Detroit Dialectic: The Irony of the Super Bowl in a Supercilious Nation

General Motors has announced that it lost billions of dollars last quarter. Delphi, GM's primary parts supplier, has demanded that its workers cut their salaries by half or more and reduce their health care benefits.

Ford will lay off 30,000 blue collar employees and close factories. Daimler-Chrysler will lay off 6,000 white collar employees. Throughout the country, American industry is curtailing pension funds or eliminating them altogether.

The naked pursuit of profit causes companies to cannibalize themselves and to decimate their work forces. Wall Street cheers while business cuts labor to the bone in the name of shareholder value.

But while it rains pink slips on the workingmen and women of Motor City, Detroit hosts the Super Bowl.

The Chief Executive Officers, the captains of industry, the bankers, the politicians, the financiers, the business gurus and show biz glitterati, the movers and shakers of our times, will pack the luxury boxes dining and wining like Roman patricians.

The proles, sitting in the bleachers or at their big screen televisions (purchased on revolving credit at 18% interest), will watch the spectacle and lustily indulge in the party.   more »

Ms Goodman said in the run-up to the Iraq war a study of NBC, CBS, ABC and PBS newscasts over a fortnight recorded 393 interviews on the conflict, of which only three reported the anti-war movement.

"This is a media cheerleading for war and does not represent mainstream opinion in the US," she added.

Ms Goodman said she believed the policy of embedding reporters with coalition forces was "a total failure for independent journalism ... western audiences need to see the other side of the story - from communities and hospitals".

"If people in the US had a true picture of war - dead babies, women with their legs blown off, dead and dying soldiers - they would say 'no'," she said.

"There is nothing more important than the media - it is more powerful than any bomb or missile and we have to take it back ... we need a media that is independent and honestly showing us the images, the hell, ugliness and brutality of war, not selling us war."   more »

The gullibility that led us into the last war could yet bring us a new conflict. Our leaders were never trustworthy, yet many people were only too willing to believe them - and they may do so again.

The day after Colin Powell did his show-and-tell before the United Nations security council in an attempt to prove that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, in February 2003, the late Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory wrote a column entitled "I'm persuaded".

Describing how Vietnam "came close to making me [a pacifist]", McGrory conceded that "nobody I know was for the war".

But something about Powell's performance made her reconsider: "I don't know how the United Nations felt about Colin Powell's 'J'accuse' speech against Saddam Hussein. I can only say that he persuaded me, and I was as tough as France to convince."

Two and a half years later Powell referred to the episode as "a painful blot" on his record - a pack of lies and half truths that has led to an ever-increasing mound of corpses.   more »

DON'T BE FOOLED, THIS ISN'T AN ISSUE OF ISLAM VERSUS SECULARISM

So now it's cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed with a bomb-shaped turban.

Ambassadors are withdrawn from Denmark, Gulf nations clear their shelves of Danish produce, Gaza gunmen threaten the European Union.

In Denmark, Fleming Rose, the "culture" editor of the pip-squeak newspaper which published these silly cartoons - last September, for heaven's sake - announces that we are witnessing a "clash of civilisations" between secular Western democracies and Islamic societies.

This does prove, I suppose, that Danish journalists follow in the tradition of Hans Christian Anderson. Oh lordy, lordy. What we're witnessing is the childishness of civilisations.

So let's start off with the Department of Home Truths. This is not an issue of secularism versus Islam.

For Muslims, the Prophet is the man who received divine words directly from God. We see our prophets as faintly historical figures, at odds with our high-tech human rights, almost cariacatures of themselves.   more »

Who was Mohamed? In answering the question we should not make the mistake of beginning with historical facts. Rather we should turn to verse 21 of Chapter 33 of the Koran, which describes the life of Mohamed as "a beautiful exemplar".

Elsewhere in the Muslim holy book he is extolled as the model of righteousness, the perfect individual, the one whose wives are seen as the mothers of the faithful.

He is a man whose actions and ambitions are held to be worthy of the closest scrutiny and imitation by his followers. And across the world every day 1.3 billion Muslims - almost a quarter of the population of the world - seek to do just that.

Beggars in the slums of India, wealthy oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia, scholars in Egypt, shopkeepers in Bradford, landless women in Indonesia, convert intellectuals in the University of Cambridge all seek daily to emulate Mohamed in every aspect of their lives.

Christians may purport to act in imitation of Christ in their spiritual lives. But, because we know more about Mohamed than about the founder of any other major faith, many Muslims seek a physical pattern too. Which is why so many Muslims wear beards, as their Prophet did, and the women veils, as Mohamed's wives did. And much more.   more »

In his book Landscapes of the Jihad, the Tanzanian-born academic argues that al-Qaida is a largely media-based outfit whose actions - its propaganda and execution videos - can be traced to the dictates and the aesthetics of the global media rather than any local tradition or Muslim authority.

Its operations, argues Devji, "invariably occur in the form of events already packaged, as it were, for media distribution".

Photography and film have always been central to modern propaganda, but the manoeuvres of this new variant of Islamic radicalism seem to be produced and choreographed only for the attentions of the global media.

Many jihadi attacks on coalition forces in Iraq are filmed, sometimes from a variety of different angles. The results are annotated, set to music and posted for distribution on subterranean websites.

Martyrdom videos, too, have more in common with Hollywood schmaltz than with traditional Islam. One of those videos, Devji points out, features a martyr-to-be kissing his beloved through her veil, which is hardly in tune with Islamic tradition.

The new radical jihadis tend to be users of the web and avid viewers of satellite television. An Iraqi tribal leader charged with negotiating the release of Indian hostages held by insurgents in Iraq, Devji points out, suggested that appeals from Indian film stars were more likely to succeed than those from the Indian government.   more »

5 NOVEMBER

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Muhammad Cartoons: Icons & Images