‘Death to the infidels!’ Why it’s time to fix Hollywood’s problem with Muslims

We all know that today's war is more of a media war than the good, old war with weapons. As the article correctly points out that what's happening in Middle East, what's happening in Muslim-majority countries around the world due to the world's sense of security & misrepresentations of Muslims countries as full of lecherous, evil, gun-toting Muslims, & the treatment of Muslims in Western countries is down to one fact only, which is that Hollywood movies have a big contribution in destroying the reputation of Muslims as responsible citizens of their countries, wherever they reside.

This narrative of all Muslims being evil is so ingrained in public's mind, with the help of media & Hollywood, that when Hollywood tries to tell a good story, like "Lions for Lambs," or "Redacted," the general public shun those movies, & those movies do horribly at the box office & later on, as rentals. The Western public wants to see Muslims being labelled as evildoers. That's why, movies like "American Sniper," & TV shows like 24, Homeland, & Quantico do great in the West.

Then, these same Western countries decry violence against Muslims in their own countries, & complain that Muslims in Muslim-majority countries seemingly hate them. That's their hypocrisy. Why make such movies, shows, & news media, which depicts Muslims as nothing less than barbaric individuals & then complain that Muslims don't like the Western public. Actually, Muslims are very forgiving people that they watch those movies, know that they are being discriminated & misrepresented, but still, they are not out to kill & hurt people in the West.

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https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/mar/08/death-to-infidels-time-to-fix-hollywoods-problem-muslims

Great convo w studio execs in LA. Good to hear their perspectives & ideas of how to counter #Daesh narrative,” tweeted John Kerry on 16 February, along with a photo of himself in a Hollywood meeting lounge with executives from Universal, Warner, Fox, Disney, Sony, Dreamworks and other big players – overwhelmingly middle-aged white men in suits.

One can’t help imagining there were some awkward moments to this “great convo”, though. Especially if Kerry queried what Hollywood had done to counter the “#Daesh narrative” so far. Even more so, if he asked what juicy counter-terrorism stories they had coming down the pipeline. Looking at the current output, such as Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Rock the Kasbah and London Has Fallen, you could easily get the impression that Hollywood is part of the problem, rather than a potential solution.

If you accept the notion of a “war of narratives”, it’s an area where the extremists have done most of the running. Still ringing in Washington’s ears and heading its PowerPoint presentations is the declaration the al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri made in 2005: “We are in a battle, and more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media.” Isis/Daesh has been sending a steady stream of video content on to that media battlefield, the relative sophistication of which has filled western commentators with a mix of horror, concern and admiration. The US and its coalition partners have floundered over how to respond.

Kerry’s visit to Hollywood comes a month after the State Department revamped its Countering Violent Extremism programme. Since 2010, that role had been performed by the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC); its counter-messaging often leaned towards counter-productive messaging. One of its strategies, for example, was to engage directly with Isis jihadists on Twitter, but that only served to legitimise their voices. The CSCC also put out a parody recruitment video, repurposing Isis’s violent propaganda footage and broadcasting it under the seal of the State Department. “Run, do not walk to Isis land,” ran the text of the ad. “Travel is inexpensive because you won’t need a return ticket!” As the TV satirist John Oliver remarked: “You are banking a lot on any potential militants understanding that that is sarcasm.”

“If our message is that Daesh is a criminal organisation that represents a distorted view of Islam, the US government is not the best conveyor of that message,” says Richard Stengel, undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs in the State Department. “The best conveyors are local people and Muslims and clerics and NGOs. So, rather than be in the business of doing tit-for-tat tweets with Daesh, we realised that we have an expertise in funding and messaging. What can we do to empower, amplify, optimise the messaging that’s out there already? That’s the central paradigm shift.”

This is by no means the first time in the 21st century that the White House has turned to Tinseltown. Just a month after 9/11, George W Bush’s top adviser, Karl Rove, convened a similar council of movie execs for a counter-terrorist pitching session, although it apparently came to nothing. There was no discussion of putting government propaganda into movies, it was reported. “Content was off the table,” said Jack Valenti, then head of the Motion Pictures Association of America.

Content was also off the table at Kerry’s Hollywood trip, it appears. “It wasn’t about asking them to make an Islamic Harry Potter,” says Stengel. “It’s not like the cold war, trying to insert positive narratives into movies. It’s connected in the largest possible way to defeating Daesh. It was an opportunity to talk to these people who shape content around the world, who shape the American brand around the world. An opportunity to go to them and say: ‘What can you do to help?’ in what [Kerry] has called the generational struggle of our time.”

But if Hollywood has any meaningful role to play here, content is arguably exactly what should be on the table. Throughout its history, American cinema has employed a lamentably narrow set of stereotypes about Arabs and Muslims. “They’ve been the most vilified group in the history of Hollywood,” says the academic and author Jack Shaheen. His book Reel Bad Arabs surveys some 1,200 depictions of Arabs and Muslims in the movies. By his estimation, roughly 97% are unfavourable, coloured by orientalist myths, racist demonising and xenophobic paranoia. “At most, three dozen or so had balance, or what I would call positive images. In the rest of them, Arabs are either terrorists or shady sheikhs or people you would not want to associate with. Those images continue to pervade our psyches.”

There are too many egregious examples to list. Selected highlights would include True Lies (Arnold Schwarzenegger versus fanatical yet incompetent Palestinian terrorists, who detonate a nuclear device in Florida), Protocol (Goldie Hawn becomes concubine to a lecherous oil-rich sheikh, so that the US can build a military base in his country), Network (“The Arabs are simply buying us,” rails Peter Finch’s rebel presenter), and 1998 thriller The Siege (in which Arab-Americans are rounded up after a New York terrorist attack. The critic Roger Ebert wrote: “The prejudicial attitudes embodied in the film are insidious, like the antisemitism that infected fiction and journalism in the 1930s”). And special mention must go to William Friedkin’s 2000 thriller Rules of Engagement, in which Samuel L Jackson’s marine goes on trial for massacring a crowd of Yemenis, but is exonerated when it turns out they were all gun-toting evildoers, even the women and children.

