Criminal Minds, S2E1, Quote 1

Criminal Minds S01E22 Quote

Criminal Minds S1E21 Quote 2

Criminal Minds, S1E21 Quote 1

No human or a person can ever claim that he / she has complete knowledge or truth, since no human can ever gain complete knowledge or know exact truth. Only Allah or God or Yahweh or Bhagwan or whatever other name you have for a Supreme Being can ever claim or say that because only It knows the what the real truth is.

Allah revealed that truth in Quran & whoever reads it, without any biases or presumptions, & with an open mind, starts to see the real truth & gain that knowledge, which will benefit him / her the most in this mortal life & in the immortal life in the hereafter.

Disclaimer: Yes, Albert Einstein was an atheist, & hence, most likely didn't believe in the latter half of the quote.

Avengers Quote

Only if American government, its military apparatus, & its people can understand this ...

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Criminal Minds, S1E18 quote

"Jupiter Ascending" quote

Time is definitely the most precious commodity in the universe. As the famous idiom goes, "time and tide stops for no man," & everyone is also equal before it. Time doesn't discriminate among people based on financial, racial, linguistic, ethnicity, or geographic factors. Everyone is competing with another for nothing else, but essentially, for more time; time to add to their lives. Since, everyone wants more time than the next guy & no one can have more time regardless of how beautiful or rich or talented or influential connections he / she has, it becomes the most precious item in the whole universe.

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Escaping the Election Cocoon

A good opinion piece on how censoring others who don't subscribe to our own ideologies / thoughts & don't confirm our pre-existing biases adversely affect our own ability to make intelligent decisions.

Lots of people around the world are wondering for the past year or so how such bigoted people like Donald Trump in US elections 2016 or even a self-professed criminal like Rodrigo Duterte, latest President of Philippines & who was nicknamed, "The Donald Trump of Philippines," can win over millions of people.

A major reason for how these kinds of people win over the hearts & minds of millions is because those millions of voters are living in a bubble / cocoon of their own. Anyone who is not a mindless "yes-man" to their ideas / opinions / thoughts are banished from their little worlds. They feel intelligent & safe in knowing that they are surrounded by people who think like them. In the end, there are millions who are mindlessly following anyone, like a herd of sheep, to do anything to appease their human god.

So why are we seeing more mind-numbing stupidity in this gilded age of data & information, which are all around us & easily accessible, too? We are seeing this happening far more frequently in this information age, because the information providers, the social media giants (Facebook, Twitter etc.), are helping the populations become mindless zombies. The social media is actively altering the perception & truth around us by feeding us info which confirm our bias & echo our thoughts, instead of helping us see the other side of the debate.

On a personal level, I've felt this happening all too often. I've been unfriended & unfollowed by friends because of my thoughts & opinions; just because I am not mindlessly saying what they wanted to hear from their "friends". I thought a true friend who is supposed to push back on your ideas which are wrong, but, apparently, in this "modern" day & age, a true friend is one who mindlessly agrees with you with whatever crap you are spewing out of your mouth.

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http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/escaping-the-election-cocoon/

More & more, we are living in our own tailor-made media cocoons, carefully constructed shells that surround us with voices & ideas that support our own beliefs. Conversely, they also shelter us from anything that might challenge our perspective. This distorts our view of the world, makes us less able to understand others, & less likely to embrace new ideas.

My parents & my grandparents before them had 3 sources of news: the local paper, the radio, & the 6 o’clock television news. On a typical day, I get my news from 2 or 3 newspapers, the radio, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, a couple of news sites & maybe LinkedIn. And I’m probably below average. A recent survey by Ipsos Reid examined 16 different types of media commonly used by Canadians for their news. Another poll by the Media Technology Monitor in 2014 found that the number of Canadians who are using the Internet as their main source of news has increased by 20% over the previous 2 years.

The options to filter that news are also increasing. The most common online news aggregators & social media platforms, such as Facebook & Twitter, allow us to customize what we see. Are stories about the global refugee crisis getting you down? Click. 60 million people just disappeared. Is a particular journalist saying something unpleasant about your political party? Click. As far as you’re concerned, her mouth has been forever covered by especially durable duct tape.

When we tune out that journalist because we feel she isn’t being “objective,” what we really mean is that her views do not support our pre-existing beliefs. In fact, truly objective news is impossible. Every adjective & headline shifts the story in one direction or another. Even if you reduced a story to just numbers & facts, much would depend on which figures & in which order.

Unfortunately, our habit of tuning out ideas & voices we don’t like is part of our biological programming. “Confirmation bias,” the tendency to search for information that confirms our beliefs & to remember it longer, is a well-documented & inescapable element of our behaviour. As a result, we instinctively tailor our universe to limit the emotionally upsetting views that contradict us. Until recently, the shortage of media choices made this hard to do. Left or right, we all watched the same suppertime newscast. Now, it’s finally possible to be bound in a nutshell, & count ourselves kings of infinite space, because we can avoid any bad dreams.

