RT Backfire
February 17th, 2012 § 8 Comments
There used to be a time when the BBC and CNN had a monopoly on world news. In recent years that monopoly has been challenged by professional operations like Al Jazeera, and also by less independent but sometimes useful channels like RT and Press TV. This is a good development. Though, just as the BBC and CNN operate within a paradigm broadly consonant with the foreign policies of their respective states, RT and Press TV are also sensitive to the foreign policy concerns of Russia and Iran. They are all good at reporting the failings of other states. But when it comes to their own and their allies, all of these channels are by and large uncritical.
This diversity is to be appreciated. Viewers for the first time are in a position to make intelligent choices as to the channels they can turn to in each situation. So, if the story is Israel’s latest assault on Gaza, CNN or the BBC will be the wrong place to look for the truth. Conversely, if the news is Syria’s latest assault on Homs, you had best skipped RT and Press TV. You’d be a fool to turn to the BBC for reporting on the London riots; just as you’d be a fool to consult CNN on the OWS movement, RT on Chechnya, or Press TV on the Green Movement. It is important to take them all with a pinch of salt.
The following program, RT’s Crosstalk, illustrates what I mean. The show has often provided a platform to voices that you’ll never hear on the BBC and CNN. Where else can you find a Norman Finkelstein debating a Benny Morris? This broadening of the discourse is a good thing. But it only works where the debate is weighted in favour of the Russian position. As the following show illustrates, when a conversation veers off script, the host is extremely heavy-handed in trying to enforce discipline. In this instance, about 10 minutes into the debate, the host starts battling all his guests to force them to see the situation in Syria his way. This is embarrassing. This side of Bill O’Reilly, the only time I had seen an intervention of this nature was when the BBC’s Ben Brown interviewed Jody McIntyre about the London protests.
Brother Arab Republic of Syria
February 6th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez has offered his unequivocal support to the leader of the ‘Brother Arab Republic of Syria’. Those unfamiliar with the anti-imperial record of this regime might find the following report instructive:
The Iron Lady
January 26th, 2012 § 2 Comments
The Iron Lady is currently in showing in British cinemas. The trailer seems to suggest that Margaret Thatcher advanced the cause of women. In a recent interview Meryl Streep confessed how much more she had come to appreciate Thatcher’s contributions to feminism. It all reminded me of this clip from The Onion.
Ralph Fiennes on Coriolanus
January 24th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
I watched Ralph Fiennes’s superb directorial debut Coriolanus last night. It is one of my favourite Shakespeare plays and Fiennes does it justice with a gritty adaptation, using a documentary camera technique. Like Orson Welles’s Julius Caesar, the play is transposed to modern times while retaining the Shakespearean language. The questions of power, representation, umbilical bonds, and the conflict between liberty and security are given a contemporary relevance. The adaptation is artistically bolder than Julie Taymor’s excellent Titus, even if Taymor’s adaptation was more creative and seamless in incorporating modern motifs into an ancient, rather more fantastic story. The performances, particularly Fiennes’s and Vanessa Redgrave’s, are outstanding. The only quibble I have is Coriolanus’s strutting. Shakespeare’s Coriolanus is confident of his own physical and moral superiority, he has nothing to prove. Whereas Fiennes’s Coriolanus is often stiff and affected, as if he feels the need to keep reminding others of his strength. The tattoo on the neck was just out of place. Gerard Butler is far more relaxed in his role, even if his performance is somewhat lacking in conviction. Lubna Azabal, last seen in the Canadian film Incendies, is convincing as the intense and rebellious Tamora.
The Ghost of Tom Joad
December 29th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
From the great 2009 film The People Speak: Bruce Springsteen sings “The Ghost of Tom Joad”, a song that was inspired by John Steinbeck’s masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath.
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Silence of the lambs
December 17th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
It says something about American society that on the day a true hero, PFC Bradley Manning, goes to trial, less than twenty people show up to support him. Shame.
Are there any winners of the Iraq war?
December 13th, 2011 § 3 Comments
With Inside Story Americas, Shihab Rattansi has really elevated the quality of the show. Rattansi is in my view Al Jazeera’s best anchor and the following is a rather superb show with an excellent selection of guests. Don’t miss.
Kargas
December 11th, 2011 § 1 Comment
The following is cross-posted from Lobelog.com.
