Support Docuseries "What Happened to Rap?" on Unjust Incarceration of Imam Jamil Al-Amin

 Trailer on Vimeo

Consider donating to support completion of the docuseries "What Happened to Rap?"

Review: 36 Seconds: Portrait of a Hate Crime by Tarek Albaba

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I watched 36 Seconds: Portraity of a Hate Crime by Tarek Albaba via the NYC Film Festival, where it is available for streaming through November 26, 2023.

Recommendation: Documentary "An Act of Worship" by Nausheen Dadabhoy

Nausheen Dadabhoy's documentary An Act of Worship uses Muslim-Americans' home movies, documentary clips of newsworth events, interviews with Muslims and a board where handwritten post-it notes with events which impacted the lives of Muslim-Americans to show the forces Muslim-Americans confront living in the United States. The film is available on PBS's show POV, and it is available for free online through January 16, 2023.

Lessons for Muslims from "Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation" by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

 

Kristin Kobes Du Mez provides answers in Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation to those who wondered why the vast majority of self-identified Christian evangelicals supported the publicly vulgar & openly sinful Donald Trump for President of the United States in the 2016 election cycle. Historians like Du Mez and Kevin Kruse claim that the answer to this apparent dilemma lies in decades of United States history. While Kevin Kruse emphasized oligarchs' fear of organized labor and social welfare programs and communism, Du Mez emphasized the misogynistic, white supremacist messaging in support of overseas imperialism and domestic patriarchy. I encourage readers to benefit from both books. I encourage Muslim readers to ponder the following questions:

Recommendation: "The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap" by Mehrsa Baradaran

 

I remember adding Mehrsa Baradaran's book The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap to my reading list after watching the movie The Banker on Apple TV+, which mentioned the book in the credits.*

This book flushes out in great detail arguments you should have ready when your anti-black family members, friends and acquaintances casually say things like, "This is a good neighborhood, there are no blacks here," or "We came here with nothing, now look at how well we're doing. If blacks are poor, it must be their fault."

Baradaran examines different periods of USA history after the end of its civil war and abolition of slavery.** In each period, compensation to the enslaved peoples and their descendants is rejected in favor of half-measures which cost the state nothing and produce only symbolic and psychological benefits. And "half-measures" is hardly the right word in most instances. We need phrases such as quarter, eighth, one-sixteenth measures.

Review: The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism by Katherine Stewart

Katherine Stewart, author of The Good News Club: The Christian Right's Stealth Assault on American's Children, which I reviewed earlier, explores how Christian Nationalists have gained influence & power in various areas of life in the United States and elsewhere since the mid-1970s. As such The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism goes beyond Good News Club to place this threat to liberal democracy in a broader historical context and therefore should rise to a high priority in your "to-read" list.


A book with similar themes is Kevin Kruse's One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America.

While there is important information in this book, I disagree with the author's exhortation in epilogue to vote harder. While voting is a tool, the USA's and the world's veering towards fascism isn't going to stop because liberals win an election here or there.

Free Imam Jamil al-Amin - Panelists Discuss Prospects for Release - Via The Dope Muslim Woman Podcast

I urge you to sign a petition calling for a retrial. Listen to a message from his son Kairi Al-Amin.

Review: How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood by Peter Moskowitz

I attended a trade show in New Orleans or Baton Rouge a year or two after Katrina. There's plenty of down time at trade shows when I would exchange small talk with the people manning neighboring booths. One person shocked me by telling me that the flooding had the silver lining of cleaning out the city. I didn't understand at the time that what he meant was that it would facilitate capitalists' exploitation of the space previously occupied by displaced black residents of the city, whom he and policy makers at all levels viewed as expendable at best and liabilities at worst.

Peter Moskowitz's book How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood wants people to understand the following:

• Gentrification isn't an inevitable or natural process. Students of capitalism have long ago noted why, if unchecked, it would occur, but human societies don't have to choose to follow capital's dictates.
• In the United States, racist policies have ensured that the negative impacts of housing crises fall on black and brown people.
• Policy makers at the federal, state and municipal levels have adopted gentrification & suburbanization as vehicles for economic growth and have subsidized these processes.

