C L O S E R

Bestuurskundigen blikken terug op debat na moord op Theo van Gogh – Nieuws en Agenda – Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA)

Posted on October 30th, 2005 by .
Categories: Murder on theo Van Gogh and related issues.

Bestuurskundigen blikken terug op debat na moord op Theo van Gogh – Nieuws en Agenda – Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA)
Bestuurskundigen blikken terug op debat na moord op Theo van Gogh

Op 2 november is het precies een jaar geleden dat Nederland werd opgeschrikt door de brute moord op Theo van Gogh. In de daaropvolgende dagen werden moskee�n in brand gestoken, verklaarde minister Zalm de oorlog aan het moslimextremisme en kwamen buitenlandse journalisten in groten getale naar Amsterdam om de trouble in paradise van dichtbij te bekijken. Nu de rook is opgetrokken, blijkt echter dat de discussie zich anders heeft ontwikkeld dan men op het eerste gezicht zou verwachten.

Dat blijkt uit de resultaten van het onderzoek naar het mediadebat volgend op de moord van Theo van Gogh, die de politicologen Maarten Hajer en Justus Uitermark zullen presenteren op woensdagmiddag 2 november. In hun presentatie komen bovendien de verschillende strategie�n aan bod die Amsterdamse politici hebben gebruikt om zich staande te houden in dat debat – en het zeer wisselende succes daarvan.

Na afloop van de presentatie is er een borrel, en kunnen ge�nteresseerden een informatiemarkt bezoeken over de de master Bestuur en beleid en de gelijknamige specialisatierichting binnen de bachelor Politicologie. Informatie over de master Bestuur en beleid is te vinden via de verwijzing onder aan deze pagina.

De bijeenkomst zal plaatsvinden in de Oudemanhuispoort 4-6 en om 13.00 uur beginnen. Voor meer informatie en aanmelding: Wytske Versteeg, w.b.versteeg@uva.nl.

Woensdag 2 november 2005, 13:00 – 15:00 uur

4 comments.

spiked-politics | Article | What's behind the battle of Lozells?

Posted on October 30th, 2005 by martijn.
Categories: Misc. News.

spiked-politics | Article | What’s behind the battle of Lozells?

According to the rumour, a 14-year-old Jamaican was caught stealing a wig from an Asian-run shop selling black beauty products in nearby Perry Barr. One of the shopkeepers threatened to call the police, but she pleaded with him not to (‘she was an illegal immigrant, and didn’t want the police to be led to her house’, one black man told me). The girl agreed to have sex with the shopkeeper if he wouldn’t tell the police. But then he called his friends, who came around and raped her – some say she was raped by three men, others say 13 or 19.

There is no evidence that such an attack took place. Police forensic experts have reportedly checked out the beauty parlour but found nothing. No girl has come forward, in spite of police pledges of leniency. Nobody knows her name or when the attack happened, though some claim to know her family.

The two communities are divided by the story – most local black people claim it’s true, most Asians say it’s a myth. But this is less about the girl, real or imagined, than about simmering economic grievances. One local black community activist told me: ‘Blacks get nothing, no funding, no support. Blacks made Asians rich, we support their shops. It’s a joke.’ According to a 17-year-old originally from Somalia, ‘The word on the street is that a war is on, and it’s Asians versus blacks’. On the other side, a young Asian man claimed that blacks are ‘stupid people. They go to school but don’t learn anything. I don’t know what they are moaning about. We did well because we worked hard’.

It’s no surprise that tensions exist in a run-down inner city area such as this. This is often presented as a case of two communities hating each other, with the police standing helpless in between. In fact, the script for the conflict in Perry Barr was written at the top of New Labour’s Britain. Today, different groups are encouraged to play up their victimhood and unique cultural identities, in a bid for public funds and social authority. The fireworks in Lozells demonstrate the fractious consequences.

Black campaigners were talking the language of identity politics, saying that they didn’t get any ‘respect’ and their ‘grievances haven’t been understood’. ‘[Asians] look at Jamaican people like we are nothing’, said one black woman quoted in the New Nation (1). Respectable community organisations have helped to broadcast the issue over the past week. Maxie Hayles, head of the Birmingham Racial Attacks Monitoring Group, has been one of the more vocal activists: he was quoted on BBC News as saying ‘There are a lot of [black] people who think that the Asian people look down on African-Caribbean people’; while the New Nation recorded his comment, ‘We are not going to tolerate our women being abused. We have a zero tolerance against it’ (2). Hayles has contributed to a number of official consultations, and in 2000 was awarded the government’s ‘Active Community Award’. Meanwhile, one of the websites that played a role in spreading the rumours, Blacknet UK, has connections with official bodies including the Commission for Racial Equality.

