Soul-searching over the passage of the Olympic Torch through France and through the West in general has reached a fever pitch, and the question on the minds of many is: As justified as the protesting in London, Paris and now San Francisco may be, what good will come of it?; and will it help those who today suffer under the iron fist of Beijing’s one-party dictatorship?
Yves Thréard writes for France’s leading newspaper, Le Figaro, “Olympism, its values and symbols were put to a bitter test yesterday in Paris. It was predictable given the opposition that the Beijing Games have encountered, especially in France. The passage of the torch looked perilous. In the end, it was more than that. In a word, it was a fiasco. … The relay by the unfortunate French athletes transformed into a way of the cross which was marked by the boos, jeers and whistles of angry crowds.”
But Thréard goes on to warn, “Beijing’s government will use the pandemonium in London and then in Paris - and soon in San Francisco - to further strengthen its ruthless dictatorship. … if we want these Games to serve the cause of the Chinese people, the best thing we can do is try to engage them once we are there. We must find a way.”
EDITORIAL By Yves Thréard
Translated By Kate Davis
July 7, 2008
France - Le Figaro - Original Article (France)
Olympism, its values and symbols were put to a bitter test yesterday in Paris. It was predictable given the opposition that the Beijing Games have encountered, especially in France. The passage of the torch looked perilous. In the end, it was more than that. In a word, it was a fiasco. Read the rest of this entry »
He knew he was going to die. Before Martin Luther King was shot and killed on the balcony of a Memphis motel forty years ago tomorrow, he went to see his parents to prepare them.
“The reports are that they are out to get me,” he told them. “I have to go on with my work, I’m too deeply involved now to get out, it’s all too important. Sometimes I want to stop. Just go away somewhere and have some quiet days, finally, a quiet life with Coretta and the children. But it’s too late for that now. I have my path before me. I know what I have to do.”
The hatred came from many directions, not only from white racists but, as we now know from FBI files, from J. Edgar Hoover, the Director, who had agents bug his hotel rooms and send him anonymous threatening letters, urging him to commit suicide.
February 18th, 2008 by SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist
Having been eligible for the draft and an all-expenses-paid trip to Vietnam since I was 18, 1968 was the year that I turned 21 and finally was old enough to drink and vote, which I did in that order and with great enthusiasm.
I had a front-row seat for this year of great change — including antiwar protests, the King and Kennedy assassinations, and the coming of age of the civil rights and women’s movements — but nowhere were those changes manifested so powerfully than in the presidential race that year.
This presidential election year also is shaping up to be one of potentially great change, which begs the question:
Were the changes of 1968 more important than the changes of 2008 could be?
That is a difficult question because America and the world have changed (there’s that word again) in myriad ways over the last four decades, so for the purpose of trying to tease out an answer, I’ll reframe the question thusly:
Were Americans individually and the nation generally better off in 1968 than in 2008?
Thus framed, the answer to that question is a big fat “yes,” and so the answer to my initial question is that the changes of 2008 — at the very least the much anticipated end of the Age of Bush — may indeed be more important.
Since we’re looking at year versus year through the prism of presidential politics, it should be noted that there is an obvious similarity and two obvious differences.
The similarity is the looming presence of costly and unpopular wars in both 1968 and 2008.
The first difference is that unlike 1968, the U.S. today is the sole superpower, has an unprecedented global reach and is the subject of profound loathing abroad, notably among the people whose most radical elements can do the American homeland harm.
The second difference is that in 1968 most of the opposition President Johnson faced was from within his own party over his stewardship of the Vietnam War, which prompted him to opt out of running for reelection, while in 2008 President Bush has gotten a free pass from most of his prospective heirs apparent, who dutifully worship at his altar although he is extraordinarily unpopular and is the chief reason the Republican hegemony in Washington is coming to such an unceremonious end.
February 15th, 2008 by SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist
WHY ARE THESE MEN NOT SMILING?
President Bush claimed today that the failure of House Democrats to approve an extension of a controversial domestic surveillance wiretapping program means “our country is more in danger of an attack.” Vice President Cheney said he also is very concerned.
