Why Ernesto Laclau is the intellectual figurehead for Syriza and Podemos

Dan Hancox writes: When Ernesto Laclau passed away last April aged 78, few would have guessed that this Argentinian-born, Oxford-educated post-Marxist would become the key intellectual figure behind a political process that exploded into life a mere six weeks later, when Spanish leftist party Podemos won five seats and 1.2m votes in last May’s European elections.

Throughout his academic career, most of which he spent as professor of political theory at the University of Essex, Laclau developed a vocabulary beyond classical Marxist thought, replacing the traditional analysis of class struggle with a concept of “radical democracy” that stretched beyond the narrow confines of the ballot box (or the trade union). Most importantly for Syriza, Podemos and its excitable sympathisers outside Greece and Spain, he sought to rescue “populism” from its many detractors.

Íñigo Errejón, one of Podemos’s key strategists, completed his 2011 doctorate on recent Bolivian populism, taking substantial inspiration from Laclau and his wife and collaborator Chantal Mouffe, as he explains in this obituary. To read Errejón on Laclau is to take an exhilarating short-cut to understanding the intellectual forces that are shaping Europe’s future. Syriza’s victory in Greece, for one, has been directly driven by the ideas of Laclau and an Essex cohort that includes among its alumni a Syriza MP, the governor of Athens, and Yanis Varoufakis. Syriza built its political coalition in exactly the way Laclau prescribed in his key 2005 book On Populist Reason – as Essex professor David Howarth puts it, “binding together different demands by focusing on their opposition to a common enemy”.

On the Mediterranean side of austerity Europe, the common enemy is not hard to discern. During Spain’s massive indignados protests and encampments of summer 2011, one of the principal slogans was the quintessentially populist “We are neither right nor left, we are coming from the bottom and going for the top”. It is, in Laclau’s terms, “the formation of an internal antagonistic frontier” like this, between a broadly defined sense of “the people” and a ruling class unwilling to yield to their demands, that readies the ground for a populist movement like Podemos.[Continue reading…]

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Don’t arm Ukraine

John J. Mearsheimer writes: The Ukraine crisis is almost a year old and Russia is winning. The separatists in eastern Ukraine are gaining ground and Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, shows no signs of backing down in the face of Western economic sanctions.

Unsurprisingly, a growing chorus of voices in the United States is calling for arming Ukraine. A recent report from three leading American think tanks endorses sending Kiev advanced weaponry, and the White House’s nominee for secretary of defense, Ashton B. Carter, said last week to the Senate armed services committee, “I very much incline in that direction.”

They are wrong. Going down that road would be a huge mistake for the United States, NATO and Ukraine itself. Sending weapons to Ukraine will not rescue its army and will instead lead to an escalation in the fighting. Such a step is especially dangerous because Russia has thousands of nuclear weapons and is seeking to defend a vital strategic interest.

There is no question that Ukraine’s military is badly outgunned by the separatists, who have Russian troops and weapons on their side. Because the balance of power decisively favors Moscow, Washington would have to send large amounts of equipment for Ukraine’s army to have a fighting chance.

But the conflict will not end there. Russia would counter-escalate, taking away any temporary benefit Kiev might get from American arms. The authors of the think tank study concede this, noting that “even with enormous support from the West, the Ukrainian Army will not be able to defeat a determined attack by the Russian military.” In short, the United States cannot win an arms race with Russia over Ukraine and thereby ensure Russia’s defeat on the battlefield. [Continue reading…]

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We are human rights defenders, but Bahrain says we’re terrorists

Sayed Alwadaei writes: The barbaric killing of Muadh al-Kasasbeh by Isis will haunt us for a long time to come as an example of the cruelty of today’s Jihadi terrorists. Kasasbeh was burned alive in a cage a month ago, his murder hidden from the world as Jordan demanded his safe return, the truth only coming to light last week when a video of his murder appeared online.

