‘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. ...

'Massive' rich-poor gap in German society

One of the major reasons for the increase in hatred towards refugees & immigrants in the Western world & the populism politics is that these Western countries are not taking care of their own citizens but their politicians are trying to pander to refugees & immigrants for their votes.

Charity begins at home & the rising poverty levels & joblessness is breeding more hatred towards those people who look different from the majority. Be it the Trump-led GOP or Afd in Germany or any number of political parties in Canada, US, or Europe, at the end of the day, those parties are increasing their popularity by going after these homeless, unemployed, poor people.

The social exclusion, economic inequality, unemployment, & poverty are increasing all over the Western world & will keep increasing until people come out on the streets & violently topple their respective sitting governments. Before the situation worsens to that point, governments need to tackle these social issues head on before it's too late (but, believe you me, they won't).

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https://www.dw.com/en/massive-rich-poor-gap-in-german-society/a-19067611

Germany's Paritätische federation, which represents 10,000 social welfare groups, warned ... that nearly one in six of Germany's residents remained at risk of being trapped in relative poverty.

The term used across the EU refers to anyone, child or adult, who lives on less than 60% of the medium income as measured statistically. In Germany, that threshold is 917 euros ($1,015) per month for a single person and 1,192 euros ($1,310) for a single parent with a child under six.

Experts said the results overall continued to point to massive inequality in German society, despite glowing data such as ... that export-driven Germany last year recorded its highest federal budget surplus since reunification, and despite its taking in 1 million refugees.

One in six below poverty line

In its latest summary, based on figures from 2014, the Paritätische said 15.4 of the population nationwide was stuck below the poverty line.

That was down a slight 0.1% on the level measured it 2013, but still up significantly on the 14% measured ten years ago, it said.

Highlighting child poverty, the federation said 19% of Germany's youngsters lived in relative poverty. Half of these were children living in a single-parent household.

And, at 15.6%, poverty among pensioners had for the first time risen above the nationwide average.

One in five Ruhr residents impoverished

Relative poverty had climbed to a record 20% in North Rhine-Westphalia's Ruhr district, once the motor of German heavy industry and now the scene of economic and urban redevelopment efforts.

Among Germany's 16 federal states or "Länder", poverty risk had declined in the city-state of Berlin and Mecklenburg-East Pomerania in northeastern Germany, the Baltic coast region that was once part of communist East Germany.

Despite record employment, poverty had not declined, said Dorothee Spannagel, a social expert who analyzed poverty trends for the trade union-affiliated Hans-Böckler Foundation.

She told the German news agency DPA that the gap in Germany between poor and rich continued to widen.

Spannegel said the so-called low wage sector involving menial jobs had become disconnected from overall economic gains. In addition, there had been a surge in individuals earning from their capital investments.

'Massive break" in equality

She pointed to 2013 data from the federal statistics office, showing that more than half or nearly 52% of net assets in Germany were owned by just 10% of the population.

In a glaring contrast, half of Germany's population of 81 million owns only just over one percent of assets.

"That is a massive break in equal opportunity," said Spannagel, adding that an individual's chance of making it ahead had diminished and the risk of falling into poverty had grown.

In the 1980s, the risk of falling from the middle income milieu into poverty had been around 12%, she said. Since 2005, the risk had risen to 16%.
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Bombs, War Crimes & Our Diminished Sensitivity

A great opinion piece on how bombing & killing innocent civilians, at the push of a button, has become just a video game for the strong & "civilized" nations.

2 Hague Conventions banned the senseless aerial bombing of civilians but the fine print was that these bombings were banned during the wars between "civilized nations." Since, the Global West has always considered itself "civilized," aerial bombing of civilians was never banned during wars when an "uncivilized" country needs to be taught a lesson.

Although, today's world has several different kinds of international institutions, beside the UN, where, countries are supposedly on an equal footing, but when it comes to politics, wars, & the ensuing value of human lives, there is still a huge divide between the strong Global West / North & Global East / South. The Global West / North still consider itself "civilized" & above any international law, whatsoever, whereas, the Global East / South has to be policed & berated like a little naughty baby.