Rules of Engagement was “probably the most racist film ever made against Arabs by Hollywood”, protested the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee at the time. But then 9/11 happened and things became even worse. Old-fashioned Islamophobia is still thriving, as demonstrated by current release London Has Fallen, in which Gerard Butler saves the world from yet another brown-skinned, detonator-happy terrorist with an Arab-sounding name, and dispatches evildoers with lines such as: “Get back to Fuckheadistan, or wherever you’re from.” Meanwhile, counter-terrorism-themed TV series such as 24, Homeland, Sleeper Cell and NCIS reiterate the “all Muslims are potential terrorists” notion, with the added point that they’re on American soil now. “Hollywood and television have created an even more dangerous precedent by vilifying American Arabs and American Muslims in particular,” says Shaheen. “They’ve blended the old stereotypes from ‘over there’ with new stereotypes from ‘over here’.”

When Hollywood has made attempts to address the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts directly, the casualty list has been high: Lions for Lambs, The Messenger, Stop Loss, Green Zone, In the Valley of Elah, Grace Is Gone, Redacted – all of them flopped at the box office. Even The Hurt Locker, with its Oscars and all-round acclaim, was greeted with widespread indifference by the American public, taking just $17m (£12m).

Only a handful of Afghanistan/Iraq films have struck a chord with US audiences: Zero Dark Thirty, detailing the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, made $95m domestically; Afghanistan action thriller Lone Survivor made $125m; and overshadowing them all is Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, based on the real-life Navy Seal Chris Kyle, who holds the record for the most kills in US military history. It took more than $350m, making it the highest grossing movie of 2014 in the US.

When viewed through the prism of “countering the #Daesh narrative”, these movies make uncomfortable viewing. Zero Dark Thirty took a relatively nuanced approach to the war on terror, but controversially depicted Arabs being tortured. Both American Sniper and Lone Survivor narrowly focus on US military personnel and their efforts to kill nameless, faceless “bad guys”. Wider questions about American foreign policy, or how ordinary Afghanis and Iraqis felt about being invaded, are sidestepped in favour of heat-of-the-battle immediacy. In its opening minutes, American Sniper gets in the “all Muslims are potential terrorists” trope, as Kyle guns down a woman and a child who both try to attack US troops (the attack did not happen in real life). It gets worse from there on in. Not that the reality was much better. In his autobiography, Kyle wrote: “I only wish I had killed more. Not for bragging rights but because I believe the world is a better place without savages out there taking American lives.”

These are the narratives the US has been sending out on to this ideological battlefield. Shaheen is not alone in wondering what role they have played, not just in the rise of Isis, but in the decisions to invade Iraq and Afghanistan in the first place, not to mention the manner in which those wars were conducted, from the high levels of civilian casualties to atrocities such as those at Abu Ghraib. And how can these mythologies not play into the increasingly Islamophobic climate back home? Republican presidential nominees are presently engaged in an arms race of anti-Muslim rhetoric, against a background of vandalised mosques, threats, shootings and general discrimination. Isis’s own atrocities have contributed to this climate, of course, but homespun narratives seem to be fanning the flames. The release of American Sniper triggered a reported three-fold increase in anti-Muslim and anti-Arab threats.

“When you create this fear and it manifests itself in hate crimes, bias and bullying, then it alienates people,” says Humera Khan, the founder and executive director of Muflehun, a counter-violent-extremism thinktank. “Society is telling you: ‘You don’t belong.’ It is reinforcing what Isis is telling them.” Islamic extremists represent, at best, 100,000 people out of a worldwide Muslim population of 1.6 billion, Khan points out, but with the exception of the occasional token “good Muslim”, these are overwhelmingly the ones we see on our screens. She offers an analogy: “Imagine if you introduced someone to white people only by way of the Ku Klux Klan, but then said afterwards, ‘Oh, by way, there are some good white people out there, too.’”

In stereotyping Arabs and Muslims, the US also reinforces stereotypes about itself, Khan adds. Muslims around the world watch Hollywood movies, too – in greater numbers than Americans. “When these movies play in majority Muslim countries, the assumption is, ‘Look: they’re misrepresenting us again.’ So for the average person who’s not interested in Isis, the impression is: ‘America doesn’t like us.’ When you think about Isis’s message, that this is ‘a war against Muslims’, that’s exactly what they’re showing.”

Mirroring Washington’s recent shift in counter-messaging, Hollywood also seems to be taking a different tack: it is now coming at the Afghanistan/Iraq wars by way of comedy. Perhaps the studio bosses looked at their casualty list of box-office bombs and wondered if all that death, torture and moral complexity wasn’t putting people off. Having repeated the history as tragedy, Hollywood is repackaging it as farce.

Rock the Kasbah is an all-too-literal example of this. The movie ... draws on the true story of Setara Hussainzada, a Pashtun teenager who bravely tested post-invasion waters by entering Afghanistan’s new X Factor/Pop Idol equivalent, Afghan Star (women singing or dancing was strictly forbidden under Taliban rule). Hussainzada was already the subject of a 2009 documentary, also titled Afghan Star, but in Rock the Kasbah, she’s discovered in a cave by Bill Murray’s jaded rock promoter. He puts her into the spotlight with the aid of some fellow Americans: a twitchy soldier, two corrupt arms dealers and a sympathetic prostitute, who operates out of a trailer on the edge of town. From a “#Daesh narrative” perspective, they could represent the horsemen of the apocalypse, but the comic tone places the gruesome realities of war well in the background. As one review put it: “Rock the Kasbah gives the impression that the nation’s ideological rebirth would have been impossible without the gumption of a hasbeen music manager learning to shed his cynicism.”