The battle for cultural recognition is another source of friction. An article in The Voice detailed all the local African-Caribbean community’s grievances: the carnival was moved from Handsworth to Perry Barr, and renamed the ‘Birmingham International Carnival Enterprise’, while ‘unadulterated’ Asian celebrations such as Vaisakhi have taken their place; Black History Month is now apparently run by an Asian man, as is the Drum (a Birmingham centre for black arts); and the BBC has banished African-Caribbean programming to Saturday nights, while establishing the Asian Network as a 24-hr station.

On the other side, Asians also claim that everybody is set against them, and appeal for protection.

Why did it take the rumour of a rape for recent tensions to explode? Perhaps it suggests the lack of a vocabulary for discussing social and political inequalities in their own terms. Instead, conflicts are conceived as an allegory, as a personal attack on a member of your community. The rape story seems to express the fact that black people feel they are being screwed over. Some seemed to identity with her: the campaign is called ‘Silent Victim’, and speculation abounds about what the girl could be feeling. ‘She could be hurt’, said one black man. ‘It’s obvious why she did a deal [to have sex]’, said another: ‘You got no power, no position. Who is going to listen to you?’ Asians have their share of victimisation stories, too. One young man said that he heard a story about two Asian girls being attacked – ‘I don’t know if it’s true, but that’s what I heard’. Another said that he heard worshippers had been attacked inside a mosque.

Beneath it all, though, it seems that some are trying to put their differences aside and move on. Certainly the last thing this community needs is council-supervised intercultural dialogues. Black people are still buying in Asian shops; most of the broken windows have been replaced, and shops reopened. A number of people I spoke to blamed the trouble on outsiders. One Asian man said that the rioters came from London; a white man blamed coachloads of visitors from London, Leeds and Bradford. At Khan’s carpet shop in Lozells Road, the young shopkeeper told me: ‘I got no tension with black people. Some local black people are driving past and saying “we’re neutral”.’

One thing that did seem to unite the communities was common hostility to the media. I was chatting to a group of young British Asians when a young African-Caribbean man cycled past. ‘News reporter?’ he asked. ‘I say fuck off. You’re not from around this area, so mind your own fucking business’. There was a pause, then the young Asians responded: ‘That’s what I say, too’, ‘and me too’.

0 comments.

spiked-politics | Article | What’s behind the battle of Lozells?

Posted on October 30th, 2005 by .
Categories: Misc. News.

spiked-politics | Article | What’s behind the battle of Lozells?

According to the rumour, a 14-year-old Jamaican was caught stealing a wig from an Asian-run shop selling black beauty products in nearby Perry Barr. One of the shopkeepers threatened to call the police, but she pleaded with him not to (‘she was an illegal immigrant, and didn’t want the police to be led to her house’, one black man told me). The girl agreed to have sex with the shopkeeper if he wouldn’t tell the police. But then he called his friends, who came around and raped her – some say she was raped by three men, others say 13 or 19.

There is no evidence that such an attack took place. Police forensic experts have reportedly checked out the beauty parlour but found nothing. No girl has come forward, in spite of police pledges of leniency. Nobody knows her name or when the attack happened, though some claim to know her family.

The two communities are divided by the story – most local black people claim it’s true, most Asians say it’s a myth. But this is less about the girl, real or imagined, than about simmering economic grievances. One local black community activist told me: ‘Blacks get nothing, no funding, no support. Blacks made Asians rich, we support their shops. It’s a joke.’ According to a 17-year-old originally from Somalia, ‘The word on the street is that a war is on, and it’s Asians versus blacks’. On the other side, a young Asian man claimed that blacks are ‘stupid people. They go to school but don’t learn anything. I don’t know what they are moaning about. We did well because we worked hard’.

It’s no surprise that tensions exist in a run-down inner city area such as this. This is often presented as a case of two communities hating each other, with the police standing helpless in between. In fact, the script for the conflict in Perry Barr was written at the top of New Labour’s Britain. Today, different groups are encouraged to play up their victimhood and unique cultural identities, in a bid for public funds and social authority. The fireworks in Lozells demonstrate the fractious consequences.

