Saturday, February 28, 2009

M.I.A. in the USA: An Oscar for a bin Laden Next?

by Ru Freeman - Published on Saturday, February 21, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
Ru Freeman is an author and activist. Her political journalism and cultural criticism has appeared internationally. Her novel, A Disobedient Girl, will be published in English and in translation in July, 2009.

Mathangi Arulpragasam, who goes by the name M.I.A., has been denied a visa to the enter the United States in the past due to her terrorist connections, but is now a resident of Bedford Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. MIA was nominated for a Grammy and an Oscar for her song on the current flavor of the month, Slumdog Millionaire which is traveling at breakneck speed toward an Oscar flush. She used her segment on Tavis Smiley to make the statement that she is the spokesperson, the only one!, for the Tamils of Sri Lanka, discrediting the thousands of articulate and frankly more informed and far less dubious Tamils who can speak both for Tamils and Sri Lanka, and, with the connivance of Smiley, continued to accuse the Sri Lankan government of engaging in genocide, that it was "trying to make Tamils extinct," that it had "an army of millions" and that Tamils weren't being "allowed to live" in Sri Lanka. Suffice to say that anybody with a computer and internet access - both of which, I'm positive, aren't denied to Mr. Smiley - could have confirmed the ludicrousness of these pronouncements. The UN, UNHCR and the Red Cross, let alone the Sri Lankan government, have released statements regarding the continued terrorism of the LTTE and its murdering of Tamil civilians before they can cross into the safety zones being maintained by the Sri Lankan government and the Red Cross. UN Human Rights reports regarding its forced recruitment of child soldiers and women as well as international aid workers, are also easily accessed.

READ MORE

No comments:

Post a Comment