Ian Harris Otago Daily Times October 10, 2014
As a shambolic election campaign fades mercifully into history, voters are left mulling over what might have been, whether for better or for worse. In the major league National’s victory was stunning, Labour’s loss gutting. And nearly one in four of us didn’t bother to vote.
A democracy waxes and wanes according to how society as a whole engages with it, so something is obviously lacking. Was this campaign so drab and dirty that many people didn’t want a bar of it? Or was there something missing in all the public debate: namely, a clear vision of what kind of people, in what kind of society, New Zealanders might aspire to be? For as the proverb warns, “Where there is no vision, the people perish”.
Sure, there was plenty of pragmatic detail around what should or shouldn’t be done to broaden the tax system, clean up our rivers, help or deter developers, tweak education, ensure children’s futures are not stunted by poverty. Most politicians presumably want to do good rather than bad, within the parameters of whatever political, economic or social ideology drives them. But parameters can turn out to be blinkers, and ideology is not vision.
At their best, politics and religion do share a common impulse. Each in its own way envisions a re-ordering of the world – not usually the whole world, but certainly the world of a particular place and time. Sometimes, though, it is the whole world. Communism had such a vision. Capitalism still does, especially multinational mega-capitalism. Europe’s imperial powers re-ordered the world by carving it up and imposing their rule.
In World War 2, Germany and Japan set out to re-order vast portions of the globe for their own aggrandisement.
Hence every grand cause needs to be tested: What are its guiding values? How will the vision be pursued? Who stands to benefit?
At the heart of both Christianity and Islam lie visions of re-ordering the world – and the long history of both religions illustrate the perils of imposing their vision top-down through becoming politically dominant, rather than growing it from the ground up in freedom of choice.
In Muslim thought, the religious and political orders are two sides of the same coin. In the great age of Islam 1000 years ago the religion of a compassionate God and caring community produced in some regions a flowering of learning, tolerance, respect and humanity.
In marked contrast is the fanatical savagery of today’s Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, or Boko Haram in Nigeria, whose followers slaughter, kidnap and oppress at the point of the sword. They envision a very different society, misusing Islam to fuel a political messianism of domination and intolerance.
Medieval Christendom went through a similar phase in its murderous crusades to restore the Holy Land to Christian rule, and in the political power exercised by popes, bishops and priests to control thought and curb freedom. Just as the barbarism of an Islamist fringe is a perversion of the teaching of Mohammed, so was Christian brutality a negation of the spirit of Jesus.
Jesus certainly envisioned a re-ordering of the world. His central image was of earth as God’s kingdom – not a kingdom to be imposed by coercive political power, but one where people who caught his vision, and then lived it into reality, could transform whole communities.
The kingdoms of Jesus’ image are not the norm any more, and for many the theistic God it assumes has faded out of consciousness, taking with it any notion of God’s kingdom on earth. Nature abhors a vacuum, so in its place have arisen the modern gods of individualism, neo-liberal economics, and the multinational corporates. Some insist these promote and expand human freedom, but they are actually the gods of the “haves” – who are past-masters at enlisting politicians to put their interests first.
Serving those gods has ensured that far from trickling down, wealth gushes upwards, widening the gap between the richest quintile of society and the rest. Faith in those gods lay behind the recent global financial crisis, and will trigger another. Central to the Christian vision of the kingdom of God, by contrast, is a sense of worth, belonging and justice as all contribute according to their strengths to the common good. It is not a political manifesto, though politicians can either build on its values or actively undermine them.
Voters need not wait on them, however, to make the vision real in their own lives and communities. It will always trump any party platform.
Monday, 13 October 2014
Propaganda war of Islamic extremists is being waged on Facebook and internet message boards, not mosques
Robert Fisk Independent UK 12 October 2014
Ever since the Pentagon started talking about Isis as apocalyptic, I’ve suspected that websites and blogs and YouTube are taking over from reality. I’m even wondering whether “Isis” – or Islamic State or Isil, here we go again – isn’t more real on the internet than it is on the ground. Not, of course, for the Kurds of Kobani or the Yazidis or the beheaded victims of this weird caliphate. But isn’t it time we woke up to the fact that internet addiction in politics and war is even more dangerous than hard drugs?
