Islamophobia & a Challenge to Bill Maher - Deepa Kumar on RAI (Part 1/5)

A great series of interviews with Deepa Kumar. She puts the right perspective on how US has always been interfering with the development & politics of developing countries, especially, Islamic countries. The whole interview can easily be summarized in the last line of interview, "the people of the Middle East and North Africa are just like everybody else. They want economic rights. They want political rights and so on. And if the U.S. just stopped interfering, we would see a flowering of a different kind of society."

Islamophobia is perpetuating lies that Islam is a backward religion because it doesn't give rights, for instance, to women. However, the problems of giving or not giving rights to women is more a cultural / political one than religious one. As Ms. Kumar says that by merely focusing on these topics & then equating these "to a problem of Islam as opposed to a problem of politics" perpetuate the notion that "all Muslims are backward, which is the very essence of Islamophobia."

Then, fundamentalism exists in every religion, & heck, even in atheism. Atheists are some of the most fundamentalist people in this world. Every religion has its die-hard followers; there are fundamentalist Muslims, Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhist etc. We can see how fundamentalist Buddhist killed, & still killing, poor Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. We can see how die-hard Hindus (BJP is a very fundamentalist Hindu political party) killing Muslims in India over the issue of beef. Fundamentalist Christians / right wing militias roam free in US & have killed ethnic & racial minorities (African-Americans, South Asians etc.). Their actions are not attributed to their religions & no one asks other non-fundamentalist Christians, Buddhist or Hindus to absolve / distance themselves from the actions of their fundamentalist brethren in religion.

One thing which Paul Jay refers to, which I would really like to highlight is that how the whole world has been focusing on the barbarism of ISIS in Iraq & Syria. What about the barbarism of US when it dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima & Nagasaki, when, as the details are coming forth now, that they were not even needed to end WW2. If one starts to scrutinize American actions all over the world, we see that barbarism of ISIS is nothing compared to what America has done all over the world.

Now, the negative stereotypes of Muslims & Islam has been around since the birth of Islam in 600 AD. They have been perpetuating these stereotypes since the Crusades when the Pope wanted to unite all Christians under the flag of Crusades & paint all Muslims as one evil group of people who have been worshipping the bad or wrong God. The sad & unfortunate part is that even Muslims now are starting to believe in these stereotypes & think that Islam is the main reason which has been keeping Muslims & Muslim societies from developing. US & its Western allies also have their hands in this that they don't want Islamic societies to develop.

Islamic societies / countries have always been ready to develop (while living within the boundaries created by Quran & Prophet's tradition), either scientifically, politically, culturally, but alien forces (US & other Western powers) have always interfered in that development. The West / Global North want dictatorships in Middle East because it serves their own purpose. So, blaming the religion of Islam or thinking that Muslims are so backward in their thoughts that this is all they can come up with, is completely wrong. At the end of the day, a Muslim anywhere in the world is just like anyone else; he / she wants to live peacefully, enjoy his / her life here, peacefully earn a living, & then die a satisfied / happy person.

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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKbw4dkGQGM

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: So what's wrong with what Bill Maher said? Bill Maher is saying that there's a great denial of rights in much of the Muslim world, not just Islamic State, but Saudi Arabia and so on, and there isn't a lot of loud critique about it. And certainly the American left spends a lot more time critiquing the domestic right. So doesn't he have a point?

DEEPA KUMAR, ASSOC. PROF. MEDIA STUDIES AND MIDEAST STUDIES, RUTGERS UNIV.: Well, what Bill Maher said is a perfect example of what I call liberal Islamophobia, which is to take up liberal themes, such as human rights, women's rights, the rights of gays and lesbians, the right to free speech, and so on and makes a case of the so-called Muslim world, like it is one big monolith in which these rights are uniformly denied to people, and then proceeds to equate, in essence, the politics of ISIS with the politics of the 1.5 billion people who practice Islam, when in fact you actually look at Muslim majority countries, which is the term that I prefer, they vary widely in terms of, for instance, the status of women. In Bangladesh, for instance, we've had two women heads of state voted into power, Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina. But in Saudi Arabia, women aren't allowed to drive.

And so of course there are these kinds of examples from Muslim majority countries like Saudi Arabia, like Iran, where women's rights are restricted. But by focusing just on those and somehow equating this to a problem of Islam as opposed to a problem of politics, he winds up perpetuating this notion that all Muslims are backward, which is the very essence of Islamophobia.

JAY: He does something else, too. He ascribes, essentially, fundamentalism about the Quran, and then all believers in Islam are somehow also fundamentalists.

KUMAR: Right.

JAY: But he doesn't do that for Christianity, because there's just as much craziness in the Bible as there is in the Quran, I think. ...

KUMAR: No, you know, any religious text, whether it's the Quran or the Bible and so on, can be interpreted in multiple ways. There are progressive interpretations of it and then there are reactionary interpretations of it. ...

Imagine if for every act of terror committed by a Christian fundamentalist, a far-right militia person like Wade Michael Page, who went to Oak Creek, Wisconsin, and shot a gun at a Sikh temple and killed people and so on, now imagine if we were to generalize from Wade Michael Page to all of Christiandom, to all of the United States, and say, now everybody else should denounce this man and distance themselves from him; otherwise, you're all culpable. Now, that's completely ridiculous, and of course that would be ridiculous if we talk about Christians in the West, but apparently it's completely acceptable when it comes to talking about Muslims. And so even President Obama said moderate Muslims should separate themselves from ISIS and from other groups and so on. Why? In what way, shape, or form are regular Muslims responsible for fundamentalism any more than regular Christians are responsible for Christian fundamentalism or regular Jews for Jewish fundamentalists? You get the idea. We see those people as being the extreme wing of a particular religious interpretation.
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JAY: ... There is nothing the Islamic State has done that compares to the barbaric activity that the United States has done in Iraq and on and on, going right back to the atomic bombing of Japan. So if we're talking scale here, the Islamic State is a whisper of what the United States has done.

