Fareed Zakaria Interviews Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Iran Bans "Imperalist" Hip Hop

Iranian Rap Music against the Islamic Republic

TEHRAN: Iran on Thursday said that it planned to launch a crackdown on rap music, complaining that the words used by hip-hop artists were "obscene," the state IRNA news agency reported. "There is nothing wrong with this type of music in itself," the official who evaluates music for the Culture and Islamic Guidance Ministry, Mohammad Dashtgoli, was quoted as saying.

"But due to the use of obscene words by its singers this music has been categorized as illegal," he said.

"In coordination with the police, illegal studios producing this type of music will be sealed and the singers in this genre will be confronted," he said.

Dashtgoli said a large number of illegal rap artists have been already identified.

The Islamic Republic's hard-line officials have repeatedly complained about a "cultural invasion" by "decadent" Western music, which they believe diminishes Islamic values.

The ministry official expressed his frustration that rap artists were finding low-cost ways to publish their music on the Internet. "We should find a solution for this," he said.

Rap music has become increasingly popular among young urban males in Tehran, with explicit lyrics exploring social, political and sexual themes.

Producing albums and holding concerts in Iran requires official permission from the authorities and, needless to say, rap music is an underground phenomenon in the Islamic Republic.

Nevertheless, rap albums are widely available on the black market with artists drawing inspiration from the Persian-language rap of the Iranian diaspora based in Los Angeles.

Iran is currently in the midst of its most severe moral crackdown in years, which has seen thousands of women warned for slack dressing, several bootleg music stores shut and mixed-sex parties raided.

Conservatives have applauded the crackdown but some moderates have questioned the value of the drive at a time when Iran's economic problems are hitting the poor hard. - AFP

Iranian Hip Hop







From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


The first group to release an Iranian Rap album was the Los Angeles based group Sandy in the early 1990s. However we can't say who was the first persian rapper, since today every one of them claims to be the first one. The first underground rapper with lyrics and beats worthy of attention was Deev, who introduced soft hip-hop to an Iranians audience, with his political track, "Dasta Bala". Hich-Kas who wrote about life from Tehran (021 area code - e.g "Khoda Pashoo"). Eventually female rappers started to emerge, with Salome (Rapper) known as the first female rapper in Iran. and few others like Pani(rapper) and 2khtar.

There is no real data about who really started Persian Rap, but it’s the talent of many who've contributed to bring it into the mainstream.


History

With the introduction of satellite television in Iran in the early 1990s and world wide recognition of hip hop and its American artists such as 2pac, NWA and Eminem and hiphop found an explosive following among the Iranian youth (mostly born after the Islamic Revolution of 1979).

They started paying attention to the beats and rhythmic lyrics present in hip hop and eventually turned to creating this genre of music in Persian. Soon they turned from rap enthusiasts to poets and rap producers, bringing to light how they saw life as Iranians and what they wanted from the world. They used it as a means of self expression, creating such artists as Daad, Feroo , Deev, Zed Bazi, Hich Kas, Pishro, who each added their own flavor to Iranian hip hop.( a.k.a: Rap Farsi, Rap Fars). Feroo[1] was interested in music since he was a teenager the entered the world of music by learning traditional Iranian music.

The musical instrument which he learns to play first was Santoor after one year he quit learning Santoor and this time he started learning the guitar. After a while he understood that even guitar could not fit the enthusiasm he had for music. Therefore he quite guitar, as well. After two year of the mergence of Persian Rap in Iran FEROO in 2000 decided to try his chance by singing in Rap style. The issued his first understood album in 2002 after he got familiar which the “seven” group.


Information and Media



One of the main ways for Iranian rappers to get their music across the world and out to the Iranian community is with the use of internet. There are many well known Iranian rap websites, such as Persian Hip Hop, Raplarzeh, 021 Music, Bia2Rap and many many more which use the farsi language on their websites.

In addition, Onloq.com, a Hip Hop video social network partly run by Persian-American MC, J. Shah, has been very supportive of the Iranian Hip Hop movement, and has reached out to numbers of Iranian rappers and currently rotates the Hich Kas "Tirippe e Ma" video. The Breakdown TV a show created and transmitted by Onloq even named that video one of the Top 6 of 2006

"Shoe tossing (or shoe flinging)"

How many times have you entered a bad neighborhood and noticed shoes dangling from electrical wires? Have you ever asked how any one could do such a things and what the purpose of it was? If so you are not alone I myself thought like many people that it was gang related. Wikipedia the free online encyclopedia has some interesting facts on this international phenomenon.

