[LINK] "Any woman can build the world by destroying herself"

Via 'Aqoul I found about Lauren Freyer's Associated Press article "Al-Qaida's stance on women sparks extremist debate".

Muslim extremist women are challenging al-Qaida's refusal to include — or at least acknowledge — women in its ranks, in an emotional debate that gives rare insight into the gender conflicts lurking beneath one of the strictest strains of Islam.

In response to a female questioner, al-Qaida No. 2 leader Ayman Al-Zawahri said in April that the terrorist group does not have women. A woman's role, he said on the Internet audio recording, is limited to caring for the homes and children of al-Qaida fighters.

His remarks have since prompted an outcry from fundamentalist women, who are fighting or pleading for the right to be terrorists. The statements have also created some confusion, because in fact suicide bombings by women seem to be on the rise, at least within the Iraq branch of al-Qaida.

A'eeda Dahsheh is a Palestinian mother of four in Lebanon who said she supports al-Zawahri and has chosen to raise children at home as her form of jihad. However, she said, she also supports any woman who chooses instead to take part in terror attacks.

Another woman signed a more than 2,000-word essay of protest online as Rabeebat al-Silah, Arabic for "Companion of Weapons."

"How many times have I wished I were a man ... When Sheikh Ayman al-Zawahri said there are no women in al-Qaida, he saddened and hurt me," wrote "Companion of Weapons," who said she listened to the speech 10 times. "I felt that my heart was about to explode in my chest...I am powerless."

I was at first astonished by this article but then I let reality catch up to me. The appealing principles of feminism can clearly propagate themselves in any environment if you give them a chance.

[BRIEF NOTE] Zizek on Tibet

The (excessively?) productive Slovenian writer and theorist Slavoj Zizek letter in the 24 April 2008 issue of the London Review of Books, "No Shangri-La," also published with minor differences in Le monde diplomatique as "Tibet: dream or reality". In both cases, Zizek's missive ends with the question of whether or not the combination of the "vicious combination of the Asian knout and the European stock market" will be more "economically efficient" than liberal capitalism. (Questionable, but that's a different topic for a different day.) The more interesting part of Zizek's writings concerns his perspective on Tibetan history.

It is not the case that Tibet was an independent country until 1949, when it was suddenly occupied by China. The history of relations between Tibet and China is a long and complex one, in which China has often played the role of a protective overlord: the anti-Communist Kuomintang also insisted on Chinese sovereignty over Tibet. Before 1949, Tibet was no Shangri-la, but an extremely harsh feudal society, poor (life expectancy was barely over 30), corrupt and fractured by civil wars (the most recent one, between two monastic factions, took place in 1948, when the Red Army was already knocking at the door). Fearing social unrest and disintegration, the ruling elite prohibited industrial development, so that metal, for example, had to be imported from India.

Since the early 1950s, there has been a history of CIA involvement in stirring up anti-Chinese troubles in Tibet, so Chinese fears of external attempts to destabilise Tibet are not irrational. Nor was the Cultural Revolution, which ravaged Tibetan monasteries in the 1960s, simply imported by the Chinese: fewer than a hundred Red Guards came to Tibet. The youth mobs that burned the monasteries were almost exclusively Tibetan. As the TV images demonstrate, what is going on now in Tibet is no longer a peaceful ‘spiritual’ protest by monks (like the one in Burma last year), but involves the killing of innocent Chinese immigrants and the burning of their stores.

It is a fact that China has made large investments in Tibet’s economic development, as well as its infrastructure, education and health services. To put it bluntly: in spite of China’s undeniable oppression of the country, the average Tibetan has never had such a high standard of living. There is worse poverty in China’s western rural provinces: child slave labour in brick factories, abominable conditions in prisons, and so on.

In recent years, China has changed its strategy in Tibet: depoliticised religion is now tolerated, often even supported. China now relies more on ethnic and economic colonisation than on military coercion, and is transforming Lhasa into a Chinese version of the Wild West, in which karaoke bars alternate with Buddhist theme parks for Western tourists. In short, what the images of Chinese soldiers and policemen terrorising Buddhist monks conceal is a much more effective American-style socio-economic transformation: in a decade or two, Tibetans will be reduced to the status of Native Americans in the US. It seems that the Chinese Communists have finally got it: what are secret police, internment camps and the destruction of ancient monuments, compared with the power of unbridled capitalism?

Zizek has a few points, aside from the mention (the investment might have boosted the Tibetan economy, but Soviet investment in Central Asia did the same and does that justify Soviet rule there?). In particular, he's right to note that Tibet's social and political system under the various Dalai Lamas was highly unequal, marked by (among other things) the widespread system of serfdom, the mutilation of prisoners, and the dispatch of children to be sex slaves of monks for years at a time. The Tibetan reality is much more complex than many people would have it. The Red Guards might have been externally directed, but isn't it just possible that many of those people who suffered from the inequities of the past were more than happy to take up suggestions of physically destroying religious institutions? It's not as if the currently Dalai Lama, ruler of a dispersed not-state though he is, has shown himself to be particularly tolerant through his ongoing discrmination against members of the Dorje Shugden sect. As for the pace of change, while it was certain terribly violent wouldn't the breakdown of the old culture have come about nonetheless? Nepal has managed to transform itself from a traditional Hindu monarchy to a turbulent Maoist-influenced republic, after all.

Zizek's conclusion to all this is worth quoting at length.

One of the main reasons so many people in the West participate in the protests against China is ideological: Tibetan Buddhism, deftly propagated by the Dalai Lama, is one of the chief points of reference for the hedonist New Age spirituality that has become so popular in recent times. Tibet has become a mythic entity onto which we project our dreams. When people mourn the loss of an authentic Tibetan way of life, it isn’t because they care about real Tibetans: what they want from Tibetans is that they be authentically spiritual for us, so that we can continue playing our crazy consumerist game. ‘Si vous êtes pris dans le rêve de l’autre,’ Gilles Deleuze wrote, ‘vous êtes foutu.’

"If you are caught up in the dream of another," Deleuze said, "you're fucked."

[MUSIC] Joy Division and New Order, "Love Will Tear Us Apart

Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" is rarely mentioned in a sentence lacking the word "iconic," the distorted vocals of lyricist and vocalist Ian Curtis combining with the high-fi downbeat indie/post-punk drama of the song's arrangement and the mystique surrounding the suicidal depression of Curtis that--some say--was presaged in this song's lyrics..

I was surprised and pleased when ever-helpful YouTube told me that New Order, Joy Division's successor band, had given more than a few concert performances of "Love Will Tear Us Apart".

"Rob Ford gets into heated confrontation with shirtless jogger" (Watch on YouTube)

Alas, New Order isn't Joy Division. It just couldn't be that compelling, not after nearly thirty years and so much mainstream pop success: New Order's members have all survived.