LIVE FROM HONDURAS: Thomas Friedman connects with Africa
August 21st, 2009 § Leave a Comment
At an internet café in Tegucigalpa the other day, I came across Thomas Friedman’s August 15 article in the New York Times Online, entitled “The Land of ‘No Service,’” which I assumed would be about a poorly functioning McDonald’s in one of the post-Soviet states. When I discovered it was instead about Friedman’s visit to Botswana, I decided it was not any less relevant for me to write about Thomas Friedman in the midst of a Honduran military coup than for Thomas Friedman to write about Africa.
Robert Mugabe: mentioned when Friedman briefly remembers that he is supposed to be a foreign affairs columnist.
From Chief’s Island, Botswana, Friedman begins:
If you travel long enough and far enough — like by jet to Johannesburg, by prop plane to northern Botswana and then by bush plane deep into the Okavango Delta — you can still find it. It is that special place that on medieval maps would have been shaded black and labeled: ‘Here there be Dragons!’ But in the postmodern age, it is the place where my BlackBerry, my wireless laptop and even my satellite phone all gave me the same message: ‘No Service.’”
Media Mis-focus – Perpetuating the Zionist Narrative, for Better or Worse
August 20th, 2009 § 2 Comments
Good propaganda isn’t constructed on lies, but rather half truths. Missing context, however, is not the only component the Israeli media employs to distort the Israeli mind. Another subtle trick is what the media focuses on. Three stories were revealed to me this week. They have little in common but a lesson on the effects of media focus.
The Irrelevance of an Israel-Born Fatah Member to the Zionist Narrative
Thank god for alternative media, because I could have completely missed this fantastic fact:
Loud applause broke out Saturday evening as it was announced that “brother” Dr Uri Davis had been elected to the Fatah movement’s largest governing body.
Blackwater and the CIA?
August 20th, 2009 § 1 Comment
Blackwater founder Erik Prince has reportedly vowed to "eliminate Muslims and Islam globally" in defense of Christianity.
Investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill, the thorn in the side of the world’s powerful private military, continues to probe the connections he has discovered and made public about Blackwater’s connection to the CIA. While The New York Times had broken the story with a significant lack of facts and in-depth research, Scahill was working on it and continues to do. During his recent appearance on Democracy Now!, Scahill discussed how Blackwater had been contracted by the CIA to conduct secret assassinations of targets in Afghanistan and possibly Pakistan.
Scahill reports that one of Blackwater’s top executives is Cofer Black, a 28 year veteran of the CIA who was running their assassination program in 2002 and was head of the counterterrorism center. Another CIA link is Alvin “Buzzy” Krongard who was the executive director of the CIA in 2002 and was introduced to Blackwater founder Erik Prince through Prince’s father, Edgar.
According to Scahill:
I think a central point here, though, is that it shows how there was no wall between the administration and Erik Prince of Blackwater. They knew that this guy was going to be a loyal foot soldier. And you take this, combined with the fact that a former Blackwater executive has alleged that Erik Prince viewed himself as a sort of crusader fighting a holy war in defense of Christianity in an attempt to, quote, “eliminate Muslims and Islam globally,” the idea that then he was working or voluntarily working on some kind of an assassination program makes perfect sense.
Crazy, right? Watch below for more information and check out Scahill’s most recent article “Blackwater: CIA Assassins?” in The Nation.
Culture of Fear
August 20th, 2009 § 2 Comments
The Eternal Jew. Nazi-era film.
I don’t usually subject myself to it, but a few days ago I found myself near a television in the act of broadcasting the BBC news. One of the headline stories, carefully selected for relevance from this world of trouble, concerned a bleach attack on the boyfriend of a married woman. The woman and her boyfriend were both British Muslims, so the newscaster expected the attack to put the focus back on ‘honour crimes in the Muslim community’. I wonder how many ‘native’ white males were glassed or bottled in Britain last Saturday night for looking at somebody’s girlfriend the wrong way. I wonder when the focus will be directed (it can’t be ‘put back’ because it wasn’t there in the first place) on Anglo honour crimes, on show right now in a pub near you.
