Forget Iran, China, Libya and all the usual suspects for a minute. When it comes to Human Rights violations, Egypt ticks all the boxes. A dictatorial regime in the full sense of the word, election fraud is a policy, presidency is almost certain to be passed down from father to son, and the country is in a league of its own when it comes to police brutality. You’d think this is more than enough for western media to mobilize and report the plight of the Egyptian people and their quest for democracy.
Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Western media – right and left – consistently chooses to ignore people’s acts of dissent in Egypt. You could even argue that dissent in Egypt is more widespread than in Iran. For while dissent in Iran is mainly constituted in middle and upper classes, dissent Egypt is almost unanimous.
“In June 2009 — the month when disputed Iranian elections brought thousands of anti-government protesters into conflict with riot police and left blood running through the streets — Iran was featured in 742 articles. In April 2008 — the month when an attempted Egyptian general strike brought thousands of anti-government protesters into conflict with riot police and left blood running through the streets — Egypt made an appearance in 28 pieces, almost none of which mentioned Mahalla (the town at the heart of the unrest).” The NewStateman
Another puzzling observation is the read more…
We all know the stereotype: you’re at some tourist destination, Buckingham Palace, the Eiffel Tower, or the Acropolis, and you see a group of sweaty, overweight, fanny-pack wearing tourists and you think to yourself, “must be American”.
Am I right? Of course I am, we even have Halloween costumes dedicated to this joke. Well, hopefully this common sight will soon be on the decline…or has at least stabilized for now.
In the January 20th edition of The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), a study suggested that obesity has leveled off in the past three years (2005-2008), maintaining an impressive 33% of the country. Although we are still the fattest in the world, with 10 times the rate of Japanese and South Koreans, there is still hope for us yet. read more…
You're a dumbass
Oh for fuck’s sake Simon Cowell, did you really have to go and do that? I don’t even know where to begin with the latest exploitation of Haiti: Simon Cowell’s decision to record a song for the Haitians, who are already suffering enough as it is. And not just any old song. No, Simon decides to go ahead and re-record R.EM’s ‘Everybody Hurts’. And here it is. Fuck me.
First of all, as snugglebus so eloquently put it, in actual fact no, not everybody hurts. Just some people hurt. Not everybody, and especially not you Simon, you dirty bastard. Forget all that’s been written about the overflow of self-serving celebrity sympathy that has seeped out of the ruins of the earthquake like the second coming of Vesuvius, this without a doubt takes the cake.
It’s not just that Simon Cowell, who is worth, what, trillions of dollars, donated a measly $ 50,000 to relief efforts, and we can ignore the fact that he’s completely shat on a classic (yet somewhat overplayed) song, it’s the choice of song itself that is sickening. If there is any song that is patronising, nonsensical, and just completely and utterly inappropriate for the naturally-induced read more…
There will come a day pretty soon when someone decides that the people of Haiti are no longer news. For now though the bright lights of global 24-hour news continue to shine on the suffering of 10 million people in the Caribbean sea. There are so many words spilled in wake of a disaster like this one that it seems pointless adding to them. What do you write that isn’t platitudes, or at least criticism of other people’s platitudes? But as time has passed and talk has turned to Tony Blair’s unshrinking ego or the grand unveiling of Michael Jackson’s children, I guess maybe I feel I do want to add one thing.
What has struck me most about this disaster, is not the magnitude of the destruction or the inadequacy (or otherwise) of the response, but the coverage of it. To be precise I mean the way we frame an event such as this. In this disaster, as in several preceding it, the global media, and so us too their viewers, are not observers but stakeholders who participate in the construction of a story; in essence it is not about the events but their narrativisation. So the question to ask is, what does the story we construct tell us, not about the event itself, but about us who weave it? read more…
There was something about the celebratory circle jerk that was the Grammy Awards that really irked me this year.
Beysus Christ
Beyonce performed her hit ‘If I Were a Boy’ followed by a sanitized, rendition of Alanis Morisette’s “You Oughtta Know”, sans the profanities, at which point Beysus Christ moved the microphone away from her mouth, as if to suggest “I am a 21st century lady, I do not use profanities, so help me God”. It really got me thinking that (a) I really miss the raw anger and originality that Morisette had in her first album, and (b) ofcourse Beysus would remove all aggro from that song and turn it into an orgy of megalomania celebrating her own magnificence. Put a ring on it, etc. Spare me.
