Monthly Archives: November 2015
Paris…
The aftermath of the events in Paris has shown many of the worst things about the current media and social media. I’ve been watching, reading and following with a feeling, primarily, of sadness.
What depresses me the most – and surprises me the least – is the way that the hideousness has been used to support pretty much every agenda. I’ve seen the events used to ‘prove’ that we should leave the EU (‘control our borders’ etc) and that we should stay in the EU (‘solidarity’ with France), that we need less surveillance (it didn’t work this time, why not direct the effort and resources elsewhere) and that we need more surveillance (the threat is real, we must do everything needed). I’ve seen it said that we need to clamp down on Islam, that we need to support moderate Islam, that terrorists are all Muslims, that the vast majority of…
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Antillia Brewing Company Strikes Double Gold at 2015 Caribbean Beer Awards
Beirut, Paris
Some bodies are global, but most bodies are local, regional, ‘ethnic’.
My thoughts are with all the victims of today’s horrific attacks, and my thoughts are with all those who will suffer serious discrimination as a result of the actions of a few mass murderers and the failure of humanity’s imagination to see itself as a unified entity.
My only hope is that we can be strong enough to generate the opposite response to what these criminals intended. I want to be optimistic enough to say that we’re getting there, wherever ‘there’ might be.
We need to talk about these things. We need to talk about Race. We just have to
I come from a privileged Francophone community in Lebanon. This has meant that I’ve always seen France as my second home. The streets of Paris are as familiar to me as the streets of Beirut. I was just in Paris a few days ago.
These have been two horrible nights. The first took the lives of over 40 in Beirut, the second took the lives of over 100 in Paris.
It also seems clear to me that to the world, my people’s deaths in Beirut do not matter as much as my other people’s deaths in Paris.
‘We’ don’t get a safe button on Facebook. ‘We’ don’t get late night statements from the most powerful men and women alive and millions of online users.
‘We’ don’t change policies which will affect the lives of countless innocent refugees.
This could not be clearer.
I say this with no resentment whatsoever, just…
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From Beirut, This Is Paris: In A World That Doesn’t Care About Arab Lives
When my people died, they did not send the world in mourning. Their death was but an irrelevant fleck along the international news cycle, something that happens in those parts of the world.
And you know what, I’m fine with all of it. Over the past year or so, I’ve come to terms with being one of those whose lives don’t matter. I’ve come to accept it and live with it.
Expect the next few days to exhibit yet another rise of Islamophobia around the world. Expect pieces about how extremism has no religion and about how the members of ISIS are not true Muslims, and they sure are not, because no person with any inkling of morality would do such things. ISIS plans for Islamophobic backlashes so it can use the backlash to point its hellish finger and tell any susceptible mind that listens: look, they hate you.
And few are those who are able to rise above.
Expect the next few days to have Europe try and cope with a growing popular backlash against the refugees flowing into its lands, pointing its fingers at them and accusing them of causing the night of November 13th in Paris. If only Europe knew, though, that the night of November 13 in Paris has been every single night of the life of those refugees for the past two years. But sleepless nights only matter when your country can get the whole world to light up in its flag color.
The more horrifying part of the reaction to the Paris terrorist attacks, however, is that some Arabs and Lebanese were more saddened by what was taking place there than what took place yesterday or the day before in their own backyards. Even among my people, there is a sense that we are not as important, that our lives are not as worthy and that, even as little as it may be, we do not deserve to have our dead collectively mourned and prayed for.
It makes sense, perhaps, in the grand sense of a Lebanese population that’s more likely to visit Paris than Dahyeh to care more about the former than about the latter, but many of the people I know who are utterly devastated by the Parisian mayhem couldn’t give a rat’s ass about what took place at a location 15 minutes away from where they lived, to people they probably encountered one day as they walked down familiar streets.
We can ask for the world to think Beirut is as important as Paris, or for Facebook to add a “safety check” button for us to use daily, or for people to care about us. But the truth of the matter is, we are a people that doesn’t care about itself to begin. We call it habituation, but it’s really not. We call it the new normal, but if this normality then let it go to hell.
In the world that doesn’t care about Arab lives, Arabs lead the front lines.
A Separate State of Mind | A Blog by Elie Fares

