23 Aug 10 | Index Index, minipost, News and features
Defence secretary Liam Fox has called for shops to ban a computer game that allows players to act as the Taliban and kill Nato troops. Fox said he was “disgusted and angry” and called the game “un-British”. The updated version of Medal of Honour, due for release in October, gives players the choice of which side to represent in its multiplayer mode. A spokesperson for the game’s publishers Electronic Arts said the format “merely reflects the fact that every conflict has two sides”. The Department of Media, Culture and Sport has distanced itself from Fox’s “personal view“.
29 Jul 10 | Uncategorized
English PEN director Jonathan Heawood has an excellent piece in the Independent today on the libel case against Bookseller of Kabul author Åsne Seierstad.
Jonathan wonders if this sets a worrying precedent on the use of real people in literature:
What would it mean for literature if all characters based on real people were removed from the record? No Buck Mulligan in Ulysses; no Sarah in The End of the Affair; no Casaubon in Middlemarch; no Zelda in Tender is the Night; no Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House; no Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited. Ottoline Morrell was cruelly satirised in both Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow and DH Lawrence’s Women in Love. Christopher Robin Milne hated living with the memory of his father’s classic books about a little boy and his teddy bear. Real people are scooped up by writers all the time. Literature does not respect the boundary between public and private; in fact, it is all about overstepping that mark.
There’s also the question of whether an author should be held responsible for the reaction, or potential reaction, of an audience (or potential audience).
That’s not to say that Seierstad has not broken an unwritten code of hospitality, or that the Rais family has not faced problems as a result of the book’s publication. Although Rais himself continues to operate a successful business out of Kabul, his first wife has sought asylum in Canada and other members of the family are now living in Pakistan. But is this discrepancy in the fates of the male and female members of the family the fault of a Norwegian journalist – or Afghan society? Is it appropriate for a Norwegian court to punish the messenger? Is a court of law the place to determine how a book treats the “honour” of an entire society?
Read the whole article here
11 May 10 | Index Index, minipost, Uncategorized
Film-maker Asad Qureshi and his fixer Colonel Iman were released last Thursday after being held captive by the Pakistani Taliban for over a month. Khalid Khwaja, the other member of their party was found dead on 30 April in North Waziristan. The two men were been handed over to the Haqqani network, an independent negotiations team who have close links with the Taliban. No ransom money has been paid.
26 Apr 10 | Index Index, minipost
A video released last week demands a Taliban leader be set free in exchange for the safety of Asad Qureshi, a British journalist ,and two retired ISI officers. The missing men left for the North Waziristan region at the end of March. A second video featuring one of the captured the ex-ISI officers, Colonel Khalid Khawaja, was also sent to Asia Times Online. In it, Khawaja details his involvement in negotiations between militants and the army, as well as his part in the arrest of Muhammad Abdul Aziz during the Siege of Lal Masjid in 2007.
