‘I feel the pressure, under more scrutiny/ And what do I do? Act more stupidly’, rapped Kanye West on Can’t Tell Me Nothing. And act more stupidly he did last week. He began by embracing Donald Trump as ‘a brother’ and ended by suggesting slavery had been a ‘choice’.

The backlash was swift. From 50 Cent to Spike Lee to Roxane Gay, celebrities, scholars and seemingly half of Twitter pushed back, pointing out the imbecilic character of West’s comments on slavery. Not only had savage force been used to capture, transport and maintain transatlantic slaves, but, despite the brutality, slaves had constantly rebelled against their condition, heroically and at great cost.

But if West’s claims were idiotic, much of the response was equally so. The problem for many critics was not just what West said, but also that he was a black man saying it. His was an act of betrayal of the black community, indeed of his very blackness.

This argument was made most elegantly, and brutally, by the essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates. In an acerbic tear-down titled I’m not black, I’m Kanye, Coates recalled his mother’s response to Michael Jackson. He ‘was dying to be white’, she observed; he was ‘erasing himself, so that we would forget that he had once been Africa beautiful and Africa brown’.

Thirty years on, Coates has a similar response to West. Black music, he argues, is inextricably linked with black history and community. And West, like Jackson, is attempting to escape that history and community, to be not-black. West champions ‘a white freedom’, a ‘freedom to be proud and ignorant’. And, writes Coates, all blacks ‘suffer for this, because we are connected’.

Many on the left have long seen rightwing black or gay people or women as traitors to the cause. There is something disturbing in this claim that there is a right way of thinking for oppressed peoples and that those who dissent are committing betrayal. It is a way of thinking about race, community and heresy that has deep, reactionary roots. ‘Traitors’ is how Islamists describe liberal Muslims. It is how the apartheid government in South Africa explained white anti-apartheid activists. And it is the label that the far right has long hung upon white anti-racists. Thomas Mair, who murdered Labour MP Jo Cox in 2016, saw her as a ‘collaborator’. ‘My name is death to traitors, freedom for Britain’, he declared at his trial.

It may be comforting to imagine that if black people are being reactionary, then they are not really black, or at least they are attempting to escape being black, by espousing ‘white’ ideas of freedom. But is it really less reactionary to imagine that ideas come colour-coded than it is to claim that slavery was a choice? Or any more progressive to insist that West is not black because he backs Donald Trump than it is to see Trump as a ‘brother’?

While some denounced West as a traitor, others insisted that whites should butt out of the debate. ‘If you think that you get to criticise black people for selling out to the system of anti-blackness that you as a non-black person benefit from and help maintain’, wrote Ijeoma Oluo, a Seattle-based writer, ‘you need to check your privilege and be quiet for a while.’ Whites, she added, should ‘stay in your own lane’.

This, too, is an old racist trope. ‘As a person of colour,’ critic David Dennis wrote in a 2013 essay on West, ‘I’ve been told repeatedly to ‘stay in my lane’. From something as simple as being followed around my neighbourhood by police to my profession, where I’ve been told to stick to writing about ‘black stuff’ and leave the ‘real news’ to white writers.’

Where racists patrol the streets and the workplace to ensure black people know their place, a new class of ‘anti-racists’ seek to police public debates to ensure that only the right people speak and only the right things get said. Segregation of public debate in the name of ‘anti-racism’ – and that is what the demand to ‘stay in your lane’ amounts to – is no more progressive than the racist segregation of social space.

Any struggle against injustice requires us to get out of our lanes, to insist on the right, whoever one may be, to speak as we see fit, against every wrong. As Kanye West and many of his critics have shown over the past weeks, there is more than one way of being reactionary. ( posted by f.sheikh)

https://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2018/05/14/more-than-one-way-of-being-reactionary/

The UNO at Crossroads While Warriors are Destroying the Humanity

Mahboob A Khawaja, PhD.

Is There a UNO to Protect the Besieged Humanity?