Over and over, we have the evidence that it is not Isis that “radicalises” Muslims before they head off to Syria – and how I wish David Cameron would stop using that word – but the internet. The belief, the absolute conviction that the screen contains truth – that the “message” really is the ultimate verity – has still not been fully recognised for what it is; an extraordinary lapse in our critical consciousness that exposes us to the rawest of emotions without the means to correct this imbalance. The “virtual” has dropped out of “virtual reality”.
At its most basic, you have only to read the viciousness of internet chatrooms. Major newspapers – hopelessly late – have only now started to realise that chatrooms are not a new technical version of “Letters to the Editor” but a dangerous forum for people to let loose their most-disturbing characteristics. Thus a major political shift in the Middle East, transferred to the internet, takes on cataclysmic proportions. Our leaders not only can be transfixed themselves – the chairman of the US House Committee on Homeland Security, for example, last week brandishing a printed version of Dabiq, the Isis online magazine – but can use the same means to terrify us.
We have grown so used to the narrative whereby a Muslim is “radicalised” by a preacher at a mosque, and then sets off on jihad, that we do not realise that the laptop is playing this role. In Lebanon, for example, there is some evidence that pictures on YouTube have just as much influence upon Muslims who suddenly decide to travel to Syria and Iraq as do Sunni preachers. Photographs of Sunni Muslim victims – or of the “execution” of their supposedly apostate enemies – have a powerful impact out of all proportion to words on their own.
Martin Pradel, a French lawyer for returning and now-imprisoned jihadists, last week described how his clients spent hours on the internet with a preference for YouTube and other social networks, looking at images and messages marketed by Isis. They did not – please note – go to mosques, and they drew apart from family and friends. A remarkable AFP report tells of a 15-year-old girl from Avignon who left for the Syrian war last January without telling her parents. Her brother discovered she led parallel lives, with two Facebook accounts, one where she talked about her normal teenage life, another where she wrote about her desire to go “to Aleppo to help our Syrian brothers and sisters”. Mr Pradel said the “radicalisation” was very quick, in one case within a month. It reminds me horribly of the accounts of American teenagers who lock themselves on to the internet for hours before storming off to shoot their school colleagues and teachers.
Online, Dabiq – named after a Syrian town captured by the jihadis which will supposedly be the site of a future and apocalyptic (yes, that word again) battle against the Western crusaders – is a slick venture. But print it up and bind it – I have such a copy beside me as I write – and it appears very crude. There are photographs of mass executions which look more like pictures of atrocities on the Eastern Front in the Second World War than publicity for a new Muslim caliphate. There is the full text of poor James Foley’s last message before his beheading which – on paper – is deeply saddening.
“The Dabiq team [sic] would like to hear back from its readers,” the editors say at the end, providing email addresses and advice to be “brief” because – they add, with perhaps unintentional humour – “your brothers are busy with many responsibilities and therefore will not have the time to read long messages.” But that’s the point, isn’t it? Be brief. Keep the length down. No aimless arguments or the letter may be “modified” (that’s the word the editors actually use in English).
I will not dwell here on the failure of the West’s “mainstream” press – another word I loathe – in defining Isis; Dabiq’s publishers have cleverly mimicked many of its faults. But those who are gripped by the messages of the internet – pictures of the chemical gas victims in Damascus last year have clearly had a tremendous influence – are not going to be swayed by us journos any more. In this new world, we can lose our heads, literally. But remember the internet. Clearly, Isis has.
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/robert-fisk-beware-of-the-role-of-the-laptop-in-our-addiction-to-politics-and-war-9790093.html
Ever since the Pentagon started talking about Isis as apocalyptic, I’ve suspected that websites and blogs and YouTube are taking over from reality. I’m even wondering whether “Isis” – or Islamic State or Isil, here we go again – isn’t more real on the internet than it is on the ground. Not, of course, for the Kurds of Kobani or the Yazidis or the beheaded victims of this weird caliphate. But isn’t it time we woke up to the fact that internet addiction in politics and war is even more dangerous than hard drugs?
