Word: spuriousness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...ability to revive and complete the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The administration's approach has been to leave that issue on the back burner while pursuing Iraq on the assumption that ousting Saddam's regime would facilitate peace between Israel and the Palestinians - an argument dismissed as spurious by Zinni, Cordesman and others. Instead, the Iraq occupation and the ongoing conflict in the West Bank and Gaza has burnished al-Qaeda's appeal in relation to the pro-U.S. Arab regimes it hopes to supplant, because these regimes appear powerless to affect the plight of the Palestinians and Iraqis...
Pinker began his argument by refuting what he called “three spurious adaptationist explanations of religion:” the suggestion that people embrace religion for its comfort, its sense of community and its ethical value...
...President Hu Jintao wraps up his first year in office. The most common grievances involve corrupt local officials, land seized by authorities and developers to fuel China's property boom, unpaid wages from cash-strapped state-owned enterprises, and industrial accidents at unregulated private factories. Some cases are doubtless spurious, but most aren't. Even Zhou Zhanshun, head of the State Letters and Visits Bureau, admitted to the state-run Xinhua News Agency in January that 80% of the complaints are reasonable...
Officials also cite safety concerns as motivation behind the new regulations: worries that street performers are actually terrorists disguised as street performers have presumably prompted some security officials to call for the banning of such urban entertainment altogether. Yet regulations as a response to terrorists fears seems completely spurious. Such threats are not documented and street musicians continue to thrive in other cities that are considered high-risk for terrorism; New York City, for example, continues to allow amplified street performers in its subways. In 1985, the New York Transit Authority started the Music Under New York (MUNY) program whereby...
...invasion of Iraq appears to have offered al-Qaeda its greatest growth opportunity yet. While the Bush administration's prewar claims about a significant connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda appear to have been spurious, they may nonetheless have created a self-fulfilling prophesy. Arab and Muslim outrage at the U.S. occupation of Iraq has created a new organizing principle for al-Qaeda, whose spokesmen now urge their followers worldwide to make their way to Iraq to wage jihad against the invaders. For bin Laden's followers, the growing insurgency in Iraq is more than simply a golden opportunity...