As Jordan mourns its hero, we in Bahrain reflect in fear and disgust: the Bahraini government names human rights defenders, journalists and political activists terrorists, and in doing so they liken us to Kasasbeh’s killers. The prospect of what it means for us is utterly terrifying.

At the beginning of the month the ministry of interior published a list of 72 persons whose citizenship was to be revoked. No trial, no appeal, no legal process – if your name is on that list, you are no longer a Bahraini. Recent amendments to the nationality law allow the state to revoke citizenship for those guilty of terrorism. About 50 of the named persons, myself included, are human rights defenders, political activists, journalists, doctors, religious scholars – peaceful activists. Most of us are now stateless. Among the reasons given for revoking our citizenship: “defaming the image of the regime, inciting against the regime and spreading false news to hinder the rules of the constitution” and “defaming brotherly countries”. [Continue reading…]

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Jordan says conducted 56 air raids in three days against ISIS

Reuters reports: Jordan’s air force chief said on Sunday his country’s jet fighters had conducted 56 bombing raids in three days against Islamic State militants in northeast Syria, targeting key bases and arms depots.

Jordan stepped up its bombing of the jihadist group on Thursday in response to the brutal killing by Islamic State of a captured Jordanian pilot, and continued until Saturday.

No new strikes were announced for Sunday.

“We achieved what we aimed for. We destroyed logistics centers, arms depots and targeted hideouts of their fighters,” General Mansour al-Jbour, head of the Jordanian airforce, told a news conference.

Jordan has carried out nearly a fifth of the sorties of the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State in Syria to date, Jbour said. U.S. aircraft joined the mission to provide intelligence, surveillance, a U.S. official told Reuters earlier on Sunday. [Continue reading…]

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Surviving a barrel bomb attack in Syria

Abo Bakr al-Haj Ali writes: It was like any normal day: I was at work in Al-Jazeera’s office in the southern city of Daraa. The bureau was housed in a residential apartment block, not far from my family home in the neighbouring countryside.

At 11:35am local time exactly, my colleagues and I heard the roar of a helicopter in the sky. We quickly finished what we were doing and rushed to get out of the building to the relative safety of the street.

I heard the sound of the first barrel bomb land nearby, and after a few seconds a second barrel bomb crashed into the office building. I knew that this was no fluke and that we had been purposefully targeted, most likely for the work we had been covering.

It was an awful, indescribable feeling. I can’t remember much of what happened next. It was a big shock, and while I am certainly no stranger to these deadly devices, I recall being frightened and I quickly fell to the ground.

I couldn’t see anything and the dust and smoke from the debris began to choke me as I struggled for breath. While little oxygen made it to my lungs, a wretched stench began to permeate my nostrils. I’m still not sure what the smell was, but I think it was trinitrotoluene, known more commonly as TNT. [Continue reading…]

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Twitter says government data queries rising

Phys.org: Twitter said Monday it saw a 40 percent jump in government request for user data in late 2014, with sharp rises coming from both Turkey and Russia.

The “transparency report” released by the messaging platform showed the United States remained the largest source of data queries with 1,622 over the last six months of the year, but that notable increases came from Turkey and Russia.

The total number of requests globally was 2,871, up from 2,058 in the first six months of the year.

Turkey — which blocked Twitter and other social media last year for leaking data about government corruption — vaulted to the number two spot with 356 requests, the Twitter report said.

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FBI monitored and critiqued African American writers for decades

Alison Flood writes: Newly declassified documents from the FBI reveal how the US federal agency under J Edgar Hoover monitored the activities of dozens of prominent African American writers for decades, devoting thousands of pages to detailing their activities and critiquing their work.

