MIER ups Malaysia GDP growth to 4,9% from 4.6%

http://broadcast.my/business/mier-ups-malaysia-gdp-growth-to-49-from-4-6/

KUALA LUMPUR (Jan 19): The Malaysian Institute of Economic Research (MIER) has revised upward, Malaysia’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth for 2011 to 4.9% from 4.6%, supported by an encouraging improvement in the previous quarter.

Its executive director, Dr Zakariah Abdul Rashid said on Thursday that strong domestic demand continued to be the main driver of growth for the local economy last year, despite global economic uncertainties.

However, it remains challenging moving forward for the domestic economy following the unfolding Euro zone debt crisis, which is likely to hurt the region’s growth outlook and weigh down exports of the European Union’s key trading partners, including China.

Speaking to reporters at MIER’s fourth quarter review here today, he said all this would influence the near-term outlook of the Malaysian economy.

“We can conclude that the fourth quarter 2011 real GDP growth moderated both year-on-year and quarter-on-quarter, and that economic growth will likely get bumpier in the months ahead,” he added.

MIER has also forecast this year’s GDP to be at 3.7 per cent as compared to that of the government at 5.0 per cent.

“When we look at the global economy and that of Asean, we expect that 2012 will not be a drastic turnaround. This year will not be better than 2011 but not as bad as 2008-2009,” Zakariah said.

MIER, in its executive summary report, said that if the global economic situation did not deteriorate significantly on account of the Euro zone debt crisis, it is unlikely that the government would launch an economic stimulus package.

Besides that, dipping household sentiment and Bank Negara’s stricter rules on lending, would likely cause loan growth to moderate further and therefore impact private consumption growth.

MIER said this tightening of precautionary measures in an environment of continued ample liquidity, low interest rates and rising asset prices, is aimed at preventing households from over extending themselves.

On inflation, the think tank said that both consumer and producer price inflation is expected to remain benign going forward, on expectations of oil prices dipping and remaining below US$100 a barrel for at least the first half of 2012.

This is against a backdrop of diminished global growth and the possibility of a double-dip recession in the Euro zone.

 

http://www.btimes.com.my/articles/20111122152609/Article/

MIER sees key rates at 3pc till 2012

Read more: MIER sees key rates at 3pc till 2012 http://www.btimes.com.my/articles/20111122152609/Article/#ixzz1l0T7TQLq

The Malaysian Institute of Economic Research (MIER) expects the overnight policy rate (OPR) to be maintained at 3.00 per cent until 2012, with a downward bias should domestic demand wane, its executive director, Dr Zakariah Abdul Rashid said.

"The OPR will be maintained at that level because Bank Negara Malaysia's policy is more to accommodate growth and not much of inflationary pressure," he told reporters on the sidelines of the MIER National Economic Outlook Conference 2012-2013 today.

He said while rising inflation is worrying and still a cause of concern, the downside risks to economic growth in the country, have further strengthened due to uncertainties in the global economy as well as volatile financial markets.

"In view of this, it is highly likely that Bank Negara will maintain the OPR at 3.00 per cent until economic conditions improve," Zakariah added. -Bernama

Read more: MIER sees key rates at 3pc till 2012 http://www.btimes.com.my/articles/20111122152609/Article/#ixzz1l0TcOdwT

MIER expects 3.7% GDP growth in 2012

MIER expects 3.7% GDP growth in 2012

 http://www.theedgemalaysia.com/in-the-financial-daily/199737-mier-expects-37-gdp-growth-in-2012.html

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:HxVsgedrbl8J:www.theedgemalaysia.com/in-the-financial-daily/199737-mier-expects-37-gdp-growth-in-2012.html+mier+2012&cd=5&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=my&client=firefox-a

Written by Clint Loh

Friday, 20 January 2012 12:09

KUALA LUMPUR: The Malaysian Institute of Economic Research (MIER) said it expects Malaysia’s GDP growth for 2012 to “decelerate markedly” to 3.7% due to external factors. It said the country would need to reposition itself for uncertainties in the global economy. MIER’s GDP growth forecast of 3.7% in 2012 is substantially lower than the 5% to 6% projected by the government in October 2011. It is, however, still higher than Standard Chartered Bank’s bearish forecast of 2.7% announced last week. For 2011, MIER forecasts a GDP growth of 4.9% compared with the government’s projected 5% to 5.5% growth. “The situation in 2012 will not be better than 2011, and it may be worse,” said MIER executive director Dr Zakariah Abdul Rashid at the institute’s economic briefing yesterday. Zakariah said the country’s GDP will be affected by external factors, mainly the European debt crisis. “We need to be watchful of what is happening in Europe and reposition ourselves,” he said. Because of Malaysia’s size, Zakariah said the country needs to undertake structural adjustments in the short term and structural reforms in the long term. The country will then be more “vibrant and ready” for the uncertainties in the global economy, he added. Zakariah: We need to be watchful of what is happening in Europe and reposition ourselves. He said the US, a major destination for Malaysia’s manufactured exports, has been growing slowly and even if it improves, that would not guarantee higher demand for the country’s exports. Zakariah said industrial output could become more sluggish in the coming months as a result of the fallout from the eurozone crisis causing further decline in external demand. During his presentation, Zakariah said the industrial production index (IPI) grew by just 1.8% year-on-year (y-o-y) in November 2011 compared with 2.8% in October. In the same month, total trade grew 8.2 % y-o-y, but fell a significant by 8.1% month-on-month. Zakariah said the worsening manufacturing and consumer sentiments seen in MIER’s fourth quarter 2011 Business Conditions Index (BCI) and Consumer Sentiments Index (CSI) do not bode well for the economy in the coming months. The BCI, which tracks domestic manufacturing activity, dipped to 96.6 points in 4Q11, 7.9 points lower quarter-on-quarter (q-o-q) and 2.9 points lower y-o-y. Zakariah said the BCI falling below the 100-point threshold indicates that the sector is in a contraction mode. He said among the reasons for the decline in the index were lower foreign and domestic sales in manufactured goods, as well as lower capital investments and capacity utilisation in the manufacturing sector. “In the next three months [January to March], our survey respondents said they do not have bright expectations for new orders,” he said. The CSI, which measures expectations pertaining to finances in the coming months, employment prospects and current financial position, fell to a two-year low of 106.3 points in 4Q11, plummeting 2.4 points q-o-q and 10.9 points y-o-y. Zakariah said higher food prices and the looming general election may have caused consumers to be cautious in their spending, especially on big ticket items such as cars and houses. On domestic demand, Zakariah said private consumption, which makes up a major share in Malaysia’s GDP, is expected to moderate in 2012. In 3Q11, private consumption grew 7.3% compared with 6.4% in 2Q and 6.7% in 1Q. He said inflation moderated in November 2011 to 3.2% y-o-y, which indicated that inflationary pressures could ease on the expectation of slower global growth. This article appeared in The Edge Financial Daily, January 20, 2012.

