Thursday, June 27, 2013

Blog: Blasphemy Law Comes to Facebook

Over the last couple of weeks Facebook has clamped down heavily on various (around 40) counter-jihad and patriot pages.

The administrators of these pages were shocked when they logged on and found that their pages had suddenly 'disappeared'. In some cases Facebook has made this statement: 'Your Page was flagged for content containing nudity, pornography or sexual solicitation.' The page admins, however, have claimed not to have posted anything with explicitly sexual content. What will have happened is that Muslims, and/or the Leftist whores/enablers-of-Islam, will have 'reported' these pages for 'sexual content' knowing full well that it would be much more difficult to make a political/religious case for banning them. (I've been reported by a Hope Not Hate (UK) member, and then banned by Facebook, for an innocent cartoon image -- Facebook used the phrase 'sexual content' then too.) These pages will therefore have been consistently reported by Muslims, and/or Leftists, for anti-Islamic content, not for sexual or violent content.

So, perhaps unknowingly, the automated machine that is Facebook will mainly respond to Muslim and Leftist 'reports' without looking into their true nature and seeing they are in fact being taken for a ride by such people. And because Facebook is free it simply won't have the manpower to check all reports. Thus it will ban indiscriminately -- on reports alone. Either that, or the Muslims and Leftists who work for Facebook are taking matters into their own hands by imposing Sharia Blasphemy Law on Facebook without its owners, or those at the top level, knowing this.

Here are some of the pages banned by Facebook recently.

On the 19th on June, 'Ban Islam' was itself banned. ('Ban Islam' had at least 45,000 followers.) The admin immediately set up 'Ban Islam 2' only to be banned again a couple of days ago. 'Islam Against Women', 'Islam Free Planet' and many others have also been banned. The blog Sharia Unveiled estimates that around 40 pages have been banned in the last couple of weeks. And, as that blog puts it, 'from what we are hearing, this is only the beginning'.

None of this is a surprise. There has been a huge effort by Muslims and Islamic groups to get rid of certain pages -- or all pages! -- which are critical of Islam (in any way whatsoever!). Of course they have focused on the most popular ones to begin with.

This campaign to get Sharia Blasphemy Law implemented on Facebook dates back to at least 2010. To take just one example of this. There is a page which is honest it its extremism and about how absolutist it is about all criticism of Islam. Its name alone betrays that extremism: 'We want Facebook to remove all groups & pages that [are] against Islam'. In that page you can find the following statement:

"This page is created for the sole purpose of removing all the groups and pages that are against Islam. If 50,000 people report those Groups and Pages than Facebook will disable."

It is partly an organisation called Islamic Socialist Network responsible for some of these assults on free expression (according to the American blog 'Sharia Unveiled'). This 'network' ran a website called 'Union Star Network'. However, in the last 24 hours this website/blog has itself been closed down. I can only assume that this has been in response to critics of the 'Wanted' posters which many Internet users may have 'reported'. On that website there were (I saw them myself) indeed various 'wanted' posters which offered rewards of up $1 million for personal information on the admins of patriot and counter-jihad pages. Of course the Islamic and Leftist totalitarians are also intent on banning or hacking websites and blogs too (e.g., 'Your Daily Muslim' is one victim of this campaign for the elimination of all contradictory views), not just Facebook pages.

All this means that Islamic Sharia Blasphemy Law Campaign on Facebook is merging into the Leftists' 'no platform policy'. (All totalitarians together, eh?) That campaign should now be called 'The Blasphemy Law Policy' or 'No Platform for Blasphemy Against Islam'. (When did the Left become so protective of religious sensibilities? Answer: When the UK and U.S.'s religious became brown-skinned.)

At least the Muslim Facebook page 'Remove all Groups and Page that are against Islam' is honest about its extremism and absolutism in that its very name is explicit about it. It is telling Muslims, and their Leftist helpers, to 'remove all groups and pages that are against Islam' so that Muslims can go on killing and oppressing without anyone doing anything about it. So that Islam can remain uncriticised; as it has been, at least in the Muslim world, for 1,400 years.