Academic William Maxwell first stumbled upon the extent of the surveillance when he submitted a freedom of information request for the FBI file of Claude McKay. The Jamaican-born writer was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, author of the sonnet If We Must Die, supposedly recited by Winston Churchill, and Maxwell was preparing an edition of his complete poems. When the file came through from the FBI, it stretched to 193 pages and, said Maxwell, revealed “that the bureau had closely read and aggressively chased McKay” – describing him as a “notorious negro revolutionary” – “all across the Atlantic world, and into Moscow”.

Maxwell, associate professor of English and African American studies at Washington University in St Louis, decided to investigate further, knowing that other scholars had already found files on well-known black writers such as Langston Hughes and James Baldwin. He made 106 freedom of information requests about what he describes as “noteworthy Afro-modernists” to the FBI; 51 of those writers had files, ranging from three to 1,884 pages each. [Continue reading…]

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America’s alignment with Iranian interests is undermining the fight against ISIS

Left Foot Forward: ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, by Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan, is brilliantly easy to read. Concise yet thorough the book charts the history of a group, “[a]t once sensationalized and underestimated,” that is simultaneously a terrorist organisation, mafia, conventional army, sophisticated intelligence-gathering apparatus, propaganda machine and the remnants of the Saddam Hussein regime which controls an area the size of Britain in the heart of the Middle East.

The book begins with an underemphasised point: neither the Islamic State (ISIS) nor its governing method – extreme violence coupled with distributing stolen oil revenue and extortion – is new. The United States battled ISIS, then known as al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), as the US tried to stabilise and democratise Iraq in the last decade. Moreover, ISIS is built out of the ruins of the Saddam regime.

In the late 1980s, Saddam launched the Faith Campaign and “Islamised his regime”. The campaign pushed a hardline Salafism combined with a cult of the leader, and involved setting up of elaborate networks of patronage, informants, militias and weapons to control the religious institutions and prevent a renewed Shi’a uprising as followed Saddam’s eviction from Kuwait in 1991. In tandem, Saddam’s deputy, Izzat Ibrahim ad-Douri, to this day an important insurgent, set up smuggling networks into neighbouring States. These networks would come under ISIS’ control as the Ba’athist-Salafist remnants of the regime fused with foreign al-Qaeda forces in the post-Saddam insurgency.

ISIS was initially led by a Jordanian drug-taker and street-thug turned religious militant named Ahmad al-Khalaylah. Khalaylah had arrived in Afghanistan in time to see the Red Army leave, and then been imprisoned when he tried to take jihad home. In prison, Khalaylah gained status over his mentor, al-Qaeda ideologue Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, and migrated to Taliban Afghanistan in 1999, where he was given start-up funds for a terrorism camp by Osama bin Laden. The world would come to know Khalaylah as Abu Musab az-Zarqawi, and his group would become AQI in 2004. Zarqawi’s supporters would brand him the “Shaykh of the Slaughterers” because of his fondness for decapitating prisoners on film.

While AQI primarily stayed in Iraq, Zarqawi often targeted the homeland he fled: the first attack of the Iraqi insurgency was against the Jordanian Embassy in August 2003; and there was a massive attack against hotels in Amman in November 2005

In post-Saddam Iraq, many Sunni Arabs joined the insurgency to thwart Shi’a power, and others joined because they were made jobless by the disbanding of the army. If the insurgents were not radicalised beforehand they were after time in American prisons, which were “little more than social-networking furloughs for jihadists”.

“If you were looking to build an army, prison is the perfect place to do it,” one expert says. “We gave them health care, dental, fed them, and, most importantly, we kept them from getting killed in combat.” AQI also actively infiltrated the US prisons to help make them jihadist production facilities. [Continue reading…]

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The fight against ISIS and the wider war

Hassan Hassan writes: Savagery is part of Isis’s ideological DNA. The danger of the group lies in its effort to transform the concept of jihad not through individual fatwas, as al-Qaida does to justify suicide bombing in civilian areas, but through a fully fledged ideology. To do so, Isis uses stories from Islamic history and modern jihadi texts to change the paradigm of how to understand and conduct jihad.

