> It was the first time that Smaker realized that her film might be controversial. “She hadn’t seen the film,” Smaker recalls, “but seemed unhappy that I — as a non-Muslim — was making a film about Muslims.” After she saw it, Chehab went on to write on the TRT World website: “The only perspective needed is the Muslim one. . . . When I, a practicing Muslim woman, say that this film is problematic, my voice should be stronger than a white woman saying that it isn’t.”
I would encourage folks to resist seeing this as “white versus brown” or “Muslim versus non-Muslim.” Identity politics is not sectarian politics—groups of people with common interests aligning against other groups with different interests. It’s about using identity as currency in politics.
Note the phrasing: “the Muslim [view] … my voice.” The same people who say they don’t want white people to speak also usually don’t want other Muslims, with different viewpoints, to speak either. What she wants to do is to speak for Muslims—use them as silent weight to bolster her own point of view.
I agree, especially because there is no "muslim view" actually here since they disagree.
That said it is important to keep in mind that the biggest defenders or retarded practices are often the ones victim of it. Same for excision in Africa.. its often the grandmother who take the little girls to the "doctor" to have it "performed".. so its not a generality
I will refrain from commenting on the specifics of this situation. But I’m curious if the logical fallacy of appealing to group authority is a new rhetorical tactic or simply an old one that we’ve leaned into. Nixon’s appeal to the silent majority a generation ago sounds quite similar.
Perhaps the difference is that the old tactic did not tell one group to “shut up” as the newer tactics did. Did Nixon do that? I’m too young to remember
I'm writing this as an Iranian immigrant, and feel compelled to say so because it is apparently and depressingly necessary in order to lend legitimacy to my statements (though I don't think it does).
The idea that a white American can't understand non-white non-American views, makes the same amount of sense the other way around. Both ways around need a great deal of research by the ones trying to understand, and I believe she's tried her best.
I'll go even further and say that she understands some things better than those in the culture she's covering, since she's an outside observer, giving her some objectivity that those inside can't have. I know I have this with the particular "white" culture I'm integrating into right now.
I will say that there are some things she'll find difficult to impossible to grasp -- and might not even realise she's missing -- but to say she's not even allowed to try belittles us as human beings. This exclusionary race mentality can go away.
Even if the film was made by a non-white non-American muslim, the implication of their reasoning would be that any white/American/non-muslim wouldn’t be able to properly understand the film.
This comes close to denying that there can ever be an understanding between cultures at all.
It is peculiar how the segregationist isolationists and cancel-culture-peddlers use exactly the same lines of reasoning, while 1 gets tagged as racist and the other a radically anti-racist.
It is about time for people to look at the core ethics that guide either thought and at least draw the association between the two. What to name this collective community is anyone's guess, but at least the cognitive dissonance will be gone.
To aspire to understand each other is at the core of facilitating diversity and inclusion. That includes asking stupid questions, difficult questions and sometimes offensive questions. It includes tolerating faux pas and cultural appropriation.
And lastly, it requires treating other communities with the capacity for occasionally just as much good and at other times just as much malice as any other community suffering from the human condition.
Luckily you posted this anonymously because if your name was ever tied to a comment like this, you'd face the wrath of the woke mob. Your comment is extremely benign as far as "right-wing" comments go, but if you would've posted this on your company Slack, you'd be crucified.
Thank you for posting this. Many of us agree with you.
The article is written by Sebastian Junger, an author and documentary-maker who co-directed Restrepo with Tim Hetherington. He also used to own a bar in Manhattan called The Half King.
When Hetherington was killed in 2011, The Half King was soon filled with Hetherington's incredible war photography, which was an odd thing to look at if you were there for a quick pint after work, but a good way to remember an incredible photojournalist.
I almost stopped listening pretty early on because she was all over the place with her talking points, but am really glad I listened to the end. It was a fascinating and moving story.
Tangentially related is the recently rebroadcasted episode with Yasmine Mohammed, who wrote the book "Unveiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam". Related to the woke mob losing it's sanity when it comes to Islam and specifically relevant to the recent Iranian protests.
I heard about this first from Sam Harris’ podcast. Then went to the go fund me, and Harris gave $25k! I’m not sure why she doesn’t run a kick starter as well. I’d pay to get a digital download of the movie.
The adulation towards voluntary segregation disturbs me. I can't help but explain this queer desire as some sort of side effect of the various "bans" against discrimination. As best I can tell, regardless of circumstance or intent, there is a fundamental hunger for sameness, and the exclusion of otherness.
I don't see that as good or bad, but merely a confusion of ideas counter to everything the world seems to bombard and repeat and echo, on some kind of loop.