Since Bush’s unprecedented powers as president are not compromised, Cheney is above any law and Republicans could have voted an extension of the wiretap law beyond its already extended February 16 expiration date before they toodled off for a 12-day recess, how can the U.S. be more in danger? Please be specific.
On Monday, fliers asked the TSA’s [Transportation Security Administration] new blog Evolution of Security why some airports were requiring passengers to remove all electronics - MP3 players, cell phones and even power cords - from their carry-on bags. So the first name-only bloggers at TSA looked into it, figured out it was local rogue offices and shut down the policy.
These practices were stopped on Monday afternoon and blackberrys, cords and iPods began to flow through checkpoints like the booze was flowing on Bourbon Street Tuesday night. (Fat Tuesday of course).
So thanks to everyone for asking about this and for giving us a chance to make it right. Our hope is that examples like this validate our forum….
Though less than a week old, the TSA blog has gotten thousands of comments, ranging from diatribes about the liquid ban to calls for government-provided booties for travelers to wear when their shoes are being x-rayed.
This action by the TSA means that someone who cared read the blog, checked out what was behind the comments and then got enough or had enough authority to get the policy changed.
That’s pretty cool. Now, if only those TSA bloggers could learn to spell “blogosphere.” Seriously, though - check out the TSA blog. I kind of like it.
Is the Church of Scientology a threat to the German state? According to this news report from Germany’s Bild am Sonntag, German intelligence authorities have uncovered internal Scientology documentation that reveals the threat that the group poses, and are investigation banning it from the country.
“In order to execute our planetary rescue campaigns we need to reach the highest levels of the German government in Berlin”
–Internal Scientology document released by German intelligence
By Von R. Eichinger und J. Gaugele
Translated By Ulf Behncke
November 12, 2007
Germany - Bild am Sonntag - Original Article (German)
Hamburg: The best-known face of Scientology is that of superstar Tom Cruise, one of the most popular actors in the world. But security authorities are convinced that behind the Hollywood facade hides a dangerous cult that is reaching for power – even within Germany.
“Scientology is an unconstitutional organization” says Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble (of the Christian Democratic Union ) in an interview with BILD am SONNTAG. “Significant and fundamental human rights, such as the right to human dignity and the right to equal treatment are to be restricted or repealed. The democratic system is being rejected.”
The dramatic warning to the Interior Minister: “Scientology is also working out in Germany, political power and influence to gain.”
The Interior Minister’s dramatic warning: “Scientology is working to gain political power and influence in Germany as well.”
In its latest report, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution [one of Germany’s intelligence agencies ] quotes from an internal document of the sect, which affords some terrifying insights. “Berlin, as the capital of Germany, is a vital address with regard to Scientology,” the report says. “In order to execute our planetary rescue campaigns we need to reach the highest levels of the German government in Berlin.”
The organization is extending its reach: At the beginning this year, Scientology’s new center in Berlin was inaugurated - a six-floor glass palace with 4,000 square meters. New centers also opened in Madrid, London and Brussels.
November 14th, 2007 by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
A major reversal is about to take place in the Bush administration. The seemingly sandbagged-from-within investigation into the controversial warrant-less wiretaps program is about to start up again:
The Bush administration has apparently changed policy and cleared the way for the Justice Department to restart an investigation into the government’s no-warrant electronic surveillance program, a department official told Congress on Tuesday.
For months the White House had blocked granting the security clearances necessary for investigators in the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility to determine whether any department attorneys had engaged in unethical behavior.
In a March letter to congressional leaders, an assistant attorney general had stressed that former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had recommended the clearances be granted, but the president decided not to do so.
H. Marshall Jarrett, head of the Justice office, told members of Congress on Tuesday that the investigation will be reopened. But in his one-paragraph letter Jarrett sidestepped the issue of who in the Bush administration had reversed course.
“We recently received the necessary security clearances and are now able to proceed with our investigation,” Jarrett said in the letter he wrote to five members of the House, including Rep. Maurice Hinchey, a Democrat from New York.
So what has changed since the spring?