Finally, it's strange that so many Muslims constantly boast about how many Muslims there are in the world as if that in itself proves something. But is it any wonder that there are so many Muslims with such a massive and deep iron wall of protection around Islam (which has been in place since that religion's invention)? In any case, the numbers of Muslims proves nothing. I would guess that at the peak of National Socialism's popularity and support there were at least 100 million Nazis in Europe and beyond. The numbers would have been even higher for Communists at the peak of Communism's popularity and support. So, if anything, that large number of Muslims is best explained by the persecution and killing of all the critics of Islam (as well as death for apostasy). And this current campaign to get Facebook to fully implement Sharia Blasphemy Law is just the latest stage in that Islamic war against everything 'un-Islamic'.

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Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Here's How We Built a Movie Theater for the People

Here's How We Built a Movie Theater for the People:

Here's How We Built a Movie Theater for the People

By Michael Moore, MichaelMoore.com

08 June 13

his past week, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the main federation of Hollywood's six major studios, posted on their web site a list of what they believe are some of the best movie theaters in the world.

And listed as #1 is the historic State Theatre of Traverse City, Michigan, an incredible movie palace which I restored and now run as a nonprofit theater - along with a few hundred great volunteers!

This month, we will sell our one-millionth admission ticket since we opened five-and-a-half years ago. What makes this statistic even more remarkable is that Traverse City's year-round population here in remote northern Michigan is only 16,000 people. And mostly we show only "smaller" indie and foreign films that open nationwide on less than 200 screens.

Even with those limitations, in the 289 weeks we've been open, for 78 of those weeks, the State Theatre has been the #1 grossing theater in the country for the movie we happen to be showing. We've placed in the top 10 grossing cities for 171 of those weeks (the other cities on that list are usually New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, D.C., Dallas, Boston, etc.).

So how in the name of trees that are right height does this happen?

Here is our basic recipe:

We only show really good movies. Nothing that aspires to the mediocre is shown at the State.

We reject the need to make a profit and, by doing so, we've been in the black since day one.

We don't rip people off. You can see a first-run movie for $8 and $6 (kids are less). Late night on the weekend is 2 for $5. We have 25-cent kids matinees on Saturday mornings (often packed with 580 people in attendance) and 25-cent classic movie matinees on Wednesdays. As for the concessions: No $10 popcorn at our place! Popcorn is as low as $2, soda $2 and candy as low as $1. We believe everyone should be able to afford to go to the movies.

This is the community's theater. Like in a co-op, everyone pitches in as a volunteer. Volunteers pop the corn, take the tickets and run the box office. Community groups pick the shift they'd like to work each month, which means on any given night you'll have a county judge and a single mom working the concession counter, the high school English staff working as the ushers, and the Boy Scout troop on clean-up. Everybody gets free movies tickets for this - and the knowledge that they are the true "owners" of this theater.

(The paid positions, like the theater managers and our professional projectionists, are paid a good livable wage with full health benefits.)

This theater has perhaps the best projection and sound in the country. We show movies the way they were meant to be seen (and on a huge 50-foot screen). We have the most comfortable theater seats that you'll ever sit in (made in Michigan, like many things in the theater). There's a theater organ that rises out of the stage. A red velvet curtain ascends at the beginning of every movie, and the ceiling above you has 3,000 tiny lights that make up the constellations as they actually appear in the night sky over Traverse City in the fall.

Filmmakers from Wim Wenders to Paul Mazursky to David O. Russell have shown their films in person at the State, and they will tell you that the State Theatre is one of a kind. I tell them, "If they'd let us filmmakers design the theaters, the public would be amazed at the difference in the theater-going experience."

Other than our coming attractions, we will never show a commercial before any of our films. You came here to see a movie, not watch TV.