I just wish everyone would make up their mind and move on with living.
People never changed their attitudes, they just updated their language and their branding. In every era and in every identity group you have your MLK's and your Malcolm X's.
You know, I'm reminded of a topic that I brought up with some friends of mine just the other day.
I hope this doesn't come off as sounding "preachy" since I've been warned by the mods in the past for "preaching". I think it does fit the topic though:
"Food will not make us acceptable to God. We are not inferior if we don’t eat, and we are not better if we do eat. But be careful that this right of yours in no way becomes a stumbling block to the weak."
1 Corinthians 8:8-9 (HCSB)
I see it as something to the affect of, no matter what time we look at the world, posturing of some sort, over some reason, carries an inherent risk of: belittling those who do not do as we do, while artificially glorifying our own position, through a means of self-defined terms and metrics. That there is a push to not just to do what is right because it is right, but instead to do what is right because of how it makes us appear.
I think that there is a matter of arrogance, pride, and glory that each of us needs to struggle with on our own terms, to find a means to humble ourselves and show humility to others. Some way of reminding ourselves that our "greatness" (good + extra works) is merely a thing that is defined by some arbitrary, outside force of what is right. Instead, we raise ourselves up because of whatever stick we use to measure by.
I'm not even sure if the people who enact this kind of rhetoric perceive their own actions in the heat of the moment. There is a sort of self-induced high we get through "going the extra mile" by insisting on be not just right, but extra right.
I hope that makes sense. It's hard to really put into words; it sounds kind of pseudo-intelectual. I just mean something like: if a man is sitting in a chair, he is not raised up off the floor just because he pulls upward from the legs of the chair. I think it's a thing we're all prone to doing. It really seems to be a matter of recognizing the risks of that thing, and being able to say "I was wrong" and turn away from it when we finally see the error.
I hope that the sorts who push for this voluntary segregation stuff do see the severe error in it. I guess I just still have some kind of twinge of regret in even holding them accountable for it, because I have absolutely tried to posture myself as better than everyone else many times, for very little reason or incentive - I just had the luck of it not making it to a national/international spotlight.
Freedom of association is a freedom many (most?) people like and practice all the time, by peacefully self-sorting (interests, beliefs, consumption choices, moving to new place). "The Big Sort" etc.
Though it does seem almost schizophrenic that everyone preaches the opposite as the highest virtue, while doing it.
Some groups and even countries do it more than others.
Sounds like it isn't a "woke mob" coming after her, but the actual subjects of the film really feel like they're being taken advantage of, their perspectives are really distorted and they felt she was re-interrogating them. The idea that the film is being cancelled solely because the filmmaker is a white woman seems to be being pushed by the filmmaker.
It doesn't seem obvious to me that we should happily censor a film because the subjects of the film don't like it.
Suppose we did a film about the Sackler family https://www.hulu.com/series/the-crime-of-the-century-63a06ef... and the Sackler family says they don't like it -- they feel they were misrepresented, and claim they didn't consent to participation, despite having signed consent documents. Is that legitimate grounds to censor the film?
Some may feel that the Sackler situation is different. You might see the Sackler family as known "oppressors" and "bad guys". And you might see Guantánamo detainees as "victims of oppression" -- perhaps you even think they're "good guys".
I don't think this argument works -- it is exactly through documentaries such as this that we can form accurate opinions about who is a "good guy" or "bad guy"; who is the "oppressor" vs "victim of oppression". If we allow anyone claiming to be a "victim of oppression" to censor stuff that makes them look bad, that just serves to lock in our current views regarding who is a "victim of oppression" -- which means we won't be able to update those views as more evidence comes in, or as circumstances on the ground change.
If someone doesn't like a documentary that was made about them, they can do a point-by-point refutation. Censorship doesn't seem like a good solution.
It isn't being censored. Private institutions like film festivals shouldn't be compelled to show it if they find that they agree more with the petition by the subjects of the film. Other institutions can show it if they like. That is just freedom of association.
I think you're missing the point. The point is not about who's a good guy and who's a bad guy, who's a victim or an oppressor; it's about honesty.
If you do an adversary investigation about the Sacklers, using public footage or even private conversations that you obtained without them participating in any way, then sure you don't have to care about what they think.
But if you do a documentary where you ask for your subjects' help, then you owe them something, and the least you can do is not exploit or spin their testimony to fit a specific point of view -- esp. a point of view they would discover after the fact. That's a betrayal.
(I don't know if that applies to the film in question, which I haven't seen.)
The facts of the Sackler family's behavior are well known and do not need a documentary to reveal them, a documentary merely provides more depth and context so you can form your own picture of the complete person or the nuances of their behavior. It is pretty reasonable to decide that they are "bad guys" without ever watching a documentary about them.
