What rhymes with Putin?

I don’t know Ukrainian, but I’m sure Ukrainians have their zingers.

In English, Zero clued in works.

Rasputin stand-in does the job.

This frivolous Putin query comes as we approach the anniversary of a madman’s attempt to rewrite world history. On February 24th, 2022, Putin let loose the power of the Russian military – with a destructive force not seen in Europe since World War 2 – on a peaceable neighbor, Ukraine. There was nothing frivolous about Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine.

What rhymes with madman?

Con man.

Convinced I can.

Bad man.

Putin thought he was invincible.

What rhymes with invincible?

Despicable.

Unpredictable.

Unthinkable.

This time last year, Putin was on top of the world, about to rewrite Russian history; he imagined himself emulating Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst, also known as Catherine the Great, once Empress of Russia, his long dead and gone heroine.

What rhymes with Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst?

I have no idea.

I do know what rhymes with Putin’s attempt to rewrite history.

Dark night.

Quenched light.

Instead of imposing his will on the populace of Ukraine, approximately 44 million souls, or about the populations of Florida and New York State combined, or even Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina, New Hampshire and Georgia combined, Putin became the first easily identifiable despot of our new century, shockingly pushed back to where he came from by the pure force of Ukrainian willpower.

What rhymes with despot?

Guess what?

Crackpot.

On February 24th, 2022, Putin lent his name to a mega invasion of a nonbelligerent neighbor on an international level never imagined. The consequences were disastrous.

In November, 2022, mere months ago and just months after Putin’s initial decision to ‘take’ Ukraine, the BBC reported that the most senior US general, Gen Mark Milley, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, estimated that 100,000 Russian and 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or injured in the war in Ukraine so far. Gen Milley added that at least 40,000 civilians had died by November of last year.

Thanks to our zero clued in, Rasputin stand-in, demented man in Moscow, epicenter of Putin’s mythical former USSR, innocent lives are being lost on a daily basis in Ukraine in numbers that are nothing short of abominable.

What rhymes with abominable?

Dishonorable.

Unconscionable.

And what rhymes with demented?

Disoriented.

Unbefriended.

Dented  – big time where it counts, in Putin’s internal psyche.

Lest we get suckered into a Putin-defined cesspit and bogged down in the mindset of an autocrat, I was inspired by one of the catchiest songs of 2023 so far, the brilliant Colombian Shakira’s take-down of her ex, to imagine how Putin might deserve his own rhyming put-down.

In a hugely publicized 2022 breakup, the former Barcelona football player Gerard Piqué left Shakira, his wife of 12 years and the mother of his 2 children, for a new paramour, a much younger woman called Clara Chía.

Shakira is resilient if anything. She is no push-over. On Jan 11th, she released a masterpiece, a blockbuster hit with the enigmatic title of SHAKIRA || BZRP Music Sessions #53.

Even though sung in Spanish, the title shot to the top of Apple’s iTunes charts in the U.S. on release. Many, so many of us it would seem, can resonate with revenge. The song’s video, with English subtitles, went viral. The song is not only catchy, bitching and biting, but cathartic. It broke YouTube records, registering more than 64 million views within 24 hours. Lord, does Ukraine need revenge!

Think about it for a minute. Millions upon millions of us can resonate with what is happening to Shakira. Millions more of us around the world identify with what is happening to Ukraine. Billions of us have reasons to get angry with Putin over Ukraine daily. The man seems unaccountable.

What rhymes with unaccountable?

Incomprehensible.

Unfathomable.

Shakira is a genius at rhyming. In her Spanish lyrics for SHAKIRA || BZRP Music Sessions #53, she found a way to connect her philandering ex, Piqué, to mortification, (te mortifique), chewing up (mastique), and a host of other rhymes and homonyms that might be enough reason for any year-abroad undergraduate or graduate student to want to learn Spanish. Shakira doesn’t let go. The video has already had 288,109,016 views on YouTube as of this writing. It’s averaging more than 5 million new views daily.

Imagine if Shakira took on Putin?

Imagine how she, stand-in for Ukraine, could destroy this pseudo Westerner, this false Russian prophet, this wannabe Catharine the Great, this Putin, with just a few rhymes and words.

Shakira can do that. She has that power. She is, after all, the reigning queen of World Cup Soccer anthems. Her Waka Waka video from the 2010 World Cup has had more than 3,472,939,423 (3 billion!) views.

Shakira knows how to garner world attention. Sorry Piqué. Maybe she’s right. Maybe you did choose a Twingo over a Ferrari, just as Putin fell into his own Twingo hell with his decision to try to absorb Urkaine into a mythical Russia.

Here’s how Shakira might put Putin – our present-day world pariah – in his place. And here, too, is how that very same Putin might feel, shamed, hearing himself belittled in a song where billions more than the billions that have watched Shakira’s Waka Waka see him as a wuss.