Over and over, we have the evidence that it is not Isis that “radicalises” Muslims before they head off to Syria – and how I wish David Cameron would stop using that word – but the internet. The belief, the absolute conviction that the screen contains truth – that the “message” really is the ultimate verity – has still not been fully recognised for what it is; an extraordinary lapse in our critical consciousness that exposes us to the rawest of emotions without the means to correct this imbalance. The “virtual” has dropped out of “virtual reality”.
At its most basic, you have only to read the viciousness of internet chatrooms. Major newspapers – hopelessly late – have only now started to realise that chatrooms are not a new technical version of “Letters to the Editor” but a dangerous forum for people to let loose their most-disturbing characteristics. Thus a major political shift in the Middle East, transferred to the internet, takes on cataclysmic proportions. Our leaders not only can be transfixed themselves – the chairman of the US House Committee on Homeland Security, for example, last week brandishing a printed version of Dabiq, the Isis online magazine – but can use the same means to terrify us.
We have grown so used to the narrative whereby a Muslim is “radicalised” by a preacher at a mosque, and then sets off on jihad, that we do not realise that the laptop is playing this role. In Lebanon, for example, there is some evidence that pictures on YouTube have just as much influence upon Muslims who suddenly decide to travel to Syria and Iraq as do Sunni preachers. Photographs of Sunni Muslim victims – or of the “execution” of their supposedly apostate enemies – have a powerful impact out of all proportion to words on their own.
Martin Pradel, a French lawyer for returning and now-imprisoned jihadists, last week described how his clients spent hours on the internet with a preference for YouTube and other social networks, looking at images and messages marketed by Isis. They did not – please note – go to mosques, and they drew apart from family and friends. A remarkable AFP report tells of a 15-year-old girl from Avignon who left for the Syrian war last January without telling her parents. Her brother discovered she led parallel lives, with two Facebook accounts, one where she talked about her normal teenage life, another where she wrote about her desire to go “to Aleppo to help our Syrian brothers and sisters”. Mr Pradel said the “radicalisation” was very quick, in one case within a month. It reminds me horribly of the accounts of American teenagers who lock themselves on to the internet for hours before storming off to shoot their school colleagues and teachers.
Online, Dabiq – named after a Syrian town captured by the jihadis which will supposedly be the site of a future and apocalyptic (yes, that word again) battle against the Western crusaders – is a slick venture. But print it up and bind it – I have such a copy beside me as I write – and it appears very crude. There are photographs of mass executions which look more like pictures of atrocities on the Eastern Front in the Second World War than publicity for a new Muslim caliphate. There is the full text of poor James Foley’s last message before his beheading which – on paper – is deeply saddening.
“The Dabiq team [sic] would like to hear back from its readers,” the editors say at the end, providing email addresses and advice to be “brief” because – they add, with perhaps unintentional humour – “your brothers are busy with many responsibilities and therefore will not have the time to read long messages.” But that’s the point, isn’t it? Be brief. Keep the length down. No aimless arguments or the letter may be “modified” (that’s the word the editors actually use in English).
I will not dwell here on the failure of the West’s “mainstream” press – another word I loathe – in defining Isis; Dabiq’s publishers have cleverly mimicked many of its faults. But those who are gripped by the messages of the internet – pictures of the chemical gas victims in Damascus last year have clearly had a tremendous influence – are not going to be swayed by us journos any more. In this new world, we can lose our heads, literally. But remember the internet. Clearly, Isis has.
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/robert-fisk-beware-of-the-role-of-the-laptop-in-our-addiction-to-politics-and-war-9790093.html
Monday, 6 October 2014
Islamic State? A better name might be unIslamic State
Richard Glover Sydney Morning Herald September 30, 2014
There's a grisly prescience about the opening line of If, Rudyard Kipling's most famous poem: "If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs ..."