Black campaigners were talking the language of identity politics, saying that they didn’t get any ‘respect’ and their ‘grievances haven’t been understood’. ‘[Asians] look at Jamaican people like we are nothing’, said one black woman quoted in the New Nation (1). Respectable community organisations have helped to broadcast the issue over the past week. Maxie Hayles, head of the Birmingham Racial Attacks Monitoring Group, has been one of the more vocal activists: he was quoted on BBC News as saying ‘There are a lot of [black] people who think that the Asian people look down on African-Caribbean people’; while the New Nation recorded his comment, ‘We are not going to tolerate our women being abused. We have a zero tolerance against it’ (2). Hayles has contributed to a number of official consultations, and in 2000 was awarded the government’s ‘Active Community Award’. Meanwhile, one of the websites that played a role in spreading the rumours, Blacknet UK, has connections with official bodies including the Commission for Racial Equality.

The battle for cultural recognition is another source of friction. An article in The Voice detailed all the local African-Caribbean community’s grievances: the carnival was moved from Handsworth to Perry Barr, and renamed the ‘Birmingham International Carnival Enterprise’, while ‘unadulterated’ Asian celebrations such as Vaisakhi have taken their place; Black History Month is now apparently run by an Asian man, as is the Drum (a Birmingham centre for black arts); and the BBC has banished African-Caribbean programming to Saturday nights, while establishing the Asian Network as a 24-hr station.

On the other side, Asians also claim that everybody is set against them, and appeal for protection.

Why did it take the rumour of a rape for recent tensions to explode? Perhaps it suggests the lack of a vocabulary for discussing social and political inequalities in their own terms. Instead, conflicts are conceived as an allegory, as a personal attack on a member of your community. The rape story seems to express the fact that black people feel they are being screwed over. Some seemed to identity with her: the campaign is called ‘Silent Victim’, and speculation abounds about what the girl could be feeling. ‘She could be hurt’, said one black man. ‘It’s obvious why she did a deal [to have sex]’, said another: ‘You got no power, no position. Who is going to listen to you?’ Asians have their share of victimisation stories, too. One young man said that he heard a story about two Asian girls being attacked – ‘I don’t know if it’s true, but that’s what I heard’. Another said that he heard worshippers had been attacked inside a mosque.

Beneath it all, though, it seems that some are trying to put their differences aside and move on. Certainly the last thing this community needs is council-supervised intercultural dialogues. Black people are still buying in Asian shops; most of the broken windows have been replaced, and shops reopened. A number of people I spoke to blamed the trouble on outsiders. One Asian man said that the rioters came from London; a white man blamed coachloads of visitors from London, Leeds and Bradford. At Khan’s carpet shop in Lozells Road, the young shopkeeper told me: ‘I got no tension with black people. Some local black people are driving past and saying “we’re neutral”.’

One thing that did seem to unite the communities was common hostility to the media. I was chatting to a group of young British Asians when a young African-Caribbean man cycled past. ‘News reporter?’ he asked. ‘I say fuck off. You’re not from around this area, so mind your own fucking business’. There was a pause, then the young Asians responded: ‘That’s what I say, too’, ‘and me too’.

0 comments.

spiked-politics | Article | Landscapes of Jihad: Osama bin Laden: more media whore than guerrilla warrior

Posted on October 30th, 2005 by martijn.
Categories: International Terrorism, Religious and Political Radicalization.

spiked-politics | Article | Osama bin Laden: more media whore than guerrilla warrior

Ask yourself the question: what the hell does Osama bin Laden want? Why did he authorise (apparently) the worst terrorist attack of modern times on 9/11, and why do groups or individuals linked to him, or inspired by him, detonate crude bombs – and often themselves, too – everywhere from beachside cafeterias in Bali to bank forecourts in Istanbul to Tube trains packed with working men and women on a sunny Thursday morning in London?

The oft trotted-out answer to these questions is that bin Laden wants a free Palestine. Or he wants America’s grubby mitts off Saudi Arabia and an end to the sell-out House of Saud’s domination of that state. Or he wants to liberate Iraq and Afghanistan from American and British occupation and that however bastardised and bloody his tactics may be, he is nonetheless part of an ‘arc of resistance’ to Western meddling in the Middle East (1).

In short, many argue: it’s about territory, stupid! This view is held by thinkers on both sides of the left/right divide. So some of a leftish persuasion have come dangerously close to gushing over al-Qaeda and its offshoot groups, or at least seeking to explain their actions with reference to historic movements for land and freedom.