This has been very apparent in the refugee debate. A significant number of Canadians are opposed to allowing in more Syrians, due to the possibility that they would include Islamic State supporters, or that they would spread Islam or because we should be helping our own poor first. If you listen to a specific set of radio stations, read certain blogs & interact with people similar to yourself on Facebook, these ideas aren’t only defensible, they are overwhelmingly obvious.

Likewise, another group of Canadians who subscribe to different newspapers, listen to the CBC & read the Huffington Post are equally convinced of the self-evident fact that there is a clear need for Canada to do more, & accepting far more refugees would neither strain our economy nor our social fabric. In reality, both sides are filtering out important pieces of information, making it impossible to see the full picture. Which is why neither group can grasp how anyone could possibly be so asinine as to dispute what is so clearly self-evident.

This is bad, & not just because it prevents us from having civil conversations about Canada’s refugee & immigration policies. It creates a lack of empathy that leads us to denigrate & dismiss the opinions of others. The leaders of all political parties, who are equally unable to acknowledge they do not have a monopoly on the truth, demonstrate this attitude repeatedly.

Our self-made cocoons also impair our ability to make intelligent decisions. In ... elections, most voters will not watch a single debate, read any of the party platforms or attend any campaign events. They don’t need to. They already know for whom they’re going to vote, &, coincidentally, everyone else in his or her cocoon is voting the same way.

And for those we ultimately elect? Their own filters will make their governing decisions less effective. Ruling parties of all stripes tend only to listen to academics who support their agenda, only attend rallies that contain true believers, only read newspapers that endorse their policies & only engage constituents who already voted for them. ...

There are ways to cut through these cocoons, however. Just by being aware that you are constantly self-censoring the information that reaches you helps. You can also consciously resist the urge to mute the outspoken critic on Twitter, or unfollow the Facebook friend who shares articles in support of that politician you loathe. One step further would be to actually read some of those articles, or pick up a newspaper you wouldn’t normally read, no matter how much of a rag you think it is.
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Palestinians Can Learn From the African-American Struggle - Ali Abunimah on RAI

Another good interview. What I really liked in this interview is the piece where Abunimah says how US, which is usually held up as the role model of integration of diverse population, cannot actually be held as that kind of role model where there's so much systematic racial injustice there.

Continuing onwards, he says something, which really struck home that even if Palestinians do achieve the dream of one-state solution where Israelis & Palestinians live side by side, peacefully; Palestinians, in fact, be heavily discriminated & oppressed, similar to Muslims in India are still discriminated & Blacks in South Africa who are still trying to come out of discrimination & oppression they were suffering during apartheid.

Then, Abunimah says something which informed & blew my mind that how Israel & US do have "shared values"; the values all American Presidents have always talked about for the past 6 decades or so. That's the "shared values" of discriminating against & oppressing Palestinians, African-Americans, Latinos, & other "coloureds". Racism is very much entrenched in Israeli & American societies, alike. On top of that, & especially in light of what happened in Baltimore & other American cities, & even in Toronto, the American law enforcement agencies visit Israel on a regular basis, to receive training on how to be better at security. They watch & learn torture techniques in Israel where Palestinians, adults & children alike, are tortured in Israeli prisons.

So, it shows me the ignorance of general public in North America & pretty much all over the world when US, Canada & Europe are held up as paragons of human rights, when these countries are no different from Israel, & treat their coloured populations in no different way; by making harsher criminal laws, hypermilitarization of policing, making education unaffordable, & keeping good jobs away from them.

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

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: So, in chapter one of the book--I'm going to read a quote--you talk about what Palestinians can learn from the African-American struggle:

While abolishing the racism and violence of Zionism practices against Palestinians is the key to justice and peace in historic Palestine, no less than the abolition of slavery and Jim Crow in the United States were absolutely necessary, recent American history demonstrates that systems of racial control and the ideologies underpinning them remain robust and adaptable. A formally liberal and rights-based order can allow a system just as oppressive as Jim Crow to hide and flourish in plain sight.

One of your themes in the first chapter is what Palestinians can learn from African Americans. And we're in a city that's 65% African-American, and you've lived in Chicago for 20 years, a city with a very large African-American population. So what do you think Palestinians can learn from the African-American struggle?

ALI ABUNIMAH, COFOUNDER, ELECTRONIC INTIFADA: Well, if I can just give some context to that quote, which I think helps to answer that as more and more people have recognized that the so-called two-state solution is over, there's--more and more people are arguing, including myself, for a single democratic state encompassing what is today Israel and the occupied territories.

And often people say, well we ought to have equal rights as in the United States or as in some other countries, and what I felt that it was necessary to do is to really interrogate that and to say, well I don't think we can sincerely or honestly hold the United States up as a model when in fact there is so much systematic racial injustice.

And so what that quote leads into is a discussion of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, which was a very important book for me and for many other people, to explain how equality before the law officially in the United States can coexist with mass incarceration. And that serves as a warning for Palestinians that even if they achieve full liberal rights in a single state, they may not get out from under the yoke of racism and oppression and apartheid.

