Archive for November 2008

I was born a Bangladeshi-Muslim and, despite growing up in Australia, have seen religion seeping through all people derived from the subcontinent. The grandmother of a Hindu-Indian friend refused to eat food cooked in our kitchen, given its Muslim owners. She saw it not as rude but a natural response to her past: Indian partition was the defining event of her life.

My inner struggle to balance an Islamic background while living in the modern West, and an ancient Bengali identity with the secular, frontier attitude of modern Australia, mirrors the wider struggles within India, and the world. Narrow, fixed identities are at the core of many struggles; the perpetrators of the Mumbai attacks invoke being Muslim at the expense of all other aspects of their identity.
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“It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me,” wrote Herman Melville, famous white American author of Moby Dick (1851). For its impropriety, its unnatural application, Melville attributes terror to the unexpected “whiteness.”

It is a crime, then, to say that the U.S. Presidency, seat of power in the world, the great white throne, as it were, was created by the white race? Is it an evil that white men created the world as we know it today? Is it a terror to colored people (like me) that they find the power over the nations is white?

Edgar Allan Poe, another white American author, suggested as much in the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838). A race of wild black people, discovered at the South Pole, was terrified of anything white, from the first white handkerchief Pym’s company held out for a parley, to the last moment of the novel, when Pym’s black captive dies of fright before a mysterious, snowy white shrouded figure.

But are white men so fearful of dark men?

Apparently not. Indeed, it was a white man who declared this month of November to be “National American Indian Heritage Month,” honoring the “Red Man.” That white man was former President of the United States, George H. W. Bush, in 1990.
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WASHINGTON, Nov. 29 — U.S. minorities and civil rights groups say they are hoping President-elect Barack Obama will appoint a Cabinet with more women and racial diversity.

After eight years of feeling frozen out under the administration of President George Bush, advocates for women, racial minorities and civil libertarians are watching Obama’s moves closely, The Washington Post (NYSE:WPO) reported Saturday.

“There are huge expectations on him because he’s the first black president, the first civil rights lawyer, the first president with an Arab middle name,” NAACP President Ben Jealous told the Post. Obama, he said, is “the first president to have been the victim of multiple forms of discrimination and the first to have made fighting discrimination a part of his career.”
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I have always read Hugh Cortazzi’s articles in The Japan Times with great interest and admiration. However, I think he might have gone too far in his Nov. 26 opinion, “Common sense versus PC.” He starts by saying: “Presumably the recent remarks of former infrastructure minister Nariaki Nakayama about Japan being ethnically homogeneous were correctly reported. If so his remarks were tactless, in view of Japan’s Ainu population, but also showed an ignorance of history.”

Later Cortazzi writes: “Nakayama’s alleged comment about racial purity suggested a throwback to prewar Japanese nationalism and an outdated ideology. Was he indulging in historical revisionism?”

To jump from “homogeneous” to “racial purity” is a dangerous thing unless Nakayama explicitly talked about racial purity. Whether we like it or not, Japan IS ethnically homogeneous. The Ainus left are so few in number that only pedants would claim nonhomogeneity.
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The move is being opposed by Queensland’s Anti-Discrimination Commissioner.

The firm, which is based in Seattle but has operations worldwide, says it has to exclude some nationalities in order to comply with US security regulations.

It was “reluctantly” seeking the exemption from the Anti-Discrimination tribunal.

The countries banned by the US Government are Belarus, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, Burma, China, Liberia, Sudan, Ivory Coast, Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, Lebanon, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Somalia.

“We would not be doing this unless we absolutely had to,” said Boeing spokesman Ken Moreton. “It’s a question of complying and getting the work or not complying and not getting the work.”

The restrictions on who could work on US military equipment were introduced after the 2001 terrorist attacks and Boeing is applying to renew an exemption already in place.
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Police have dropped all charges against the BNP’s ‘Liverpool 13′, admitting that there is no evidence to substantiate any of the allegations of ‘racism.’

The remarkable move came early this morning, when all thirteen men were hand delivered letters by members of the Liverpool constabulary. The letters, which formally advised the men that there was ‘insufficient evidence’ to pursue charges, were pushed through their doors by policemen, who then quickly left before being forced to talk to anybody to explain.

“The looming BNP demonstration in the city centre, set for this morning, was clearly too much for the political chiefs of the Liverpool police,” said Nick Griffin, BNP chairman.

