"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in"
(Leonard Cohen)
"Ignore all proffered rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say"
(Michael Moorcock)
"Look for your own. Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings."
(Andre Gide)

"I want my place, my own place, my true place in the world, my proper sphere, my thing which Nature intended me to perform when she fashioned me thus awry, and which I have vainly sought all my life-time."
(Nathaniel Hawthorne)
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
(Franz Kafka)
"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated"
(John Donne)
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
(Robert J. Hanlon)
"Life is beautiful, but the world is hell"
(Harold Pinter)

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Government Demonises Muslims As Extremists

EXTRACT: This redefinition of ‘extremist’ is now edging very close to anyone who strongly opposes British military aggression, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya. Let alone anyone who suggests, whether a Muslim or not, that oppressed peoples have the right to resist imperialist occupation. However, it goes without saying that “calls for the death” of those doing the resisting - or actually killing them - is not extremist in the slightest. On the other hand, according to the new Prevent redefinition and strategy (and the sentiments expressed by Cameron), to even debate with any group or individual labelled an ‘extremist’ can now mean that you too get stigmatised in the same way - after all, are you not giving them the oxygen of publicity?
No wonder that, by all accounts, there was a fierce battle within the cabinet - it being argued, not without reason, that the new policy was short-sighted and self-defeating. In the words of Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat energy secretary, the revamped Prevent programme “alienates and marginalises Muslim communities” and “exacerbates racist bias and ignorant views” - not to mention that it has “just prevented a practical solution to tackling violent extremism”. But the Michael Gove-Theresa May ‘tendency’ won the day and hence it is full steam ahead.
READ MORE
Posted by at 1:40 pm

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