Fortinbras Radio Weblog:30. desember 2004

30. desember 2004

Det er mulig at dette ikke bare er en melding til Frankrike - det kunne kanskje være noe for Norge også?

Rapper's message for France

Caroline Wyatt
BBC News, Paris

The French government is worried that Muslim prayer leaders, or imams, are preaching radical Islam in the poorer suburbs of the big cities, and that increasing numbers of young immigrants are responding to the message. But there are some who have tried it and decided it is not for them.

I sat in a cafe opposite the Gare du Nord station, feeling slightly apprehensive as I waited for Abdel Malik to arrive.

Since 11 September, like many others, I've often wondered what drives some young Muslims in the West to become radicalised, sometimes to the point of violently rejecting the countries they've made their home.

All I knew about Abdel Malik was that he'd been an Islamist, written about in the French press a few years ago under the unlikely headline "Rapping for Allah". The 29-year-old singer came from the deprived banlieux or suburbs of northern Paris and, as a teenager, had followed and preached a radical form of Islam.

The only photo I'd seen of him showed a stern, shaven-headed youth staring out intensely at the world with a challenging, almost hostile gaze.

So when a tall, strikingly handsome man walked in with a broad smile, apologising profusely for being late, I felt a rush of relief. He wasn't at all what I'd expected.

He was still shaven-headed, and wearing the baggy trousers and hooded parka top that are de rigueur for any self-respecting rapper, French or otherwise. But he turned out to be funny, gentle and thoughtful.

I had a spiritual need. And Christianity wasn't answering my questions. Islam fulfilled that need and it gave me the answers
Abdel Malik, rapper

His parents were Congolese, he told me, in softly French-accented English, and he was born Catholic, brought up in a Paris suburb plagued by drugs and gun-crime.

By the time he was 13, several of his friends were dead - killed in gang warfare. Abdel was searching for answers, trying to make sense of it all, and his older brother provided them by giving him a book on Islam.

"I had a spiritual need," he tells me, without embarrassment. "And Christianity wasn't answering my questions. Islam fulfilled that need and it gave me the answers."

It also gave him an identity, made him someone that other, younger boys looked up to. Abdel smiles as he remembers growing a beard, walking the streets of the suburbs preaching, and the way that people would look at him - either with respect or for some, respect tinged with fear.

Choice

But at the same time, he was also discovering music, writing rap songs with a band he and his friends had formed. The songs he wrote were another way of trying to make sense of the world he was growing up in.

It was as if they had asked me to give up my family, to cut all my ties to something I loved, and I couldn't
Abdel Malik, rapper

Why were so many people he knew poor, angry, and in a dead-end life of violence and crime, while just a few miles away, others lived comfortable, complacent lives, simply crossing the road if they saw the boys from the banlieu coming their way?

"I wasn't violent, but my way of thinking was violent," he admits now. "I saw the world in black and white. If you weren't with us - the good people - you must be evil."

A few years later, though, his more hardline Islamist friends told him he had to make a choice. To be a proper Muslim, they said, Abdel must give up music. For him, it was an epiphany. "It was as if they had asked me to give up my family, to cut all my ties to something I loved, and I couldn't."

Instead, he cut his ties with radical Islam and continued to write music, at the same time reading more about his religion till he discovered Sufi-ism - a more mystic form of Islam that, he said, nonetheless made him feel whole.

'We're all human'

Now he looks back and wonders why he spent so long consumed with hatred, dividing up the world into good and evil.

"It sounds naive," he says, "but now I know that if you want to be a real Muslim - or a Jew or a Christian - you have to love people, not hate them. I came from the bottom of the bottom - I'm black, I'm poor, I grew up in a difficult neighbourhood - but then I realised it was up to me what I did about that, and I didn't want to be a victim.

"In the end whatever your religion, we're all human, we all share the same human heart."

I asked him about one of the songs on his last album - a song about his country. Abdel nods, and explains. He'd been travelling in Morocco, he says, and looked at the poverty around him. And for the first time, he felt a surge of gratitude to France. All around him were children too poor to go to school, already working by the time they were 13.

And he realised that whatever the problems of the place he'd grown up in, it had still offered him one crucial chance - the chance of an education. "You might take that for granted," he tells me, "but I suddenly realised that others couldn't." And so Abdel Malik wrote what sounds like a love song to his country, a song called May Allah bless France.

Today, he's found his own language - music - to express himself, and Abdel's message to his young compatriots in the suburbs is a rather different one to the vision he preached in his angry teenage years. Abdel Malik wants them to stop seeing themselves as victims, and instead as people who can achieve whatever they want.

