Zcom_simple

Hello,

Blogs are a familiar feature on the internet - where users post content in an accumulating manner, with comments, and search options, etc. They facilitate expression and exploration, and via attached comments, also debate and synthesis.


Reading and
Navigating Blogs

Our blogs are quite powerful. Each writer can post, as is typically the case. Sustainers who have the option can also post, however. All Blogs appear in the blog system, and sometimes also in content boxes the top page of ZNet - and always via the left menu of the top page - and can be found via searches, etc.

Commenting on blogs follows the blogs, attached at the bottom, and blog comments, like all others, are also visible in many places that show comments including in the forum system. In addition, the entire blog system gathers content for everyone - but one can look at the accumulating content in many ways.

  • For example one can look at one writer's efforts - so one is seeing what is effectively a blog system for that one writer, or Sustainer.
  • One can also look at the content by topic, seeing blogs that are tagged as being about a certain topic - or place, as well. Thus, when doing that, it is a blog system about a topic, or a place, with many contributors.
  • One can look at only writer blogs, or only sustainer blogs, as well.
  • One can look at blogs for particular Groups, too.

All this is easily done using the left menu. Searches allow even more variables and refinements.


Creating Blog Posts

If you are a Sustainer with permission, and are logged in, you will see a link in the left menu for you to post a blog - and you can use that to post one, and then tag it various ways (such as with a topic or place, or a group tag), and once you do, it is in the system with you as the author.

You can also use the console button to the left to post a blog - anytime and from anywhere in the site, as long as you are logged in.

Meanwhile, enjoy the blogs - and, by the way, if you are a Free Member or a Sustainer with a ZSpace page, of course you can put one or more content boxes on it, pulling blog links of any sort you may want to filter for, for example, by you or by your friends or by others - and by topic, about places, for groups, etc.

Blogs

Deepsk_tripathi

Deepak Tripathi's Blog

Web Address: http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/deepaktripathi
Bio: Deepak Tripathi is a writer. Before 2000, he spent 23 years with the BBC as a commentator, editor and correspondent. He set up the BBC office in Afghanistan and w... (More)

All Tripathi Blogs

Massacre in Lahore

By Deepak Tripathi at May 29, 2010


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[[Deepak Tripathi's latest book Overcoming the Bush Legacy in Iraq and Afghanistan  (Potomac Books, Inc., Washington, D.C.) is avaiable from Amazon.com and its counterparts in Canada (Amazon.ca) and Britain (Amazon.co.uk).]]  

Even for a country where violence has long become routine, the orgy of killing in Pakistan at Friday’s prayers in Lahore is particularly distressing. Men armed with guns, hand grenades, wearing suicide vests, killed nearly 80 people and wounded more than 100 at Garhi Shahu and Model Town in the capital of Pakistan’s Punjab province. Three suicide bombers blew themselves up as security forces began closing in.

It is important to say a few words here about the victims. They were members of the Ahmadiyya sect of Muslims, regarded as heretics by many other Muslims, particularly hard-line Sunnis. Pakistan has a four-million-strong Ahmadiyya community, officially regarded  as non-Muslims. They have long been persecuted and the discrimination continues to date. In 1984, Pakistan’s military dictator General Zia-ul-Haq issued an edict that prohibited Ahmadis to call themselves Muslim, or ‘to pose as Muslims’. General Zia then enjoyed the patronage of the United States president Ronald Reagan. At the time, Washington was providing Zia with billions of dollars of military and economic aid, and arming and encouraging Sunni Islamic fundamentalism, to fight Soviet communism in Afghanistan.

Ahmadis, in fact, claim to lead the revival of peaceful propagation of Islam. The sect’s founder Ghulam Ahmad (1835-1908) declared himself the Mujahid (divine reformer) of the fourteenth Islamic century. To their hardline Muslim critics, among the most objectionable aspects of Ahmadiyya beliefs is their view on the death and return of Jesus.

The massacre on Friday at Ahmadiyya mosques in Lahore is yet another reminder of the folly of feeding bigotry and intolerance that always leads to unforeseen disastrous consequences. Today, the same fundamentalists the Americans fed, and their children, confront their erstwhile masters. They kill fellow citizens who do not conform to their interpretation of Islam. And those who do.

[END]

 

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