According to Wiki Shoe flinging or "shoe flinging" is the American and Canadian practice of throwing shoes whose shoelaces have been tied together so that they hang from overhead wires such as power lines or telephone cables. The shoes are tied together by their laces, and the assembly is apparently then thrown at the wires as a sort of bolas. This practice plays a widespread, though mysterious, role in adolescent folklore in the United States. Shoe flinging has also been reported in Australia, Sweden, France and Norway.

Shoe flinging occurs throughout the United States, in rural as well as in urban areas. Usually, the shoes flung at the wires are sneakers; elsewhere, especially in rural areas, many different varieties of shoes, including leather shoes and boots, also are thrown.

A number of sinister explanations have been proposed as to why this is done. Some say that shoes hanging from the wires advertise a local crack house where crack cocaine is used and sold (in which case the shoes are sometimes referred to as "Crack Tennies"). It can also relate to a place where Heroin is sold to symbolize the fact that once you take Heroin you can never 'leave': a reference to the addictive nature of the drug. Others claim that the shoes so thrown commemorate a gang-related murder, or the death of a gang member, or as a way of marking gang turf.[1]

A newsletter from the mayor of Los Angeles, California cites fears of many Los Angeles residents that "these shoes indicate sites at which drugs are sold or worse yet, gang turf," and that city and utility employees had launched a program to remove the shoes.[2] These explanations have the ring of urban legend to them, especially since the practice also occurs along relatively remote stretches of rural highways that are unlikely scenes for gang murders or crack houses.

Other, less sinister explanations also have been ventured. Some claim that shoes are flung to commemorate the end of a school year, or a forthcoming marriage as part of a rite of passage. It has been suggested that the custom may have originated with members of the military, who are said to have thrown military boots, often painted orange or some other conspicuous color, at overhead wires as a part of a rite of passage upon completing basic training or on leaving the service. Others claim that the shoes are stolen from other people and tossed over the wires as a sort of bullying, or as a practical joke played on drunkards. Others simply say that shoe flinging is a way to get rid of shoes that are no longer wanted, are uncomfortable, or don't fit. It may also be another manifestation of the human instinct to leave their mark on, and decorate, their surroundings.

In the motion picture Wag the Dog, a spin doctor flings shoes into trees as a part of a campaign to call attention to a fictional war hero named Sergeant William Schumann, who was given the nickname "The Old Shoe." In another motion picture, Like Mike, a character is struck by lightning in an attempt to retrieve shoes from a power line, and improbably acquires superpowers as a result.

In fact, shoe flinging is unwise and may cause utility outages. Some people have been killed by electrocution while trying to remove shoes from power lines. Utilities have asked the public to call them instead of trying to remove the shoes themselves.

In some neighborhoods, shoes tied together and hanging from power lines or tree branches signify that someone has died. The shoes belong to the dead person. The reason they are hanging, legend has it, is that when the dead person's spirit returns, it will walk that high above the ground, that much closer to heaven.

Activists in Zimbabwe Suffer Arrests, Beatings

The southern African nation of Zimbabwe is suffering from massive inflation, rampant poverty, and a 90 percent unemployment rate. But when people try to speak out against the situation and the current government under President Robert Mugabe, they say they are subjected to harassment, arrest and even beatings. A reporter for VOA, who must remain anonymous for security reasons, filed this undercover report from Bulawayo.

Ali, Atheism And Islam

"Although she has the credibility of a witness as well as the moral standing of a victim, Hirsi Ali remains a bystander civilian in the great war of our times, whose broadest front is in the global South. That is, she proclaims herself to be an atheist.

Millions of Muslims reportedly convert to Christianity each year, mainly in Africa. Islam is stagnant in Asia while tens of millions become Christian. Yet all the Muslim apostates whose voices we hear are atheists - not only Hirsi Ali, but also Salman Rushdie, the celebrated author of The Satanic Verses, the Syrian poet Adonis, and the pseudonymous Ibn Warraq, author of Why I am not a Muslim and several compendia of Koranic criticism. Why do Muslim apostates gravitate towards atheism?

That is not true of other religions. Many Jewish converts achieved prominence in 20th-century Christianity - for example, the recently deceased Cardinal Danielou of Paris, the martyred Carmelite nun Edith Stein (now canonized), and the great Protestant theologian Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy.

But the name of no prominent Muslim convert to Christianity (much less to Judaism) comes to mind. It is easy to change what we think, but very hard to change how we think. Contrary to superficial impressions, Islam is much closer in character to atheism than to Christianity or Judaism."Spengler continues: "The implication that the West will crush Islam by force [as Ms. Hirsi Ali desires] borders on the absurd. Western armies, to be sure, could make short work of the military forces of any Muslim country, but what would they do then?


