Museums Faulted on Restitution of Nazi-Looted Art

Despite the fact that the United States and 44 other nations signed a pledge in 1998 to return Nazi art to rightful heirs, some museums are backtracking on that pledge, according to the New York Times. In some cases, museums argue that the statute of limitations has passed.  In other cases, museums try to beat claimants to the courthouse and try to get themselves declared as the rightful owner.

"At stake," notes the New York Times, "in this emotional debate are the fate of valuable works of art, the reputations of elite cultural institutions and the legal issue of whether the American judicial system is capable of addressing restitution claims."

The Times story also includes a short video that offers some good background.

Minarets, Burqas, now Garages

In 2000, Switzerland voted to ban the construction of new minarets, in April of this year France introduced a law to ban the burqa. Now, in Dearborn, Michigan, officials introduced an ordinance to curb the use of garages as hangouts. Is this another attempt to single out Muslim Americans?

With over 100,000 Arab-Americans, Dereborn is the largest Arab-American community in this country and outside the Middle East.  Many Arab-Americans in this community convert their garages into social hangouts where, according to ABC news, they like to socialize eat, smoke, and watch TV.  It's a continuation, says ABC,  of the hooka.

Parking is now at a premium since the Arab Americans now park their cars on the street, instead of in their garages. In addition, they say garages are not meant to be living spaces.  Is this, as some Arab-Americans claim, a class and ethnic reaction?

Buddhists Boycott Mobile Contract to Muslim Firm

The animosity between Buddhists and Muslims in Myanmar is so strong that even the government award of a mobile telephone contract to a firm in Qatar led to a boycott within hours, according to the NY Times. The leader of the Buddhist 969 movement wanted to know why the government awarded the contract to a Muslim firm.  The 969 group has boycotted Muslim shops in the past, lynched more than 200 Muslims, and forced more than 150,000 Muslims from their homes.  Here is a slideshow from the NYTimes called Radical Buddhism Ascendant in Myanmar.

California Declares October as Month for Hindu Awareness

California will celebrate the contributions of Hinduism in October, declaring it Hindu Awareness and Appreciation Month, according to the Indian Express.  It notes that there are over 370,000 Hindus in California and the Hindu American Foundation is planning several events for the month.

Swami Vivekananda first introduced America to Hinduism in the first World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893.  Thanks to Michael J. Altman for tweeting the link.

Muslim Women in the Media

The photo above is part of an interesting infographic about how Muslim women are portrayed in the media. The infographic argues that the media portrays Muslim women as "voiceless, submissive, passive, and oppressed victims instead of the powerful and creative leaders they are."  The International Museum of Muslim Women (IMOW) storified a tweet chat about Muslim women and the media which you can find here.

Arab Idol Winner Performs “I want it that Way”

Muhammad Assaf of Gaza performs “I want it that Way” by the Backstreet Boys. Historian Juan Cole writes about it in his blog, Informed Consent. He writes that Palestinian cities "went wild with celebrations" after the winner was announced. Here is the story from the Guardian.  

Roxana Saberi: Prisoner of Conscience in Iran

Roxana Saberi, an American journalist was arrested in Iran four years ago and accused of espionage. She was sentenced  to eight years in an Iranian prison.  That sentence was eventually reduced to 2 years and then after a hunger strike and a judicial review, she was released after 101 days.

In prison, she developed a relationship  with two Bahá’í leaders, Mahvash Sabet and Fariba Kamalabad,  who were serving 20 year sentences. The Bahá’í religion is not recognized in Iran and the government often arrests its leaders.

In the touching clip below, Saberi explains how she survived and how her her friendship with Mahvash and Fariba helped her survive and strengthened her faith. You can read more about Saberi in this article from the radio program, On Being, and in this 2009 story from Time Magazine.  And here a number of New York Times stories about her trial and imprisonment.

Saberi is an interesting woman. She was born in  North Dakota.  Her mother is Japanese and her father is Iranian. She grew up in North Dakota and won the Miss Dakota beauty pageant in 1997.  She moved to Iran in 2003 and periodically contributed stories to NPR and PBS.

Civil Rights 50th Anniversary

Christian leaders from all over converged on Birmingham, Alabama to mark the key events of the civil rights movement fifty years go. In the video clip below from PBS Religion and Ethics Newsweekly,  historian Taylor Branch, explains why 1963 was a "tipping point" in the civil rights movement.

