Saturday 31 January 2015

It's time the government stopped trying to run the country like a private company

Richard Denniss


Running a country is nothing like running a business. But if the "Open for Business" Abbott government, which so often frames its policies in corporate language, was to be judged by corporate standards, it would be facing a shareholder revolt.
In the business world, knowingly lying to your investors or your customers is illegal. But in the long term, it's also just bad business practice. A company selling tickets to Hawaii and flying people to Rockhampton is a bad way to build your brand or attract repeat business. Tony Abbott was elected at the 2013 election by promising no cuts to Medicare or the ABC. Many first time travellers on Abbott Air will not come back for a second flight.
Of course, the corporate sector keeps secrets from their competitors and their customers, but keeping secrets is not the same thing as lying about your objectives. Again, a CEO who told their investors that they were going to do something they had no intention of doing, or one who told their consumers that their product had features it didn't really have would end up being disqualified from holding a position in a listed company.
The Abbott government's failings cannot simply be accredited to "keeping secrets" from the electorate, and they run deeper than governance and transparency. Indeed, its approach to growth and investment is inconsistent with both economic theory and standard corporate practice. Imagine how the market would react to a CEO who sold off their profitable assets in order to reduce low interest debt. Imagine how the market would react to a CEO whose vision was simply to distribute profits to shareholders because they didn't have any ideas where best to invest for growth.
Can you imagine the press releases if Tony Abbott was running an airline instead of our economy? "Abbott Air to postpone all maintenance: good news for bottom line", "Abbott Air cancels all advertising: spending cuts provide proof of good management".
Can you imagine an airline proudly announcing it had paid down its debts, and all it took was selling all its planes? The CEO may boast of being debt-free, but shareholders might see things differently.
Companies don't grow by reducing debt; they grow by borrowing to make the right investments. BHP Billiton has been around for 130 years and is currently carrying $66 billion in debt with no plans to repay it. Indeed, since the mining boom their net debt increased by a massive 315 per cent from $16 billion in 2004 to $66 billion now.
The Abbott government recently sold Medibank Private for $5.9 billion. In the four years since the Rudd government converted Medibank Private into a profit-making insurer, the Commonwealth collected from it $1.366 billion in dividends and taxes. As far as productive assets go, the government had a cash cow. Medibank Private earned the Commonwealth a 16-fold return on the $85 million investment they put into it.
If the proceeds of the sale had been put into paying down Australia's debt, as many amongst the Abbott government's supporters called for, the foregone revenue would have exceeded the saving on debt payments. In this context, paying the debt down made no sense. It's the equivalent of flogging the silverware to pay for Tupperware.
The way our budget papers are put together deliberately combines spending on infrastructure, spending on services such as health and education, and spending on income support. No private sector company puts their financial accounts together in a way that treats long term investments the same as short term expenses. Then again, we have laws to prevent private companies seeking to deceive their investors about the true state of their finances.
Conservative governments have done a remarkable job of convincing voters that public spending is wasteful and the less we have of it the better. Given that their objective is to cut spending on the poor so that they can cut taxes for the rich, this strategy makes political sense, but it has no basis in economics or corporate finance.
Leaving aside the fact that profitable companies happily incur large debts in order to fund good long term investments, profitable companies do not view their expenses as something bad that simply needs to be minimised. Well-run companies set out to spend large amounts of money on advertising, staff retention, research and even lobbying politicians because it helps achieve their objectives. Successful businesses don't purely seek to minimise their expenses; they seek to spend on the things that help them achieve their long run goals.
Cutting spending is easy. If that's all the government wanted to do, it could simply dismantle unemployment benefits, refuse to fund the age pension, or fire all public servants. Of course, doing so would deliver social and economic chaos. The challenge in both the public and private sector is identifying where cuts can be made in ways that do no harm to the long run growth and prosperity of the organisation. The fact that spending is discretionary does not mean it is unnecessary. It takes good management to make the right decisions. Efficiency dividends that cut spending in all departments by the same amount are the exact opposite of good private sector practice.
Running a country is far harder than running a big company. While public companies are by law required to focus on the narrow measure of financial success, governments must juggle national security, long term economic performance, social cohesion and environmental stewardship.
The business community is increasingly confident in their public and private delivery of advice to our politicians, but there is no evidence that their advice is helpful. Indeed, the more governments try to run our country as if it's a business, the worse the job they seem to do.
If business leaders really think they know how to run our country, they should run for office. And if politicians really think they know how to run a business, they should retire from office and go and run a company.
But in the meantime this government, and future governments, need to stop using flawed private sector metaphors to justify its determination to sell profitable assets, cut spending on things that save us money in the future, and ignore long term problems like climate change so it can brag about protecting future generations from levels of debt that are low by international, historical and, ironically, private sector standards..

Richard Denniss is executive director of The Australia Institute.

