28 Apr 10 | Index Index, minipost, Uncategorized
Musician M.I.A‘s video for her new single Born Free has been banned from Youtube just days after it was released. The controversial video, directed by Romain Gavras, shows American police rounding redheads, and subjecting them to brutal violence. Critics have suggested the explicit video is a publicity stunt for M.I.A and the director, whose debut feature film Redheads, is based on the same premise.
26 Apr 10 | Index Index, minipost, Uncategorized
The former editor of the Cameroon Express Germain Ngota, died in a Yaoundé prison last Thursday. Henriette Ekwee, a local union official, said Ngota suffered from high blood pressure and had not received adequate medical attention while in jail. He had been incarcerated since February with two other journalists accused “jointly forging a document with the signature of the Secretary General of the Presidency of the Republic, Laurent Esso, with the aim of discrediting him”. Before his arrest, Ngota was investigating corruption allegations involving the state-run oil company and a presidential aide. Local sources claim officials used psychological and physical torture to force Ngota to expose his sources.
23 Apr 10 | Uncategorized
Trey Parker and Matt Stone, purveyors of toilet humour, obscenity and slander of just about every celebrity and religious figure in the world, have succeeded in gaining even more notoriety for their 200th anniversary episode of the cartoon South Park.
The premise for the two-part episode is that all the celebrities of Hollywood (otherwise known as the Legion of Doom) gather forces to file a class-act lawsuit against the residents of South Park for their continual defamation of figures such as Tom Cruise, Barbara Streisand and even the Pope. However, in order to truly gain the “the power to not be ridiculed”, the celebrities must kidnap the Prophet Mohammed, the only figure in the world to hold this “superpower” and clone it for themselves.
The day after the first part of the episode was broadcast on 14 April, a post on the (temporarily defunct) Revolution Muslim website appeared not threatening, but warning the creators that “they will probably wind up like Theo Van Gogh for airing this show”.
Comedy Central in response, decided to censor Mohammed’s name from the second part of the episode which was broadcast on Wednesday. In addition, the customary concluding speech at the end of every episode, in which some kind of moral is normally gleamed from all the chaos, was also censored. According to the makers, the speeches that were made by various different characters were about “intimidation and fear”, and contained no mention of Mohammed.
The network’s decision to censor Mohammed’s name and image can be justified to some extent due to fears from religious attacks, or simply just to create greater publicity for the show. However censorship of the concluding speech is simply an over the top reaction, stifling exactly the kind of “rational dialogue” endorsed by the Revolution Muslim blog: to “create the possibility that a deeper and more productive dialogue may be initiated.”
Moreover, it is questionable whether the act of censorship itself was intentionally written into the script as part of the joke. In the one of the penultimate scenes, Tom Cruise manages to finally clone Mohammed’s “power to not be ridiculed”, and emerges out of a contraption only to end up as a censored black box himself. The only way to not be slandered or defamed it seems, is to become completely unrepresentable and inexistent, proving that absolute censorship itself is impractical, ridiculous and unrealistic.
For an interview by Xeni Jardin with the creators about the 200th episode click here.
The interview also contains an uncensored clip of Mohammed from an episode broadcasted two months before 9/11, which generated almost no controversy whatsoever. Already, there have been rumours of an uncensored version of the second episode being leaked online.
22 Apr 10 | Uncategorized
We call on the local radio stations to stop broadcasting the songs and all music. We give them a 10-day deadline and any radio station found not complying with the orders… will face sharia action. Moalim Hashi Mohamed Farah, a senior Hizb al-Islam official, 3 April
Hizb al-Islam is one of Somalia’s two main insurgent forces. The Islamic rebels control large swathes of the war-torn Somalia, imposing strict Islamic law in those regions. Ten days after the ultimatum was pronounced, 14 of Mogadishu’s FM broadcaster fell dramatically silent. From 13 April onwards those hoping to hear music had only two options, Radio Bar-Kulan, a UN-funded channel broadcast from Kenya and the government-run Radio Mogadishu.
Music might be “unislamic” to the Islamic militias, but residents say music “is the only break from the shelling, the gunfire and the general insecurity”. Even before the latest ban, music was outlawed along with football, movies, beauty salons and bras, in other suburban Somali areas subject to Islamist control men have been forced to grow beards. Proscribing every single tune is a visible sign of a minority group’s ability to instil a real terror in the populace.
“Journalists working in the radio stations have in the past witnessed broad daylight assassination of their colleagues and have now been signaled that they would follow the same fate if they do not obey these oppressive orders,” said Omar Faruk Osman, secretary general of the National Union of Somali Journalists. Unsurprising then, that those who want to survive comply with the militia’s orders.
The Hizb al-Islam’s order echoes the Talibans’ strict rules imposed on the Afghani population, first, and later on parts of the Pakistani population. In 2009, John Bailey, a renowned British ethnomusicologist, was asked by Radio Liberty correspondent Abubakar Siddique to give his opinion about the Talibans’ music ban:
You know, the Taliban like to invoke the hadith, that, you know, the person who listens to music will, on the day of judgment, have molten lead poured into their ears and you can read the rest of it for yourself …The Taliban were not against all forms of music, and they certainly permitted religious singing without musical instruments. This isn’t just the banning of music but it is a competition between different kinds of music.”
In an interview with a UN news service, Ali Sheikh Yassin, the deputy chairman of the Mogadishu-based Elman Human Rights Organidation said “We are talking about music as a sin against Islam, yet the biggest sin of all, killing humans, is being committed every hour of every day. What is more anti-Islam than killing innocent people?”
On 20 April, the situation for station workers worsened. The Somali Transitional Federal Government warned all the radio stations that heeded the Islamists’ ban they will be punished with a shutdown.Somali journalists can’t believe at what they are hearing. “Each group are issuing orders against us and we are the sole victims,” Abukar Hassan Kadaf, the director of Somaliweyn radio told the New York Times.
Update: Keeping its word, the government had closed Tusmo Radio and Somaliweyn. But it has now decided to repeal its order. According to Somalia’s Information Minister, Dahir Mohamud Gelle, “The Somali government is not happy with the oppression of the media and will always work toward creating an enabling environment where it can operate freely.”