Over seventy years of its existence, the UNO should have been enriched with systematic excellence to safeguard the humanity from protracted agony, deaths and deliberate destruction. Not so, the record is otherwise filled with man-made catastrophic conflicts, sarcastic hollowness of indifference to human realities and overwhelming addiction to arrogance mocking the truth. For over 7 years, the cold blooded massacres and chemical warfare went on against the civilian population in Syria but the UN Security Council just argued and counter punched each other in paper resolutions and did nothing to protect the civilians from the scourge of inhuman atrocities. Syria, Iraq, Libya and Yemen are destroyed by design. Some of these places were the hub of ancient cultures and human civilizations and will never be rebuilding again by the warmongers and raging sectarian bloodbath. It reminds us all of the man-made sadistic events leading to the First World War and the 2^nd World War. As a conscientious global community, what have we learned from the history? Absolutely nothing – nothing that could be rationally described in human expressions, thoughts and words to represent the indignation and prevalent disgust as if there is no civilized humanity in existence on Planet Earth. Is there a normal human conscience still intact and working?

Under the UN Charter, the civilians were supposed to be protected by the UNO and the global community but across the Syrian warzones the civilians are asked to move out from one place to another site while the warfare is in full swing against the victimized population. From nowhere to nowhere – where will the victims find protection under the continuous bombardment? Has the global humane conscience come to its own abstract end? All the so called moral and political intents to safeguard the people and references to UN “concerns”, “critical situation” and claim of “war crimes against the humanity” in Syria are false and wicked expressions of escape from the reality and sheer inhumanity when thousands and thousands are daily massacred by the chemical warfare and aerial bombardments. Were the global powers, more so, the Western nations claiming to be more of humanitarian impulse not supposed to protect the civilians in a war zone as the situation warranted action across Syria? Is there an international community alive and intact to ensure the principles and humanitarian values of a civilized global community?

Wars Kill People and Create Delusional Culture

The mankind is fraught with sorrows and pains of institutionalized animosities and wars. When fear of unknown animosities and killings overwhelm the daily thinking process, a society – a nation no matter how normal claims to be, cannot function as normal beings to co-exist with their own self, the surroundings – in the human culture and make any positive contributions to human change and progress. This state of affairs reflects complete societal breakdown and march towards self-annihilation. We are witnessing and living in that delusional culture of human degeneration. Dictators never listen to voices of reason and logic. The absolute power makes the Bashar al-Assad regime a pathological liar killing the people. The entrenched Syrians called upon the global community as if it existed in reality to protect them from barbarity of the Assad regime and Russian collaborated attacks. Some besieged children and women echoed voices on Twitter and Facebook appealing to President Trump to save their lives. They were too innocent to know the political nature and psychology of reality of the war – America and Russian are coordinating the war in Syria for their own interests and futuristic weapons sales. The human destruction and bombed habitats are not part of their sense of humanity.

Animosity and wars are not outgrowth of celestial bodies but essentially man-made follies throughout the history. All human acts are subject to change and reformation. Over the decades, this vital concern has occupied my scholarly thoughts, human interactions with so many other beings (both in the industrialized West and with people in the developing nations) to find out, how can we safeguard the “succeeding generations from the scourge of wars” and maintain normal societal living and co-existence in diversity. Had this concern and priority been in the thoughts and commitments of the governance of the international institutions evolved more than half of century ago to manage global peace and security, it would have supported the sustainable movements to protect global peace and harmony. To great surprise, looking at the modern history of international affairs, every new man-made conflicts takes new approaches and time and resources to ponder and new agenda as if we have wasted decades in doing nothing except giggling, laughing and lying about peace and the ideals of the mankind in competitive and hilarious animosities and blame games. Is it part of the human nature to look for animosity and madness of war? Wars kill people – the living human beings, destroy humanity of the man enforcing barbarism and cruelty, practically denying all prospects of peace and co-existence. Previous wars of centuries were aimed at annihilation of political and economic enemies but the 21^st century conflicts are ready-made recipes not only to eliminate the mankind but also the environment in which human beings survive and the Planet Earth that sustains life. Given the strategic know-how and the scientific-technological developments, it is an established fact that any futuristic global warfare could end the very existence of man and humanity on this planet.