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/comment/its-time-the-government-stopped-trying-to-run-the-country-like-a-private-company-20150130-131t1o.html

Gunman as Hero, Children as Targets, Iraq as Backdrop

American Sniper is well acted, slickly produced, and occasionally gripping. It's also war propaganda


by ,

American Sniper, the latest blockbuster by director Clinton Eastwood about Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle, is having a major moment.
Articles about the film’s big opening weekend, its star and co-producer Bradley Cooper, and its six Academy Award nominations fill mainstream, alternative, and social media alike. Controversies involving Michael Moore’s and Seth Rogen’s critical comments, and their subsequent explanations and apologies, have flooded twitter.
The film’s audio track begins with the recitation of Allahu Akbar from a mosque in Fallujah. (The Iraqi scenes were filmed in Morocco.) Then the screen fills with U.S. Humvees, rolling through the destroyed streets of a former residential district, and the rumble of the vehicles interweaves with the repetition of the call to prayer, creating an auditory/emotional confrontation between the exotic, dangerous Orient and the techno-military US forces.
Next we see Chris Kyle, lying belly-down on the roof of what was once an Iraqi home, looking through his gunscope, providing “overcover” for the marines going house-to-house on a brutal, door-smashing manhunt. The Navy SEAL sniper spots an Iraqi man on a cellphone in a nearby house, followed by a woman and young boy emerging. The woman, presumably the boy’s mother, passes him an RPG to fire off as a group of Marines approach on foot. Kyle’s large green eye behind the scope expresses anxiety and doubt – what’s he going to do?
Cue the childhood flashbacks: Chris as a boy, going with his father to kill his first deer (“you have a gift, son” is the father’s praise for his precise shot). Chris as a middle school student, beating up a schoolyard bully hurting his younger brother. Chris as a young rodeo cowboy, throwing his cheating girlfriend out of his house.
So far, it’s an almost comical presentation of deeds that an adolescent boy – the target demographic of major motion pictures like this one – would most admire. Young Chris, a churchgoing but hard-drinking Texas youth, is shown developing as a protector, a theme that will repeat throughout the movie, in others’ grateful recognition of his “gifts” and in his own words about his motivations.
The 9/11 attacks shake 30-year-old Kyle out of his rather unsatisfying life as a cowboy, and he joins the Navy SEALs to “protect America.” A sense of purpose and the love of a good (albeit often whiny) woman, Taya – played by an unrecognizable Sienna Miller – follow the cornball scenes of Kyle and other young men training on the beach, lying in the cold surf, slathered in mud, and hanging tough in face of taunts by their instructors.
At his wedding to Taya, the call comes through for Kyle and his buddies to be deployed, thus making a narrative link back to his reason for joining the military (9/11) and going to war against Iraq. Thus is the Bush administration’s lie about the link between the attacks in 2001 and the country of Iraq repeated and emotionally underscored through the film.
The scenes set in Iraq – of briefings, gun battles with “the bad guys,” and joshing among the troops – sit at the center of the film, showing Kyle’s four, increasingly harrowing tours of duty. And what about the locals? In his brilliant analysis in Reel Bad Arabs, Professor Jack Shaheen gives a sort of taxonomy of Arab male types in popular films – the evil Arab, the silly/horny Arab, the primitive Arab, and the nervous/arrogant Arab. With the exception of the “primitive” type with camels, these stereotypes are on display in “American Sniper,” plus a couple of others I would name “Pitiful Father” and “Kid as Target.”
The presentation of children as potential or actual evildoers, and thus “deserving” victims of Kyle’s kill shots, seems to me a sinister new development in American film.
The first named Arab character is arch villain Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, shown during a rapid-fire briefing before Kyle and buddies hit the streets to find and “kill or capture,” as ordered, “this motherfucker.” Al-Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI, is mentioned frequently throughout the film, without one line of dialogue as to how al-Qaeda had penetrated Iraq following the US invasion, or what Zarqawi’s political allegiances might be.
Another named character is Zarqawi’s second-in-command, nicknamed “The Butcher” for his MO of maiming and killing his Iraqi victims with an electric drill. The “Pitiful Father” meme is represented by a man called “The Sheikh,” whose daughter has been maimed by The Butcher and who is forced, in a horrifying house raid scene, to give information about this evil man’s whereabouts, though he pleads that he and his family will be killed if he does so.
In this scene, of necessity, an Iraqi interpreter suddenly appears. The interpreter is not presented as a character beforehand, is not named, and has no scenes outside of those showing his utility as a translator. What is his motivation, his relationship with Kyle (and other US soldiers), his feelings about the US occupation of his country? We’ll never know, and this is one of many blanks the film leaves open.
Also never mentioned: Saddam Hussein, Nouri al-Maliki, oil corporations, or Abu Ghraib or any other US detention camps – not one word. The word “mercenaries” occurs in one fleeting line of dialogue, but any corporate name such as Blackwaterstays as unmentionable as menstruation in a Victorian lady’s parlor. These absences absolve the United States of its many war crimes in Iraq and perpetuate the warmongering narrative we are all too familiar with in the still-ongoing “War on Terror” era.
The Bay Guy Supremo in American Sniper, however, is not Zarqawi or The Butcher, but Mustafa – the Best Bad Guy Sniper, reputed to be a former Olympic and Syrian athlete. Mustafa is Kyle’s counterpart and competitor in killing. Handsome, nimble, and cunning, the Bad Guy Sniper, played by Egyptian Sammy Sheik, evades death by leaping from roof to roof or running into a tunnel after shooting Kyle’s buddies. In the interminable final gun battle scene, the American Sniper locates and kills the Bad Guy Sniper, whose death is shown in slow motion for maximum emotional impact. This is a revenge killing that endangers the entire local operation and brings down fire from Iraqis, until a last-minute rescue – guided by a surveillance drone – from an attack chopper.
By now, Kyle as Protector has been reduced by the hell of war to a scared fuck-up, crying to Taya on a satellite phone (their long distance conversations punctuate the battle scenes), “I’m ready to come home!” Sadr City, and by extension the entire country of Iraq – a malodorous hellscape – are visually annihilated as a sandstorm sweeps in, and Kyle is pulled into a vehicle on his way back to the United States.
The violent battle scenes had, for me, a tedious inevitability that kept me from being pulled in emotionally. What hurt me the most, as I flashed back to my own memories – based mostly on the courageous reporting of Dahr Jamail of the two terrible sieges of Fallujah in   April    and   November 2004 – was my sense of Iraq being used as backdropIt’s reduced to a hot, dirty place that “smells like dog shit,” as one Marine says in the opening scene. “This place is evil,” Kyle’s psychologically shattered younger brother, a fellow veteran, tells him as he departs the country. One war-blasted city looks much like another, almost as if a painted stage backdrop representing “Urban War Scene” were just hauled from one scene to the next. Fallujah… Ramadi… Sadr City… whatever.
The important data points are Kyle’s escalating kill counts in those places, which soon earn him the honorific of “The Legend” and a bounty on his head of $180,000. The Iraqis that Kyle kills lie flat, literally and metaphorically, like images in a video game, and we hear no one weep for them (with the exception of “The Sheikh,” whose screaming daughter runs to his corpse). One scene briefly shows dogs eating Iraqi corpses. The American dead, by contrast, are pulled at great risk from the battleground, wept over, accompanied in their flag-covered coffins in flights home, and laid to rest in magnificent ceremonies, remembered.
The American dead were persons, and they count. The Iraqi dead were objects in a sniper’s scope, and they are counted. That in a nutshell is the message of American Sniper.
How Chris Kyle and hundreds of thousands of other, mostly young Americans came to invade and occupy, wound and be wounded, kill and be killed in Iraq – for what politics, for whose profits – cannot be touched upon in American Sniper. Because to do so would be to move the narrative away from the isolated, tragic white male – that hoary old trope of Western Civ – toward something more politically and historically informed, and much less of a money maker.
And the boy in Fallujah with the RPG in his arms? Kyle kills him, and the woman with him. It’s Kyle’s initiation as sniper. We as audience are asked to listen to Kyle’s fellow SEAL’s reassuring justification for his first kills (which he is shown feeling guilty for), and to empathize, not with the boy in the devastated street, but with a “tormented” man becoming a hardened killer, who calls Iraqis “savages” in several scenes.
Snipers are protectors, and invaders are The Good Guys. Iraq children are legitimate targets, and Iraq is battleground and backdrop for American deeds and emotions – nothing more. In war propaganda – a huge genre in which American Sniper stands as a well-acted, high-production example – fictional narratives borrow just enough from true-life stories to reinforce already established memes. Cowboy, family man, Navy SEAL, sniper, trainer, author, veteran, celebrity, murderer, and eventually a murdervictim of another tormented combat veteran – Chris Kyle was a mystery. American Sniper portrays the life of a flawed “hero” who is also a blank slate on which other Americans can project rage, hatred, and ignorant misconceptions about Iraqis and other Arabs, as well as their – our – many conflicted feelings about war, “the troops,” and veterans.
As the US bombing campaign continues in Syria and Iraq, with the issue of a newAuthorization to Use Military Force hanging, American Sniper has come out at a fraught moment in US foreign policy. I left the movie theater with an aching head and a heavy heart, and the feeling that this is a very dangerous film.
Janet Weil is a military family member since January 2003 and a CODEPINK staffer. She is planning to livetweet the 2015 Academy Awards, and she is annoyed that David Oyelowo did not receive an Oscar nomination for Best Performance by an Actor for his portrayal of Martin Luther King in Selma.