Our cell phone policy is simple: If we catch you talking on the phone, texting or checking your mail, you will be banned from the theater for life. Zero tolerance for those who are there to annoy the people who are there to watch a movie in peace.

Each summer we present the Traverse City Film Festival at the State Theatre and seven other venues. We have 100,000 admissions each year and and this year's fest will take place July 30-August 4.

There's a lot more, but you get the picture. We've created a comfortable, pleasant place to disappear into the dark and be transported by an excellent movie. Shouldn't every town - especially the small ones - have this? We'd be happy to share with anyone who'd like our help.

In three years, in 2016, we'll celebrate the 100th anniversary of movies being shown on the site of the State Theatre in Traverse City, Michigan. If you love the cinema and if you are ever in our area, please stop by to experience what going to the movie palace was like many, many years ago.

We offer our deep appreciation to the Motion Picture Association of America for this honor of being named one of the best places in the world to see a movie.

Sincerely,

Michael Moore
President, State Theatre and Traverse City Film Festival

Board of Directors

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Tuesday, June 25, 2013

How many skeletons can he fit in his closet?

How many skeletons can he fit in his closet?:

How Many Skeletons Can He Fit In His Closet?

Two biographies of the desperately aspiring Narendra Modi are reminders that Gujarat’s ‘CEO’ can’t hide from his grisly past, argues Paranjoy Guha Thakurta

PARANJOY GUHA THAKURTA

2013-05-18 , Issue 20 Volume 10

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Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Muslims that 'minority politics' left behind | The Hindu

Muslims that 'minority politics' left behind | The Hindu:

Muslims that 'minority politics' left behind

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KHALID ANIS ANSARI

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The pasmanda’s quest for empowerment will help democratise Indian Islam and deepen democracy in the country

‘Pasmanda’, a Persian term meaning “those who have fallen behind,” refers to Muslims belonging to the shudra (backward) and ati-shudra (Dalit) castes. It was adopted as an oppositional identity to that of the dominant ashraf Muslims (forward castes) in 1998 by the Pasmanda Muslim Mahaz, a group which mainly worked in Bihar. Since then, however, the pasmanda discourse has found resonance elsewhere too.

The dominant perception is that Islam is an egalitarian religion and that Indian Muslims on the whole, especially in the post-Sachar scenario, are a marginalised community. The pasmanda counter-discourse takes issue with both these formulations. In terms of religious interpretation, Masood Falahi’s work Hindustan mein Zaat Paat aur Musalman (2006) has convincingly demonstrated how the notion ofkufu (rules about possible marriage relations between groups) was read through the lens of caste by the ‘manuwadi’ ulema and how a parallel system of “graded inequality” was put into place in Indian Islam.

Caste-based disenfranchisement

As far as the social sphere is concerned, Ali Anwar’s Masawat ki Jung (2000) has documented caste-based disenfranchisement of Dalit and backward caste Muslims at the hands of self-styled ashraf leaders in community organisations like madrasas and personal law boards, representative institutions (Parliament and State Assemblies) and departments, ministries and institutions that claim to work for Muslims (minority affairs, Waqf boards, Urdu academies, AMU, Jamia Millia Islamia, etc). The book also underlines stories of humiliation, disrespect and violence on caste grounds that various pasmanda communities have to undergo on a daily basis, at least in northern parts of India.

Thus, pasmanda commentators contest the two key elements of mainstream ‘Muslim’ or ‘minority’ discourse —Islam as an egalitarian religion and Indian Muslims on the whole as an oppressed community. Islam may be normatively egalitarian but actual-existing Islam in Indian conditions is deeply hierarchical. Similarly, all Muslims are not oppressed, or not to the same degree, at any rate: Muslims are a differentiated community in terms of power, with dominant (ashraf) and subordinated (pasmanda) sections. Consequently, the so-called ‘minority politics’, which has been quite content in raising symbolic and emotional issues so far, is really the politics of dominant caste Muslims that secures their interests at the expense of pasmanda Muslims. Not surprisingly, a recurrent theme in pasmanda narratives is that minority politics has singularly failed to address the bread-and-butter concerns of the pasmanda Muslims, who constitute about 85 per cent of the Indian Muslim population and come primarily from occupational and service biradaris.

