I’ll be back in Morocco in a few weeks — this video makes me impatient.
Congratulations to the guy who created this out of still photography frames — it’s an innovative technique!
I’ll be back in Morocco in a few weeks — this video makes me impatient.
Congratulations to the guy who created this out of still photography frames — it’s an innovative technique!
The above blog post is brief, but it contains no less than thirteen links for those seeking more information.
It’s true that in recent days, the Pakistani Taliban managed to capture the district of Buner, some 100 kilometers from Islamabad, provoking well-publicized panic among American officials and now, a heavy-handed response from the Pakistani military. This has caused even progressives to react with alarm, calling on the Obama administration to do something before Pakistan’s nukes fall into the hands of extremists. A cynic might wonder, as Lenin’s Tomb does above, whether the scare tactics are deliberate on the part of the Obama team, to justify the wider regional war Obama signaled during his campaign; or even, as some Pakistani elites fear, a spiriting away of Pakistan’s nukes by American special forces.
In the U.S. we’re hearing only one side of the story. We don’t a thoughful discussion of how the drone attacks begun under Bush and continued by Obama, intended to target Al Qaeda operatives but which inevitably kill women and children, are themselves a major cause of the instability we’re reading about. There are now up to one million refugees in Pakistan due to the fighting, and drone attacks have killed nearly 700 civilians but only 14 confirmed militants, a ratio of 50:1.
Just as in Iraq in 2004 and 2005, it might be time to ask whether U.S. tactics are part of the problem, and stop the provocative drone attacks. Concrete gestures of cooperation with the Pakistani governing class would also help, to allay fears that Washington is preparing for another military coup. This could start with U.S. officials taking Pakistani democracy more seriously than ever before, and engaging in a public, transparent discussion with Pakistani politicians, journalists and civil society. Scaremongering by the U.S. won’t help build trust on either side.
Egypt’s paranoid dictatorship is trying to distract the people from its own unpopularity by cracking down on emos.
What’s an emo? A disaffected teenager with dyed black hair, who is always feeling sad and sensitive. Or to put it another way:
Like every other problem in Egypt, like the recent pig slaughter, this seems to be due to a government that lacks legitimacy, overreacting out of weakness because it fears a challenge from Islamic conservatives.
I wish I had some pictures of Egyptian emos to present here, but apparently there aren’t that many of them. So instead I’m showing you a Western emo as a type specimen.
Could a few thousand oversensitive teenagers be a threat to Egyptian society? Read the article for a portrait of a dictatorship in decline.
I thought Christians were supposed to be fishers of men, not hunters of men?
Evangelical Christians in the U.S. military apparently think they’re in Afghanistan to bring Muslims to Christ. Leaving aside the fact that this is deeply provocative and against the military’s own regulations, these words of Lt. Col. Gary Hensley, the top chaplain in Afghanistan, don’t sound very Christlike to me.
The video is from Al Jazeera, with footage from Bagram Air Base, shot last year by documentary filmmaker Brian Hughes.
President Bush said, “America does not torture,” but there is evidence — documents and testimony — proving that America did torture, and that responsibility for this went all the way to the top. Now President Obama wants to “look forward” rather than going after those responsible, but as one gentleman in this video says:
Another thing to keep in mind, as Bernard Chazelle pointed out today, is that America didn’t just start torturing after 9/11. Our “tradition” of torture goes back a long time, to the Phoenix program in the Vietnam War for example, or to the training of Latin American interrogators at the School of the Americas. One thing the latest outcry actually obscures, is that even if Bush and the rest are held accountable, other American administrations were just as guilty. The only difference is that in the past, they were more careful to cover their tracks.
Following his recent post on the need for a democratic transition in Egypt, I asked doga the question, “What happens if democratic elections in the Arab world bring the Islamists to power? How do you answer those who might think that dictatorship is better?” Here is his response.
Must we choose between democracy and the Islamists? Before trying to answer this question, we need to remind ourselves that the state of democracy in the Arab world was a problem even before the Islamists appeared on the scene as undeniable political movements. The real challenge to democracy came from governments in the Arab world that monopolized power for decades, basing their monopoly on a mastery of all the foundations of the state. At that time, any effort to advance democracy found itself confronted with the repression of the security apparatus. Not even electoral competition was permitted, and the result was a social and political exclusion that eliminated any counterweight to these systems. Certainly there are those who point out that this exclusion, along with poverty, was precisely what noursished the growth of Islamism; but Islamism also represented a new inspiration, since the Arab people saw that there were movements that shared their concerns, until in the end it was impossible to speak of the majority of the population without speaking of Islamist movements, which had quite simply become popular movements.
As a result of this, the question of future relations between the West and the Arab world is problematic today when we imagine Islamist movements in charge of Arab states; especially since these movements, whether they be in Morocco, Egypt or Kuwait, demonstrate their support each time there is an election. This makes it impossible to consider democratizing the Arab world without these movements, since the more democracy is practiced, the stronger the Islamists get. Some will have a hard time understanding this process, but that’s the way it is. We need to keep in mind that in many cases, there is perhaps no better choice before the people than the Islamists. Not all such movements have the same concept of Islamism, and I don’t want to spell out the differences here, but allow me to simply note that there are Islamist movements that respect the system in which they have agreed to participate through electoral competition, such as the PJD in Morocco, while others seek a more fundamental change, such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt which remains in perpetual conflict with the Mubarak regime. We also need to distinguish between those movements that take religion as the driving force of their agenda, and those that use religion as a reference point while pursuing a pragmatic political program.
To those who are afraid of the Islamists, I would ask them to suspend their prejudices for the time being, and recognize that there are Islamists with modern viewpoints. For their part, the Islamists should take steps to encourage and reassure the West. I would propose for example that they collaborate with Western organizations that support democracy and human rights, in order to give a practical demonstration that Islamism isn’t a closed system, but rather an open and modern one that admits the interests of the other side. We will never be able to agree on all aspects of life, but compatibility between the two worldviews should be the objective, especially now that Islamist movements are capable of arriving in power by democratic means, and without these movements we won’t see the emergence of democracy in the Arab world.
We can always ask ourselves questions like this: Is the future of democracy under Islamist movements a positive one? Without prejudging or getting ahead of ourselves, I think we should first of all give these movements a chance, while insisting on reforms essential to the practice of democracy such as freedom of expression, independent media, and the rule of law; as well as the development of networks of civil and human rights organizations that are able to protect the citizens against all abuses of power. These reforms need to be strong enough to prevent monopolies of any kind in the future, thus keeping open the possibility of alternance between Islamists and non-Islamists.