http://fpif.org/gunman-hero-children-targets-iraq-backdrop-review-american-sniper/

The Muslim Response to Paris

Why was Catholicism Never Blamed for IRA Offensives?

by TARIQ ALI


In the week following the atrocities, a wave of moral hysteria swept France. ‘Je suis Charlie’ became almost obligatory. The Hollande/Valls message was simple: either you were for the magazine or for the terrorists. Quite a few, now as in 2001, were for neither. These included Henri Roussel, the 80-year-old founder of Hara-Kiri, the title under which Charlie Hebdo was published before it was forced into a name change – it was banned by the French government for insulting the corpse of Charles de Gaulle. In a remarkable essay published in theNouvel Observateur Roussel made two essential points. The first concerned French foreign policy:
I don’t much like it when a head of state speaks of the dead as heroes. It usually happens because citizens have been sent to war and not come back, which is rather the case with the victims of the attack on Charlie Hebdo. The attack is part of a war declared on France, but can also be seen in the light of the wars France has got itself involved in: conflicts where its participation isn’t called for, where worse massacres than that at Charlie Hebdo take place every day, several times a day, where our bombardments pile death on death in the hope of saving potentates who feel threatened and are no better than those who threaten them … If Obama had not held Hollande back, he would have gone after Assad in Syria, just as Sarkozy went after Gaddafi in Libya … with the result we’re familiar with.
The second was personal. Roussel knew all the victims well and this made him both angry and sorrowful. He denounced Charb for his recklessness:
He was the boss. Why did he need to drag the whole team into it? In the first attack on Charlie Hebdo in November 2011, the offices were torched after an issue was called ‘Charia Hebdo’. I quote what I said … in the Obs: ‘I think we’re ignorant and imbeciles who have taken a pointless risk. That’s all. We think we’re invulnerable. For years, decades even, we do provocative things and then one day the provocation comes back at us. It didn’t need to be done.’
It didn’t need to be done, but Charb did it again. A year later, in September 2012, after a provocation that put France’s ambassadors in Muslim countries in a state of siege … I asked Charb in the pages of the Obs: ‘To show, with the caption “Muhammed: A Star is Born”, a naked Muhammed praying, seen from behind, balls dangling and prick dripping, in black and white but with a yellow star on his anus – whatever way you look at it, how is this funny?’
I was sick of it. Charb told a journalist from Le Monde: ‘I have no kids, no wife, I prefer to die on my feet than to live on my knees.’ Cavanna, who feared death, wrote when he was Charb’s age: ‘Rather red than dead.’ * The reds are no longer red, the dead are still dead. Everyone has seen Charb’s last cartoon: ‘Still no attacks in France?’ And the jihadist in the cartoon, armed like the one who killed Charb, Tignous, Cabu, Honoré and the others, replies: ‘Wait! We’ve got until the end of January for New Year’s greetings …’ Have you seen Wolinski’s last cartoon? It ends: ‘I dream of returning to Cuba to drink rum, smoke a cigar and dance with the beautiful Cuban girls.’
Charb who preferred to die and Wolin who preferred to live. I blame you, Charb. Peace on your soul.
Roussel’s was a lonely voice and in response to complaints, including one from the publisher of Charlie Hebdo, the editor of Nouvel Observateur replied that after serious discussion it had been agreed that freedom of speech was best preserved by not denying it to those who disagreed with the mainstream narrative. Elsewhere three publishers who refused to display ‘Je suis Charlie’ on their websites were subjected to persistent questioning and bullying. It was reminiscent of the post 9/11 mood in this country (remember Mary Beard?), leave alone the States.
And what of the huge Sunday crowd convened by the president at the place de la République? The photo-op brigade at the front turned into a disaster when Netanyahu, waving triumphantly to onlookers, crashed his way to the front. The dignitaries he was so keen to join weren’t all that impressive: the puppet president of Mali; Angela Merkel, the Mother of Europe (her hands held in a way that suggested a mysterious Masonic signal); Donald Tusk, the Polish president of the Council of Europe. And, hurriedly summoned at the last minute to balance the presence of the Israeli leader, there was Mahmoud Abbas, the PLO leader, holding hands with the king of Jordan (both are Israeli supplicants). Sarkozy, placed in the fourth row, quickly began his own long march to the front, but by the time he got there the cameras had disappeared and the celebs soon followed suit. How many turned up in all? A million was the official figure. Eric Hazan, the waspish historian of Paris, used different criteria:
It was as big as the one on 28 April 1944, when Marshal Pétain attended the funeral service for the victims of Allied bombings at the Hôtel de Ville. War fever apart (the shouts of ‘To Berlin!’ in 1914), the great moments of unanimity have taken place at public funerals – like those of Victor Hugo, Pierre Overney, Jean-Paul Sartre, or Edith Piaf. Sunday’s demonstration is of the same order, the crowd is moved by sentiment and satisfied by coming together to express a vague desire for unity and reconciliation. As if the strength of the crowd was enough to mitigate the lack of a society that takes our common well-being as its goal.