But it also requires us to examine the kind of so-called shared values. And that's from a chapter in the book called "Shared Values, Shared Struggle", that at every occasion, President Obama and all his predecessors will tell us that, oh, the United States and Israel have shared values. And so what are these shared values? And I argue that it includes things like a really racialized view of the world, where Palestinians, in the case of Israel, and African Americans, Latinos, and other people of color in the United States are viewed as some kind of demographic threat that needs to be policed and controlled and surveilled.

And these shared values take a very real form when you see ... that the top police brass from almost every major U.S. city and many smaller cities have been taken on junkets to Israel by groups including the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, groups sponsored by AIPAC, the Israel lobby group, and they take them to places like Megiddo Prison, where Palestinians are routinely tortured, including children, held in solitary confinement. And then they come out and they say, oh, the Israelis are so good at security and in living in a tough neighborhood. And even that language of the tough neighborhood, it comes out of a racialized American discourse. And they say, you see all these quotes from American police chiefs saying, oh, the Israelis are such experts, we're going to take what we learned back to Chicago, back to L.A., back to Baltimore.

And, in fact, Israel is--its niche now is the so-called homeland security industry, where they're exporting billions of dollars of goods, weapons, and services to federal, state, and local police and judicial authorities. So there's a real kind of convergence of ideology and business interest, where, in a sense, if you're fighting mass incarceration in the United States or if you're fighting what Israel is doing to Palestinians, you really need to be part of the same fight, because it's the same corporations profiting from them and it's the same politicians who are talking about Israel as a paragon of human rights and a model for the United States while backing the hypermilitarization of policing, the rail to jail for schoolchildren in the cities, particularly African-American schoolchildren, where we see public education being gutted and privatized and at the same time we see prisons flourishing.
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JAY: I think it was the 1940s where it was made illegal. But if you had a subdivision, a new subdivision just outside the city or a suburb in Baltimore, you actually had to sign an agreement in your deed which said that you could not sell your house to blacks--or Jews, for that matter, but particularly targeted with African Americans. Later, it was formally made illegal and then informally was still in force: if you actually tried to sell your house, you could be--there would be repercussions in terms of the people that own the subdivision; and later they used blockbusting to play this. But as late as 1969 in Baltimore, there was ... in The Baltimore Sun, there was a section of real estate classifieds for whites, a section for Jews (a separate section), and no section for blacks.

ABUNIMAH: Well, and that was true in Chicago and that was true all over the country. And it's important to--and that was true in Canada, by the way. And it's important not to lay all this history on the South and to forget how entrenched and systematic and formal this segregation and racism was throughout the United States. And the legacy of that is that cities like Chicago are still the most segregated in the world in terms of the ongoing effects of that.

But that kind of segregation, which we view today as a negative result of racism that we now repudiate, is actually the goal that Israeli policymakers are working towards with many of the laws. There's a statement from the Israeli Housing minister a few years ago, Ariel Atias, who says that we have populations mixing who shouldn't be mixing and we have to keep them apart, and so Israel actually pushing policies designed at promoting ethnoracial, ethnoreligious segregation.

But this doesn't stop President Obama from these heartfelt declarations of the values he shares with Israel. And I find that to be a particularly tragic and cruel irony, given that his own election victory is seen as being one of the fruits of the sacrifices so many people made in the civil rights struggle, that, someone like him, whose election was unimaginable, even a decade ago, is today promoting a country like Israel, whose racism against Palestinians, against Africans, against others is so systematic.

JAY: What are some other examples on the housing side in Israel of where there isn't this equal citizenship?

ABUNIMAH: Well, it's on so many levels. It's on the micro level, where you have Jewish and non-Jewish citizens in present-day Israel, where Palestinian citizens of Israel have actually had to go to court for the right to live in Jewish neighborhoods. But it's also on the macro level. I mean, what is Gaza? Gaza is really an open-air prison where 1.7 million people live. 80% of them are refugees from areas that are now part of Israel. And the only reason they have to live in a fenced open-air prison in Gaza and can't go back to their lands--most of which are empty, by the way, in what's now southern Israel--the only reason they can't go back is because they're not Jewish. If they were Jewish, Israel would tear down the fences and say, come on home. So it's the micro level, where you have hundreds of Israeli rabbis, municipal rabbis whose salaries are paid for by the state, who've issued these public calls saying it's forbidden to rent to Arabs--you know, if you own an apartment, don't rent it to an Arab--and at the same time this macro level segregation. It's almost like, to use a South Africa analogy, the petty apartheid and the grand apartheid.

And, by the way, the reason these rabbis have been issuing these calls in recent years is because Israel has not allowed even the Palestinian population who are citizens of Israel to build a single new town in 65 years, has taken most of their land. So what are they trying to do? They're trying to get houses in areas where the houses are being built, which is in Jewish areas, and then they're being met with these kinds of decrees.