MIER: Worse to come

http://biz.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2012/1/20/business/10296504

MIER: Worse to come

Friday January 20, 2012

Eurozone crisis, slower China growth likely to hurt economy

KUALA LUMPUR: The Malaysian Institute of Economic Research (MIER) expects gross domestic product (GDP) for 2011 to be 4.9% but to decelerate to 3.7% in 2012.

MIER executive director Dr Za-kariah Abdul Rashid said this year would not be as bad as 2008 or 2009 but might not be as good as 2011, pulled down by the eurozone crisis as well as slower growth in China's economy.

He said if the eurozone crisis turned worse, the country's economy might be affected and the GDP could reach the 2008/2009 level.

“There's some avenue if the Government wants to spur the economy by spending on development. It will depend on the private sector whether our economy turns out to be strong this year,” Zakariah said at a briefing to present Malaysia's economic outlook.

Zakariah: ‘The private sector has done a lot for the economy.’

 

“However, the private sector has done a lot for the economy. We can't expect much more from the private sector.”

He said MIER had previously forecast 2011 GDP growth to be 4.6% but revised it upwards after looking at the latest numbers and the crisis in the eurozone.

“Growth in the last quarter of 2011 is expected to be much lower on account of external developments. The latest monthly economic indicators are already suggesting that,” MIER said in a report.

It added that economic growth would likely get “bumpier” in the months ahead.

Meanwhile, Zakariah said that there was “room for 25 to 50 basis-point downward revision” in the overnight policy rate (OPR). However, he said the revision would depend on the situation and had to be done vigilantly.

Based on MIER's Business Conditions Index (BCI), the business sentiment had worsened from the second quarter of last year. The BCI fell to 96.6 in the fourth quarter of 2011, the first time it had dipped below the 100 threshold since the fourth quarter of 2010.

“It usually shows a contraction mode when the index sinks below 100. The BCI had been dropping since the second quarter of 2011,” Zakariah said.

Sales, local and foreign orders, as well as capacity utilisation were significantly lower in the fourth quarter of 2011, with companies expecting to scale back production over the next three months as inventory builds up.

Concurrently, consumer sentiment also fell to a two-year low of 106.3 on the Consumer Sentiments Index as household incomes lost momentum, and finances and job became a growing concern.

Zakariah said the index pointed out that consumers were also holding on to purchasing big tickets items as spending plans took a backseat.

Separately, Zakariah said it would be better for the Government to call for general elections early as uncertainty over the nation's political future would hurt the economy.

He said private investors were currently holding back investments on concerns that government policies could change due to the political climate here.

“If you ask me as an economist, I would rather see the problem solved once and for all. The earlier they settle the political matters, the better, we can focus on the economy.

“Right now everything is still hanging. People are postponing because of the elections. So if they settle it once and for all and immediately, it would be better,” Zakariah said.

Opinion -Understanding the Muslim world

Opinion

Understanding the Muslim world

http://www.aljazeera.com/focus/2010/08/20108213643408629.html

New generation of scholars abandoning theories that have long dominated academic discourse. Mark LeVine Last Modified: 29 Aug 2010 13:33 inShare Email Print Share Feedback

