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Oh, those wacky religious Muslim terrorists are at it again going all murder happy on people who dare to make fun of their religion.
This event is completely ludicrous and, in 2015, should not be happening, some reasons off the top of my head:
1. Mohammad, Jebus, Krishna, Sif – pick your imaginary friend – they all don’t fucking exist.
2. If they did exist wouldn’t there be some godly smiting going on, like all the time? Being immortal and all powerful and all that shite, you would think that they could take care of business without the help of mere mortals.
3. How can you, a mere mortal, even think that you can contemplate what your Godhead wants, never mind what she’s offended by?
4. How does killing Western journalists advance your cause by even one micrometer? Not all journalists are card carrying lackeys of empire yet, but with doing shit-for-brains (shit for brains is my new term for “stupid” because I’ve been informed by certain elements that “stupid” is ablest slur) wankery like mass murder how is the non-wanking western media supposed to put forward the case for Islam not being full of yahoos ready to kill people for shit-for-brains reasons?
If you think this is going to be all about bashing the religious and the Muslims, you’d be wrong. Let’s get a little context on the situation from Ziauddin Sardar:
“I would argue that western imperialism has not so much forged an alliance with radical factions, as created them”, I was told, in London, by my friend, and leading progressive Muslim intellectual, Ziauddin Sardar.
And Mr. Sardar continued:
“We need to realize that colonialism did much more than simply damage Muslim nations and cultures. It played a major part in the suppression and eventual disappearance of knowledge and learning, thought and creativity, from Muslim cultures. Colonial encounter began by appropriating the knowledge and learning of Islam, which became the basis of the ‘European Renaissance’ and ‘the Enlightenment’ and ended by eradicating this knowledge and learning from both Muslim societies and from history itself. It did that both by physical elimination – destroying and closing down institutions of learning, banning certain types of indigenous knowledge, killing off local thinkers and scholars – and by rewriting History as the history of western civilization into which all minor histories of other civilization are subsumed.”
Of course our hands are dirty on this one most of the terrible shit going on in the world can be directly or indirectly attributed to putting our state interests (see colonialism, empire, and name your flavour of exceptionalism et al.) ahead of the needs of other people who happen to be living in their own countries.
Andre Vltchek continues:
“From the hopes of those post-WWII years, to the total gloom of the present days – what a long and terrible journey is has been!
The Muslim world is now injured, humiliated and confused, almost always on the defensive.
It is misunderstood by the outsiders, and often even by its own people who are frequently forced to rely on Western and Christian views of the world.
What used to make the culture of Islam so attractive – tolerance, learning, concern for the wellbeing of the people – has been amputated from the Muslim realm, destroyed from abroad. What was left was only religion.
Now most of the Muslim countries are ruled by despots, by the military or corrupt cliques. All of them closely linked with the West and its global regime and interests.
As they did in several great nations and Empires of South and Central America, as well as Africa, Western invaders and colonizers managed to totally annihilate great Muslim cultures.
What forcefully replaced them were greed, corruption and brutality.
It appears that everything that is based on different, non-Christian foundations is being reduced to dust by the Empire. Only the biggest and toughest cultures are still surviving.
Anytime a Muslim country tries to go back to its essence, to march its own, socialist or socially-oriented way – be it Iran, Egypt, Indonesia, or much more recently Iraq, Libya or Syria – it gets savagely tortured and destroyed.
The will of its people is unceremoniously broken, and democratically expressed choices overthrown.”
[Source]
Picture is unrelated. I need some awesome in this post, because otherwise it is too damn depressing.
You’ll see the word “stability” crop up when you begin to examine the officially accepted version of history we all know and love. Stability used in the geopolitical exceptional context is anti-democratic and anti-nationalist – pretty much the exact opposite of the flowery boilerplate about human rights and democracy promotion that is exuded from ‘top government’ officials.
It is usually about here I get painted as a part of the I hate america/canada crowd – but that shit can frack-off before it starts. I am not about hating my country, I’m about this country looking at our history without the friendly blinders on and owning up and taking responsibility for the horrible shit we have done/continue to do in the name of the ‘national interest’.
So ya, wanna fix the terrorism problem? Lets start at home ,with us, like this:
“If we seriously want to end the plague of terrorism, we know how to do it. First, end our own role as perpetrators. That alone will have a substantial effect. Second, attend to the grievances that are typically in the background, and if they are legitimate, do something about them. Third, if an act of terror occurs, deal with it as a criminal act: identify and apprehend the suspects and carry out an honest judicial process. That actually works. In contrast, the techniques that are employed enhance the threat of terror. The evidence is fairly strong, and falls together which much else. ”
Thank you Mr.Chomsky for that gem of a quote. Thank you dear readers for taking the time to listen to me rant.
Arbourist out.
