The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) runs a July 13 piece from the Florida Times-Union, "Muslim Leaders Condemning Terror to Deaf?" in which columnist Mark Woods speaks to CAIR's new chairman Parvez Ahmed and finds that such Muslim condemnations are in fact widespread—but never seem to be sufficient:

There are twin moral and intellectual traps most commentators are falling into vis-a-vis the London bombings. The first is the terrifyingly myopic and widespread consensus which is emerging that the attack "wasn't about Iraq." The increasingly predictable Christopher Hitchens writes in "The Anticipated Attack: Don't Blame Iraq for the Bombings" (Slate magazine):

The offices of the Oaxaca daily Noticias continues to be under siege by loyalists of the state's entrenched political machine—yet, amazingly, the paper continues to publish. This July 15 report from Dos Mundos, Kansas City's bilingual newspaper:

Journalists held hostage in Oaxaca

By Mischa Byruck

The employees have been unable to leave the building for twenty days. Reporters without Borders, an international non-profit organization that protects the rights of journalists worldwide, immediately condemned the occupation, stating that the “strike" is “the act of persons external to the paper and is just a means used by the local authority to silence it."

The Zapatista communities in Chiapas are beginning to return to normal, as the rebels' "red alert" has been lifted. The rebels say they are about to commence work on the new political initiative—still somewhat vaguely defined—which they agreed upon in the "consulta" they held in their communities during the alert. These two recent communiques state their purposes. First this one, on the new initiative, online in translation at the Chiapas95 archive:

And, really, we could have done without this one. From the New York Times, July 15 via TruthOut:

Chinese General Threatens Use of A-Bombs if US Intrudes
Beijing - China should use nuclear weapons against the United States if the American military intervenes in any conflict over Taiwan, a senior Chinese military official said Thursday.

Jeez, will people please stop blowing other people up already? This is really getting old.

Minibus Explosion in Turkey Leaves 5 Dead
ANKARA, Turkey (AP) - A bomb tore apart a minibus in a popular Aegean beach resort town Saturday, killing at least five people, including two foreigners, the second explosion in a week aimed at Turkey's vital tourism industry.

We have noted before that the world-shaking London attacks took a toll equivalent to the average bad day in Iraq. Well, Iraq is having another bad day. From Reuters:

Suicide bomber truck kills 55 in Iraq
Sat. July 16

BAGHDAD - A suicide bomber in a fuel truck killed 55 people in a town south of Baghdad on Sunday, the latest in a series of spectacular guerrilla attacks to rattle Iraq.

The bomb, which police said exploded near a Shi'ite mosque and market, also wounded 82 people. It followed several attacks which killed at least 16 people, including three British soldiers, on Saturday.

This July 14 commentary from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty provides some long-overdue real analysis on the Iraqi insurgency. While the anti-war movement either ignores or glorifies the blood-drenched and reactionary "resistance" in Iraq, RFE/RL, funded by the State Department (which, unlike the anti-war forces, actually has something invested in the outcome in Iraq), at least looks at the question squarely. We cannot share their call "for Arab states to take action against insurgent Islamist groups"—if the death-squad regime in Iraq is a template for fighting Islamist resistance throughout the Arab world, we are looking at a future nearly too horrible to contemplate. But anti-war activists who are serious about actually understanding what is going on in Iraq would do well to read—and grapple with—this analysis.