Skip to main content

Saving the Other

The following is a drivel by me, nothing of it gets closer to an analysis aimed at radical readers or intelligent people.
"The coalition task force fighting IS in Iraq and Syria reported on 26 September that it had conducted 34,573 air strikes between August 2014 and August 2019, and that at least 1,335 civilians had been unintentionally killed.
But Airwars believes between 8,214 and 13,125 non-combatants are likely to have been killed as a result of coalition actions over the same period."
But "the price is worth it." "Collateral damage" is inevitable and necessary. Saving coalition forces' lives is crucial. We are helping you to destroy evil, so you must make some sacrifices. I am sure those who lost their loved ones will understand the situation and the difficulty that faces pilots. We will give them some money. 
What about if some of them go and join the "jihadist" groups out of anger and frustration? We strike them... After 9/11 and the London bombing, the official line was it was imperative we went "there" and fought them "there" so "they" could not come here and bomb us again. 

 But they came and killed our loved ones in France and England and other places.

 Well, I guess because there is something wrong with "Islam"; something ideological that drives them to hate "our values."
But the Arab uprisings of 2011 and the recent and ongoing revolts in Sudan, Algeria, Lebanon and Iraq show otherwise. That it is not a religious issue at all. 

 Yes, but look at Syria, Libya and Yemen and how they are killing each other over there for almost a decade now. Just look at Libya and how our NATO tried to help them and save lives.
And if we didn't do it, imagine how many lives would have been taken by ISIS. Just look how we have destroyed the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, or the "insurgents in Iraq."

 And when those people terrorised by ISIS, Taliban, A-Asad, Saudi-UAE air raids... flee their homes and seek refuge in Europe they are "sheltered" in detention centers and treated as aliens who are incompatible with "our culture". 

 Because we cannot afford having all of them and because a siginificant number of our population do not accept more foreigners, especially Muslims. It is a hard choice. We cannot upset our people and strengthen the far-right.

 But over the last few decades all the talk was about a "prosperous" and "tolerant" Europe, a Europe of "liberal values", "human rights", "aid", and even "helping the Other develop".

 And we are still doing that, but we have to do it differently today. We have new challenges like climate change and economic stagnation facing us. Also, we should not dismiss the intricacies of geopolitics in a region like the Midle East and North Africa...

 ........

 The circle has not finished. More is yet to come.
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

The Qarmatians (Al-Qaramita)

By Nadeem Mahjoub Documentary film-makers G. Troeller and M. C. Defarge once asked a cabinet minister in South Yemen, why socialistic ideas were so readily acceptable in that part of the Arab world. He replied: “Because we have been communists for a thousand years! My mother was Qarmatian.” Official Muslim scholars and clerics, and many so-called moderates (whether individuals or groups) oppose sedition ( fitna ). Tensions and contradictions in society should be solved peacefully and even if the ruler was unjust and impious, it is generally accepted he should still be obeyed, for any kind of order is better than anarchy and sedition. “The tyranny of a sultan for a hundred years causes less damage than one year’s tyranny exercised by the subjects against one another.” Revolt was justified only against a ruler who clearly went against the command of God and His prophet.” 1 Here we look at not what happened in the minds of people who call for calm, oppose dissent and preach the re...
Post a Comment
Read more
John Gray, the Guardian, 03 March 2015: "To a significant extent, the new atheism is the expression of a liberal moral panic." "There is no more reason to think science can determine human values today than there was at the time of Haeckel or Huxley. None of the divergent values that atheists have from time to time promoted has any essential connection with atheism, or with science. How could any increase in scientific knowledge validate values such as human equality and personal autonomy? The source of these values is not science. In fact, as the most widely-read atheist thinker of all time [Nietzsche] argued, these quintessential liberal values have their origins in monotheism." "The reason Nietzsche has been excluded from the mainstream of contemporary atheist thinking is that he exposed the problem atheism has with morality. It’s not that atheists can’t be moral – the subject of so many mawkish debates. The question is which morality an atheis...
Post a Comment
Read more

Capitalism

Some of this reminds me of how five or six years ago in a class of seven students in a UK elite university three of them (two Germans and one British) were in favour of a "benevolent dictator" (in the Arab context). The bloody horrors of Pinochet showed how capitalism will react when it's threatened
Read more
Varoufakis "speaks of how great it was to have the support of Larry Summers, Norman Lamont, and other figures on the Right, but it was support for whom, for what, and in whose class interests? Class analysis is far from the foreground of the picture sketched out here. Closed rooms and class war
Post a Comment
Read more
"A second position argues against transition, which is transitology itself. It is well known—especially among economists—as the sudden mobilization of a considerable mass of experts who are generally foreigners,generally Western, who come to preach the good word and to propose ready-made models of democracy. The science of the transition has become a financial windfall, a market. And the word transition has of course become a reflex of language, a term of reference, a call for tenders ( appel d’offres ) to which the whole society was supposed to respond.  Consequently, the reticence that one can express is the following: our history is framed, transition is a heteronomy. Every democratic revolution is henceforth supposed to take a unique, imposed path, which is, at the same time, indistinctly democratic and liberal (or neoliberal). A more or less non-“negotiable” package.  It is necessary to highlight the imposed character (and imposed from the outside) of this coming to t...
Post a Comment
Read more
"By 2003, the Libyan government had entered into relations with the International Monetary Fund, privatizing a number of state-owned enterprises. In 2004, Libya opened up 15 new offshore and onshore blocs to drilling. Campbell also chronicles the burrowing actions of the “Western-educated bureaucrats [who] worked to bring Libya into the fold of ‘market reforms,’ and the deepening commercial relations with British capital.”  In 2007, British Petroleum inked a deal with the Libyan Investment Corporation for the exploration of 54,000 square kilometers of the Ghadames and Sirt basins. It also signed training agreements for Libyan professionals, helping create a base for neoliberalism within the government. By 2011, 2800 Libyan professionals were studying in the United Kingdom, learning “Western values” of destatization and thus the removal of the possibility for production and power to be responsive to the demands of the people.  Libya under Qadhaffi was mercurial, but against ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Europe's Refugee Camps

"Just three and a half years after the signing of the refugee deal, these camps have become symbols of Europe's failure to protect those who knocked on its door for help. These camps, with Moria chief among them, are now places where already traumatised people are stripped off their dignity." The invisible violence of Europe's refugees camps
Read more