“Ask Osama bin Laden and the 22 out of 30 top Al-Qaeda leaders who have been taken off the field whether I engage in appeasement… or whoever’s left out there.”
#9/11
Call of Post-Modern Warfare – Video Games as Propaganda
Despite the game’s macho bluster, Call of Duty speaks to us as a culture of fear: fear of terrorism, fear of foreign invasion, fear of duplicity and deceit on the part of our leaders. It helps accustom us to a post-9/11 view of war that is perpetual and global, a conspiratorial view of world events, and an apocalyptic outlook that views collapse and catastrophe as ever imminent.
Toward a Society of the Anti-Spectacle
Jonathan Bernstein asked for suggestions on 9/11 Reading/Viewing/Listening. I suggested: Gillespie THE THEOLOGICAL ORIGINS OF MODERNITY Wright THE EVOLUTION OF GOD Lilla THE STILLBORN GOD Ansary DESTINY DISRUPTED (A History of the World through Islamic Eyes) Van Creveld THE TRANSFORMATION…
WTC cameos…
Twin Tower Cameos from Dan Meth on Vimeo. From 1969 to 2001, the Twin Towers made countless cameos in Hollywood films. Sometimes featured prominently in the foreground, sometimes lurking in the distance. This montage celebrates the towers’ all-too-short film career…
Martin Peretz: “Muslim life is cheap, and I mean it.”
Martin Peretz, Editor-in-Chief of the New Republic, has offered an apology for one of two statements singled out yesterday by Nicolas Kristof in his New York Times column. Both statements appeared in the concluding paragraph of a post at Peretz’s…
Posted in Politics Tagged with: 9/11, Ground Zero Mosque, Islam, Islamophobia, Martin Peretz, Nicolas Kristof, Othero, Terror
On the other side of zero
According to the Wikipedia Entry, we started to use the term “Ground Zero” for the World Trade Center site within hours of the 9/11 attacks: The adoption of this term by the mainstream North American media with reference to the…
Note on “9/11 Trutherism”
One conservative political goal seems to be to make acknowledgment of any U.S. co-responsibility for 9/11, of any even potential validity in Binladenist justifications for war, as inadmissible as “Trutherism” – which latter, informatively, stands as a classic “repressive de-sublimation,”…
Cost of Islamophobia 3 – Islamism and Modernity
John asked for me to address the following point: [N]otwithstanding all the sects and interpretations of Islam that evolved in the agrarian age, all the relatively peaceful local practises mediated by saints, shrines, and the pragmatic needs of Islamic societies,…