The choice, he says, is up to them. But France must also play its part - ordinary French people must open their minds, especially when they look in the suburbs. Not every Muslim they meet, he says, is a potential terrorist.

1:54:57 PM

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December 30, 2004

EDITORIAL fra New York Times.

Så da var selvfølgelig ikke Jan Egeland så langt fra sannheten. Men det kunne jo alle se at disse 15 mill $ var t ynkelig piss i havet.

Are We Stingy? Yes

resident Bush finally roused himself yesterday from his vacation in Crawford, Tex., to telephone his sympathy to the leaders of India, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Indonesia, and to speak publicly about the devastation of Sunday's tsunamis in Asia. He also hurried to put as much distance as possible between himself and America's initial measly aid offer of $15 million, and he took issue with an earlier statement by the United Nations' emergency relief coordinator, Jan Egeland, who had called the overall aid efforts by rich Western nations "stingy." "The person who made that statement was very misguided and ill informed," the president said.

We beg to differ. Mr. Egeland was right on target. We hope Secretary of State Colin Powell was privately embarrassed when, two days into a catastrophic disaster that hit 12 of the world's poorer countries and will cost billions of dollars to meliorate, he held a press conference to say that America, the world's richest nation, would contribute $15 million. That's less than half of what Republicans plan to spend on the Bush inaugural festivities.

The American aid figure for the current disaster is now $35 million, and we applaud Mr. Bush's turnaround. But $35 million remains a miserly drop in the bucket, and is in keeping with the pitiful amount of the United States budget that we allocate for nonmilitary foreign aid. According to a poll, most Americans believe the United States spends 24 percent of its budget on aid to poor countries; it actually spends well under a quarter of 1 percent.

Bush administration officials help create that perception gap. Fuming at the charge of stinginess, Mr. Powell pointed to disaster relief and said the United States "has given more aid in the last four years than any other nation or combination of nations in the world." But for development aid, America gave $16.2 billion in 2003; the European Union gave $37.1 billion. In 2002, those numbers were $13.2 billion for America, and $29.9 billion for Europe.

Making things worse, we often pledge more money than we actually deliver. Victims of the earthquake in Bam, Iran, a year ago are still living in tents because aid, including ours, has not materialized in the amounts pledged. And back in 2002, Mr. Bush announced his Millennium Challenge account to give African countries development assistance of up to $5 billion a year, but the account has yet to disperse a single dollar.

Mr. Bush said yesterday that the $35 million we've now pledged "is only the beginning" of the United States' recovery effort. Let's hope that is true, and that this time, our actions will match our promises.

1:40:06 PM

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Earthquake rewrites SE Asia map - warning system

A good LA Times article puts the powerful earthquake in some perspective:

The magnitude 9.0 earthquake that struck off Indonesia on Sunday morning moved the entire island of Sumatra about 100 feet to the southwest, pushing up a gigantic mass of water that collapsed into a tsunami and devastated shorelines around the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.

The quake was the largest since a magnitude 9.2 temblor struck Prince William Sound, Alaska, in 1964 and was one of the biggest ever recorded by scientists. It triggered the first tsunami in the Indian Ocean since 1883, civil engineer Costas Synolakis of USC said.

If this is true, it is astonishing. One can only imagine what forces were needed to move a huge swath of continental landmass 100 feet.

After the disaster, there are already calls to put in place a tsunami warning system like the one in the pacific. Something like that may well happen now. But I think criticism against Asian governments for not already having such a warning system in place are misdirected. What is the incentive for using sparse resources for building a warning system for an event that is so rare not even our grandfathers were alive when it last occurred?

Let's face is, such events are extremely rare, and even as the cost of this one event is horrible, we have to remember that in lesser time than it takes newspapers to move on to the next news item, more people will have been killed in traffic accidents (according to this page, more that 1.1 million are killed and almost 40 million injured in traffic accidents worldwide every year). While one massive disaster naturally gets all the attention, our sparse resources should really be used where they can benefit people the best.

[Secular Blasphemy]
12:49:53 PM

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New wine in old wineskin

How to fix mom's computer is a nice article that most geeks can relate to with some dread. Starting with a totally unprotected PC with lots of adware and a full mess, Gina Trapani walks you through the necessary updates. Thus it's also a nice PC security primer.

Windows 98 directly on cable with no forewall? The horror! Updating to XP wasn't even mentioned as an option. Odd. Maybe the machine was very old.

[Secular Blasphemy]
12:29:23 PM

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