A new generation of scholars from the Muslim world are advancing a better understanding of the key issues that shape the region [EPA] What does it say about the chances for American success in Afghanistan and the larger global 'war on terror' - which despite the Obama administration's official name change to "Overseas Contingency Operations" remains deliberately far removed from any contingency that might hasten its end - that the wives of the military's most senior commanders better comprehend the reasons for the continued difficulty in pacifying the country than do their husbands? The military wives, it seems, have as a group given their stamp of approval to the now ubiquitous bestseller Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Renin. Many of their husbands have also read the book at their urging, and according to The New York Times, recently cashiered General Stanley McChrystal met with Mortenson several times. Mortenson's message is as simple as it is eloquent: build schools, not bombs. The idea fit well with McChrystal's civilian-focused counterinsurgency strategy; but despite the obvious logic, not to mention economy of such a concept - the cost of keeping one soldier in the country for one year could pay for 20 schools - the Obama administration is committed to further militarising rather than deescalating the war. They fail to grasp that you cannot win the "hearts and minds" of a people when you are not merely occupying them, but supporting a massively corrupt and violent elite while killing a significant number of civilians on a routine basis. More broadly, it was recently announced that the Obama administration is trying to loosen export controls for American-made weapons so that the US - whose weapons sales, by some estimates, equal if not surpass those of the rest of the world combined - can expand its dominance of the international arms market even further. So much for the changes in the US' relationship with the Muslim world promised by Obama last June in Cairo. And needless to say, if the Italians, French, Russians, Brits or Chinese could get a bigger piece of the weapons sales pie, they would demonstrate as little scruples about what they sell to whom as has the US. New Barcelona process Obama's promised changes in relations with the Muslim world have not materialised [EPA] Last week, as I attended the World Congress for Middle Eastern Studies (WOCMES) in Barcelona, I could not help thinking about the radical disconnect between what those who know Afghanistan and the larger Muslim world have long said needs to be done to bring peace and prosperity to the region and the policies that Western governments, particularly the US, pursue. Some 2,000 of the world's leading scholars of the region were on hand, discussing the myriad complexities of the cultures and civilisations of the Muslim world in all their richness. With almost 500 panels exploring issues as diverse as religious and political censorship in the pre-modern Middle East, climate change and food security, and Sufism and urban development, the WOCMES highlighted the interconnectedness of so many disparate elements of the region's history and contemporary dynamics.| Equally as importantly, it reaffirmed how a new generation of scholars, particularly those from the region, are advancing our understanding of so many key issues that define how we see the Muslim world - its history, its present issues, and through them, its future. It is hard to overstate the importance of these voices. And they are increasingly hard to come by in the US, where in the years since 9/11 foreign scholars, especially from the Muslim world, have found it much harder to get visas. This emerging generation of scholars are presenting analysis which increasingly is not grounded in the Euro-American theories that have for so long been accepted as the 'gold standard' for studying the Muslim world. At the same time, however, unlike conservative religious thinkers, this new group of scholars are not innately hostile to so-called 'foreign' ideas and types of knowledge or trying to operate in isolation from them. Southern Theory As one senior colleague at the conference put it, there was almost no evidence of the kind of simplistic analyses of power relations or the use of uncritical and impossibly broad categories like the "West" or "Islam," which populate so many mainstream analyses of the region on both sides of the so-called civilisational divide. To be sure, panels on Iraq and Palestine were well attended, with younger researchers from these countries offering powerful testimonies of the ongoing costs - human and moral as well as political and economic - of their occupations. But so were panels on the pro-democracy movement in Iran, the changing relationship between Sufism and popular culture in Morocco, urban history and the importance of conserving biodiversity in the region. In fact, one could spend all four days of the conference without attending a panel focusing on Palestine/Israel, Afghanistan, Iraq or the other trouble spots of the Arab/Muslim world. And even if you did, what you would likely take away from them was the growing power of what has been termed Southern Theory or South-South Theory. By this I mean concepts, arguments and explanations that have originated in the global south by scholars and intellectuals rooted in local traditions and who are spending more time in conversation with each other rather than with the Western theories and scholars that have for so-long dominated scholarship. These are not closed conversations by any means - unlike European social science theory, which has a long history of excluding non-European voices - but they are producing a new and more nuanced relationship between Euro-American scholars and those from the region, who are starting to play a much more powerful role shaping both the way scholars study region and the subjects they investigate. Healing a 'decadent' discipline IN depth More from Mark LeVine:   Beyond hypocrisy   The burden of hypocrisy   The meaning of strangulation   The cautionary tale of Helen Thomas   Israel's 'friends' also to blame   The terrors of occupation   Obama and the curse of moderation   'Stupid' law or 'soul' of the US?   The world is not flat   Hypocrisy and the end of empires It is hard to overstate how refreshing it is to escape the near ubiquitous focus on terrorism and American-led wars when talking about the Middle East. In the US since 9/11 the Middle Eastern studies community has been harshly criticised both for its supposed anti-American and anti-Israel bias and for focusing on seemingly trivial issues like medieval Arabic poetry and varieties of textile production in the Abbasid empire. In particular, right-wing commentators have criticised the US counterpart to WOCMES, the Middle East Studies Association, for being filled with "anti-American, anti-Israel leftists who are apologists for Islamic terrorism," and for having conferences that are "commonly used by anti-Semites as forums to air their views". In covering one of the first meetings of the Middle East Studies Association after 9/11, one reporter even noted with a sense of astonishment that attendees tend not to wear "stars-and-stripes" lapel pins to indicate their support for the policies of the US government. In the aftermath of 9/11 well known Israeli Middle East studies scholar Martin Kramer wrote in The Wall Street Journal that "this very sick discipline did nothing to prepare America for the encounter with Muslim extremism, and ... can't contribute anything to America's defence". Another commentator went further, calling scholars working on the region "terror's academic sympathisers". 