Domestic violence is an issue that deserves more time in the basket labeled “things society cares about.” I am only one generation removed from a time when women were widely thought as of the property of their fathers, then their husbands. Then Radical Feminism got into the mix and started to analyze, deconstruct and protest this unacceptable situation. Andrea Dworkin from Women Hating Right and Left:
Putting ideas and concepts together so that they can be shared, and more importantly passed on, to the next generation is so frightfully important, yet it is not being done. I did not even know about Andrea Dworkin and her writing till very recently. Outside of a few tumblr’s and few Woman’s Studies courses that haven’t drunk too much of 3rd wave kool-aid you just won’t find mention of one of the key figures in feminist history.
I’ve read a lot of Dworkin and sometimes it is really all over the place, but at others (see the above quote) she focuses in like a laser to give words and then understanding to the the problems facing women. Dworkin’s insights must be handed down and shown to the next generation(s) of women – lest we invoke another historical chestnut – those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it blah blah blah.
Are we repeating?
I’d like to see in my time the quote from above (and others like it) get into the history books and stay there.
The so called war on drugs contains so much irony, we’ll need a new solar system to keep it in check.
“As long as demand and prices remain at current levels in wealthy drug-consuming nations, traders will enter almost any potential production area with wads of currency to elicit supply that can meet this demand. Over the past thirty years, the U.S. and UN prohibition has simply served to push production and processing, and smuggling of illicit drugs back and forth across the globe’s three critical trafficking areas – between Turkey and Laos within the Asian opium zone, from Bolivia to Columbia in the Andes coca belt, and from south Florida to northern Mexico along the U.S. border. At each turn and twist in this futile war on drugs, production has ratcheted upward.
Since opium can be grown in any temperate or highland area, crop suppression shifts cultivation elsewhere within the vastness of the Eurasian landmass or to the other continents, such as South America. And since the human brain’s chemistry makes all of humanity potential addicts, repression merely forces traffickers to seek new markets in another neighbourhood, nation, or continent. With such flexible market constraints, the blunt baton of repression has become the wand of stimulus, pushing consumption and production into ever-widening spheres and thereby compounding the drug problem.
[…]
In the last half of the 20th century, drug prohibition thus fostered a global illicit economy that funds criminal syndicates, highland warlords, ethnic liberation movements, terrorist networks and covert operations. Failing to understand the character of these commodities, the United Nations and the United States have attempted suppression with a range of ineffective, ultimately counterproductive, policies that include arresting consumers, pursuing dealers, and harassing growers.
Looking back on this sordid past gives little cause for optimism or celebration. To ordinary Americans who witness the dismal spectacle of the drug traffic at street level, it may seem inconceivable that the U.S. Government could somehow be implicated, directly or indirectly, in the international narcotics trade. During the cold war, American diplomats and CIA agents were involved at three levels: (1) a coincidental complicity through their covert alliances with major drug traffickers; (2) support for known traffickers by condoning their involvement and concealing their criminality from investigation; and on occasion, (3) active involvement in the actual transport of opium. More broadly, Washington has remained wedded to its prohibition policy and refuses to recognize that its attempts at eradication, from Turkey in the 1970’s to Columbia today, have actualy stimulated production and increased the global supply or illicit drugs.
It is ironic, to say the least, that America’s drug problem is of its own making.”
-from The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. Alfred W. McCoy. p.22-23
This should be basis for an argument for legalization of all illicit drugs. We should make them available and tax the crap out of them putting the revenue into treatment programs and rehabilitation, rather than incarceration trajectories. I think it would work like gangbusters.
You know what Remembrance Day should be for?
1. Remembering all those who have died in war. Precedence on the civilian deaths, because they die at far higher rate than any established military force.
2. Educate yourself as to what war is and how it is waged.
3. Take action to prevent future war and the inevitable human suffering that goes along with the organized murder we like to call warfare.
Today I’m all about the second bullet point.
Full Documentary
Have your minute of silence. Then take an additional hour and a half to get a glimpse of what the war on terror looks like.
In the crazy fun house world of imperial politics nationalist regimes are less preferable than radical religious ones. Noam Chomsky and Andre Vltchek discuss the motivations of empire in the Middle East in this selection from the book: On Western Terrorism – From Hiroshima to Drone Warfare.
“Noam Chomsky:
“Anyhow, going back to the Middle East after World War II. The British role in Iran was reduced and the US began to take over. IN Iraq in 1958, there was a so-called independent government, but it was basically British-run, and it was overthrown in a military coup. A couple of years later the US was able to engineer a coup that overthrew the Nasser-type nationalist government, and that’s where Saddam Hussein comes in. The CIA handed the new Ba’athist government a long list of Communists, radicals, and teachers, and then they all got assassinated. Then you come to the present; the US expects to run Iraq. In Saudi Arabia, the British were the junior partner, Finally the British pulled out, and left it to the United States.”
Andre Vltchek:
Of course Saudi Arabia is a tremendously destabilizing force in the world and its influence spreads from Bahrain to Indonesia. In Bahrain there is the fear that the country may be annexed by Saudi Arabia, The Saudi Army is and out of Bahrain.
Noam Chomsky:
The Saudis are pouring money all over the place to sponsor the most extreme forms of radical Islam – Wahabbism – in Madrasas, in Pakistan, pouring money into Egypt to support the Salafis, all extreme Islamic elements. The United States is happy with that; it doesn’t try to prevent them.
