Smack

I was originally going to post this as a comment to Bryan’s Post, but it became too unweildy.

I must thank Bryan for this link for a number of reasons.

First, It prompted me to finally wikipedia NSFW, which I have seen on Wil’s Blog so many times before, and have consistently wondered what the fuck the SF stood for. Heh. SF. Stood – For.

Secondly, this was an amazing article. Just amazing. I won’t even get into the “what I liked about it”, but suffice it to say that I would like to add this particular Author’s SSG blog to my RSS feed(s). Can you (Bryan) please send me the link? SSG doesn’t seem to have a link back to the parent blog, or I am simply missing something. “His” blog there seems to have ended in 2005. Again, perhaps I am missing something.

Thirdly, I want to represent, a bit. I love this post because it brings a bit of personality and face to what is going on over there (ie: the Middle East in general). I don’t pretend to know or understand a fraction of it, however the one clear vantage I took in while visiting at the end of November was that “these people aren’t terrorists”.

As westerners, we are exposed to our fair share of propoganda. Of course, if you believe otherwise, you have your head in the sand. Just watch CNN and it should be obvious to you that the spooge spewed forth from the CNN mouth is, at best, vomit. But to use an example, you might believe that Al Jazeera is a terrorist media outlet and is funded by terrorists. No, it is not. It is equally outspoken against Middle Eastern factions. And outspoken it is. It is not opinionated, like CNN. It tells the news. It just tells it from both sides, and without opinion, and without hiding from backlash. In fact, most Arabs don’t watch it as they believes it speaks out against their own cause(s).

Our propoganda has us believing that it is “not safe” over there, because we only hear of the car bombs. We only hear of “Bad Hezbollah” and “Good Isreal”. Again, I’m not taking sides. I’m only pointing out that WE DON’T KNOW SHIT about what goes on over there. There are politics. There are people. Millions and millions of people – innocent people like you and I. There is ignorance over there but there is ignorance over here too. And there is a helluva lot more ignorance over here. 330+ million in Canada and the USA who don’t know enough about the politics of the Middle East, and a heckuva lot more politics in the Middle East than in North America.

All I can really say with any certainty is that we collectively need to get our heads out of the sand, stop listening to CNN and start watching Al Jazeera, or lobbying your local restricting body preventing Al Jazerra English from being broadcast here. Or start surfing the web for posts like this, which again I must thank Bryan for bringing to my attention.

The world is still in its infancy and it will eventually grow up. We all need to have a broader and more tolerant perspective to help get it there.

If you enjoyed this post, please go here and watch the video link titled “Ellison plays down Quran flap”.  If you don’t know what this is about, read this first. And yes, I know I basically said above to not watch CNN. I actually went there looking for propoganda bullshit against Canada, but found this immediately and decided to post about this instead. And I’m too lazy to find a non-CNN link. I didn’t say CNN was all-evil. Sheesh.