Kipling, of course, wasn't thinking about beheading as a tool of terror, nor of the rampaging horror of Islamic State, but he did understand the way we could all metaphorically lose our heads in times like these. His poem is a warning about the dangers of being swept along by the noise of the crowd. He wanted us to understand how difficult it is to stand steady against such pressure, and how doing so requires character, values and fortitude. Let's hope we all measure up, for the time is now.
This is the real battleground of terrorism: a million tiny interactions on the streets of our cities. Will that glance be a hostile one or a kindly one? Will the angry Facebook post be shared or criticised? Do we together push the vulnerable towards the extremists, or do we tempt them back to the middle?
And how do we collectively cope when things go wrong? Will the Muslim community, seeing a mosque daubed with graffiti, understand the crime is the act of a deranged, hate-filled minority? Will non-Muslims, aghast when a preacher refuses to criticise a terrorist, understand that he speaks for the few and not the many?
Right now, anger and fear is being directed from both sides towards a shared target: those of us in the middle. It is the noise of the fanatical street preacher trying to brainwash a disaffected young man; equally, it's the shrill voice of the "go-back-to-where-you-came-from" bigot seeking to demonise Islam. “All this violence is right there in the Koran," rant a thousand voices on Facebook, before going on to quote certain lines, as if the Christian Bible doesn't offer the odd smiting.
What's interesting is that these anti-Islamic crusaders are doing identical work to the terrorists: they seek to make Islamic State an expression of Islam. They are trying to recast the world so that a rag-tag group of violent criminals is suddenly the true representation of a religion.
This of course is the exact project of the terrorists. That's why they call it Islamic State, when a better name maybe unIslamic State. It's why they use terms such as "jihadists" for their recruits, when "disaffected loser" would be more accurate. It's why they talk about people becoming "holy warriors", when "brainwashed dupes" would be more precise.
In truth, Islamic State is just a flag of convenience for the lost and enraged. It's Islamic in the same way as Nazism was Christian. Look at the backgrounds of those who've left to fight overseas and it's the same limping, sad-sack backstory: drug use, minor crime, and often a fumbling, failed attempt at fame. Throw in a relationship break-up and some financial problems, and they are now ready for a "solution" to their discontent.
How much is any of this about Islam? The most eloquent answer to that question emerged in court proceedings against two of the British jihadists, Yusuf Sarwar and Mohammed Ahmed. Before heading to Syria, they ordered books from Amazon: Islam for Dummies and The Koran for Dummies. Like most jihadists, they were not observant Muslims; they were the opposite. Islam wasn't their motivation; Islam was their cover.
Amid all this, there's a hunger for hope. Last week, a 10-year-old called Mohammed called my radio show and spoke about the lack of racism in his Sydney school. Everyone gets on, he said, we all play together and really the adults could take a leaf out of our book. Whacked up on social media, his advice has since been shared more than 50,000 times. From the names I see on Twitter and Facebook, the sharing has been done by Sydneysiders from both Muslim and non-Muslim backgrounds.
Those 50,000 know the truth: we keep ourselves safe by placing our arms around each other. We keep ourselves safe by staring down those on both sides who seek to make this about religion instead of about criminal violence and madness. On both sides, we must divide the normals from the nutters. We must keep our heads when all about us are losing theirs. [Abbrev.]
http://www.smh.com.au/comment/-10o0ok.html
There's a grisly prescience about the opening line of If, Rudyard Kipling's most famous poem: "If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs ..."
Kipling, of course, wasn't thinking about beheading as a tool of terror, nor of the rampaging horror of Islamic State, but he did understand the way we could all metaphorically lose our heads in times like these. His poem is a warning about the dangers of being swept along by the noise of the crowd. He wanted us to understand how difficult it is to stand steady against such pressure, and how doing so requires character, values and fortitude. Let's hope we all measure up, for the time is now.
This is the real battleground of terrorism: a million tiny interactions on the streets of our cities. Will that glance be a hostile one or a kindly one? Will the angry Facebook post be shared or criticised? Do we together push the vulnerable towards the extremists, or do we tempt them back to the middle?
And how do we collectively cope when things go wrong? Will the Muslim community, seeing a mosque daubed with graffiti, understand the crime is the act of a deranged, hate-filled minority? Will non-Muslims, aghast when a preacher refuses to criticise a terrorist, understand that he speaks for the few and not the many?