The idea that the US is opposed to radical Islam is ludicrous. The most extreme fundamentalist Islamic state in the world is Saudi Arabia, which is the US’s favourite. Britain also has consistently supported radical Islam. The reason was to oppose secular nationalism. US relations with Israel reached their current close state in 1967 because Israel performed the huge service of smashing secular nationalism and defending radical Islam.
A British diplomatic historian, Mark Curtis, wrote a very good book a few years ago called Secret Affairs: British Collusion with Radical Islam (review here). Curtis went through the British records on Islam. It turns out the British had consistently supported radical Islamist elements, pretty much was the US has been doing. They may not have liked it, but they prefer them to the secular nationalists.
Secular nationalists threatened them – they threatened to take over the resources and use them for domestic development and that’s the worst sin; so we support radical Islamists.”
-Excerpt from “On Western Terrorism from Hiroshima to Drone Warfare p.115 – 116
It would seem that Geo-political decisions are quietly being adjudicated by the imperial powers of the world. It would also seem that they are quite separate from the political fodder being offered to their respective populations.
Fascinating reading about some of the circular nature of events that are playing out in the Middle East as of late. This excerpt from the Counterpunch article titled Once More, Into the Quagmire.
The Middle East Needs Our Military Might
One can hear, in the reverberating noise of mainstream justifications, a series of claims. Among them is the idea that the Middle East is united in opposition to ISIS. Indeed it is, if you confine your poll to the rotten monarchies of the Gulf, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain. Adding Jordan to the mix, this fulsome collection of anti-democratic and largely puritanical theocrats is by some stretch of the imagination supposed to provide Arab and Muslim legitimacy to America’s war.
Fancy that, legitimacy conferred by five of the most authoritarian governments in the Middle East. Thus we are ostensibly defending the cause of freedom by assembling a coalition of five treacherous freedom deniers. One human rights violator is leading a coalition of human rights violators against a new human rights violator whose actions deeply offend it. We are appalled at the sight of beheadings and intend to destroy those who practice it, supported by the leading beheader on the Arabian Peninsula. We bomb ISIS oil depots, claiming they have been criminally seized. This barely a decade after we criminally seized major Iraqi oil contracts, while our troops “guarded” the oil ministry (from ‘insurgents’).
Then there’s the dutifully ignored footnote, a poll conducted by the Arab America Institute, which found that:
“Strong majorities in every country favor U.S. policies that support a negotiated solution to the conflict, coupled with more support for Syrian refugees. Majorities in all countries oppose any form of U.S. military engagement (i.e., “no-fly zone,” air strikes, or supplying advanced weapons to the opposition).”
And most Arabs found President Obama most effective in ending the U.S. presence in Iraq. Perhaps the true patriot could efface all of this were it not for the additional fact that our partners in extermination are the leading financial backers of extremists across the Arab world. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are nothing if not open-air markets for arms merchants, money launderers, and angry mullah mosque builders. You could be forgiven for wondering if half our coalition is helping attack ISIS and then immediately re-arming it when it emerges from the rubble, as it invariably will. This is what’s known in arch capitalist circles as “creative destruction.”
Fifty seven years ago seems like a long time, but in term of changing cultural norms it was mere minutes, we still have such a long way to go. Three cheers for Ms.Counts and her steely determination, courage and perseverance in the face of such ugly human behaviour.
In 1956, forty black students applied for transfers at a white school. At 15 years of age, on 4 September 1957, Dorothy Counts was one of the four black students enrolled at various all-white schools in the district; She was at Harry Harding High School, Charlotte, North Carolina.
Three students were enrolled at other schools, including Central High School. The harassment started when the wife of John Z. Warlick, the leader of the White Citizens Council, urged the boys to “keep her out” and at the same time, implored the girls to spit on her, saying, “spit on her, girls, spit on her.” Dorothy walked by without reacting, but told the press that many people threw rocks at her—most of which landed in front of her feet—and that many spat on her back. Photographer Douglas Martin won the 1957 World Press Photo of the Year with an image of Counts being mocked by a crowd on her first day of school.
More abuse followed that day. She had trash thrown at her while eating her dinner and the teachers ignored her. The following day, she befriended two white girls, but they soon drew back because of harassment from other classmates. Her family received threatening phone calls and after four days of extensive harassment—which included a smashed car and having her locker ransacked, her father decided to take his daughter out of the school. At a press conference, he said:
It is with compassion for our native land and love for our daughter Dorothy that we withdraw her as a student at Harding High School. As long as we felt she could be protected from bodily injury and insults within the school’s walls and upon the school premises, we were willing to grant her desire to study at Harding.
The family moved to Pennsylvania, where Counts attended an integrated school in Philadelphia, and later earned a degree from Johnson C. Smith University. She has spent her professional career in child care resources.
In 2008, Harding High School awarded Counts an honorary diploma. In 2010, Counts received a public apology from a member of the crowd which harassed her in 1957. In 2010, Harding High School renamed its library in honor of Counts-Scoggins, an honour rarely bestowed upon living persons.
[Source:Wikipedia]
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