At the end of the day though, Beyonce can sing, but it really wasn’t that great of a performance. Next year Beyonce will probably go on stage, cough up phlegm, and everyone will cry out in joy as the angels descend from heaven singing ‘Halo’. Art.
Heidi's surgery run-down (click to enlarge)
I’m not going to lie to you; I’ve watched The Hills.
During the first few seasons, it was actually weirdly compelling, and before the storylines started to recycle themselves and there were more one-dimensional characters than you could shake an STD test at, the show was entertaining. My favorite parts of the show were Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt – also affectionately known as Speidi. I loved them because they were ridiculous. They were obnoxious, they were self-centered, and most of all, they were deluded. I have a soft spot for the crazies, and on a backdrop of characters with about as much depth as a kiddie pool, their hilarious and fame-whoring antics brought in an endless supply of laughs.
Even outside of The Hills, their otherwise unacceptable behavior was amusing to me. Whether it was the couple’s stint on ‘I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here’, Heidi’s Miss Universe performance, which she swore was live (we’ll turn a blind eye to the fact that even Britney Spears is a better lip-syncer), or their televised wedding, I consistently laughed them off as publicity stunts, and even gave the couple credit for being so shameless and cut-throat in their eternal quest for relevance and fame. Each of these stunts – even the wedding – could easily be a set up, I told myself. Maybe they’re the ones having the last laugh. And then Heidi dropped off the face of the earth for a couple of months, and earlier this month, shit got serious…
"Shut up betch, I'm speaking for your people"
It was only a matter of time really, wasn’t it?
Bono is teaming up with Jay-Z and producer Swizz Beatz (yes, that is his name) to record a charity single for Haiti. Swizz Beatz took to Twitter to say:
“ME , BONO ,HOVA, HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY ABOUT HAITI STAY TUNNED I TOLD YOU I WAS WORKING ON SOMETHING AMAZING FOR HAITI THEY NEED US!!!!!!”
Yes, Mr. Beatz, Haiti need you to break it down for them. Forget food and safe drinking water, shelter, logistical coordination, and access to immediate medical care, what Haiti really needs is for Bono to release another self-serving pop song in his endless pursuit to be the next Messiah.
I just don’t get it though. Yes, yes, celebrities are the new royalty, their cultural influence is unrivaled, and they need to set good examples. But surely one can go a bit further than making a pop song. Why doesn’t Bono dip into his deep pockets and pull out some moolah for Haiti without having to subject our ears to another natural disaster? read more…
“OK, guys. How many of you can honestly say you never stuffed your underpants to try to impress someone?”
Al-Qaeda on twitter…who’d have thought it?
I HEART K’naan, the Somali-born, Somali-lived, Somali-exiled and Canada-adopted rapper. His first album, The Dusty Foot Philosopher, was great and while going on and on about how damn hard-core he is for having grown up during Somalia’s erupting civil war (“I make 50-Cent look like Limp Bizkit”) might get tedious, his musical talents make up for it as they’re catchy enough to have wanky white suburban i-phone types like myself nodding along to the “ethnic” beats and his witty vocals. You’ve got to give to him, all his bragging about the real thing, well he has a point:
All Somalis know that gangsterism isn’t to brag about. The kids that I was growing up with [in Rexdale] would wear baggy [track] suit pants, and a little jacket from Zellers or something, and they’d walk into school, and all the cool kids would be like, ‘Ah, man, look at these Somalis. Yo, you’re a punk!’ And the other kid won’t say nothing, but that kid, probably, has killed fifteen people.
… And his song, Wavin’ Flag, is an official world cup anthem.
For all this, I LIKE K’Naan.
But the reason I HEART K’nann is this: read more…
Yes Pat, all eyes are on you.
Lately I have been running a vague kind of vox pop of my most interesting and informed friends to discover the news sources they favour. I have been doing this to combat my perpetual suspicion that somewhere there is an ultimate website, newspaper, or magazine that in one fell swoop will imbue me with great understanding and mind bending perspective on all of the most salient happenings around the world. So far I remain a slave to trawling the usual suspects.
