The dilemma of being a Muslim-American- you are presumed guilty unless proven innocent.

Your intimate family and friends are in the pay of the NSA (and so are you). It is a re-run of the East Germans and the Stasi- mothers spying on kids and the like.

Arun Kundnani has written a book on Islamophobia that highlights many aspects of what it means to be a Muslim in America today.
….
How come when we talk
about spying we don’t talk about the lives of ordinary people being
spied upon? While we have been rightly outraged at the government’s
warehousing of troves of data, we have been less interested in the
consequences of mass surveillance for those most affected by it – such
as Muslim Americans.

In writing my book
on Islamophobia and the War on Terror, I spoke to dozens of Muslims,
from Michigan to Texas and Minnesota to Virginia. Some told me about
becoming aware their mosque was under surveillance only after
discovering an FBI informant had joined the congregation. Others spoke
about federal agents turning up at colleges to question every student
who happened to be Muslim. All of them said they felt unsure whether
their telephone calls to relatives abroad were wiretapped or whether
their emails were being read by government officials.

These
are the types of people whom the National Security Agency can suspect
of being two “hops” away from targets. These are the types of “bad guys”
referred to by outgoing NSA director Keith Alexander.
Ten years ago, around 100,000 Arabs and Muslims in America had some
sort of national security file compiled on them. Today, that number is
likely to be even higher.

A study
published last year by the Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition
documented the effects of this kind of mass surveillance. In targeted
communities, a culture of enforced self-censorship takes hold and
relationships of trust start to break down. As one interviewee said:
“You look at your closest friends and ask: are they informants?”

Underpinning all
the surveillance of Muslim Americans is an assumption that Islamic
ideology is linked to terrorism. Yet, over the last 20 years, far more
people have been killed in acts of violence by right-wing extremists
than by Muslim American citizens or permanent residents. The huge
numbers being spied upon are not would-be terrorists but law-abiding
people, some of whom have “radical” political opinions that still ought
to be protected by the First Amendment to the constitution. Just the
same, there are plenty of other minority Americans who are not would-be
“home-grown” terrorists – but they still live in fear that they might be
mistaken as one.

So let’s reform the NSA and its countless collections. But let’s not forget the FBI’s reported 10,000 intelligence analysts working on counter-terrorism and the 15,000 paid informants helping them do it. Let’s not forget the New York Police Department’s intelligence and counter-terrorism division with its 1,000 officers, $100m budget and vast program of surveillance.

Let’s not forget the especially subtle psychological terror of being
Muslim in America, where, sure, maybe your phone calls won’t be stored
for much longer, but there’s a multitude of other ways you’re always
being watched.
….
regards

The (chinese) tiger mother pride defeats the California Democratic machine.

That said congratulations are premature. As far as Asian Americans are concerned, the problem of being whiter than whites is that one day the whites will get wise and ask: dude where is my uni seat? That day may have been postponed but it is coming. Proportional representation (aka quotas) is a powerful weapon in the hands of the less privileged (as also seen in India). Be very afraid.

And as far as black/hispanic pressure groups the real target was falling populations at UC Berkeley and UCLA. However they ignore (perhaps intentionally) that the famous two are now admitting more poor students and that is a worthy target as well.

…
Democrats in California are in a state of shock at the defeat of their
effort to reinstate racial preferences in university admissions….The state Senate approved a measure 27-9 to ask voters in
November to overturn the ban. Little did it expect the backlash that ensued.

California’s politically sleepy Asian-American community, in defiance of its
own civil
rights leaders, mounted a massive grassroots campaign to kill the measure.
It made phone calls, wrote letters, blanketed the airwaves. Ultimately, not
only did the Assembly abandon the proposal, but three Asian senators who
originally supported the measure reversed themselves.

The liberal idea of racial justice is proportional representation under
which each group is represented in proportion to its population at universities
and other institutions. The whole point of scrapping Prop 209 is to hand
university officials the power to ignore student test scores and grades to
create a more balanced student body based on racial criteria.

Setting aside the moral objections to putting groups rather than individuals
at the heart of a scheme of social justice, such racial balancing is profoundly
at odds with Asian-American interests. They represent the single largest ethnic
group among the University of California’s 173,000 undergraduates. They form
about 14 percent of the Golden State’s population, but in 2008, they constituted 40 percent of the student body at
University of California, Los Angeles, and 43 percent at University of
California, Berkeley — California’s most selective public universities — as
well as 50 percent at University of California, San Diego and 54 percent at
University of California, Irvine. They had an admission rate of 73 percent compared to 63 percent
of all in-state applicants last year.

Trying to perform a racial balancing act in a country that was neatly
divided into two groups — the white discriminators and the black discriminated
— was one thing. But pulling it off in a diverse country with diverse groups
with diverse histories and diverse interests is quite another. 

regards

‘As the third son of a Scottish landowner, Forbes needed to make his fortune elsewhere and like many ambitious young men, he went to India to do just that. 

‘When Forbes arrived in the Bombay Presidency he employed a housekeeper, Eliza Kewark. They had three children, one of whom, Catherine or Kitty, was the ancestress of Princess Diana.’

With the full article it shows just how serendipitous it that Eliza’s daughters go on that in this rising Asian age the British King will have a substantial Asian link.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2341437/Williams-Indian-ancestry-DNA-tests-future-monarch-clear-genetic-line-country-mothers-side.html#ixzz2veFzxMJW
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Ironically the current Jacobite heir at the moment (who genealogically have a better claim to the British throne than the current British Royal family) is the Second in Line to the Throne of Lichtenstein. It seems Europe’s Royal Families and Aristocracies are mind-numbingly inter-linked.