Rather, al-Qaeda is a new and peculiarly globalised movement. Its people can hail from Riyadh, Paris or Huddersfield, and can claim to be acting on behalf of Muslims in Iraq, Chechnya or Palestine – or even across historic periods as well as borders, as in the case of bin Laden’s claim that he wanted vengeance for the Moors who were booted out of Spain over 500 years ago. They blow up civilians in London or Madrid as payback for the killing of civilians in Grozny or Ramallah, and profess to represent Muslims in nations they have never visited, and which they might have difficulty pointing to on a map (a bit like their arch enemy, George W Bush, perhaps), but which they once saw on an evening news bulletin. ‘Take Mohammed Siddique Khan’, says Devji, referring to the Leeds-born former supply teacher who blew up himself and six others at Edgware Road in London on 7 July. ‘He said he was motivated by Iraq. When did he ever go to Iraq? What does he truly know about Iraq?’

In Landscapes of the Jihad, Devji argues that al-Qaeda’s relations are ‘not the kind of relations that had characterised national struggles in the past, which brought together people who shared a history and a geography into a political arena defined by processes of intentionality and control’. The jihad, he writes, ‘unlike the politics of national movements�is grounded not in the propagation of ideas or similarity of interests and conditions, so much as in the contingent relations of a global marketplace’ (5). In short, the disparate individuals who are part of al-Qaeda, or who claim to be part of al-Qaeda, are not bonded by any common experience of oppression (many of them are well-to-do and Western-educated) or by shared political visions, but rather by fleeting and fluid relationships, often forged in the planning and execution of a one-off spectacular event rather in the pursuit of a future-oriented programme of ideas and tactics.

So al-Qaeda’s fanciful war is not for something tangible; it is not about making a state or an Islamic territory. Where the Islamic radicals of the past – from the Iranian revolutionaries of 1979 to that last gasp of Islamic fundamentalism in the shape of the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan in 1996 – were motivated by the desire to create an ideological state, al-Qaeda’s actions are better understood as a pose, Devji tells me, as ‘ethical gestures’. ‘Their acts function as exclamation marks’, he says.

‘Prior to al-Qaeda and networks of that ilk, the form that radical Islam took was fundamentalism – a form that explicitly drew from the communist imagination’, says Devji. ‘These were movements dedicated to setting up, through revolution, an ideological state, and they made use of all those terms: revolution; ideology; ideological state; even workers’ committees and all that. They had critiques of capitalism built into them to various degrees. That is no longer evident and it is not invoked at all by al-Qaeda. They have taken leave of that.’

According to Devji, al-Qaeda is not that different from other movements that inhabit our changed world – in terms of its substitution of moral posturing for politics and its appeal to the media rather than to a grassroots constituency. Indeed, Devji says al-Qaeda associates ‘resemble the members of more familiar global networks, such as those for the environment or against war and globalisation’. He writes: ‘Like the gestures that mark the environmentalist or anti-war movements, those of the jihad arise from the luxury of moral choice. This is a world whose concerns are global in dimension and so resistant to old-fashioned political solutions, calling instead for spectacular gestures that are ethical in nature. The passion of the holy warrior emerges from the same source as that of the anti-war protester – not from a personal experience of oppression but from observing the oppression of others. These impersonal and even vicarious passions draw upon pity for their strength. And pity is perhaps the most violent passion of all because it is selfless enough to tolerate monstrous sacrifices.’ (8)

Devji is at pains to point out that he isn’t saying al-Qaeda and Greenpeace are the same thing. ‘One uses murderous violence, the other doesn’t!’, he tells me. But he does think we need to interrogate the new political and social forces that have created something like al-Qaeda if we are going to come up with better ways of dealing with terrorism than simply by saying ‘sort out Palestine and everything will be okay’. It is time to ditch the lazy explanations that really are political hangovers from a bygone era, and look afresh at the problem of terrorism today.

Landscapes of the Jihad by Faisal Devji is published by Hurst & Company.

0 comments.

spiked-politics | Article | Landscapes of Jihad: Osama bin Laden: more media whore than guerrilla warrior

Posted on October 30th, 2005 by .
Categories: International Terrorism, Religious and Political Radicalization.

spiked-politics | Article | Osama bin Laden: more media whore than guerrilla warrior

Ask yourself the question: what the hell does Osama bin Laden want? Why did he authorise (apparently) the worst terrorist attack of modern times on 9/11, and why do groups or individuals linked to him, or inspired by him, detonate crude bombs – and often themselves, too – everywhere from beachside cafeterias in Bali to bank forecourts in Istanbul to Tube trains packed with working men and women on a sunny Thursday morning in London?

The oft trotted-out answer to these questions is that bin Laden wants a free Palestine. Or he wants America’s grubby mitts off Saudi Arabia and an end to the sell-out House of Saud’s domination of that state. Or he wants to liberate Iraq and Afghanistan from American and British occupation and that however bastardised and bloody his tactics may be, he is nonetheless part of an ‘arc of resistance’ to Western meddling in the Middle East (1).

