Akram's Razor - Reflections on Islam, Muslims & America

Colbert b-slaps W and the Beltway (REPOST)

[So I've censored my original, overly exuberant title to mostly eliminate the b-word.  To cleanse the URL, I must repost.  No major changes otherwise.  Guess I'm getting squeamish and prudish with middle age. ]

Forgive the thuggish turn of phrase, but it's the only way to capture what went down.

I just watched the clip of Stephen Colbert's absolutely brutal send-up of George W. Bush, the Beltway establishment, and the media that prostitutes itself to them at the White House Correspondent Dinner.  Whew.   It was scorching and quite funny at times in a very understated way.  Tto think he gave this talk in front of the most powerful people in Washington.   (Here's a summary.  Here's another, with the transcript of this brilliant tirade.  Here's an analysis.)

If this administration didn't have a history of trampling on truth, government accountability, the rule of law and the other fundamental elements of democracy--and if the mainstream media hadn't often whitewashed his campaigns against the same--I'd consider Colbert's performance in exceedingly poor taste.  Were this president not so arrogant and imperious, I'd pity him for having had to sit through 20 minutes of some lowly comedian implying him to be a dolt and a failure.

But it does and he is, so desperately unorthodox measures are needed to get the word outside the bubble of Washington DC.  I salute Colbert.  And express my amazement at his amazing...umm...chutzpah. 

This is what democracy is all about.  It's about fighting for what you believe is right, not currying favor with those in power or timidly hoarding your "political capital" for some great battle for all that's holy  (and which never materializes) a la Bill Clinton.

One of many memorable quotes:  Like New Orleans, "Washington DC is a 'chocolate city' [slang for a majority-black town].  Except with a marshmellowy white center."  Savage, but so painfully true.

Colbert for President!

Ethiopia & Eritrea at it again

It looks like those estranged siblings, Ethiopia and Eritrea might be going to war again. God only knows why.

It's comical in a morbid sort of way, as these two nations were long held up as examples for the rest of Africa because of their regimes' eager embrace of American neoliberal orthodoxy and supposed commitment to democracy.  Now, they're increasingly tyrranical, poor, and fighting over dirt because their leaders--who once were close associates--are in a spat.  Thousands of people have died in fighting over the fuzzy border between the two impoverished countries.

This might come as a surprise, but in a former life (i.e., during the year or so between my graduation from Goucher College in 1997 and my reluctant entry into the I.T. field in late 1998), but I actually briefly interviewed Ethiopian PM Meles Zenawi and then President Negasso Gidada while in Ethiopia working on a "special report" (read: supplement that gives the publication a pretext to go the country and sell advertising) on the country for The Washington Times. 

It was my first and, so far, last brush with the journalist's life.   I was a recent college grad who was sick of temping.  I saw a classified ad for aspiring journalists who liked to travel (read: tyros with so little professional experience that they'll be willing to work 100% on commission) and replied.  I was a bit disappointed that it was Washington Times--I'm no friend of their politics--but it turned out that they didn't care about my politics for this gig and my job would just be to write tourism propaganda, anyway, so I figured why not.  I was broke and needed the experience.

Ended up spending 6 weeks in Ethiopia interviewing various bigwigs (government ministers, heads of key companies) in order to give my partner, a marketing rep, a pretext to pitch advertising to them. (It's understood that ministries and companies that advertise can expect more coverage of their sector, and their work will obviously be the case study for any expanded coverage.)

The report, which ended up being a bit on the short side due to the few sales we were able to make--people from the UK's The Independent and the Institutional Investor magazine had recently passed through and drained everybody's advertising budgets, and we found ourselves competing with a team from Paris Match for the few scraps remaining--ran in May 1998. 

My brief taste of the life of the roving foreign correspondent.

I still miss the music and dancing.  There is something really funky about Ethiopian music, and the traditional dances are a lot of fun to watch.  (The things they do with their shoulders!)

An odd detail:  While there in 1998, I attended the lavish launch of Africa's only 5-star hotel, the Sheraton Addis. The place was gorgeous--it reminded me a bit of Versailles--and incredibly decadent given that Ethiopia is arguably Africa's poorest country. 

The bash included a concert with Kool and the Gang (who'd reunited for this event), Ethiopian pop star Aster Aweke, and some American jazz singer whose name eludes me at the moment.

I got a great "seat", nestled between a speaker and the stage and got to see a middle aged and considerably less spry Kool Keith get down.  I suspect that most people--including a drunk Frenchman who kept rubbing up against me and with whom I almost got into a fisticuffs in the middle of a soulful rendition of "Cherish"--were there for the amazing food and the freely flowing booze, but the best part for me was the surrealness of it all, rocking to Kool and the Gang in Addis Ababa.

Another surreal twist:  While interviewing VIPs, I kept hearing the name of some "Sheikh Mohmmad Alamoudi" reverently intoned, even by the Prime Minister.  A Saudi financier who was born in Ethiopia, he's a mayor player behind the scenes in Ethiopian politics (e.g., I think he brought in the investment that built the Sheraton Addis).   Turned out he was related to someone I'd met occaisonally at Islamic events in Washington DC, Abdurrahman Alamoudi (who's now in prison for involvement in a shocking and bizarre assasination plot by Libya against then Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah).

At the time, we tried really hard to line up an interview with this mysterious Sheikh Alamoudi, but we couldn't get past his secretary.  Given all this crazy stuff that happened later with his cousin (?  I'm not sure what the relation is) in the States, I'm grateful.  Sometimes it's good to be just a little guy--it can be a lot safer.

It's such a small world.