'Taking the cake' This view did not change as the decade wore on and the realities of the war on terror and its various occupations came far closer to matching the warnings of the scholars accused of such behaviour than to the rosy predictions of the ideologues of the 'war on terror'. And so in 2008 the National Review lamented that "professors of Middle East studies would be very helpful right about now. But they are, unfortunately, among the worst of the lot: among the worst in the American professoriate. A range of departments, of course, is the province of radicals and ideologues, rather than genuine scholars. But departments of Middle East studies may take the cake". The implicit argument here is that "genuine scholars" should be "contributing to America's defence". But I do not know a single "genuine scholar" who would frame the last 10 years in such terms - who would even use the word "America" as if it was a self-evident place where everyone had the same interests above and beyond conflicts of class, ethnicity and other narrower identities. More to the point, most of the scholars I know who have spent their adult lives studying, living and working in the Arab/Muslim world have no desire to "contribute to America's defence" in an unending global war; precisely because - like the military wives who are enamored of Three Cups of Tea - they understand how false the premises of that war are, and how dangerous and unreliable are its goals. In fact, many of the scholars most often attacked by right-wing pundits and politicians, like Greg Mortenson, offer their advice to the US government and even intelligence agencies, when asked. The problem is hardly anyone in power wants to hear what they have to say, never mind take to heart the near unanimous judgement that the only way to end the cycle of violence is to address core issues such as the US' unwavering support of dictatorship or authoritarian rule, occupation and rampant exploitation of the countries of the region. Only then, in a collaborative effort with local forces fighting for democracy, justice and peace, could the US and its European allies close down the innumerable roads that lead to religious and political extremism and violence. Militarising academic knowledge New discourse does not serve the interests of US military and corporate elite [GETTY] Such a perspective, of course, has no place inside either the neo-conservative or even mainstream Washington establishment. Instead, conservative scholars like Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami have created an alternative association, the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa, that is, presumably, less "decadent" and unhelpful to the advancement of the strategic interests of the US' military and corporate elites. Along with counterparts like the Heritage Foundation, Washington Institute for Near East Policy and other well-funded think tanks, it produces the arguments and knowledge that enables the continued justification of ongoing war and enmity at a cost of well over $2bn per day. The defence establishment has begun to more heavily militarise academic knowledge by creating several programmes that attempt to put "scholars" on the field of battle to act as cultural interpreters and offer other services to military and intelligence personnel. Needless to say, the vast majority of Middle East scholars vehemently oppose this practice. And yet, according to a recent US supreme court decision, when scholars do attempt to bridge warring sides by engaging groups like Hezbollah or Hamas in order to promote non-violent strategies of resisting occupation, they can be prosecuted for aiding terrorists. This while, according to The New York Times, Obama quietly ditches the celebrated counterinsurgency strategy for a more old-school "counterterrorism," based almost entirely on killing insurgents, with all the collateral damage that often comes with it. I suppose it is easier to try to develop a more accurate drone, that can take out a few dozen more Taliban per year than to change a global economic and political system that has helped transfer so much wealth from so many to so few during the last three centuries. But the latest advances in scientific killing will no more win the war against the Taliban or al-Qaeda than they did a generation ago in Vietnam, or in Afghanistan when it was the Soviets doing the fighting. The reality is that you cannot imagine, let alone plan a radically new strategy for resolving conflicts like those in Afghanistan, Israel/Palestine, Iraq or elsewhere unless you can first imagine the people you are in conflict with in all their complexity and contradictory natures, and not merely as a quintessential type: the "poor farmer," "unemployed youth," "opium grower" or "jihadi fanatic" who must either be bought off or killed. Sufis and rappers One of my favourite panels of the conference was a two-part affair called Islam in performance? Pious art production in the Muslim world. Critics might dismiss the title as hopelessly abstract and "unhelpful" in answering the great war and terrorism related questions of the day. But the presentations and discussions touched on a host of issues - globalisation, the circulation of religious knowledge, the intersection of religion, popular culture and market forces, and how people experience their identities as Muslims in settings as diverse as Indonesia and Morocco - that are crucial for understanding the forces that create both resistance against and transcendence of the status quo. The question remains, who will listen to and learn from all this knowledge, produced increasingly by people to whom those in power, both in and outside the region, have very little incentive to listen and every incentive to marginalise? It would seem that today more than ever, scholars, artists and activists will have to band together globally to ensure that a more accurate and yet potentially hopeful portrait of the Arab/Muslim world can pierce through the veil of ignorance and violence and reach the consciousness of a public that is in desperate need of a new paradigm, not merely for understanding the region, but their own societies as well. Mark LeVine is a professor of history at UC Irvine and senior visiting researcher at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University in Sweden. His most recent books are Heavy Metal Islam (Random House) and Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Books). The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