Just imagine Shakira’s singing these rhymes as she does on SHAKIRA || BZRP Music Sessions #53, but addressed to Putin, and here we go:

Putin?

Zero clued in

Rasputin stand-in

Madman?

Con man.

Convinced I can.

Bad man.

Invincible?

Despicable.

Unpredictable.

Unthinkable.

Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst?

History rewrite?

Dark night.

Quenched light.

Despot?

Guess what.

Crackpot.

Abominable.

Dishonorable.

Unconscionable.

Demented.

Disoriented.

Unbefriended.

Dented

Unaccountable?

Incomprehensible.

Unfathomable.

Despicable.

Unpredictable.

Unthinkable.

Abominable.

Dishonorable.

Unconscionable.

The post Shakira nails Putin appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Being a Republican in Congress is a lot easier than being a Democrat. That’s because there are very few things that Republicans have or want to do. Most Democrats have full plates in front of them as they want to reform our society so that government provides a strong and secure safety net for all of us, particularly those most at risk. If we reach a point of gridlock, of stalemate, it is the right that wins, because if nothing happens, that is exactly what they want.

In the wake of the January 6, 2021 insurrection and other rebellious acts from the right, there is increasing talk of a new American civil war. What shape it might take is open to all kinds of interpretation. It certainly would not be like America’s first civil war, or even a feared possible upcoming war between Russia and Ukraine.

That does not mean there would not be violence. The January 6 insurrection resulted in the deaths of five individuals and the injuring of hundreds. The Right certainly does not hesitate to use threats of violence against those with whom they merely disagree.

For example, Fox News anchor Jesse Watters recently told a group of conservatives to “ambush” Dr. Anthony Fauci with questions and “go in for kill shot.” Fox News has not reprimanded Watters; in fact, they have not said a word about his using their platform to threaten to kill someone. Fox did the same things with correspondent Lara Logan who compared Fauci to the Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele (also included in the clip below).

As we approach the end of 2021, the Washington Post reports “Inside the nonstop pressure campaign by Trump allies to get election officials to revisit the 2020 vote.” The Big Lie continues more than thirteen months after the 2020 safe, secure and democratic elections.

The fallout has spread from the six states where Trump sought to overturn the outcome in 2020 to deep-red places such as Idaho, where officials recently hand-recounted ballots in three counties to refute claims of vote-flipping, and Oklahoma, where state officials commissioned an investigation to counter allegations that voting machines were hacked.

The important point in the article is that the Trumpsters are continuing their efforts to intimidate Republican-controlled state legislatures to undo the past and change the future so that free and fair elections become something of the past.

A “civil war” could include numerous other acts of aggression by the right including the intimidation of teachers, vigilante forces, Congressional action to not raise the debt limit and not fund necessary programs that are the framework of our social and economic safety net.

COVID has already played a key role in dividing the nation and threatens to do so for some time to come. Samuel Goldman in The Week suggests:

I’m not the first to compare the way of thinking about the pandemic still dominant in official statements to the military disasters of the last two decades. My colleague Noah Millman and the journalist Daniel McCarthy have both noted parallels between the interminable conflicts that followed 9/11 and the “war” on COVID. “Like the old Afghan government,” Millman wrote, “those in charge of public health have little practical ability to shape events. But they speak as if they are sovereign and in control.”

It is hard to imagine what aggressive actions those on the Left may take. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, extremists far to the left of the Democratic Party engaged in bombing attacks on both public and private buildings. But there was very little coordinated about that and as it became apparent that the bombings were counter-productive, the bombings essentially ended.

Regrettably, there is very little that the Right needs to do now to win a “civil war.” The current stalemate allows those on the Right to generally get their way.

Progressive legislation will not pass. The right to safe and legal abortions will be ended in most states when Roe v. Wade is overturned, elections will be rigged to favor far-right Republicans, COVID and other infectious diseases will continue to run rampant, gun-control measures will not be passed, climate change legislation will stall and those who do not agree with those on the Right will live in fear of violence.

The only real way that progressives and others can prevent an escalated “civil war” is by winning big in elections and having protections against Republican electoral manipulation. This means that the U.S. Senate is going to have to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act in order to maximize the chances of free and fair elections. Additionally, Democrats are going to have to figure out a way to elevate the popularity of Joe Biden and improve their chances of winning 2022 Congressional races. Perhaps a backlash to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade would help, but that seems unlikely.

The stakes are truly high for progressives; we need to do all that we legally and non-violently can do.

The post Why A “Civil War” Would Be So Hard for Progressives to “Win” appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Recently, many of us learned that the US has troops stationed in Niger and in other African nations. The news came as a surprise to many—not the least of whom was Sen. Lindsay Graham [R-SC], who is a long-time member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and who often touts his credentials as a foreign policy wonk.

