Corporation for Enterprise Development’s Dedrick Asante-Muhammad explains the whitewashing of Martin Luther King’s legacy, transforming him from a leader for racial and economic justice who died in struggle to a post-racial patriot who died in victory.
Yesterday the Oscars were announced, and once again they were notable for a lack of diversity. Popular entertainment helps shape how we view the world, and Hollywood shapes the world as a very white male place. While every year has exceptions, the Oscars often follow the trend of the rest of Hollywood, snubbing films like Selma for the awards last year, and giving its seal of approval to a whitewashed world. But the Oscars are also just reflecting the bleak reality of who is given the resources to make films that might qualify.
Moments before an Aegean Airlines flight was due to take off, three Israeli passengers took security into their own hands and demanded that two fellow passengers, from Israel’s Palestinian minority, be removed from the plane. Dozens more Israeli Jews joined the protest, refusing to take their seats. Like a parable illustrating Europe’s bottomless indulgence of Israel, Aegean staff caved in to the pressure.
On Sunday, January 3, two passengers who had paid their fares, had passed security checks, boarded the Aegean Airlines flight from Athens to Tel Aviv and found themselves at the centre of a racist onslaught by belligerent Jewish-Israeli passengers. The Jewish-Israeli passengers accused the two other passengers of being ‘terrorists’ and demanding their removal from the plane.
The victims were attacked for one reason only — they are Palestinian, even though one carried an Israeli passport and the other an Israeli residence permit.
Iranian demonstrators chant slogans during a protest denouncing the execution of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr Photo: Vahid Salemi/AP
The Saudi monarchy is increasingly fearful that it could fall prey to the Frankenstein monster it has unleashed in the form of groups such as ISIS and the Al Nusra Front, whose Wahabi religious ideology and mass beheadings are modeled after the state terror imposed in Saudi Arabia itself
The defeated ogre, licking his wounds, finds little comfort from his hawkish “best friend”, despite his love for Israeli birds for whom he helped raise more than ten million Canadian dollars to build a bird sanctuary in the Promised Land. This was in preference to Canadian birds, who along with almost all other Canadians, had their funding slashed.
Recently, a teacher at a school in Augusta County, Virginia handed out a homework assignment. The homework, part of the Geography curriculum, dealt with world religions. Among other exercises, it included a question asking students to copy Arabic calligraphy (in order to help them understand the complexity of calligraphy in the Arabic language).
Here is the question:
I was brought up in Rhodesia, the country named after Cecil Rhodes, so I’m quite interested in the current controversy about the removal of his statue outside Oriel College in Oxford.
The big lie is a propaganda technique generally employed when telling the truth would be unfavorable to your side. It goes like this: never admit doing any wrong and instead always insist on a story that portrays your side as the good guys. What really happened is irrelevant. The key is repetition. Do it often enough and loudly enough until most people believe you.