It’s a similar story with Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, which opened in the US this weekend. Again, the plight of war-ravaged Afghanistan is largely window-dressing for the journey of our war-reporter heroine, Tina Fey, a fortysomething singleton who is pitched into the battlefield and the hard-partying expat “Kabubble”. One character lets the cat out of the bag by describing it as “the most American-white-lady story I’ve ever heard”. A few Afghani characters do get speaking parts in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. One is a clownish local politician, basically a standard-issue “lecherous Arab”, played by the British actor Alfred Molina. The other, Fey’s Afghani helper, Fahim, is that rarest of things: a male Muslim movie character who is intelligent, educated, empathetic and not the slightest bit lecherous. That bad news is he’s played by an American actor, Christopher Abbott, best known as Charlie out of Girls.

There’s more of this to come. Such as War Dogs, formerly titled Arms and the Dudes, about two real-life Miami stoners who made a fortune illegally exporting arms to Afghanistan with US approval – directed by the guy who made The Hangover. It sounds like a cross between The Wolf of Wall Street and Pineapple Express. Then there’s War Machine, in which Brad Pitt plays General Stanley McChrystal, the former commander of US forces in Afghanistan, who famously talked himself out of a job in a profile for Rolling Stone magazine, by expressing his contempt for Barack Obama and his administration. It could be a great satire – and there is certainly a place for those in cinema, when you think back to movies such as Catch-22, M*A*S*H, Dr Strangelove, or even Three Kings or Team America. There have been a plethora of fine American documentaries chronicling this era, too. But again, what does it mean for the battle of narratives?

For Hollywood, it can look like a case of “damned if we do, damned if we don’t”. Either they take a purely US-centric point of view and dehumanise Arabs and Muslims – which plays right into the #Daesh narrative. Or they take a critical look at the US’s military and foreign policy failings – which also plays into the #Daesh narrative. What are they supposed to do?

A good start, says Shaheen, would be to stop perpetuating the same blinkered, divisive rhetoric as our enemies. It wouldn’t take much. “There really needs to be a couple of blockbuster films that squash these stereotypes, as well as some responsibility on the part of our political leaders, who are encouraging voters to hate their fellow Americans. It has to come from the top.” He cites the way Hollywood cleaned up its act with regard to racist depictions of African-Americans, Jews and LGBT characters.

Khan agrees: “If they were just more responsible in their portrayal of Arabs and Muslims, that would actually help the environment on the ground.” What happens on the ground, in Syria and Iraq especially, is obviously paramount if anything is to change, but movies absolutely have a role to play. “Is any narrative going to be sufficient? No. Is this a necessary part of this landscape of needs? Yes.”

Just as the US likes to think of itself as the world’s policeman, it is also unquestionably the world’s storyteller. That narrative supremacy comes with certain responsibilities, now more so than ever.

In the meantime, we can take comfort from the fact that even jihadis can’t resist a good movie. ...

‘West creates refugees by destroying Islamic nations’ – Chechen leader

In some of my blog posts last year [2015], I also wrote in detail how Western countries try to create chaos in so-called developing / third-world countries, & especially so-called Islamic countries, to destroy their economies while getting cheap educated labour for themselves.

So, I wholeheartedly agree with Ramzan Kadyrov's statement about the West ruining Muslim countries, destroying their economies, provoking conflicts, & making thousands of refugees. But, I also want to add my disclaimer here that Ramzan Kadyrov is the "installed" leader of Chechen Republic by Putin & hence, he is saying what Putin thinks of the West. Regardless, Mr. Kadyrov is still correct.

To make Ramzan's point (& my point) hit home, let's take the example of current conflict going on in Yemen. American military brain is helping Saudis kill thousands of Yemenis & making thousands others refugees. British & Canadians are also supplying Saudis with weapons, arms & ammunitions, which will, & are being used, against Yemenis & to quell any internal unrest, like peaceful protests for human rights.

Then, these same countries will make a big noise for Saudi government to work towards instituting human rights in its country. Muslims, all over the world, are of course, completely brainwashed by "white idiots". Nobody is going to blame why UK, Canada, & US supplied Saudis with the same weapons that they are using to kill their fellow Muslim brethren but put the blame squarely on the shoulders of Saudi government. I am not excusing Saudi government for its actions, but you cannot ask for harsh punishment for the drug dealer to facilitate drugs for youths & then turn around & blame youths for using drugs, & absolve the drug dealer for all its heinous actions.

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https://www.rt.com/politics/314350-chechen-leader-blames-west-for/

The head of Russia’s Chechen Republic claims the current asylum seeker crisis in European countries originated in the aggressive policies of the USA & the EU. He also called upon all Muslim nations to jointly fight the root of the problem.

“If today no one rises against the inhumane policies of the Western countries, tomorrow the disaster may come to any Muslim country. I call upon you to urgently discuss this problem, to develop a unified position and to save the lives of thousands of people,” Ramzan Kadyrov wrote on his Instagram account (Kadyrov uses Instagram as a social network for public statements).

“Tens of thousands of Muslims are dying. Women, old people, children and young people as well. Under such conditions the leaders of Islamic countries has no right to remain silent, to stand aside and remain simple observers,” he added.

Kadyrov also explained in his post that in his opinion the West must be blamed for tragedies that are currently taking place in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Libya, Yemen, Algeria & other Muslim nations.

Europe & the USA are not simply refusing to act, they instigate the tragedies of millions of people by destroying the economy of Islamic countries & starting wars in Muslim regions of the world, he added.