Most of the general public in the Global West has a diminished sensitivity towards illegitimate wars & chaos their countries are creating in other countries. News of innocent civilians being killed for no reason than just being alive either don't make to the Western news media or if they do, the public just brushes it away like some kind of unwanted annoyance. There was a time when huge protests were organized in the streets of American streets against the Vietnam war, but when American drones are easily killing innocent civilians in Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria etc., the public is all fine & dandy with it.

Ironically, as the emir of Afghanistan implied, so-called "civilized" nations have not only mastered the art of killing innocent civilians for no reasons, whatsoever, they have also lost any sensitivity or guilt towards falsely creating wars & then killing people in other countries. In the West, when someone kills someone else without any remorse, he / she is labelled a psychopath. But when hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians are killed by a "civilized" nation, it's all in the name of peace & justice. Prosecution of war crimes are never done against them & everyone goes on with their lives like nothing ever happened.

Then, the Western public wonders why the people of "uncivilized" nations hate us? They don't hate you. They hate the double standards of international bodies like UN. They hate double sensitivities of the general public. They hate how the value of an Iraqi life is far less than a French one, for instance. The general public cries a river if a few die in the West, but a thousand killed in the East don't even register a small tear.

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http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/10/bombs-war-crimes-diminished-sensitivity-151013101634047.html

On April 28, 1937, Pablo Picasso read the front-page headlines in L'Humanite: "One thousand incendiary bombs dropped by Hitler and Mussolini's planes reduce the city of Guernica to ashes. An incalculable number of dead and wounded. For how long can the world tolerate the terrifying exploits of international fascism?"

Though generally not much affected by political events, Picasso was devastated by the aerial bombing of civilians in his native country & immediately began to work on an enormous painting of protest & memorial. Executed in the same black-and-white as the harrowing newspaper pictures, Guernica was immediately adopted as both emblem & fund-raiser for international anti-Franco activism.

In the ensuing decades, it became so iconic an image of the horrors of war that a tapestry facsimile was placed in the lobby of the United Nations. In 2003, when Colin Powell went to the UN to present the US' case for military intervention in Iraq, this tapestry was covered with a blue curtain. As the New York Times commented at the time, "Mr Powell can't very well seduce the world into bombing Iraq surrounded on camera by shrieking and mutilated women, men, children …"

Picasso's masterpiece emerged from his epoch's general repugnance towards aerial bombing (in the streets, one million Parisians protested the Guernica bombing while he was painting inside), a now-diminished feeling that we would do well to revive.

Last resort

As HG Wells' 1908 novel, War in the Air, showed, it was not civilian air travel that people envisioned in the wake of the Wright brothers' early successes, but bombs. And, as was immediately recognised, the dominance of the skies by "air navies" would herald a different kind of warfare. Forget those soldierly qualities celebrated since Homer - courage, valour, chivalry & the like; in the future, you could defeat a people without emotion & without danger to yourself. Even generals demurred at a prospect both so brutal & so cowardly, & aerial bombing of civilian targets was banned by both Hague Conventions in 1899 & 1907.

But the Hague Conventions only governed the conduct of war between "civilised nations", which implied that such crude tactics could be used against those deemed neither "civilised" nor "nations". Therefore, naturally, there were experiments in Europe's empires. In 1920, Britain & France used bombs to terrorise civilians rebelling against their newly-installed regimes in Iraq & Syria, respectively. Britain also dropped bombs on civilians in Afghanistan, whose emir articulated the paradox that has obtained ever since: "It is a matter for great regret that the throwing of bombs by Zeppelins on London was denounced as a most savage act … while now we see with our own eyes that such operations are ... prevalent among civilised people of the West."

Western assumptions about which populations may be targeted with aerial bombardment have remained intact - & no one should be surprised if those populations have stored up a diabolical picture of the West over the course of the intervening century.