Right now, anger and fear is being directed from both sides towards a shared target: those of us in the middle. It is the noise of the fanatical street preacher trying to brainwash a disaffected young man; equally, it's the shrill voice of the "go-back-to-where-you-came-from" bigot seeking to demonise Islam. “All this violence is right there in the Koran," rant a thousand voices on Facebook, before going on to quote certain lines, as if the Christian Bible doesn't offer the odd smiting.
What's interesting is that these anti-Islamic crusaders are doing identical work to the terrorists: they seek to make Islamic State an expression of Islam. They are trying to recast the world so that a rag-tag group of violent criminals is suddenly the true representation of a religion.
This of course is the exact project of the terrorists. That's why they call it Islamic State, when a better name maybe unIslamic State. It's why they use terms such as "jihadists" for their recruits, when "disaffected loser" would be more accurate. It's why they talk about people becoming "holy warriors", when "brainwashed dupes" would be more precise.
In truth, Islamic State is just a flag of convenience for the lost and enraged. It's Islamic in the same way as Nazism was Christian. Look at the backgrounds of those who've left to fight overseas and it's the same limping, sad-sack backstory: drug use, minor crime, and often a fumbling, failed attempt at fame. Throw in a relationship break-up and some financial problems, and they are now ready for a "solution" to their discontent.
How much is any of this about Islam? The most eloquent answer to that question emerged in court proceedings against two of the British jihadists, Yusuf Sarwar and Mohammed Ahmed. Before heading to Syria, they ordered books from Amazon: Islam for Dummies and The Koran for Dummies. Like most jihadists, they were not observant Muslims; they were the opposite. Islam wasn't their motivation; Islam was their cover.
Amid all this, there's a hunger for hope. Last week, a 10-year-old called Mohammed called my radio show and spoke about the lack of racism in his Sydney school. Everyone gets on, he said, we all play together and really the adults could take a leaf out of our book. Whacked up on social media, his advice has since been shared more than 50,000 times. From the names I see on Twitter and Facebook, the sharing has been done by Sydneysiders from both Muslim and non-Muslim backgrounds.
Those 50,000 know the truth: we keep ourselves safe by placing our arms around each other. We keep ourselves safe by staring down those on both sides who seek to make this about religion instead of about criminal violence and madness. On both sides, we must divide the normals from the nutters. We must keep our heads when all about us are losing theirs. [Abbrev.]
http://www.smh.com.au/comment/-10o0ok.html
Australia and Islamic State: put it in perspective
Hugh Mackay Sydney Morning Herald October 4, 2014
Given the unfolding events in Iraq and Syria and the acts of barbarism being committed by Islamic State militants, it's tempting to throw up our hands and see this as the greatest threat to civilisation since … which threat shall we choose? Oliver Cromwell in Ireland? Pol Pot in Cambodia? Adolf Hitler?
A mere 75 years ago, Nazi Germany had even grander territorial goals than ISIL: control of Europe, not just Iraq and Syria. Like ISIL, the Nazis were determined to suppress dissent and exterminate "others". Many Nazis were Christians who believed God was on their side: Hitler himself was a Catholic. On the other hand, many Christians inside and outside Germany were bitterly opposed to Nazism, just like the many Muslims who abhor the extremism and violence of both ISIL and al-Qaeda (who are, of course, at war with each other).
At a time like this, it's important to keep things in perspective. We are not being "over-run" by Muslims in Australia. The vast majority of asylum-seekers are not Muslims. The fastest-growing religion in Australia is not Islam (it's Hinduism, though off a low base). Muslims represent just 2.2 per cent of the Australian population, compared with 61 per cent identifying themselves as Christian.
Anxiety about security should remind us that governments tend not to discourage rumours of war because they know any talk of military action fuels our insecurity and that, in turn, strengthens their grip on power (think Thatcher and Falklands; think Howard and Iraq). Our heightened fears are bad for us, but good for them. Advertisement
So we would do well to resist the excesses of simplistic tribalism and remind ourselves that our common humanity is more powerful than our individual differences. We are social creatures who are defined more by our interdependence than our independence, though the popular cult of "Me-ism" would deny that.