Next little episode: Jim Fitzpatrick MP, whose east London constituency is a third Muslim, walked out of a constituent’s wedding party when he discovered – to his horror – that men and women were asked to sit in separate areas. Many comment-posters on the ‘liberal’ Guardian supported Fitzpatrick’s action, because gender segregation is not something we do in this country. Absolutely. If it weren’t for the Muslim cultural invasion, proper Brits wouldn’t have picked up the foreign habit of the stag and hen night.
LIVE FROM HONDURAS: Introducing Micheletti, man of god; Honduran populace meets its de facto president after almost two months
August 20th, 2009 § 1 Comment
Pages 2 and 3 of yesterday’s La Prensa are devoted to an interview with Honduran coup president Roberto Micheletti entitled “Nada me ha quitado el sueño”—roughly “Nothing keeps me up at night.” The first paragraph informs us that this interview constitutes the first time Micheletti has spoken openly with the national media, which calls into question what Micheletti was hiding when he announced at a July 1 press conference in Tegucigalpa that time was on the side of the coup regime when it came to the return of ousted President Mel Zelaya. Also called into question is why the de facto president has jeopardized La Prensa’s scoop by also giving interviews to Channel 5 TV and to the McClatchy newspaper chain in the last 48 hours.
As for why the coup has not interrupted Micheletti’s sleeping patterns—which are presumably easier to maintain when time is on one’s side—he assures us that his conscience is not burdened by the military interruption of the sleeping patterns of Zelaya, who was removed from his home in his pajamas on June 28. La Prensa asks whether he is not kept up at night by threats from the international community and Zelaya himself; Micheletti responds with a request for Hondurans to vote on November 29 in defiance of international threats not to recognize a government elected via illegitimate elections. US ambassador to Honduras Hugo Llorens may have further eased Micheletti’s conscience last week by explaining at a meeting with an American human rights delegation that “you don’t boycott,” which for the moment served as the US stance on such elections.
LIVE FROM HONDURAS: FARC goes without food in order to fuel unrest in Honduras; Honduran media indicate need for course in constructing news headlines that are not contradicted by subheadlines
August 18th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Outside forces posing as Hondurans. (Photo: La Tribuna)
While attempting a nap in my hotel room in Tegucigalpa the other day, I overheard a British backpacker down the hall ask the owner of the hotel what was going on in this country. I thus accepted that the nap attempt was over, acquainted as I was with the acoustical setup of the hotel and the longwinded pedagogical tendencies of its owner, who had been especially thrilled with the arrival of a traveler from France the week before and the ability to invoke French revolutionary models of executing traitors. Proposed Honduran traitors had incidentally not included General Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, who had assured ousted Honduran President Mel Zelaya that the coup against him was simply a matter of business and nothing personal; other matters of business included the increase in minimum wage by which Zelaya had traitorously rendered workers slightly less disempowered.
The British backpacker was treated to a new revolutionary theme, in which resistance to the coup regime of Roberto Micheletti was being funded by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. In my hotel owner’s view, the FARC was paying Nicaraguans and Salvadorans to pretend that they were Hondurans opposed to military coups, although he did not explain why the organization did not use its funds to pay its own guerrillas to pretend they were not starving in the Colombian jungle. Also not accounted for in the current theory was why a participant in last week’s anti-coup marches in Tegucigalpa had explained to me that marchers would not respond to police beatings by beating up police based on the principle that “we are all Hondurans.”
Normal is hard to watch in “Towelhead”
August 18th, 2009 § 1 Comment
"Towelhead" is based on a novel by Alicia Erian and directed by "American Beauty" writer Alan Ball
While taboo topics like underage female sexuality and racism in America will inspire controversy on their own, combining them as the main focus of a feature film guarantees discomfort from all fronts. In fact, the unease viewers experience while watching Alan Ball’s “Towelhead” is constant throughout, beginning with the opening scene which narrows in on an older stay-at-home boyfriend shaving the bikini line of his girlfriend’s 13 year old daughter Jasira, played by 18 year old Summer Bishil.
