The latest from The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com
- Coleen Rowley: Censorship Is Wrong: Let Max Speak!
- Mark Joseph: The Moral Equivalent of Our Founding Fathers
- Karen Dalton-Beninato: Rumi, Twitter and Iran: In Praise of the Whirling Dervishes
- Andy Plesser: Twitter Emerging as Distributed News Source: High Number of Retweets of Iran News, Report
| Coleen Rowley: Censorship Is Wrong: Let Max Speak! | Top |
| Anyone who scans my prior Huffington Posts will quickly see that the common thread in most of them, is how counterproductive the post 9-11 "war on terror" has been; how it served to increase terrorism and violent acts in the world and was quickly turned into a war on dissent and on civil liberties within our own country. As HuffPost readers are, by now, well aware, the myriad of ways in which this has occurred include through the unjustified invasion of Iraq; reliance on military weapons; post 9-11 massive collections of data on citizens; warrantless surveillances; resort to torture; extraordinary renditions and indefinite detentions; attempts at curtailment of First Amendment rights and political repression during "national special security events" here in the U.S. Censorship has even reared its ugly head a time or two in the Twin Cities. In October of 2007 we were stunned when we opened our Twin City newspapers to find Nobel Peace Laureate Desmond Tutu had been banned from speaking on the campus of one of our major (albeit private) Minnesota universities. The University of St. Thomas had disinvited Tutu, even though he's considered one of the most important voices responsible for peacefully ending apartheid in South Africa but also one of the strongest continuing voices for peaceful change and reconciliation in the world. Moreover, St. Thomas officials had gone so far as to demote the director of their Peace and Justice Studies program who had invited Tutu to speak. After the shock wore off, many Twin Cities residents realized this type of academic censorship was terribly wrong and went into action. The head of St. Thomas received hundreds of complaint letters from alumni, the public and from members of groups like "Jewish Voices for Peace" after it came out that Tutu had apparently been falsely labeled as "anti-Semitic". A friend and I painted a big "Let Tutu Speak" banner and held it in front of the University for three consecutive days. I ended up posting two pieces ( here and here ) on the Huffington Post about the situation, the second one describing the happy ending when Father Dease, the priest in charge of St. Thomas reversed his decision after a few days and re-invited Desmond Tutu to come speak. On another occasion, in April 2008, I Huff Posted about some extreme hate talk that aired on a right-wing radio station in Minneapolis that I thought crossed the First Amendment line, inciting violence against people that the radio talk jock claimed were coming to protest the Republican National Convention in September 2008. We complained to the FCC and to local police about this talk show host telling "good ole' boys" to hand out ax handles and to use machine guns to "mow 'em down baby" but, for whatever reason, no official action was taken to stop or even warn the radio talk show host. (It's possible officials thought the threat was not imminent enough since it was made five months in advance of the RNC or maybe they just didn't take the statements seriously. But we have since witnessed a number of hate-based shootings around the country that were at least inspired by such right-wing media statements so I don't think our complaint to the FCC was totally alarmist.) The point is that adherence to the First Amendment should not only allow but encourage citizens to enjoy the broadest range of free speech. It is admittedly a delicate, tricky balance. While criminal penalties and/or censorship should only be applied under the Constitution to the most imminently and clearly dangerous incitements like "yelling fire in a crowded theater", the antidote to most hate speech is exposing it and subjecting it to more speech, other people's opposing ideas and values, and (hopefully in the case of hate speech) to the wider public's disapproval. That worked to some extent in the case of KTLK's Chris Baker. Although no official action was taken against him, once the offensive portions of his diatribe that April morning were posted on You-Tube and then sent to some of the radio program's advertisers, he seemed to reign in his inflammatory rhetoric (at least for a while). All of the above background is to explain why I agree (again) with the organization Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) which has begun a campaign demanding YouTube to put Max Blumenthal's video back up . After explaining the background of the "Feeling the Hate" video by Blumenthal and Joseph Dana that was viewed by over 400,000 people before being taken down, JVP suggests people write YouTube to protest their censorship decision: The night before President Obama spoke in Cairo, Max Blumenthal and Joseph Dana took a video camera to downtown Jerusalem and asked kids on the street - mainly Americans in Jerusalem over the summer - how they felt about Obama. The answers they heard: mainly hardcore racism enhanced by expletives, homophobia, Islamophobia, Arab hatred, and a lot of ignorance. Blumenthal posted a video to YouTube called "Feeling the Hate in Jerusalem on Eve of Obama's Cairo Address". Then, without explanation, YouTube took down the video and has stonewalled all attempts to find out what happened... YouTube has just announced that it is relaxing some of its guidelines so that videos showing the current events in Iran may be posted. I am asking (You-Tube) to draw upon that same commitment to supporting human rights by returning Max Blumenthal's video and any other similar ones to your site. The extreme views represented in these videos need to be heard and acknowledged so that they can be overcome. Making the videos disappear doesn't make the hateful views expressed in the video disappear, too. In the same vein, I'd like to humbly suggest that Huffington Post reflect more on these admittedly difficult First Amendment issues and reverse its own prior decision to censor Max Blumenthal's video. Just as Father Dease belatedly recognized back in 2007 after getting so many letters and watching us hold our banner in front of his university, free speech works! More on Press Freedom | |
| Mark Joseph: The Moral Equivalent of Our Founding Fathers | Top |