Slowly, a more critical France is beginning to speak up. An opinion poll two days after the big march revealed a divided country: 57 per cent were ‘Je suis Charlie’s, but 42 per cent were opposed to hurting the feelings of minorities. Some of the latter might have been thinking of the blanket publicity for Michel Houellebecq and his new novel, Soumission, on TV and in print in the week preceding the attack on the magazine. Those with longer memories might have recalled Houellebecq’s statement in 2001, which laid the basis for the title of his latest offering: ‘Reading the Quran is a disgusting experience. Ever since Islam’s birth it has been distinguished by its desire to make the world submit to itself. Submission is its very nature.’ Replace the Quran with the Old Testament and Islam with Judaism and you would be locked up in France today, as some have been, including a 16-year-old schoolboy who parodied Charlie Hebdo. A satirical magazine, it appears, cannot be satirised. The double standards prevailing in France were made clear yet again when the Jewish Defence League, modelled on its US counterpart, was allowed to organise a demonstration under a banner – IMMIGRATION: REFERENDUM – which aligned it firmly with the extreme right in France and the rest of Europe.
In the Muslim world responses were varied. Even as Niger’s president, Mahamadou Issoufou, was marching in Paris, 45 Christian churches in his country were being torched and pastors’ homes targeted – the Boko Haram leader, Abubakar Shekau, was born in Niger and is an influential presence there, if only on video. Public funerals for the slain terrorists were held in Pakistan and Turkey (even though Islam expressly forbids funerals without a body). Two distinct narratives competed in Turkey. The president and his prime minister, just back from the Paris march, entered the realm of conspiracy satire by implying that the terrorist attack had been carried out by the French themselves, possibly aided by Mossad. The mayor of Istanbul backed them. These are Nato’s favourite Islamists and we can only speculate as to whether the leash will be shortened soon. The Turkish republican followers of Kemal Atatürk supported Charlie Hebdo unconditionally. Their daily paper,Cumhuriyet, published four pages from the new issue of Charlie Hebdoas an insert, but not the cover or drawings portraying the Prophet Muhammed. However two columnists on the paper reproduced the cover beside their pieces, enraging the government and its followers. Vans carrying the paper to distribution outlets were seized and Erdoğan also used the crisis as an excuse to crack down on local dissidents who had been rubbishing him on various websites.
Elsewhere the Sunni-Shia divide was highlighted when Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbullah, used a TV address marking the anniversary of the prophet’s birth to denounce extremists within Islam (takfiris) who behead and slaughter their captives, claiming that their actions were much more dangerous for Islam than for anyone else. He had no such compunctions when the Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced a fatwa sentencing Salman Rushdie to death, and was still going on about it in 2006 on al-Jazeera. ‘If the faithful had carried out Ayatollah Khomeini’s injunction and killed the apostate Rushdie,’ he said on that occasion, ‘the Danish newspaper editor would never have dared to publish these cartoons.’ A naive view, but times have changed and the battle with Sunni extremism is now at its peak.
On the question of images there has always been a debate within Islam. The Quran itself contains warnings against the worship of idols and graven images, but this is taken straight from the Abrahamic tradition and the Old Testament. It’s a stricture on forms of worship. After all, images of the prophet were embossed on early Muslim coins to replace Byzantine and Persian potentates. A number of paintings by Muslim artists in the late medieval period depict the prophet with loving care. The Shia tradition has always ignored the supposed ban on images and portraits of Shia imams have never been forbidden. All the different schools of Sunni jurisprudence don’t agree on the question. It has only become a big issue since Saudi money pushed Wahhabi clerics onto the world stage to fight communism during the Cold War (with the total backing of Washington). Wahhabi literalism misinterprets the Quran and its hostility to images led the Saudi government to destroy the graves in Mecca of the prophet, his companions and his wives. There were no protests except by architects and historians who denounced the vandalism. One can only imagine the response in the world of Islam had the destruction of the graves been carried out, deliberately or accidentally, by a Western power.
We now know that the assault on Charlie Hebdo was the outcome of intra-Wahhabi rivalry. The attack has been claimed by Ayman al-Zawahiri as an al-Qaida initiative, organised by its section in the Yemen. There is no reason to doubt his assertion. His organisation has been outflanked and partially displaced by the Islamic State and a global act of terror was needed to restore its place as the leading terror group. As in other suicide-terrorism outings by al-Qaida, the act itself was well planned and predictably successful, and those who carried it out were duly sacrificed. Al-Qaida’s supporters will now boast that while their rivals kill other Muslims and accept Western largesse, they alone target the West and inflict damage. The fact that all these acts are inimical to the interests of European or American Muslims and benefit only the West seems to escape their attention.
David Cameron and other Western leaders insist, as they do after every outrage, that the problem is radicalised Islam and therefore the responsibility lies within the religion. (Why was Catholicism never blamed for the IRA offensives?) The real problem is not a secret: Western intelligence services regularly tell their leaders that the radicalisation of a tiny sliver of young Muslims (more work for the security services in Britain and France than for al-Qaida or ISIS) is a result of US foreign policy over the last decade and a half. Some of these Muslims have been happy to acquire new skills and priorities while fighting in Bosnia and, more recently, Syria.
Tariq Ali is the author of  The Obama Syndrome (Verso).
This essay originally was originally published by the London Review of Books.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/01/30/the-muslim-response-to-paris/

