riots

Betsy Shirley 4-28-2022

On April 29, 2017, a protester holding a sign participates in a march where the LA riots started in 1992. REUTERS/Kevork Djansezian

The devastation of the 1992 riots inspired Hyepin Im to advocate for the economic and political empowerment of underserved communities, including Korean Americans — and her own faith led her to look for ways that churches could be more effective partners in this work.

Oren Dorell 9-18-2012

Anti-American protesters in Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian administered Kashmir, India., on Sept. 14, 2012.

Anti-American riots that have spread to more than a dozen countries across the Middle East are a sign of fissures between radical and more moderate Islamists that are vying for power as their societies undergo change, Middle East experts say.

Whether U.S. foreign policy has helped create a political environment where radicals are struggling to remain relevant, or emboldened extremists to act out, is a matter of disagreement.
 
President Obama's approach to the Arab Spring, to engage with the Islamists and not the secularists, "is seen by our foes as disengagement, while the radicals are not backing off," said Walid Phares, an adviser to the Anti-Terrorism Caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives and author of the 2010 book The Coming Revolution: Struggle for Freedom in the Middle East.

"When we withdraw, they advance."
 
Tamara Wittes, who served as deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs until a few months ago, sees it differently.
 
The U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq removed "a massive source" of grievance for ultra-conservative Muslims, called Salafis, who have been leading the charge in the recent protests and who are ideologically close to Islamic terrorists who have warred with the U.S., Wittes said. "Now they're left trying to gin up anti-American feelings over this campy movie. If Salafi groups are left having to troll the Internet for a pretext, I think we're in pretty good shape."

Joshua Witchger 4-30-2012

Aussie grandma performs The Black Keys on spoons -- LA riots appear on Twitter 20 years later -- Stephen Colbert and Jack White meet again on The Report -- TED and NPR team to deliver new podcast -- a capella renditions of pop songs -- the interactive scale of the universe -- and The African Queen steamboat (of Bogart/Hepburn fame) is rescued from the junk heap. Read this and more on today's Links of Awesomeness...

Tripp Hudgins 4-27-2012
HAL GARB/AFP/Getty Images

A rioter breaks a glass door of the Criminal Courts building, downtown Los Angeles, 29 April 1992. HAL GARB/AFP/Getty Images

This weekend, if you can believe it, marks the 20th anniversary of the Los Angeles riots that followed the verdict in the Rodney King trial that acquitted four police officers of any wrong doing. Maybe some of us are old enough to remember the beating that King took as he was being arrested.

Maybe some of us are old enough to remember the violence that followed. Fifty people died in the riots.

Why do we bother to honor such memories? Why do we hold them up? St. John of the Cross, the Carmelite mystic, writes of a temporal veil that separates us from God. It's an unavoidable separation, he said, that every creature encounters.

We live in time. God does not. He also said, however, that by grace that veil can be torn, time and memory collapsing in upon one another and we are no longer separate from God.

Andrew Simpson 4-19-2011

One year after the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, life has not returned to normal in the Gulf.

The issue of illegal immigration in the United States requires an anti-logic of radical love. (The anti-logic I propose is not fallacious logic. The distinction is a topic for another essay.) Christianity is a counter-intuitive religion.

Elizabeth Palmberg 11-11-2009
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Jim Wallis 6-16-2009
Elections -- indeed the democratic process itself -- shape countries, culture, and the future, no matter what their outcome.