Reality check for Karen Hughes (and Bush Junior)

Karen Hughes, Bush Junior's PR flack to the the Muslim world, recently had a rude awakening in Ankara when she was grilled by Turkish women activists on the Iraqi occupation and American militarism in general.

Despite its brevity, the article (Glen Kessler, "Turks Challenge Hughes On Iraq Female Activists Decry U.S. Policy", Washington Post, 29 September, 2004) is quite enlightening and sums up the problem with so much Beltway debate and analysis on the Middle East and the Muslim world.

Hughes, a longtime confidante of President Bush tasked with burnishing the U.S. image overseas, has generally met with polite audiences -- many of which consisted of former exchange students or people who have received U.S. funding -- during a tour of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey this week.

In this case, the U.S. Embassy asked an umbrella group known as Ka-Der, which supports women running for office, to assemble the guest list. None of the activists currently receives U.S. funds or had any apparent desire to mince words. Six of the eight women who spoke at the session, held in Ankara, Turkey's capital, focused on the Iraq war.

Far too much of what passes for debate in Washington occurs in front of such "polite audiences", where noone is willing to talk about the consequences on the ground of American foreign policy, realities which are self-evident to people around the world.

It is interesting to see that the minute the White House propaganda tour veers slightly from its carefully gerrymandered audiences (whether in the USA or abroad) it gets burnt and exposed to be out of touch with popular opinion.  It's a bit cliche to talk about the Emperor being naked, but few metaphors seem so apt.

One of Hughes' impromtu interogators makes a profound observation about the futility of aspiring to lofty ideals while embracing war and militarism:

"War makes the rights of women completely erased, and poverty comes after war -- and women pay the price," said Fatma Nevin Vargun, a Kurdish women's rights activist. Vargun denounced the arrest of Cindy Sheehan, the mother of an American soldier killed in Iraq, in front of the White House this week.

This is a fundamental lesson of modern times (which any reasonably responsible and independent media would hammer home during times of war) that I wish far more Americans understood.  You cannot solve the world's problems by embracing war, as war reverses gains and spawns new, far worse challenges.

Ms. Vargun also reminds us how, for all our high fallutin' talk about liberating  women, our policies continue to devastate them.  And this is just the latest example, as the hundreds of thousands of women and children who died needlessly due to the (un-)American trade embargo against Iraq will someday testify.

Vargun's mention of Cindy Sheehan's arrest is another example of how small the world is.   This American activist's campaign is being watched carefully across the globe.

I also love the role reversal here--an official from the Bush administration (which is known for sanctimonious prattle about freedom in Muslim countries) being put on the defensive about its own dubious record on freedom and dissent.  What's good for the goose...

The Catholic Church in Argentina and the “dirty war”

From "Breaking the silence: the Catholic Church in Argentina and the 'dirty war'" by Horacio Verbitsky  in OpenDemocracy.net:

Among the horrors of Argentina’s military rule that “disappeared” up to 30,000 citizens from 1976-83, the complicity of senior figures in the Catholic hierarchy is becoming known thanks to the investigations of writer Horacio Verbitsky. openDemocracy publishes an exclusive extract from his new book, “The Silence”.

While the systematic cruelty reported here is chilling, what I find most interesting is how these practices were justified by some church leaders as a defense of the moral fabric of their socieities from the cancer of secularism and Marxism.   In other words, their support was not guided by some newfangled ideology, but rather by a kind of religious faith and cultural conservativism that many of us might find familiar.

It is well known today how some leftist ideologies of liberation have lent themselves to the establishment of totalitarianism.  It is less often noted how the same temptations exist for   defenders of religion and tradition, as well.

The problem with Michael Ignatieff (and so many other liberal American pundits)

Mariano Aguirre has written a trenchant critique of the politics of the pundit Michael Ignatieff  in  OpenDemocracy.net.

This piece highlights a depressing trend in American political life, the willingness of many self-described liberal and progressive intellectuals to propagandize for the immoral and disastrously short-sighted "Neocon" foreign policy of the Bush administration and its allies.

Since 9/11 there has been a parade of liberals who've finally come out of the closet as Realpolitik pragmatists when it comes to Muslims (Christopher Hitchens is an excellent if confusing example, his own diatribe against the murderous arch-pragmatist Henry Kissinger not withstanding).   People who long professed the most sacred reverence for human rights, international law and justice have turned into various sorts of "cruise missile liberals" (perhaps the more apt metaphor now is "embedded liberal") now that the pillars of the Establishment have endorsed the "Islamofascism" cop-opt.

OpenDemocracy is an innovative and refreshing online publication, btw.  I'm constantly amazed at the caliber of contributions and the big names they get to write for them.  (Not that this fact is in any way connected with the previous observation, but I should note that I have been published by them--I wrote a piece for them in January 2004 on the hijab controversy in France.)

freedocumentaries.org

Came across a promissing project called freedocumentaries.org.  This group distributes independent documentaries on current affairs online for free.   Such innovative initiatives are desperately needed, as the corporate media's stranglehold on debate is becoming a threat to America's social and political health. 

Alternative delivery channels must be developed so that progressives and activists can bypass the sterile, complacent "debate" of the Corporate Media.  This is an area that the American Right is lightyears ahead on, btw, not that they really need it all that much, given how the mainstream media rarely really challenge their worldview.

It is interesting to see that Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 911" is among the films that are available.  I wonder if this is because he donated it, or because he realizes that, contrary to the propaganda of Jack Valenti and company, in many cases free downloads not only do not hurt sales in stores, but create new customers.   (This is something I've always said about Napster and its immitators--how many who can afford to buy a CD or DVD are going to go to the trouble of burn one themselves?)