One needs to tread carefully because the upper management (and much of the brown elite world) happens to be sympathetic to this argument (the rest are gung-ho for a Mao like great man- out of the boiling pots of human flesh the next Spartas will emerge). But to be fair, having whites as stewards of browns is not a bad way for brown leaders (and brown populations) to avoid responsibility. Also, it must be said, the (proposed) new rest of UK flag (minus Scotland) looks really nice.

A few quibbles before we jump into the white-waters. First off, much as we despise Mugabe and Museveni, Marxism and Christianity, which are singled out for their ill effects, took specially strong root in brown land via the earnest efforts of white men who were eager to lift brown people out of darkness. We can hardly fault brown-folks now if they have learned their lessons too well and decide to stay faithful to their borrowed tenets.

Also it seems (to a neutral observer) that you have to take the good with the bad (just like the colonial project itself). While one set of white bible-peddlers helped cover breasts in Kerala, another set of WBPs are helping to expose necks in Uganda (in a non-erotic manner). And marxism is good (if for nothing else) for scaring the shit out of crony capitalism, all the trees in central India would have probably disappeared in the absence of the Red Army.

The author engages in a bit of white-washing as well. Australia (also NZ) was not really empty space settled by British emigrants, there did exist a native population which was wiped out with or without deliberate malice. That such a fate escaped India was not for a lack of trying (large fractions of population under white rule perished with regular frequency, for some reason this phenomena stopped post-1947).

To end on a positive note, the author does admit that (baby) George cant do it all by himself, he will need an (adult) Mandela by his side. Just like Gandhi was considered a recruiting agent for the British-Indian army to fight WWI on behalf of their colonial masters. Amidst all the confusion that is state-craft these days, it is always a good practice to underline the obvious.

I must admit to being something of a Commonwealth sceptic. The way
Britain largely abandoned the organisation of its former colonies and
dominions when it joined Europe in 1973 was, to many of us, utterly
shameful. Blood is thicker than water, however, and when one experiences
the importance of democratic values — as one does when talking to a
Commonwealth people who live under threat of invasion and within earshot
of sabre-rattling — it is rather humbling.


 
The British government these days certainly does take the
Commonwealth seriously. This may be partly an effect of the mounting
disillusion with Europe, but it is also because of a new recognition
that the ties of shared history binding the Commonwealth count for
something significant in an increasingly unstable world.  

This is also
true in Australia, a country infinitely larger and more populous than
the Falklands, but built on the same values and a common pioneer spirit.
A recent poll showed that support for the idea of a republic in
Australia has fallen by 15 per cent since the referendum of 1999,
suggesting that the Anglo-Saxon notion of a constitutional monarch and a
non-political head of state continues to hold great attraction even in
the 21st century.


 
But before one gets carried away on a tide of nostalgic affection for
the idea of the Commonwealth, one should pause to consider the
fragility of the institution itself. Word is that behind the scenes at
the last Heads of Government Meeting in Sri Lanka in the autumn of 2013
there were some fraught discussions based not on cultural
misunderstandings but on sheer cultural differences between some of the
players.  

One is loath to talk about a ‘white Commonwealth’, but there
does seem, with certain important exceptions, to be a measure of
polarisation between those countries that were settled by British
emigrants and those that were conquered and colonised by them.


 
Zimbabwe was suspended from the club for serial human rights
violations under the Mugabe regime in 2002; and it chose to leave the
organisation altogether in 2003, determined not to accept the view that
other nations had of it. Since then certain other black African
countries have lobbied relentlessly to allow its readmission, despite
the evidence that nothing much has changed in Zimbabwe, and will not do
so until Mugabe (who has just celebrated his 90th birthday) has gone to
the final reckoning. 

One of those interceding on Mugabe’s behalf is Jacob Zuma, whose own
conduct of office in South Africa increasingly leaves much to be
desired: Nelson Mandela he is not. South Africa is seen as increasingly
corrupt, cronyist, dangerous and authoritarian, and it sits increasingly
uncomfortably within a Commonwealth template of advancing democracy,
civilisation and political integrity.

It would be fatal for the Commonwealth to become polarised between
‘white’ and ‘black’ countries, not least because some nations whose
rulers are not of Anglo-Saxon descent behave perfectly reasonably and
honourably. Yet there is a growing challenge as some nations within the
family behave in a fashion unacceptable in polities such as Australia,
Britain, Canada or New Zealand.  

At the end of February Yoweri Museveni,
the president of Uganda, signed into law a Bill making homosexuality
(which was already illegal) and same-sex marriages crimes punishable by
life sentences, and the promotion of homosexuality a crime carrying a
still heavy sentence of seven years. Hitherto such sanctions as existed
applied only to men: now lesbians will feel the force of the law too.
After the furore surrounding President Putin’s homophobic policies in
the context of the Sochi Winter Olympics, it will be hard for the
Commonwealth to turn a blind eye to Uganda locking up people for life
because they are homosexual; we must wait and see.


 
In an ideal world, an institution such as the Commonwealth would lead
all its members along the path to enlightenment. The most significant
country in this respect is India, which has become progressively more
westernised as it has put its considerable economic and human capital to
work on becoming one of the great business success stories of the 21st
centuries. Without considerable leadership from the non-white
Commonwealth, extending the values of Australians, Britons and
Falklanders into parts where they hitherto have not reached may be
problematic at best, and impossible at worst. 

Had South Africa produced
another Mandela, he — or she — would have had this leadership role,
because (other than Pakistan, which has nightmares all of its own) the
part of the Commonwealth where those values are most under threat is the
collection of Britain’s former colonies and possessions in Africa. It
used to be called the white man’s burden; but in the interests of good
government, liberty, prosperity and decent human rights it can no longer
be his alone.

regards