In short, many argue: it’s about territory, stupid! This view is held by thinkers on both sides of the left/right divide. So some of a leftish persuasion have come dangerously close to gushing over al-Qaeda and its offshoot groups, or at least seeking to explain their actions with reference to historic movements for land and freedom.

Rather, al-Qaeda is a new and peculiarly globalised movement. Its people can hail from Riyadh, Paris or Huddersfield, and can claim to be acting on behalf of Muslims in Iraq, Chechnya or Palestine – or even across historic periods as well as borders, as in the case of bin Laden’s claim that he wanted vengeance for the Moors who were booted out of Spain over 500 years ago. They blow up civilians in London or Madrid as payback for the killing of civilians in Grozny or Ramallah, and profess to represent Muslims in nations they have never visited, and which they might have difficulty pointing to on a map (a bit like their arch enemy, George W Bush, perhaps), but which they once saw on an evening news bulletin. ‘Take Mohammed Siddique Khan’, says Devji, referring to the Leeds-born former supply teacher who blew up himself and six others at Edgware Road in London on 7 July. ‘He said he was motivated by Iraq. When did he ever go to Iraq? What does he truly know about Iraq?’

In Landscapes of the Jihad, Devji argues that al-Qaeda’s relations are ‘not the kind of relations that had characterised national struggles in the past, which brought together people who shared a history and a geography into a political arena defined by processes of intentionality and control’. The jihad, he writes, ‘unlike the politics of national movements�is grounded not in the propagation of ideas or similarity of interests and conditions, so much as in the contingent relations of a global marketplace’ (5). In short, the disparate individuals who are part of al-Qaeda, or who claim to be part of al-Qaeda, are not bonded by any common experience of oppression (many of them are well-to-do and Western-educated) or by shared political visions, but rather by fleeting and fluid relationships, often forged in the planning and execution of a one-off spectacular event rather in the pursuit of a future-oriented programme of ideas and tactics.

So al-Qaeda’s fanciful war is not for something tangible; it is not about making a state or an Islamic territory. Where the Islamic radicals of the past – from the Iranian revolutionaries of 1979 to that last gasp of Islamic fundamentalism in the shape of the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan in 1996 – were motivated by the desire to create an ideological state, al-Qaeda’s actions are better understood as a pose, Devji tells me, as ‘ethical gestures’. ‘Their acts function as exclamation marks’, he says.

‘Prior to al-Qaeda and networks of that ilk, the form that radical Islam took was fundamentalism – a form that explicitly drew from the communist imagination’, says Devji. ‘These were movements dedicated to setting up, through revolution, an ideological state, and they made use of all those terms: revolution; ideology; ideological state; even workers’ committees and all that. They had critiques of capitalism built into them to various degrees. That is no longer evident and it is not invoked at all by al-Qaeda. They have taken leave of that.’

According to Devji, al-Qaeda is not that different from other movements that inhabit our changed world – in terms of its substitution of moral posturing for politics and its appeal to the media rather than to a grassroots constituency. Indeed, Devji says al-Qaeda associates ‘resemble the members of more familiar global networks, such as those for the environment or against war and globalisation’. He writes: ‘Like the gestures that mark the environmentalist or anti-war movements, those of the jihad arise from the luxury of moral choice. This is a world whose concerns are global in dimension and so resistant to old-fashioned political solutions, calling instead for spectacular gestures that are ethical in nature. The passion of the holy warrior emerges from the same source as that of the anti-war protester – not from a personal experience of oppression but from observing the oppression of others. These impersonal and even vicarious passions draw upon pity for their strength. And pity is perhaps the most violent passion of all because it is selfless enough to tolerate monstrous sacrifices.’ (8)

Devji is at pains to point out that he isn’t saying al-Qaeda and Greenpeace are the same thing. ‘One uses murderous violence, the other doesn’t!’, he tells me. But he does think we need to interrogate the new political and social forces that have created something like al-Qaeda if we are going to come up with better ways of dealing with terrorism than simply by saying ‘sort out Palestine and everything will be okay’. It is time to ditch the lazy explanations that really are political hangovers from a bygone era, and look afresh at the problem of terrorism today.

Landscapes of the Jihad by Faisal Devji is published by Hurst & Company.

0 comments.

Protected: NRC Handelsblad – God voelde als een XTC-Pil

Posted on October 30th, 2005 by martijn.
Categories: My Research, Religion Other, Youth culture (as a practice).

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C L O S E R – de waarde van je blog

Posted on October 30th, 2005 by .
Categories: Joy Category.

Omdat het zondag is, ff een geintje.

0 comments.