“We knew all along that there was nothing wrong with the ‘Racism Cuts Both Ways’ booklets, but the rapidity of the police climbdown is testament to the boldness and dedication of BNP activists,” Mr Griffin said.

“The realisation that their Gestapo-like tactics had engendered a broad public revulsion and had energised the BNP, is probably the primary reason for their decision to drop all charges,” he continued.
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KARACHI - Growing ethnic violence is gripping the City which is creating panic among the citizens.

Rumours and warning threats to people to leave their houses, teashops, incidents of torture and blazing of pushcarts/shops have been created panic among the Karachiites.

Gossips spread across the City that Pushtoon have planned to blow up the water supply line and will also devise a strategy to halt the supply line of basic commodities from rest of the country.

Residents of various areas where ethnic rivalry is strengthening include North Nazimabad, North Karachi, Orangi Town, Baldia Town, Quaidabad, Liaquatabad and number of other areas.

Residents of the Chappell Apartment, Gulshan View, A-One Apartment, Phase 1, 2 and Iqra City situated at Abul Hassan Isphahani Road, Sohrab Goth have been suffering due to rising political tension.
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Last week the Secretary of State for Communities, Hazel Blears, spoke out, claiming that white working class voters turn to the BNP because they feel ignored by mainstream political parties.

Hazel Blears suggested that for many people politics is often a “closed world” far removed from their everyday existence, and that politicians need to be addressing the “bread and butter” issues which really matter to typical voters. She recognises that where the BNP wins votes it is often a result of local political failure in places where estates are often ignored for decades and votes are taken for granted, leading people to look elsewhere for answers.

In the current political climate, with the ongoing problems of the economy, the health service, the fight against terror and attitudes towards immigration, increased dissatisfaction with the government and political parties in general is clear. Many people feel that there is simply nobody in the mainstream parties representing their interests. This as a result has been clearly illustrated by increasing voter apathy. The feeling that the mainstream parties are failing the population is reflected in the presence of former Liberal Democrat, Labour and Conservative party members on the leaked list. Whilst the mainstream parties are doing little to address the growing grievances of ordinary voters, the British National Party is taking the opportunity to exploit genuine concerns in order to gain increased popular support.

Under Nick Griffin’s leadership the BNP have made an effort to distance itself from its overtly racist past in an attempt to make the party more acceptable to a wider range of people, including those who would not consider themselves as racist. By focusing campaigning on areas with racial tensions the BNP has been able to develop support in a small number of specific areas such as Leicester and East London, and now has 56 local councillors across Britain.
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White parents are less likely to take an interest in their children’s education than black or Asian parents. And they are also more likely to believe that their children’s schooling should be left up to their teachers, according to a study for the Department for Children, Schools and Families.

Their lack of involvement is likely to hamper their children’s chances of exam success later in life, it says, adding that black parents are more than twice as likely to say they are very involved in their children’s education than whites. Black and Asian parents say education is “very important to combat racial discrimination and disadvantage”.

It also showed that Chinese and Asian youths consistently outperformed white pupils in maths and English national curriculum tests. The research comes after the Rowntree Foundation found that white working-class pupils made the least progress throughout their schooling.
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This serial essay started with the assumption that Barack Hussein Obama’s election as the 44th President of the United States would accelerate the creation of a multicultural supra-state encompassing all the countries founded and developed by whites. This entity, that I called Meccania, would be an ideological extension of the European Union, suppressing and diluting its white majority, its original civilization and its civic freedoms while force-flooding its territories with ever more black, brown and Muslim minorities, and increasing state control over all areas of life.

A week after Mr. Obama’s election, it was impossible to exaggerate its impact on the world. That oxen had been slain for feasts in Kenya, and black Americans had cried for joy is fair and normal. But what the descendants of Europa were doing was unique, fascinating and terrible. They were dancing on their own grave in euphoric rapture, by the hundred millions, celebrating their own demise.

There were the leading airheads. For Gordon Brown, “America stands at its own dawn of hope” and St. Obama is about to usher a new age of “progressive multilateralism.” For Madame Sarkozy, the election of Obama was a fount of “immense joy” and hope that the “Obama effect” would reshape French society. For America’s “conservative” President Bush, Obama’s win was ‘good for our country’.
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