“The problem cannot be solved by fighting its consequences, by silencing the reasons that caused it. But this is what Europe and the United States are currently doing. The USA and Europe have ruined these countries, destroyed their economies, provoked lingering internal conflicts and forced the desperate people into becoming refugees,” the Chechen leader wrote.

In February this year [2015], Kadyrov openly accused the US & other Western nations of “spawning” Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) in order to incite hatred towards Muslims all over the world.

Kadyrov also suggested the West was backing IS in order to distract public attention from numerous problems in the Middle East, in the hope of destroying Islamic nations from inside.

Prior to this, Kadyrov had told reporters that he possessed information that the IS leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had been recruited to work for the US personally by General David Petraeus, the former director of the CIA & former commander of coalition forces in Iraq & Afghanistan. At that time, Kadyrov claimed IS “was acting on orders from the West and Europe.”

Kissinger forever

I really can't say much on this story, since it might be considered overtly anti-American & then who wants to deal with its "consequences". But, this is still a great opinion piece on one of the most powerful men in the world. Reading this piece reminded me of a piece Canadian Business magazine did back in August 2013 in which it showed that Henry Kissinger is the only man in the world who is a member in all of the 3 most powerful & elitist organizations in the world (World Economic Forum, Bilderberg Group, & Trilateral Commission).

Henry Kissinger is also the one who said that "power is the ultimate aphrodisiac." In my personal experience, whoever loves power so much, he/she will certainly abuse it & will hurt a lot of people in the process. This piece made me think that the way this man thinks, he has done & will still do anything to achieve what he wants more, which is, power. We try to teach our children that "with great power comes great responsibility," but, as this piece suggests, Kissinger's hunger for power almost makes him a sociopath.

As the piece below states how Kissinger supported prolonging the Vietnam war & the secret Cambodian war, in which hundreds of thousands people died. His powerful actions in the hallowed halls of government irreversibly changed the lives of millions around the world, from Latin America to North America to Asia. He apparently loved to attack other countries to show American military prowess. He loved more violence, government secrecy, militarism & ruling with the classic dictatorial "divide & conquer."

The piece ends with an excellent, & rather unfortunate, line that the world's humanity still has dark days ahead, since, his methods are still being employed by the American government & he is still deeply involved with the foreign policies of US governments.

But, hey, he will not be tried, for his actions, in the International Criminal Court (ICC) or any other court of justice in this world. Per my last quote picture of Criminal Minds here, the society is definitely not taking the place of thousands of victims & on their behalf demanding any atonement for Kissinger's push for military actions against innocent people around the world. At least dictators like Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi, Joseph Stalin, Robert Mugabe, & several others from Latin America, Africa, or Asia killed innocent people of their own country. Henry Kissinger's actions made the life hell for thousands of people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile, Panama & who knows wherever else. So who is the bigger dictator here? Where is the justice coming from the largest self-anointed "just" & "fair" country of the world?

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http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/08/kissinger-america-book-150823083842452.html

In 1950, Henry Kissinger - who would go on to serve as an inordinately powerful US National Security Adviser and Secretary of State - wrote that "life is suffering, birth involves death".

As historian Greg Grandin documents in his just-released book "Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman", the man's "existentialism laid the foundation for how he would defend his later policies". In Kissinger's view, Grandin explains, life's inherently tragic nature means that "there isn't much any one individual can do to make things worse than they already are".

Of course, the victims of Kissinger-sanctioned military escapades and other forms of inflicted suffering might beg to differ. Among the countless casualties are the dead and maimed of the Vietnam War - a disaster Kissinger fought to prolong despite recognising that it was unwinnable - and the secret US war that was launched on neutral Cambodia in 1969.

'Power for power's sake'

A pet project of Kissinger and then-President Richard Nixon, the bombing of that country killed more than 100,000 civilians in four years, according to Ben Kiernan, the director of Yale University's Cambodian Genocide Program.

To this day, the cluster bombs with which the US saturated sections of southeast Asia continue to wreak deadly havoc.

And from Chile to Panama to Iraq to Angola to East Timor, there's no dearth of evidence linking increased earthly suffering to Kissingerian policy & tradition, which still exert a preponderant influence over the US political establishment. (Complaints could even be filed by impoverished victims of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Kissinger unofficially helped negotiate years after leaving office.)

As Grandin notes, Kissinger had an "outsized role… in creating the world we live in today, which accepts endless war as a matter of course".

Embracing the pursuit of "power for power's sake", Kissinger advocated for war in order to "show that action is possible", Grandin writes, and to thus maintain American power - the purpose of which "is to create American purpose". With such an approach to existence, it's perhaps no wonder the former statesman found the whole phenomenon to be rather dismal.

Campaign against history

Grandin details Kissinger's contributions to the "rehabilitation of the national security state" in the US around a "restored imperial presidency", which, he contends, was based on "ever more spectacular displays of violence, more intense secrecy, and an increasing use of war and militarism to leverage domestic dissent and polarisation for political advantage".

A key aspect of Kissinger's own dominant role in contemporary history is his philosophy of history itself, which Grandin summarises as follows: "For Kissinger, the past was nothing but 'a series of meaningless incidents'". According to this mindset, under no circumstances must history be seen as a collection of causal relationships capable of guiding current policy choices.

The concept of blowback, for example, is conveniently disappeared - such that Kissinger, for one, is excused from having to acknowledge the reality that US military aggression against Cambodia in fact helped propel the Khmer Rouge to power. Instead, further US military aggression was deemed to be the proper antidote to the new state of affairs.