Saudi Arabia's culpability for extremism

By Brian Cloughley 

We've been reading and hearing a great deal about freedom of speech recently, with much of the reporting and comment being generated by the appalling murder of journalists and cartoonists in France by Muslim fanatics. 

Understandably, their actions were thought by most of the world to be barbaric as well as totally unjustified in any intellectual sense. But justification is essentially subjective, and the savages who murdered the staff of the Paris magazine Charlie Hebdo exulted that "We have killed Charlie Hebdo! We have avenged the Prophet!" as if this were in some way adequate or even laudable explanation of murder. 

For them it was irrelevant that killing is forbidden by the law of the land in which they lived. They had been taught that modern-day laws - designed, debated and developed over centuries by impressive intellects - are entirely negated by selective interpretation of the sayings of a religious leader by intolerant clerics to whom the word ‘objectivity' is objectionable. 

French President Hollande's statement that "These madmen, fanatics, have nothing to do with the Muslim religion" was well-intentioned and meant to defuse tension in his country where people are understandably furious about the murders. But alas these crazy fanatics were only too representative of a substantial number of those who follow Islam. 

Not all, of course. Far from it. But of the 1.5 billion Muslims on the planet, there are some who think the same way as the savages who brought fear, anger and death to the democratic country of which they were citizens. They are convinced that anyone considered to be critical of the Prophet Mohammad, founder of their religion, deserves to be killed. It's as basic as that. 

But there is no democracy in the religiously intolerant Kingdom of Saudi Arabia which practices and preaches the most fundamental and intolerant type of Islam and carried out a vicious religiously motivated flogging of a human being on the same day that the assault on freedom and democracy by Muslim fanatics was defeated by French security forces. 


Following Friday prayers in the Saudi city of Jeddah on January 9 a man was lashed 50 times. The medieval thrashing was carried out in public because although the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia does not permit government of the people by the people it is all in favor of demonstrating support for Islamic punishments as publicly as possible. The crime of 30-year-old Raif Badawi was to have had a website that "undermined general security" in addition to "going beyond the realm of obedience." 