“I didn’t know there was 1,000 troops in Niger,” Graham told NBC’s Chuck Todd on Meet the Press. “They are going to brief us next week as to why they were there and what they were doing.”

It has to make you wonder: Where else in Africa does the US have troops? How many are there? And what is their mission?

One person who seems to know a great deal about this subject is Nick Turse, who writes at Tom Dispatch.com, and who published a book in 2015 called Tomorrow’s Battlefield: US Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa. A summary of the book says:

You won’t see segments about it on the nightly news or read about it on the front page of America’s newspapers, but the Pentagon is fighting a new shadow war in Africa, helping to destabilize whole countries and preparing the ground for future blowback. Behind closed doors, U.S. officers now claim that “Africa is the battlefield of tomorrow, today.”

What is AFRICOM?

The US military presence is not new. US troops have been stationed in African nations since 2007, mostly as part of Special Operations units. They are overseen by U.S. Africa Command [AFRICOM], a unit that is only now, in light of the recent ambush in Niger, beginning to get press coverage. AFRICOM’s headquarters is in Stuttgart, Germany, rather than in Africa, because, according to an NPR report, “While many African nations welcome the U.S. assistance, they aren’t interested in a high-profile U.S. presence.”

Much of the US’s engagement in African nations comes by way of Joint Combined Exchange Training, known informally as JCET missions. The budget for these operations in Africa has been growing in recent years, and that budget escalation reflects a steady rise in the number of special operations forces deployed in African nations.

According to CBS News,

The US has roughly 800 military personnel temporarily deployed to Niger, and roughly 6,000 military personnel spread across the continent.

Turse reports that on average,

Special Operations are “routinely engaged in about half of Africa’s 54 nations… Special Operations Command Africa [SOCAFRICA], is busy year round in 22 partner nations.”

As an example of the scope of US presence, U.S. Special Operations forces conducted 20 JCETs in Africa during 2014, according to documents obtained from SOCOM.  These missions were carried out in 10 countries, up from eight a year earlier.  Four took place in both Kenya and Uganda; three in Chad; two in both Morocco and Tunisia; and one each in Djibouti, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, and Tanzania.

A few nations host the bulk of US military personnel. CBS News reports that:

Djibouti is one of the world’s smallest countries, but it currently hosts more US military personnel than any other African nations. Roughly 4,000 U.S. military personnel on the continent are temporarily deployed to Djibouti.

U.S. troops have been in Djibouti for years. Camp Lemonnier is the only permanent U.S. base in Africa, and serves as a key outpost for surveillance and combat operations against al Qaeda and other extremist groups in the region.

The country with the second most U.S. military personnel deployed there is Niger, with roughly 800, according to AFRICOM. Next comes Somalia, Djibouti’s neighbor, with roughly 400 U.S. military personnel. The fourth nation in terms of U.S. military personnel is Cameroon, with more than 100.

Reportedly, the US has one drone base in Niger, and is working on a second one.

It should be noted, though, that exact figures are hard to come by, and Turse points out the many discrepancies in counts that come from different military sources. The question then becomes, “does anyone really know what America’s most elite force are doing in Africa?”

What are we doing?

The Pentagon says that US troops are in Africa “support African partners, alongside allies like France, with the goal of increasing the African nations’ own security capabilities and stabilize the region.”

NPR says,

In almost all of the missions, the Americans are there to advise, assist and train African militaries—and not to take part in combat. The operations tend to be small; they are carried out largely below the radar, and most are focused on a specific aim: rolling back Islamist extremism…Still, those supporting roles can often take US forces into the field with their African partners, as was the case in Niger…It’s hard to say it’s not a combat mission when there’s the potential for conflict and combat as they accompany African troops.

“Africa is an enduring interest for the United States,” said the commander of AFRICOM in a statement.  “Small, but wise investments in the capability, legitimacy, and accountability of African defense institutions offer disproportionate benefits to Africa, our allies, and the United States, and importantly, enable African solutions to African problems.”

It’s hard to decipher what the first part of that crypto-statement actually means–and  the obfuscation is probably intentional. But the part about enabling “African solutions to African problems?” That sounds eerily, worryingly, and dangerously familiar.

The post Where does US have troops in Africa, how many, and why? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

In 1934, following the era of Al Capone and the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, Congress placed restrictions on the sale, purchase and ownership of what it termed “Class 3 weapons,” aka automatic weapons. Fast forward to 2017 Las Vegas – enabled by a device called a bump stock, Stephen Paddock killed 59 people and injured more than 500 in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

Was Paddock using automatic weapons? Not really, but with a bump stock, a legal AR15 semi-automatic becomes every bit as lethal as the Tommy guns of the roaring twenties.

