News from Cole

Great stuff, as always, over at Juan Cole’s blog today. Especially this snippet from a friend of his who managed to call a friend inside Najaf:

    The Americans are repeatedly sending in envoys to Sistani, who rejects Americans the permission to enter the city. They have now told Sistani that they are going to enter the city in four days after religious celebrations are over. Sistani has ongoing negotiations with Muqtada trying to make him leave the city…
    A lot of pilgrims from Iran are caught in this mess, sleeping in the streets, roaming streets trying to find shelter and something to eat. Pilgrimage in Najaf these days coming won

7 thoughts on “News from Cole”

  1. The US needs to tread very lightly in Najaf. Without question, it is important to respect the holy sites of others.
    As the third holiest city to Shi’ites (after Mecca and Medina), it is as holy to them as the Tomb of Rachel (near Bethlehem) is to the Jews (after Jerusalem and Hebron). If only liberals were as sensative to the Jews in this regard as they are to Muslims.
    I am sick to death of the Temple Mount being described as ‘the third holiest site in Islam’. Apart from not being strictly correct, it omits the fact that it is THE HOLIEST SITE in Judaism. Reports on Hebron or Rachel’s Tomb hardly ever (I cannot think of any examples) refer to them as the second or third holiest site in Judaism – that doesn’t seem to have much import for the liberal media.
    For that matter, news reports on Jewish-Palestinian tensions over Hebron usually fail to mention that there would be a significant Jewish population in Hebron if the ‘Palestinians’ there had not ‘ethnically cleansed’ them in 1929. Yet Jews who want to return to this holy Jewish city are referred to as ‘settlers’, as though Jews have no right to live in a city in which they had a continuous presence for centuries.

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