Bangladesh

For those of you who haven't heard, Bangladesh was struck by Cyclone Sidr earlier this month. Thanks to a very efficient pre-storm warning and evacuation system, the confirmed death toll so far is around 3500; previous cyclones in the 70's and 80's each killed hundreds of thousands.

Salma Yaqoob has written a very good piece on why Muslims should participate. I'll let her say it:

Palestine should not be a reason for boycotting Holocaust Memorial Day, but a reason for participating. As the peace campaigner Uri Avnery, who organised a demonstration against the killing of Palestinian children on last year's Holocaust Memorial Day in Tel Aviv, put it: one of the lessons of the Holocaust is that you must not accept an ideology telling you "that other people are inferior and subhuman" or that loyalty to your country justifies "the occupation of another country and oppression of another people".

Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank, which pioneered the strategy of economic development through collateral-free business loans to the poor in Bangladesh, have won the 2006 Nobel peace prize! The Guardian story has a good summary of what his microcredit scheme entails, for those who haven't heard of it before.

Dr. Yunus has been a national hero in Bangladesh for years now, and his microcredit model inspired me to write my first published piece on religion (my Islamic economics article way back in 1994; the conclusion mentions Grameen Bank in particular).

The BBC carried this story yesterday, along with a good discussion of what exactly constitutes war crimes under the Geneva Convention. It's refreshing to see mainstream media attempt for once to argue this sort of thing through rather than fall back on tired and lazy stereotypes.

According to the BBC's analysis, Hizbullah was definitely guilty of war crimes for firing missiles into civilian areas in Israel. Whether or not Israel is also guilty of war crimes in its response depends basically on two things; whether it tried sufficiently to avert civilian casualties, and whether the force of the response was disproportionate to the provocation it faced. As in all things legal, there is a big element of subjectivity to both these questions.