That being said, one does not need to hold back on describing IS as a barbaric, brutal force that the people of the region on the whole, you would think, will despise, just as much as most Afghans despise the Taliban.

KUMAR: Absolutely. I completely agree with that. ... in my book, actually, I have a pretty strong critique of the parties of political Islam, and I don't think we should be soft on that. There was a tendency back in the 1970s, when Foucault goes to Iran and so on, to see--particularly in France there was a tendency to somehow see the Islamists as being progressive and painting with progressive colors the Iranian Revolution and so forth. But I don't think that tendency exists anymore. I think, if anything, one of the first few pieces that I wrote on this topic is about the left and their attitudes towards political Islam, is how ignorant the left was in terms of, actually, Islamophobia and in terms of sort of equating the Islamists with all of Islam and all of Muslims and so forth. So I think that there is, in the United States especially, a sort of blind spot around Islamophobia and a lack of a nuanced analysis of who these groups are, why they come to power, and what the historic conditions are for their rise.

JAY: It seems to me where he is--one is this part of where he extends this to anyone who believes in Islam and tries to make Islam itself and come up with some quotes from the Quran that are particularly backward is one thing. But the second thing, which is this idea that he talks about our society having liberal values and free speech and this and that, you can argue what that's becoming and with this national surveillance state and so on, but it's still true. I mean, compared to a lot of societies, ... we can have this conversation, and we're not going to walk out and get arrested.

That being said, it's at home you have those things. The United States has 50, 60 years of supporting the worst kind of dictatorships everywhere, and particularly in the Middle East, whether it's supporting the Saudis and so on and so on. There's no support for these kind of values when it conflicts with American interests abroad.

KUMAR: Right. ... the narrative that gets constructed in the West and that Bill Maher and people like that are echoing is the clash of civilizations rhetoric, which was coined by Bernard Lewis and then popularized by Samuel Huntington, which is the idea that in the post-Cold War period, conflict would no longer be political, it will be cultural, and that there were seven or eight civilizations, each with their own unique cultures--the West and the Islamic world and so on--and that they are bound to conflict with each other.

... there are any number of problems. It's ahistorical, it's just wrong, and so on. But the problem I have with it, one problem, at least, is that it negates the fact that the rights that people do have in this country, whether you're talking about workers' rights, the rights of African Americans to vote, the right of women to vote, this didn't happen automatically because some benevolent president decided. It's people's movements, it's women fighting for 100 years and their male allies that caused suffrage, right? And, therefore, somehow to assume the liberal mantle as being the natural inheritance of what it means to be the West, starting from Greece to the present, and seeing the East, particularly Muslim majority countries, as being mired in barbarism, this is the classic language of colonialism, which whether Bill Maher knows it or not, that is what he's echoing. And, in fact, even in the East, in Iran, in Egypt, you've had Feminist movements, you've had women's rights movements, which we barely ever hear of.

JAY: Well, the roots of this go right back to the early days of the Catholic Church and the fighting against--the Crusades, and then the Ottoman Empire. I mean, it wasn't about liberal values then. It was about the true god, and they got the bad god, and we're going to fight it out. But it's kind of--the roots of it go very deep.

KUMAR: Absolutely, which is why my book is called Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire and it starts with the Crusades, because every empire needs an enemy. And at least one of the motivations for the Crusades was to create this ideal Muslim enemy, which could then motivate people to go out and fight wars. But it was always--there was always a very contradictory notion of how to look at the East, because even while the Crusades are going on, you have the most horrific stereotypes of Muslims and all the rest of it.

In al-Andalus, which is the name given to Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula--Spain and Portugal--you see the most advanced civilization. Remember, Europe is in the dark ages at this time, right, and here in al-Andalus you have street lighting, you have developments in science, medicine, and so on. In that region, Europeans had a very positive idea of Muslims and what they developed because they had actual contact with them. So, typically this idea of a Muslim enemy works when people have never met anybody from the Middle East or North Africa or have never traveled. And then the stereotypes can work, just as it's working in the case of ISIS and scaring people to death.

JAY: But I think one of the things that always gets missed in this conversation in the mainstream media is that these are class societies we're talking about, the Muslim societies, Arab societies. And in many of them, the classes that are in power are barbaric and they are backward and they do call up the worst of whatever you can call up in Islam, the same way you can find in Christian fanatical regimes in Latin America and other times.

KUMAR: Absolutely.
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JAY: I think part of it is ... like, if you're in any of the Muslim countries and you see what American policy in the Middle East has been, you are going to--unless you're in the elite and you somehow benefit from it, but even amongst the elites I think there's going to be resentment ... . The thing is: what else is there to have some sympathy for than the Islamist opposition? Why? Because the American policy and the Israeli policy destroyed the secular opposition.

KUMAR: That's right. And this has been happening through the course of the Cold War, when it was clear that the secular nationalists, whether you're talking about Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt or you're talking about Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran, when it was discovered that they couldn't be co-opted to serve the U.S.'s interests in the region, the key policy from 1958 on with the Eisenhower doctrine was to create an Islamic bulwark to act as a counter to secular nationalism. And you read some of the accounts of what the CIA is doing, and they're putting poison into Nasser's cigarettes, they're trying to put poison into his chocolates, some of these sorts of awful things that you think happen only in the movies. But at a very systemic level what they're doing is funding and sponsoring all sorts of radical Islamist groups, all the way from Iran and across the region.

JAY: Well, and most importantly it starts with Roosevelt, the deal with the Sauds. I mean, the Saudis are the heart of all of this. And this was the deal, that the Saudis would use the defense of Mecca to be the force to spread Wahhabism throughout the region, and all this extremism is part of American policy.

