Saturday, November 25, 2006

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English and French and German and Spanish pages for sadr city slum.

Posted by olvlzl.

Have you noticed that almost every time you hear the phrase “Sadr City” on the news it is followed by the word “slum”? With what this war has done to other places in Baghdad, how can they tell what is and what isn’t a slum?

When this kind of phrase is universally used in the American media I have a hard time believing it’s a coincidence. The word “slum” doesn’t only designate a place as a center of highly concentrated poverty, it marks the people living there. Slum dwellers become non-persons, designated as unimportant, unworthy and expandable if a problem. It’s what they do to people who live in American slums. The American People are being told to forget about these people as individuals with lives and ideas of their own, they are only parts of a slum. If is the effect, intentional or unintentional, someone should point out that the residents of Sadr City probably aren’t impressed in the least by how Americans are taught to see them. No one here should be surprised when they refuse to see themselves that way.

John McCain and others in the United States have been calling for the death of al-Sadr, which must also do nothing to diminish his standing with his followers. Here’s a hint for the would-be president McCain, in a culture which values martyrdom you don’t exactly hurt the standing of a cleric by pinning a target to him. It might please the soft-handed wannabe warriors here but I doubt your calls are making it any easier for the real American troops on the ground in Iraq, of whom you are eager to make so many more. At some point the stream of irresponsible posturing mixed with your cowardly capitulation to Falwell et al on a host of issues, will start to leave you exposed.

The American establishment seems to believe that their ability to spin things through the American media means something to other people in the rest of the world. It doesn’t. At least not what they want it to mean. Americans should keep that in mind too, like us they have lives that interest them a lot more than other peoples ideas about them do. The blithe and irresponsible calling for the deaths of people by our politicians and media idiots doesn't play there.