Category: media

Chapel Hill shooting and western media bigotry

Mohamad Elmasry: Three Muslim Americans were murdered on Tuesday in a University of North Carolina dorm room. The crime came on the heels of recent anti-Muslim attacks in Europe, carried out in apparent response to the January murders (committed by Muslims) of Charlie Hebdo journalists in Paris. Western media outlets will likely frame the most recent perpetrator of what some speculate is an anti-Muslim crime in the same way they frame most anti-Muslim criminals – as crazed, misguided bigots who acted alone. If past coverage is any indication, there will likely be very little suggestion that the killer acted on the basis of an ideology or as part of any larger pattern or system. But what if acts of anti-Muslim violence are consistent with at least some strands of current western ideology? What if Islamophobia has become so commonplace, so accepted, that it now represents a hegemonic system of thought, at least for relatively large pockets of people in some regions of the West? More here.

#MuslimLivesMatter #ChapelHillShooting

A Conversation With Steven Salaita

this is an incredibly important event both for free speech and palestinian solidarity. hope u can join us!
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“Digital Means, Political Ends, and Academic Freedom in the New Gilded Age: A Conversation With Steven Salaita”

Steven Salaita received his PhD in 2003 in Native American Studies at the University of Oklahoma. In the decade since, he published six books on topics ranging from Arab literature, to Anti-Arab racism in the United States, to the politics of Israel and Palestine. As a scholar, Salaita is not the sort to remain cloistered within the ivory tower. He is an activist. A Palestinian-American by heritage and identification, Salaita has been active in efforts to mobilize scholars to fight for justice for Palestinians.

In August, when Dr. Salaita was poised to begin a tenured professorship in the American Indian Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he was preemptively fired. His apparent offense? A series of provocative tweets that he authored during the then still ongoing war in Gaza.

Across the humanities and social sciences, faculty was outraged. Over 5,000 scholars from a range of disciplines and at various levels of professional advancement signed petitions pledging to boycott the University of Illinois until the situation had been rectified. Regardless, on September 11th, by an 8-1 vote, the University of Illinois’ Board of Trustees rejected Salaita’s appointment.

Both for scholars seeking to change the world and for scholars concerned merely with keeping their jobs, the Salaita affair is a parable for the academy in these trying times. The questions it raises are many: how might scholars with political commitments best advocate and organize? What opportunities and perils do digital media present? Does what one writes on social media belong to one’s private life or does it become part of one’s scholarly portfolio? What sorts of speech does the principle of academic freedom protect? What speech is exempt? Or, maybe, whose speech is exempt? And perhaps most crucially, in an era of the academic precariat, weakened public sector institutions, and hyper-empowered economic elites, just how sacred a principle does academic freedom remain?

On October 30th, come to the University of Rochester to see Professor Salaita discuss these issues and more. Framing commentary will be offered by Ted Brown and Tom Gibson of the University of Rochester, and Lisa Cerami of Nazareth College.

This event is generously cosponsored by the following departments, programs, and institutes at the University of Rochester: American Studies, Anthropology, Art and Art History, English, Film and Media Studies, The Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African American Studies, History, The Humanities Project, Philosophy, Religion and Classics, The Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies, and Visual and Cultural Studies.

Asim Rafiqui: Making the Forgotten Visible – Watson Institute for International Studies

interview i filmed with photojournalist asim rafiqui, whose series “law and disorder: a people’s history of the law in pakistan” is now on exhibit at the watson institute, brown university. he speaks eloquently about the plight of ordinary pakistanis whose interaction with the state is defined by brutal injustice. yes, the taliban are not pakistan’s only problem, especially when one views the country through the eyes of its most marginalized citizens. watch my interview with asim here.

Shadow lines

after being covered by dear cinema, india abroad, canada’s weekly voice, india’s sunday tribune, and the hindu, “partition stories” is now in the indian express! more here.

Partition Stories: funding campaign on Indiegogo

We are excited to launch our Indiegogo campaign to fund the completion of our film Partition Stories, a feature length documentary about memory, truth and the possibility of reconciliation. It focuses on a unique event (the partition of India) but derives lessons that remain urgently relevant today. The film is also a work of art infused with original animation, music and literary writing. We need your support to complete it!