Day to day this is mildly unsatisfying on a fairly general level, however when I am actively looking for real information about a specific event, the paucity of the global media machine becomes violently apparent. The recent earthquake in Haiti is a case in point. Highly esteemed publication after highly esteemed publication trotted out identikit stories with the same quotes, the same non factual facts and the same inane technical information of little interest to anyone but the random geologist they managed to dig up for said inane technical fact, in order to disguise the actual fact that essentially no one knew much at all.
But then to rescue of well-meaning journalists pandering to the news hungry masses everywhere came the crazy religious people. read more…
Re-Thinking Identity: I’d Totally Engage in Non-’Gay’ Same Sex Relations with Joseph Massad!
An ewz reader, currently based in the Middle East, sent us a very good response to an article written by sysh about Joseph Massad, Arab gay identity, and cultural relativism, and we’re reposting it here as a guest blog. Read it to the end, there’s a great line in the final paragraph about the liberation of all forms of sexuality.
Re-Thinking Identity: I’d Totally Engage in Non-’Gay’ Same Sex Relations with Joseph Massad!
I completely disagree with sysh’s post– it completely misreads Massad’s theory. What Massad is trying to do is attack the over simplified binary of homo- and hetero-sexuality that was birthed out of European modernization, specifically through modern psychology that invented ‘the homosexual’ as an attempt to cure and eradicate him/her. I know when using the word ‘invented’ people get upset but the fact of the matter is that until then, ‘homosexual’ as noun didn’t exist, and the idea of some authentic universal timeless homosexual identity is false.
Gay activists will have you believe you are born gay, but this is just not true. You are named gay once you show signs of effeminate behavior for a boy or butch behavior for a female, or you announce attraction to the same sex. This difference is huge. So you may be born with homosexual desire but you are most definitely not born ‘Gay’. Like all identities there is nothing authentic about it. Massad explains that and details Arab readings of homosexual behavior and acceptance of it in his book all without the use of a specific social category or identity.
do the math...?
…says the EU’s top health advisor, who has accused the makers of H1N1 vaccines of unduly influencing the WHO’s decision to declare the virus a pandemic that led to governments around the world to stockpile Tamiful.
Erm…srsly?? Because that would be kind of a big deal. It’s not that there weren’t enough conspiracies about at the time, especially with cuddly people like Donald Rumsfeld having links to the Tamiflu makers. But now Wolfgang Wodarg, head of health at the Council of Europe, has outright made the accusation, and called for an investigation for how it was that decisions were made to spend billions.
“There is a very inefficient work of our agencies. They made a big panic with the bird flu and they made big panic with the swine flu.
“The national governments spent billions of euros to buy their vaccines [for H1N1] so we have to investigate what was behind it, we cannot afford such agencies that spent the money for useless health measures.”
US spent $3 billion on Tamiflu alone, the UK government spent around $1 billion on vaccines that according to some reports they are now trying to quietly off-load, with the total across governments likely to run into the tens of billions. Compare that to George W Bush’s Malaria Initiative launched in 2005 which should have spent $1.4 billion by the end of next financial year on a disease from which up to a million people die annually. The WHO estimates that 13,000 people have died globally from Swine flu.
Of course its simplistic just to say that money spent on Tamiflu could have saved X number of lives if spent elsewhere…but, guys, come on.
I remember a few years back, MTV aired an episode of their True Life series entitled, “I have a Summer Share”. Back in 2004, the show introduced us to Tommy, Anthony and other friends who spent their summers partying hardcore in Seaside Heights, NJ, where the current Jersey Shore series is filmed. No doubt, “I have a summer share” was the brainchild for Jersey Shore and MTV has capitalized bigtime on this apparently fascinating group of young adults.
I can vouch for the accuracy of this program, but however irritating and obnoxious these characters seem to be; why are they constantly being singled out as “Italian-Americans” acting poorly? These are young adults acting like every other idiot on the boardwalk every summer, except they are being televised while doing it. By isolating this group as ‘giving Italian-Americans a bad name’, critics are read more…
What is in a name?
The Alpha and the Omega apparently resides in the name Allah and it seems that even the use of the word Allah in its intended context – to refer to the supreme deity – is strictly reserved for Muslim rhetoric.
Recently a Malaysian court ruled in favour of The Herald (a Christian paper) in its appeal against the ban of the use of the ‘sacred’ word by non-Muslims to refer to their God. This decision soon invoked two petrol bomb attacks causing damage to churches. The attacks were later honoured by hackers who broke into the Malaysian judiciary’s website as well as The Herald’s website and proceeded to soil it with profanities. The hacker with the alias “Brainwash” – obviously the irony being completely lost on the individual – left threatening messages such as “Mess with the best, die like the rest.”
