Posts Tagged ‘arundhati roy
OMNI-TV File (November): Killing Occupy Movement, Multicultural Remembrance Day, Cluster Bombs & Banks, Torture in India
How Occupy Movement was killed by media and the state
It was sad to see the tents of the occupy movement being dismantled across Canada and the young people with a fresh vision being driven off to the fringe – our government leaders and our media ignoring their message and focusing instead on how these trouble makers were messing up public spaces – and they did have a message that unchecked capitalism and free enterprise was not the answer to a planet in crisis – that the American model was the cause of massive inequality, poverty, hunger, deprivation, war, famine and conflict – poor countries like India have been worshipping this model for two decades and today a hundred families control a quarter of the country’s GDP – 800 million Indians live on fifty cents a day – while corporations use the media to brainwash us that happiness is to turn into a zombie at a department store’s midnight sale – in America itself people are losing their jobs and homes while Barack Obama bails out Wall Street and bombs innocent people – Indian author Arundhati Roy said it best at an occupy speech in New York – we need an end to cross-ownership in businesses – weapons manufacturers cannot own TV stations; mining corporations cannot run newspapers; business houses cannot fund universities; drug companies cannot control public health, put a cap on how much wealth individuals can accumulate and the children of the rich cannot inherit all their family’s wealth – the young men and women were simply telling us an inconvenient truth that it is time to guarantee a home, food, healthcare, total education for all – instead of building them a shrine where we could ponder a different god, we drove them away – Think about it, I’m Zuhair Kashmeri.
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OMNI-TV File (October): Pakistan, its ISI and America…; Kashmir – the politics of slaughter and mass graves…
Kashmir and DNA testing — dissappearances, mass graves and the politics of slaughter
Imagine reading on the front page of your favourite newspaper or watching on your favourite TV newscast that thousands of bodies have been discovered in mass graves in a country – the result of extrajudicial killings – imagine the hue and cry in the Canadian Parliament – imagine the outrage and condemnation – headlines would continue for days – well, we did live through a similar scenario just recently – Omar Abdullah, the chief minister of the Indian state of Kashmir, announced that DNA testing will be carried out on hundreds of bodies found in mass graves – human rights activists say thousands of people, suspected by Indian security forces of either being militants or having links to such groups demanding independence for India’s Muslim majority state of Kashmir, were summarily detained and killed – Across the valley, more than 8000 relatives live in enduring uncertainty, hoping that missing relatives may one day come home alive – while on the one hand, this DNA testing decision is a testament to India’s democracy, on the other hand this democratic response has been rather slow and reluctant and condemnation from the champions of democracy in the western world non-existent – the disappearances have been documented for years in well-known magazines and in books such as Pankaj Mishra’s Temptations of the West – Booker prize-winning author Arundhati Roy never stops talking about the disappearances of Kashmir’s young men – but don’t expect a hue and cry in Ottawa – after all, these are all just Muslims, and these days Muslims are fair game for drone attacks and extra-judicial killings, or simply because they happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time – Think about it, I’m Zuhair Kashmeri but with no connection to that troubled state.
Pakistan, its ISI and America: is there some mischief afoot?
Once again, Pakistan’s spy agency, the ISI, is in a spotlight of infamy – it has been accused by one of the highest-ranking American military officers, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, of organizing two of the deadliest bombings in Afghanistan – in mid-September, a NATO outpost south of Kabul was truck bombed, killing five people and wounding 77 foreign troops, plus an armed assault on the US Embassy left 16 Afghan police officers and civilians dead – the admiral told a Senate armed services committee open quote with ISI support, Haqqani operatives planned and conducted that truck bomb attack, as well as the assault on our embassy end of quote – Mullen said the Haqqani group is an arm of the ISI – US intelligence says it also was able to determine through cell phone wiretaps that the ISI was behind the 2008 bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul which left several dead – the story played out in the media for two days and then simply vanished – but if you reflect on it, this is a very serious charge against a country, Pakistan, which I have said time and again is a totally failed state that should never have been created in the first place – for lesser accusations than this, people have been hauled in as war criminals and put to trial – is the head of the ISI, Lieutenant General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, going to be extradited to face charges of war crimes and murder? – Of course not – but it does lay a media manipulation groundwork for America to undertake its unfettered extrajudicial killings outside of any international law that it imposes on other countries –Think about it, I’m Zuhair Kashmeri.
9/11: The algebra of infinite justice by Arundhati Roy
As the US prepares to wage a new kind of war, Arundhati Roy challenges the instinct for vengeance
Arundhati Roy
The Guardian, Saturday 29 September 2001
In the aftermath of the unconscionable September 11 suicide attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre, an American newscaster said: “Good and evil rarely manifest themselves as clearly as they did last Tuesday. People who we don’t know massacred people who we do. And they did so with contemptuous glee.” Then he broke down and wept.
CLICK THIS LINK to read the rest of the article at The Guardian, U.K. : The algebra of infinite justice or if the link does not work, click me to read our PDF.