After months of war drums and talk of a nuclear Armageddon in the Middle East, it now turns out Iran halted its nuclear weapons program four years ago. At least that's the conclusion of a new U.S. intelligence assessment. It's good news for the voices of reason, like Mohammed El-Baradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who has been telling the world there is no 'clear and present danger.' Interestingly, when President George W. Bush recently warned of the impending threat of a potential "World War III," he had already seen the reports that the effort to build nukes had been halted. Disingenuous, at best.
Equally contrived was the Sudanese government's pseudo outrage over British schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons, who had the temerity to allow her class to name their mascot, a stuffed bear, after one of the children in the class, who happened to be Muhammad. Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir this week magnanimously set aside Mrs. Gibbons' 15-day jail sentence, but not before a rent-a-crowd gathered outside the prison quite literally demanding her head. It was all a patently obvious effort to bolster the Islamist credentials of the reactionary Khartoum regime and distract from the fact that it continues to allow the slaughter of fellow Muslims in Darfur.
Then there was the front page piece in the Washington Post examining the efforts of equally reactionary U.S. right-wingers to portray Barak Obama as some kind of Muslim Manchurian Candidate, a reference to the old Hollywood movie in which a Chinese "sleeper" agent was elected U.S. president. Obama, of course, isn't actually Muslim, but the fact that his paternal grandfather was a Muslim and that Obama himself spent a few years of his youth in Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country, is enough for the crazies. The claim would be laughable if not for the fact that a new Pew poll shows that almost half of Americans say they probably wouldn't vote for a Muslim presidential candidate.
Clear, this whole dialog of civilizations thing needs work.