Comments on "To the Far Right Christian Hater...You Can Be a Good Speller or a Hater, But You Can't Be Both" by Bonnie Weinstein

I read To the Far Right Christian Hater ... You Can Be a Good Speller or a Hater, but You Can't Be Both by Bonnie Weinstein in a book club I organized as a member of the local chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. It consists of hate messages sent to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), occasionally accompanied by a pithy rejoinder from the author, who is married to the organization's founder, Mikey Weinstein.

While the Establishment Clause of the USA Constitution has brought this society many benefits, some of which I've mentioned elsewhere, this book can open eyes to the dangers the continuation of the Global War on Terror (GWOT), in its neoconservative Bush-the-Small iteration or its neoliberal Obama iteration or its 45 Regime kill all non-whites iteration.

Review: The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War by Eilleen Welsome

Eileen Welsome's The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War should be a cautionary tale for all people considering scientific and technological solutions to grave problems. People in authority -- intelligent, ambitious, competent, hard-working people who talk well, smell good and love their children -- will always place their goals above the harms their actions do to people they consider less consequential. As humanity approaches the cliff of the climate catastrophe, many beneficiaries of greenhouse gas emitting economic activities will propose technological remedies with unknown and unknowable consequences, and you can be sure that these proposals' main feature is they keep the people on top in the same relative position of privilege.

Welsome's book is like a compilation of "long-read" articles describing various aspects of the United States's military's dealings with nuclear energy during the development of the first atomic bomb and through the next few decades as it attempted to find tactical uses for nuclear weapons.

Review: "Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment" by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

I first heard about Professor Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's book Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment on either Black Agenda Radio or On Contact with Christ Hedges.

I've never liked guns. People I know died by suicide with a gun or accident. A stranger pointed a gun at me in a road rage incident when I was a teenager. And, when I fired guns at a shooting range, the extent to which I liked it frightened me. On my social media, I follow and promote @Well_Regulated_, which publicizes tragic incidences of uses of firearms in the United States. I tell people I support "smart" gun control, which in my mind means requiring registration of weapons, restricting sales of weapons & munitions designed to kill masses of people and stripping rights to weapons from particular classes of convicted criminals, such as domestic violence offenders.

Review: American Hate: Survivors Speak Out by Arjun Singh Sethi (ed.)

Arjun Singh Sethi's volume consists of his introduction and conclusion and thirteen accounts by victims of hate crimes and/or their surviving relatives. A web site accompanies the book.

I've never met Professsor Arjun, but he was kind enough to consult in the case of a hate crime in my city.

Even though I'd heard about most of the thirteen cases, the power of the testimonials still overwhelmed me. I had not adequately considered the long-term effects of these crimes on their immediate victims, and many of the initial media accounts did not include poignant details revealed in this volume.

Hey Creative People! Is it the right time for a remake of "The Prisoners of Quai Dong" by Victor Kolpacoff?

My local public library regularly removes books from its shelves for a variety of reasons. I purchased about 15 boxes of books through the Friends of the Library, a volunteer organization which sells these books to fund efforts to support the public libraries in my city. I've sold, exchanged and given away most of the books in those 15 boxes. Recently, I received an order through my Amazon store for The Prisoners of Quai Dong by Victor Kolpacoff. Before fulfilling the order, I read the book. I can't do a proper review of it, but I wanted to give you creative people out there a heads up that this book may be a productive basis for a play or movie or a graphic novel.

Review: "The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder" by Vincent Bugliosi

I had started listening to the audio narration of The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder by Vincent Bugliosi several years ago and never finished it. My new car has a working CD player, and I remembered I had 3 more discs from this book, so I finished them driving around town over the last week.

Even though I lived through the events of George the Small's years in the White House, this book reminded me how bad he was and how much he deserves punishment for the criminal wars he pursued. If you are like me and you've forgotten or you are too young to know, it's worth a read.