What has not remained intact is the basic repugnance towards aerial bombing which made it, even in the old empires, an unpopular last resort. Today, aerial bombing fails to generate the outrage that Guernica did, despite its inordinately more destructive effects. Of course, this is partly because the West now feels it will not itself be the target, which was not the case in the 1930s. But it is also because the great internationalist enterprise of which the Hague Conventions were a part - which included making war less brutal, &, if possible, ending it - has fallen into cynical disrepair, & one of the results is the diminished sensitivities of our era.

The Palace of Nations in Geneva ... is a relic of that enterprise, which sought a new and better world. Visionaries from every continent were united in the feeling that what must replace Europe's empires was some form of inter-national "society of societies": Just as in modern nations, free citizens freely congregated to resolve social disputes & determine their joint future, so in the "society of societies", free nations would do the same. Arbitration would replace war; the sphere of politics would be the world.

In an era threatened by total war, this vision captivated generations of idealists, including such disparate figures as Andrew Carnegie and HG Wells. It resulted in an impressive furniture of international laws, conventions & institutions, some of which still operate today. But it was severely damaged by the Cold War when both the US & the Soviet Union undermined international bodies so they could transform the world in their own interests. Since then, the US & its allies have pursued aggressive private policies on the global stage whose relationship with any residual idea of the international "community" is well expressed by that blue curtain across Guernica. Russia is now returning to a similarly extralegal role.

The envisioned "society" of societies has become instead a gangland, & one where there is no trace of the "democracy" that is its frequent war cry. The attack on the MSF hospital on October 3 is just another example of how battered the old civilising project, a key part of which was the inviolability of medical personnel in war zones, is.

Prosecuting war crimes

As far back as 1864, when a Swiss millionaire who had earlier witnessed the carnage of the Battle of Solferino established in Geneva an international medical force to care for the victims of war, regardless of their nationality, the red cross on the doctors' flag was a guarantee of immunity from attack. The Geneva Convention, at which the new organisation was announced, stated, "Ambulances and military hospitals shall be recognised as neutral, and as such, protected and respected by the belligerents as long as they accommodate wounded and sick." This provision was updated & expanded in the Hague Conventions & - during that last burst of internationalism before the Cold War - in the Geneva Convention of 1949.

Despite everything, the legal situation has not been diluted since. Any wartime belligerent knowingly attacking neutral medical staff & facilities without notifying them in advance is guilty of a war crime. ...

Our present world crisis is, in great part, a result of the assault over the last seventy years on the ideals & infrastructure designed between 1850 & 1950 to ensure world peace. It may be too late to rebuild them, but we do not have a better hope. The vision of a consensual internationalism built on parliamentary & judicial process remains the only way to restore to global affairs the kind of legitimacy that might give young people in Iraq or Syria or Afghanistan a feeling that the world is not entirely lawless & senseless - & it does not need to be burned down. And the starting point of such a "society of societies" must be that the strong - as in any society worth the name - be bound by the same rules as the weak.

An apocryphal story goes like this: Pablo Picasso, living in Nazi-occupied Paris, had his studio searched by the Gestapo. Coming across a reproduction of Guernica, a German officer asked the artist, "Did you do this?" "No," replied Picasso. "You did."

One wonders how such a conversation would go today.

Rana Dasgupta is a British novelist and essayist based in Delhi. He is the author of Capital: The Eruption of Delhi.

Primary reasons for violence spike in Malmo, Sweden

Although, the article is a few months old, the only reason I liked it, is because it shows how social & economic inequality among the public is dangerous to us all.

Governments, especially Western ones, keep saying for the past couple decades that they are working hard to root out "terrorism". Whenever there are violent incidents, government officials issue statements with words like "unnecessary" & "senseless", & outline how they will root out the terrorism problem from their societies & the world. But the violence has only increased.

So, the common sense says that the root cause analyses done by these government officials' advisors are useless. One of the major root cause of modern terrorism is social & economic inequality, & hidden & open discrimination.

In one of my prior blog posts from last year (2015), the article mentioned was a Daily Mail article mentioning how Charlie Hebdo attackers were born-&-bred French citizens. Those attackers / "terrorists" grew up in Parisian suburbs, which are full of immigrants or even "foreign" citizens, & who are excluded from the economic development of France, Paris, & its general public. They have been left out in the metaphorical cold outside, while the Caucasian French natives are enjoying the fruits of immigrants' hard labour.