Arab Conflicts are Planned to Divide and Control the Region

Emerging conflicts in Syria, Yemen, Palestine, Libya, Kashmir, Iraq and soon to other parts of the Arab world are the outcomes of consequential military invasions and aggression that kill people and do not produce peace and harmony but resentment and degeneration. History illustrates when a nation or its leaders challenge the limits of the Laws of God and approach near the end of their lifespan, insanity takes-over common sense and they tend to ignore warnings and reject all voices of reason. Professor John Esposito of Georgetown University – a distinguish scholar of Western-Islamic civilizations (author of Unholy War and What Everyone Needs to Know about Islam), makes a candid observation:

“in many parts of the Muslim world the war against global terrorism has come to be viewed as a war against Islam and Muslims. The image of America has become that of a neo-imperial power that has sought to redraw the map of the Middle East and the Muslim world, influenced by an unholy alliance of neoconservatives and the militant Christian right.”

Political Temptations and Hegemonic Policies Ignore the History

Once again, humanity appears to have been pushed back to the shameful annals of the European Dark Ages. The 1% global elite – men of king operate the UNO and other international institutions – the perverted insanity lacking basic understanding of the Human Nature and of the working of the splendid Universe in which we enjoy coherent co-existence. The mankind continues to be run down by the cancerous ego and cruelty of the few superpower warlords. Killing unjustifiably one innocent human being is like killing of the whole of the humanity. The global warlords represent cruel mindset incapable to see the human side of the living conscience. Madness of the perpetuated war on terrorism and its triggered insanity knows no bound across the global spectrum. Animals do not commit massacre of their kind and species, they do not bombard fellow animals with chemicals, nor set-up rape camps for the war victims, the Western led wars against the humanity have and continue to do so at an unparalleled global scale in Syria, Iraq and Yemen without being challenged by any global organizations or leaders. Torture and massacres of innocent civilians are convenient fun games to be defined as “collateral damage” and a statistic. Perhaps, they view humanity just in digits and numbers, not as the living entities with social, moral, spiritual and intellectual values and progressive agendas for change and development. Every beginning has its end. It is just that most powerful nations have failed to learn from the living history- a slap to EH Carr’s precious thoughts of human history. Albert Einstein (“The World as I see it”) made it known that he was against military campaigns, killings and destruction of the natural environment: “This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor… This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism — how passionately I hate them!.”

American historian Harry Elmer Barnes (“Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: A Critical Examination of the Foreign Policy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and It’s Aftermath”) offered this stern warning to American politicians if the US led wars continue leading to man’s annihilation from this planet:

“If trends continue as they have during the last fifteen years, we shall soon reach this point of no return, and can only anticipate interminable wars, disguised as noble gestures for peace. Such an era could only culminate in a third world war which might well, as Arnold J. Toynbee has suggested, leave only the pygmies in remote jungles, or even the apes and ants, to carry on ‘the cultural traditions’ of mankind.”

If a hate crime results in killing of the innocent people in American society, America foreign policy is actively doing the same to other nations – Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and others as if they were not entitled to be human beings.

Lessons of History Challenge the 21^st Century’s Elite Global Governance

How could the Arab leadership failure be turned into change and reformation of the neo-colonialism and to revive the cultural presence and visionary leadership role in the global political arena? The Arab states are run by the Western assigned puppets, the tribal and authoritarian agents lacking knowledge-based leadership, wisdom and moral-intellectual discipline. The 21^st century is more enlightened and an age of information and knowledge-driven global culture of creativity, effective leadership and human progress. It is not reasonable for the ignorant to inherit kingship or a leadership role to be successful. The emerging and complex political imperatives call for the new generation of proactive educated and intelligent people to be in the leading role of planning of change and reformation of the old and obsolete inherited infrastructures of political governance unto new sustainable system of institutional development and nation-building and to be people-oriented and represent the Islamic interests in a rational manner. The hard facts of life speak for themselves. There is not a single Arab-Muslim country to have produced a credible intelligent leader to address the international community. There was a time in history that Arab people had moral and intellectual credibility to interact with others and be influential. The oil-geared happiness has lost all that was valuable in the context of Arab civilization. The Arab elite are operating from a position of moral and intellectual weakness and deprivation, not of political or intellectual strength. To change the naïve political governance, Muslims in general and the Arabs in particular, must develop public institutions of the citizenry participation – the concept of “Shura”- public consultation is an important principle for societal decision making, of law, justice and leadership accountability. Islam underlined the accountability of leaders in dealing with societal affairs. Arab leaders have none and are afraid of losing their wealth and palaces if people were to determine the future-making and ruler’s destiny. Ironically, none of the Arab States have any public educational institutions to study and analyze peace and conflict resolution. This is what assumes the imperatives of societal change and progress.