"The Fifth Estate" movie quote

Saudi Arabia manipulating world media with petro-dollars – Reporters Without Borders

The oppressor is always afraid from the truth & hence, never wants the truth to be out in the world. Unfortunately, in this case, the oppressor is not a Christian or a Jew or a Hindu or a Buddhist or some other 'kaffir' but is the Protector of the Two Holy Mosques in one of the two holiest places for Islam (the other one being Al-Aqsa mosque).

The demise of Saudi Arabia is not in some far-off future but in the very near future. The pride & hubris of Saudis of being the 'chosen' one (because Prophet Muhammad were one of them), its sole dependence on oil for its country's revenue (& using that God-given resource & resulting revenue to enrich its own citizens multiple folds), & trying to control & manipulate regional politics in its favour, going as far as colluding with Israel &, directly & indirectly, killing fellow Muslims, are all coming back to haunt it.

Its economy is falling in shambles. It embroiled itself in a war from which victory seems elusive. Its power play in regional politics coming undone. Its respect among Muslims around the world is cracking, if not fallen right off the cliff.

Islam is all about justice & truth. Justice doesn't require hiding truth from media using power & money. Actually, it's very hard, if not impossible, to hide the truth. It may keep hidden for awhile, but it eventually reveals itself. When the truth does come out, the oppressor is always punished in the name of justice.
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https://www.rt.com/news/272713-saudi-media-freedom-propoganda/

To paint a better picture of the Kingdom, Riyadh has been paying media across the globe as well as setting plans to ban reporters critical of the government from working in the country, Reporters Without Borders concluded after digging into WikiLeaks.

The so called ‘Saudi Cables’, revealed by the whistleblowing website, were used by Reporters Without Borders to give a better insight at the lengths the Saudi authorities are willing to go to in order to try to present a more positive image of the country abroad.

The non-governmental organization cites numerous examples dated from 2010 until 2015 including Saudi Arabia looking to fund media publications from around the globe – from Iran to Senegal.

“In 2011, for example, the Saudi embassy in London suggested funding Wesal Farsi TV (now called Tawhid), a London-based, Persian-language TV station owned by a Sunni Iranian citizen opposed to his country’s government. In return for monthly funding and allowing Saudi Arabia to appoint a representative to its board of governors, the TV station would respond to Iranian media criticism of Saudi Arabia,” Reporters Without Borders (RSF) wrote on their website.

The cables also highlight how some media organizations would actually approach the Saudi’s themselves for funding. Reporters Without Borders cites the example of the Afghan media center Spogmai. Its head requested funding in 2009 for the creation of a news website, a daily newspaper, a magazine & a TV station that would act as counterweights to Afghan media outlets, which were funded by rivals Iran.

Not all media outlets are willing to be bought, but the Saudi government seems to have a solution for those not interested in petrol dollars, RSF says.

Infuriated by the Financial Times newspaper, which it had said had “published lies” about Saudi Arabia, authorities in the Kingdom forced the publication to withdraw its correspondent & shut down its bureau in Riyadh. Saudi Arabia even considered taking legal action against the newspaper if it did not issue an apology & seek to report on the Kingdom in a “neutral” & “objective” manner.

The Saudi regime has also targeted journalists, the report finds. The country’s embassy in Berlin paid 5 German reporters at least €7,500 per month in order to write positive articles about Saudi Arabia every 6 months. This came in response to an alleged campaign by the Israeli embassy in Berlin cooperating with German media publications to write against Arab countries.

“The embassies play a dynamic role in organizing and maintaining active pro-Saudi propaganda abroad. As they are familiar with the local media, they are best placed to monitor what the media are saying and to make suggestions to the Saudi government,” Reporters Without Borders stated.

Following the revelations by WikiLeaks, the Saudi government warned its citizens not to share documents on social networks as they said they could have been fabricated.
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“We are seeing how the oil money is being used to increase influence of Saudi Arabia which is substantial of course - this is ally of the US and the UK. And since this spring it has been waging war in neighboring Yemen,” Icelandic investigative journalist & spokesperson for the WikiLeaks organization Kristinn Hrafnsson told RT.
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Paranoia quote 3

A great line from the movie, "Paranoia," highlighting the cold hard truth of our modern times.

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Young American Muslims would rather live under Sharia law

I've talked about how young Muslims, growing up in the West, feel alienated, in one of my previous blog posts.

The parents of these young Muslims immigrated to US, from their own troubling countries, & have first-hand knowledge of what goes on there or how bad those countries are; Somalia, Sudan, Middle Eastern countries, Pakistan, Afghanistan etc.

Then, after immigrating to the West, those parents had 3 options of how to raise their kids; strict Islamic & within the boundaries of their own cultural background, take a balanced approach between Western & Eastern values & cultures, or take the proverbial "do as the Romans do while in Rome" approach. All these approaches have their own pros & cons, but all in all, they all will work until their kids are younger than teen years & haven't started building their own identities.

Once, their children get into their teen years & start developing their own identities, with the help of their peer groups, their own understanding of Islam, & depending on the level & kind of support they got from home, then those children start to either see the hypocrisies, discriminations, & biases in the Western societies against Islam & Muslims, or they become just one of many ignorant Westerners.