One of the most prominent of those jihadi texts is a book called Idarat al-Tawahush, or Management of Savagery, by an anonymous jihadi ideologue who calls himself Abu Bakr Naji. The book, translated by William McCants of the US Brookings Institution in 2006, has been widely distributed on jihadist online forums. But for the first time, Isis members have confirmed that the book is part of the organisation’s curriculum. As part of research for a book I co-wrote, one Isis-affiliated cleric said that Naji’s book is widely read among provisional commanders and some rank-and-file fighters as a way to justify beheadings as not only religiously permissible but recommended by God and Muhammad. Another member gave a list of books and ideologues that influence Isis, including Naji’s book.

The Management of Savagery’s greatest contribution lies in its differentiation between the meaning of jihad and other religious tenets. The author argues that the way jihad is taught “on paper” makes it harder for young mujahideen and Muslims to grasp the true meaning of the concept. “One who previously engaged in jihad knows that it is naught but violence, crudeness, terrorism, [deterrence] and massacring,” Naji writes, as translated by McCants. “I am talking about jihad and fighting, not about Islam and one should not confuse them. He cannot continue to fight and move from one stage to another unless the beginning state contains a stage of massacring the enemy and deterring him.”

The concept Isis used to justify the massacre of hundreds of Shaitat tribesmen in Deir Ezzor, Syria, in August was tashreed, a word that can be translated as “deterrence”, as mentioned in the quoted text. “That is the true jihad,” said Abu Moussa, an Isis-affiliated religious cleric, echoing Naji’s text. “The layman who learned some of his religion from [mainstream] clerics think of jihad as a fanciful act, conducted far away from him. In reality, jihad is a heavy responsibility and requires toughness.”

Naji’s book offers practical tips on how to fill the power vacuum left by what he calls the retreating armies of the west and its regional agent regimes, as a result of gradual violence applied by the mujahideen. He says that the defeat of the crusaders in the past was not a result of decisive battles between the Muslim and Christian armies, but was a process of exhaustion and depletion. He argues that the Muslim victory in the 12th-century Battle of Hattin, when crusaders led by the king of Jerusalem, Guy of Lusignan, were defeated by the Muslim army, led by Saladin, was possible only because of previous small-scale skirmishes in a variety of locations. Such small acts, Naji writes, include “hitting a crusader with a stick on his head”, a statement echoed by Isis’s spokesman Abu Mohammed al-Adnani in the wake of the air strikes in Syria.

Naji says that people think of Muslims at the time of the crusaders as one state, led by Saladin al-Ayubi and Nouradin Zinki, but “the fact is they were small families controlling citadels and fighting jihad against crusaders on a low level, in a hard hitting way. What Zinki and Ayubi did was to bring together those small blocs into one big organisation but the largest role was played by those small blocs.” According to Isis, violence has to be steady and escalatory to continue to shock and deter. Random acts of violence are not enough in this context. Brutality has to be ever more savage, creative and shocking. So if the immolation of the pilot is more savage than previous murders, Isis will undoubtedly be searching for an even more savage method to carry out its violent punishments.

J.M. Berger notes that following the release of the video of Muath al-Kasaesbeh’s murder, many commentators suggested that this time ISIS’s brutality may have been so extreme that it will provoke a backlash, potentially leading to the group’s downfall. Berger cautioned against jumping to this conclusion:

When ISIS publicizes its inhuman horrors, its goal is to infuriate and horrify its enemies, to create divisions within the coalition fighting it, and to draw more and more countries ever deeper into the conflict. The “gone too far” theme may be reassuring, but it’s dangerous. We shouldn’t be congratulating ourselves for reacting to ISIS propaganda exactly as ISIS intends.

This is a popular idea: that if we react the way the terrorists want us to react, then we have given in to terrorism. We have allowed ourselves to bend to their will.