Now, those "foreign" citizens are from former French colonies & have been living in France for generations. But they are still considered as "foreigners". This similar problem has permeated other countries in EU; from Spain to UK to Belgium to Sweden. The root problem is still same, though; immigrants are welcomed wholeheartedly because they are discriminated against in the upper echelons of the labour market & they are only given hard labour jobs, at minimum wages & benefits, if any, while the natives of the country enjoy becoming rich on the backs of those immigrants.

As the professor of social science clearly explains in the article that these violent incidents in Sweden are not senseless but have major social problems like discrimination & high unemployment among immigrant families are their root causes. The unemployment rate for youths is about 25%, & most of those unemployed are “not Swedes.” He further affirms my points that “in the last 15 years the gap between the rich & the poor has grown enormously & ... you find very rich people that are white people & the poor people are non-white people.”

Problem is that Western governments & other non-Western governments will not solve the root cause of these violent incidents. Solving root causes will involve stop interfering with the internal sovereign matters of other developing countries, stop selling arms & weapons to developing countries, putting in policies in their own countries to judge every job applicant on merit & not on personal & professional networks, & end discrimination in labour market & education. Some of these are much easier to do but unachievable because it will hurt them economically. Some others are much harder to do, perhaps impossible, because human nature cannot be changed (we like people who are like us & hence, we readily will help them).

But if Western governments want these violent incidents to stop, then they have to take the first steps to carefully examine themselves & correct their own actions first. We can't blame others for their actions until we take a hard look at ourselves & correct our own actions first. Why give an excuse to others to harm us?

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https://www.rt.com/news/310757-sweden-malmo-blasts-crime/

On Sunday, the southern Swedish city of Malmo saw the fourth grenade attack in under a week as the a hand grenade was detonated in a car park in the district of Värnhem in the morning, local media reported.

The attack came after a blast on Friday in the Solbacken neighborhood, which occurred less than 12 hours after another explosion in the residential area of Limhamn in the west, & 2 days after a car bomb attack that injured a man outside a community center in the south.

“It is the thirtieth explosive attack since the New Year. We have a situation that is serious,” said the Malmö police chief, Stefan Sintéus, about the explosion on Friday, as quoted by the Local.se on Saturday.
...

This week’s unrest continues a series of numerous shootings, explosions & arsons that have occurred since the beginning of the year in Malmo, infamous for high crime rates, multi-ethnic & gang-related violence.

Since the beginning of 2015, 18 explosions rocked the city prompting the Swedish police's national bomb squad (NSB) to be called in. Over the whole 2014 a total of 25 explosions took place which shows a significant increase, Goran Mansson, head of NSB Malmo, told regional newspaper Sydsvenskan on Friday.

Police said they believe this week’s explosions are linked with the court sentencing of 3 young men on July 10 for their roles in the Christmas Eve bombing in Rosengard – the city district which has been dubbed by media as Sweden’s “most notorious refugee ghetto.” The Financial Times reported that 9 out of 10 in Rosengard have a foreign background.
...

Rosengard, a district in Malmo, was built in the 1960s & has long been associated with immigrants. Over 80% of residents there are immigrants, hailing from the Middle East, Africa & Eastern Europe. Only 38% of residents in the district are employed, according to the Economist, prompting restive youth to take to rioting & crime.
...

Forstell told RT that there are 30 to 40 people with criminal background & weapons in the city. He explained that criminal activity is connected with internal conflicts between different gangs or ethnic groups.

“Some of these people are involved in selling drugs and some of them are in other kinds of economic relations with each other and are not happy with the way things work out. It’s more of a business-like conflict,” he said.

According to statistics provided by local authorities, 31% of the city’s 300,000 population were born abroad & nearly 41% of the residents have a foreign background. The main countries from which immigration takes place are ones which have been recently plagued by conflicts – migrant groups from Iraq, Syria, the former Yugoslavia & Somalia are among them. The data also says that the Muslim population constitutes about 20% of Malmo’s population; this is one of the most significant percentages in Scandinavian cities.