Now, this article, in itself, is flawed, in the sense, that we all know that you cannot take a very small sample (a little slice of the Somali community in only one American city, Minneapolis) & extrapolate it to all American Muslim children. You are going to get shocking, & certainly wrong, results, if you do do that.

Having said that, & depending on what kind of Muslim children we are talking about here (as I explained above), the results may completely surprise you or they may not. For example, there are many children of Ismailis in the West, who are second or third generation Westerners, & they don't want to go back to Uganda or Kenya. Looking at these people, a person who knows & understands Islam, would never recognize that these Ismailis are Muslims, since, they don't have a problem with drinking, pre-marital sexual relations, dating, wearing clothes that even respectful non-Muslim Westerners would hesitate wearing etc.

These "children" consider themselves South Asians but they don't want to go back to an Islamic country, since their parents took the proverbial "do as the Romans do while in Rome" approach in raising them. There are also new generations of Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Nigerians, Arabs etc. who have the same attitude towards Islam & they will never give away their freedoms to go back & live in the countries from where their parents originated.

On the other hand, there are Somalis, Pakistanis, & children of people from Middle Eastern countries, who are completely opposite on the spectrum. They are very strict in abiding by the rule of Quran, or Shariah, & would not consider otherwise, regardless of how much it benefits or harms them.

The attitudes of these latter kinds of Muslim youths become a problem for the West when these youths are alienated by the society. Their friends become other Muslim friends who think like them, & not the "white" ones, who drink & party. When these Muslim youths grow up further & become of age where they start looking for jobs, they are again made to feel alienated by the labour market, which discriminates based on name & appearances. Western labour markets are heavily based on "networking." While "laissez-faire" Muslims change their names & appearances to network & mingle in the labour market, Muslims, who are strictly following Islam, are left behind. This happens regardless of merit or education or skills background. That further alienates & angers those Muslims who follow Islam & Quran by the book. They start to feel that those noble values their parents & teachers led them to believe while they were young that the West is fair, just, honest, & people in the West respect honesty & truth, & the jobs are based on objective merit, etc. are all a façade.

These feelings of alienation & anger lead to believe these Muslim youths that they won't feel such alienation in their countries where there is Islam & Shariah-based laws. Since, they have not lived in those countries, themselves, for a long time, they have not experienced some harsh realities of living in those countries. These feelings of alienation & anger are also currently making many Muslim youths to join such groups as ISIS.

So, not all young Muslim Americans want to live under Shariah law. There is a wide spectrum. Some do & some don't. The ones who do want to live under Shariah law are made to think like that by the false promises the West made itself to these people. The West portrayed a very noble picture of a honest, fair, just, & an objective society, but fell far short of it. And whenever, reality falls far short of the expectations, anger & disappointment follows.
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http://www.rt.com/usa/263529-us-muslims-sharia-law/

A US film maker, Amy Horowitz, went out onto the streets of Minneapolis to speak to young Muslims & found that most of those questioned would rather live in the Muslim countries they came from & under Sharia law than in the US.

Horowitz asked the simple question: “Do you feel more comfortable living under American Law or do you feel more comfortable living under Sharia law?”

The majority of the people answered that they’d rather live under strict Sharia law. Sharia law gives women virtually no rights at all, they can be married at the age of 9, & is a literal interpretation of the Quran, which governs all aspect of life.

Horowitz then asked Muslims in a predominately Somali area of Minneapolis if they would rather live in the US or Somalia.

Somalia, which has been engulfed in civil war for 3 decades, is one of the poorest countries in the world. Yet most of the Somalians Horowitz spoke to said they would prefer to live there than in the US, except for one young boy who said he wanted to live in Saudi Arabia.

Horowitz believes that many young Muslims he spoke to answered the way they did because they feel alienated from US society, despite being born or growing up in the US.

“What we find among the Muslim immigrants in Europe & the United States is that the first & second generation are more radical than their parents, they’re not integrating as time goes by & there’s a larger alienation,” he told RT.

One young Somalian wearing a baseball cap & speaking fluently in a strong American accent said he did not feel American.

“I speak fluent [English] & I can articulate what I’m trying to say, but other than that, as far as my culture & my preferences & everything I’m still Somali,” he said.

Horowitz explained that it is this generation of immigrants that has become problematic to Western countries.

“The fact that the vast majority of young people I asked would rather live in Somalia or Saudi Arabia as opposed to the United States, it blew me away,” he said.

Don’t blame migrants – the West helped to create their plight

A great opinion piece by Yasmin Alibhai Brown.

A lot of it what she said I have been saying all along in my blog posts (June & July 2015), especially the ones about how the West is busy selling arms & weapons to the developing countries in Asia, Middle East, & Africa.

First, the Western countries looted current-developing countries through invasions, occupations, & wars. Then, they concede those territories to the locals but they still keep meddling in the internal politics of the regions of Asia, Africa, & South America. For them, it's a game of political chess to keep their superiority intact.