The Attorney General:
“I am happily surprised,” Hinchey told The Associated Press. “It now seems because we have a new attorney general [Michael Mukasey] the situation has changed. Maybe this attorney general understands that his obligation is not to be the private counsel to the president but the chief law enforcement officer for the entire country.”
Jarrett said the investigation will be confined to the “role of Department of Justice attorneys in the authorization and oversight of the warrantless electronic surveillance by the National Security Agency and in complying with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.”
The Justice Department is still stressing the limited nature of this probe. And since election year is on the horizon it would not be a shock if no major, earth shattering revelations eventually come of it.
But it does seem to signal a shift from the “I can do what I want, I dare you” attitude of Alberto Gonzales to a style the acknowledges the importance of cooperation. Plus, it shows a smarter perspective on the importance of image. Substance? Don’t be your house in Vegas yet. But in this instance at least the Justice Department has seemingly shifted a gear out of defiance mode.
Tom Tancredo’s campaign ad is designed to be “shocking,”and it has legs, though the candidate might not….
We in his home state, Colorado, are not supposed to see Representative Tom Tancredo’s ad. Neither are you. Unless you live in Iowa.
But Representative Tancredo is hoping his ‘shock’ ad will generate free publicity, so you might see it anyway. He’s hoping that media will carry it for free as ‘news.’ They likely will, actually have already, but perhaps not the way Rep. Tancredo imagined.
Terry Jessup from KCNC CBS4 affiliate in Denver reported on his conversation with Tancredo today.
Congressman Tancredo, “… told me he has to do well in Iowa or money will dry up and he’ll have to drop out of presidential race. He says the controversial new ad will definitely get him noticed.”
The ad comes at a time when Representative Tancredo’s numbers are flagging and his donations are way down. The ad is meant to provoke and inspire lots of media coverage so that the ad will infiltrate people’s living rooms over and over again… and then hopefully money will roll in again. The ad was designed to make big ad buys.
He may get bloggers, but some think he might also, without meaning to, get YouTube. From distant thunder I hear, there are parodies of his ad already in the works.
Think of the AppleHillary ad. Think of the original ad from which Tancredo’s ad appears to draw its oeuvre…1964 Lyndon Johnson anti-Goldwater ad (here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKs-bTL-pRg) showing a child counting daisy petals, then stop-motion zooming into her eye… where a mushroom cloud forms. Lyndon’s voice-over implying, Elmer Gantry style, that all of God’s children are going to die if Goldwater, ‘nuclear war monger,’ is elected.
Add ‘Eau de SNL’ to all this, and there may be a YouTube Festival revolving around scary ads… although have you seen the content in horror and disaster films teenagers not only sit through in cinema without blanching once, but also laugh over?
Tancredo goes on to say the ad is meant to make people uncomfortable… the ad shows the imaginary blowing up of a family shopping center by a terrorist. Tancredo says: “There is nothing, absolutely nothing that says this can’t happen in the United States.”
Tancredo commented about his ad depicting a seeming young person in a hoodie with backpack blowing families to Kingdom Come: “I thought it (the final ad) was a little tame. When I explained what I wanted, um and they came back with this after two or three different iterations of it, um I finally accepted it, but ( Tancredo laughs here) what I had in mind, was um a little more dramatic than this.”
Tancredo’s ad opens with him standing in a light-toned, patterned-fabric suit, next to large American flag on left screen. There’s a wall of Reader’s Digest looking “Great Books Club” hardbacks in red. green and dark yellow in the bookcase behind him. Representative Tancredo says: “Hi, I’m Tom Tancredo, and I approve this message… because someone needs to say it.”
Then an announcer comes on: a fellow sounding a lot like the man who used to do all the spooky movie preview ads, one who could just be saying, “I think I’ll go do the dishes”– and make it sound like Rodan, clawing for blood of the firstborn, has just landed again. The opening carries the sound of a heart beating hard in the background. This under-sound sort of goes into an arrhythmia in the middle of the ad, and then quits halfway through the word ‘politicians,’ near the end, an odd symbolic place to stop.