Adrian Groglopo, professor of social science at the University of Gothenburg said that the conflicts are fueled by racial & economic tensions.

“People growing up in different areas segregated racially and economically are trying to keep their own business, protect their own areas and sometimes create a very violent climate,” he told RT.
...

Groglopo believes that the young population is being hit the hardest by the “racism and segregation in Sweden.”

“We have living conditions which are not good for the youth, that’s one of the problems,” he explains.

He also pointed to the problem of unemployment in Sweden which is “about 8-9 percent and for young people it’s about 25 percent.” He stressed that one of the main problems is ethnic discrimination in the labor market as most of the unemployed are “not Swedes.”

“In the last 15 years the gap between the rich & the poor has grown enormously & of course it has racial connotations – you find very rich people that are white people & the poor people are non-white people,” he added.

He urged the Swedish government to implement political measures for non-discrimination. There have been controversial incidents involving security forces & refugees ... .
...

“Sweden is going through political period very complex and bad,” Groglopo said. “We [are witnessing] a raise of fascism and Nazism in Sweden…they are getting political power.”
...

Thousands of children in Britain being forced to live on £1 a day

Since, this is happening to 1000s of children, "many of whom are British children," what do you expect will happen to the children of refugees. In many cases, refugees are treated much better than the country's own citizens. Why?

Reason being that, depending on how visible the issue is of refugee crisis (for example, the current refugee crisis stemming from the wars in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya etc.), governments tend to throw inordinate amount of money at the crisis to appease the voting public. But, since, the government has a set amount of money in its coffers, it takes that money from somewhere else in the social security system. So, for instance, in this case, other vulnerable families & children.

This news story also dispels the myth that Western countries are awash in money. This myth is especially true in Asia, Africa, & Middle Eastern countries ... all the developing nations. At least, 80% of the public of Western countries is struggling financially. These people are the residents & citizens of the country; be it UK, US, Canada, Germany, France, Italy etc.

Problem is that these people & stories are not visible. What is visible in the media is the high-falutin' people with luxurious lifestyles of the rich. In many cases, those people themselves are also struggling financially, & only able to afford luxurious items by borrowing heavily on their credit cards.

So, anyway, if & when, refugees & their families are treated much better in a Western country than their own citizens & their families, resentments & hate start fomenting among the public. Citizens turn against refugees, whom they see as robbing them off jobs & money, of which those citizens think they were entitled of, in the first place. Were those citizens entitled of that extra financial help is a separate discussion. But what should be of common sense to any government is that the welfare of its own public comes first.
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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/thousands-of-children-in-britain-being-forced-to-live-on-1-a-day-10292792.html

Thousands of children – many of whom are British citizens – are subsisting on as little as £1 a day because their parents are migrants with no recourse to public funds.

There are 5,900 children in England & Wales living on the brink of total destitution because their parents cannot work or receive government benefits, according to research from The University of Oxford’s migration unit. Charities say the situation is pushing vulnerable children into “severe poverty & hunger.”

In almost a quarter of the families affected at least one child is a British citizen, researchers from Oxford’s Centre on Migration, Policy & Society (COMPAS) found. Some go for months without receiving any help at all, forced to sleep in cars, disused buildings or even on the street.

Most of the families affected are here legally but awaiting a Home Office decision on their immigration case. ... 71% of the families helped by local authorities in 2012/13 had a decision on their immigration status pending.

Forbidden from working or receiving welfare, the only money many migrant parents can find to feed their children is a child poverty payout from social services, which can be as low as £5 a week for a family. If the local authority decides the child is destitute its family will also be given accommodation.

The Home Office does not help families while they wait for a decision on their immigration case unless they are seeking asylum - & it forbids them from working.

Local Authorities have an obligation to help all destitute children under the Children’s Act. The financial support, known as Section 17, is set by individual councils, often on a case by case basis.

Since councils’ budgets have been significantly cut back by central Government, these payments are frequently far below the necessary amount to live on. Payments typically range from £23 to £35 per child per week but this money has to feed parents too. If a family receives help from a food bank the value of this is often deducted from the meagre council help, leaving them with just a few pounds a week for nappies & other essentials.