How did the modern bump stock come about? Ask its developer Jeremiah Cottle of Moran, TX. [from an article on Tactical Life.com]

I’ve been a recreational shooter my entire life, and I’ve always enjoyed shooting full-auto weapons. At the same time, purchasing a Class 3 firearm is outrageously expensive, not to mention it requires a mountain of paperwork sure to give you life-threatening paper cuts. I had bump fired in the past, but it was completely uncontrollable, unsafe and unusable. I wanted to find a way to change that, to make bump firing safer and more controlled.

So, I thought about it, and I prayed about it. Ultimately, I decided to go for it. I used all of my savings from the military, sold everything in my house that wasn’t nailed down and started making 3D-printed models and solving problems. Finally, I sent the stock to the BATFE [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives] when I had a design that was close to being commercially ready. I was so happy when I got the word that it was approved.

Cottle’s company, Slide Fire is the principal manufacturer of the bump stock. Its promotional videos are chilling. Have a look at their showpiece.

How does a bump stock get past Federal regulators? The approval letter from BATFE explains

“The stock has no automatically functioning mechanical parts or springs and performs no automatic mechanical functions when installed … Accordingly, we find that the ‘bump-stock’ is a firearm part and is not regulated as a firearm under the Gun Control Act or the National Firearms Act.”

More from Jeremiah Cottle:

Some people like drag racing, some people like skiing and some people, like me, love full-auto. Unfortunately, the average recreational shooter doesn’t have access to a Class 3 firearm of their very own—they’re just expensive and impractical, like buying your own personal golf-cart hovercraft. I mean, if you can afford it, why not? For everyone else, Slide Fire brings shooters the same full-auto experience but without having to take out a second mortgage on their home.

I wonder how much Cottle loves full-auto in light of what happened in Las Vegas. Maybe the incident didn’t affect him. According to Slide Fire’s video, it’s every man’s birthright, freedom unleashed. But right now @SlidefireSol is getting slammed on Twitter and rightly so.

One of Slide Fire’s videos begins with a quote it says is from George Washington [it is actually a misquote from George Washington Carver], “When you can do common things in uncommon ways, you will command the attention of the world.” Sad to say, in this case, the idea is very true.

The post Rapid fire weapons – every man’s birthright? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

It’s possible that Donald Trump can run away from his Charlottesville problems by trying to be commander-in-chief and uttering a policy about Afghanistan. What he cannot run away from, unless he receives some miraculous treatment for narcissistic tendencies, is the mental health baggage that he carries with him.

While it is true that all of us make decisions based on our psychological make-up, it would be thoroughly confusing and unworkable for us to base everyone’s judgment calls on their psychological make-up. An extension of this is that we cannot assess policy decisions on the psychological profiles of those who make them.

But when someone is as detached from reality as Donald Trump, it is essential that we put psychology first and policy assessments second. What took place in his mind to spur him to present to the country and the world a new program of adding 3,900 uncounted troops to Afghanistan? What makes him think that if he chooses a strategy that is remarkably similar to the one that he consistently disparaged and berated from Barack Obama, that he will have sudden success? It is timely that we remind ourselves that one definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Isn’t that what Trump is doing in Afghanistan?

He said,

We will not talk about numbers of troops or our plans for further military activities. Conditions on the ground, not arbitrary timetables, will guide our strategy from now on. America’s enemies never know our plans or believe they can wait us out.

He thinks this is new, perhaps because in style it varies from what Barack Obama did. But in substance, it is precisely what George W. Bush, Obama’s predecessor, and the man who initiated the sixteen-year-long quagmire in Afghanistan, did. The Bush-Cheney Administration went gung-ho into Afghanistan, wishing to spare no limitations on how it would try to rid the country of terrorists and to make it thoroughly inhospitable to terrorists in the future.

It may serve any United States president well to not just look back at the policies of Barack Obama or George W. Bush in trying to “conquer” Afghanistan. He won’t find success there and he won’t with Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev whose late 1970s invasion into Afghanistan was a total fiasco. If you want victory in Afghanistan, then you might find some with Alexander the Great with his campaign from 330 – 323 BCE. That really wasn’t that good either,

The type of guerilla-style fighting that Alexander faced during the Afghan campaign was described centuries later by the chronicler Plutarch, who compared Afghan tribesmen to a hydra-headed monster: as soon as Alexander cut off one head, three more would grow back in its place.

In some ways, looking at Trump through the lens of his mental health issues rather than standard policy evaluations, reveals the irony in that he could have done what he previously espoused, and what no western country has done in millennia. He could have just pulled out.

Imagine if Barack Obama had tried to simply disengage from Afghanistan. It is what many Americans, including those in uniform, wanted him to do. But since Obama had never been in the military, and he was the one who called America’s presence in Iraq “a dumb war … a rash war,” his credentials were somewhat tainted for withdrawal (as opposed, for instance, to Dwight Eisenhower leading the U.S. out of Korea in 1953).