Source:

Al Jazeera

 

A new generation of scholars from the Muslim world are advancing a better understanding of the key issues that shape the region [EPA] What does it say about the chances for American success in Afghanistan and the larger global 'war on terror' - which despite the Obama administration's official name change to "Overseas Contingency Operations" remains deliberately far removed from any contingency that might hasten its end - that the wives of the military's most senior commanders better comprehend the reasons for the continued difficulty in pacifying the country than do their husbands? The military wives, it seems, have as a group given their stamp of approval to the now ubiquitous bestseller Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Renin. Many of their husbands have also read the book at their urging, and according to The New York Times, recently cashiered General Stanley McChrystal met with Mortenson several times. Mortenson's message is as simple as it is eloquent: build schools, not bombs. The idea fit well with McChrystal's civilian-focused counterinsurgency strategy; but despite the obvious logic, not to mention economy of such a concept - the cost of keeping one soldier in the country for one year could pay for 20 schools - the Obama administration is committed to further militarising rather than deescalating the war. They fail to grasp that you cannot win the "hearts and minds" of a people when you are not merely occupying them, but supporting a massively corrupt and violent elite while killing a significant number of civilians on a routine basis. More broadly, it was recently announced that the Obama administration is trying to loosen export controls for American-made weapons so that the US - whose weapons sales, by some estimates, equal if not surpass those of the rest of the world combined - can expand its dominance of the international arms market even further. So much for the changes in the US' relationship with the Muslim world promised by Obama last June in Cairo. And needless to say, if the Italians, French, Russians, Brits or Chinese could get a bigger piece of the weapons sales pie, they would demonstrate as little scruples about what they sell to whom as has the US. New Barcelona process Obama's promised changes in relations with the Muslim world have not materialised [EPA] Last week, as I attended the World Congress for Middle Eastern Studies (WOCMES) in Barcelona, I could not help thinking about the radical disconnect between what those who know Afghanistan and the larger Muslim world have long said needs to be done to bring peace and prosperity to the region and the policies that Western governments, particularly the US, pursue. Some 2,000 of the world's leading scholars of the region were on hand, discussing the myriad complexities of the cultures and civilisations of the Muslim world in all their richness. With almost 500 panels exploring issues as diverse as religious and political censorship in the pre-modern Middle East, climate change and food security, and Sufism and urban development, the WOCMES highlighted the interconnectedness of so many disparate elements of the region's history and contemporary dynamics.| Equally as importantly, it reaffirmed how a new generation of scholars, particularly those from the region, are advancing our understanding of so many key issues that define how we see the Muslim world - its history, its present issues, and through them, its future. It is hard to overstate the importance of these voices. And they are increasingly hard to come by in the US, where in the years since 9/11 foreign scholars, especially from the Muslim world, have found it much harder to get visas. This emerging generation of scholars are presenting analysis which increasingly is not grounded in the Euro-American theories that have for so long been accepted as the 'gold standard' for studying the Muslim world. At the same time, however, unlike conservative religious thinkers, this new group of scholars are not innately hostile to so-called 'foreign' ideas and types of knowledge or trying to operate in isolation from them. Southern Theory As one senior colleague at the conference put it, there was almost no evidence of the kind of simplistic analyses of power relations or the use of uncritical and impossibly broad categories like the "West" or "Islam," which populate so many mainstream analyses of the region on both sides of the so-called civilisational divide. To be sure, panels on Iraq and Palestine were well attended, with younger researchers from these countries offering powerful testimonies of the ongoing costs - human and moral as well as political and economic - of their occupations. But so were panels on the pro-democracy movement in Iran, the changing relationship between Sufism and popular culture in Morocco, urban history and the importance of conserving biodiversity in the region. In fact, one could spend all four days of the conference without attending a panel focusing on Palestine/Israel, Afghanistan, Iraq or the other trouble spots of the Arab/Muslim world. And even if you did, what you would likely take away from them was the growing power of what has been termed Southern Theory or South-South Theory. By this I mean concepts, arguments and explanations that have originated in the global south by scholars and intellectuals rooted in local traditions and who are spending more time in conversation with each other rather than with the Western theories and scholars that have for so-long dominated scholarship. These are not closed conversations by any means - unlike European social science theory, which has a long history of excluding non-European voices - but they are producing a new and more nuanced relationship between Euro-American scholars and those from the region, who are starting to play a much more powerful role shaping both the way scholars study region and the subjects they investigate. Healing a 'decadent' discipline IN depth More from Mark LeVine:   Beyond hypocrisy   The burden of hypocrisy   The meaning of strangulation   The cautionary tale of Helen Thomas   Israel's 'friends' also to blame   The terrors of occupation   Obama and the curse of moderation   'Stupid' law or 'soul' of the US?   The world is not flat   Hypocrisy and the end of empires It is hard to overstate how refreshing it is to escape the near ubiquitous focus on terrorism and American-led wars when talking about the Middle East. In the US since 9/11 the Middle Eastern studies community has been harshly criticised both for its supposed anti-American and anti-Israel bias and for focusing on seemingly trivial issues like medieval Arabic poetry and varieties of textile production in the Abbasid empire. In particular, right-wing commentators have criticised the US counterpart to WOCMES, the Middle East Studies Association, for being filled with "anti-American, anti-Israel leftists who are apologists for Islamic terrorism," and for having conferences that are "commonly used by anti-Semites as forums to air their views". In covering one of the first meetings of the Middle East Studies Association after 9/11, one reporter even noted with a sense of astonishment that attendees tend not to wear "stars-and-stripes" lapel pins to indicate their support for the policies of the US government. In the aftermath of 9/11 well known Israeli Middle East studies scholar Martin Kramer wrote in The Wall Street Journal that "this very sick discipline did nothing to prepare America for the encounter with Muslim extremism, and ... can't contribute anything to America's defence". Another commentator went further, calling scholars working on the region "terror's academic sympathisers". 