The announcer says (verbatim transcript I took down from TV ad):
“There are consequences to open borders beyond the 20 million aliens who’ve come to take our jobs. Islamic terrorists are now free to roam US soil. Jihadists who are fraught with hate, free to do here as they’ve done in London, in Spain, and Russia
“… the price we pay for spineless politicians who refuse to defend our borders against those who come to kill.”
Aside from 2 serious errors in the root logic of the ad, one of which infers that if our Southern and Northern Borders were closed tight like a vacuum-sealed coffee jar, it would prevent terrorism… it wouldn’t. The 9-11 terrorists were all here legally, had come right through government daylight channels.
The second wobbly inference in the ad, that others come illegally to take ‘our jobs’… it’s hard to imagine that the souls who scale the fence are also carrying a DayTimer and know how to run Vista (We can hardly run Vista ourselves, come on)….
but, setting aside those underlying assumptions in the ad…
The visual is a seeming young male, ‘Hoodie man,’ with backpack. Pan shopping center. Pan leg of child running in shopping center. And etc. Finally, legs of Hoodie man shown as he leaves his back pack on the floor. Bloodied child being carried. (Picture of actual child from Russia) Then, Read the rest of this entry »
November 5th, 2007 by DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, TMV Columnist
Norman Rockwell, American painter, was known for gathering archetypal representations of people and creatures together in one scene, all of them wearing expressions or carrying hopes or fears that each of us have felt somewhere in time.
What we see:
This amazing archetypal photograph sent me by a correspondent this morning, ran in the NYT, with the title: “Police officers beating a lawyer outside provincial High Courts in Lahore today.” There in the photo is a Pakistani lawyer, center, who is protesting Musharraf’s newest stand of declaring an emergency suspension of civil rights in Pakistan, seeming, some say, in order to protect Musharraf himself.
I hope Musharraf is not eerily wanting to be for nefarious purposes– I hate to say this– like The Bloody Butcher of Burma, Senior General Than Schwe, who holds office both as ‘President’ and is also self-appointed head of the military.
The thinking people in both Pakistan and Burma, both, fear one man holding ALL power over all affairs of state and civil life. It would be as if our US President had all powers to suspend civil rights, bring military to the streets without oversight in order to quell dissent, launch a military anywhere without agreement of the representatives of the people.
But, as of this week, Musharraf publicly appears to want to continue to hold both power positions, and all their respective say-sos. A large vocal group of Pakistanis doesn’t want that. Add in the reappearance of Madame Bhutto. To much of the world, it appears the emergency might be Musharraf’s personal emergency: imminent loss of his absolute power.
What we do not see:
However, there is also the issue of deeply combative Pakistanis within the nation, as well as old tribal groups who have their ancient hatreds still and are spring loaded for avenging. There is also a seething anger between the classes, also boiling just under the surface.
Musharraf may as much be holding ‘an Emergency’ to keep all those old resentments from breaking out into blood gushing. Again. In many parts of the world, including the US, the peace between various groups of people who carry old grudges, is far more tenuous than most realize. It just takes a few ‘incidents’ to ignite all the old dry tinder.
What we can see in the photo… but, are we seeing what we are told we are seeing?:
Blowing this picture up on a 30″ monitor using a photograph software I use to analyze photographs in cases, this photo noted on various news sites is one showing the beating of a lawyer by soldiers in the streets.
But, not so fast. It is true that for many people of the world, a roaming street military causes an animal reaction of fear and fight or flight.
What we cannot see: But look at the photo closely and wonder: Is this a man being beaten by soldiers? Or is this a man being rescued by soldiers from a small village group who are beating him? Is this, despite its caption, really a photo of a lawyer being beaten by a ‘plain clothes’ policeman, that is, a village man deputized by the government, with no training, to ‘help’ the soldiers?
If so, who ordered, sanctioned such? Is there in Pakistan, the equivalent of an ‘informant network’ unleashed by the government, that also invites rabble-rousers, drunks, grudge-holding, mercenaries, and mentally ill people to join in beating up others? What is this a photo of, really?
What we can see:
I’ve used monikers below to identify the persons, normally they would be numbered right on the photograph. The identifying titles are not meant to be disrespectful, just to name by association, so track can be kept of the many persons in the photograph.