For this he was sentenced to a 10-year jail term and 1,000 lashes to be executed in installments of 50 a week for 20 weeks. 

During this savage thrashing in the name of Islam and the King of Saudi Arabia, Mr Badawi didn't utter a word. He didn't cry, shout or scream. He suffered the barbaric beating silently while watched by a crowd of hundreds who yelled "Allahu Akbar" and clapped and cheered while the spirit of Raif Badawi rose above that theocratic kingdom like a star of hope whose reflection sparkles in the water of a putrid swamp. 

As the BBC reported, " Saudi Arabia enforces a strict version of Islamic law and does not tolerate political dissent. It has some of the highest social media usage rates in the region, and has cracked down on domestic online criticism, imposing harsh punishments." 

We should not be surprised that so many international devotees of Saudi Arabia's "strict version of Islam" are those who support the Paris murderers because Saudi Arabia sets an example to the Sunni world - and therefore to Sunni fanatics. 


The official Saudi Arabian interpretation of Islam is inflexible, intolerant and savage. There is no room for sympathetic regard for all humanity; no space to embrace the wider meanings of life; no shade of understanding for those who choose to follow other than the blinkered path dictated by bigoted Saudi clerics and approved by their pliable kings. And although official Saudi statements about the Paris killings were predictably critical, the warped Islamic doctrine of the clerics of the Saudi Kingdom remains uncompromising in condemning unbelievers. Their message is spread worldwide. 

The plain fact is that murder is illegal in civilized countries, no matter the contention that "there is no dispute that anyone who curses Allah is killed" - which is the firm conviction of the theocratic autocracy of Saudi Arabia in which over four million people espouse Salafism, an ultra-puritanical type of Islam that advocates jihad as do the matching Wahhabis whose fanaticism beggars belief but whose intolerant teachings gain more adherents day by day. 

Osama bin Laden was a Saudi Wahhabi, but Saudi Arabia did and does nothing to attempt to limit the spread and influence of such rancid zealots. 

When they were killing their victims the Paris murderers screamed that "we have avenged the Prophet!" and followed to their deaths what they had been taught. In doing so they continued to practice one of the most extreme forms of Sunni Islam, the version expounded and preached by Saudi Arabia where personal freedom is unknown - except if you are born into the monarchy. 

For Saudi Arabia is a two-faced kingdom. It reeks of hypocrisy as much as it stinks of the barbaric savagery of the punishments it carries out in the name of religion. 

One instance of squalid humbug came to light in a Wikileaked US diplomatic communication from Saudi Arabia in November 2009 describing an alcohol-fuelled jamboree in the country that professes to keep to the strictest tenets of Islam, especially concerning prohibition of alcohol and enforced "modesty" of women. 

inside the gates, past the Nigerian security guards . . . the scene resembled a nightclub anywhere outside the Kingdom: plentiful alcohol, young couples dancing, a DJ at the turntables, and everyone in costume. Funding for the party came from a corporate sponsor, Kizz-Me, a US-based energy-drink company that now distributes out of Saudi Arabia, as well as from the princely host himself.

Religious police/CPVPV (Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice) were nowhere to be seen . . . [although] our host “His Highness” Faisal al Thunayan (protect) . . . is considered a second-tier "Cadet" prince, not in line for the throne, he still enjoys the perks of a mansion, luxury car, lifetime stipend, and security entourage. 


Alcohol, though strictly prohibited by Saudi law and custom, was plentiful at the party's well-stocked bar.
The humbug is obvious in the nightclubs of New York, Paris and London where the gilded youth of the Saudi King's 12,000 strong royal family indulge in alcohol and are otherwise right royally dissipated in exploration of worldly pleasures. 
Back home, however, their ferocious religious police are vigilant in seeking out women who drive cars, and it was reported that "two Saudi women detained for nearly a month for defying a ban on females driving were referred to a court established to try terrorism cases on Thursday [December 25]." 

What do you suppose the Koran says about female drivers? Might there be a verse describing the evil that would fall upon the world when women get behind the wheel of a motor vehicle? That would be difficult to imagine, because the motor car wasn't invented until some centuries after Islam was founded. So how can anyone claim that it is ungodly for women to drive cars? There is no civil law in Saudi that forbids females to drive (indeed there is no civil law at all), but the clerics who take it upon themselves to interpret the Koran and Hadiths (the reputed sayings of the Prophet) have decided that if women drive cars they will "undermine social values" and must therefore be subjected to persecution. 

The Saudi ‘Arab News' had it on September 1 last year that, "there is no law that prohibits women from being behind the wheel, but it is a widely accepted norm that they don't drive. As such, women should accept simple things. First they should be allowed to drive in certain conditions such as taking their children to school or sick family members to hospitals. This is a wise thing women could do at this stage. Being stubborn won't support their cause." 

This sort of mindset typifies the warped outlook and dangerous quasi-religious propaganda of the Islamic Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The authentic holy word, as intended by the Prophet, continues to be warped in interpretation by bigoted charlatans and the result is indoctrination of gullible fools to the point that they can become murderous fanatics. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a hothouse that nurtures shoots of distorted dogma. Its acceptance, endorsement and external preaching of perverted ideology is an international disgrace. 