KUMAR: Absolutely. In fact, the language that they used in the State Department is that they wanted the Saudi monarch to be an Islamic Pope and to use the legitimacy of being the guardians of Mecca and Medina to actually push people away from secularism. So absolutely. And Saudi Arabia had a very systematic program of Islamization, whether it was distributing Qurans for free, whether it was giving tons of petrodollars for setting up madrasas all over. Not just in the Middle East, but even in Pakistan they set up schools and colleges and send their preachers there and so forth. And the end result is the mujahideen, is al-Qaeda.

And, I mean, I think that's really important to bring up, because there's a tendency to somehow think of the parties of political Islam as being the sort of logical outcome of this region -- this is all that Muslims can produce. But if you don't talk about how left secular alternatives were systematically crushed by the U.S., by Saudi Arabia, by Israel, and so on, then you don't get a sense that these are people just like anybody else who have a range of politics.

JAY: And not only left-secular; they destroyed in Afghanistan a more normal capitalist development. They had a king that was a modernizer. They wanted to have a more modern capitalism. And they threw it all out the window to suck Russia into a war and then arming all the jihadists and, village elders who didn't know anything, give them rocket launchers, and they become the new powerbrokers. And then you wonder where the Taliban comes from.

KUMAR: Right. In fact, every single reformist and pro-democratic movement that has come into being in the Middle East and North Africa, the U.S. has always been on the wrong side of it, even in Saudi Arabia. There was a modest movement called the Free Princes Movement, where they wanted a constitutional monarchy. Would the U.S. have any of it? Absolutely not. They immediately dispatched forces to make sure these forces are marginalized. There was a workers movement in the Shia eastern region trying to form unions, but Aramco, at that time American-owned, would have none of it. And so they got rid of that. So every step towards creating rights for a whole group of people, from workers to women and so on and so forth, the U.S. is always been on the wrong side, including after the Arab Spring of 2011, right? So you look at the role that the U.S. is played: support the dictators till the very last second, and then back to counterrevolutionaries, whether it's Egypt and the military or it's giving the green light to Saudi Arabia to crush the resistance in Bahrain, what have you.

And so I think that framework is important, because then you start to see that the people of the Middle East and North Africa are just like everybody else. They want economic rights. They want political rights and so on. And if the U.S. just stopped interfering, we would see a flowering of a different kind of society.

Feminism's Radical Turn

A great opinion piece on the West's struggle with the feminism movement. Feminism movement was made by humans / people who don't have any ability to see / predict the future. Circumstances are always evolving & one's situation is never same as the other. Hence, feminism movement was not only short-sighted to start with, it lacked inclusion of all women from different backgrounds; based on ethnicity, religion, race, culture etc.

The idea of feminism was women are equal to men. Which they definitely are. No doubt. Problem was, & still is, that women were expected to act & do things exactly like what men were doing. As Jessa Crispin notes in her book that "feminism sold women a bill of goods by framing work as self-fulfillment and self-actualization. Women who rose to positions of traditional male power in corporations, in politics, in the military, on boards, like Clinton or Sheryl Sandberg became feminist role models." Essentially, a woman's self-worth was how much money she was earning by working in male-dominated sectors of the economy; heck, it didn't have to be male-dominated sectors of the economy. Period. That's why, some women in pornography industry are very happy & rose to the level of company CEOs themselves, & on their way to the top, debased other women, because they themselves have become millionaires; their self-worth is being measured in cold hard cash by themselves & the society around them.
As the writer details Jessa Crispin's thoughts on feminism in the following paragraph, it becomes evident that women were only fighting for equal rights & jobs as men, as long as those jobs were of privileged positions in the society. Women were not fighting to get in menial jobs. After all, those menial jobs are also held by men.

Equality is another issue in Western ideal of feminism; equality based on racial, ethnic, cultural, & social grounds. It seems that feminism became the movement-du-jour for the Caucasian / white privileged women. Every other women didn't get the memo; be they be women of African descent in America or of Latin descent in Northern & Southern America, or Muslim women in Middle East & South Asia or Hindu & Buddhist women in Asia. As Crispin correctly "echoes the sentiment in her rejection of the condescending attitude of Western feminists toward women in Muslim countries—this idea that these women need to be rescued (itself a masculine model) from their head scarves and their traditions."

In the name of feminism, women were driven out of their homes to work alongside men, & to become one more bread-winner for the family. However, nobody worked towards sharing the house work, & hence, women's responsibilities became child-bearing, child-rearing, all house work, & corporate work. Men still enjoyed their work outside the house & that was the end of their day's work.

What the general public has forgotten now that the women were driven out of the house to create a two-income family, to essentially, increase GDP in North America. The public & private sectors weren't creating any more jobs & GDP increases when the public spends on house & home purchases. Wages had become stagnant. So, instead of increasing wages or creating more jobs, women were encouraged to get out of the house, be independent, & make their own money; helping to keep up the lifestyle the public was used to; all in the guise of gender equality.

Here, I am going to bring feminism in Islam. The West & now, even the East, thinks that Islam, as a religion, suppresses Muslim women & their rights. In Islam, women are equal to men. Islam recognizes them as EQUAL, not as IDENTICAL. Both genders are complementary to each other & need one another to create a fully-functional, proper society.

This is all beautifully summarized by a letter to editor in the May issue of Maclean's magazine, by a Dr. Howard Taynen, from Ancaster, Ontario, Canada:

"... I am struck yet again by a routinely mistaken fundamental in this ever-present & evolving subject - equal is confused with identical. Thankfully, men & women are not identical anatomically, physiologically, temperamentally or psychologically. We are a magnificent complementarity of great potential value to ourselves, our children & the world. Eliminate the abuse, not the difference! It is naive & futile to defy nature by arbitrarily imposing identical roles in parenthood, marriage or the world in order to be equal. We are equal & different. It is a partnership that can function wholesomely without trying to change the differing roles & their respective strengths."