Two and two

The forcible severing of cause from effect has also come in handy in places like Afghanistan, a country whose history is often reduced to one date: September 11, 2001. But go a bit further back in time, as Grandin does, and you'll find that the conversion of the country into a base for transnational jihad was in no small part an effect of policies put into place by - who else? - Kissinger.

These included facilitating destabilising behaviour vis-a-vis Afghanistan by the shah of Iran, Pakistani intelligence, and Saudi Arabia, and encouraging the flow of weapons to radical Islamists.

Naturally, none of this history prompted an internal questioning of US qualifications to spearhead the post-9/11 war on terror. Now, nearly 14 years and trillions of dollars later, it might be a good time to start putting two and two together - particularly given the expansion of the war to encompass the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), an entity the US helped create in the first place.

Dark days

In an interview last year with radio host Todd Zwillich, Kissinger defended his infamous bombing of Cambodia on the following grounds: "The current administration is doing it in Pakistan, Somalia". The "it" apparently refers to Barack Obama's covert drone strikes on countries with which the US is not at war.

But as Grandin points out, this retroactive justification fails to account for the fact that "what [Kissinger] did nearly half a century ago created the conditions for today’s endless wars". In Cambodia and elsewhere, he "institutionalised a self-fulfilling logic of intervention", whereby US "action led to reaction [and] reaction demanded more action".

Of course, if power depends on the constant proof that "action is possible", this seems like a pretty logical - if sociopathic - arrangement.

As for Kissinger's shadow, it doesn't appear to be budging anytime soon - portending many a dark day ahead for humanity.


Belen Fernandez is the author of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, published by Verso. She is a contributing editor at Jacobin Magazine.

The Interview: Nobel laureate & economist Joseph Stiglitz

What I liked from this interview is about a little discussion on economic & financial inequality among the public. Politicians & economists of the world are trying to increase demand, & hence, GDP, but they are not trying to resolve the root problems of the recession & slow recovery, & keep trying to put in place harsh austerity measures for the poor public & tax cuts for the rich. These measures are counter-intuitive & decrease the national demand & hurt the national & international economies even further.

The tax cuts for the rich doesn't entice the rich to take that extra cash & increase the minimum wages or provide more benefits to their workers, & instead, they invest in their private yachts, sports arenas, sports clubs, racing animals, real estate, stock portfolios, or simply horde it all away in tax havens. The harsh austerity measures, coupled with more taxes in some cases, for the poor public reduce the free cash available to them, for discretionary purchases, & in many cases, even for needy purchases, which in turn, reduces aggregate demand in the country.

These measures create economic, financial, & social inequality. People cannot move up the social ladder, since they don't have enough money, but they can definitely move down, which is happening all over the world. The young populations of the world are seeing their dreams crush after spending a fortune on their education & building that dream where they would be owning their own homes, have families, build up their wealth, & finally, retire to a relaxing future. Instead, they are seeing their degrees pretty much worthless & jobs that pay so little that owning homes & building up wealth is becoming a very far-fetched dream. All the while, these same poor youths are also seeing people with no discernible talent making a lot of money, for instance, celebs like the Kardashian family or the rich billionaire kids of new billionaires in Europe, China, India, & Russia.

That inequality starts to breed hatred in these young minds. That hatred then tries to find an outlet in terms of violence; be it gun violence in America or Canada or gang warfare in Latin America or refugee crisis of Europe or ranks of terrorist groups like ISIS & Al-Qaeda in Middle East & Africa swelling up with young Westerners.

So, the root problem of violence in Middle East, Latin America, Europe, & in North America are all due to inequality all over the world. If only politicians & economists try to resolve this one major problem, we won't be having these fears of recessions hounding us all the time, & violence would definitely be down all over the world, which in turn, would save billions in arms & weaponry purchases, safety & security apparatus, & of course, millions of lives around the world. Those billions of money can then be used towards helping students in post-secondary institutions with their tuitions, improving infrastructure, creating more companies with subsidies, for instance, for green economies, which in turn, create more well-paying jobs, which in turn, would increase aggregate demand & reduce inequality. If only ... !!!

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http://www.amazon.com/Great-Divide-Unequal-Societies-About/dp/0393248577/

Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, a professor of economics at Columbia University, has written extensively about inequality in America, including his latest book, The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them. He’ll be a visiting scholar in the new Lind Initiative U.S. Studies at the University of British Columbia this fall.
...

Q: You’ll be lecturing at UBC on global inequality. Why should people be worried about inequality?

A: Inequality is very related to the problems we’re talking about. People at the top spend less money than those at the bottom so when you have redistribution toward the top, aggregate demand goes down. Unless you intervene, you’re going to have a weak economy unless something else happens. That something else could be a bubble. The US tried a tech bubble & a housing bubble, but those were not sustainable answers. So I view inequality as a fundamental part of our macroeconomic weakness. There have always been two theories about inequality. One is that it reflects just deserts. The other is that there are large elements of exploitation & inequality of opportunities. The evidence is overwhelmingly that the increase in inequality is associated with those negative factors. If it were all social contribution, then when the top did better, they would be contributing to everybody’s well-being. That trickle-down hasn’t happened. We’ve seen median income, people in the middle, actually worse off than they were 25 years ago.

Q: You’ve said that inequality is fraying the bonds that hold the US together. That sounds scary. Is it that bad?

A: Oh, I think it is. [It’s behind] a lot of what you see as dysfunctional behaviour & extremism. Particularly, young men are angry. You know, how can people like Donald Trump be so politically successful, running ahead in the Republican primary with no policy other than a sense of anger? What he’s been doing is pointing out the corruption in our system. I mean, Jeb Bush has Florida put $250 million of pension funds into Lehman Brothers & then when he leaves as governor he gets a job at Lehman at a salary of $1.3 million—those things resonate with Americans. The system looks broken.