All this points to the classic human quandary: we are individuals with a strong sense of our independent personal identity and we are members of families, groups and communities with an equally strong sense of social identity, fed by our intense desire to belong. This tension between the two sides of our nature explains why we sometimes act against the interests of the very communities we depend on.
There are plenty of signs of "attacks" on our way of life, but they are not coming from forces beyond our control, or from some external threat to our values. We ourselves are making the changes that are reshaping our way of life, and many of them do indeed work against the stable and cohesive communities we aspire to belong to.
For example, the disruptions and upheavals caused by our changing patterns of marriage and divorce demand difficult adjustments for many families, and for the social networks they belong to. Roughly one million dependent children live with only one of their natural parents, and half of them are caught in a pattern of weekly or fortnightly migration between the homes of custodial and non-custodial parents. Almost one-quarter of homes with dependent children are single-parent households. None of that is plain sailing for anyone.
Here's another radical shift: relative to total population, we are producing the smallest number of children Australia has ever seen. Our low birthrate diminishes the role children have traditionally played as a social lubricant in local neighbourhoods. But no one did that to us; we are doing it to ourselves.
In Australia, like the United States, we move house, on average, once every six years, and such mobility inevitably destabilises neighbourhoods. Universal car ownership reduces local footpath traffic and decreases the chance of those encounters and everyday courtesies that strengthen the bonds of community. Meanwhile, the IT revolution makes it easier for us not to see each other, while creating the illusion of connectedness.
The cumulative effect of such changes takes its toll on us and our communities, and the sense of an external threat only exacerbates it. We need to connect, to associate, to engage. Joining a service club, giving a neighbour your undivided attention, responding to the needs of strangers … all such actions help build the social capital that makes us strong. Communities can be magical places, but the magic comes from us, not to us. Social cohesion is simply about treating each other with kindness and respect. [Abridged]
http://www.smh.com.au/comment/australia-and-islamic-state-put-it-in-perspective-20141002-10p0jj.html
Given the unfolding events in Iraq and Syria and the acts of barbarism being committed by Islamic State militants, it's tempting to throw up our hands and see this as the greatest threat to civilisation since … which threat shall we choose? Oliver Cromwell in Ireland? Pol Pot in Cambodia? Adolf Hitler?
A mere 75 years ago, Nazi Germany had even grander territorial goals than ISIL: control of Europe, not just Iraq and Syria. Like ISIL, the Nazis were determined to suppress dissent and exterminate "others". Many Nazis were Christians who believed God was on their side: Hitler himself was a Catholic. On the other hand, many Christians inside and outside Germany were bitterly opposed to Nazism, just like the many Muslims who abhor the extremism and violence of both ISIL and al-Qaeda (who are, of course, at war with each other).
At a time like this, it's important to keep things in perspective. We are not being "over-run" by Muslims in Australia. The vast majority of asylum-seekers are not Muslims. The fastest-growing religion in Australia is not Islam (it's Hinduism, though off a low base). Muslims represent just 2.2 per cent of the Australian population, compared with 61 per cent identifying themselves as Christian.
Anxiety about security should remind us that governments tend not to discourage rumours of war because they know any talk of military action fuels our insecurity and that, in turn, strengthens their grip on power (think Thatcher and Falklands; think Howard and Iraq). Our heightened fears are bad for us, but good for them. Advertisement
So we would do well to resist the excesses of simplistic tribalism and remind ourselves that our common humanity is more powerful than our individual differences. We are social creatures who are defined more by our interdependence than our independence, though the popular cult of "Me-ism" would deny that.
All this points to the classic human quandary: we are individuals with a strong sense of our independent personal identity and we are members of families, groups and communities with an equally strong sense of social identity, fed by our intense desire to belong. This tension between the two sides of our nature explains why we sometimes act against the interests of the very communities we depend on.
