“911: The Day that Changed Everything?” w/ Deepa Kumar
Audio here!
It has been 9 years since the terrorist attacks on two cities in the US, that – at least according to the ruling classes – changed the world forever. Certainly, these passing years have indeed changed the lives of many. Many lives have been lost, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan, American families have lost or welcomed home maimed and distraught young men and women from the Middle East, the American Left has been even more marginalized than before, despite an early, strong resistance to the Iraq invasion back in 2003, and tensions have been drawn between people of differing religions (and the non religious), not the least of these being, of course, Muslims here and abroad.
Every year since 911 – particularly with the vicious and sometimes delusional attacks on President Obama – fear and hatred of Muslims everywhere has grown to dangerous proportions, culminating thus far in a major protest over a proposed Muslim Center near Ground Zero, to planned Koran burnings in Florida by a Christian Pastor. What is going on here, and can it be stopped before we have a full-fledged disaster on our hands? And can the Left find a voice in these deeply troubling times when those who seem to be heard the loudest – and who have genuine concerns we on the Left share – are taking their cues from the radical right?
Deepa Kumar is Associate Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at the Rutgers University. She is a critical media studies scholar whose work is driven by an active engagement with the complex issues that characterize our era of globalization and war. Her lectures, teachings and writings revolve around the limitations of the corporate media system and the ways in which dissenting voices are marginalized from the public sphere.
Deepa’s areas of research include media, war, and imperialism; media, globalisation, and class; media and gender; and Islam, Islamophobia, the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy, on which she has published several articles. Her article titled ‘Danish Cartoons: Racism Has No Place on the Left’ following the Danish Cartoons controversy, which was published in the Monthly Review magazine in February 2006 attracted a lot of criticism, to counter which she published another article titled ‘Fighting Islamophobia: A Response to Critics’ in the same magazine in March, 2006.
Deepa has also lectured on issues such as media and democracy, labor and globalisation, the Iraq war, media representations of women, and Hindu fundamentalism in India. She is the author of the book ‘Outside the Box: Corporate Media, Globalization, and the UPS Strike’ (University of Illinois Press, 2008)