What I argued in The Great Divide is that societies can’t function without trust, both politically & economically. And in the context of politics, what you see increasingly is young people not voting. The voter turnout in the last election was the lowest it’s been since the Second World War, when a lot of people were off fighting. In 2010, voter turnout among young people was 20%. Americans like to say we’re fighting for democracy, & yet young Americans have come to the view that democracy doesn’t deliver.

Q: It’s been 4 years since you wrote, “Of the one per cent, by the one per cent, for the one per cent,” which gave the Occupy movement its slogan “We are the 99 per cent.” Is inequality getting more attention now?

A: Very much so. You see Hillary Clinton has emphasized it in her campaign, but even the Republicans have said inequality is the major issue. To me that’s one of the optimistic things, that it’s finally moved to the top of a political agenda. The other optimistic note is that you see, across the country, 70% support for increasing the minimum wage. Congress can’t get it through because it’s dysfunctional & so we’re having strong grassroots movements to raise it, in Seattle, Los Angeles, New York. The grassroots people are saying our national government is broken; we have to do something about it.
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Q: What about Canada? Do you think we have an inequality problem?

A: Oh, yes, clearly. But it’s in the middle of the OECD pack. It’s not as good as the Scandinavian countries. It’s not been doing as good a job as it did in the past in taking inequality of market income & reducing it. Also, you are a natural resource economy, & natural resource economies, with a couple of exceptions, tend to be very unequal. You can, in principle, tax the natural resource rents at very high rates & use that to create a more equal society. The country that’s been most successful at that is Norway. The more typical countries are those in the Middle East where a small group seizes those resources, uses it to buy arms to make sure that they can oppress the remainder, & you get these great inequalities. So Canada is among the better performing of the natural resource economies, but it’s still not up to the best performing.

Q: In Canada the share of income going to the rich has been falling for several years. We have better social mobility than in the US. Why is Canada better on inequality?

A: You have a more egalitarian education system, & I think your health care system is so much better than ours. A third aspect that clearly is part of American history is our racial issue. But the problems of inequality are even within the white group. 20% of American children grow up in poverty, & that means they get inadequate nutrition, inadequate health care, & because we have a very local education system, they get inadequate access to education. With those as a starting base, you perpetuate inequality. That’s why, here in New York, Mayor de Blasio has made a big deal of trying to focus on preschool education, because by 5 years old, there are already huge differences. We’ve finally begun to recognize it.
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America's wars drag on no matter what officials say

A great opinion piece on how American troops once enter a country never actually leave; be it Germany & Japan (after WWII), South Korea (after Korean War), Vietnam (after Vietnam war), & now, Afghanistan & Iraq. Other than these well-publicized conflicts, American troops entered, & wrecked havoc, in several other countries around the world; in Africa & Latin America.

Regardless of how much American leadership says to their naïve, & ignorant, American public that American troops will be out of a country at some point in the future; in reality, they never do. Those troops become the expense, financial & social, of the host country. The military operations continue on for decades on end. Heck, nowadays, American military hand the military operations to "military contractors" (former military personnel) to offload operational costs to a third party & reduce its own liability in case something goes awry.

Furthermore, America needs a war(s) to keep its own populace in fear, which in turn, helps the government to keep control of the public. These wars are / will always be started & fought over false pretenses & the military-industrial complex needs wars like an addict need its addiction. After all, all those billion-dollar budgets won't be passed by the Congress for the military in absence of a war(s).

One more point the opinion piece makes is that these wars, & their continuation, are done without any input whatsoever from the general public. Isn't that against the basic concept of "democracy"? So, can the American public please enlighten me then what's the difference between a Saudi prince waging a war against a poor country, Yemen, without any input from its general public (since, it's an authoritarian regime) & an American government starting wars against poor countries like Afghanistan, Libya, & Iraq, without any input from its general public (especially since, it's a "democratic" country)?

One last point the opinion piece makes, & which hit home, is that billions are spent, & essentially, are being wasted, in these wars. American troops suffer heavy losses in terms of death (almost 10,000 troops have died in Afghanistan & Iraq in the past decade) & life-long physical & mental disabilities. These recent wars against Afghanistan & Iraq have also pretty much bankrupted one of the richest countries in the world. Its general public work hard & still, millions are merely surviving on meagre incomes. Homelessness has substantially increased in the past decade. Poverty keep increasing & shows no signs of abating in the foreseeable future. But billions are wasted on "foreign fighters" who have no allegiance to America, its ideals, & its people.

But, then, America needs wars like a drug addict needs its drugs.
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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/22/america-war-iraq-libya-afghanistan-endless

In all three of the countries where the Obama administration declared US wars “over” in the past few years - Afghanistan, Iraq & Libya - the US military is expanding its presence or dropping bombs at an ever-increasing rate. And the government seems to be keeping the American public in the dark on the matter more than ever.

Pentagon leaders suggested ... that the US military wants to keep remaining 9,800 troops in Afghanistan from withdrawing in 2016, despite the fact that the Obama administration declared combat operations in the country “over” ... months ago. The gradual extension of the Afghanistan War hasn’t been a secret to anyone who’s been paying close attention, but sadly it has happened far away from the pomp & circumstance of Obama’s now embarrassingly false State of the Union announcement that the Afghanistan War had ended.

Shortly after his January speech, the president signed a secret order that would keep the military fighting & killing in the region through 2015, then delayed any troop pull-out through 2016. ...

As the Council on Foreign Relation’s Micah Zenko remarked: “First it was al Qaeda, then the Taliban, now ISIS will be reason US military remains in Afghanistan.” There’s always going to be someone. What unnamed group will be holding our attention in 2020 when we still have troops fighting & dying there for nebulous reasons?