In the piece, the author, although, does concede that all the blame cannot be put on the shoulders of first world leaders, since a lot of the developing countries are ruled dictatorially by corrupt leaders. But whoever has read my previous blog posts may recall that I put the blame of those corrupt leadership on the first world leaders, too.

Those corrupt leaders of the developing world are propped up by the staunch support of the same first world leaders, who, so proudly, extoll the virtues of democracy, human rights, & free speech.

Saddam Hussein was a good friend of the American leadership. So was Bashar Al-Assad. So is current Saudi ruling family. And they are such good friends that American governments still censors the documents & reasons why Saudi royals were quickly shipped out of US, right after the 9/11 incident. UK government flies their flags at half mast at the death of Saudi King. Canada obliges to keep the sale of billions of $$$ of armoured vehicles secret, at the request of Saudi ruling family.

The main reasons the developed countries keep such despots in power in developing countries are:
1. developing countries keep transferring their financial wealth to these developed countries through arms purchases.
2. conditions in developing countries keep & stays horrible, so the intellectual brain drain starts to happen.
3. That intellectual brain becomes a "legal" slave in the West, working in jobs for which he/she is way overqualified but he/she works there because he/she needs money.
4. developing countries also lose their mineral & agricultural wealth (as mentioned in the piece, too)

All in all, this truth has to be spoken. Problem is that the majority of the population of the West either doesn't know or doesn't want to know how their governments have destroyed, & are still destroying, the developing countries. But ignorance is not the answer when comeuppance comes along.
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http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/dont-blame-migrants--the-west-helped-to-create-their-plight-10273545.html

... . After years of ferocious migrant-bashing, the national psyche has been successfully reprogrammed: millions of our citizens truly believe that humans from the old Soviet Union, Africa, Asia & the Middle East are flocking to get at those gorgeous council flats & big, fat, state handouts.

So easy isn’t it? Just blame those who can’t answer back. Don’t think too deeply about why there is this movement of peoples & how they feel before, during & after they leave their homelands.

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Most migrants carry that sense of loss, even those who went off voluntarily to seek better fortune. Those who have never felt the need or pressure to emigrate can’t empathise with them, for that would be a chink in their fortress mentality. Fear is a terrible thing. It depletes compassion.

To many Britons, the current crisis is disconnected from history, & from global geopolitics. Again, it is so much easier to think of “them” & “us”, & disregard Western culpabilities, past & present.

In 2011, David Cameron, on a visit to Pakistan, accepted that Britain was responsible for many of the world’s intractable problems. It was the first & only time I recall a British leader accepting that colonialism left fractures & stains which have led to discord & failed states. (Margaret Thatcher, as well as Tony Blair & Gordon Brown, extolled the Empire & the subjugation of millions.) Mr. Cameron was savaged by the right-wing press & Labour’s Tristram Hunt. Maybe that is why he never again spoke candidly about that history. Silence is the path of least resistance.

No, you can’t just blame white people for post-colonial chaos & failures. Since independence, leaders have almost all been incompetent, corrupt & callous. Dictatorships & one-party rule, profligacy & greed, have despoiled potentially productive nations, turning them into hopeless, dependent, unsustainable entities. But the case against old European imperialists is strong & indubitable.

Last week, one Drusilla Long had a letter in a newspaper about desperate & desperately unwanted migrants. She was raised in Ghana during British rule. “I believe [we should] return some of the immense wealth we all stole from these countries, such as gold, diamonds, etc, which we have long used to build up our own wealthy ‘fortress’ Europe,” she wrote.

Brave woman, saying the unsayable.

Then there is the continuing support this country gives to oppressive regimes, the arms we sell, & the wars we have launched in the past 20 years. Iraqis never chose to become resented refugees, nor did Afghans.

Libya is now the export depot for hungry, frightened, distressed people. The allies who bombed the place have gone & feel no obligation for the mess they left. Many ISIS insurgents are from Saddam Hussein’s old Baathist army. True, we did not intervene in Syria, but for decades Bashar al-Assad was propped up by us, as was his equally heinous father. Many of the migrants trying to get into Europe come from these places. They are hated perhaps because they remind us of our bad policies & actions. Are these then our noble British values?

When bigots tell me to go back to where I came from, I remind them I am here because the British government supported Idi Amin’s bid for power. A million or more black Ugandans fled or were killed. Some fled to the UK. Has Britain ever admitted this was a big mistake? ...

Among the flotsam & jetsam of wandering humans are “economic migrants” who are seen as the biggest threat of all. They, too, are victims of Western games & unending austerity measures. We know how that affects the vulnerable & should understand why people die trying to escape poverty.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) & World Bank have driven down spending on health & education across Africa & elsewhere. Developing world debt is used by the West to cut the cost of raw materials & steal resources. Privatisation is the condition for borrowing money. It stinks.

Anup Shah is the editor of the excellent www.globalissues.org. He writes about the unjust trading system. The West protects its interests & pushes poorer countries to supply materials, labour & goods at the lowest costs. To be a dumping ground, too.

