Afghanistan

With the power vested in us by ourselves, we have chosen ten candidates in the hopes that one of them will win popular acclaim and restore glory to a throne too long left empty.

It’s the hierarchy and killing, not just the discrimination.

I’m not arguing that Islamophobia is racist, or that Islamophobes are racists, because that’s not quite what’s happening. For one thing, Islamophobes embrace ex-Muslims like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and racists wouldn’t (indeed couldn’t) do the same. But consider the similarities: the Islamophobe must assume Muslims suffer some sort of pre-Islamic inferiority, sufficient to explain how some (largely non-white) people—actually, a lot of people—not only fell for Islam in the first place, but then stayed down. How long do enforced ideologies last? Nazism: twelve years. Communism: some decades. Islam: Fourteen centuries and counting.

This list, in links and headlines, just skims the surface. But it gives a sense of what to watch for in 2013.

Almost half of the world’s countries have laws or policies that penalize blasphemy, apostasy, contempt of religion, or religious “hate speech.”

A scholar returning from a visit with Syrian opposition figures discusses the role of religion in the Syrian civil war, including whether it’s a sectarian war, what Americans need to know, and whether a post-war Syria will be an Islamic state.

In the process of doing all they could to defeat Obama, self-proclaimed and media-designated evangelicals discredited their message and reduced it to a mere political gospel.

What is it about rage that pervades so much thinking about Islam? Start by picking up the latest issues of Time and Newsweek—America’s airport reading—and talking to Google.

I remember thinking, with Western intervention in Libya, that this all had a familiar ring to it. But perhaps this time would be different, many of us hoped. How, though, one conflict can escape the reality of its conditions and not realize certain consequences is beyond me.

Mormons lined up to attest to the candidate’s humanity, but our collective story gets no airtime.