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http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/feminisms-radical-turn/

Literary Critic Jessa Crispin clearly appreciates the value of a catchy title. Her blog was named Bookslut. Now her new book, Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto, seems calculated to grab attention at a moment when feminism is portrayed as either trending or dead—or trending because it’s dead.

Feminism’s most recent and much exaggerated death spiral can be traced to the assumption, an absurd one, that the U.S. election provided a referendum on the topic. “Hillary Clinton’s loss in the presidential election to America’s most famous sexist instantly plunged the feminist cause into crisis,” The New Republic proclaimed hours after Trump’s win, as if the “feminist cause” is a single entity run out of a central command. If anything, the reverse proved true: the political upset galvanized organized protest driven by fear that the advances made by the feminist movement over the past 50 years would be reversed. The New York Times was bleaker: “Feminism lost. Now what?” ran a headline that suggested Clinton was herself synonymous with an ideology that dates back more than a century.

It’s precisely that conflation of a powerful, high-achieving woman with modern feminism that Crispin denounces in her slim, bracing polemic. The thought-provoking, sometimes frustrating book is part of a new literary groundswell: works grappling with the complex inequities of sexual equality and the ever-shifting gender see-saw a half century after “women’s lib.” Toronto writer Stephen Marche also wades in with his trenchant new book, The Unmade Bed: The Messy Truth About Men and Women in the 21st Century, in which he recounts leaving his job to be primary caregiver to his son so his wife could fulfill her career ambition. A countervailing groundswell is simultaneously at work: this vocal contingent calls for a return to the zero-sum game of the alpha husband, beta wife just as more than a third of women out-earn their husbands. The Alpha Female’s Guide to Men and Marriage by Suzanne Venker, the niece of conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, laments that “society is creating a crop of women who are unable to love” and advises “it’s liberating to be a beta!” Similar messaging underlines the North Carolina billboard that sparked outrage last month. “Real men provide,” it read. “Real women appreciate it.”

Taking a cue from Crispin’s title, the media have described its message as more piling on the feminism-is-dead pyre: “The fall of feminism,” read the headline of a Los Angeles Times’ review. “Why this literary critic rejects modern-day feminism,” said CBC Radio.

Yet Crispin sits at an extreme rarely discussed in modern-day feminism: she’s a self-professed radical feminist, hell-bent on dismantling a patriarchy she blames 20th-century feminism for buttressing. “I am angry,” she writes. “And I do pose a threat.”

Feminism sold women a bill of goods, Crispin states, by framing work as self-fulfillment and self-actualization. Women who rose to positions of traditional male power in corporations, in politics, in the military, on boards, like Clinton or Sheryl Sandberg of Lean In fame, became feminist role models. Crispin doesn’t buy it, noting Clinton dismantled social welfare programs and supported international interventions that killed thousands.

Only spaces occupied by privileged men were desirable, Crispin points out; women, who’d always worked, but in menial positions, weren’t fighting for jobs held by poor men, labourers or miners, for whom the workplace and society would become increasingly hostile. The consequence, she writes, is a “kind of hyper-masculinized world, where women are participating—and absolutely expected to participate in this world by feminists—in patriarchal values.”

Crispin also takes aim at “universal feminism”—her term for a non-confrontational feminist status quo that bends over backwards to be agreeable to avoid the “man-hating” stereotype of decades earlier. This mainstream, she believes, is preoccupied with identity politics, narcissistic “self-empowerment” and whining about TV shows rather than the hard work of bridging to universal human rights. It’s a pop star battle: on one hand, Beyoncé embraces the “feminist” label; on the other, Taylor Swift, never one to rock the boat, prefers “equalism,” the belief that both sexes should be equal without highlighting feminism. “Lifestyles do not change the world,” Crispin writes.

Within this Instagram feminism, shrillness is anathema. That’s a problem, Crispin writes: “I hear the word ‘feminazi’ coming from young feminists’ mouths today way more often than I have ever heard it coming from the mouths of right-wing men.”

The reaction can also be chalked up to marketing forces that have diluted and co-opted “feminist” to sell products with an upbeat, friendly “empowerment” message for decades—from the “You’ve come a long way baby” Virginia Slims ads of the ’70s, to Acne Studios’ “Feminist Collection” featuring a $650 sweater, to the recently published picture book Strong is the New Pretty: A Celebration of Girls Being Themselves.

The fact that anyone can self-define as feminist, or not, also can render the word meaningless. Ivanka Trump claims both she and her woman-objectifying, women-grabbing dad are feminists. ... Marche rejects the self-proclaimed “male feminist,” saying it’s typically used to win points or get women into bed. Just be a decent guy, he writes.

Decades of hindsight offer perspective. For one, “trickle-down” feminism is about as effective as trickle-down economics. Equality has not touched all women equally, and there’s anger, as was evident at the Women’s March in Washington, where I saw a black woman hold up a sign at a largely white crowd: “F–k you and your white imperialistic feminism,” it read. She had a point.

Crispin echoes the sentiment in her rejection of the “condescending attitude of Western feminists toward women in Muslim countries—this idea that these women need to be rescued (itself a masculine model) from their head scarves and their traditions.”
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Non-feminist history also reveals that blaming 20th-century feminism for the glorification of the work and the workplace, as Crispin does, gives it too much credit. Yes, the civil rights movement stirred second-wave feminism and The Feminine Mystique raised consciousness. But other factors, namely the need for dual-income-earning families and the Pill, which let women delay child-bearing or defer it altogether, played a role.