When a friend told me past midnight to check the news about Paris, I had no idea that I would be looking at a map of a city I love, delineating locations undergoing terrorist attacks simultaneously. I zoomed in on that map closer; one of the locations was right to where I had stayed when I was there in 2013, down that same boulevard.
The more I read, the higher the number of fatalities went. It was horrible; it was dehumanizing; it was utterly and irrevocably hopeless: 2015 was ending the way it started – with terrorists attack occuring in Lebanon and France almost at the same time, in the same context of demented creatures spreading hate and fear and death wherever they went.
I woke up this morning to two broken cities. My friends in Paris who only yesterday were asking what was happening in Beirut were now on the opposite side…
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WHY THERE IS NO ONE WAY TO BE BLACK
Dixon nails it!
First you Survive/ Then you Thrive
And if I rebel against anything, it’s the notion that there is one real way to be black. ~ Jonathan Capehart
History: WHY THERE IS NO SINGLE WAY TO BE BLACK AND THERE NEVER HAS BEEN.
the African Diaspora includes for most Black Americans the TransAtlantic Slave Trade. Human Beings were stolen, kidnapped from the Continent of Africa. The Gold coast and the Grain Coast is the location for modern African countries such as Ghana, Togo and Benin. Other countries from which people were taken against their will were Senegal, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria and Angola.
Would you condemn an Italian who was indifferent to an Irishman?
but you want all Black people to think and act as one.
and lets look at the ethnic communities within these countries.
Nigeria is composed of more than 250 ethnic groups. The most populous and politically influential groups are: Hausa and Fulani…
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Tribes Unanimously Reject Feds “Sham” Consultation Webinar on Sacred Grizzly Delisting and Stand with GOAL on Boycott Call
Tribal nations opposed to the delisting and trophy hunting of the Yellowstone grizzly bear today rejected the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s (FWS) latest attempt to present itself as proactive on consulting with tribes on the issue. The approximately fifty tribal nations that have issued resolutions and declarations against removing federal protections from the grizzly and placing its future in the hands of states that intend to open trophy hunts on the bear, unanimously boycotted FWS’s webinar.
The Latest: Bataclan attackers blew themselves up
PARIS (AP) — The latest on shootings and explosions in Paris. (all times local):…
Monarch butterfly population likely to quadruple, says Mexico | News | DW.COM | 13.11.2015
“We estimate that the butterfly population that arrives at the reserve is as much as three and could reach four times the surface area it occupied last season,” Mexican Environment Secretary Rafael Pacchiano said at a press conference at the Piedra Herrada monarch reserve.Monarch populations have witnessed a steady plunge of nearly 90 percent since their peak, hitting roughly 35 million between 2013 and 2014, a stark contrast to around one billion in the mid-1990s.US Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, who addressed reporters alongside Pacchiano, said that the North American countries are making concerted efforts to impede illegal logging and plant more milkweeds, which the monarch butterflies use to produce offspring.
Source: Monarch butterfly population likely to quadruple, says Mexico | News | DW.COM | 13.11.2015
Taslima Nasreen: ′Wahhabism has invaded Bangladesh′ | Asia | DW.COM | 13.11.2015


For the past 21 years, Nasreen has been living in exile in various countries, including India, Sweden, Germany and the United States.Due to her criticism of Islam, multiple fatwas have been issued against the author calling for her assassination. Still, 53-year-old Nasreen doesn’t mince her words when she talks about freedom of expression and the rise of religious fundamentalism in Bangladesh.The South Asian nation has been afflicted by rising Islamist violence in recent months. Extremists have been blamed for the killings of at least four atheist bloggers and a publisher since the start of this year.In an exclusive DW interview, Nasreen, who recently returned to India from the US, talks about the shrinking space for free thinkers in Bangladesh and said that Islam cannot be exempt from the critical scrutiny that other religions go through.Nasreen also believes Bangladesh will be headed for a complete disaster if the government fails to bring Islamic terrorists to justice.
Source: Taslima Nasreen: ′Wahhabism has invaded Bangladesh′ | Asia | DW.COM | 13.11.2015


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