Student associations at schools in the northeastern United States have demanded the attorney general probe the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) “secret surveillance” of students in their associations. The demand comes after investigative reporting published by the Associated Press revealed the NYPD conducted surveillance of Muslim students at Rutgers University, Yale, Columbia, New York University (NYU), University of Buffalo and other schools.

Is the national focus on terrorism justified? Kevin Drum has this chart showing that indictments for homegrown support for terrorist attacks have declined significantly. In addition, violent attacks carried out by Muslim-Americans in 2011 were almost non-existent. And a Department of Defense official now suggests we over-estimated the al Qaeda threat.

Everyone’s talking about this exchange from last night’s CNN/Tea Party Express debate (I assume the CNN/MoveOn debate is next week), where the crowd cheers the prospect of allowing an uninsured man to die. And I’ll get to that in a moment. But perhaps just as rotten was when the crowd booed Ron Paul, who’s supposed to be a kind of Tea Party godfather, for daring to suggest that not every Muslim is responsible for 9-11. Beyond the crassness of this incident, it should definitively end the speculation that the Tea Party is anything other than an outgrowth of the Republican Party.

The title, Who Are We, signals a questioning about identity and begins an exploration of its “vexed terrain.” Gary Younge, columnist for the Guardian and The Nation and the author of two previous books, lifts our understanding of identity from the taken-for-granted where it is too often treated as a fixed and done thing. Instead, Younge brings us into layers of our identities from micro to macro, from the personal to the political, revealing paradoxes both in how we know ourselves and how others (too often wrongly) ascribe identity to us.

The only response to the two attacks in Norway yesterday is total horror. In the latest update, at least 91 people are dead from a bomb at a suite of government buildings and a gun attack at a Labour Party youth camp on Utoya Island. The suspect, Anders Behring Breivik, was a right-wing nationalist and Christian fundamentalist with a predilection for Pamela Geller and other anti-Muslim, white supremacist websites and writers.

Israel passed a law punishing people who advocate for a boycott of the settlements. The law is definitely not only a blow to freedom of speech in Israel but also another act of repression against Palestinian solidarity activism in Israel.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, through an advisor, made a vow prior to planned protests on Friday; he would not order protesters to be shot dead in the streets. At least, not this time. Because he’s a humanitarian. Sure, the UN estimates that 850 Syrians have died from government suppression. But today, the people will speak in a bullet-free manner.

I don’t think the protest movement had any reason to believe that.

I’ve gone back and forth on this. Given the existence of Photoshop in this day and age, it’s impossible to have such a thing as photographic evidence for at least some set of people. And I think the counterfactual is useful here. You’ll remember that George Bush released pretty grisly photos of Uday and Qusay Hussein, which were summarily splashed across front pages, and they definitely gave me a queasy feeling at the time. The word “trophy” came to my mind as well.

And yet, these are public records.

Aside from actions having consequences, this is a powerful example of the dangers of foreign occupation. Provocations can lead the local populations to turn on not only the occupiers, but the NGOs and UN officials trying to keep the peace and help the villagers.

Oh, and we need some denouncing, stat: Michele Bachmann, Tim Pawlenty, Mike Huckabee, and Haley Barbour, likely presidential aspirants all, have appeared on Bryan Fischer’s radio show.