Now it’s evident that the very corporate workplace that women—mostly wives—flocked to in the ’70s was built on a male-breadwinner, female-homemaker model that remained unchanged. Needs of the new working wife and mother were ignored; nor was there a movement to replace or redistribute her labour in the home. The result: that famous Ms. magazine cover “I want a wife,” which also became a common working women’s half-joke.
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That disconnect could explain why, 60 years after the “women’s movement,” reproductive health rights and sexual violence remain barriers to women’s freedom. Female politicians receive death threats. A gender pay gap exists, even in the professions. Yet Crispin isn’t offering an olive branch to men. She slams “casual hatred of men as a gender,” yet in the next breath, tells men it’s not her job to make feminism easy or understandable to them. “Figure it out,” she writes. “I just want to be clear that I don’t give a f–k about your response to this book. Do not email me, do not get in touch. Deal with your own s–t for once.” She offers one consolation: “Everything is more complicated than anyone wants to admit.” And that vague understatement pretty much sums up the long march ahead.

"Muslim Culture" by Ramzy Taweel

 "Muslim Culture" - Ramzy Taweel, Beirut, Lebanon

Obama poster artist says president is a disappointment

Damn, I should've started this blog in 2008, right before Obama got elected for the first time. At that time, I used to be amused at people around me, in office & in my friend circle, that how everyone blindly bought into whatever Obama was selling at the time. Bunch of ignorant morons !!!

At that time, back in 2008, I was saying that Obama will disappoint you. He is not who he made you think he is. I saw this "hope dashed" 8 years ago.

So how did I predict that Obama will dash hope? Simple. There are very, very few organizations in the world that like radical & different ideas, & thus, promote those people within them, which question the established culture of the organization. Most organizations don't want anyone "disturbing" their culture. US government, & any other government in this world, is like that.

Obama, regardless of his upbringing & his personal values, he was required to toe the line of the government, if he ever wanted to become the President of US. He was required to abandon his own views, ethics, & morals to become President of US. If you want to become the President, you need to jockey up to groups whose ideals & objectives may very well clash with your own.

It doesn't matter how great Barack Obama is on the personal level. That doesn't affect anyone but him & his family alone. What does affect the whole world are his decisions, which were, for the past 7 years, similar to, if not as bad as, his predecessor, Mr. George Bush. I am still amazed how the Nobel committee awarded Obama the Peace prize. He hadn't, & still hasn't, done much in the name of peace. Guantanamo prison is still open. Destruction of Libya & the rise of ISIS in Syria & Iraq are the testament of how much of a failure Obama has been on delivering the mandate of world peace.

The only good legacy he might be remembered for years to come, is American affordable healthcare act or "Obamacare". That made life easier for many poor Americans. Other than that, financial mess he inherited from previous American leadership is still a mess, without any substantive controls, whatsoever. Personal privacy for Americans, & essentially, for the people around the world, became a joke under him. Weapons & arms deals with the corrupt leaders & despots continue on unabated. Violence in America itself has escalated multiple folds due to the rise in gun ownership, which he didn't, or perhaps, couldn't, do anything about. Working conditions & middle class in the American socio-economic strata are set to become worse, due to his relentless push for Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

You may point out the fact that I am not mentioning Iran nuclear deal or opening up the American embassy in Cuba. These deals are actually not in the name of peace. These deals are in the name of business elites. Consumer markets for American international businesses are running out. American businesses are everywhere around the world, except, only in those places where they are not allowed to operate by law. Other than North Korea, Cuba & Iran were the only countries left where American businesses couldn't sell their wares. American businesses right away pushed in Cuba, as soon as, the borders open, & they are already ready to enter Iran.

Now, I am not saying all this, because I prefer Republicans or I think Republicans would've done a better job of running the country. Heck no. Republicans might have been the same, if not worse. Reason being that US government, as an institution, has a set culture & only people who rise through it are the ones who follow that culture by the book. You think differently & your chances of ever becoming an influential person in that organization are slim to none. Both political parties in America will only promote those people within them, who think alike. Therefore, regardless of which political party comes to power in 2016 or in 2020 or in 2024, foreign policies coming out of the White House won't change a bit.
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http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/28/hope-dashed-artist-behind-obama-poster-disappointed

The man on the poster is still president. But the artist behind the poster has moved on.

Shepard Fairey, whose stencil portrait of Barack Obama with the caption “Hope” became the defining image of the 2008 presidential campaign, told Esquire magazine in an interview ... that the politician had not lived up to the propaganda.

“Not even close,” Fairey said.

“Obama has had a really tough time, but there have been a lot of things that he’s compromised on that I never would have expected. I mean, drones & domestic spying are the last things I would have thought [he’d support].”
...

Fairey is not a wholesale detractor of Obama, however.

“I’ve met Obama a few times, & I think Obama’s a quality human being, but I think that he finds himself in a position where your actions are largely dictated by things out of your control,” Fairey told Esquire. “I’m not giving him a pass for not being more courageous, but I do think the entire system needs an overhaul & taking money out of politics would be a really good first step.”

As for whom he is supporting in 2016, Fairey said: “I mean nothing against Hillary [Clinton]. I agree with Hillary on most issues, but campaign finance structure makes me very angry.”

In 2014, Fairey released a poster that was evocative of the Obama image, but which featured a different, anonymous politician holding a fistful of cash.

The image was captioned: “Sold”.

India marital rape victims' lonely battle for justice

Let me start this post by saying that sexual assault (i.e. rape) is wrong, regardless of it's marital rape or any other kind of rape. Perpetrators should be punished to the full extent of the law.

BUT, I don't agree with campaigners in India or anywhere else that marital rape be criminalized. Why?

Problem is that marital rape will be criminalized just like any other kind of rape is in the country. But will that solve the problem? If we forget about India, a developing country, for a minute, & focus on how rape criminal laws help fight / reduce rapes in developed countries, we see that it still happens quite a lot; from marital rapes & domestic abuse to sexual harassment & assault on streets & offices. So much so, that in Canada, there's a project, started by Rogers, called Project97. It's called "Project 97" because, per the organizers of this project, 97% of sexual assaults & harassment are never reported. Please keep in mind that this is in Canada & not something happening in a developing country.