Emotionally, this makes sense. Provocation is an exercise in attempting to hijack agency. So refusing to be provoked in the desired way seems like the best way of avoiding losing control.

But on Twitter, @kufr666 says: “It’s a mistake to take IS ‘intentions’ into account at all when measuring our response to their provocations.” I’m inclined to agree with him.

This isn’t a game in which the winner turns out to be simply whoever succeeds in the exercise of their will. Outcomes matter more.

When ISIS launched its assault on Kobane, the small Kurdish town on the Syrian side of the Turkish border held little strategic value. What it offered instead was an opportunity for the media to have a grandstand view of ISIS in action and a demonstration that they are an unstoppable force. ISIS expressed no doubt about how swiftly or decisively it could accomplish its goal.

Initially, the U.S. deployed its “strategic patience,” responded cautiously to the provocation of ISIS’s muscle-flexing and was willing to allow Kobane to fall under the jihadists’ control.

It turned out, however, that when YPG fighters declared they were willing to fight to their last drop of blood, they really meant it.

The U.S. then faced a dilemma. It could either sit on the sidelines with Turkey and watch the Kurds getting slaughtered, or it could step in and provide air support and hopefully help demonstrate that ISIS is not an unstoppable force.

Some may argue that Kobane ended up being destroyed in order to save it, but the town’s residents were in no doubt that they could claim victory. It was ISIS which sustained the heaviest losses while Kobane itself can be rebuilt.

While the savagery of ISIS is indeed calculated to intimidate those who would stand in its way, the danger for its opponents seems to come less from the risk of overreacting than it does from viewing a small irregular army as a global terrorist organization.

ISIS will succeed or fail based on its ability to conquer and govern territory. It can’t be sustained on propaganda victories alone.

ISIS has staked its credibility on its ability to create a caliphate. It can’t survive as nothing more than a network and an ideology. Ultimately, without land, populations, and resources under its control, it has nothing.

Paradoxically, what some would like to characterize as the greatest terrorist threat in human history, might be better viewed through the prism of conventional warfare with potential winners and losers. ISIS is unlikely to ever surrender, but that does not preclude the possibility of its defeat.

Nevertheless, even if it turned out that the fall of ISIS were to come as rapidly as its rise, the consequences of such a victory would likely have a limited impact on the wider conflict — a conflict currently seen through multiple fractures that span all the way from Pakistan to Libya, but which when history is written may eventually come to be seen as a single war: the Greater Middle East War of the 21st century.

In that war, the fight against ISIS is just one battle. And in that war, ultimately either everyone finds a way of coexisting or everyone continues losing.

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Shiite militia drives back ISIS, but divides much of Iraq

The New York Times reports: At their victory rally, the Shiite militiamen used poetry, song and swagger to sweeten their celebration of an ugly battle.

More than a hundred fighters from the militia, the Badr Organization, had been killed in the farms and villages of Diyala Province in recent fighting against the Sunni extremists of the Islamic State. During the battle, thousands of residents had been forced from their homes — including Sunni families who accused Shiite paramilitary groups like Badr of forced displacement and summary executions.

But the militias had pushed the Islamic State back from key areas in a crucial battle. So on Monday, the Badr Organization convened in a mosque at Camp Ashraf, its base in Diyala, to celebrate its “liberation” of the province — and to serve notice that it was the vanguard force battling the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

Speaking at the rally, to an audience that included giddy fighters barely past their teens, the head of the Badr Organization, Hadi al-Ameri, boasted of the towns his men and allied militias had set free. “These were big operations that others must learn lessons from,” he said.

But even as Mr. Ameri was fishing for broad support and recognition, his group stands among the most divisive in Iraq, accused of atrocities against Sunnis and known for its close ties to Iran. The new government of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, which has promised to rule inclusively, has been under pressure to distance itself from retaliatory attacks against Sunnis by both Shiite and Kurdish militiamen. [Continue reading…]

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Syria death toll now exceeds 210,000

Reuters reports: The death toll after nearly four years of civil war in Syria has risen to 210,060, nearly half of them civilians, but the real figure is probably much higher, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Saturday.