Away from the headlines, Libya continues to deteriorate since the US & NATO allies bombed the region & deposed dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. ...

As a result, the US military to desperately look to build another drone base near Libya that they can start launching regular drone strikes from - targeting both Libya & “elsewhere in North Africa.” This news comes around the same time as yet another retired US general, former director of the Pentagon’s intelligence unit Michael Flynn, indicated ... that drone strikes are actually creating more terrorists than they’re killing. Flynn’s comments echo the same point that has been made over & over by former generals & many other smart people recently, yet has evoked no change in policy or even public debate.

This potential expansion of the Isis war to a third country has all happened without congressional approval. Hardly anyone seems to care that we’re engaged in a generational war spanning multiple continents that we haven’t legally declared, almost a year after it was started.

Meanwhile in Syria, after months of delay, the first US-trained rebels finally entered the Isis-controlled regions and the process is already being accused of “mission creep” by defense experts, given its further entrenching US into the war there (again, without so much as a formal announcement by the government).

The rebels also come at an astronomical price-tag for the US of $4 million for each rebel, & there is no indication that it will have any effect on the chaos that now engulfs Syria, besides potentially causing more of it. Zenko called the program “one of the more poorly conceived and implausible foreign policy schemes in modern history.”

The Obama administration & CIA knew full well that funding rebel armies in foreign countries almost always ends in disaster, yet did it anyways - & hid the conclusions of a CIA study saying as much from Congress along the way.

What’s troubling about all of this is that it is happening with little debate in Congress & almost no input from public. The US is ramping up its war efforts across the Middle East & now North Africa. They want to increase drone strikes, continue to spend billions to train Afghanistan & Iraqi troops, despite the fact that the last decade of “training” has been a disaster where whole armies have deserted & billions of dollars in US weapons are now in the hands of Isis. And of course, the specter of adding more US ground troops always lurks in the background.

There is growing realization from experts that we’re not going to be able to bomb our way out of this. Is there no one in charge in Washington who is willing to admit that doubling down yet again on military force is only going to keep making matters worse?

UN peacekeepers sexually abused hundreds of Haitian women & girls

Another one of those articles highlighting how UN "peacekeepers" took advantage of vulnerable people in vulnerable situations. Regardless of who stoops so low in the society, helping someone to gain sexual favours is always wrong. However, if this would've been done by non-UN & some groups in Middle East or Africa, not only that group of people is maligned but the whole religion is dragged through the mud & dirt. But when UN "peacekeepers" do the same thing, it's a back-page news (assuming it's considered news at all in the first place). Western hypocrisy at its peak !!!

When the 2011 movie, "The Whistleblower," showed how UN "peacekeepers" sexually abused girls in war-torn Bosnia, & how UN tried to cover up the whole scandal, the world didn't demand answers from UN for what it has done wrong. UN "peacekeepers" realizing that their actions carry no adverse consequences for themselves or for UN, carried on, business as usual. Now, although, the allegations of sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers have spread out from Cambodia to Central African Republic to Haiti; thanks to Western media, UN & the world public still won't take any substantive corrective measures & punish those who did wrong.

Well, UN "peacekeepers" will keep doing what they do best; sexually abusing women, girls, & boys in countries where they are sent to serve & protect the vulnerable general public. Doesn't it seem like that UN is starting to become better in hiding scandals nowadays than to actually prevent wars & chaos in the world?
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https://www.rt.com/news/266179-un-peacekeepers-haiti-sexual/

According to a new UN Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) report obtained by the news agency, a third of alleged sexual exploitation & abuse involved minors under 18.

The shocking conclusions were revealed after investigators interviewed 231 people in Haiti who claimed they were forced to perform sexual acts with UN peacekeepers in exchange for basic necessities.

“For rural women, hunger, lack of shelter, baby care items, medication & household items were frequently cited as the 'triggering need,'" the report says. Those living in the city or in its vicinity had sex in exchange for “church shoes, cell phones, laptops & perfume, as well as money,” report says.

“In cases of non-payment, some women withheld the badges of peacekeepers & threatened to reveal their infidelity via social media,” the report says.

The UN explicitly bans the “exchange of money, employment, goods or services for sex,” & discourages relationships between UN staff & those who are under their care. However, only 7 of the interviewed victims “knew about the United Nations policy prohibiting sexual exploitation & abuse,” the report states.

The report ... makes no reference to the time frame of the alleged violations, but the 7,000-strong UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti started in 2004. The investigation also does not mention the number of peacekeepers involved.

The report says that the lack of any clear action is “demonstrating significant underreporting,” while noting that assistance to those that suffered is “severely deficient.” The average investigation by OIOS takes more than a year, according to AP.

Sexual abuse by peacekeeping troops, some 125,000 of which are currently deployed around the world, has undermined the credibility of their missions. A rapid increase in prostitution & abuse in Cambodia, Mozambique, Bosnia, Sudan & Kosovo were documented after UN peacekeeping forces moved in.

Earlier this year it was revealed that UN peacekeepers raped & sodomized starving & homeless boys in the Central African Republic, some as young as 9.

However, the number of documented cases of sexual abuse & exploitation by members of UN peacekeeping missions was 51 in 2014, down from 66 the year before, according to the secretary-general's latest annual report on the issue.

How the US fuelled the rise of ISIS in Syria & Iraq

Loved this opinion piece.

How can ISIS or any other terror group or terrorism can be wiped out by the same forces who helped flourish it in the first place? The Western countries have a habit of supporting a set of proxy fighters as long as those fighters help achieve the Western countries its objectives. As soon as those objectives are achieved, those proxy fighters or mercenaries are labelled "terrorists" & the West wants them to be eliminated asap. That may looks easy & good in Hollywood movies, but doesn't work in real life. As the author very nicely says that "terrorism is now squarely in the eye of the beholder. And nowhere is that more so than in the Middle East, where today’s terrorists are tomorrow’s fighters against tyranny – & allies are enemies – often at the bewildering whim of a western policymaker’s conference call."

