ETHOS

I know it’s about a week old by now, but I thought it would be worth having in the ETHOS archives:

His name is Muntadar al-Zeidi and he is my hero.

Out with the old, in with the new is what they say I guess. Check out this long-ish sober (scary) assessment of what the new has to offer us from al-Jazeera English (yeah, al-Jazeera – contrary to popular belief they actually have some of the best coverage of U.S. politics and Middle East policy. Oh yeah, and they are also your one stop source for the latest Osama Bin Laden video).

The second part of the segment – a debate between Black Agenda Report’s Glen Ford and some activist preacher – can be found here.

Over and out,

Eric

By Eric Augenbraun

I will start by saying that from the very little I know of TV host Rachael Ray, I find her incredibly annoying and rather stupid, possessing the personality of a Jack Russell terrier or a similarly excitable small animal. I also know that my mother owns one of her misleadingly titled 30-minute meals cookbooks that contains not a single recipe that could possibly be prepared in 30 minutes or less. I get the impression that Ray’s audience (like that of most daytime talk show/cooking show hosts) is generally composed of middle-aged, middle-class, women of the white variety. So, given the demographics of her audience and her own dim-wittedness, I find it hard to believe that either Ray or those who follow her (or the vast majority of the American population for that matter) had even the slightest clue to the significance of the keffiyeh that she donned in a recent Dunkin’ Donuts ad.

That’s not a Dunkin’ Donuts Iced Mocha Latte she is holding, it’s a fully functional bomb!

Naturally, there was a backlash to the advertisement, eventually resulting in it being canned. Conservative pundit Michelle Malkin took a break from defending the internment of Japanese-American people during World War II to chime in: “The keffiyeh has come to symbolize murderous Palestinian jihad.” I guess one person’s “murderous Palestinian jihad” is another’s “struggle for national liberation against a brutal apartheid regime.” We’ll just have to agree to disagree on that one Michelle. In any case, this situation has brought to the fore a few issues I have wanted to write about for a while now:

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By Eric Augenbraun

As I write this more than 23,000 people are dead and an estimated 37,000 are missing in the wake of Cyclone Nargis’ landfall over Burma (also known as the Union of Myanmar) on May 2^nd. Many expect the death toll to reach a staggering 100,000 by the final count. Just to put this in perspective, as a result of the September 11^th attacks and Hurricane Katrina 3,017 and 1,836 died respectively. I do not point this out to suggest that these two tragedies are in some way less significant than what has happened on the other side of the world, nor do I wish to let our government off of the hook for the unnecessary hell that Huricane Katrina wreaked and continues to wreak on the people of New Orleans—you know me, that is the last thing I want to do. I make this comparison merely to remind people that in the insulated media market that is the United States, it is easy to lose sight of the pain and suffering that goes on in the parts of the world that most people would be hard pressed to find on a map.

In case you slept through geography class…

So what can we learn from the devastation that resulted from this Cyclone and Hurricane Katrina?

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