But with Trump’s psyche and his penchant for outright lying, there is no requirement that he follow reason or base decisions on evidence. That’s why he could have chosen in his August 21, 2017 speech to pull the United States out of Afghanistan. It simply would have been “Trumpian.”

But for whatever reason, he didn’t. And now we’ll all have to pay the price. Whether the military actually gave him the advice that he ascribed to them, they had better keep a close eye on him. The idea of Donald Trump using military resources is about as scary as it can get. We can never lose sight of who he is and what he brings to the table. First and foremost, it is an illness, and that is not the correct prescription for leadership.

The post With Afghanistan, Trump cannot run away from his mental health problems appeared first on Occasional Planet.

I had been planning on writing yet another article decrying the afflictive double standard and dog whistle politics of the term “terrorism.” Saturday, thousands of Muslims in Cologne, Germany marched to protest Islamic extremism, and I wanted to express how ineffably tired I am of having to march with a “Love & Unity” sign to prove my humanity/innocence/possession of a heart, but when Muslims are the victims instead of the perpetrators no one has “Love & Unity” with us. But it’s been written again and again and again and again and again.

Then on Sunday, 47 year old Darren Osborne drove a van into a crowd of Muslims leaving Ramadan night prayers at a London mosque, killing at least one person and injuring near a dozen others. Witnesses say Osborne shouted he wanted to “kill all Muslims” and that he did it as retribution “for London Bridge.” The CNN headline read, “London van hits pedestrians in Finsbury Park,” all mentions of the deliberate targeting of Muslims curiously omitted. News outlets lined up pundits to say they “weren’t sure” if it was terrorism or not (no mention of hate crimes either), but they all took a few moments to spout a few glib words on “diversity.” No word yet if Trump will respond by tweeting some blather about his Muslim Ban.

Of the entire incident, what struck me most is that I—  I didn’t react. Other than a frisson of anger at the hypocrisy and a few twangs of grief at lives lost… I feel almost… unperturbed. Logically, I feel where the overwhelming sadness and despondency ought to be— where it has unfailingly been in the past— but none of its symptoms have manifested. Instead, I just feel dispassion. And that worries me. I don’t ever want to be the type of person who shrugs or turns a blind eye to someone’s pain.

But I’m coming to realize this isn’t really the onset of callousness and cold-hearted antipathy. If I feel rather impassive at the moment, it’s not because I’m losing my capacity for empathy, it’s because over the last 6 months or so, I’ve developed a (questionably healthy) defense mechanism to The Era of Trump and realized that sometimes the best thing I can do for my mental health is accept occasional apathy. And I’m also realizing that maybe, just maybe, it’s not peculiar to me— that this defensive quasi-cynicism exists as a sort of distinctive facet of the collective consciousness of people of color (if such a thing exists) post-Trump.

The night of November 8, I remember the insidious feeling of dread creeping over me, slowly giving away to a consumptive panic when I realized it wasn’t just a fluke or a grand karmic joke, it was really happening. The man who began his campaign by saying “Mexicans are rapists,” earned bonus points for calling for the “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” and couldn’t even be stopped by hot mic recordings when he bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy”— that man was going to become the most powerful person in the world. I remember my eyes being glued to the electoral college tallies in the same morbid sort of way you can’t look away from a tragic accident. I remember my brain being a jumble of panic as once-worst-case-scenarios suddenly seemed inevitable, images striking me of my grandparents being unable to return to the country even with Green Cards, of my parents’ citizenship being revoked, of my siblings being rounded up for internment camps. I remember questioning the next morning if I should leave my apartment, afraid what his 60 million voters would now feel emboldened to do. I remember feeling like each and every one of those voters had looked directly at me and told me I didn’t belong in their country, and that knowledge squeezed like rubber bands around my chest so I couldn’t catch a full breath of air or form a coherent sentence. I remember looking at the faces around me that were in various states of terror or denial as each of our private nightmares seemed to come to life, and no amount of hugs stemmed the tears. During lunch I usually worked on law school applications, but I remember that day just staring immobilized at the screen because I couldn’t look that far into the future without drowning in waves of crushing panic again. I remember constantly feeling nauseated and bone weary, unable to eat or sleep for almost a week. I remember waking up every morning in the weeks after, terrified this would be the day a severed pig head, or racist graffiti at the very least, showed up in front of the apartment I shared with another hijabi woman. I remember the only time the panic truly drowned me and I gave into the terror was a little over a week later when there was a suspected hate crime on campus, and the night I found out I remember how I struggled to bring my voice to lower than a shout and how the only words I could formulate were a torrent of curses as I practically yanked my hair out in frustration. I remember vowing never to return to that bone-crushing panic again, and I remember the dispassion taking over ever since.

