Sunday, 25 September 2016
Saturday, 24 September 2016
Deeyah Khan: JIHAD
The world has watched aghast as thousands of young men and women abandon comfortable lives in the West to join the barbaric ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria). Girls and boys have gone rapidly from being apparently well-adjusted school kids, to enthusiastically joining the ranks of Kalashnikov-wielding religious warriors and burkah-clad “jihadi brides”. It feels like a new and frightening phenomenon, one which has left many feeling bewildered and revulsed.
But as this new documentary film by Emmy Award winning director Deeyah Khan shows, Westerners embracing jihad and death is nothing new. For three generations now, young people across Europe have fallen prey to extremist groups and fought, killed and died with mujahideen movements from Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Kashmir, to Chechnya and Burma.
In this film, Deeyah, who has herself faced threats from extremist fundamentalists in the past, sets out to find out why the jihadi message has such an alluring hold on young Westerners.
First, she went back to the roots, spending two years with some of the leading figures in the British jihadi movement from previous generations. She secured unprecedentedly emotional and raw testimony from former extremists, learning from the inside what it is like to be drawn into radicalism, to have your life ruined by extremism and violence, a message which has continued appeal cascading down through the generations.
In JIHAD, Deeyah meets one of the founding fathers of the British jihad, who went abroad to fight, and who preached extremism to thousands of young Muslims across the UK and the West.
Deeyah’s search for answers then takes her to the streets of modern Britain, meeting today’s young Muslims, caught between extremism and the War on Terror. She meets young British Muslims who feel angry and alienated, facing issues of discrimination, identity crises and rejection by both mainstream society and their own communities and families; but in surprising moments of insight and enlightenment, she also finds hope and some possible answers to the complex situation we are currently in
Henry Rollins: Backroom Bigotry Is Now Out in the Open
Here in beautiful Australia, there is talk of conducting a plebiscite (basically, what USA would call a referendum vote) to ask the electorate if they are in favor of marriage equality. To ask this ridiculous question could cost upward of A$160 million. It was surprising to learn about this when I got here two weeks ago. Australia doesn’t seem like the kind of place to get bogged down in something so mean-spirited and small-minded
Friday, 23 September 2016
Thursday, 22 September 2016
Wednesday, 21 September 2016
The Bug makes a move
My system was on the move today. New Home, new beginnings. Berlin plans in motion bodies will be broken! 😉 @clubGRETCHEN. Stay tuned.— The Bug(official) (@thebugzoo) September 21, 2016
🔊 💣 🔊 pic.twitter.com/MRxGJul5OK
Tuesday, 20 September 2016
HA!
The brilliance of my Lego creation is lost on my 5yo. #parenting #lego #play #cassette pic.twitter.com/fjtIONyx9L— Vanessa Mann (@McNooza) September 20, 2016
WTF?
Once upon a time there were young people whose future was stolen bc their elders were afraid of being called racists pic.twitter.com/6kXiLLB6xM— David Duke (@DrDavidDuke) September 19, 2016
Alan Moore knows the score
If you believe in democracy as something other than a vending machine dispensing several slightly different flavours of privilege, then you should put all of your mind and all of your muscle into supporting someone who offers a future that ordinary people could actually live in
Monday, 19 September 2016
bvdub - Yours are Stories of Sadness
True story...
In 2012, I was singing karaoke in the lavish VIP suite of the most opulent bar of Shaoxing. Hours in, at the height of drunken revelry, suddenly, literally out of nowhere, one of the hired girls walked over to me from the other end of the room, and whispered in my ear:
"When I saw you walk in, I knew yours was a story of sadness."
These are flashes of memories from that time... broken fragments, and spaces in-between... each a portrait of instances I have remembered that moment, each its own place and time. Every time I remembered that moment in the years that followed, I made a brief tribute to the beginnings of that realization, and the starting point for my mental wanderings that followed... putting that initial realization to sound, before going the rest of the journey in my own head.
Unlike all my other works which are meant to be in the foreground, these are meant to stay in the shadows... to be the quiet and subconscious soundtrack... each not a story, but just a moment... that moment you realize. Unlike the norm, when I elucidate every second to near unbearable levels ;), this time how that moment materializes or continues is up to you...
As a result, they are, for the first time, unnamed... to let each take on its own meaning, and its own fabric in both my story and yours...
4 years later, these were the 19 times I remembered that moment... they will surely not be the last
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