There is little wonder that the admirable tenets of true Islam are regarded with suspicion and even revulsion by so many non-Muslims. The murderers in Paris screamed that by slaughtering defenseless people they had "avenged the Prophet!" But of course they hadn't done any such thing. And they had done their religion untold harm. They made countless millions of non-Muslims believe that Islam is a religion of aggression rather than of peace and understanding. 
Their guiding spirit came from Saudi Arabia's extremists who are supported by an absurd, outdated and hypocritical monarchic regime that has the unearned distinction of being located at the geographical center of a great religion that has been perverted by self-centered bigots. God help us all. 

Brian Cloughley is a former soldier who writes on military and political affairs, mainly concerning the sub-continent. The fourth edition of his book, A History of the Pakistan Army, was published last year. 

(Copyright 2015 Brian Cloughley) 

http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MID-01-300115.html

Why the Macho Sludge Peddled by 'American Sniper' Is Really Cowardice

Martin Luther King Jr. exemplifies real bravery in "Selma."

Well, you can beat on your chest / Hell, any monkey can—Bruce Springsteen, “Real Man”
In an essay on Theodore Roosevelt, Gore Vidal classified the former president and known tough guy as an “American sissy.” He was a sissy, because “he never showed much real courage.”
“Despite some trust-busting,” Vidal writes, “he never took on the great ring of corruption that ruled and rules in this republic.” The man whose face forms a fourth of Mt. Rushmore was a particularly American sissy, because he was a “war-lover” and he embodied the belief that physical bravery was the ultimate manly virtue. Vidal, inspecting the idiocy of this belief, concludes, “There is something strangely infantile in this obsession with dice-loaded physical courage when the only courage that matters in political or even real life is moral.”
There is a war in the American cinema right now, and it is not the one that is visible in the boring battle scenes of Clint Eastwood and Bradley Cooper’s jingoistic fairy tale. It is the war for attention and adulation taking place at award ceremonies and ticket booths between American Sniper, and a movie about the sacrifices of heroes who fought for freedom, Selma.
Selma and American Sniper present two different heroes of two dramatically different historical narratives. As they compete at the box office, they mimic the competition between two conflicting conceptions of heroism. There is the heroism of Martin Luther King Jr., who challenged the most powerful forces and institutions of his culture, facing death threats and daily harassment, to work tirelessly toward equality and justice, practice peaceful resistance to oppression, and preach love for your neighbor, stranger and even enemy. Chris Kyle said it was “fun” to kill the “savages” of Iraq, and blindly followed the destructive marching orders of George W. Bush.
As much as these ideas of heroism clash ethically and politically, there is a deeper conflict at work in American culture. It involves America’s inability to advance beyond its BCE notion of masculinity, and progress into an CE world of humanity. Martin Luther King and Chris Kyle not only represent two radically different definitions of heroism, but also two divergent models of manhood. Given the box office success of American Sniper, and the falling feather impact of Selma, it is clear how the majority of Americans view and enforce manhood.
The prevailing and prevalent projection of American manhood is at once a cartoon, simplistic in its emphasis on strength and eschewal of sensitivity, and dangerous in its celebratory zeal for violence. It is not masculine as much as macho, according to the useful distinction of one of America’s finest male novelists, Jim Harrison. Because Harrison often writes about roughneck, working-class characters in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan or the ranches of Montana, many shortsighted critics have called his literature “macho.” Explaining his objection to that label, Harrison said, “I have always thought of the word ‘macho’ in terms of what it means in Mexico—a particularly ugly peacockery, a conspicuous cruelty to women and animals and children, a gratuitous viciousness.”
Idolatry of physical strength and bravery, without an ethical compact or moral purpose, naturally morphs into the glorification of violence, and directly contributes to the maintenance and enhancement of social catastrophes and crises, especially those that involve abuse or neglect of the weak and vulnerable.
The American macho problem of social dysfunction and intellectual paralysis is at work on the football field whenever coaches, fans, parents, and even players enforce a code to take concussions like “real men,” and ignore the possibility of early onset dementia. America’s antiquated notion of macho toughness is operational in the aggressive pursuit of sexual ownership in the military, where one third of women are victims of sexual assault, and on college campuses, where one fourth of women experience sexual harassment.
It is also not far in the background of America’s foreign policy, and its enthusiasm for wars when primitive, locker room calls for “kicking ass” replace meaningful discourse on geopolitics and international affairs. Toby Keith’s anthem about “putting a boot in the ass” of terrorists, like President Bush’s flight suit posturing and “bring it on” finger waving, captured the nation’s attention, demonstrating how at the highest levels of governance and in the most avid articulations of politics, America has not yet graduated out of the Bronze Age nor has it left the professional wrestling ring.
Anyone who attempts to navigate the minefield of the macho mentality will face accusations of failing to live up to some bizarre standard of acting as a “real man.” Steve Almond writes that he is deluged, almost daily, by people telling him, through the tough guy forums of anonymous social media and email, that he is not a “real man” because he is critical of the NFL for its complicity in covering up concussions and their consequences. Antiwar activists and writers often have their “real men” credentials questioned. The recent mockery of John Kerry and James Taylor for a performance of “You’ve Got a Friend” in France reveals that the only acceptable language of international alliance is the terminology of violence. Had Kerry vowed to “destroy” or “eliminate” all Islamic terrorists, he would have won favor in the press. Using song as a gesture of political and personal friendship is worthy only of scorn.