| For the last several days I've watched the cable pundits argue back and forth about whether President Obama's strategy of staying on the sidelines of the Iranian Revolution was wise. When liberal pundits and Pat Buchanan argued that Obama's nuanced policy was just what was needed I was convinced they were right, until a conservative came on the tube and said that it was important for the morale of the protesters to see the American President was behind them. I went back and forth like that several times. But after watching video of the brutal crackdown and remembering the words of former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky, I think the President has made a critical mistake. In 1983, Sharansky was imprisoned in a Soviet prison when word reached him and his fellow prisoners that Ronald Reagan had ignored advice from his own State Department which favored an Obama-like nuanced position, and labeled the Soviet Union an "Evil Empire" and "the focus of evil in the modern world." "The dissidents were ecstatic," said Sharansky years later. "Finally, the leader of the free world had spoken the truth--a truth that burned inside the heart of each and every one of us." To paraphrase Reagan from another time and place, you who are fighting for freedom and democracy in Iran are the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers and though our President may have chosen to stay on the sidelines, others like the Huffington Post which has covered this story relentlessly, and millions of Americans have not and we are cheering you on as you struggle against tyranny. | |
| Karen Dalton-Beninato: Rumi, Twitter and Iran: In Praise of the Whirling Dervishes | Top |
| "Rumi is considered the greatest mystic poet of Iran . . . As an Iranian, I am immensely proud and delighted to see that Rumi's work is being widely recognized in the West at a time when my country's image is otherwise tarnished." - Empress Farah Pahlevi to the New York Times 11 years ago. Poetry can be seen on the streets of Iran as the protesters rise up, and Pahlevi told the Daily Beast this week: "She's hopeful that she is watching the beginning of the end of Iran's theocracy - and the three decades of repressive Islamic rule that followed her husband's departure." Tina Brown asked the deposed queen, "Do you think the Twitter revolution, as they're calling it, is the major difference between your day and now? The speed with which people can communicate? You faced a revolution that was not powered by any of these technological means." - Pahlevi replied, "Well, I remember what my son said many years ago: 'If Khomeini came with tapes, Khomeini then will disappear with the Internet.' And I think it's happening." Something has happened thanks to the World Wide Web. We are all deeply and irrevocably connected as evidenced by Nico Pitney's Huffington Post LiveBlog with upwards of 70,000 comments, Twitter now keeps us in contact to a degree that nothing could during four post-Hurricane Katrina days while the world waited. Waited for news, waited for help - just waited. That has changed so dramatically that if a disaster befalls New Orleans or any other town, I am now confident that my city will no longer be in the dark. New Orleans is arguably the most mystical place in the country, and our own whirling dervishes will celebrate St. John's Eve this weekend. (This story takes a bit of a turn, but I'll do my best to tie it all together). During a trip back to New Orleans last spring I noticed that a pile of sheets which looked perfectly normal during the day looked like this as the shadows changed at dusk: It looked to me like the poet Rumi, sculpted from sheets. My husband's band was on a European tour at the time so I bought a cheap camera and captured photographic evidence. Having seen it, he assures me he didn't mean to leave a sculpture, just a pile of clean sheets that happen to resemble a dervish. I posted the photo last year and a reader requested a MySpace page for it, but I demurred for fear of starting a new religion. I will, however, be linking the story on Twitter where Rumi's countrymen and women have found their voice. The humanity of Rumi's work has gone global. In 2007, schoolbells rang across Iran to celebrate what would have been his 800th birthday, and he remains one of the most popular poets in the world. His immense volume of work was sparked by an encounter with Shams, the wandering dervish. My first Rumi post ran on Father's Day along with a poem that consoled me after losing best of all possible fathers. Rumi made of sheets turned up on the first anniversary of losing him. My father had Alzheimer's Disease, my mother does too, and The Ocean Moving All Night captured their slipping away. SheetRumi, Dr. Ray Dalton, St. John's Eve, Twitter and the Iranian people. The internet is spinning us to a degree that a dervish could love. The Ocean Moving All Night Stay with us. Don't sink to the bottom like a fish going to sleep. Be with the ocean moving steadily all night, not scattered like a rainstorm. The spring we're looking for is somewhere in this murkiness See the night-lights up there traveling together, the candle awake in its gold dish. Don't slide into the cracks of the ground like spilled mercury. When the full moon comes out, look around. - Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi-Rumi More on Iran | |
| Andy Plesser: Twitter Emerging as Distributed News Source: High Number of Retweets of Iran News, Report | Top |
| Tweets from within Iran are gettting retweeted as much as 300 times, according to a review of retweets of tweets coming out of Iran, according to an analysis done today by Simon Owens . It is quite interesting to see how the retweets have emerged as sort of distributed news source. Many of them, it appears, have been retweeted by users outside of Iran. It almost seems as a peer-to-peer news service. Last month at the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital conference in California, I interviewed Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams on the role of Twitter as a news entity. It has surely grown in impact during this historic moment. You can find this post up on Beet.TV More on Twitter | |
CREATE MORE ALERTS:
Auctions - Find out when new auctions are posted
Horoscopes - Receive your daily horoscope
Music - Get the newest Album Releases, Playlists and more
News - Only the news you want, delivered!
Stocks - Stay connected to the market with price quotes and more
Weather - Get today's weather conditions
| You received this email because you subscribed to Yahoo! Alerts. Use this link to unsubscribe from this alert. To change your communications preferences for other Yahoo! business lines, please visit your Marketing Preferences. To learn more about Yahoo!'s use of personal information, including the use of web beacons in HTML-based email, please read our Privacy Policy. Yahoo! is located at 701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94089. |
No comments:
Post a Comment