For instance, militant arm of the Kurdish party in Turkey, PKK, was labelled a terrorist group, for years, by US, UK, & their allies. Well, now, they are all supporting PKK because they are using them against ISIS.

Even the West wanted ISIS in Iraq & Syria. They wanted a Sunni group, which they can control, & which will keep Shiite Bashar Assad & its Shiite allies, Hezbollah & Iran, in check. But, when ISIS start slitting throats of westerners, they become a "terrorist" group, which needs to be bombed out of existence now.

The author very nicely ends the piece with "endless western military interventions in the Middle East have brought only destruction & division. It’s the people of the region who can cure this disease – not those who incubated the virus."
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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/03/us-isis-syria-iraq

The war on terror, that campaign without end launched 14 years ago by George Bush, is tying itself up in ever more grotesque contortions. ... the trial in London of a Swedish man, Bherlin Gildo, accused of terrorism in Syria, collapsed after it became clear British intelligence had been arming the same rebel groups the defendant was charged with supporting.

The prosecution abandoned the case, apparently to avoid embarrassing the intelligence services. The defence argued that going ahead with the trial would have been an “affront to justice” when there was plenty of evidence the British state was itself providing “extensive support” to the armed Syrian opposition.

That didn’t only include the “non-lethal assistance” boasted of by the government (including body armour & military vehicles), but training, logistical support & the secret supply of “arms on a massive scale”. Reports were cited that MI6 had cooperated with the CIA on a “rat line” of arms transfers from Libyan stockpiles to the Syrian rebels in 2012 after the fall of the Gaddafi regime.

Clearly, the absurdity of sending someone to prison for doing what ministers & their security officials were up to themselves became too much. But it’s only the latest of a string of such cases. Less fortunate was a London cab driver Anis Sardar, who was given a life sentence ... for taking part in 2007 in resistance to the occupation of Iraq by US & British forces. Armed opposition to illegal invasion & occupation clearly doesn’t constitute terrorism or murder on most definitions, including the Geneva convention.

But terrorism is now squarely in the eye of the beholder. And nowhere is that more so than in the Middle East, where today’s terrorists are tomorrow’s fighters against tyranny – & allies are enemies – often at the bewildering whim of a western policymaker’s conference call.

For the past year, US, British & other western forces have been back in Iraq, supposedly in the cause of destroying the hyper-sectarian terror group Islamic State (formerly known as al-Qaida in Iraq). This was after Isis overran huge chunks of Iraqi & Syrian territory & proclaimed a self-styled Islamic caliphate.
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Some Iraqis complain that the US sat on its hands while all this was going on. The Americans insist they are trying to avoid civilian casualties, & claim significant successes. Privately, officials say they don’t want to be seen hammering Sunni strongholds in a sectarian war & risk upsetting their Sunni allies in the Gulf.

A revealing light on how we got here has now been shone by a recently declassified secret US intelligence report, written in August 2012, which uncannily predicts – & effectively welcomes – the prospect of a “Salafist principality” in eastern Syria & an al-Qaida-controlled Islamic state in Syria & Iraq. In stark contrast to western claims at the time, the Defense Intelligence Agency document identifies al-Qaida in Iraq (which became Isis) & fellow Salafists as the “major forces driving the insurgency in Syria” – & states that “western countries, the Gulf states & Turkey” were supporting the opposition’s efforts to take control of eastern Syria.

Raising the “possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality”, the Pentagon report goes on, “this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq & Iran)”.

Which is pretty well exactly what happened 2 years later. The report isn’t a policy document. It’s heavily redacted & there are ambiguities in the language. But the implications are clear enough. A year into the Syrian rebellion, the US & its allies weren’t only supporting & arming an opposition they knew to be dominated by extreme sectarian groups; they were prepared to countenance the creation of some sort of “Islamic state” – despite the “grave danger” to Iraq’s unity – as a Sunni buffer to weaken Syria.

That doesn’t mean the US created Isis, of course, though some of its Gulf allies certainly played a role in it – as the US vice-president, Joe Biden, acknowledged last year. But there was no al-Qaida in Iraq until the US & Britain invaded. And the US has certainly exploited the existence of Isis against other forces in the region as part of a wider drive to maintain western control.

The calculus changed when Isis started beheading westerners & posting atrocities online, & the Gulf states are now backing other groups in the Syrian war, such as the Nusra Front. But this US & western habit of playing with jihadi groups, which then come back to bite them, goes back at least to the 1980s war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, which fostered the original al-Qaida under CIA tutelage.

It was recalibrated during the occupation of Iraq, when US forces led by General Petraeus sponsored an El Salvador-style dirty war of sectarian death squads to weaken the Iraqi resistance. And it was reprised in 2011 in the NATO-orchestrated war in Libya, where Isis last week took control of Gaddafi’s home town of Sirte.

In reality, US & western policy in the conflagration that is now the Middle East is in the classic mould of imperial divide-and-rule. American forces bomb one set of rebels while backing another in Syria, & mount what are effectively joint military operations with Iran against Isis in Iraq while supporting Saudi Arabia’s military campaign against Iranian-backed Houthi forces in Yemen. However confused US policy may often be, a weak, partitioned Iraq & Syria fit such an approach perfectly.

What’s clear is that Isis & its monstrosities won’t be defeated by the same powers that brought it to Iraq & Syria in the first place, or whose open & covert war-making has fostered it in the years since. Endless western military interventions in the Middle East have brought only destruction & division. It’s the people of the region who can cure this disease – not those who incubated the virus.