So if I say that I felt impassive in the face of Sunday’s London attack beyond my angry huffs and frustrated sighs, understand it’s just because at this point I can’t afford to allow something which is, in the grand scheme of things, relatively small to pierce my armor of dispassion. You have to understand that over the last six months I saw hate crimes against Muslims spike after the election to such a level that I was convinced I was next, but I couldn’t summon more than an unaffected shrug at the possibility, adopting an “if it happens, it happens” sort of mentality. I saw a slew of Cabinet positions filled by alt-Right Neo-Nazis, racist conspiracy theorists, and Islamophobes, including one who said Islam is a “vicious cancer inside the body of 1.7 billion people” that had to be “excised,” and all I felt was mild relief the man who called to “exterminate” Muslims wasn’t chosen. I saw a man motivated by extremist far-right views kill 6 people in a Quebec mosque in a shooting rampage, but I couldn’t summon an ounce of surprise it had happened, only that Trudeau condemned it so roundly. I saw a British politician, after the London Bridge Terror Attacks, suggest the internment of Muslims as a solution to extremism, and I couldn’t summon more than a bitter, humorless laugh that that was really the solution he was proposing. For goodness sake, last month a man tried to harass me on the street and yell racial slurs at me as he drove by and, I swear to you— rather than sink into despair as I did a year ago— I just cackled at him, wanting to tell him he’d have to do better than that if he wanted to scare me.

After the grand upset that was Trump’s election, nothing seems to faze me. Since then, I’ve been able to summon copious amounts of anger and disgust— and grief in small doses— at the state of politics, but everything else has succumbed to a void of apathy. Each terrible piece of news has been met with a derisive woosh of air in an indignant exhale, but it all just felt inevitable. It’s the same frustrated, resigned air with which BlackLivesMatter activists greet every failure to indict police officers who shoot unarmed Black men unprovoked. We all expected it. It’s the same fatalistic way Muslims square their shoulders when, despite all their prayers, the gunman turned out to be ISIS-affiliated after all. We all expected it. It’s the same repulsed tone in which anti-deportation attorneys snarl “of course, they did” after they learn ICE tore up yet another family with their raids and forced deportations. We all expected it. It’s not that we don’t care, it’s that if we broke apart after each time the world showed its hostility, there’d be nothing left in us but desolate despair, abject terror, and bottomless grief. And then we wouldn’t be able to make it through the day, let alone work to make anything better.

And I’m not sure how I feel about my realizations about my own dispassion, even if I’m not the only one to retreat behind defensive cynicism lest we bow to panicked despair again. Because at at some level, that despair we’re avoiding is a sign we’re still human, and embracing that grief is a reminder to never turn away from someone’s plight in disconcern. I worry that this dispassion will stunt my capacity for empathy because that’s one thing I never want to lose. But if the dispassion is the only thing keeping depression from crushing shoulders that cannot bear the horrors of the world, I’m loathe to disavow its protection. How else are we to survive the unholy mess that is The Era of Trump?

The post The battle within between dispassion and empathy appeared first on Occasional Planet.

June 22: Amman, Jordan, military checkpoint, 6 dead. June 27: Mukalla, Yemen, Security target, 42 dead, 30 injured. June 28: Istanbul, Turkey, Airport, 45 dead, 239 wounded. July 1: Dhaka, Bangladesh,Small bakery, 30 dead. July 2: Baghdad, Iraq, Neighborhood, 200+ dead, 147 wounded. July 4: Medina, Saudi Arabia, Mosque. At least 4 dead. At least 5 injured.

As I write this, the death toll in Medina continues to grow; it’s too soon to accurately count bodies. But still very few will pay attention.

The world reeled, the media buzzed, and Facebook grieved November 13 when bombers and shooters instigated a coordinated attack in Paris that left 130 dead and hundreds wounded.

The world reeled, the media buzzed, and Facebook grieved again on December 2, when two shooters in San Bernardino, CA killed 14 and seriously injured 22.

The world reeled, the media buzzed, and Facebook grieved again on March 22 when two bombings shook Brussels and killed 32 people and wounded over 300 others.

The world reeled, the media buzzed, and Facebook grieved again on June 12 when Omar Mateen went on a shooting rampage at a nightclub in Orlando, FL, killing 49 people.

The world did not reel, the media did not buzz, Facebook did not grieve for Amman. For Mukalla. For Istanbul. For Dhaka. For Baghdad. For Medina.

My goal is not to chastise the coverage of the first set, but to challenge the unrepentant disregard of the second. For them, where is the outrage? The wall-to-wall media coverage? The memoriams? The videos on replay? The profile picture overlays? The hashtags? The “thoughts and prayers”?

In fact, those deaths were little more than a blip on a screen. because Donald Trump tweeted something else utterly imbecilic, Kevin Durant signed with the Golden State Warriors, and Tim Duncan might retire. I mean, in the face of such groundbreaking developments, of course those victims took a back a seat: They don’t have fame, power, or prestige; they can’t sell newspapers; they don’t fuel any political narrative.