We, the People Voices of Reason must envisage a new UNO and systems of governance accountable to the people of the global community, not to the hypothetically structured systems of States and dysfunctional global institutions. Such institutions do not belong to the moral, intellectual and spiritual precepts and values of the living humanity. If time and history are a reference point, we the humankind stand at a critical juncture of our own complacency to have allowed ignorance, hatred, fear and animosity to destroy our life, culture and existence. The few obsessed with invincible armies and political powers – the warriors as dreamers to control and dominate us have driven the humanity to a terrible sense of helplessness and void about its future. We are witnessing a growing culture of domination by the same as was in history- universally the self-centered maniacs claiming to be leaders of peace and mankind, the most hated and feared are turning the world into more man-made tragedies, animosities, continued bogus wars – all causing massive deaths and destruction to endanger the life, human habitats and the sanctity of Planet Earth. The need is URGENT to understand – how to change the egoistic and embittered insanity of the few hate-mongers and warlords into an equilibrium of balanced relationship between Man, Life and God, Global Governance and Peacemaking – being at accord within the Universe in which we reside all.

(Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja specializes in international relations-global security, peace and conflict resolution with keen interests in Islamic-Western comparative cultures and civilizations, and author of several publications including the latest book: Global Peace, Security and Conflict Resolution: Approaches to Understand the Current Issues and Future-Making. (Lambert Academic Publications, Germany, 2017).

Shared by Imtiaz Bukhari

Replaying the Holocaust in the Middle East

By ANNA DELLA SUBIN

JAN. 18, 2018

THE LAST GIRL 
My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State
By Nadia Mural with Jenna Krajeski
Illustrated. 306 pp. Tim Duggan Books. $27.

How to approach a memoir of a war still being waged? “The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State” contains open wounds and painful lessons, as the Yazidi activist Nadia Murad learns how her own story can become a weapon against her — co-opted for any number of political agendas. In August 2014 Islamic State militants besieged her village of Kocho in northern Iraq. They executed nearly all the men and older women — including Murad’s mother and six brothers — and buried them in mass graves. The younger women, Murad among them, were kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery. Raped, tortured and exchanged among militants, 21-year-old Murad finds an escape route when she is sold to a jihadist in Mosul who leaves a front door unlocked. She flees into Kurdistan by posing as the wife of a Sunni man, Nasser, who risks everything to escort her to safety.

Just when Murad, and the reader, expect a flood of relief, there is another sinister turn: Murad and Nasser are detained by Kurdish officials who force them to testify about their escape with cameras rolling. The officials are eager to hear how peshmerga fighters from a rival Kurdish faction — the two groups fought a civil war in the 1990s — had abandoned the Yazidi communities they were supposed to protect. The officials swear no one will ever see the tape, but it appears on the news that same night, putting Nasser and his family in grave danger. “I was quickly learning that my story, which I still thought of as a personal tragedy, could be someone else’s political tool,” Murad writes.

Freed from captivity, Murad remains trapped inside politics. To publish “The Last Girl” right now, in the United States, means there are tricky issues of sensationalism to navigate; in a threatening climate of Islamophobia, Muslims of all kinds are vilified for the actions of one group. Yet Murad, and the team of translators and writers with whom she worked, hedge against this response with a book intricate in historical context. Visible throughout are the disastrous legacies of the American intervention that dismantled Baathist institutions and bred a generation of Iraqis raised on violence and with few prospects. In a childhood flashback, a young Nadia receives a ring from one of the many American soldiers who arrived in Kocho in the mid-2000s bearing trinkets and empty promises. During the Iraq war, Yazidis became increasingly isolated from their Sunni Arab neighbors, caught in cross hairs of sectarianism in the wake of the “coalition of the willing.”

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