The notion of ‘minority’ and ‘majority’ communities in India — read primarily in terms of religious identity — is of modern origin and linked with the emergence and consolidation of a hegemonic secular nation-state project. In this sense, while ‘secular’ nationalism becomes the locus of legitimate power and violence, Hindu and Islamic nationalisms become the sites of illegitimate power. The seemingly epic battles that are constantly fought within this conceptual framework — around communal riots or ‘Hindu’/‘Islamic’ terror more recently in the post-9/11 world — have been instrumental in denying a voice to subordinated caste communities across religions and in securing the interests of ‘secular,’ Hindu or Muslim elites respectively. In this sense, the pasmanda articulation has highlighted the symbiotic nature of majoritarian and minoritarian fundamentalism and has sought to contest the latter from within in order to wage a decisive battle against the former. As Waqar Hawari, a pasmanda activist, says: “While Muslim politicians like Imam Bukhari and Syed Shahabuddin add the jodan[starter yoghurt], it is left to the Hindu fundamentalists to prepare the yoghurt of communalism. Both of them are responsible. We oppose the politics of both Hindu and Muslim fanaticism.”

Faith and ethnicity

The structures of social solidarity that pasmanda activists work with are deeply influenced by the entangled relation between faith and ethnicity. The domains of Hinduism and Islam are quite complex, with multiple resources and potentialities possible: in various ways they exceed the ‘Brahminism’ and ‘Ashrafism’ that have come to over-determine them over time. On the one hand, the pasmanda Muslims share a widespread feeling of ‘Muslimness’ with the upper-caste Muslims, a solidarity which is often parochialised by internal caste and maslak-based (sectarian) contradictions. On the other hand, pasmanda Muslims share an experience of caste-based humiliation and disrespect with subordinated caste Hindus, a solidarity which is equally interrupted by the discourse around religious difference incessantly reproduced by upper caste institutions. Since the express object of the pasmanda movement has been to raise the issue of caste-based exclusion of subordinate caste Muslims, it has stressed on caste-based solidarity across religions. As Ali Anwar, the founder of Pasmanda Muslim Mahaz, says: “There is a bond of pain between pasmanda Muslims and the pasmanda sections of other religions. This bond of pain is the supreme bond … That is why we have to shake hands with the pasmanda sections of other religions.”

This counter-hegemonic solidarity on caste lines is effectively encapsulated in the pasmanda slogan ‘Dalit-Pichda ek saman, Hindu ho ya Musalman’ (All Dalit-backward castes are alike, whether they be Hindu or Muslim). At the same time, birth-based caste distinctions are sought to be transcended from the vantage point of an egalitarian faith: “We are not setting the Dalit/Backward Caste Muslims against the so-called ashraf Muslims. Our movement is not directed against them. Rather, we seek to strengthen and empower our own people, to enable them to speak for themselves and to secure their rights and justice … We welcome well-meaning people of the so-called ashraf background … who are concerned about the plight of our people to join us in our struggle.” It is in the midst of such complex negotiations, the punctuated nature of faith and caste-based solidarities, that the pasmanda emerges as a political factor.

