Jerusalem tunnels 

What’s underneath? Centuries of living together in peace, not war. The zealots must not separate humans one from another.

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“Traitor!” Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence – The New York Times

Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials.American law enforcement and intelligence agencies intercepted the communications around the same time that they were discovering evidence that Russia was trying to disrupt the presidential election by hacking into the Democratic National Committee, three of the officials said. The intelligence agencies then sought to learn whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election.The officials interviewed in recent weeks said that, so far, they had seen no evidence of such cooperation.But the intercepts alarmed American intelligence and law enforcement agencies, in part because of the amount of contact that was occurring while Mr. Trump was speaking glowingly about the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin. At one point last summer, Mr. Trump said at a campaign event that he hoped Russian intelligence services had stolen Hillary Clinton’s emails and would make them public.The officials said the intercepted communications were not limited to Trump campaign officials, and included other associates of Mr. Trump. On the Russian side, the contacts also included members of the Russian government outside of the intelligence services, the officials said. All of the current and former officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the continuing investigation is classified.

Can Russia really derail Emmanuel Macron? – The Local

The motivation for Moscow to derail Macron’s campaign is simple.They would far rather see the anti-EU Marine Le Pen or François Fillon, both of whom are open admirers of Vladimir Putin, unlike Macron, who is openly pro-Europe, elected the next President of France.”They do not want a strong Europe, they want a weak Europe,” Macron’s spokesman Benjamin Griveaux said on Tuesday.The problem for Moscow is that ever since Fillon was struck down by fake job claims surrounding his wife, Macron has emerged as the favourite to win the election, beating Le Pen in  the second round runoff vote.’This is Putin’s plan to break up the EU’Macron’s team believe the increase in hostile reports and cyber attacks and the rise of the candidate in the polls is no coincidence. Moscow is getting jittery it seems.But so is Emmanuel Macron.His campaign chief Ferrand issued an appeal in French newspaper Le Monde on Tuesday.“We cannot let Russia de-stabilise the French presidential election,” read the title.“If these attacks succeed then the organisation of the EN Marche campaign would become very difficult, if not impossible,” said Ferrand.

Source: Can Russia really derail Emmanuel Macron? – The Local

Chinese students at Columbia University fight racism by explaining the meaning behind their names: Shanghaiist

“In the spirit of coming to harmonious terms with the incidents, I’d like to think that those who took our name tags only did so to learn our names by heart,” writes sophomore Yan Huhe from Hohot, Inner Mongolia in the Colombia Spectator.”I apologize once more for not having put up a pinyin-spelled name tag on my door earlier. I now have prepared plenty. Feel free to take one.”

Source: Chinese students at Columbia University fight racism by explaining the meaning behind their names: Shanghaiist

Swedish minister responds to Iran headscarf criticism – The Local

Jan Björklund, the leader of the opposition Liberal party, has attacked Linde, saying she should not have worn a garment which is “part of patriarchal oppression” and that doing so was “ruinous for feminist foreign policy”.But Linde has fired back in turn, accusing Björklund and the opposition of trying to score cheap points over the matter.”I think it’s so stupid I don’t know what to say. The opposite: what has he done in Iran to address women’s rights?” she told news agency TT.Images of German Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen visiting Saudi Arabia without wearing a headscarf have been shared on Twitter in response to Linde’s visit, but the Swedish Trade Minister has pointed out that the law there does not require women to wear the garment, unlike in Iran.”It is their law, unlike in Saudi Arabia where it is not the law to wear a headscarf. I will travel to Saudi Arabia in the next month and I of course won’t wear a headscarf,” she said.

Source: Swedish minister responds to Iran headscarf criticism – The Local

Times May Change But Fascism Remains the Same | Dame Magazine – Trumpism, the latest run for Fascism!