Would they order Muslims to abandon their spiritual life in favor of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, the heroes of Hirsi Ali? The West cannot stop Muslims from burning in effigy the editors of a Danish newspaper in their own countries. Secular liberalism, the official ideology of almost all the nations of Western Europe, offers hedonism, sexual license, anomie, demoralization and gradual depopulation. Muslims do not want this. In Africa, Christian missionaries go to Muslims and offer them God's love and the hope of eternal life. But I am aware of no Christian missionaries active in the Muslim banlieue (outskirts) of the Paris suburbs or the Turkish quarters of Berlin. By contrast, there is indeed a war with Islam, and it is being won in parts of the world where Christians wage it on spiritual grounds. No Christian army has had to march in its support. Europe, meanwhile, is losing ground to Islam because it declines to fight. Hirsi Ali, to be sure, sympathizes with Judaism and Christianity, and allows that the two sister religions might be instrumental in countering Islam - but only because they are compatible with secular liberalism.....The pressing question is why Muslim apostates cling to the secular liberalism that has failed so thoroughly in Western Europe.


The trouble is that old habits of mind die slowly. That is not only true of Muslims. The sort of Eastern European Jews who hailed the false messiahs of the 17th century, for example, were attracted to the messianism of Karl Marx. Marxist intellectuals found it easy to convert to the so-called neo-Thomism colored by the Enlightenment rationalism of Francisco Suarez. Bolshevik brawlers in Germany in the 1930s often crossed the line from Red to Brown. And Muslims find it easier to be atheists than to be Christians or Jews."And more: "On the contrary, the absolute transcendence of Allah in the physical world is the cognate of his despotic character as a spiritual ruler, who demands submission and service from his creatures.

The Judeo-Christian God loves his creatures and as an act of love makes them free. Humankind only can be free if nature is rational, that is, if God places self-appointed limits on his own sphere of action. In a world ordered by natural law, humankind through its faculty of reason can learn these laws and act freely. In the alternative case, the absolute freedom of Allah crowds out all human freedom of action, leaving nothing but the tyranny of caprice and fate. The empty and arbitrary world of atheism is far closer to the Muslim universe than the Biblical world, in which God orders the world out of love for humankind, so that we may in freedom return the love that our creator bears for us. Atheism is an alternative to Islam closer to Muslim habits of mind than the love-centered world of Judaism and Christianity.

Hirsi Ali has my unqualified admiration. The courage which guided her journey from Somalia to the Netherlands still prompts her to warn of the dangers before the West at great risk to her own life. I have a similar admiration for Orhan Pamuk, now in virtual exile from his native Turkey, and Rushdie, who remains in danger of a Muslim death warrant, and other Muslim apostates who refuse to be intimidated. Courage, Winston Churchill said, is the first of the virtues, for without it, one does not have the opportunity to exercise the others. Yet it is not the only virtue, and I hope that Hirsi Ali's journey takes her further, beyond atheism."

"Forty Acres and a Gap in Wealth"

In a NYT op-ed, Henry Louis Gates write about "Forty Acres and a Gap in Wealth"

I have been studying the family trees of 20 successful African-Americans, people in fields ranging from entertainment and sports (Oprah Winfrey, the track star Jackie Joyner-Kersee) to space travel and medicine (the astronaut Mae Jemison and Ben Carson, a pediatric neurosurgeon).

And I've seen an astonishing pattern: 15 of the 20 descend from at least one line of former slaves who managed to obtain property by 1920 — a time when only 25 percent of all African-American families owned property.

(HT: Social Science Statistics Blog)

No? Hugo

The New York Times is reporting that the people voters of Venezuela defeated a proposed overhaul to the constitution which had it been passed would have given President Hugo Chávez sweeping new powers.





Report from Caracas Chronicles: “Quico says: Multiple sources inside CNE now confirm it. Chávez’s constitutional reform proposal has been defeated at the polls. An official announcement is imminent.”


Update: Delays, delays, delays.


Daniel at Venezuela News and Views:

Translation: I tried to pull the wool over my citizens eyes and failed.

~The thing about communist dictators is that they don't give up power easily. Chavez will find some way to legitimize his continuing reign, or just say "hell with it" and decide to stay without a vote.The news says he lost. The next couple of days should be interesting. A recount will show he actually won, of course. Or, declare it a null and void election since it was manipulated by the CIA. He will try to work around the vote. Elections in a communist state are for show anyway.