The film has already been shot in Pakistan, India and the US. We are now in the process of editing the film. Post-production is crucial, as this is when hours of footage metamorphose into a cogent film. It is also the costliest part of filmmaking. We need your help to complete Partition Stories in 2014.

Our Indiegogo campaign is live now (as of April 15) and will run until May 25, 2014.

Contributions start at $15. Each and every contribution is welcome! Every level of participation comes with exciting rewards. Here is a link to our campaign with detailed information including trailer, film’s background, rewards, our creative team, and much more.

If you cannot support this project financially, please spread the word through email and social media. We invite you to comment and share your own stories about the partition of India, but also about the immigrant experience in general, about the dislocation of identity, geography, language and culture. Our Tumblr blog and Facebook page are meant to advance such dialogue by bringing multiple communities together in one safe and vibrant space. Thank you!

Partition Stories is co-produced by Mara Ahmed and Surbhi Dewan, both are descendants of families torn apart by partition – one ended up in India, the other in Pakistan.

The Surprising Lessons of the ‘Muslim Hipsters’ Backlash

LAYLA SHAIKLEY: The mixed reactions within the Muslim-American community excited me because it proved the idea that Muslims are not a monolith. But the criticisms made me realize I’d been naïve to think that the video could be a personal celebration. Inevitably, people saw it as a representation of our community. Muslim Americans are in many cases wounded, marginalized, reactive, and defensive, in large part because we’re underrepresented and misrepresented in the media. The two and a half minute clip stirred up feelings born of years, if not generations, of exclusion and marginalization. And the way to counter feelings of exclusion and marginalization is to write our own narrative at a national level—a portrait that includes academics, community builders, leaders, artists, and intellectuals worth being proud of. […] What I learned in all of this may help anyone who is marginalized: Tell your own story, and don’t rely on others to do it for you. More here.

How the New York Times silences Palestinians

On 30 November, protests all over historic Palestine against the [Prawer] plan were met with Israeli police brutality and, according to eyewitnesses, unprovoked police violence, as I reported in a post earlier today. But Kershner [NYT] presents what happened as being the fault of protesters: “In scenes reminiscent of the Palestinian uprisings in the West Bank, protesters hurled stones at police forces, burned tires and blocked a main road for hours near the Bedouin town of Hura in the Negev. The police used water cannons, tear gas and sound grenades to disperse the demonstrators.” It’s hardly surprising that Kershner follows a purely official Israeli narrative, because she only quotes Israeli officials… This is not reporting. It is colonial propaganda. It is also not surprising given Kershner’s record of misleading reporting and her conflict of interest. As Alex Kane reported last year for the media accuracy watchdog FAIR, Kershner’s “husband, Hirsh Goodman, works for the Institute for National Security Studies as a senior research fellow and director of the Charles and Andrea Bronfman Program on Information Strategy, tasked with shaping a positive image of Israel in the media.” More here.

Books on Muslim women

From Laila Lalami: Titles of most books on Muslim women: Behind the Veil, Under the Veil, Secrets of the Veil, The Veil of Silence, True Stories of the Veil. All of them, of course, illustrated with the requisite face veil.

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What Edward Said would say.

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Nothing symbolizes this distinct otherness more than the veiled woman, as Myra MacDonald highlights in her article “Muslim Women and the Veil.” MacDonald notes that the veil has been a fascination with Western imperialists since their first footsteps on Eastern soil. The veil represented something mysterious, an image of a frail yet sexualized woman who was hidden from the gazes of outsiders (men) and yet, who could see without being seen. If we consider this juxtaposition through Laura Mulvey’s concept of the gaze, the veil restricted the agency of the imperialist powers by limiting their ability to gaze onto and thus control the covered women. Further, because access (visual and other) to Eastern women was off limits to European travelers, unveiling the covered woman became an obsession. MacDonald writes:

The desire to penetrate behind the veil was intensified by the “scopic regime of modernity” that privileged seeing as the primary route to knowledge. It was characterized by a desire to master, control and reshape the body of the subjects by making them visible.

