Okay, yes, this is someone I know rather well, but that’s not why I’m recommending this video. You simply have to watch it and listen to the talk all the way through if you really want to understand why it is that Muslims and Islam are being victimized, vilified, and slandered, not just in the U.S., but around the world.
I’ve spoken with friends and family in Delhi and Bangalore recently, and all of them speak to me worriedly about how difficult it has become to defend Muslims and their rights. The term “Muslim appeasement” seems to have entered into people’s vocabulary, and a friend of mine recently asked for some theoretical and historical “ammo” to arm himself with so he might more successfully take on the rampant Islamophobia that’s been building in India for years now.
So, check out Professor Deepa Kumar outline the history and politics of Islamophobia:
Hello everyone. It’s been a long time since my last post. Nine months, in fact.
No, I haven’t been pregnant.
Well, hello at least to those of you who still bother to subscribe to this much-dormant RSS feed, for there’s no reason why this url would make its way into your browser otherwise!
Some of my readers know me well enough to know that these have been an interesting nine months, to say the least. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, well, I’m not saying much more on this question. Suffice it to say that I am back in the blogosphere for a few good reasons, although I’m not sure for just how long before I get sucked back into my other life!
So why the prolonged silence? Pre-tenure anxieties, followed by my struggle for tenure, stretched well into mid-summer, and ever since I won that fight, I’ve had percious little time to write a single post, let alone blog regularly. From the October 11 National Equality March in Washington D.C., to the rally for marriage equality in New Jersey, this has been a busy semester indeed. It has had its moments of relaxation too, so I’m not complaining.
It’s nearly the end of the year (the decade!), and I needed to do some political writing. There’s been more activism this semester than I’ve seen in some of my busiest years of organizing, and it’s been in turns exhilarating and frustrating, but mostly exhilarating. Case in point:
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I THINK IT’S becoming clear to more and more people these days that our world is being flushed down the toilet in a hundred and one different ways. In the world’s richest country, which also claims to be the great champion of the world’s poor, millions of people cannot affort to get sick. And if the government has its way, they will now have to pay a penalty if they don’t purchase expensive health insurance from private insurers. So while the public are desparate for change, healthcare reform is being has been scuttled by the likes of “senatorial prostitute” Joe Lieberman, as MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann put it.
Of course, the Democrats showed no spine, no heart, no principles, no nothing, except their clear, and in fact clearly articulated (Obama is indeed a good speaker!) ambition to restore the United States’ position of power in the world. Or rather, to repair its image abroad, while holding fast to its military gains in these two disastrous wars, while simultaneously shoring up the profitability of its banks, its insurance giants, and its corporate robber-barrons.
And then, of course, we’ve had the nearly absurdist irony of watching a warmongering President not only receive the Nobel Peace Prize (“Peace Prize or War Prize?” asks Howard Zinn), but also use the occasion to lecture the world on the justness of his wars, in a speech that would have made his predecessor, Henry Kissinger, proud.
Nowhere in the mainstream American media did we see how Obama’s surge was being viewed by anyone other than the talking heads and the pundits.
It is indeed Obama’s turn in the great game, and I wonder what mental gymnastics liberals will now ask us to play to keep supporting this bankrupt party.
The left has produced some spectacular displays of solidarity, that in sheer numbers outnumbered even the Fox-News-inflated figures of the teabaggers, the birthers, the truthers and the like. But the growth of the far right in the U.S. can no longer be taken lightly. As the Democrats have betrayed the hopes of those who put them in office, the far right have mobilized their base, built on some of the most virulently racist, xenophobic, and reactionary ideas propagated by right-wing windbags like Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.
SO IT’S BEEN a busy semester, a busy year, alright. And the spring promises to be even more hectic, with the struggle against budget cuts, and for LGBTI rights, more likely than not to escalate. Might we see rallies around healthcare? Who knows, we might even have mass, intercontinental mobilizations at the various “climate summits” to be held in Mexico and elsewhere throughout 2010. Hell, we might even see the re-emergence of an antiwar movement in the U.S. (I’ll have mine with a labor upsurge on the side, please.)
But now that the semester has ended, and I’m getting ready for my trip to India, I figured it would be a good time to dash off a blogpost or two.
THIS IS SUPPOSED to be a blog with a “desi focus,” but increasingly, it’s becoming impossible (if it ever were possible) to extricate South Asian politics from what’s happening in the rest of the world. And I don’t think you’ll disagree when I say that that world is being flushed down the toilet in a zillion different ways by the people who are supposed to be “in charge,” by the “captains of industry,” and the great “leaders of the world.”
