It's really too bad that The Bad Writing Contest doesn't still accept nominations, because the abstract for this event to be hosted by the University of British Columbia's Liu Institute on January 21 would surely take the cake:
Toxicity Incorporated: Toxic Assets, Privileged Bodies, and the Affects of Toxic Management
Appeals to the toxic are pervasive today, whether leveraged in a medical, environmental, economic, or social sense. While toxicity is seemingly given transparent responsibility for actual effects in human (often privileged) bodies the incidence of cancer in those copresent with certain toxic elements in given quantities it is also, I suggest, performative: consonant with the flexible demands of risk society. Toxicity thus produces both the threatening nature and the externality of proximate objects. The talk proceeds by following several seemingly incommensurable discursive and material sites in which toxicity is animated, paying particular attention to the financial entity called a toxic asset, and tracking their affective dynamics. Throughout, I attend in particular to the racial, sexual, and economic registers of toxicity, suggesting that they deeply inform toxic notions rather than being incidental to them.
Mel Y. Chen is Associate Professor of Gender & Womens Studies at
It's always curious to me what stories hit a nerve in the media. What does it take exactly? The exact recipe of horror, devastation, drama, intrigue and injustice eludes me, I confess.
Once in a while, circumstances collide to garner good coverage for a good story, like that of the brave Malala Yousufzai of Pakistan. Long avoided conversations get started, like, hey, those Taliban are actually really kind of mean and they kill little girls and stuff. But then, another story that seems to exhibit just as much injustice, and with an even grizzlier ending, like that of the slain secondary student, Anisa of Kapisa, Afghanistan, get barely a token mention in passing, with the Government of Afghanistan doing its level best to see the story die promptly, and mostly succeeding.
Like assassination attempts against schoolgirls, stonings are another fussy theme. Mostly we don't meddle, but sometimes we let ourselves get real worked up. Back in 2002, when 30-year-old Amina Lawal was sentenced to be stoned to death by a sharia court in Nigeria for having a child out of wedlock, she made frontpage news the world over. Miss World contestants boycotted Nigeria, Oprah got more than...More >>
Karim Delgado is a former military journalist with the Marine Corps, where he deployed in support of various humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations throughout Southeast Asia. He is currently majoring in philosophy at Columbia University, but took a break from school the first half of this year to work as a civilian videographer for the U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan. During this time, he documented the work of special forces teams throughout the country and their efforts to empower Afghans through the improved security, governance and development of their own villages.
Here is a link to Karim's short film using footage from his time in Afghanistan, Humans of Afghanistan, and an excerpt from the artist's statement (available in full at the link):
When I arrived back in the States, everybody wanted to talk with me about Afghanistan. It was very difficult for me, even to hear the name; I just wanted to hide somewhere private and cry. I couldn't really understand why that was for a while. But I think I've come to realize that here in the West, people's opinions about the region, its people and the war have really congealed into this sickening sort of knee-jerk
Like the Iranian Government's Press TV, RT (Russia Today) wears the veil of a mainstream corporate English language news service, often being mistaken by the casual listener for a tabloid style independent news company. It is in fact a Kremlin-created and funded propaganda-disseminating organization. Thus as with Press TV, take reporting like this with an atomic grain of salt:
The majority of people killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan are not militants, according to the country's Interior Minister. Rehman Malik said 80 per cent of more than two thousand people who have died as a result of strikes were civilians.
This is according to an RT broadcast which you can watch here on youby tuby. RT's one and only source for the "80%" figure is the obviously unbiased and trustworthy Pakistani Interior Minister (incidentally, the Pakistan Government has been known to secretly call for more drones, while publicly denouncing them, in accordance with their standard two-facedness policy long in effect). Pakistan is, afterall, the most transparent collaborator any ally could ever hope to rely on, so there is no reason to question any statement (especially ones with clean round numbers) their government ministers make (including...More >>
The "worst day" of Hojatoleslam Ali Beheshti's life was the day that a "bad hijab woman" in Semnan, Iran, beat him up, after he took it upon himself to "politely" instruct her to cover herself up. He was hospitalized for three days after the incident. The recipient of his unsolicited advice, it would seem, snapped. Perhaps she had simply had enough of sneering, crotchety, uptight men appointing themselves independent dress code police. As Golnaz Esfandiari writes:
For the past 30 years, Iranian women have been harassed, detained, fined, and threatened by the morality police, security forces, and zealots over their appearance. Women have fought back in different ways, including by pushing the boundaries of acceptable dress and criticizing the rules, which apply only to women.
Officially, the hijab is promoted as “protection” for women against evil in society. For many women, however, the hijab feels like a burden, an insult, a limitation of their freedom and an attempt to keep them under control.