The Observatory, which is based in Britain and has a network of activists across Syria, said that 10,664 children and 6,783 women were among the dead.

Reuters tried to contact Syrian authorities for comment, but they were not immediately available.

Peaceful protests against four decades of rule by President Bashar al-Assad’s family in March 2011 degenerated into an armed insurgency following a fierce security crackdown.

The rights group said it had counted 35,827 Syrian rebels and 45,385 Syrian army soldiers killed. The Observatory’s toll could not be independently verified by Reuters.

Among the Observatory’s documented deaths were 24,989 foreign jihadist fighters, including radical Sunni rebel groups such as Al Qaeda offshoot Nusra Front and Islamic State. [Continue reading…]

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Vian Dakhil: Iraq’s only female Yazidi MP on the battle to save her people

Abigail Haworth reports: The young Yazidi woman in a blue headscarf says her name is Hana. She is 18. She is standing in the muddy courtyard of her new temporary home – an abandoned, unfinished building outside the Iraqi-Kurdish town of Zakho. Beside her is Vian Dakhil, a politician from the same religious minority. Hana is speaking rapidly and clutching Dakhil’s hand as though she’s terrified this local heroine has something far more important to do than listen to her story.

Hana was abducted by Islamic State (Isis) last August. Heavily armed, black-clad militants stormed her village and shot dead her father, four brothers, two uncles and six cousins. They then separated her from her older female relatives. “They drove me away in a truck with other unmarried girls. Two fighters took me and held me prisoner in their house. They beat me and gave me scraps to eat.” After 36 days, Hana escaped when one of her captors left a window unlocked. “It was like a suicide mission, but I didn’t care. I ran for three days and nights to get away.”

Dakhil, a slim woman with long auburn hair, is not going anywhere. She listens intently as her two armed bodyguards stand at a discreet distance. “How is your health? What else did the men do to you?” she asks.

Blood rushes to Hana’s cheeks. Her eyes, locked on to Dakhil’s, well up with tears. They look at each other in silence. “It’s OK, I will help you, I will help you,” says the politician eventually, freeing her hand from Hana’s grip to pull the girl into a hug.

Vian Dakhil is one of only two Yazidis in Iraq’s parliament. It seems obvious that it’s a lonely job; she’s also the only woman from the besieged minority in an assembly that is three-quarters male. (The other Yazidi politician, a man, is so inactive that few people seem to know he exists.) But I don’t realise how lonely her job is until I’ve spent a 14-hour day with her in northern Iraq, visiting Yazidi survivors of Isis carnage. It’s a relentless marathon of inhaling dust, kissing babies and comforting catastrophically traumatised, grief-wracked refugees like Hana. [Continue reading…]

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Israeli center-left Zionist Camp leader accuses Netanyahu of not hitting Hamas hard enough

Ynet: Zionist Camp leader Isaac Herzog – currently the main contender to replace Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel’s prime minister – took aim at the hawkish leader’s security policy, blasting him for being weak on Hamas, the terror group ruling Gaza with which Israel locked horns in a 50-day war over the summer.

“For years Hamas has been tunneling under our communities near the Gaza border. And what did you do? You waited, stalled and hesitated,” Herzog said in a new video.

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The anti-Islamic far-right is spreading in Europe — and going mainstream

Kabir Chibber: In recent months, a street movement called Pegida — Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident — has emerged from nowhere in Germany, seeking to “protect Judeo-Christian culture” and halt to what it calls the spread of Islam. Though it denies being xenophobic or racist, its leader quit after being pictured dressed as Hitler. Pegida’s rallies have attracted tens of thousands of people in Germany.