Matthew Reed, chief executive of The Children’s Society said: “The desire to be seen to be tough on immigration can often mean the government overlooks its legal obligation to recognise children as children. As a result, too often they & their families are being pushed into severe poverty & hunger. They are being made homeless, forced into over-crowded, inappropriate accommodation & even on to the streets.

“Some families aren’t even being assessed to determine what help they need or are entitled to. And if they do get support, it is too low & often at the discretion of local authorities. Recent cuts to legal aid & the Home Office’s slow decision making means children are being forced to live on this support for long periods of time. This must change.”

Experts believe the Government needs to step in & provide funding to protect children’s welfare in this situation. Mr. Reed said: “It is critical that these families get the help they need & that the Government provides the funds necessary so local authorities can protect these children’s welfare. Children must be treated first & foremost as children — not as immigration statistics.”

Councils have to assess whether a family is eligible by working out if they are truly destitute. Researchers found social services often rejected cases with very little evidence.

Rita Chadha, chief executive of the Refugee & Migrant Forum of Essex & London (RAMFEL), said: “We see at least one client a day in this situation. They come in extremely distressed. We’ve seen children sleeping in church graveyards & disused shops. In many cases councils won’t give families money until prompted to by other agencies.”

More than a third of families surveyed survived on rudimentary council support for more than a year, largely due to lengthy waits for a decision from the Home Office. In 7% of cases, families needed help for more than 3 years.

Jonathan Price, co-author of the report, said: “Even after they have started receiving Section 17 support, some children face long periods living on subsistence rates that are well below those deemed minimal for any other category of people in the UK. This raises real concerns about the long-term impact of poverty on these children.”

Price added: “These are vulnerable people. We found that, prior to receiving local authority support, children & families were living highly precarious lives & were sometimes subject to exploitation. Domestic violence was an element in many referrals.”

A Home Office spokeswoman said: “We welcome those who wish to make a life in the UK with their family, work hard & make a contribution. But family life must not be established here at the taxpayer's expense.

“We work closely with local authorities to ensure that immigration decisions in cases receiving local authority support are made as quickly as possible.

“In exceptional circumstances, or where people granted leave on family grounds show that they would otherwise be destitute, they are granted recourse to public funds.”

The study was based on a survey of 137 Children’s Services departments in England & Wales, as well as 105 voluntary sector organisations & 92 interviews.

The police force accused of hating black people

That headline may give a thought that this news is about police brutality & racism in US, but you would be wrong. This news is about Portugal.

So, if Europeans are thinking that "our European societies have grown out of such uninfluential & petty social issues as racism", then they would be very wrong.

Similar to the people saying, in regards to the police brutality & hate crimes against African-Americans in US, that American society is still very much racially divided, Europe is also still very racially divided. Over the years, I have read news how young black soccer / football players are discriminated against in Italy, or how Russian & Italian professional football matches are marred by racist chants & slogans, or how African migrants are treated badly in Scandinavian countries, or immigrants are treated badly in France (Paris) or the London riots etc.

We recently saw how African migrants are abused & hated in Europe, when they are trying to flee their war-ravaged homes in Middle East & Africa. Even though, those wars are the handiwork of Europeans themselves, by selling billions of weapons to the known corrupt governments of those conflict regions.

So, instead of successfully integrating these migrants in their societies, European countries are essentially rejecting these migrants & making them feel like that they are not wanted in their countries, by treating them "like animals".

So, as the world is seemingly becoming "modern," we, humans are moving backwards in our thinking of other human beings, & social diseases like hatred, racism, violence, & geopolitical conflicts are increasing on a daily basis.
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http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32419952

Jailza Sousa's young son is afraid when she hangs out the washing on their first-floor balcony.
 
"He's traumatised," says the 29-year-old from Cape Verde. "He says, 'Don't go there because you're going to get shot.'"

Looking down the narrow, potholed streets, she remembers what happened one day in February, earlier this year.

It was noon in Cova da Moura - a ramshackle suburb on a hill on the outskirts of Lisbon built by immigrants from Portugal's former African colonies.

