July 18, 2012

In-depth

A Nuclear-Armed Iran Would Have No Hotline to Avert Catastrophe

Unlike the US and the Soviet Union or India and Pakistan, there is no direct line of communication between Israel and Iran, which, warns Alan Elsner in Algemeiner, could be disastrous if Iran gains nuclear capabilities.

A nuclear-armed Iran would be a deadly risk to the world. Unlike during the era of containment and even the situation between India and Pakistan today, there would be no fail safe mechanisms, no fallbacks, no circuit breakers, no safety nets.

This German circumcision ban is an affront to Jewish and Muslim identity

Writing in the Guardian, Giles Fraser argues that the religious identity provided by circumcision overrides the modern day liberal attitudes on choice.

Faith is about being a part of something wider than oneself. We are not born as mini rational agents in waiting, not fully formed as moral beings until we have the ability to think and choose for ourselves. We are born into a network of relationships that provide us with a cultural background against which things come to make sense. “We” comes before “I”. We constitutes our horizon of significance. Which is why many Jews who consider themselves to be atheists would still consider themselves to be Jewish. And circumcision is the way Jewish and Muslim men are marked out as being involved in a reality greater than themselves.

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