Idiots in a global village

I remember an ad that came out slightly after the Columbine High School shootings. About the myopic measures that it led to with regard to gun control laws. It said something to the effect of “Kid in trench coat comes in to his school, uses semi-automatics and shotguns and kills children. What did we do? Ban trench coats.”

The Australian Government is up to something similar. Indians, students in particular, get beaten, mugged, attacked, victimised. Instead of doing something about the crime, and cracking down on the criminals and admitting that it’s as racist as anything goes, Oz is instead implementing laws that make it tougher for Indian students to get into Australia. By asking for higher IELTS scores and planning on making prospective students showing/having sufficient funds to see them through their study time without having to work. Instead of taking action and ensuring that Indians are protected, they’re preventing them from coming. And our government isn’t helping the cause either. By pussyfooting around the issue and just about grumbling enough to count as a ‘reaction’. What can one really expect from a government that has twits like our esteemed Minister of State for External Affairs Shashi Tharoor who publicly declares that the attacks on Indian students is purely a domestic issue and there’s nothing India can do about it. When I say twit here I mean it in the sense of someone thoroughly contemptible, not one who twitters (with his foot in his mouth, like the twit mentioned above). Idiots I tell you.

In other news, France wants to ban the burqa. On purely secular grounds. ‘secular’ as it is understood in France, not India. Else it might be taken that Sarkozy is anti-hindu. That’s the thing that should be with ‘secularism’. Not anti anybody or pro anything. Anyways, Sarkozy makes the claim and suddenly the world is up in arms against it. The way a woman dresses and what she chooses to wear should not be dictated by the state. Or anything personal for that matter. I spotted one of the useful idiots of the great Indian intellectual landscape, a lady on not one but two different channels. From being a ‘media person’ on one channel she morphed into a ‘social activist’ on the other. Now this lady is supposedly the face of modern “liberal” Islam. Bleh! Amidst all her railings I can only wonder why no one asks these people why they take such a vocal stand when France does it, but don’t say anything when the whole middle east is telling a woman (and a man) what she should war and not wear. Where the ‘human rights’ that they so trumpet around and uphold on television channels is missing entirely. Like in the case of Roxanne Hillier for example. And this is but the latest of many, and only those that became public. I’m not saying whether Sarkozy is right or not, but how come all this righteous indignation and protests and human rights goobledock and individual freedom of expression speeches are not targeted towards countries that run on Islamic law? Not that running a country by Islamic is wrong per se, but it’s just that everyone knows how liberal or uplifting or free these Islamic laws can be. Idiots I tell you.

Speaking of Islam, spotted hoardings around the city with Obama’s smiling mug on them for some organization handing out free copies of the Koran should you be interested. The ostensible reason is that you might be interested in knowing why Obama is quoting from the Koran. And Obama himself is playing to the field, putting the ‘Hussein’ back in Barack Hussein Obama. Wonder how many people still cling to the illusion that Obama becoming President of the US of A is a step forward for negro, I mean black, I mean African-american emancipation/equality, end of racism etc. Black skin white masks I tell you. Each day and article I read just reaffirms (to me at least) that the very fact that Obama got elected means that racism is well and alive and kicking. And kicking is what the racist Australians are doing to our people down under. Idiots I tell you.

And just for the sake of symmetry, let me end with a story I remember hearing an american theater actor whose name escapes me. On his first visit to Australia he was apparently stopped at the Immigration Counter and after a while an Oz officer came up to him, checked his papers, etc. and sternly asked him, “Any criminal records?” And the actor replied, “Oh! That’s still the essential requirement to be an Australian, is it?”