Here are the figures in the photo and what they actually seem to be doing that runs counter to the original title of the photo: Read the rest of this entry »
If some conservatives have their way, Alex Jimenez will become to an expanded domestic-spying program what Graeme Frost became to the expanded S-CHIP program: A human face on a contentious political issue.
Frost, of course, is the 12-year-old who gave a Democratic Party radio rebuttal to President Bush’s veto of a bill to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program that had passed Congress with broad bipartisan support.
Before you could say “Michelle Malkin,” conservative and right-wing bloggers and talk-show blatherers were dumping all over the Frost family because Graeme and sister Gemma were eligible for the Maryland version of S-CHIP even though they were card-carrying members of the middle class.
Jimenez, on the other hand, was kidnapped along with two fellow troopers by Al Qaeda insurgents in Iraq’s Triangle of Death in May and almost certainly was executed.
Jimenez was much in the news after he went missing because of his wife, Yaderlin, who like him is a native of the Dominican Republic but entered the U.S. illegally prior to marrying the Army specialist and naturalized citizen in 2004. Yaderlin had been slated for deportation because she had not applied for a green card, but can stay in the U.S. because an immigration lawyer who had the support of the Army intervened in her behalf and she was granted a card.
Well, Jimenez is now back in the news — at least in The New York Post and on Fox News, it’s identical TV twin, because of claims that U.S. intelligence officials apparently got bogged down for nearly 10 hours seeking approval to use wiretaps against the terrorists suspected of kidnapping he and the other men.
I say apparently because The Post, which never misses an opportunity to grind its political ax on its news pages, noted before even providing details of what happened to Jimenez that Congress plans to vote on a bill this week that leaves in place legal hurdles in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). These apparently include the need to get permission before a cell phone conversation between two people in Iraq is monitored because those communications typically are routed through U.S. hubs.
The Post, of course, is dead set against any hurdles and safeguards and wants the government’s powers to spy on its citizens to be expanded.
The newspaper says that a search to try to rescue the men was quickly launched, but soon bogged down because lawyers abiding by the FISA law were told that special approval from the attorney general would be required first.
The Post says that:
“For an excruciating nine hours and 38 minutes, searchers in Iraq waited as U.S. lawyers discussed legal issues and hammered out the ‘probable cause’ necessary for the attorney general to grant such ‘emergency’ permission.
“Finally, approval was granted and, at 7:38 that night, surveillance began.
” ‘The intelligence community was forced to abandon our soldiers because of the law,’ a senior congressional staffer with access to the classified case told The Post. ‘How many lawyers does it take to rescue our soldiers?’ he asked. ‘It should be zero. ‘ “
It would be nice to think had there not been a delay that Jimenez and his colleagues would have been located and rescued, but that is assuming an awful lot since the ambush and abduction occurred in a hotbed of insurgent activity where the lay of the land made a search very difficult and the locals were extremely uncooperative, two salient factors that The Post of course does not take into consideration in its rush to judgment.
Meanwhile, Think Progress makes a convincing case that unnecessary red tape and the incompetence of Alberto Gonzalez’ Justice Department are to blame.
Can’t exceptions to the FISA rule be made in extraordinary emergencies like this? Of course they can – and the The Post doth protest too much in wanting to strip the bill of all protections.
Verizon, for one, seems quite willing to make exceptions: A Congressional committee was told this week that the telecom giant has provided customers’ telephone records to federal authorities in emergency cases without court orders hundreds of times since 2005, in addition to the thousands obtained through subpoenas and court orders.
While young Frost and his family were skewered unmercifully in what has passed for an S-CHIP debate, don’t expect liberals and other opponents of the FISA expansion to try to even lay a finger on Jimenez.
He had as little to do with FISA as Frost had to do with S-CHIP. Not that that mattered to Malkin and her fellow swiftboaters.
Even in the seventh year of the Age of Bush, I still don’t want to believe that my country is being led by an intellectual, ethical and moral lightweight in the thrall of dangerous power mongers whose views are inimical to what my mother told me that the U.S. of A. is supposed to stand for.