Nobody around the world is trying to resolve the root problem of sexual assaults. What is the root problem?

Media around the world, be it internet, TV, magazines, movies etc. constantly keep pushing the boundaries of female nudity. Sexualized imagery is becoming the norm. Heck, even roaming around nude in the street is now being discussed in New York & Kitchener, because women there want to go out topless or, in some cases, even completely nude. We have celebrities like Kardashian clan or Miley Cyrus who are brainwashing young minds that female nudity in public should be celebrated & not criminalized.

Due to male biology, on the other hand, heterosexual men, who are still in the majority around the world, get aroused by watching a female who is trying to flash as much flesh as she can. The only things holding them back from humping that woman, right there & then, are laws & some moral views (for example, incest is not liked in any culture or country, irrespective of the law of the land).

Now, women in the West are far more liberal. They will go to a dance club & may go home either with a man or sexually satisfy themselves before going back home. If that's not enough, then annual "young sexapalooza" or, in other words, Spring Break in Florida, is internationally famous event, where young female nudity is wholly encouraged. Young males are there to only fornicate & get drunk.

However, women in the East are stuck in between conservative Eastern & liberal Western values. For example, in India, young women want to study, have a career, live in the metropolitan cities all by themselves, & want to choose their life partners themselves. They want to enjoy the night life, just like all those girls do in the Hollywood movies. Bollywood movies are full of Indian actresses in skimpy dresses, dancing all over the place, & men are ogling them like hungry wolves.

But, Indian women also want to marry someone who is highly educated, earns enough money to keep them well pampered, & of course, not a player. They want a respectable family man to raise their children.

On top of that, female infanticide in India is common. Although, it is illegal in the country, couples are still forced by their families to have as many boys as they can have, & girls are killed as soon as the ultrasound results come around. So, in the general population, demographically, the male to female ratio is skewed towards males. So, fewer females for more males in the general society.

One more problem all this sexualized media is causing is infidelity. As you may know how Ashley Madison, the site of cheaters, was hacked recently & the data of 33 Million users was released in the public. As you may know that Ashley Madison is one of the businesses of a Canadian company. It has operations in several countries around the world, including India.

There is nothing essentially wrong with what Ashley Madison is providing to the masses around the world. Since, rape is criminalized in the West, & infidelity or adultery is grounds for divorce, men try to cheat the system by cheating on their wives through an intermediary, Ashley Madison. Men are watching sexualized imagery all around them & women in their lives are trying to control the relationship through sex. So, men just simply cheat to satisfy their sexual arousals.

Some may say at this point that "men are pigs." Male reaction to sexualized imagery is just natural. A couple in love undress in their bedroom to sexually arouse themselves & physically enjoy their love. But, what a man gotta do when he is surrounded by sexualized imagery 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year? Did he ask for Miley Cyrus or Kardashian clan to get naked on the worldwide media?

Anyway, now, a poor, young man is watching Bollywood & Hollywood movies, watching porn on Internet, watching supermodels around the world wearing skimpy dresses in fashion magazines, & then watching Indian girls dating & having sexual relations with their boyfriends & even office colleagues. He is sexually aroused on a daily basis. So, at that point, he has 4 options:

1. If he is single & not in a relationship, then find a girlfriend & satisfy his sexual need or pay a prostitute (assuming he has enough money to hire a prostitute).
2. If he is single & in a relationship, then he will try to satisfy himself with his girlfriend, & due to his education level & social upbringing, he may or may not force himself on her.
3. If he is married, then he will try to satisfy himself with his wife, & due to his education level & social upbringing, he may or may not force himself on his wife.
4. If he is married, then he may try to cheat on his wife with a girlfriend or a prostitute.

As you can see in the example above, I started the example with the word, "poor". Because, in many cases, especially in India, but it happens all around the world, poor men have a very difficult time in starting a relationship. Girls want to start a relationship with a man who can pamper them. Money is an issue. An educated, but poor, man has a hard time in getting married in South Asia. But that poor man still has sexual needs, & even more so, after watching so much sexual images all around him. He may want to get married but he can't, because girls or their families want him to be educated (education costs money, too) or be education & be rich.

So, as you can see, nobody influential in the world of media is working towards reducing female nudity in the media. Quite contrary, it is being encouraged. Men, however, are being told to 'keep it in their pants', which goes against their biological nature. Women are trying to control relationships through sex; rewarding their male partners by sex when they are good & holding it back if their male partners do something undesirable. It is similar to being a pet that desirable behaviours are rewarded & undesirable ones are punished by the owners.

Cheating or adultery or infidelity is illegal in a majority of the countries. So married men are forced to rely on their wives for sexual satisfaction. They wouldn't have so much sexual needs if they are not bombarded 24/7 by sexualized media. But that's not the case. So, he is "forced" to relieve his sexual tension through his wife, since adultery is not allowed. But the wife just doesn't "feel" like having sex. What's he supposed to do? If he forces her, then it becomes marital rape. If he finds another girl, then it becomes cheating.

Today's man, around the world, is stuck between rock & a hard place.
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http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-32810834

...
In India, it is not a crime for a man to rape his wife. And many believe that marriage is a source of sexual satisfaction for men &, therefore, women must submit.

No equality
...
Campaigners have long demanded that marital rape be criminalised in India.

A committee formed after the December 2012 gang rape & murder of a student on a bus in Delhi to suggest criminal law reforms recommended that martial rape should invite the same punishment as any other rape. The government of the day, led by the Congress party, rejected the recommendation.

Victims of marital rape, however, refuse to give up the fight.
...

Widely prevalent

Supreme Court lawyer Karuna Nundy who specialises in human rights litigation & gender justice says Indian law provides little relief to victims of marital rape.