The flipside is also quite reasonable here. I don't need to watch a documentary in order to decide that people horribly abused in American prisons are victims, the facts are pretty clear on that. (A bad person can, also, for reference, be a victim simultaneously.)
As for whether a point-by-point refutation is the best and only remedy, that seems to require that the victim automatically have access to the resources necessary to air their refutation where viewers of the documentary will see it. Will the National Review bump an opinion column by a Republican senator in order to publish an opinion column by a Muslim detainee instead? "The remedy for speech is more speech" style defenses assume that everyone has equal access to speech and everyone's speech will be heard equally. Neither of those are true when we're talking about released films.
The world is in fact full of examples where victims are defamed in public and are not offered a real opportunity to refute it, in some cases in fact in the National Review, which published this piece. I think it's generally fine that things work that way, but you need to keep it in mind when making arguments of the sort.
When there’s an open letter signed by lots of people who are guaranteed to be woke (documentary filmmakers!!), few of which have actually seen the film, how is that not a woke mob?
In the Sam Harris podcast Making Sense the director clears up the claim made by the guardian. If you’re interested in getting a better factual grounding on this issue I would recommend listen to it. In addition, the NYT article shows many inaccurate steps like the guardians and others took when writing about a film they hadn’t seen and simply passed along the protested opinion of others who they themselves didn’t see the film.
The National Review was a loud mouthpiece for the politicians promoting the war on terror, including the use of enhanced-interrogation-teqniues-don’t-call-it-torture. A piece of that national shame is all theirs.
I guess it’s nice they don’t seem to support it anymore, but it looks more like a shift of convenience to me — the better to stroke the current conservative narrative to redefine “free speech” so as to cast speech they dislike as “cancellation”, that it can be repressed while still claiming to own the moral high-ground.
Readit News
I would encourage folks to resist seeing this as “white versus brown” or “Muslim versus non-Muslim.” Identity politics is not sectarian politics—groups of people with common interests aligning against other groups with different interests. It’s about using identity as currency in politics.
Note the phrasing: “the Muslim [view] … my voice.” The same people who say they don’t want white people to speak also usually don’t want other Muslims, with different viewpoints, to speak either. What she wants to do is to speak for Muslims—use them as silent weight to bolster her own point of view.
That said it is important to keep in mind that the biggest defenders or retarded practices are often the ones victim of it. Same for excision in Africa.. its often the grandmother who take the little girls to the "doctor" to have it "performed".. so its not a generality
Deleted Comment
The idea that a white American can't understand non-white non-American views, makes the same amount of sense the other way around. Both ways around need a great deal of research by the ones trying to understand, and I believe she's tried her best.
I'll go even further and say that she understands some things better than those in the culture she's covering, since she's an outside observer, giving her some objectivity that those inside can't have. I know I have this with the particular "white" culture I'm integrating into right now.
I will say that there are some things she'll find difficult to impossible to grasp -- and might not even realise she's missing -- but to say she's not even allowed to try belittles us as human beings. This exclusionary race mentality can go away.
This comes close to denying that there can ever be an understanding between cultures at all.
It is about time for people to look at the core ethics that guide either thought and at least draw the association between the two. What to name this collective community is anyone's guess, but at least the cognitive dissonance will be gone.
To aspire to understand each other is at the core of facilitating diversity and inclusion. That includes asking stupid questions, difficult questions and sometimes offensive questions. It includes tolerating faux pas and cultural appropriation.
And lastly, it requires treating other communities with the capacity for occasionally just as much good and at other times just as much malice as any other community suffering from the human condition.
We need more dialogue between cultures, not less.
Thank you for posting this. Many of us agree with you.
When Hetherington was killed in 2011, The Half King was soon filled with Hetherington's incredible war photography, which was an odd thing to look at if you were there for a quick pint after work, but a good way to remember an incredible photojournalist.
Incredibly sad, but fantastic interview.
https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/298...
[1] https://www.gofundme.com/f/the-unredacted-jihad-rehab
I don't see that as good or bad, but merely a confusion of ideas counter to everything the world seems to bombard and repeat and echo, on some kind of loop.
I just wish everyone would make up their mind and move on with living.
I hope this doesn't come off as sounding "preachy" since I've been warned by the mods in the past for "preaching". I think it does fit the topic though:
"Food will not make us acceptable to God. We are not inferior if we don’t eat, and we are not better if we do eat. But be careful that this right of yours in no way becomes a stumbling block to the weak."