Overall, pasmanda politics has relied on transformative constitutionalism and democratic symbolism to attain its social justice goals — the deepening of existing affirmative action policies, adequate representation of pasmanda Muslims in political parties, state support for cottage and small-scale industries, democratisation of religious institutions and interpretative traditions, etc. Obviously, it confronts all the challenges that any counter-hegemonic identity movement faces in its formative phases: lack of resources and appropriate institutions, cooption of its leaders by state and other dominant ideological apparatuses, lack of relevant movement literature, internal power conflicts, and so on. Also, as Rammanohar Lohia said: “The policy of uplift of downgraded castes and groups is capable of yielding much poison. A first poison may come out of its immediate effects on men’s minds; it may speedily antagonise the Dvija without as speedily influencing the Sudras. With his undoubted alertness to developments and his capacity to mislead, the Dvija may succeed in heaping direct and indirect discredit on the practitioners of this policy long before the Sudra wakes up to it.” These are the challenges that the pasmanda activists face while confronting the ashrafiya-dominated minority politics. However, their struggle for a post-minority politics is on and one hopes it will democratise Indian Islam in the long run by triggering a process of internal reform. The pasmanda critique of the majority-minority or the secular-communal dyad will also contribute to a democratic deepening that will benefit all of India’s subaltern communities in the long run.

(Khalid Anis Ansari is a PhD candidate at the University of Humanistic Studies, Utrecht, The Netherlands. He also works with The Patna Collective, New Delhi, and engages with the pasmanda movement as an interlocutor and knowledge-activist. Email: khalidanisansari@gmail.com)

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Sunday, June 16, 2013

What Germany’s Iron Chancellor Can Show Red China - Bloomberg

What Germany’s Iron Chancellor Can Show Red China - Bloomberg:

What Germany’s Iron Chancellor Can Show Red China

By Pankaj Mishra Jun 2, 2013 3:00 PM PT

More than a century and a half after it was published, Alexis de Tocqueville’s “The Old Regime and the Revolution” has become an unlikely best-seller in China.

Wang Qishan, China’s anti-corruption czar, is reportedly among the senior leaders obsessed with what he sees as the book’s cautionary message: that increasing prosperity and piecemeal political reform didn’t protect France’s pre-revolutionary regime from violent overthrow.

About Pankaj Mishra»

Pankaj Mishra is the author of "Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond," ... MORE

The mass energies unleashed by large-scale industrialization and urbanization have exposed China’s existing political institutions as weak and inadequate. In Wang’s reading of Tocqueville, Chinese leaders must prepare for more upheaval ahead.

It is easy to see in Tocqueville’s subtle opinions, which can’t be pigeonholed in the contemporary way as “left-wing” or “right-wing,” what you want to see. John Stuart Mill claimed to be inspired by his writings. British conservatives in the 19th century also deployed his criticisms of American democracy to argue against the extension of adult franchise.

Unlikely Gurus

Understandably, Chinese leaders are eager to learn from European thinkers and Europe’s early and immense experience of socioeconomic change. Visiting India two weeks ago, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang quoted both Max Weber and Georg Hegel.

But Tocqueville, an aristocrat, seems an unlikely guru for Chinese leaders, even the “princelings” among them, who may find that 19th-century German philosophers and economists offer more practical instruction than French or English ones.

Germany under Otto von Bismarck came relatively late to industrialization; its leaders were determined to avoid the traumas and upheavals of England and France. The country’s influential economists, mostly opposed to Adam Smith’s laissez-faire individualism, enshrined a major role for the state in running and regulating the modern economy; the state was also supposed to alleviate the class antagonisms and hardships that the great shift from agrarian to industrial societies made inevitable.

Accordingly, Bismarck’s Germany pioneered social welfare guarantees of health insurance, disability and old age pensions; it was also ahead of European nations in enacting legislation aimed at protecting the laboring classes from exploitation and degraded working conditions.

People in other late industrializing societies, including the U.S., took careful note. As the historian Daniel T. Rodgers showed in his study of the Germanic roots of American progressivism, the experience of studying economics in Germany in the 1890s “knocked the provincial blinkers off a cadre of young Americans,” liberating them from “the tightly, syllogistically packaged intellectual paradigms of laissez-faire.”

The American economy has gone through many refinements since the age of robber barons. We no longer remember well “the disordered, violent camping expedition that was the U.S.,” in its early phase of industrialization in the late 19th century.

