Deepak Jois – Blog

Random Update On Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Labels: gasoline, international affairs, terrorism  

In what could be considered a slight change of heart, I have been spending a lot of my free time doing something other than writing code. And guess what, I have been reading feverishly about international affairs. Here are a couple of things that showed up on the radar.

The first one is a stunner, at least for me. While I knew that Americans are gas guzzlers, here is something that breaks it down. It is the gasoline consumption of the United States against the next twenty largest consumers of gasoline in the world. The image is taken from an article in the latest issue of Foreign Policy magazine.

The other one is a letter from the Economist. For those of you who don’t know it yet, The Economist publishes almost all the letters it receives on a blog called The Inbox. While the Economist is a great magazine, it is easy to lose perspective and not see the other side of things if you read it for a continuous period of time, since they tend to be quite opinionated. The Inbox does a great job of providing different perspectives on issues, some of which are extremely well argued. Here is one for instance.

Yes, Osama bin Laden uses Islamic rhetoric to further his cause, but that does not mean that “Islam” has to do with his nationalistic and terrorist agenda, which is often in direct contravention to established Islamic doctrine. The Israelis mobilize support by using Jewish symbolism and rhetoric in their continuing conflict with the Arabs and Palestinians, but we do not talk of the Jewish military or Jewish policies; instead, we correctly talk of Israeli soldiers and the Israeli policies. Timothy McVeigh bombed the Oklahoma federal building pursuant to his Christian beliefs and the dictates of the Christian Identity Movement, but he is never called a “Christian” terrorist.

By all means, let us “have the courage to talk honestly about what is going on.”