'Taking the cake' This view did not change as the decade wore on and the realities of the war on terror and its various occupations came far closer to matching the warnings of the scholars accused of such behaviour than to the rosy predictions of the ideologues of the 'war on terror'. And so in 2008 the National Review lamented that "professors of Middle East studies would be very helpful right about now. But they are, unfortunately, among the worst of the lot: among the worst in the American professoriate. A range of departments, of course, is the province of radicals and ideologues, rather than genuine scholars. But departments of Middle East studies may take the cake". The implicit argument here is that "genuine scholars" should be "contributing to America's defence". But I do not know a single "genuine scholar" who would frame the last 10 years in such terms - who would even use the word "America" as if it was a self-evident place where everyone had the same interests above and beyond conflicts of class, ethnicity and other narrower identities. More to the point, most of the scholars I know who have spent their adult lives studying, living and working in the Arab/Muslim world have no desire to "contribute to America's defence" in an unending global war; precisely because - like the military wives who are enamored of Three Cups of Tea - they understand how false the premises of that war are, and how dangerous and unreliable are its goals. In fact, many of the scholars most often attacked by right-wing pundits and politicians, like Greg Mortenson, offer their advice to the US government and even intelligence agencies, when asked. The problem is hardly anyone in power wants to hear what they have to say, never mind take to heart the near unanimous judgement that the only way to end the cycle of violence is to address core issues such as the US' unwavering support of dictatorship or authoritarian rule, occupation and rampant exploitation of the countries of the region. Only then, in a collaborative effort with local forces fighting for democracy, justice and peace, could the US and its European allies close down the innumerable roads that lead to religious and political extremism and violence. Militarising academic knowledge New discourse does not serve the interests of US military and corporate elite [GETTY] Such a perspective, of course, has no place inside either the neo-conservative or even mainstream Washington establishment. Instead, conservative scholars like Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami have created an alternative association, the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa, that is, presumably, less "decadent" and unhelpful to the advancement of the strategic interests of the US' military and corporate elites. Along with counterparts like the Heritage Foundation, Washington Institute for Near East Policy and other well-funded think tanks, it produces the arguments and knowledge that enables the continued justification of ongoing war and enmity at a cost of well over $2bn per day. The defence establishment has begun to more heavily militarise academic knowledge by creating several programmes that attempt to put "scholars" on the field of battle to act as cultural interpreters and offer other services to military and intelligence personnel. Needless to say, the vast majority of Middle East scholars vehemently oppose this practice. And yet, according to a recent US supreme court decision, when scholars do attempt to bridge warring sides by engaging groups like Hezbollah or Hamas in order to promote non-violent strategies of resisting occupation, they can be prosecuted for aiding terrorists. This while, according to The New York Times, Obama quietly ditches the celebrated counterinsurgency strategy for a more old-school "counterterrorism," based almost entirely on killing insurgents, with all the collateral damage that often comes with it. I suppose it is easier to try to develop a more accurate drone, that can take out a few dozen more Taliban per year than to change a global economic and political system that has helped transfer so much wealth from so many to so few during the last three centuries. But the latest advances in scientific killing will no more win the war against the Taliban or al-Qaeda than they did a generation ago in Vietnam, or in Afghanistan when it was the Soviets doing the fighting. The reality is that you cannot imagine, let alone plan a radically new strategy for resolving conflicts like those in Afghanistan, Israel/Palestine, Iraq or elsewhere unless you can first imagine the people you are in conflict with in all their complexity and contradictory natures, and not merely as a quintessential type: the "poor farmer," "unemployed youth," "opium grower" or "jihadi fanatic" who must either be bought off or killed. Sufis and rappers One of my favourite panels of the conference was a two-part affair called Islam in performance? Pious art production in the Muslim world. Critics might dismiss the title as hopelessly abstract and "unhelpful" in answering the great war and terrorism related questions of the day. But the presentations and discussions touched on a host of issues - globalisation, the circulation of religious knowledge, the intersection of religion, popular culture and market forces, and how people experience their identities as Muslims in settings as diverse as Indonesia and Morocco - that are crucial for understanding the forces that create both resistance against and transcendence of the status quo. The question remains, who will listen to and learn from all this knowledge, produced increasingly by people to whom those in power, both in and outside the region, have very little incentive to listen and every incentive to marginalise? It would seem that today more than ever, scholars, artists and activists will have to band together globally to ensure that a more accurate and yet potentially hopeful portrait of the Arab/Muslim world can pierce through the veil of ignorance and violence and reach the consciousness of a public that is in desperate need of a new paradigm, not merely for understanding the region, but their own societies as well. Mark LeVine is a professor of history at UC Irvine and senior visiting researcher at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University in Sweden. His most recent books are Heavy Metal Islam (Random House) and Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Books). The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

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As the world continues to struggle with the global economic recession, a shift in power is also taking place.