It was, as Rodgers wrote, “a country on the run, too busy with its private affairs to bother knitting its pieces together, tossing its cast-off goods wherever they might land, scamping public life in its drive to release individual energy.” It was the German-educated Americans who “brought back an acute sense of a missing ‘social’ strand in American politics and a new sense, as unnerving as it was attractive, of the social possibilities of the state.”

Tender Mercies

The Japanese, as the historian Kenneth B. Pyle and others have shown, were even keener students of the German example. Kanai Noburo, Japan’s most influential economist for three decades, studied in Germany about the same time as many American proto-progressives and New Dealers.

Traveling through England, he witnessed the very inadequate protection for the country’s poorest people; he became convinced that the state had a duty to intervene on their behalf. They couldn’t be left to the tender mercies of free marketeers (whose quasi-religious faith in the invisible hand had condemned millions to death in unrelieved famines in British-ruled Ireland and India).

But Kanai, a strong critic of free-market individualism, was no socialist. On the contrary: His ideas were aimed at diminishing class antagonisms, averting violent revolution and maintaining the power of the Japanese bureaucratic state, which alone promised to guarantee national unity and strength.

“If workers are treated like animals,” he wrote, “then after several decades unions and socialism will appear.” And that, he was convinced, would be a very bad thing for a country that was still very weak compared with European nation-states. For Japanese leaders seeking to justify their power, mobilize a sense of nationality and avoid social unrest, this was just the thing they wanted to hear.

Having tasked an agrarian people to build an industrial society through quasi-traditional notions of loyalty and obligation, Japanese leaders faced in the early 20th century fresh problems resulting from their success: widening disparities of income, class cleavages, and the loss of old values of family and community.

Laissez-faire liberalism was no good to them; and it was also in retreat around the world. Fortunately, the Germans had proposed an attractive new identity for the technocratic state: one that, in the words of the German economist Gustav von Schmoller, “legislates above the egoistic class interests, administers with justice, protects the weak and elevates the lower classes.”

That is the persona that the Chinese leadership now seeks for itself as it cracks down ostentatiously on corruption, and enacts progressive legislation aimed at the rural poor. This fresh search for an appealing self-image largely explains its broadening intellectual references, particularly the vogue for Tocqueville.

Ego Boost

For, as the shrewd China-watcher Rebecca Liao writes, “Tocqueville’s conservative admiration of a learned aristocracy with a healthy sense of noblesse oblige is ultimately a validation of the party’s pride in (still maturing) modern Chinese governance.”

Reading Tocqueville, in other words, can be good for the ego. Still, Chinese leaders navigating the global traffic of ideas will find more familiar landmarks in some late 19th century German and Japanese policies -- those meant, as Weber wrote, “to unite socially a nation split apart by modern economic development.”

It remains to be seen whether they -- and the rest of us -- will avoid the perils of yet another big and overly centralized state tasked with both economic growth and social cohesion. The young Max Weber, after all, was an ardent imperialist, convinced, like many of his German peers, that his country’s economic development depended on the acquisition of foreign territories and resources.

Trying to sustain their power both domestically and internationally, Japanese groups controlling the state erected too many ideological defenses against healthy dissent and debate, finally taking their country into an unwinnable war.

In any case, Chinese leaders boning up on Bismarckian and Meiji conservatism or Tocqueville outline a piquant irony: that the Chinese revolution of 1949 -- one of the pivotal events of the 20th century -- has become a deeply conservative project, designed to forestall social fragmentation and unrest and perpetuate the Communist Party’s long monopoly over power.

(Pankaj Mishra is the author of “From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia,” and a Bloomberg View columnist, based in London and Mashobra, India. The opinions expressed are his own.)

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Thursday, June 27, 2013

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Here's How We Built a Movie Theater for the People

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Muslims that 'minority politics' left behind

The pasmanda’s quest for empowerment will help democratise Indian Islam and deepen democracy in the country

Sunday, June 16, 2013

What Germany’s Iron Chancellor Can Show Red China

About Pankaj Mishra»

More from Pankaj Mishra:

Unlikely Gurus

Tender Mercies

Ego Boost