Of all of the pointless discussions taking place on Facebook at any given moment, I thought this particular one was worth a little further diagnosis, if not to understand, than at least to exhibit the mentality at work in such “debates” over women’s dress codes in Islamic contexts.
This morning, someone on Facebook named Mohammad Aman tagged me in this photo he posted, with the caption:
Which one look nice and respective to you????? Please answer upper question....
The deluge of comments (over 100 within a few hours) were revealing of a debate playing out within and beyond Muslim societies offline and online. And while I welcome the fact that there is debate at all, the level and substance of that debate is not very encouraging.
The first thought that occurred to me in seeing this photo was, what is the point? Indeed, a small number of others felt similarly and said so. One commenter asked, “What's the point of this? To promote religious bigotry?”
Some were critical of the veiled dress. One commenter, from Mazar-i-sharif in Afghanistan, simply replied that his...More >>
New data from Pakistan published in the American Journal of Political Science suggests that the middle class there is more likely to support violent extremism than those who are less well off. The factor proposed for this difference is interesting:
the contextual factor that matters appears to be exposure to the externalities of militant violence. Leveraging a new dataset of violent incidents, we find first that violence is heavily concentrated in urban areas and second that dislike of militant groups is nearly three times stronger among the urban poor living in districts that have experienced violence than among the poor living in nonviolent districts. It is not that people are vulnerable to militants' appeals because they are poor and dissatisfied. Instead, it appears that the urban poor suffer most from militants' violent activities and so most intensely dislike them.
In other words, the people who have to deal with the consequences are those who don't like the violent extremism. It's not a surprising causal relationship, but it is emblematic of the habit among the better-off classes the world over to casually form hardened opinions over matters that have nothing whatsoever to do with them.
Pat Kennelly, Associate Director of the Marquette University Center for Peacemaking, writes an astounding load of fiction posing as non-fiction on CommonDreams.org on June 6, claiming that NATO and US Forces in Afghanistan are the cause of all of the problems of Afghan women. For instance, Kennelly claims:
NATO operations have caused greater insecurity for women. They create countless widows, destroy homes, and foster a psychological terror that women are not safe and secure, even in their own homes.
He offers no evidence whatsoever to back this claim, and goes on to imply that the "occupation" is responsible for everything from self-immolation cases among women to maternal mortality.
It's also remarkable that in an article on the theme of what most plagues Afghan women, the word "Taliban" is not mentioned even once. Yet it's indisputably the Taliban who pose the greatest threat to the rights of women and the evidence I would offer is their well-established track record from 1994-2001 as the greatest misgynists the world has ever known.
Kennelly vaguely alludes to evidence from interviews in Afghanistan that would support his claims:
In recent visits to schools, orphanages, and Afghan NGOs, ordinary Afghans did not identify specific
As Canadian fans of Ayatollah Khomeini beat their grovelling wings at an event commemorating the Ayatollah's demise (commemoraring it for all the wrong reasons), Afghans are putting their foot down at persistent Iranian interference in their nation's sovereignty.
As Michael Petrou of MacLean's explains of the event in Ottawa, co-hosted by the Iranian Embassy there and Carleton University's Iranian Cultural Association:
The conference featured a talk by Moulana Sayyid Muhhamad Rizvi, the “Guidance Alim” of a Toronto Islamic school whose teaching materials — some of which which were written in Iran or by a foundation believed by the FBI to be controlled by the Iranian government — refer to “crafty” and “treacherous” Jews.
Also on the agenda was Kurt Anders Richardson of the University of Toronto’s Trinity College, who drooled of Khomeini that he “was the one who emphasized the equality of human beings, the equality of male and female.”
Petrou notes,
This revelation is likely news to millions of Iranian men and women, and would have been news to thousands of more, if they hadn’t
The "worst day" of Hojatoleslam Ali Beheshti's life was the day that a "bad hijab woman" in Semnan, Iran, beat him up, after he took it upon himself to "politely" instruct her to cover herself up. He was hospitalized for three days after the incident. The recipient of his unsolicited advice, it would seem, snapped. Perhaps she had simply had enough of sneering, crotchety, uptight men appointing themselves independent dress code police. As 
Of all of the pointless discussions taking place on Facebook at any given moment, I thought this particular one was worth a little further diagnosis, if not to understand, than at least to exhibit the mentality at work in such “debates” over women’s dress codes in Islamic contexts.
As Canadian fans of Ayatollah Khomeini beat their grovelling wings at an event commemorating the Ayatollah's demise (commemoraring it for all the wrong reasons), Afghans are putting their foot down at persistent Iranian interference in their nation's sovereignty.