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Opinion Steve Jobs' counter-cultural ties

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/10/20111013114551694458.html

Opinion

Steve Jobs' counter-cultural ties

The sense of community Apple helped foster in places like Cairo and Tunis are a part of Jobs' legacy. Mark LeVine Last Modified: 13 Oct 2011 15:53 inShare7 Email Print Share Feedback

Steve Jobs and his company projected an image that epitomised modernist consumer style  [GALLO/GETTY] If you work in the arts it is hard not to be hyperbolic about the death of Steve Jobs. For a large share of the artists, musicians, designers and other arts professionals I've met in the last twenty years, owning an Apple  was a necessary if not sufficient component of becoming a real artist. Apple has literally become part of our identity. A Mac seemed to add an extra dose of creativity to whatever you were working on, be it a song, a movie, a website or a novel. It was like performance enhancing drugs for artists and writers. Of course, such feelings had little basis in fact. Whether you produced a document, design or piece of music on a Mac or did it on a (usually much cheaper) PC shouldn't have affected its quality or originality. Especially when you could use the same programmes on Windows and Apple operating systems. Yet there was something about working on a Mac that made you feel like you were better, smarter and more talented. It was like the quality of your creation increased merely by flowing through one of Jobs' machines. Writing, designing or recording on a Mac was like playing guitar on a Gibson Les Paul or Fender Stratocaster. Yes, other guitars could do the same thing, except that somehow they didn't. Indeed, their limitations usually became apparent at precisely the moment you needed them to carry your talent to the next level. Creative DNA An Apple is like an Ikea desk or bookcase. In fact, Ikea opened its first US store a year after the Macintosh debuted, but with better quality and higher end design. But unlike Ikea you never felt like an Apple was a mass-produced product. Using it was a personal experience, precisely because it reflected the core elements of modernist design: simplicity, beauty and functionality all interconnected and reinforced each other. Jobs' aesthetic genius was somehow so embedded into the DNA of his computers and devices that they augmented your own creative DNA. Or so we'd all like to think. If anyone should have been favourite target of hackers and virus programmers, it was Steve Jobs and Apple. Yet somehow, despite their incredible success, Jobs and his company managed to project an image that at once epitomised the height of modernist consumer style-Bauhaus for the computer age, and the ethos of the counterculture and the Hacker's Manifesto. Using an Apple computer, iPod, iPhone and now iPad, opened the door "to a world... rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addicts veins". You could almost here the computer telling you: "This is it... this is where I belong." Of course, true computer geeks didn't need a Mac to feel this; they had Linux and could interface with their computer at a much deeper level than most artists. They were the guys, like Eddie Van Halen or Jack White, who just built their own guitars. But for the rest of us, switching to Apple meant leaving a "pre-chewed and tasteless" world dominated by "sadists" who wanted to oppress you and the "apathetic" who merely ignored you. Culture jamming Indeed, introducing the Macintosh computer with the famous "1984" advertisement during the most commercialised and corporatised moment in American culture, the Super Bowl, seemed, at first glance, like a monumental act of hacking, or at least culture jamming. Jobs was using the Super Bowl to sell a product that, according to the advertisement, challenged everything corporate capitalism represented. In deth Co-founders' Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs during the launch of Apple computer's almost 30 years ago [EPA] The advertisement even based itself directly on George Orwell's book 1984 without securing a license to do so. An act of piracy that ostensibly followed in the hacker tradition. Of course, any similar attempt to utilise Apple's intellectual property without permission would be met with ruthless retaliation over the years. Almost a generation later, Apple has become the world's most valuable corporation. But even when it was the underdog against IBM and Microsoft, the imagination of Apple as somehow counter-cultural was, in retrospect, one of the greatest myth spun by Jobs. Apple was never anything but a corporation intent on maximising profits. Its just that Jobs learned from mentors like Sony chairman Akio Morita that you could charge a premium for better design, functionality, and quality, and still mass produce your products at a profit - the holy grail of consumer capitalism. Apple workers haven't fared as well as consumers, however. The super-exploited labourers at the factories producing Apple products, some of whom have killed themselves out of the desperation caused by low wages, impossible production targets, and dismal working conditions - can attest to that sad reality. Apple's aura Perhaps the biggest key to Apple's success has been its ability to transcend a paradox of modern cultural production first noticed by the great critical theorists of the Frankfurt School in the wake of World War I. They were among the first to demonstrate how mass-produced, commodified culture was becoming not merely a key component of twentieth century industrial capitalism, but a crucial tool for ensuring that the masses accepted rather than challenged the ruling system. But the power of commodified culture was always a double edged sword. Cultural production had to be meticulously controlled lest it escape and be used to attack rather than prop up the system - thus the symbolism of Apple's "1984" commercial. For the seminal inter-war philosopher Walter Benjamin, the mechanical reproduction of works of art and their mass circulation "stripped away the aura" of the work. The almost magical power that allowed a work of art to be experienced should be unique and intrinsically valuable. Benjamin thought the stripping of the aura from art through its mass production and circulation was a good thing because it allowed for the production of art that no longer served existing power structures. Art liberated from its aura would enable new and even revolutionary visions of the future to be put forth, which held the possibility of liberating the masses from totalising ideologies like fascism or capitalism. Benjamin's good friend Theodor Adorno, perhaps the greatest critical theorist of the 20th century, similarly recognised the power of mass produced, commodified cultural production. But he saw the process far more negatively than Benjamin did. Art and cultural production could perhaps be stripped of their natural aura, but that aura would be replaced by the aura of style, the "stereotyped appropriation of everything for the purpose of mechanical reproduction that eliminated every unprepared and unresolved discord." IN depth More from Mark LeVine:   Understanding the Muslim world   The Maiden frontier   Beyond hypocrisy   The burden of hypocrisy   The meaning of strangulation   The cautionary tale of Helen Thomas   Israel's 'friends' also to blame   The terrors of occupation   Obama and the curse of moderation   'Stupid' law or 'soul' of the US?   The world is not flat   Hypocrisy and the end of empires In other words, mass produced cultural products and the "culture industry" that fabricated them had little power to expose the contradictions within society that should be the defining function of true art in the modern age. As opposed to Benjamin, Adorno argued that style "represents a promise in every work of art" that can never be kept. I have no idea if Steve Jobs read Adorno and Benjamin, but Apple achieved its phenomenal success precisely because the aesthetic quality of Apple products seemed to return the aura to the art (or literature, or music or film) produced or listened to on them. Rather than reinforcing "obedience to the social hierarchy," as Adorno witheringly described the culture industry, Apple actually seemed to deliver on its promise to help us "think different" - the first step on the road to the broader liberation of society. In retrospect, what Jobs' designs enabled was an unprecedented "fetishisation" of the commodities he produced. The aesthetic power of the products completely obscure the increasingly exploited labour that went into making them. The myth of Apple as counterculture convinced people they were taking on the system when in fact they were reinforcing it, even as the unique aesthetic properties of Apple products encouraged or enabled greater personal or professional "liberation" for many users. Planting Seeds in the Middle East It used to be pretty hard to find Apple computers in the Arab world. Given the high tariffs on imported electronics, the already expensive computers remained out of reach for most computer users in the region, at least until recently. I first noticed people using Apple laptops in the region in the mid-2000s, when following the original rise of Apple Computers in the United States, people in the arts, and especially in design, film and music, began to use them. It is worth noting, that this period was, precisely the time when the "facebook" generation began to come of age and question the quiescence and obeisance of their elders towards the sclerotic regimes that ruled over them. If Macs gave the illusion of making a difference in New York or Los Angeles, my own experience of them in the Middle East hewed more authentically to the narrative Jobs scripted. I can remember the first time I really noticed an Apple computer in the studio of the Lebanese rock band the Kordz in Beirut. It was a brand new dual core desktop, its silvery aluminium skin projecting power and speed that far exceeded that of my own old G4. We were just beginning to record a song together and the band's lead singer, Moe Hamzeh, was running recording software on it that I hadn't seen and creating sounds I hadn't yet heard. This was the first time I felt like the region, or at least my musical comrades, had levelled the playing field with their counterparts in the US. But when I heard what Moe could create on it, it was clear that they had jumped ahead, that the "students" were now able to teach their teachers. For me, that computer, it was a thing of beauty, like all Macs, that was direct evidence of the rise of a new generation in the region who would surely do great things one day soon, as I argued in my book, Heavy Metal Islam. I remember being surprised at the presence of the Mac in the studio but Hamzeh explained that it was the most powerful and fastest computer he could buy, which was precisely what he needed to turn his complex musical visions into reality. "I doubt even Steve Jobs envisioned that scene when he released the first Apple over three decades ago. " - Mark LeVine Half a decade later, in an activist safe house nine floors above Tahrir Square in the midst of the protests that toppled Mubarak, Apple computers once again proved their worth. Upwards of a dozen Macs, including my own, circulated among the scores of activists who passed through the safe house almost every day. We wrote articles, uploaded videos, edited movies, shared files, updated facebook pages, skyped with family and journalists across the world. There was an incredible amount of creativity and energy in the apartment, a degree of shared purpose and mission that has been tragically tarnished, if not lost permanently, with the violence of the last week. But in those incredible late January and early February days, the young activists had managed to create a sense of community, a counterculture in which, with the help of their Macs, they were "thinking different". It's hard to imagine it all having worked so smoothly if the revolution made largely on Windows. One thing was for sure, the thugs at the Interior Ministry weren't working on Macs. Of course, the brand of computers favoured by activists had no practical impact on the successful overthrow of Mubarak, or Ben Ali before him. But working late into the night as violence and uncertainty flared in Tahrir and the surrounding streets below, there was something comforting about the glowd, or better aura, of so many apples in that darkened apartment, linking everyone together just a bit more tightly than they otherwise would have been. I doubt even Steve Jobs envisioned that scene when he released the first Apple over three decades ago. But the sense of community Apple helped foster in places like Cairo and Tunis earlier this year are as much a part of his legacy as the iPad or iPhone. The cultures they helped create have now spread back to the US where, as I write these lines, iPads, iPods, iPhones and Macbook Airs are no doubt helping to inspire a large share of the Occupy Wall Street protesters as they sit late into the night, planning yet another, still nascent revolution. Let's hope that soon Apple products can also help liberate the underpaid and highly exploited workers who make them. Mark LeVine is a professor of history at UC Irvine and senior visiting researcher at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University in Sweden. His most recent books are Heavy Metal Islam (Random House) and Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Books). The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