The EU, IMF & World Bank must transform the system; our leaders need to tell more truths about the dispossessed. Xenophobia, withdrawal of welfare & gunboats won’t stop the tide of humanity coming to our shores. They come because they have no choice. But the West does.

Emperor movie quote

A great line from 2012 movie, Emperor, neatly summarizes the past 100 years or so, & the current international chaos UK, US, & other European countries have caused in the world. These countries cause an uproar when one country, e.g. Japan in World War 2 or any other country (Iraq "invading" Kuwait in 1991, Saudi Arabia in Yemen, Russia annexing parts of Ukraine etc.) does the exact same thing which they themselves (US, UK, & other European countries) have been doing for the past several decades.

US goes into Iraq & kills thousands upon thousands of innocent civilians & then says, "oops, my bad ... I thought Iraq had WMDs." No criminal prosecution against American leaders. Russia takes parts of Ukrainian territory & North America to European leaders are up in arms.

**Disclaimer: I am not favouring any one country over another or one country's aggression over another. I am saying that international law, if it is being applied, then should be applied equally over everyone.

The Quantum Mechanics of Israeli Totalitarianism

A great opinion piece, detailing how Israel controls Palestinians.

With that much control, even little kids & teens start to rebel against their own parents, who love them dearly. Israel, after all, is an occupying force, occupying illegally (per several UN resolutions) & would love to even control how much air Palestinians breath (it already controls their water).

It's funny how the Western, developed world still think that Israel is a democratic country, surrounded by authoritarian regimes. As the opinion piece points out very nicely that "the unending occupation, the sheer chutzpah with which the Israeli government continues to expand its presence in the West Bank while sieging Gaza, the escalating protests by minorities inside the country's 1967 borders, & the composition of the new government, all put the lie to such claims today," that it's a democratic country.

What was astonishing for me in reading this commentary was the intro to few processes & procedures Israel has put in place to control the Palestinians. And, these procedures are put in such a way, that an untrained eye would not be able to see the oppression & control Israel exerts on Palestinians.

Then the developed world complains a few rockets were fired in Israeli territory by Palestinians. The developed world should ask the question to themselves, before blaming & complaining about Palestinians, is what would you do if someone (your boss, your parents, your spouse, your neighbour etc.) watches & control your every move? Would you feel relaxed in that environment or would you violently lash back, keeping in mind that moving out of that job / family / relationship / neighbourhood is not an option?
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http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/05/quantum-mechanics-israeli-totalitarianism-150507072609153.html

With the coalition government formed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu easily the most ultranationalist & conservative government in Israel's history, even the most cockeyed optimist would shrink from imagining that Oslo can still be revived, if only the right treatment were concocted.

The problem today is not that anyone but the most self-interested Israeli, Palestinian or US officials still pretends that the peace process is functioning. Rather, it's that hardly anyone in a position of power can explain precisely when, how & especially why it died. To do so requires moving far more deeply into the dynamics of the endlessly troubled peace process than most policy-makers or commentators are willing to delve, into what I term the "quantum mechanics" underlying Oslo's fatally flawed structures.

Israel has long claimed uniquely democratic credentials in a region besot with authoritarian regimes.
The unending occupation, the sheer chutzpah with which the Israeli government continues to expand its presence in the West Bank while sieging Gaza, the escalating protests by minorities inside the country's 1967 borders, & the composition of the new government, all put the lie to such claims today.

Matrix of control

What's still poorly understood by most non-Palestinians is just how deep the level of control has long been. Even if you've spent decades travelling through the West Bank & Gaza, the intensity of that control remains hard to grasp.

As I walked through the Jordan Valley last month near the front-line village of Fasayel, I began to understand how one reason why it's been so difficult to explain the intensity & all-encompassing scope of Israel's "matrix of control" over the Occupied Territories is that even its critics don't use strong enough language to describe it.

Israel is not just an "occupier" or a "coloniser". However democratic it may (or may not) be inside its 1967 borders, in the Occupied Territories Israel's rule is nothing short of totalitarian.

In calling Israeli rule totalitarian, I am not arguing that the government mimics the worst policies of thought control & ideological purism practised by the 20th century's Fascist & Communist states such as Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia or Maoist China (although Israel's constant harassment & imprisonment of Palestinian activists does reflect a desire to control how Palestinians think and act, at least publicly).

Rather, I'm talking about a much deeper level of control, at what can only be described as the quantum level of Palestinian daily life.

To understand how it feels to live as a Palestinian today you need to think like a particle physicist, not a social scientist. Moving through the space of Israel/Palestine involves negotiating a host of forces that the average Palestinian has about as much control over as the average electron or proton does of the nuclear & quantum forces determining its path. And it's through this near total control of the space that Israel is able, in George Orwell's description of totalitarianism, to "control the past as well as the future".