And now the group is spreading abroad. Pegida held its first march in Vienna and is to hold its first British rally in the city of Newcastle on Feb. 28, with more planned in the UK. Britain already has anti-Islamic groups such as the English Defence League, a small but vocal force. Only this weekend, the EDL attracted as many as 1,000 people to a march against the building of a mosque.

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Arming Ukraine army may escalate conflict, West warned

The Guardian reports: The head of the international organisation monitoring the conflict in Ukraine has said pro-Moscow separatists are constantly being re-armed, but warned that for western states to supply weapons to the Ukrainian army would risk an expansion of the war.

Lamberto Zannier, secretary general of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OCSE), issued the warning at the Munich security conference where the debate over supplying arms to Kiev has pitted eastern European states and US members of Congress against Germany, the UK and other western European countries. The Obama administration says it has not made up its mind.

Zannier said he supported reform and non-lethal support of the Ukrainian army, but saw huge problems in supplying lethal weaponry.

“This carries a risk with it, and the risk is that this will strengthen a narrative we are seeing already appear on the side of the separatists, that they are fighting a war against Nato and against the west,” Zannier told the Guardian in an interview in Munich. [Continue reading…]

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Egypt reporter to stand trial alone as foreign colleagues freed

AFP reports: With Australian Peter Greste freed and a Canadian colleague close to release, the other Al-Jazeera journalist arrested in Cairo faces languishing in jail for an indefinite period because he has only Egyptian nationality.

Under global pressure to release the prisoners, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi issued a decree tailored for Greste and colleague Mohamed Fahmy, allowing the deportation of foreigners but overlooking Baher Mohamed in the process.

Greste, an acclaimed reporter for Al-Jazeera English, was deported last week.

Fahmy, a dual national, had to renounce his Egyptian citizenship and his release and deportation to Canada is imminent, a government official said.

But in the face of delays, prominent lawyer Amal Clooney, who married Hollywood star George Clooney last year, has requested a meeting with Sisi to press Fahmy’s case, a letter obtained by AFP on Saturday showed, leaving Mohamed in the cold.

“We’re paying the price for being Egyptian,” his embittered wife Jihan Rashid told AFP. [Continue reading…]

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Music permeates our brain

Jonathan Berger writes: Neurological research has shown that vivid musical hallucinations are more than metaphorical. They don’t just feel real, they are, from a cognitive perspective, entirely real. In the absence of sound waves, brain activation is strikingly similar to that triggered by external auditory sounds. Why should that be?

Music, repetitive and patterned by nature, provides structure within which we find anchors, context, and a basis for organizing time. In the prehistory of civilization, humans likely found comfort in the audible patterns and structures that accompanied their circadian rhythms — from the coo of a morning dove to the nocturnal chirps of crickets. With the evolution of music a more malleable framework for segmenting and structuring time developed. Humans generated predictable and replicable temporal patterns by drumming, vocalizing, blowing, and plucking. This metered, temporal framework provides an internal world in which we construct predictions about the future — what will happen next, and when it will happen.

This process spotlights the brain itself. The composer Karlheinz Stockhausen hyphenated the term for his craft to underscore the literal meaning of “com-pose” — to put together elements, from com (“with” or “together”) and pose (“put” or “place”). When we imagine music, we literally compose — sometimes recognizable tunes, other times novel combinations of patterns and musical ideas. Toddlers sing themselves to sleep with vocalizations of musical snippets they are conjuring up in their imagination. Typically, these “spontaneous melodies,” as they are referred to by child psychologists, comprise fragments of salient features of multiple songs that the baby is piecing together. In short, we do not merely retrieve music that we store in memory. Rather, a supremely complex web of associations can be stirred and generated as we compose music in our minds.

Today, amid widely disseminated music, we are barraged by a cacophony of disparate musical patterns — more often than not uninvited and unwanted — and likely spend more time than ever obsessing over imagined musical fragments. The brain is a composer whose music orchestrates our lives. And right now the brain is working overtime. [Continue reading…]

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