But more importantly, he ends the book discussing the cultural changes he saw in the United States which allowed for the election of George the Small and the popularity he enjoyed for most of his rule. Now some of this is simply an aged curmudgeon (he hates rap music), but there are some points congruent with a book I reviewed earlier about the erosion of literacy.

Review: "The Holy Vote: The Politics of Faith in America" by Ray Suarez

The Holy Vote: The Politics of Faith in America by Ray Suarez is a good introduction to policy discussions with religious claims in the United States in 2006, the time of the book's publication. Some of those issues have waned and new ones have arisen, and, if you've read other books I've reviewed on this blog under the tag Establishment Clause, you may not find these chapters exciting.

Mr. Suarez's style, in this age of bombastic partisanship, is frustratingly documentarian. He includes lengthy quotes from people whose positions he opposes. He avoids snarky rejoinders. Maybe his long years at the United States Public Broadcasting System, which depends on funding from the government and thus must garner support from many diverse sectors of our nation, have increased his ability to listen respectfully to others beyond that of those who publish in ideological Internet news sites, corporate media and crazy, egotistical bloggers like myself!

Quotes from Ralph Ellison's "The Invisible Man"

Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man is the best English language novel I've read, IMO. How I've considered myself well-read this long without having read it is to my shame. I consider it a decolonization novel for black people of the United States (and hence for all other marginalized groups here). The unnamed narrator goes through a Ulysses-like odyssey in search of personal power and individual and collective liberation, growing and learning through each betrayal and cul-de-sac.

Film: Rosevelt's America by Roger Weisberg & Tod Lending

Rosevelt's America is a 25-minute documentary film about Liberian refugee Roosevelt Henderson's struggles in Chicago earning enough to support his family. During this period, his wife was attempting to leave Liberia with their newborn child to join her husband and elder children.

At a time when the United States turns away hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers from other parts of the Americas and politicians are competing with each other to make entrance of Syrian, Iraqi and Afghani refugees more difficult, this film is an important resource to educate the public.

Radio Islam Show Features Steve Downs, Coleen Rowley & Marcy Wheeler to Discuss War on Terror & Orlando Shooting

Here are the show notes:

In this Radio Islam segment we'll explore what FBI entrapment cases entail and loop it back to the Orlando shooting. See more at: www.radioislam.com/node/5168 Host: Gerald Hankerson Guest: Steve Downs, Founding Member of Project SALAM Guest: Coleen Rowley, Former FBI Agent Guest: Marcy Wheeler, Blogger/Journalist on the Empty Wheel

Review: Bad Faith: When Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine by Paul Offit

Bad Faith: When Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine by Paul A. Offit (Twitter)

Dr. Offit reviews a series of incidents in which children died of treatable illnesses due to the pursuit of their guardians or parents of spiritual healing through supplication in lieu of standard medical practice. He then gives an interpretation of Christianity which rejects spiritual healing as a substitute for medicine. Then he provides an overview of the historically recent development of state protection of children from abuse by their parents and guardians. Finally, he discusses efforts to proscribe and punish parents and guardians who fail to provide standard medical care to the children in their care and resistance by some religious groups which led to religious exemptions to these anti-neglect laws.

The organization of the book makes for a logical progression to Dr. Offit's call for an end to all religious exemptions to laws designed to protect minors.

Documentary - Kareem: Minority of One

In November 2015, HBO released a documentary, Kareem: A Minority of One, about the National Basketball Association star Kareem Abdul Jabbar. If you are a sports fan or interested in the biography of a prominent Muslim-American, you really should check this out. It even has footage of Bruce Lee, with whom Kareem had formed a friendship!

Many of Kareem's problems in his personal life, including estrangement from his parents, stemmed from his commitment to following a religious path set out for him by Hamaas Abdul Khaalis, leader of the self-described Hanafi Muslims. Only as he began to make decisions for himself did his spiritual life and relationships become as rich as his professional life.

You can follow Kareem on Twitter. He also has a website.