Then I wake up and realize that Our Long National Nightmare rages on.
I also have come to understand something else of perhaps greater consequence. I’ll cut right to the chase for those of you who won’t read the entire post, let alone the snappy joke at the end.
George Bush and his Merry Bunch of Enablers deserve the lion’s share of the blame for these toxic times, but let’s reserve plenty of blame for a feckless news media, a Supreme Court newly packed with justices who are conservative except when it comes to activism, a compliant Congress and emergent Democratic majority that has talked the talk but largely failed to walk the walk.
But you, my fellow American, share a big dollop of blame as well.
That is unless you speak out at forums like this one, write to your congressfolk, show up at the rare demonstration or plan to vote in the next election and encourage others, especially those who aren’t registered, to do so. Praying for America’s salvation also counts, even if you don’t do it in front of others.
But while one or more of the above certainly disqualifies you as a silent lamb by my calculus, doing nothing qualifies you as a “Good German,†as Frank Rich puts it so powerfully. Why? Because we are inching ever closer to the shocking realization that analogies to the silent citizens of the Third Reich no longer seem so extreme.
The typical response of Bush sycophants has been to accuse people like myself of suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome. But with the destruction that the president has wrought as obvious as the nose on your face and his hard-core supporters dwindling to a lonely few, that pejorative seems as quaint as an archaic expression like “Gag me with a spoon.”
Let’s briefly recap some of the highlights of Year Seven . . .
You don’t have to suffer from Bush Derangement Syndrome to believe that some seriously nasty things have happened in Washington over the last six-plus years. But when historians take stock of The Age of Bush it is likely that they will find there is no darker stain on that presidency — and on America at the start of the new millennium — than the top-down approval of the use of torture.
Almost as abhorrent is this secrecy-obsessed administration’s systematic efforts to justify the use of torture on the one hand while denying that it approved its use on the other.
That is the crux of a New York Times’ investigative report this week that found while the Justice Department publicly declared torture to be “abhorrent” in a 2004 legal opinion it then issued a secret opinion a few months later that endorsed the CIA’s use of head-slapping, waterboarding and being confined naked in frigid cells, among other hard-core techniques that the intelligence agency had cherrypicked from the cookbooks of Soviet and Saudi dungeon masters.
It is a testament to how far this administration has slipped from the moorings of common decency — let alone the belief of suckers like myself that the U.S. never would succumb to acting like terrorists in fighting back against terrorists — that the Times story actually made me feel dirty.
On Wednesday, Republican-turned-Libertarian and Former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr wrote an Op-Ed piece in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in which he expressed his views about the recent FISA Bill that was passed by Congress just prior to the August Recess.
Introduced by Republican Senator Mitch McConnell and named the Protect America Act of 2007, the bill was passed by the U.S. Senate by a vote of 60 to 28, then passed by the U.S. House of Representatives by a vote of 227 to 183, and signed into law by President Bush on August 5, 2007. Republicans nearly unanimously supported the bill while Democrats largely opposed the bill (although the bill received considerable support from Blue Dog Democrats, without whose support, the bill likely would not have passed).
And where does the former Republican Congressman stand on this issue?
Here’s a hint. The title of his op-ed is Congress Trashes Your Privacy.
Mr. Barr writes:
Spokesmen for the Bush administration, including the president himself, in the lead up to the recent precipitous congressional action amending and expanding the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, repeatedly claimed that its efforts were designed simply to “update” the 30-year-old law. As usual, however, the remedy went far beyond that which might have been reasonably necessary. The administration claimed also that the targets of the expanded power were only to be those persons who were themselves suspected terrorists or were communicating with known or suspected terrorists. This assertion was simply false.
There was a need to modernize certain of the technical provisions in FISA. For example, there was a recent interpretation by a court that calls sent by modern routing mechanisms through the U.S. even though both parties were located abroad required a court order, because the routing alone subjected them to the warrant provisions of the law. But such matters could easily have been handled without dramatically altering the scope of the law.
