About tolerance, 2007

Author: NO name Given!
Where:http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-tolerance25dec25,0,4199048.story?coll=la-opinion-leftrail

The Los Angeles Times editorial "About Tolerance, 2007" reflects upon a year full of religious and ethnic strife, while looking forward to the looming new year and the opportunities for progress and unity following a sustained global period of violence. The political squabble in the United States demonstrates that religion has become a political tool for undermining opponents--with Mike Huckabee's smearing of Mitt Romney's Mormonism serving as an example. Abroad, 2007 was a year of violence and suppression. In Iraq, the ethnic and religious divisions continue to ravage the country. In China, the Communist government has continued its assault on Tibetan Buddhism. Further, the cohesion of human rights and religion have also reached a crossroads--in Saudi Arabia, a girl who was raped and condemned by the courts to hundreds of lashes, and in Sudan, an English woman's death was called for when her students named a stuffed animal "Muhammad"--such examples show the increasingly uneasy relationship between Western standards of rights, and religiously influences reality. In the midst of such a destructive year, however, the writer sees optimism and hope for a better year...

Tone: Serious...

Application: How does religion influence you, personally?

"The walls around Bush's Iraq strategy"

Rosa Brooks' Los Angeles Times Opinion article "The walls around Bush's Iraq strategy" (http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-brooks20dec20,0,4654247.column?coll=la-opinion-rightrail)
raises the issue of the Iraq's occupiers latest (and more successful) strategy for containing violence: building walls to divide communities in Baghdad. While keeping apart rival ethnic and religious groups, thus contributing to the decline in violence, the walls also serve to create "prisons" across Baghdad. Further, the walls segregate Iraqis from each other, thus aggravating the already prominent problem of warlords and sectarian strife in a nation already struggling to have a central government.Brooks concludes that, while the wall-building strategy successfully reduces violence, it may also contribute to am Iraq with indefinite US troop presence and a literally walled Iraq, which is clearly a sign of US failure in Iraq.

Tone: Critical.

Application: How is the literal walling of Iraq symbolic of US foreign policy?

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