1 Corinthians 8:8-9 (HCSB)
I see it as something to the affect of, no matter what time we look at the world, posturing of some sort, over some reason, carries an inherent risk of: belittling those who do not do as we do, while artificially glorifying our own position, through a means of self-defined terms and metrics. That there is a push to not just to do what is right because it is right, but instead to do what is right because of how it makes us appear.
I think that there is a matter of arrogance, pride, and glory that each of us needs to struggle with on our own terms, to find a means to humble ourselves and show humility to others. Some way of reminding ourselves that our "greatness" (good + extra works) is merely a thing that is defined by some arbitrary, outside force of what is right. Instead, we raise ourselves up because of whatever stick we use to measure by.
I'm not even sure if the people who enact this kind of rhetoric perceive their own actions in the heat of the moment. There is a sort of self-induced high we get through "going the extra mile" by insisting on be not just right, but extra right.
I hope that makes sense. It's hard to really put into words; it sounds kind of pseudo-intelectual. I just mean something like: if a man is sitting in a chair, he is not raised up off the floor just because he pulls upward from the legs of the chair. I think it's a thing we're all prone to doing. It really seems to be a matter of recognizing the risks of that thing, and being able to say "I was wrong" and turn away from it when we finally see the error.
I hope that the sorts who push for this voluntary segregation stuff do see the severe error in it. I guess I just still have some kind of twinge of regret in even holding them accountable for it, because I have absolutely tried to posture myself as better than everyone else many times, for very little reason or incentive - I just had the luck of it not making it to a national/international spotlight.
Though it does seem almost schizophrenic that everyone preaches the opposite as the highest virtue, while doing it.
Some groups and even countries do it more than others.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/jul/29/jihad-rehab-for...
Sounds like it isn't a "woke mob" coming after her, but the actual subjects of the film really feel like they're being taken advantage of, their perspectives are really distorted and they felt she was re-interrogating them. The idea that the film is being cancelled solely because the filmmaker is a white woman seems to be being pushed by the filmmaker.
Suppose we did a film about the Sackler family https://www.hulu.com/series/the-crime-of-the-century-63a06ef... and the Sackler family says they don't like it -- they feel they were misrepresented, and claim they didn't consent to participation, despite having signed consent documents. Is that legitimate grounds to censor the film?
Some may feel that the Sackler situation is different. You might see the Sackler family as known "oppressors" and "bad guys". And you might see Guantánamo detainees as "victims of oppression" -- perhaps you even think they're "good guys".
I don't think this argument works -- it is exactly through documentaries such as this that we can form accurate opinions about who is a "good guy" or "bad guy"; who is the "oppressor" vs "victim of oppression". If we allow anyone claiming to be a "victim of oppression" to censor stuff that makes them look bad, that just serves to lock in our current views regarding who is a "victim of oppression" -- which means we won't be able to update those views as more evidence comes in, or as circumstances on the ground change.
If someone doesn't like a documentary that was made about them, they can do a point-by-point refutation. Censorship doesn't seem like a good solution.
If you do an adversary investigation about the Sacklers, using public footage or even private conversations that you obtained without them participating in any way, then sure you don't have to care about what they think.
But if you do a documentary where you ask for your subjects' help, then you owe them something, and the least you can do is not exploit or spin their testimony to fit a specific point of view -- esp. a point of view they would discover after the fact. That's a betrayal.
(I don't know if that applies to the film in question, which I haven't seen.)
The flipside is also quite reasonable here. I don't need to watch a documentary in order to decide that people horribly abused in American prisons are victims, the facts are pretty clear on that. (A bad person can, also, for reference, be a victim simultaneously.)
As for whether a point-by-point refutation is the best and only remedy, that seems to require that the victim automatically have access to the resources necessary to air their refutation where viewers of the documentary will see it. Will the National Review bump an opinion column by a Republican senator in order to publish an opinion column by a Muslim detainee instead? "The remedy for speech is more speech" style defenses assume that everyone has equal access to speech and everyone's speech will be heard equally. Neither of those are true when we're talking about released films.
The world is in fact full of examples where victims are defamed in public and are not offered a real opportunity to refute it, in some cases in fact in the National Review, which published this piece. I think it's generally fine that things work that way, but you need to keep it in mind when making arguments of the sort.
Deleted Comment
Just absolutely wild to read this sentence in the National Review of all places.
The National Review was a loud mouthpiece for the politicians promoting the war on terror, including the use of enhanced-interrogation-teqniues-don’t-call-it-torture. A piece of that national shame is all theirs.
I guess it’s nice they don’t seem to support it anymore, but it looks more like a shift of convenience to me — the better to stroke the current conservative narrative to redefine “free speech” so as to cast speech they dislike as “cancellation”, that it can be repressed while still claiming to own the moral high-ground.