As a result, MacDonald notes, Western imperialists took it as their imperative to “rescue” women from the domination of Arab men. Rhetorically speaking, this liberation could only come by uncovering the women themselves, giving them freedom through exposure like their Western sisters. Yet, it is important to note that during the height of imperialist activity in the Middle East, Western woman were similarly denied many political, economic, and social freedoms. More here.

muslim women and the veil
muslim women and the veil

TED talks are lying to you

Thomas Frank: In Steven Johnson’s “Where Good Ideas Come From” (2010), the creative epiphany itself becomes a kind of heroic character, helping out clueless humanity wherever necessary: Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders. They want to complete each other as much as they want to compete.

And what was the true object of this superstitious stuff? A final clue came from “Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention” (1996), in which Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi acknowledges that, far from being an act of individual inspiration, what we call creativity is simply an expression of professional consensus. Using Vincent van Gogh as an example, the author declares that the artist’s “creativity came into being when a sufficient number of art experts felt that his paintings had something important to contribute to the domain of art.” Innovation, that is, exists only when the correctly credentialed hivemind agrees that it does. And “without such a response,” the author continues, “van Gogh would have remained what he was, a disturbed man who painted strange canvases.” What determines “creativity,” in other words, is the very faction it’s supposedly rebelling against: established expertise.

Consider, then, the narrative daisy chain that makes up the literature of creativity. It is the story of brilliant people, often in the arts or humanities, who are studied by other brilliant people, often in the sciences, finance, or marketing. The readership is made up of us — members of the professional-managerial class — each of whom harbors a powerful suspicion that he or she is pretty brilliant as well. What your correspondent realized, relaxing there in his tub one day, was that the real subject of this literature was the professional-managerial audience itself, whose members hear clear, sweet reason when they listen to NPR and think they’re in the presence of something profound when they watch some billionaire give a TED talk. And what this complacent literature purrs into their ears is that creativity is their property, their competitive advantage, their class virtue. Creativity is what they bring to the national economic effort, these books reassure them — and it’s also the benevolent doctrine under which they rightly rule the world. More here.

Women living under the Taliban – ideal messengers

Description by WikiLeaks staff: This classified CIA analysis from March 2010, outlines possible PR-strategies to shore up public support in Germany and France for a continued war in Afghanistan. The memo is an recipe for the targeted manipulation of public opinion in two NATO ally countries, written by the CIA. It is classified as Confidential/No Foreign Nationals.

“Afghan women could serve as ideal messengers in humanizing the ISAF role in combating the Taliban because of women’s ability to speak personally and credibly about their experiences under the Taliban, their aspirations for the future, and their fears of a Taliban victory. Outreach initiatives that create media opportunities for Afghan women to share their stories with French, German, and other European women could help to overcome pervasive skepticism among women in Western Europe toward the ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] mission.” More here.

Linsanity Official Trailer

saw “linsanity” and loved it. not only is it a well-produced, moving documentary but the man at the center of the film, jeremy lin, is captivating. unquestionable talent, impeccable work ethic, natural leadership skills, fearlessness and passion should have ensured a successful career in professional basketball, but lin had to struggle and prove himself non-stop. it was exhausting to watch it on film so i don’t know how he survived it in real life. the racism was relentless, whether it was the subtle kind that wouldn’t let him play in practice let alone in games, or the blatant kind where audiences shout racial slurs at him or sports commentators make fun of the “chink” in his armor. he talks about learning to laugh at the racial jokes rather than getting upset because he plays an awful game when he’s angry. for a young man in his early 20s to be able to process racism and continue to perform brilliantly is absolutely mind-blowing. many times some of his mannerism and wacky humor reminded me of my 18 yr old son. so proud of him!

This Documentary Might Be The Thing That Kills Texting While Driving

Acclaimed filmmaker Werner Herzog wants to bring an end to the scourge of texting while driving once and for all — and he just might do it. In a powerful 35-minute PSA entitled From One Second to the Next, Herzog hauntingly and painfully documents the tragic testimonies of individuals who have shattered lives and have had their lives shattered as a direct result of texting and driving. “There’s a completely new culture out there,” Herzog told the Associated Press. “I’m not a participant of texting and driving — or texting at all — but I see there’s something going on in civilization which is coming with great vehemence at us.”