported the war by just 49% to 48%. Americans generally supported it by 57% to 37%. The Gallup figures also show that Jewish opposition to the war is not explainable by the high Democratic Party affiliation among Jews. Even within the Democratic Party, […]
It sounds like something from a futuristic TV thriller: American spies thwarting the next 9/11-style terrorist plot through a shared online community modeled after Wikipedia, the free and highly popular user-created, web-based encyclopedia. But Anthony D. Williams, co-author of the new book, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, recently told a Wharton audience that this online community of spies already exists, and is on the case. ‘The national intelligence community took a lot of criticism after 9/11 for failing to connect the dots,’ said Williams, who delivered the keynote speech at the 9th Annual Emerging Technologies Update Day, sponsored by Wharton’s Mack Center for Technological Innovation. ‘And so now the national intelligence community is saying, ‘Well, could we learn something from Wikipedia, and could we share knowledge in a cross-organizational way?’ And in fact we have IntelliPedia, which is actually a real project. Of course, it’s not open to the public.’ IntelliPedia may be sealed off, but other web sites — community-oriented and built around user-generated content — are not only open to all but thriving, from the public photography site Flickr.com to Craigslist.org, the mostly free classified-ad site that now draws more traffic than mainstream […]
JERUSALEM — Brace yourself. James Cameron, the man who brought you ‘The Titanic’ is back with another blockbuster. This time, the ship he’s sinking is Christianity. In a new documentary, Producer Cameron and his director, Simcha Jacobovici, make the starting claim that Jesus wasn’t resurrected –the cornerstone of Christian faith– and that his burial cave was discovered near Jerusalem. And, get this, Jesus sired a son with Mary Magdelene. No, it’s not a re-make of ‘The Da Vinci Codes’. It’s supposed to be true. Let’s go back 27 years, when Israeli construction workers were gouging out the foundations for a new building in the industrial park in the Talpiyot, a Jerusalem suburb. of Jerusalem. The earth gave way, revealing a 2,000 year old cave with 10 stone caskets. Archologists were summoned, and the stone caskets carted away for examination. It took 20 years for experts to decipher the names on the ten tombs. They were: Jesua, son of Joseph, Mary, Mary, Mathew, Jofa and Judah, son of Jesua. Israel’s prominent archeologist Professor Amos Kloner didn’t associate the crypt with the New Testament Jesus. His father, after all, was a humble carpenter who couldn’t afford a luxury crypt […]
Mexico’s Congress has condemned what it says is a border violation by US workers building a controversial barrier between the two countries. Legislators say workers and equipment building a section of the barrier have gone 10 metres (yards) into Mexico. The alleged border violation comes ahead of a high-level meeting in the Canadian capital Ottawa. US, Mexican and Canadian foreign ministers are to discuss border security and trade issues. Mexican legislators said they had photographs and video, taken on Monday, of the workers and heavy-duty construction equipment that showed them about 10 metres inside Mexico near the border city of Agua Prieta and the town of Douglas, Arizona. The Mexican Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa said she had complained to the US authorities and that the men and equipment had been withdrawn. Continental trade concerns In a statement, the US Ambassador to Mexico Tony Garza said: ‘The US is sensitive to Mexican concerns… [and] has the deepest respect for the integrity of the sovereignty of Mexican soil’. He said US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff had not been in the area of the alleged incursion and recent photographs of him welding a section […]
For Muslims and non-Muslims alike, the stock image of an Islamic scholar is a gray-bearded man. Women tend to be seen as the subjects of Islamic law rather than its shapers. And while some opportunities for religious education do exist for women - the prestigious Al-Azhar University in Cairo has a women’s college, for example, and there are girls’ madrasas and female study groups in mosques and private homes - cultural barriers prevent most women in the Islamic world from pursuing such studies. Recent findings by a scholar at the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies in Britain, however, may help lower those barriers and challenge prevalent notions of women’s roles within Islamic society. Mohammad Akram Nadwi, a 43-year-old Sunni alim, or religious scholar, has rediscovered a long-lost tradition of Muslim women teaching the Koran, transmitting hadith (deeds and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) and even making Islamic law as jurists. Akram embarked eight years ago on a single-volume biographical dictionary of female hadith scholars, a project that took him trawling through biographical dictionaries, classical texts, madrasa chronicles and letters for relevant citations. ‘I thought I’d find maybe 20 or 30 women,’ he says. To date, he has found 8,000 […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