When Westerners are killed at the hands of “radical Islamic terrorists,” politicians can use it to get elected. When those politicians are elected, the military industry gets billions in government funding for the production of war machines. When those war machines are deployed, independent contractors are hired to work abroad in war zones. It’s a beautiful mechanism, carefully oiled for repeated use and reuse after every tragedy for maximum profit. Why change what people don’t see as broken?

When non-Westerners, when Muslims, when non-Whites are killed, it doesn’t just not fuel that narrative, it actively counteracts it. It doesn’t allow anyone to paint all Muslims as violent, ISIS as a fanatical anti-American jihadist group, or xenophobia as patriotism. But who likes nuances anyway?

Actually, now that I’m thinking about it, the radio silence does fuel one political narrative. But it’s the last narrative we ought to encourage. It’s the narrative of the attackers who argue that we think some lives– Muslim lives, Arab lives, Brown and Black lives– matter less. It’s the narrative that to acheive peace and liberation, violence is necessary. It’s the narrative that pits the West against the “Muslim world” and justifies the bloodshed.

So, I just wanted to use whatever voice I might have to remind you what is happening off-screen. When the media isn’t paying attention, when politicians aren’t shouting on podiums and platforms, when no one is changing their Facebook profile picture, people are being killed.

Those numbers– those numbers you probably didn’t hear about– look at the dates. All of those attacks occurred in less than the last two weeks. And each one of the tally marks is a life extinguished and tens of hundreds of lives more that are now broken, despairing, and grieving.

And to add to all that pain and suffering, these countries ought to be rejoicing. The holy month of Ramadan is ending and Eid-al-Fitr, one of the biggest Muslim holidays is in a few days. Usually, during this time, those countries are brimming with joy and festivities. There are feasts and parties and lights and excitement and laughter, and everyone puts away their differences for a few days to celebrate the blessed time of the year.

But instead there is grief, and there is blood, and there is destruction. There is a cry for help and for attention, and there is an overwhelming tiredness for having to grieve alone. Again.

And on the other side of the world, there is an indomitable wave of extreme apathy that glances at that carnage– that carnage that dared to interrupt its cool existence–, shrugs its shoulders, and turns back to the entertainment of the moment. Maybe it’ll even take a moment to send out “thoughts and prayers” if enough bodies are in the morgue.

So let us have a moment of silence for the dead, and may our consciences not be among those we have lost.

The post Amman, Yemen, Istanbul, Dhaka, Baghdad, Medina: Where is the outrage? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The next time you hear Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, or any of the phony journalists and sneering pundits of Fox News claim that Muslims have failed to speak out against extremism and terrorism, remember the faces of Naji Jerf and Ruqia Hassan. These determined, anti-Isis activists are just the latest victims of a targeted assassination campaign waged against journalists and filmmakers who are putting their lives on the line to bear witness to the human-rights abuses of the Islamic State in Syria.

Jerf and Hassan, along with three other Syrian journalists murdered by Isis since October 2015, had their lives taken from them because they refused to keep silent. A recently released video shows another five men—who were falsely accused of spying—recounting the crimes that ultimately led to their executions. What exactly did they do? The first crime was operating an Internet café. The second was sending photos of life in Syria to Turkey.

It’s shameful that American media provides a seemingly unlimited platform for pundits and politicians spreading unsubstantiated claims of widespread Muslim acceptance and support for terrorism. It is even more shameful to witness how the narrative of hatred and fear is successfully exploited to gain airtime and rack up a few more polling points, while courageous Muslims are risking—and losing—their lives to protest the violence and let the rest of the world know the truth.

Naji Jerf was a Syrian documentary filmmaker, anti-Isis activist, and editor-in-chief of Hentah, a magazine reporting on Syrian life.

The 38-year-old father of two made films documenting massacres by the Islamic State in Syria. According to reports from the Committee to Protect Journalists—a non-profit organization promoting press freedom world wide—Jerf was shot and killed just one week before traveling to France where his wife and children had already been granted asylum status.

Jerf had been working with the citizen group Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, which in recent months has lost three other members of its staff by assassination.

Ruqia Hassan was killed by Jihadists in September of 2015. Thirty-year-old Hassan was the first female journalist and activist killed by Isis.

Hassan, who studied philosophy at Aleppo University, used social media to post information about everyday life in Raqqa, Syria, and the challenges of women living under the rule of the Islamic State. She also shared information about coalition airstrikes on social media using the pseudonym Nisan Ibrahim.

Confirmation of Hassan’s execution on charges of espionage was only recently announced, even though she had been killed in September.

According to The Independent, for months Isis claimed that Ruqia, who was imprisoned, was still alive. During the interim Isis hijacked her Facebook account and continued posting in her name, hoping to entrap other dissidents.