   

Buddhists, Muslims, Violence & Democracy in Myanmar

PBS News Hour Special correspondent Kira Kay shows how the violence between the Buddhists and Muslims is tearing the fabric of democracy in Myanmar. Here is another story from the NY Times called Extremism Rises Among Myanmar Buddhists. 

    

More on Twitter: Educators Discuss its Value

Jerry Bluemengarten and Sean Junkins, a technologist in the Myrtle Beach, SC schools discuss the value of Twitter in the slideshow below. (I collected the tweets into a program called Storify and saved it as a slide show.)

10 tips for Using Twitter in Education

Steven Anderson, instructional technologist for Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools in Winston-Salem, NC,offers 10 good tips for using Twitter in education in this article for T.H.E. Journal.. Some of his suggestions include:

• Find good hastags to follow--they can expand the impact of a  tweet more than the number of followers an account has
• Check out the hashtag #edchat and check out Jerry Blumengarten's collection of educational hashtags at http://cybraryman.com/edhashtags.html
• Who you follow is more important than the number of followers you have
• Don't use twitter.com except to register your account.  Use third party software like TweetDeck. Anderson likes the older version and the way it allows you to categorize your tweets.
• Expand who you follow with lists--you can create lists for different groups--world history teachers, religion teachers, psychology teachers, etc.
• Save tweets.  You can use Diigo for that. (diigo.com/tools/save_tweets)

Women Exiled in Nepal Face Rape, Murder

My colleague, Frances Coffey, tweeted this sad story about menstruating women in Nepal.  In western Nepal, people believe these women are impure and bring bad luck.  According to the authors of the video above, Poh Si Teng, Allison Shelley and Allyn Gaestel,  they are exiled and "become vulnerable to rape and other horrors."

The practice, which many believe is rooted in Hinduism, is called chaupadi and calls for "the monthly separation of women deemed impure during menstruation."   In a story for the Pulitzer Center on crisis reporting, Allyn Gastel writes, "each month women sleep in a small hut called a goth, in the stable or outside. They are considered polluting, so they do not touch their family; they eat separately and cannot go in the house."  

10 TedTalks on Islam & Islamic Culture

• Lesley Hazleton: On reading the Koran
• Maz Jobrani: Did you hear the one about the Iranian-American?
• Maajid Nawaz: A global culture to fight extremism
• Shereen El Feki: Pop culture in the Arab world
• Naif Al-Mutawa: Superheroes inspired by Islam
• Mustafa Akyol: Faith versus tradition in Islam
• Bobby Ghosh: Why global jihad is losing
• Kavita Ramdas: Radical women, embracing tradition
• Shirin Neshat: Art in exile
• Bahia Shehab: A thousand times no

East vs. West: The Myths that Mystify

Awesome talk about Hindu myths and myths in general.  Absolutely worth viewing in class when studying either Hinduism or religious myths at the beginning of the year. Pattanaik's talk is engaging and  thought provoking.  He is a Hindu physician who has become a writer and speaker about myths and mythology.

Origins of the Demonstrations in Turkey

Excellent short clip, from AlJazeera, about the origins of the demonstrations in Turkey (just less than 3 minutes)

4 Cool IPad Apps

Sean Junkins, in this Google hangout web cast from Edudemic, reviews four I-Pad apps that are great for content creation. Junkins is a learning specialist in the Myrtle beach, SC school district. He reviews Splice (movie making app), Poplet, (timeline among other things), Haiku Deck (a little like PowerPoint), and Morfu (create famous figures and have them talk).

Sufi Whirling Dervishes

Here is a short two minute review of the origins of Sufi whirling dervishes. Sufism is the mystical branch of Islam and emphasizes love and peace. It comes from a story in the online magazine, Religion and Ethics Newsweekly. Might be great for students studying Islam.

Tibetan Buddhist Nuns Break Glass Ceiling

For the first time ever, 27 Tibetan Buddhist nuns will sit for exams that will give them the equivalent of a PH.D.  Only men could get such a degree before because, according to this story in the Washington Post by reporter and author, Michaela Haas, the Tibetan Buddhist tradition does not fully ordain women, which means they cannot study the whole curriculum. So, as Haas suggests,  this is a big deal and has the support of the Dalai Lama, who recently announced that a woman could succeed him.

What Causes Terrorism: Religion or Social & Political Conditions

             

Two horrific tragedies--the Boston Marathon bombings and the Woolrich, UK attack and murder--and two very different interpretations.

