Resources

• Bob Dylan: The Music Travels, the Poetry Stays Home
  1 November 2016, by siawi3

  Even those who do speak English to a certain level and have heard “Mr. Tambourine Man” a thousand times, will very likely not react to it in the same way that a native English speaker would. So we have this fantastic paradox. Of all Nobel winners, Dylan is surely and by far the best known worldwide. Hurrah. But only known in the sense that people have heard the songs, not understood, not relished the words.

• Paul Beatty, The Sellout (Man Booker Prize)
  30 October 2016, by siawi3

  It’s appropriate that the Booker goes to a writer who puts American values so nakedly on the mat... And closer home, we have had Africans targeted in Bengaluru and elsewhere by local hooligans. And Dalits get battered with the regularity almost of train schedules. The riff of racism plays out for us on a frighteningly intimate note.

• UK: The limits of free expression in debate
  26 October 2016, by siawi3

  Discrimination against people should be unlawful but not discrimination against ideas and opinions. So, It seems that businesses cannot now lawfully refuse a customer’s request to propagate a message, even if it is a sexist, xenophobic or anti-gay message...

• Soup Kitchens and Street Fighting: The Brownshirts in Hamburg
  20 October 2016, by siawi3

  In the elections of September 1930, however, the Nazi share of the vote skyrocketed, and Adolf Hitler’s party became a major player in national politics, signaling the beginning of the end of Germany’s interwar experiment with democracy. Stormtroopers’ central motivation (and the factor that drew them to the SA) was a desire to restore Hamburg to its (perceived) prewar state, which of course meant destroying the hated Weimar Republic. However, the Stormtroopers, unlike their fathers, were prepared to accomplish this with violence; that is, they sought to uphold the bourgeois order through practices that were (ostensibly) contradictory to that very order. Joining the SA, then, was an act of both conformity and rebellion.

• Women and Human Rights in Iran
  20 October 2016, by siawi3

  The findings suggest that recent political changes mark a new phase in this struggle, where tensions within the regime can be marked by the mistreatment of women, such as British-Iranian citizen Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, and where even modest efforts to support women’s role in society are seen by factions as a conspiracy against their core Islamic Republic values. Consequently, incendiary claims around national security are increasingly being used as grounds for curtailing women’s freedoms and their rights.

• Salman Rushdie - Debating Religion & Politics
  16 October 2016, by siawi3

  Salman Rushdie on Islam, atheism...

• Islam’s NonBelievers
  16 October 2016, by siawi3

  Deeyah Khan’s film: ’Islam’s NonBelievers’ is now available on Youtube. It tells of the magnitude of this new worldwide phenomenon: youth declaring themselves atheists in Muslim contexts, and of the hardship and attacks they face.

• France : Les « nouveaux antiracistes », mauvais génies de la laïcité
  15 octobre 2016, par siawi3

  Caroline Fourest publie un nouveau livre, « Génie de la laïcité » : « Ces « nouveaux antiracistes » sont plutôt pro-islamistes, partisans de la concurrence victimaire entre les juifs et les Arabes ou les Noirs, parfois même racistes envers les juifs et méprisants envers les homosexuels. »

• Le ciel attendra
  13 octobre 2016, par siawi3

  Le processus de radicalisation des jeunes filles françaises. Emplis de culpabilité de n’avoir rien vu, les parents assistent désemparés à la métamorphose de leur enfant... Un film à montrer dès le collège, le plus tôt possible !

• South Africa: The Secret Struggle Against Apartheid
  11 October 2016, by siawi3

  The struggle against apartheid in South Africa was perhaps the greatest transnational social movement of the post-World War II era. Figures like Nelson Mandela are rightly associated with this history, but the Left is less often remembered. The book and forthcoming documentary London Recruits offers a corrective to this. Both serve as a reminder of the tremendous importance of leftists in the global struggle against apartheid.

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