the real news - Paul Jay - Helen Thomas

Helen Thomas: Thrown to the wolves

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2010/12/20101229124751864918.html

Opinion

Helen Thomas: Thrown to the wolves

At a time of forgiveness, why is Helen Thomas still being ostracized? Danny Schechter Last Modified: 29 Dec 2010 13:58 inShare Email Print Share Feedback

Helen Thomas, who once occupied a front-row seat in the White House briefing room, has been completely ostracized due to some inelegantly-put remarks about Israel captured on film by provocateurs [EPA] In 1960, I was fixated on emulating the courageous media personalities of the times, from Edward R. Murrow to a distinctive figure I came to admire at presidential press conferences - a wire service reporter named Helen Thomas. In recent years, my faith in the power of dialogue in politics has been severely tested - as, no doubt has hers - in an age where diatribes and deliberate demonization chills debate and exchanges of opposing views. Once you are labeled and stereotyped - especially if you are denounced as an anti-Semite - you are relegated to the fringes, pronounced a hater beyond redemption, and even beyond explanation. As the legendary Helen Thomas soon found out. The rise of a legend As a member in good standing of an activist generation, I saw myself more as an outsider in contrast to Helen’s distinctive credentials as an insider, as a White House bureau chief and later as the dean of the White House Correspondents' Association. Yet, beneath her establishment credentials and status, she was always an outsider too - one of nine children born to a family of Lebanese immigrants in Winchester Kentucky, who despite their Middle East origins were Christians in the Greek Orthodox Church. She became a woman who broke the glass ceiling in the clubby, mostly male, inside-the-beltway world of big egos and self-important media prima donnas. Her origins were more modest. She grew up in an ethnic neighborhood in Detroit. Helen received her bachelor's degree from Wayne State University in 1942, the year I was born. Earlier this year, her alma mater, of which she had taken so much pride in her achievements, canceled the award in her name. A fall from grace The withdrawal of her name from the prominent award was a striking gesture of cowardice and submission to an incident blown out of proportion that instantly turned Helen from a 'she-ro' to a zero. The Simon Wiesenthal Center put her on their top ten list of anti-Semites after angry remarks she made about Israel went viral and exploded into a major story. President Barack Obama who cheerfully brought her a birthday cake, later labeled her remarks as "reprehensible". You would think that given all the vicious ad hominems, Godwins and putdowns directed at him, he would be more cautious tossing slurs at others. But no, all politicians pander to deflect criticism whenever the wind of enmity blows their way. Now it was Helen who was being compared to Hitler in the latest furor. Snakes and Foxes Then suddenly last June, I, like everyone in the world of media, was stunned to witness her public fall from grace, partly self-inflicted, perhaps because of the inelegant language used in response to an ambush interview by provocateur father-son Israeli advocates posing as journalists. They were following in the footsteps of the vicious comments by Ann Coulter earlier denouncing Thomas as an "old Arab" sitting yards from the President as if she were threatening him. She refused to dignify that smear with a response. I didn't know until she told me that she had also been hounded for years by Abe Foxman, a leader of the Anti-Defamation League who demanded she explain 25 questions she asked presidents over the decades. "I didn’t answer," she told me, "because I don’t respond to junk mail." Bait and switch Helen always stuck to her guns. She was considered the marquise of journalists that presidents respected. She even went to China with Nixon. She has, however, always been polite enough to try to answer questions from strangers without always realizing who she was dealing with in a new world of media hit jobs, where  "gotcha" YouTube videos thrive on spontaneous embarrassing moments, what we used to call "bloopers." She had been baited and fell for it. Unaware of how the video could be used, she vented and then regretted doing so. It was too late. That short media snippet triggered millions of hits. Helen later apologized for how she said what she did without retracting the essence of her convictions. But by then, it was too late. Her long career was instantly terminated. The perception became everything; the context nothing. Damage control She tried to be conciliatory, saying, "I deeply regret my comments I made last week regarding the Israelis and the Palestinians. They do not reflect my heart-felt belief that peace will come to the Middle East only when all parties recognize the need for mutual respect and tolerance. May that day come soon." Her remarks were derided and dismissed, with the pundits and papers demanding her head. She had no choice but to resign after her company, agent,  co-author and many "friends" started treating her like a pariah. "You cannot criticize Israel in this country and survive," she says now. She was forced into retirement and thrown to the wolves in a media culture that relishes stories of personal destruction and misfortune. It's the old 'the media builds you up before they tear you down' routine. As blogger Jamie Frieze wrote, "I don't think she should have been forced to resign. After all, freedom of speech doesn't come with the right to be comfortable. In other words, the fact that you're uncomfortable doesn't trump my free speech. Thomas made people uncomfortable, but that doesn't mean her speech should be punished." But punished she was. A lesson learned When I called Helen Thomas to ask if she might be willing to share some of her thoughts on what happened, I found her as eloquent as ever, supportive of Wikileaks, critical of grand jury harassment in the Mid West against Palestinian supporters and angry with President Obama for his many right turns and spineless stands. She was, she said, on a path outside the White House when a rabbi, David Nesenoff, asked to speak to her, and introduced his two sons whom he said wanted to become journalists (one of whom wasn't actually his son). "That happens to me a lot," she said, "and I told them about my love of journalism and that they should pursue their goals. I was gracious, and told them to go for it." Then the subject abruptly changed. "'What do you think of Israel' they asked next. It was all very pleasant and I don't blame them for asking,” she told me. But, then, she added, she didn't know the people would've "shoved a microphone in my face like a jack knife." It wasn't just any rabbi making conversation. Nesenoff is an ardent Israel supporter who runs a website called 'Rabbi Live' and can be a flamboyant self-promoter. He says, "Even though I was born in Glen Cove and grew up in Syosset Long Island, Israel is my Jewish homeland. It is the homeland for all Jewish people." The sin of silence She remembered being moved by a rabbi who spoke alongside Martin Luther King Jr at the March on Washington in 1963. I was there also, and heard him speak too, and so I looked him up. It was Joachim Prinz of the American Jewish Congress who made a speech that influenced a younger Helen Thomas. He said, "When I was the rabbi of the Jewish community in Berlin under the Hitler regime, I learned many things. The most important thing that I learned under those tragic circumstances was that bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problem. The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem is silence." Helen says her whole career has been about combating the sin of silence.  She says she has now been liberated to speak out. "All I would like is for people to know what I was trying to say, that Palestinians are living under tyranny and that their rights are being violated. All I want is some sympathy for Palestinians," she says. Forgotten but not forgiven Now it's the holiday season, allegedly a time of peace and forgiveness when presidents issue pardons to convicted criminals and reflection is theoretically permitted, a time when even a State Department hawk like Richard Holbrooke can, on his deathbed, it is said, call for an end to the Afghan war that he had dogmatically supported. We have watched the rehabilitation of so many politicians over recent years who have stumbled, taken money or disgraced themselves in sex scandals, including senators and even presidents. Helen Thomas is not in that category. Yet, many of those "fallen" are back in action, tarnished perhaps, but allowed to recant, to work and then reappear in the media. But, to this day, there has been almost no compassion, empathy or respect shown for one of our great journalists, Helen Thomas, who has been presumed guilty and sentenced to oblivion with barely a word spoken in her defense. How can we expect Israelis and Palestinians to reconcile if our media won't set an example by reconciling with Helen Thomas? Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org. He directed Plunder The Crime of Our Time, a film on DVD about the financial crisis as a crime story. (Plunderthecrimeofourtime.com) The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.