If these were normal times, the American view of the conflict in Lebanon might look something like the street scenes that have electrified the suburbs of Detroit for the past four weeks. In Dearborn, home to the Ford Motor Co. and the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the country, up to 1,000 people have turned out day after day to express their outrage at the Israeli military campaign and mourn the loss of civilian life in Lebanon.

We will soon have no world-class universities left in this country. Oxford and Cambridge struggle to retain a position among the top 10; I expect that they will soon drop out through the bottom. It is easy to assume that better government resourcing would make all the difference, but the problem is not wholly, or even perhaps mainly, financial.

Americans are constantly told that they have to defend themselves against people who "hate them", but without understanding why they are hated. Is the cause our secular democracy? Our appetite for oil? There are lots of democracies in the world that are far more secular than the United States (Sweden, France...) and lots of places that want to buy oil at the best possible price (China) without arousing any noticeable hatred in the Middle East. 

Muslim while flying. If you thought "black while driving" was bad...imagine being Muslim while flying. If you want to learn about what Islam really is, don't study the Muslims...study Islam.

The use of the terms Islam and fascist together is a deliberate attempt to incite hate towards the religion of Islam as a whole. The implication is that the religion teaches fascist ideas, and that a fundamental following of Islam equates into a fascist ideology. How can a religion that has been around over 1400 years be labeled as a precursor to fascist behavior? Now if you are going to give a laundry list of totalitarian Muslim countries that have committed atrocities, be prepared to recite an equally long list of fascist theocracies based in Judeo-Christian beliefs. How can such an irresponsible term be used, when the actual fascist tactics are being used on the other side of the equation? In present day society, there is only one country that is building walls between religious groups, forbidding entry and development of religious groups creating refugee populations based on ethnic demographics---that country is Israel.

Mosque Imams, already facing a large amount of pressure from Muslims for being unable to speak English,  are now coming under fire from Mosque committee chairs  over what they call their "ineffectual and incompetent" use and style of dua (prayer asking for help from Allah). "Every time the Mosque Imams are criticised, they insist that the Ummah is in their prayers" said the Mustafa Al-Faloodi, Chairman of the Manchester Jamme Mosque Committe. "That may be, but it's becoming more and more clear that these prayers are either too infrequent, too brief, or not strongly worded enough to be effective."

When my electricity returned at around 3am yesterday, I turned on the BBC World Service television. There were a series of powerful explosions which shook the house - just as they vibrated across all of Beirut - as the latest Israeli air raids blasted over the city. And then up came the World Service headline: "Terror Plot". Terror what, I asked myself? And there was my favorite cop, Paul Stephenson, explaining how my favorite police force - the ones who bravely executed an innocent young Brazilian on the Tube.