It's a colourful, friendly place by day, but it has a reputation for drugs, crime & violence. It's a place that taxi drivers refuse to go at night.

On 5 February, a team of police officers had a young man called Bruno up against a wall. They were searching him & started beating him - his blood stained the wall & street for several days afterwards. Bystanders started protesting, & the police reacted with shotguns loaded with rubber buckshot.

"They treat us like animals," Sousa says of the police. "It's a black neighbourhood - they treat us like we're all here to be exterminated."

Sousa was taken to hospital while 2 people who work for a local human rights organisation, Moinho de Juventude, or Mill of Youth, set off for the police station to find out what had happened to Bruno.

The two men, Flavio Almada & Celso Lopes, were accompanied by about 5 other young men who had witnessed the incident.

When they arrived at the police station, they say 3 police officers were blocking the entrance.

"Suddenly about 15 or 20 cops came with sticks, with shotguns, & started trying to kick & punch us, trying to hit us with batons," says Lopes.

"And I said 'OK, I'm leaving,'" claims Almada. But he says one police officer cocked his shotgun. "And quickly, he shoot."

Lopes was hit in the leg by rubber buckshot. He, Almada & 3 others were then taken inside the police station, where they were handcuffed. They allege the beatings continued accompanied by extreme racist abuse.

Almada says one officer told him, "You don't know how much I hate you. If I had the power, you would all be exterminated."

He says he was terrified. "I will never forget his face. I will never forget his words."

The men claim other police officers told them they should join Islamic State.

Lopes says for 5 hours they received no medical attention. Eventually all 5 men were admitted to hospital.

Almada says he suffers from terrible nightmares & some of the injuries have still not healed.

4 separate investigations are underway into what happened. Both the Interior Ministry & Portugal's racial discrimination commission are investigating the conduct of the police.

Almada, Lopes & their friends face charges of invading the police station, & they in turn are pressing their own charges of torture & racism against the police.

"When the police come the police are the law," says Lopes. "You are no longer living in a democracy, you are living in a police state."

At the time, the media reported that Bruno had thrown a rock at a police van, breaking a window & injuring an officer. Bruno & eyewitnesses deny this.

It was also reported that the men had tried to storm the police station & that the 5 who were detained had suffered "minor" injuries after resisting arrest. There were later reports that a police officer was taken to hospital with a broken arm.

This incident re-ignited long standing claims of police brutality & racism - a story told in the graffiti on Cova da Moura's walls.

A video circulating on social media shows another recent police raid in Cova da Moura which was filmed by a resident. In the early hours of the morning, police with shotguns & wearing balaclavas can be seen walking through the streets, & shots can be heard.

These police are part of what's known as a Rapid Intervention Team - highly trained & heavily equipped, & normally only called in when a situation escalates beyond what the regular police can handle. But Almada says they are a common sight.

He introduces me to Whassysa Magalhaes, a teacher & part of the management of Moinho de Juventude. One day the police stopped her and asked for her ID.

"I was late & said I had to go to university & they said, 'Black people study?'" she recalls, adding that they used a derogatory term for black people.

Others tell stories of being called monkeys or having their ID cards destroyed by police.

"Here, police just ask you to stop & if you don't stop or you ignore them, they shoot at you, start kicking you, hitting you with sticks," says one young man, Fabio.

"They hate black people."

In another part of Lisbon, Quinta da Lage, the side of one house is painted with a mural of a young black man, & the words "RIP Kuku, let justice be done."

The house belongs to Domingas Sanches. In 2009, her 14-year-old son Elson, also known as Kuku, was driving with friends in a stolen car when they were stopped by police. They started to run away, but Elson was caught by one of the officers. He managed to break away, & was then shot in the head at point blank range by the policeman.

"It's difficult but life goes on, sometimes I cry, I miss him," says Sanches.

The policeman was tried for gross negligent manslaughter & acquitted after claiming he heard a sound like a pistol being cocked, & saw a metallic object in Elson's hand. A weapon was recovered at the scene, although Elson's defenders say it had no fingerprints on it & claim it was planted.