If these arguments seem familiar, it’s because if you substitute Muslim for Jew and American identity for Christian identity, the cultural chaos and the backlash against women and those who are seen as not being part of the community are eerily similar. Donald Trump emphasizes exclusion and the marking of Muslims as a way of convincing Americans that there are distinctions between “real” Americans and “terrorists.” (The ideas are similar in his rhetoric about “Mexicans” and undocumented immigrants.) Trump’s executive order that banned Muslims from seven different countries was not about keeping Americans safe. His purpose was to convince his supporters that they have a claim to some sort of specialness that is due to having been born on American soil.While Trump uses different rhetorical structures to separate Americans by gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity, the purpose of his executive order was to create a sense of American identity that was based on one idea. According to Trump, Muslims cannot be true Americans. And, he believes, they cannot be admitted because, “In order to protect Americans, the United States must ensure that those admitted to this country do not bear hostile attitudes toward it and its founding principles. The United States cannot, and should not, admit those who do not support the Constitution, or those who would place violent ideologies over American law. In addition, the United States should not admit those who engage in acts of bigotry or hatred (including “honor” killings, other forms of violence against women, or the persecution of those who practice religions different from their own) or those who would oppress Americans of any race, gender, or sexual orientation.”The irony, of course, is that if “acts of bigotry … violence against women … or the oppression based on race, gender, or sexual orientation” are the criteria by which being admitted to the United States will be determined, millions of native-born Americans, including Donald Trump himself, should not be allowed to stay.It is a primary tool of the demagogue to convince their audience that a secret group lives among them. This secret group plots the larger community’s downfall; therefore, all the members of the community must not only swear allegiance to its chosen leader, they must all be willing to spy on other members of the group and turn them in should anyone suspect that a mole be working to bring them down.

Source: Times May Change But Fascism Remains the Same | Dame Magazine

Humans of New York

Source: Humans of New York

“I water my lawn every morning and birds come to get worms out of the wet ground. If I ever miss a day, the ground will be too hard, and the birds will sit in the yard and call out because their babies are hungry. That’s how I’ve felt my whole life. Like a bird calling out for food. Thirty years ago I went on strike in this same square. We weren’t getting paychecks. There was no money for bills or food. At the time my sons were one, eight, and nine. So we decided to go camping. I’d go fishing on the lake every night and catch two trout. That was enough to feed the four of us. We did it out of necessity but it was beautiful. My sons are in their thirties now. All of them have flown away. But they remember those times with happiness.”(San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentina)

The New York Times And The Muslim Brotherhood

merica needs a new centrist approach to terrorism that abandons the current platitudinous attitudes toward Islam and Muslims – an approach that stops glamorizing Islamism and demonizing Muslims, a realistic approach that defines and rejects the ideology that sanctions violence. Such a complex task is indeed not easy; nonetheless, defending an opaque and mercurial group like the Muslim Brotherhood is certainly not the way to achieve this.

The New York Times in its defence of the Muslim Brotherhood, could be likened to a lawyer who bases his defense on improper legal procedures rather than the client’s actual guilt. Moreover, the Times has no right to equate the Brotherhood with Islam and use the faith of millions of non-Brotherhood Muslims as a pawn in the newspaper’s battle against the Trump administration.

Nervana

On February 9, The New York Times (NYT) published an editorial titled “All of Islam Isn’t the Enemy.” The article suggests that an order issued by the American President, Donald Trump, designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, would “be seen by many Muslims as another attempt to vilify adherents of Islam.” The article then argues that the Muslim Brotherhood is not a terrorist group, and, based on this one analysis, it claims “there is no evidence that senior Brotherhood leaders ordered any violence or carried out any of the recent major terrorist attacks in Egypt.”

As a devout practicing Muslim, I find the editorial troubling, to say the least. It not only desperately defends a secretive group like the Muslim Brotherhood; it also asserts, without sound evidence, that the Brotherhood is a representative of adherents of Islam – an assertion that is fundamentally flawed. It is unfortunate…

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