Instead of simply doing what it said publicly it needed to do —- that is, a technical fix to the law to bring its provisions in line with 21st-century communications technology —- the administration played on congressional fears and ignorance of the law to ram through an expansion of the law’s reach that made virtually every international call or e-mail subject to monitoring. This essentially gutted any oversight by the courts.
During his time in Congress, Bob Barr was one of the most conservative politicians in office. A fierce critic of the Clinton administration, he led the impeachment effort against Clinton and even wrote a book in which he lambasted Clinton.
And even he can’t support the policies of the Bush administration.
August 10th, 2007 by DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, TMV Columnist
I wrote on TMV about Taslima, a poet and doctor, against whom a fatwa to behead her had been called ….for she dared to write poetry about “honor killings”; she was imprisoned for writing about women taken to the stadium and stoned to death while the mullahs present were laughing.
Read on TMV May 18, 2007: Four Arrested In Honor Killing and a New Call for Beheading Taslima Nasrin
http://themoderatevoice.com/?s=taslima
Yesterday she was attacked at a book signing of her work. To me, it is AS noteworthy, that men tried to protect her as that men tried to attack her. There are few stories about the men of the world who have unbitter and heroic hearts despite all reason to be bitter. I know that for many, this is non-news. For many women, they don’t want a man ‘intervening.’ But, for a person like myself who has had many challenges in the world, these are the kind of men, the kind of people, that I most admire. Ever. Always. Brothers by bloodline of the soul.
I often think that many of us, in these times, find we are rowing down a river of burning garbage with snipers on both shores. Many of us know we’re not crewing a ship, but a tea cup with sails made of memories of the worst and the best of what we’ve lived. And, there under one of the small rowing benches, is the Life Force protected under a worn tarp, still glowing. Our work: to carry that forward unharmed.
But, carrying such precious cargo through this perpetual dual-war zone we all seem to live in at present on many fronts, will not and can never be done without the help of those who, despite varying religions, politics, attitudes, opinions and other, are also strong-minded and soul-minded, both… Both.
Though there are some in the world who find it easier to breathe scathing smoke rather than life-giving oxygen to others, those who attempt to wither most all they touch… that there are others who are brave in ways that teach and shelter and offer life to others without being preemptory– that there are men (and women) who first-person, try to help to shelter despite blowback to themselves…these I bless.
I believe such souls in turn bless goodness in this earth… goodness that would otherwise, though precious, go unblessed and be disheartened under myriad unwarranted attacks. The world is made poorer and poorer then… more and more run by the fire starters who take strange arousal from conflagrations, and who ever try to force-feed that they are ‘right’… all at the expense of building toward others a living bridge that holds….
Taslima Nasrin writes to attempt to protect others. That some brave souls see she merits protection from those who seek to harm her mind, her creativity, her spirit and her body… this is a huge often overlooked news… a news that can be heartening to many, and this is why I brought it here.
Tracy Clark-Flory reports
Feminist author attacked in India
A mob of Muslim extremists assail writer Taslima Nasreen and call for her murder.
Aug. 10, 2007 | Taslima Nasreen, an outspoken feminist author who has railed against the treatment of women under religion, particularly Islam, showed up for her book release party yesterday in Andhra Pradesh, India. A mob of Muslim extremists also showed up to combat her depiction of Islam as oppressive to women … by throwing things at her and shouting for her death.
A crowd of 100 protesters, including a handful of Indian lawmakers, hurled a “leather case, bunches of flowers and other objects at her head and threatened her with a chair,” reports Reuters. By one account she was also slapped. Others tried to protect her from the onslaught and police eventually managed to escort her to safety; she walked away with only a bruised forehead.
As well as yet another reminder that plenty of people would like her head — quite literally. Just in March of this year an extremist Indian Muslim group offered an $11,319 reward for anyone willing to behead this “notorious woman.” This is nothing new; Nasreen has been avoiding execution since 1994 when her sacrilegious prose led to calls for her death in her birthplace of Bangladesh (which forced her to flee to Sweden and later India).
It’s no surprise, then, that Nasreen said the attack would not intimidate her into silence. Or, as she wrote in a poem:
I, come what may, will not be silenced.
Come what may, I will continue my fight for equality and justice without any compromise until my death.