There are plenty of signs of "attacks" on our way of life, but they are not coming from forces beyond our control, or from some external threat to our values. We ourselves are making the changes that are reshaping our way of life, and many of them do indeed work against the stable and cohesive communities we aspire to belong to.
For example, the disruptions and upheavals caused by our changing patterns of marriage and divorce demand difficult adjustments for many families, and for the social networks they belong to. Roughly one million dependent children live with only one of their natural parents, and half of them are caught in a pattern of weekly or fortnightly migration between the homes of custodial and non-custodial parents. Almost one-quarter of homes with dependent children are single-parent households. None of that is plain sailing for anyone.
Here's another radical shift: relative to total population, we are producing the smallest number of children Australia has ever seen. Our low birthrate diminishes the role children have traditionally played as a social lubricant in local neighbourhoods. But no one did that to us; we are doing it to ourselves.
In Australia, like the United States, we move house, on average, once every six years, and such mobility inevitably destabilises neighbourhoods. Universal car ownership reduces local footpath traffic and decreases the chance of those encounters and everyday courtesies that strengthen the bonds of community. Meanwhile, the IT revolution makes it easier for us not to see each other, while creating the illusion of connectedness.
The cumulative effect of such changes takes its toll on us and our communities, and the sense of an external threat only exacerbates it. We need to connect, to associate, to engage. Joining a service club, giving a neighbour your undivided attention, responding to the needs of strangers … all such actions help build the social capital that makes us strong. Communities can be magical places, but the magic comes from us, not to us. Social cohesion is simply about treating each other with kindness and respect. [Abridged]
http://www.smh.com.au/comment/australia-and-islamic-state-put-it-in-perspective-20141002-10p0jj.html
The focus on first US Ebola case shows how cheaply we value African lives
The sad reality is that African victims continue to suffer an excruciating death, while westerners are flown out, treated and become near-celebrities
Owen Jones Guardian/UK 1 October 2014
The life of a westerner is judged to be of greater worth than that of a black African – and by a number of factors, too. That it’s such a statement of the obvious, rendered glib, met with an instinctive “Well, duh”, simply underlines the point. And so it is unsurprising that the case of Ebola in the US should attract headlines. We do not know yet whether the patient is a US citizen - but the widespread media attention is due to the threat being transported to US soil and therefore putting westerners at risk.
That is not to belittle the suffering of the victim, and I hope the treatment that has been successful with the westerners who contracted the virus returns them to good health. But in due course, we will undoubtedly learn more personal details about this victim treated in a Dallas hospital than we know about the 3,000-plus Africans who have so far perished.
When aid workers have succumbed to Ebola, they have been invariably flown out and given ZMapp, an experimental drug that seems to have saved their lives. British nurse William Pooley is one and – having been flown out and saved – he wants to return. But this treatment is denied to Africans dying from an agonising hemorrhagic fever, which leaves victims bleeding on both the outside and the inside.
One defence of this practice is straightforward. The safety and effectiveness of ZMapp has not been proven through clinical trials. For westerners to start using such a drug on African victims – with consequences we cannot be entirely confident about – would risk claims that pharmaceutical companies are using Liberians and Sierra Leoneans as experimental fodder. But it has, after all, already been judged to be worth using on westerners. No wonder human rights activists in Africa are saying that it proves that “the life of an African is less valuable”.
My colleague Joseph Harker wrote two weeks ago about his brother-in-law’s sister, Olivet Buck, a Sierra Leonean doctor risking her life to help the dying. When she contracted the disease, a campaign was mounted to evacuate her to Germany where a hospital in Hamburg was ready to take her. But the World Health Organisation refused to fund such a lifesaving move, and Dr Buck died.
According to Médecins Sans Frontières, the western response has been “lethally inadequate”. But you can be sure that if such an epidemic had broken out in, say, Chicago, Paris or Rome, every possible resource available to the western medical world would be thrown at the problem.