Two months before her murder, Hassan tweeted these defiant words:

“I’m in Raqqa, and I received death threats, and when Isis [arrests] me and kills me it’s ok because they will cut my head and I have dignity its better than I live in humiliation with Isis”

The post Brave Muslim journalists assassinated for reporting on ISIS appeared first on Occasional Planet.

I record TV shows to watch when I want to “zone out” as the kids say. One that I like is NCIS (not the grisly parts but the problem solving parts.) Last night I watched an episode from 2011 which was about some people who do terrible things to other human beings in the name of what they call their religion. One woman was a teacher in an Afghan school working alongside some American female service members organizing a school for girls. The Afghan woman set an explosive device which allowed men from her group to kidnap the girls. Some of the girls died after being tortured.

Two of the girls and one female American service member were rescued by the NCIS team and Army rangers.

When the woman/teacher was questioned, along with her son who was part of the plot to destroy the school, she was asked why she did such horrible things, especially after gaining the trust and affection of those little girls. That’s a question no one seems to be asking seriously despite all the talk about terrorists, “radicalization” of otherwise law abiding American citizens, or what this “war on terror” actually is all about.

The woman and her son on the NCIS program offered the closest thing I’ve heard to an explanation from their point of view. They said they are defending their traditional culture from an invasion by foreigners who bring “radical” ideas and try to pervert their girls and women with filthy sexual materials. She mentioned the internet specifically.

That conversation in the interrogation room was only a few minutes, but it is the only time I’ve heard any kind of explanation for actions I find so despicable, inhumane and completely incomprehensible.

And that was a TV show from 2011.

It’s natural, I guess, for us to demonize whoever our enemy is at the time. I’m sure our enemies in previous wars did the same about us. We certainly were led to believe the Japanese were inherently evil during World War II. And the “North” Vietnamese were monsters in our eyes despite there not actually being a “North Vietnam” at all.

I don’t have any answers, but I need to try harder to learn why people do terrible things to other human beings. I don’t think it’s helpful to just keep saying “They hate our freedom.”

As with all wars, past and present, there’s more to the story than we can see at the time.

The post How “NCIS” helped me understand religious extremism appeared first on Occasional Planet.

A short primer on countering some of the anti-Muslim myths and misinformation politicians and the media are feeding us following the terrorist attacks in Paris:
Fiction
America is a shining example of religious tolerance for all.

Fact
There are 784 known hate groups in the U.S. In 2014 Muslims were the targets of 154 hate crimes. In 2015 there have been 63 recorded attacks on mosques in the U.S. Since the horrific attacks in Paris and Saint-Denis on November 13, 2015, there have been 71 documented Islamophobic attacks in the U.S., many of them involving women wearing hijab.

Fiction
Only “real” Americans belong in America.

Fact
Out of a total population of 308.7 million Americans, 305.8 million of us are either immigrants or refugees or the descendants of immigrants, refugees, or slaves brought to these shores involuntarily. Only 2.9 million of us can claim historically to be “real” Americans.

Fiction
Muslims and Islamic organizations are failing to speak out against terrorists and terrorist organizations.

Fact 1
Brave and determined Muslim journalists are risking their lives to expose the crimes of ISIS—journalists like Syrian Ibrahim Abdul Qader of the journalist alliance Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, who along with his friend Fares Hamadi were brutally murdered in Turkey after smuggling news of ISIS crimes out of the Islamic State.

Muslim academics, politicians, and ordinary citizens of all ages in countries around the world, sickened by the crimes perpetrated against innocent Muslims and non-Muslims, are risking—and sometimes losing—their lives to speak out and reject the violence and those committing it.

Fact 2
Following the attacks at Le Bataclan, the list of Muslim organizations issuing unequivocal condemnations of terrorist tactics and attacks has grown ever larger

Here is just a partial list culled from various online sources:

United States
American Muslims for Palestine
Council on American-Islamic Relations
Islamic Circle of America
Muslim American Society
Muslim Alliance in North America
Muslim Umman of North America
Muslim Legal Fund of America
Mosque Cares
The Council on American-Islamic Relations
Republican Muslim Coalition

Germany
Muslim Coordination Council of Germany
Milli Gorus Organization
Ahmadiyya Muslim Jamaat

Netherlands
Council of Moroccan Mosques
Liaisons to Muslims and Government

France
Etudiants Musulmans de France
French Muslim Council
The Grand Mosque
Islamic Centre in Courcouronnes

Great Britain
Muslim Council of Britain
Representing 500 affiliated Muslim organizations and communities

India
Ahmadiyya Muslim Community

Ireland
Al-Mustafa Islamic Center
Irish Muslim Peace and Integration Council

The post Anti-Muslim myths and misinformation in post-Paris America appeared first on Occasional Planet.