Former English Prime Minister, Tony Blair, believes that the two tragedies represent a problem within Islam. "There is not a problem with Islam," Blair writes in a article for the Daily Mail," "...But there is a problem within Islam--from the adherents of an ideology that is a strain within Islam."

John Esposito, a professor of international affairs and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University, disagrees with this interpretation.  He does not doubt Blair's sincerity or  intentions, but argues that political and social conditions foster terrorism, not religion.

In a recent article in the Washington Post, Esposito suggests that Blair's interpretation "perpetuates his long held belief since the Bush-Blair invasion and occupation of Iraq that the primary driver, the root cause of terrorism, is religion and not political and social  contexts and foreign policies."  Esposito even calls the interpretation "..wrong-headed and doomed to continue to be part of the problem and not the solution."

School is all but over so a discussion about the merits of the two arguments will have to wait until next year.  But it is an interesting argument, not just for a religion class but also for a world history class.

Muslim Clothing Gets Chic With 'Hijab Couture

Saw this on the Huffington Post. You can also see a slide show on Muslim fashion.

The Parsi and Vanishing Vultures

The Parsis have one of the most unusual funeral rituals of all religions.  Parsis are members of India's largest Zoroastrian community. They originally came from Iran where Zoroastrianism was founded over a thousand years ago. I wrote about them in March when the Indian photographer, Sooni Taraporevala, opened a Parsi photographic exposition.

 Their funeral rituals are unusual because they do not believe in burying or cremating their dead. They see that as polluting nature. Instead, according to this NPR story,"the Parsi corpse is exposed to the rays of the sun, and the corpse is consumed or devoured by birds of prey — vultures, kites and crows."  A problem developed last year when the population of vultures vanished. They tried solar concentrators to speed up decomoposition but the process was slow and made neighbors squeamish. Now the Indian government is setting up reserves for vultures and working hard to revive the population and restore the proper funeral rites to the Parsi.

You can listen to the NPR broadcast of the story here,  read an older BBC news story about Parsi funeral practices, and you can read this NY Times story about Mumbai's effort to revive the vulture population.

4 TEDTalks on Buddhism

• Bob Thurman: We Can all be Buddhas
• Matthieu Ricard: The habits of happiness
• Joan Halifax: Compassion and the true meaning of empathy
• Dhammananda Bikkuni: Empowering Our Potentiality

How Books Can Open Your Mind

Lisa Bu explains how books transformed her life--in The Correspondence in the Family of Fou Lei, she found parental advice, in Jane Eyre, she found a role model of an independent woman, from Cheaper by the Dozen, she learned how to be efficient, and from The Complete Works of Sammao, she realized she learned that she wanted to study abroad. She came to the US in 1995 and began reading books that were banned in China like the Bible and Pearl Buck's, The Good Earth. 

But what makes the talk so interesting is how the books challenge some of her long held Confucian values.  

A Breakout Role for Twitter

Twitter took on a new role yesterday as street clashes rocked Istanbul. It replaced the traditional media, which was almost non-existent, in spreading information about the demonstration. During the Egyptian revolution, the majority of the tweets came from outside the country, according to this story from Monkey Cage.  In Turkey, by contrast, over 50% came from inside Istanbul and over 80% were in Turkish, meaning that they were written for Turkish consumption, not for the outside world. 

Monkey Cage says that "the social media response to and the role of social media in the protests has been phenomenal." They report over 2 million tweets relating to the demonstrations since late afternoon yesterday. Why? The reason for the phenomenal number of tweets is related to the lack of coverage of the demonstrations by the Turkish media.

What  this trend suggests," Monkey Cage notes, "is that Turkish protesters are replacing the traditional reporting with crowd-sourced accounts of the protest expressed through social media."   Here is a another news story about the protests and the role of twitter in spreading the news from The New Yorker Magazine.  And here is a link to a Reuters slideshow showing the police crackdown on the protests.  Thanks to Michael J. Altman for tweeting the link to this story.

Afghanistan's Buddhist Buried Treasure Faces Destruction

 

In 2001, the Taliban blew up two huge 6th century Buddhas that were built into the sandstone cliff face of the Bamiyan valley in central Afghanistan. Now, Afghanistan is threatening another Buddhist  heritage, Mes Aynak, which, according to The Guardian, "is a magnificent Buddhist city, and the most important archaeological discovery in a generation."  That's because the ancient city sits atop a vast copper deposit.  The photograph below shows the remains of statutes found at Mes Aynak.

William Dalrymple, whose most recent book was the Last Mughal, wrote the story and outlines the dispute between China's copper companies and French and British archaeologists.