Iran’s Zahedan airport is located on a road named for Allama Iqbal, the great Indian philosopher whom Pakistan after partition adopted as its national poet. The shaheen, or eagle, features prominently in Iqbal’s poetry, as a symbol of vigour, dignity and daring. It is contrasted against the figure of the kargas, or vulture, which represents cunning, cowardice and ignobility. It is the latter appellation that the region frequently applies to the CIA drones which today menace the skies from Waziristan, Kandahar to Zahedan. But shaheen or kargas, they are both ferocious; and it is a feat to capture either. Small wonder then, that some in Iran see cause for celebration in the capture of CIA’s RQ-170 Sentinel drone, a stealth surveillance craft manufactured by Lockheed Martin.
This is not the first time the CIA has delivered one of its most advanced aircraft for inevitable reverse engineering to its putative enemy. On April 9, 1960, people at the Zahedan airport watched anxiously as an aircraft with unusually wide wings approached from the north-east. The Lockheed U-2C was on a top-secret spying mission for the CIA, but its target was not Iran. Indeed, it was coming in to land after being chased by several fighter planes. Over the previous 8 hours, the plane had photographed four strategic Soviet military sites from an altitude of 70,000 feet, well out of the reach of the Russian MiGs and Sukhois. It embarked on its mission from the Badaber air force base 10 miles to the south of Peshawar.
The Terrible Beauty of Wikileaks
December 10th, 2011 § 5 Comments
Following are excerpts from my long essay on Wikileaks and the Palestine Papers which appears in The Arabs Are Alive, the first issue of Critical Muslim, edited by Ziauddin Sardar and PULSE’s own Robin Yassin-Kassab.
British journalist Gary Younge once quipped that the English nation only exists for 90 minutes during a game of football. As the webs of social relations that tied nations together have frayed under the neoliberal assault, societies have fragmented, existing only as imagined communities in spectacles, especially war and sport. The Wikileaks cables revealed little about Tunisia or Egypt that the individual citizen did not already know. But it was the spectacular manner of the revelations that turned a mass of atomised and jaded individuals into an angry nation clamouring for dignity. As witnesses to the spectacle of the global phenomena that was Wikileaks and the local tragedy that was Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisians had coalesced into a community around the common source of their humiliation.
If Mohamed Bouazizi’s spectacular act was born of desperation, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s was born of ingenuity. By using the prestige and resources of five of the world’s leading news organizations, Assange ensured a global audience for his revelations. In his earlier experiments he had discovered that dumping a mass of data online, however sensational, generated little public interest. Information, like any commodity, is also subject to the laws of supply and demand. Truth has never been in short supply, but it needs amplification to have an impact. An obscure website might draw those actively pursuing a story, but masses who are mere passive consumers of news will have little reason to upset the bliss of their ignorance. For it to have an impact the information will have to be thrust into people’s faces.
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Romney’s Radical
October 28th, 2011 § 1 Comment
The following is an excerpt from my latest article for Al Jazeera in which I discuss how the Israel lobby has taken over Republican front-runner Mitt Romney’s Middle East policy through its man with a shady past:
[Walid Phares] is a one-time member of the notorious Lebanese Forces – the sectarian Christian militia which played a leading role in the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre (though there is no evidence that he personally played a part). It is an experience he now wisely leaves out of his resume. Nor does he include his association with Etienne Saqr, the head of the Guardians of the Cedars, an outfit the Congressional Research Service described as “[a]n extremist Maronite militia and terrorist organisation”. Saqr played a prominent role in Phares’ World Lebanese Organisation long after he was exiled to Israeli-occupied south Lebanon for his crimes against the Lebanese and Palestinian people.
But it is not this association with the Lebanese Forces and Etienne Saqr that grants Phares his expert’s cache. He is an Arab with bona fide academic credentials who validates proponents of military intervention in the Middle East the same way that Ahmed Chalabi once did. Indeed, both once shared the same publicist, Benador Associates, a neoconservative favourite. Phares can make the aspirations of the Arabs and Iranians sound remarkably consonant with the interests of Tel Aviv. For someone who wrote papers for Israeli think tanks urging continued occupation of Southern Lebanon (“the only place in the world where Christian and Jewish blood is shed together for the defence of two Judeo-Christian nations”) this might not be too big an imaginative leap. But his capacity to divine the real yearnings of the Middle East’s Muslims is perhaps less certain.