But instead the western response too often has been “what about us?”. The Bloomberg Businessweek carries an alarmist Ebola Is Coming front cover. This is a nonsense. Ebola is a disease of poverty. It is very difficult to spread, and depends on direct contact with the bodily fluids of the infected, rather than being an airborne (and thus catastrophic) illness. If Liberia had a functioning public health system, the epidemic would be shut down. It needs trained health workers, isolation wards and protective gear to combat it – infrastructure that, in our grossly unequal world, simply is not there in a countries like Liberia or Sierra Leone. In Nigeria and Senegal, where there is a far more effective public health system, the countries appear to have put a stop to the onward march of Ebola. The disease has no real chance of spreading in western countries, because any victims would be quickly isolated and treated.
The sad reality is that African victims will continue to suffer an excruciating death, denied of basic dignity, drowning in their own fluids. As they do so, they will remain nameless and forgotten, except to their forever mourning relatives. Westerners, on the other hand, will be flown out, treated and become near-celebrities. Perhaps some are resigned to such a disparity, believing that this is the inevitable way of the world. I tend to differ: it is perverse, and it is unjust.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/01/us-ebola-cheap-value-african-lives
Owen Jones Guardian/UK 1 October 2014
The life of a westerner is judged to be of greater worth than that of a black African – and by a number of factors, too. That it’s such a statement of the obvious, rendered glib, met with an instinctive “Well, duh”, simply underlines the point. And so it is unsurprising that the case of Ebola in the US should attract headlines. We do not know yet whether the patient is a US citizen - but the widespread media attention is due to the threat being transported to US soil and therefore putting westerners at risk.
That is not to belittle the suffering of the victim, and I hope the treatment that has been successful with the westerners who contracted the virus returns them to good health. But in due course, we will undoubtedly learn more personal details about this victim treated in a Dallas hospital than we know about the 3,000-plus Africans who have so far perished.
When aid workers have succumbed to Ebola, they have been invariably flown out and given ZMapp, an experimental drug that seems to have saved their lives. British nurse William Pooley is one and – having been flown out and saved – he wants to return. But this treatment is denied to Africans dying from an agonising hemorrhagic fever, which leaves victims bleeding on both the outside and the inside.
One defence of this practice is straightforward. The safety and effectiveness of ZMapp has not been proven through clinical trials. For westerners to start using such a drug on African victims – with consequences we cannot be entirely confident about – would risk claims that pharmaceutical companies are using Liberians and Sierra Leoneans as experimental fodder. But it has, after all, already been judged to be worth using on westerners. No wonder human rights activists in Africa are saying that it proves that “the life of an African is less valuable”.
My colleague Joseph Harker wrote two weeks ago about his brother-in-law’s sister, Olivet Buck, a Sierra Leonean doctor risking her life to help the dying. When she contracted the disease, a campaign was mounted to evacuate her to Germany where a hospital in Hamburg was ready to take her. But the World Health Organisation refused to fund such a lifesaving move, and Dr Buck died.
According to Médecins Sans Frontières, the western response has been “lethally inadequate”. But you can be sure that if such an epidemic had broken out in, say, Chicago, Paris or Rome, every possible resource available to the western medical world would be thrown at the problem.
But instead the western response too often has been “what about us?”. The Bloomberg Businessweek carries an alarmist Ebola Is Coming front cover. This is a nonsense. Ebola is a disease of poverty. It is very difficult to spread, and depends on direct contact with the bodily fluids of the infected, rather than being an airborne (and thus catastrophic) illness. If Liberia had a functioning public health system, the epidemic would be shut down. It needs trained health workers, isolation wards and protective gear to combat it – infrastructure that, in our grossly unequal world, simply is not there in a countries like Liberia or Sierra Leone. In Nigeria and Senegal, where there is a far more effective public health system, the countries appear to have put a stop to the onward march of Ebola. The disease has no real chance of spreading in western countries, because any victims would be quickly isolated and treated.
The sad reality is that African victims will continue to suffer an excruciating death, denied of basic dignity, drowning in their own fluids. As they do so, they will remain nameless and forgotten, except to their forever mourning relatives. Westerners, on the other hand, will be flown out, treated and become near-celebrities. Perhaps some are resigned to such a disparity, believing that this is the inevitable way of the world. I tend to differ: it is perverse, and it is unjust.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/01/us-ebola-cheap-value-african-lives
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)