The Israel Lobby
February 25, 2008
Last night, a few friends and I attended a lecture given by John J. Mearsheimer, co-author of the book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. Now, I’m not all too big on politics and the whole political science scene, but I thought that the lecture was pretty good. The question and answer session that followed was pretty interesting as well, with some really good questions being asked.
The lecture was centred around his book, co-authored with Stephen Walt. He basically outlined the arguments made in the book and mentioned some additional points that weren’t found in it, (so says my friend, who’s actually read the book). I won’t give a synopsis of the talk as I didn’t take notes (my memory isn’t all that great either), but for those interested in knowing what the book’s about and the contraversy surrounding it, here are two videos you can watch. One’s a clip of a Democracy Now interview with Michael Massing, a contributing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, in which he talks about the book and the responses to it. The other is a Dutch documentary titled, Tegenlicht (Backlight).
Shaikh Khalid al-’Anbarî Around the GTA
February 10, 2008
The praise is Allah’s, the February conference is underway. Turn out so far has been pretty good with a bunch of new faces, as well as a bunch of old ones (some of whom I haven’t seen for ages); and the praise is Allah’s. The Friday sermon was very nice, with the shaikh speaking about having good assumptions of Allah. The talk the shaikh gave after the evening prayer (’ishâ’) was very nice as well; he spoke about the various remedies one can derive from chapter Yūsuf (ch. 12). I missed the first lecture held yesterday, so I can’t really give you an idea of how it was. I’m told however, the shaikh gave an introduction to the main topic of this weekend: Commanding the recognized good acts (al-ma’rūf) and prohibiting the reprehensible acts (al-munkar). After the sunset prayer (maghrib), the shaikh continued with Shaikh of Islam Ibn Taimiyyah’s book and completed it shortly after the evening prayer. This was followed by a question and answer session.