These highly visceral retaliations scream out the inanity of these kinds of people and the whole Islamic extremism ethos. We’ll excuse the glossed over hyper-violence present in the main holy books and accept that the major religions teach peace and understanding, to a degree, which then renders such recourse utterly contradictory to their supposed beliefs. However, what is particularly ridiculous about this affair is that these headstrong fools who resort to grievous violence seem painfully unaware that the word Allah is not a Muslim word. The word is the Arabic word for God , and many Arabic Jews and Christians do not have another word for God. The word preceded Islam itself; it simply refers to the metaphysical all powerful being, in a generic sense.
usually when the words ‘viral’ and ‘breasts’ are used together, it involves a painful trip to the doctor and a few awkward phone calls with awkward silences. but today the whole world is talking about a viral campaign about boobs and bras that had some people laughing, some rolling their eyes, and others scratching their heads with curiosity.
for those of you still left in the dark about this – this week, my facebook feed was quickly taken over with updates including only a color. as i shift my attention to my blackberry, i’ve noticed status changes there, too. on twitter all the boys have been wondering “what is going on with these colors”? (68 percent of the people i follow are males, who were not part of this stealth campaign).
someone somewhere started a movement to get women to change their status to the color of their bras. this is the message that most women received (in some form or another):
To add to the pointless top 10 lists that emerge this time of year, the ‘ewz krewz’ sat down for a group-think to come up with our own top ten of things we want to see happen in 2010. And so here it goes, in no particular order, 10 things we want to see happen in 2010:
Can Americans throw logic aside so easily? The latest ‘Most Admired’ Gallup poll proves they can…
Gallup polls are typically a reliable and objective measure of public opinion in America, but it was shocking to read last month’s \’Most Admired Men and Women\’ choices. It went something like this:
There is no longer any such thing as fiction or non- fiction; there’s only narrative.
Yemen is back in the news this week after it was discovered that the would-be Detroit airline bomber spent some time studying Islam in Yemen, and since then the UK and US have announced plans to fund an ‘anti-terror’ police unit in Yemen.
Since the attempted bombing, Yemen has featured heavily in the news, in the context of the alleged dangers of ‘radical Islamic schools’ in the country. For many years the media and politicians were undecided over how to ‘narrate’ Yemen to the public. It would be almost too easy to create a narrative around Yemen that would mirror Somalia or Pakistan: failed state, terrorism, al-Qaeda, and anti-Westernism. Anyone who has ever spent any time in Yemen knows that such a narrative is dangerously untrue, and here’s why…
The Unbearable Threat of HyperSexualized Femininity: Why Amanda Knox is the Modern Day Joan of Arc
Amanda Knox
Two years ago, on Halloween, British exchange student Meredith Kercher was found murdered in her bedroom in Perugia, Italy, her throat slashed open in what was later to be described as a ’sex attack’. Earlier this month, Amanda Knox, her young and beautiful American roomate, was charged with the murder and sentenced to 26 years in prison.
In the two years in between, the narrative of ‘Foxy Knoxy’ was born, an overblown media portrayal of Knox as a sociopathic ultra-sexual temptress that killed her innocent and subdued roomate in a jealous, sex-fuelled fury. The problem is, evidence is inconclusive, and doesn’t really point to Knox being the murderer (in fact, the probable murderer, Rudy Guede, was jailed a year ago).
Also, Italian juries are not sequestered, which means that they’re often exposed to all the media rumours that, in this case, were salacious, wild, and more often than not unsubstantiated. This, combined with the machismo, totally Italian, and arguably anti-woman attitude that surrounded this case, Knox stood little chance, even though there is absolutely zero physical evidence linking her to the murder itself.
Since then, many have spoken out about the problems of the trial itself. Equal Writes summarizes the dialogue quite well, arguing that Amanda Knox was persecuted for her beauty as much as for her alleged murdering of Meredith Kercher. The New York Times’ Timothy Egan went a bit further in his anger over the prosecution’s description of Knox as a “dirty-minded she-devil:
errwhateverz
theflithyviewer
sysh
snugglebus
elmaryachi
giuseppecaruso
Claude Van Inkins
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cabbageeater
ianrecon
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