But not all madrassas are terrorist factories. There are some that indeed fuel extremist ideologies, but they are likely in the minority. It’s come to be associated with Islamic education, but the word only means an educational facility.
I do agree that the ones funded by the Saudis are clearly religiously oriented to their preferred interpretation of Islam. Not all madrassas are. [quote=“pbasch, post:15, topic:97489”]
Part of the problem, of course, is that there are a lot of poor Muslim communities in Western nations. So the petrocrats swoop in and open lavish mosques with fire-breathing imams imported directly from Riyadh with their toxic messages.
[/quote]
I agree here. The saudis have used this to promote their own religious brand, no doubt. You saw this problem in the rural hinterlands of Kosova in the aftermath of the Balkan Wars. The justification was that of “well, of course a Muslim would rather receive charity and help from another Muslim” ignoring the fact that the Saudis and the Muslims of the Balkans were incredibly different (with many Albanian Muslims following more Sufi interpretations).
Still - not all madrasses or even the majority are terrorist factories. The more we believe this line, the bigger the wedge between us and them continues to grow.
Sure, sure. “Not all…” So, careful to avoid the words “all”, “every”, or “any”, I think we can say that there are SIGNIFICANT moneys flowing from SOME members of the petrostates aristocracy to fund a NUMBER of madrassas which teach a poisonous brand of Wahhabism. And that that “number” is enough to create a LOT of problems. And that NOBODY from those petrostates has been included in any travel ban because they fund our weapons industries.
Okay - so what does your problem with a brand of Wahhabism have to do with this video on Chomsky, apart from it being from Al Jazeera’s show? Does media manipulation work differently in Qatar or Saudi Arabia? Does money here equal speech, so I should conclude that if there is any such financial connection that it is some kind of hypocritical burn against the US? Is watching this on YouTube somehow funding oppression?
The currents of cultural influence here are not easily untangled. There are US interests which profit both from destabilization in some Muslim countries and the resulting Islamophobia, as well as doing business with elites in other Muslim countries. Yes, it is a reckless, hypocritical, and cynical clusterfuck.
But I still think that teaching media literacy in this way helps the overall situation rather than hurts it. And since I don’t have any easy answers to fix it all, I will take the help where I can get it, and be happy that there are some people out there trying to teach rather than profit off of strife and imperialism.
That’s a fair remark. Money = speech? Well, sure. Always to some extent, after all that’s how Ben Franklin became a billionaire-equivalent in his day, by running printing presses. His speech outweighed many others’. Of course, we like him so its okay. And in Arab countries, money = speech pretty exclusively, since there is pretty damn near no speech at all that doesn’t issue forth from the aristocratic class, which tends to be pretty strictly fundamentalist right-wing petrocrats. Which, yes you find here and in Europe and in Canada even (they support Harper). We don’t imprison for saying bad things about the faith or the state. Yes, sure, be the wrong color and pull out a cell phone and you could be shot. Very bad, of course.
Let’s take a hypothetical case. Let’s say you’re a bloody tyrant who sees human rights talk as endangering your hold on power. Let’s say you have a neighbor, also a bloody tyrant. What a good move it would be to finance a nice, liberal news outlet in their country, that publishes well-written articles with moving photographs about human rights abuses in that neighboring country. Who knows? Your neighbor might even have one of those Arab Spring things and suffer destabilization.
Clever, right? Disentangle that. Make it a couple of moves more complicated and you have Al Jazeera.
But you’re right of course. You can view the video on YouTube, send just a few pennies (or nothing) to Al Jazeera, and have it stand on its own merits.
So, are you saying that any journalistic “truth” can only count as tokens in some cultural/ideological conflict? That whether or not the content of the video is accurate is less significant than who produced it? It sounds like license to remain ignorant of information which comes from outside one’s ideological bubble.
I think that how media are used to shape public discourse is a topic which goes beyond individual human rights abuses, and addresses how we organize societies themselves. The Euro/Colonial sphere uses the concept of “democracy” as a key selling point - both at home and abroad - for its expanding influence. If that democracy is more than a cynical pretense for imperialism, then we get a say in how our society is organized, and what cost we are willing to pay for those ideals.
Those are classic arguments of 20th century US conservatism against totalitarianism - that stability is not worth having without regards to its cultural and individual cost. But 21st century US conservatism seems to be declaring the US brand of imperialism an exception somehow, with no evidence more compelling than cynical self-interest of a minority of shareholders.
Yeah, this is what we believed during what is retrospectively labeled “web 1.0”. At the time, we understood the media to be basically made of: reporters, screenwriters, etc (content creators), institutions with money and resources to turn raw content into a consumable format (producers), and institutions with access to delivery channels (tv/radio networks, publishers).
When the internet got going, we were all like, “wait a minute, I’m already a content creator, and the Desktop Publishing Revolution has already made it possible for me to be my own producer. Now that the internet can be my delivery channel, I can do everything that the media does. I can BE the media!”
Today, everyone is a content creator - often without even trying. Production is easy, and in a lot of cases totally optional (hi YouTube). There are more delivery channels for your content than you know what to do with. And yet it’s still the same institutions who control the discourse in our society. How are they still doing it? Maybe “The Media” is more complicated than we anticipated.
Today’s media networks are actually networks on many different levels, not just channels for producing and broadcasting content. Both me and General Motors have pages on Facebook, but we might as well be on different planets when it comes to our power and influence over discourse. The reasons for the power difference are subtle and multifaceted, but the prominent surface similarities make us identify much more with the media than we used to in the television age.
So yeah. that may be partly why we hear less criticism of “the media” from radicals these days, because we see ourselves as part of or complicit with it, rather than colonized or hypnotized by a distant and unaccountable power.