Initially appearing in 2007 at the Toronto Film Festival under the name of “Nothing is Private,” “Towelhead” made its first US appearance in 2008 at the Sundance Film Festival where it garnered a mix of mediocre to negative reviews. Although the decision to change the name of the film several months after its release spurred some initial buzz, it still generated low revenue and viewership. Even though the Council on America-Islam Relations directly asked Warner Brothers and Warner Independent Films to rescind their decision, the director remained firm on his choice to change the film’s name to the title of the novel on which it was based:
I believe one of the unintended consequences of forbidding such words to be spoken is imbuing those words with more power than they should ever have, and helping create the illusion that the bigotry and racism expressed by such cruel epithets is less prevalent than it actually is, which we all know is sadly not the case.
Alicia Erian, the author of the novel, also defended the decision:
As an Arab-American woman, I am of course aware that the title of my book is an ethnic slur. Indeed, I selected the title to highlight one of the novel’s major themes: Racism. In the tradition of Dick Gregory’s autobiography Nigger, the Jewish magazine Heeb or the feminist magazine Bitch, the title is rude and shocking, but it is not gratuitous. Besides the fact that the main character must endure taunting about her ethnicity (including being called a towelhead), so much of the novel’s plot is fueled [sic] by the characters’ attitudes toward race.
Imperialism Resurgent
August 17th, 2009 § 7 Comments
In “The End of Tolerance: Racism in 21st Century Britain”, Arun Kundnani writes, “Racisms are no longer domestically driven but take their impetus from the attempt to legitimise a deeply divided global order. They are the necessary products of an empire in denial.”
by Steve Bell
Commentators call for immigrants to be schooled in ‘our national story’, which includes hefty chapters on the beneficence of empire. Gordon Brown says, “The days of Britain having to apologise for the British Empire are over. We should celebrate!” Sarkozy urges France to be “proud of its history,” meaning its imperial history.
European empires did sometimes construct railways and drainage systems in the conquered lands. They did build law courts and disseminate a certain kind of cuture. But these questionable achievements must be understood against the larger ugly backdrop. Economies under imperial rule stagnated at best. Huge swathes of Africa were transformed from subsistence agricultural land to cashcrop plantations. When the value of the crop plummetted, or when the crop was grown more cheaply elsewhere, local people were left hungry and unskilled on exhausted soil. Africa has still not recovered from this deliberate underdevelopment. During British misrule, preventable famines killed tens of millions of Indians. Elsewhere in the empire, hundreds of thousands were forced into concentration camps, and torture was institutionalised. There were the genocides of indigenous Australians and Americans, by massacre and land theft as well as by disease. There was the little matter of the transatlantic slave trade.
Advocacy Group Decries PETA’s Inhumane Treatment Of Women
August 16th, 2009 § 1 Comment
Women Deserve Better says PETA abuses defenseless, simple-minded women by forcing them to remove their clothing and participate in humiliating…
Sleeping with the Enemy – Zionism and Nazism and Other Kinky Collaborations
August 15th, 2009 § 16 Comments
On one of my blog post’s comment sections, a mini-debate ensued about the good ole’ Mufti’s meeting with Hitler, in which I pointed out to a link, involving Zionists with The third Reich, written by the Institute for Historical Review. It was later pointed out to me that the Institute for Historical Review is headed by someone who’s written for neo-Nazi publications. I’ve made the correction on the comment section, but I was definitely dissatisfied with the simplistic shelving of a source- even if I’m disgusted by its motives- as I felt there was academic merit to it. The world is far from black and white, and just as the Zionist Benny Morris’ work is regarded in academic discussion of Palestinian history, so can the writings of the Institute for Historical Review teach us about Zionist history. The rule of thumb would be, in these cases, to tread carefully and consider only the facts and not the conclusions.