"At the moment, a wife can file a case under the domestic violence act which are dealt with in a civil court. It gives a woman a legal right to separate from her husband on the grounds of cruelty.

"But what is the legal provision to punish the act of crime? Any sexual act which is forced or is being done without the consent of the woman is a crime. The relationship of the victim with the perpetrator makes no difference."

A number of studies done over the years suggest that sexual violence in marriage is prevalent in India.

The last National Family Health Survey (2005-2006), conducted among 124,385 women in 29 Indian states, had 10% women reporting that their husbands had physically forced them to have sex.

Another study conducted by the International Centre for Women (ICRW) & United Nations Population Fund's (UNPFA) across 7 states in India last year covered 9,205 men & 3,158 women aged 18-49 from each state. One-third of the men interviewed admitted to having forced a sexual act on their wives.

The victims of "marital rape" say they fight a lonely battle because their suffering falls under no category of Indian legal system. Moreover, society often blames them for maligning the institution of marriage.

However, Save the Family Foundation, a men's rights group, cautions against criminalising marital rape.

"We have already seen how 498A, the anti-dowry law, has been largely misused by women in India to harass men & their family. The Central Woman Commission of India has accepted that a number of rape cases reported each year are false. How can one prove a marital rape? Taking bedrooms to court is a dangerous idea," a spokesman said.
...

Robert Fisk in Abu Dhabi: The acceptable face of the Emirates

My questions after reading this opinion piece from Robert Fisk are:

1. How Oriental & Western paintings, & Gauguin, Picasso, & Poussin art is going to help educate the Arabs?

2. What's the point of this education when it doesn't help broaden the mind to discuss political, social, cultural, & religious matters openly (instead of one family dictatorship rule)?

3. What's the point of all this educational institutions when Arabs, & Muslims, most likely, have forgotten how Prophet Muhammad used to live & they are spending billions on gigantic mosques to show what to whom?

As Mr. Fisk very aptly asks, "what to make of the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque? The truly gigantic carpet, the chandeliers, the fact that it was constructed by men & materials from Morocco to China & can hold more than 40,000 faithful – all give it the feel of cathedrals built in the Middle Ages. It has avoided the gruesome, concrete pseudo-modernism of the Saudi-built mosques of Bosnia, but is it art? Or, with its gold and precious stones, is it a message about the power of wealth as well as the power of God? The Prophet Mohamed was a businessman & he would, I suspect, have rather liked Abu Dhabi – but Mohamed was also a humble man. Is this mosque humble?"

And while UAE spends billions on grand mosques & building Louvres & Guggenheims "for educational purposes," thousands upon thousands of Muslims are getting killed in South East Asia (Rohingya) to Iraq to Libya, & millions more are refugees. I am not even going to discuss the plights of Muslims in Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya, & Xinjiang etc.

4. What's the point of this education when those same Arab elites are forcing thousands of foreign workers from South & Central Asia to work in extreme heat of the Middle East, to build these grand mosques, museums, roads, buildings, & essentially, whole cities in the middle of desert, for meagre wages & at great risks to their lives?

5. What's the point of such education which doesn't help one learn the meaning of justice, equality, & basic humanity?

I guess, I can't really pin that one on Emiratis or Arabs only, since this is all over the world. There are far more "educated" people now in this so-called "modern" world than, say, 1900s, but the suffering & plight of our fellow human beings have increased that much in only a century.

Didn't this modern "education" increase injustice, inequality, & erased the meaning of humanity from the public's minds?

So what's the point of such education when it only increases suffering, further traps the public in the flawed system (poor can't get good quality education because of its unaffordability & the rich don't really need it in the first place) & the overall system doesn't change at all since education doesn't help in broadening the mind?
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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/robert-fisk-in-abu-dhabi-the-acceptable-face-of-the-emirates-10211050.html

The Abu Dhabi Louvre looks like the top of a giant, primordial eggshell pushing its way out of the sand. Its giant dome already glisters under the sun, its construction workers moving like spiders over 5 layers of cladding, steel & aluminium which will give this extraordinary museum a combined weight of 7,000 tons, just a little less than the Eiffel Tower. Already the concrete base of a man-made lake spreads around the construction, for architect Jean Nouvel's Louvre will be on a miniature island, its works of art transported to its gallery through an underground tunnel, light sprinkled into its interior as if through the fronds of palm trees.
 
Very romantic. Very French orientalist, I say to myself. Very Arab too, perhaps. The idea is that art will move chronologically through centuries inside the new Louvre, oriental & Western paintings next to each other.
 
But won't Abu Dhabi have a few problems with nudes, with Gauguin or Picasso or Poussin? No, says my companion, as he explains the double insulation & the cladding which will ... prevent water spewing on to the Louvre's greatest masterpieces. "All that is accepted. This is art. This is for education." Contemporary art will be inside the Abu Dhabi Guggenheim a few hundred yards away, still just a sand-pile of dumper trucks & bobbing labourers' hats.
 
... so many people in Abu Dhabi don't like their names being revealed – my companion included – for they live under a form of autocracy; not the dictatorship of Saddamite or Mubarakite or Ghaddafite political power, but the dictatorship of money. Abu Dhabi is so rich, & its ambitions so mystical, that people speak in whispers. If the Abu Dhabi Louvre has already purchased Gauguin's Breton Boys Wrestling ... & Magritte's The Subjugated Reader ... then perhaps some miracle has taken place.
 
But if all this is educational, what to make of the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque? The truly gigantic carpet, the chandeliers, the fact that it was constructed by men & materials from Morocco to China & can hold more than 40,000 faithful – all give it the feel of cathedrals built in the Middle Ages. It has avoided the gruesome, concrete pseudo-modernism of the Saudi-built mosques of Bosnia, but is it art? Or, with its gold & precious stones, is it a message about the power of wealth as well as the power of God? The Prophet Mohamed was a businessman & he would, I suspect, have rather liked Abu Dhabi – but Mohamed was also a humble man. Is this mosque humble?
 