"I felt a great disgust," says Sanches. "If it were a 14-year-old kid killing a policeman, then someone would be found responsible."

"The only thing I wanted was that justice be done, but it probably won't be."

This sense of injustice is widespread. Activists claim that 14 young black men have been killed by police since 2001, & that no police officers have been held responsible for those deaths, though the numbers include some deaths where police responsibility is disputed.

One person who remembers the first of those shootings is Lieve Meersschaert. Born in Belgium she came to Cova da Moura in the early 80s where she co-founded Moinho de Juventude, the organisation that Almada & Lopes work for.

In 2001 a police officer killed a man by shooting him in the back, she says, prompting an escalation of violence.

Eventually Moinho arranged a dinner for local police commanders to meet young people from the neighbourhood - including the sister of the man who was shot.

"It was very funny when the 35 police station commanders arrived, they didn't want to come in. And afterwards we almost had to kick them out, because they didn't want to leave," she says.

After that meeting the police commander of the local area, Antonio Manuel Pereira, worked on improving relations between police & residents. They held football tournaments & children spent time with the officers.

But Pereira retired in 2012 & his replacement put less emphasis on community policing, says Meersschaert. Around the same time a pilot programme called the Critical Neighbourhoods Initiative, which promoted closer co-operation between police & residents, was cancelled by the newly elected conservative government.

Meersschaert says brutality has got worse since then, & that the government ignored warnings.

The BBC made several requests for interviews to the Interior Ministry & the Prime Minister's office, which were all turned down. Eventually the Ministry provided a statement about the police, referred to here as the PSP.

"We reject the suggestion of the existence of police violence & racism. Community policing was, & will continue to be the basis for the deployment of police resources, with a view to ensuring the safety of people & property & to prevent crime. [Community policing] has never been abandoned by the PSP, either in Cova da Moura or in any sensitive urban area. On the contrary, the PSP carries out, on average, more than 15,000 community or neighbourhood policing operations a year, & in sensitive urban areas, interventions of this nature have been increasing. It is not correct to establish a correlation between the reduction of police officers in recent years & purely economic measures."

Almada feels that the problems in Cova da Moura come from a deeper attitude in Portuguese society.

"Racism is beyond the police, it's the whole frame of society, it's a big issue & I don't believe they want to change all these things," he says. "If you see Portugal receiving a prize for well integrated immigrants it's a big lie."

But Portugal's High Commissioner for Migration, Pedro Calado disagrees. "We don't have this big problem of racism in our society," he says.

Calado - the head of the government body tasked with promoting integration, & dealing with racial discrimination - points to the Migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX). This global study ranks countries according to how successfully they integrate migrants. Portugal currently comes second, behind Sweden.

Portugal's defenders also point out that it hasn't had riots like London or Paris, & that there's little anti-immigrant political rhetoric in Portugal.

"I have this clear perception that what happened in Cova da Moura is not the general situation of the country. This was an exception," says Calado.

He also oversees Portugal's Commission for Equality & Against Racial Discrimination, which handles racial discrimination complaints.

"We don't have many complaints," he says as he shows me a report containing the data. It indicates that from 2005-13, there were 75 complaints against the security forces.

I ask how many of those complaints were upheld.

"We would have to look at the data," says Calado. "I cannot tell."

Despite several weeks of emailing back & forth after our interview, the High Commission wouldn't tell me the number of complaints upheld against the security forces for racial discrimination. They say they lack the resources to process the data.

But piecing together the data that is available, it seems that fewer than 10 racism complaints against the security forces have been upheld in the past 10 years in the whole of Portugal. In places such as Cova da Moura, this is seen as evidence of a broken system which doesn't hold police accountable.

Although Portuguese officials deny a deep, systemic problem with the police, the recent incident involving Almada and Lopes has led to some changes.

The Interior Ministry met people from neighbourhood organisations, including Moinho de Juventude & promised to set up a new Early Warning Commission to avoid conflict.

Almada says he hopes that what happened to him might make a small difference, but he's cautious.

"I want to see the results," he says. "I'm like that guy the disciple of Jesus, I just want to see."