Israeli geographer Jeff Halper, founder of the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions (ICAHD) coined the "matrix of control" to describe these forces. The name evokes numerous overlapping layers of control, including the physical infrastructure of settlements & their security corridors & zones, bypass roads, closed military areas & even "nature reserves". The matrix also includes the bureaucratic & legal/planning levels, & the use of large-scale violence & imprisonment to control people's behaviour & movement.

With its matrix of control, Israel has achieved an unparalleled & uniquely successful synergy of "bio" & "necro"-politics, controlling life & death at most every scale of Palestinian existence. The matrix is continuously adjusted with as much care as Israel has adjusted the caloric intake of Gazans during its periodic intensifications of the Gazan siege.

Three, four & five dimensions

A look at the group of detailed maps created by ICAHD reveals upwards of two dozen parameters of control that can intersect at any given coordinate on the map. But the map is only a two dimensional representation of a multidimensional & multi-levelled reality. It's not just various forces meeting on the ground. When you're walking through the 97% of the West Bank that is in Areas B or C & thus under Israel security control, you realise that the matrix extends both under the ground you're walking on & above your head.

Below ground, Israel controls all the water resources in the West Bank, &d for 50 years has systematically taken most every possible well, stream, aquifer or other water source from Palestinians (in direct violation of international law, it must be remembered).

It also controls the airspace above Palestinians' heads, as the constant buzz of Israeli fighter jets training overhead in the Jordan Valley, & the ubiquitous presence of drones & helicopters almost everywhere at any time, & the prohibitions on building new floors on existing structures makes clear.
In whatever direction Palestinians look or want to step or reach - left or right, forwards or backwards, above or below them - the land, air & water surrounding them is largely outside their permanent control.

Blink of an eye

But it is not just that most of their territory is out of Palestinian hands. The quantum physics of Israel's matrix of control also has its own Heisenberg, or uncertainty principle.

In quantum mechanics this principle asserts that it is impossible to know with precision the exact state of a particle because the very act of observing it changes its state. In the same way, merely by changing their location Palestinians change the state of territory upon which they are moving.

On the one hand, despite the rockiness of the landscape, the geography of the West Bank can be among the most liquid on earth. It changes as one moves through it, depending on who you are - Jew or Palestinian, settler or refusnik, soldier or international. Spaces that seems open & free can suddenly be surrounded by military forces & closed off, declared off limits for any length of time for a variety of reasons merely because Palestinians moved into & through it or used it for grazing, water, or other normal activities.

Moreover, their very movement through the geography can change it not just for a moment, but permanently. At the same time, the uncertainty principle can also operate with a time lag. If Palestinians decide to walk through a Jordan Valley village, for example, or to plant trees on their land in the hills around Hebron or Jenin, it's not at all uncommon for the Israeli military to issue demolition or confiscation orders a few days later.

In particular, the movement of Jews has an even more profound effect than Palestinians especially when establishing an outpost or settlement. Once land is claimed even on the flimsiest of pretexts the military usually moves in & declares a still larger area a security zone, making it impossible for Palestinians to access the land for months, years or even decades.

And so, it seems that land in Palestine can change states from liquid to solid almost instantly, freezing in place whatever Israel decides it wants frozen, from people to legal categories. The quantum physics of Palestinian geography can thus produce permanent changes not just in the three normal dimensions of space, but in the conflict's "fourth dimension" as well, namely time.

But however many dimensions one considers, the goal remains the same: to achieve, in the words of the Palestinian-Israeli hip-hop group DAM, "Maximum Jews on maximum land; minimum Arabs on minimum land."

Neoliberal policies

There is even a fifth, economic dimension in which the physics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict operates. The neoliberal policies imposed on the Occupied Territories under Oslo have ensured that when Palestinians aren't being displaced by Israeli settlers or bombs, they are fixed in place as objects of development, whose economic life is confined to small spaces that remain largely under Israeli control. The possibility of their becoming subjects able to shape their own destinies is, it seems, outside the laws of physics operating in the Holy Land.

It is the changing nature of the political, physical & economic geographies of the Israeli-controlled Occupied Territories that has made it so difficult for Palestinians & their supporters internationally (including in Israel) to develop effective strategies of resistance, never mind transcending the occupation.

With Oslo's final demise, Palestinians don't just need new strategies for resisting an occupation without end; what's needed is an entirely new physics as well.

Indeed, it has long been argued that Palestinians are still waiting for their Ghandi. It might well turn out that to overcome decades of totalitarian Israeli rule, a long-dead peace process, & ineptitude, corruption & authoritarianism internally, Einstein would be a far more useful figure.


Mark LeVine is a professor of Middle Eastern History at University of California, Irvine, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Lund University.

"Civic Duty Slipping" by Steve Kelley

"Civic Duty Slipping" - Steve Kelley, Times-Picayune, New Orleans, LA, US

"Incitement to Violence" by Pat Bagley

"Incitement to Violence" - Pat Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune, Salt Lake City, UT, US

"Reporters without Borders" by Stavro Jabra

"Reporters without Borders" - Stavro Jabra, Lebanon

"American History Makeover" by Mike Luckovich

"American History Makeover" - Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Atlanta, GA, US