That's the catch in Abu Dhabi. When you own 9% of the world's oil & close to 5% of the planet's natural gas, you have to decide whether you shout about it, display it before all with Saudi abandon, or send it off to fund charitable projects or cult-like Islamist militias. Abu Dhabi has stuck to charity, avoided the darkness of Wahabism, ... but can't shake off the need for ostentation. And the Emirates Palace Hotel is an obscenity. I've stayed there twice ... & I've written of its imperial architecture – Mogul-Gothic Lutyens, I suppose, with just a hint of Saddam & just a dangerous flavour of Titanic.
 
This is egregious affluence on an unprecedented scale, real gold on the walls, doors & fittings, 1,022 crystal chandeliers & a guest list of Hollywood-Bollywood glamerati who've taken rooms at up to £10,000 a night. So gargantuan is the wretched hotel's size that no guest can escape walking 2 miles a day; the Egyptian & Russian staff call it the "Hotel Sporto" because most have to walk between 10 & 15 miles a day escorting guests.
 
This, however, is being picky. Old Sheikh Zayed, the founder of Abu Dhabi, his son & successor, the current Sheikh Khalifa, & now his brother, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, have all said that the Emirates lagged behind in that most precious, & largely absent, commodity of any Arab state: education. Now that Abu Dhabi had "a lot of wealth" ... the emirate needed to invest in education, Prince Mohammed told a summit 2 months ago. "Maybe in 50 years, we might have the last barrel of oil. The question is: will we be sad? If today we are investing in the right sectors, we will celebrate at that moment."
 
Abu Dhabi is the sensible, adult version of Dubai, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, smaller than its neighbour, but probably the wealthiest city in the world. It's still ruled by the al-Nahyan family whose Bani Yas tribe migrated to the north Arabian peninsula Gulf coast, opposite what is now Iran, in the late 18th century. So rich is Abu Dhabi, with an oil producing capacity of 2.3 million barrels a day, that even its total investments – statistics it prefers to keep secret – must be calculated to the nearest £70bn. The total figure is probably close to £650bn.
 
In the awful corporate language that crown princes now feel constrained to speak, Prince Mohammed said that, while Abu Dhabi possessed oil & gas for the present, "We need as of today to stress that learning outcomes should create human capital that is able to serve us for the 50 years & beyond." In other words, education, education, education…

What on earth, I asked Zaki Nusseibeh, one of the advisers to the government's cultural affairs ministry, was Prince Mohammed banging on about? "The Arab peoples in their revolutions asked for dignity," he replied. "They asked for a future. But… you need to create the 'custom' for discussion & for accepting other people's point of view. All that is happening with religious ideology in this part of the world is a fascist movement. Teaching is by rote – I mean this, by rote – & people are not encouraged to have critical thinking. They don't listen to music at a young age or know what it's like to go to a museum. Sheikh Zayed said this as early as 1968."
 
Mr Nusseibeh sits on a Rhodes Scholarship committee & says how rewarding it is to see two young UAE students competing with international students, to see them go to Oxford to get their Masters. So Abu Dhabi & the other emirates must have good universities, he says, fine schools, a commitment to "education & culture". Investing in the future, every Abu Dhabi government official will tell you, is also about renewable energy, solar energy, but it's primarily about education.
 
"Political ideology has taken over from education," Mr Nusseibeh says of recent Arab history. He talks of the museums & the Biennale in Sharjah & Abu Dhabi & then blurts out one of those clichés which always make me suspicious: that Abu Dhabi must be "a role model for the societies around us – look at the media, the internet city, the communications infrastructure…"

It's not long ago that the West told the Arabs that Turkey should be their role model – until Recep Tayyip Erdogan started going bonkers, talking about plots & locking up journalists & turning into a role model for the Mubaraks & Ghaddafis that had already passed into history. Yet it's not difficult to see what Abu Dhabi is trying to do. If Saudi Arabia is the empire of prayer & Qatar the empire of television ... then Abu Dhabi runs the empire of higher education, the one commodity which has always failed the Arabs, or which the Arabs have always failed to take advantage of.
 
From education comes dignity & from dignity comes justice. But this is surely too sentimental. It's glorious to know that in Abu Dhabi there is an Abu Dhabi Choral Group, an Abu Dhabi Music & Arts Foundation, an Amadeus Music Institute, a House of Oud, studying the Arabic stringed instrument which is a distant relative of the lute, the International Music Institute & the Modern Art Music Institute. But then I find Abu Dhabi's version of Time Out lists 108 bars & nightclubs in its entertainment inventory. Is it trying to imitate Dubai? Can there be two Dubais – or two Abu Dhabis – in the Emirates?
 
And who are they ultimately for? Not for the 4 million foreign labourers, of course. Nor for the middle-class elites who arrive from the West & from the rest of that amorphous "Arab world". An Iraqi high-up in the medical profession in Abu Dhabi – which is why he, too, asked to remain anonymous – explained his relationship with the Emirate in surprisingly frank terms. "We all came here by choice," he said over the hottest coffee I've ever tasted in Arabia. "I made an informed decision – I believed I would have a better life here. I'm very happy with the way they run their country."
 
He paused here, I think because – as a doctor as well as an expatriate – he didn't want to give Abu Dhabi too clean a bill of health. "The deal is this: 'We're going to pay you money & you can have the lifestyle you have chosen – but you have no rights.' A non-Emirati cannot go to a government school. You can only go to a government hospital in emergency. I'm here as a servant of the country. I know if I don't want to be a servant any more, I can get on a plane & go home."
 
Then he thought for a moment & captured the venality of it all. "We're all here by invitation – or temptation."