Muslims and Liberals

Myriad East-West interactions renewing religious and secular values

Joe Biden’s valued ‘autocrat’

SEVERAL NEWS OUTLETS have lauded President Biden’s meeting on Monday with Recep Tayyip Erdogan as “upbeat.”  Have you been following Biden’s comments about Turkey and its president? In April he riled up the entire Turkish nation by labeling the 1915 Armenian tragedy Turkish “genocide.” Earlier he called the Turkish president an “autocrat,” proposed to support...

Bennett to stick with apartheid?

THE SWEARING-IN of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, the leader of Israel’s pseudo-fascist Yamina party, and his Cabinet inaugurates an era for Israel without Benjamin Netanyahu in power.  Many Israelis think that this chimera of an ultra-rightist-centrist-liberal-Arab government is going to crumble soon over policy differences. If it doesn’t, what kind of an era that Bennett...

Can Palestinians bypass Biden’s blind spot?

PRESIDENT BIDEN’S UNSWERVING defense of Israel’s relentless bombing of the Gaza Strip reminds me of my last meeting with a friend and colleague at the Hartford Courant newspaper in Hartford, Connecticut. On a spring day in 1985 my op-ed on the killing of several Palestinians by Israeli troops had appeared in our newspaper. Robin Frank...

Must skin tone replace values?

I AM AN Asian American and a life-long Democrat, who has been rudely hurt by the recent racist attacks on Americans of Asian descent. I am disappointed, however, by Asian American Senators Tammy Duckworth’s and Mazie Hirono’s cynical use of the tragic incidents to advance their own careers. They have announced that they would boycott...

Biden’s war on racism nets UK war hero

ONE OF THE TOP items on President Biden’s agenda is fighting racism. So upon entering the White House on Wednesday he removed – again – the bust of the racist British Prime Minister Winston Churchill from the Oval Office. President Barack Obama had put away the bust from the room but Donald trump, his successor,...

A crusader for the oppressed

By Mustafa Malik THE 14TH ANNIVERSARY OF Mahmud Ali’s passing fills my mind with memories of the man I had come to know as a human incarnation of Pakistan. Among those memories was his forecast that Bangladesh would establish good relations with Pakistan “sooner than you think.” The last time he repeated this prognosis to...

Biden’s pursuit of LBJ legacy

“Our long national nightmare is over!” So declared Gerald R. Ford on August 9, 1974, from the East Room of the White House. He was making his maiden speech to the nation as the 38th president of the United States. By ending the “national nightmare” the new president meant that his pardoning of his predecessor,...

Joe Biden speaking with attendees at the 2020 Iowa State Education Association (ISEA) Legislative Conference at the Sheraton West Des Moines Hotel in West Des Moines, Iowa.

Can Biden get a Muslim lad mad?

SEVERAL AMERICAN MUSLIM friends, spooked by President Trump’s “Muslim ban,” shift of America’s Israeli embassy to Jerusalem and other anti-Muslim acts, are getting excited about Joe Biden’s steady lead over him in the polls. I am trying to douse their enthusiasm for the Democratic presidential nominee for several reasons, especially because Islam and liberalism, the...

Beirut after the 2020 explosion

India’s lesson for Lebanon

India and Pakistan could have been spared catastrophes by power-sharing systems they rejected. The Lebanese should hold on to the one they have. I NORMALLY CAN’T stand Boris Johnson because of his demagoguery and conservative political creed. But last week Emmanuel Macron made me appreciate the British prime minister, for the first time. The French...

Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi and President of China Xi Jinping before the beginning of the 2017 BRICS Leaders' meeting

China plots to encircle India

“Yay!” I exclaimed within myself. China was going to upgrade the Sylhet airport, said a blurb on the Internet. Sylhet is my hometown in northeastern Bangladesh. Sylhet’s Osmani airport is rather small and every time I fly in to the city, I have to hustle through a crowded arrival lounge into the hurly-burly of a...