Friday, June 10, 2011

The Council Has Spoken!! This Week's Watcher's Council Results.


The Council has spoken, the votes have been cast, and the results are in for this week, carved eternally in the records of cyberspace.

This week's winner, What Does Peace Mean, Anyway? by Joshuapundit took a look at the often used term peace...what it is, what it isn't and how actual lasting peace has been achieved in history. Here's a slice:
Peace is said to be a high priority, no matter whom you talk to.People crave it and pray for it, and rightly so.

This is a much more important issue, I think, than most of us realize, especially in these days when people use terms like 'The Long War' and 'the peace process' .Yet few of us, especially in the West actually stop to think of what we really mean by peace, and what you can't define clearly is frequently illusory.

The Bible provides one definition, with the prophet Isaiah talking of a time of peace so profound that men will not only transform the arms of battle into implements of peace but cease to study the arts and strategy of war.

That's obviously an unrealized ideal in the immediate future.

Islam is much more direct about the matter. Westerners are confused when Muslims say that Islam means peace (actually, it comes from the Arabic aslama, which means submission). To Muslims, who divide the world into dar Islam, the part of the world where Islam rules and the non-Muslim world, referred to as dar harb ( literally the house of war), peace is much simpler. It's a condition where the entire world is dar Islam, exactly what Mohammed ordered his followers to strive for right before his death in 632 CE, according to the Hadiths.

If some Muslims talk of peace when they actually mean a time of dar Islam, it's understandable that something gets lost in translation - sometimes deliberately.

So, is peace then simply an absence of war and conflict? It ain't necessarily so.


In our non-Council category our winner was the one and only Zombie, whose piece this week, Proof that S.F.'s circumcision ban Is anti-Semitic submitted by The Noisy Room shows us that the proposed ban on male circumcision on the ballot in the California cities of San Francisco and Santa Monica has an agenda directed specifically at Jews..as evidenced by campaign literature pushed by its primary backers that takes its inspiration from classic Nazi publications like Der Stürmer.


Here are this week’s full results:

Council Winners



Non-Council Winners



See you next week!

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