In American Sniper, one of the most important scenes takes place early in Chris Kyle’s childhood. The boy is sitting at a dinner table with his brother and parents, and his father explains that in the world there are “sheep” (weak people without the capacity for violence), “wolves” (evil people who are violent), and “sheepdogs” (good people who are violent). The earnest father, speaking in an inexplicable tone of anger, tells Chris and his brother that he is raising them to be sheepdogs.
The worldview is deranged in its simplicity. History, ethics and politics are much more complex than the categories of wolves, sheep and sheepdogs will allow. The worldview becomes dangerous when coupled with macho notions of physical strength and infantile ideas of physical courage, because it causes the aspiring sheepdogs to actively look for wolves.
“There is evil here,” an adult Chris Kyle tells a SEAL turned war skeptic in American Sniper when justifying the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. There certainly is evil in Iraq, just as there is evil in America and everywhere else. Sending sheepdogs to pick fights with wolves, as the world has seen in Iraq, will only spread misery, enhance cruelty and create chaos. The medieval macho philosophy, dominant in American life, insists that the eradication of evil is possible with guns, tanks and tough guys. It is naïve at best, but catastrophic when combined with the categorization of human beings in absolutes. Failing to question, much less protest, the state for its advancement of its own interest overseas, with the trajectory of the missile and bullet, reveals America as a nation of sissies in desperate need of “real men” like King to demonstrate authentic moral bravery.
Martin Luther King Jr. did not classify all human beings into the static groups of “evil” and good”—“wolves” and “sheep.” He said that “there is evil in the best of us, and good in the worst of us,” and explained that all it takes for evil to triumph is for “good men to do nothing.” He resisted the simplistic and self-serving supremacist worldview. According to his friend, Harry Belafonte, he did express consternation that he was succeeding in the integration of his people into America, but that he was integrating them into a “burning house.” The regressive relegation of manhood to aggression without compassion acts as kerosene in a culture committed to arson.
It is erroneous to distill the civil rights movement into the struggle of one man. King would have meant nothing without his staff and supporters. Even if he was a genius and a giant, it was the movement that made King. It was not King that made the movement. Similarly, Chris Kyle’s attitudinal aggression toward anything un-American and his fatal, doctrinal loyalty to the interests of Empire fuels the death machinery of militarism, but it does not construct and create it. The war in Iraq was a policy decision of the American government carried out with the enthusiastic endorsement, or at least, tacit approval of the American media.
At the movie theater, however, there exists the dramatization of two distinctly American men, and through an imaginative confrontation with the tragedies and triumphs of their lives, Americans can draw distinctions between two different molds of manhood.
One mold makes room for tenderness, love, and sensitivity to the suffering of others, along with a willingness to admit weakness. It is a 21st-century adaptation to the acquiescence of knowledge and the progression of cultural norms more suitable for sophisticated, and more importantly, peaceful living. The other mold makes room only for arrogance, intimidation and the reckless abandonment of humanistic values in favor of the desire to dominate.
Gore Vidal, a gay veteran of World War II who risked his entire career in an act of moral courage by writing the first gay love story in a novel during the height of homophobia in the 1950s, was part of an American vision of manhood that allowed for complexity of thought and emotion. The cinematic characters of Paul Newman’s best roles—strong but sensitive—provide another example, as does the music of Bruce Springsteen, an all-American man whose most masculine song, “Tougher Than The Rest,” equates strength with loyalty and love.
At some point, American culture lost its balance, and its mind, and reverted back into an action movie, video game conception of masculinity. The consequences, far from fictional or digital, are located in the wreckage of women’s lives darkened by sexual assault, children’s futures destroyed by war, and its macho practitioners’ loss of emotional stability and satisfaction.
Martin Luther King Jr.'’s life demonstrates the sturdiness and softness necessary for healthy masculinity. Acceptance of such a contradiction, and sublimation of two oppositional ideas into one identity, requires comfort with the nuanced variety of psychology and history.
The failure to evolve out of stone age masculinity is especially damning because America prides itself on its status as a “Christian nation,” yet Jesus Christ said “he who lives by the sword dies by the sword” and advocated “turning the other cheek” when facing a tormentor. It was this very idea, along with Gandhi’s application of nonviolent protest to politics, that inspired King to lead the civil rights movement according to principles of peace.

Chris Kyle suffered from post traumatic stress disorder, a condition that caused robotic detachment from his family culminating in nearly killing his son’s pet dog during a child’s birthday party. It is likely that his laconic rejection of regret, remorse, or even reflection on his own role in an unjust war worsened his psychic disorder.
“Do you have any regrets or doubts over anything you did?” a VA psychiatrist asks Chris Kyle in the movie. “No, that’s not me,” he answers back.
It isn’t America either. The trauma will only escalate until an increasingly isolated and violent nation can look itself in the mirror with a willingness to see its disfigurements and deformities. King’s life was lived and lost in service to the truth. He understood that recognition of the truth, even when it is ugly, is elemental to the beauty of a hero and the substance of a man. That is the place King still occupies in every moral American’s conscience
King and Gandhi possessed what Vidal described as “moral courage.” That standard of courage and measurement of bravery is flawlessly helpful in the world or adult reality, but not as appealing in the world of juvenile fantasy.

http://www.alternet.org/culture/why-macho-sludge-peddled-american-sniper-really-cowardice

Roma fear being brushed out of the history of the Holocaust

About 19,000 Roma died at Auschwitz, yet the they have no official presence at commemorations