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‘Combating The Appeal Of ISIS-Debate in NYT’

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(It is worth reading debate in in today’s NYT on similar topic like ‘ Why some American Muslims fall prey to extreme ideology of violence?’)

Muqtedar Khan teaches at the University of Delaware. He is a co-founder of the Delaware Council for Global and Muslim Affairs and is on Twitter.

How can we wrap our minds around the perverse appeal of ISIS to youth growing up in modern, liberal and democratic societies of the West? What is it that compels a young woman in Paris or a well-established young professional in California to eschew the fruits of modernity and liberalism, to join a radical movement that is so brutal and inhuman that even Al Qaeda finds it repellent?

According to some, these youth have embraced an ideology, a radicalized interpretation of Islam, that teaches gratuitous violence against unbelievers. Their policy solutions — profiling Muslims, making a registry of all Muslim-American, closing mosques, etc. — seem as arbitrary as the violence.

Others argue that when Muslim youth in the West — who are experiencing racism, Islamophobia and socio-economic marginalization or already alienated from their home communities — see a movement that is fighting Western imperialism, such as support for Israel and invasion of Iraq, they run to join it in the hope that they will earn victory in this world and in the next.

Finding real policy solutions won’t work until we subject modernity to a fundamental scrutiny. Why are youth in the West, where there are religious and political freedoms, equality and economic opportunity, turning away? The key question here is not what is the appeal of ISIS but rather why has the American dream and the promise of Western liberalism lost its appeal?

The answer is that modernity promises much more than it delivers and hence ultimately engenders disenchantment.

Muslims were told that if they embraced modernity they would become free and prosperous. But modernity has failed many Muslims in the Muslim World. It brought imperialism, occupation, wars, division and soul stifling oppression by home states and foreign powers. Today the most important element of modernity, the modern state, is crumbling across the Arab World, precipitating chaos and forcing Muslims to seek refuge abroad.

For Muslims in the West, unjust foreign policies of their new homes, persistent and virulent Islamophobia, state surveillance, discrimination and demonization can be at best alienating and at worst radicalizing. Perhaps it is those whom modernity has failed at home and abroad who are tempted by the fatal attraction of extremism.

But why Muslims only you might ask? My answer: Open your eyes and look, modernity is failing non-Muslims too. Egregious income inequalities, police brutality, rampant institutionalized racism, mass-killings, drugs, gang violence, sexual predatory behaviors, militarization of police, diminishing civil rights as the state becomes more intrusive and rising rhetoric of intolerance from mainstream politicians — they are symptoms of institutional failures, extremism and even domestic terrorism.

We can combat extremism only by recognizing and resisting it everywhere. But we must make the promise of modernity a reality for all in order to render the appeal of radical utopias less attractive.

Read views of other writers by clicking on the link below:

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/12/06/how-can-america-counter-the-appeal-of-isis/this-is-what-happens-when-modernity-fails-all-of-us

“Why Some Muslims in America Fall Prey To Extreme Ideology of Violence” By F. Sheikh

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There could be different factors involved in rest of the West, but this article deals mainly from American perspective. Recent study by the George Washington University, From Retweet To Raqqa, concludes that there is no specific profile of a Muslim terrorist and they come from all demographics. They are not necessarily raised as religious fanatics, uneducated or disadvantaged as one might expect. As per study 40 % are under the age of 21 year. I think the proper question is not what motivates them, rather what makes them vulnerable to extreme ideology of violence? Many experts are still at loss to answer this question. There may be some other factors, but I think, unfortunately one of the major contributing factor is that Muslims are living in a  charged anti-Muslim environment that makes them feel insecure, depressed and marginalized. It is especially true of teenagers. Some teenagers sense additional pressure of feeling different from their peers, and even target of anti-Muslim insults, ridicule and taunts from their own friends. It can lead to alienation, isolation and being bottled up in anger. Teenagers usually do not want to talk about it at home because they do not want to upset their parents. If teenagers do not have an outlet to express their feelings and anger at the dinner table at home or in Muslim community centers, unfortunately this bottled up anger and alienation may make them vulnerable and prime target of extreme nihilistic ideology like ISIS.

 Although Muslim adults have more capacity to absorb such pressures, but for some who face discrimination, ridicule and insults at job may react the same way as teenagers does.

Sometimes the situation described above may get worse if the discussion at home or Islamic centers is ‘limited’ to grievances against the West’s part in the creation of Al-Qaeda, Taliban (Use of Taliban freedom fighters-Jihadis to defeat Russia in Afghanistan), ISIS by military misadventure in Iraq and support of repressive regimes in Muslim lands. This discussion limited to just grievances sometime may leave the wrong impression on alienated teenager or adult of justifying the violent acts of Al-Qaeda and ISIS, and which may re-enforce the already bottled up anger and might even inflame it further.

As American citizens, there is nothing wrong in disagreeing with the policies of the West and USA, and many Americans do, but grievances discussion must always be followed by a strong and clear emphasis that to bring the change in situation and policies is possible only through political process and not by the violence as advocated by the extreme ideologies like ISIS. This change through politics and community involvement was achieved by minorities like Jews, Irish and Catholics who faced similar hostility as Muslims are facing today.  In 2012, Douglas Saunders wrote in NYT in his article ‘Catholics Then, Muslims Now’;

 “As late as 1950, 240,000 Americans bought copies of “American Freedom and Catholic Power,” a New York Times best seller. Its author, Paul Blanshard, a former diplomat and editor at The Nation, made the case that Catholicism was an ideology of conquest, and that its traditions constituted a form of “medieval authoritarianism that has no rightful place in the democratic American environment.”

 The hostility against Catholics was so virulent that many liberals, including Bertrand Russel, supported the above view. Catholics, Jews and other minorities were able to overcome this hostility and become part of American fabric by involvement in politics and community works like building charity hospitals, Museums, colleges and universities.

I strongly feel having such discussions at dinner tables and in Islamic Centers, including Sunday schools and emphasizing on right course of action through political process and community involvement will provide the opportunity to some of the teenagers and adults who feel alienated and bottled up to open up and prevent them following a wrong path-and may also lead to some observation that who needs more help and attention. Such discussions will help regardless the cause of alienation and anger.

There is a great fear in Muslim communities that any such open discussions may lead to some misunderstandings by the law enforcement officials with untoward repercussions. Many Muslims are afraid to write even ‘terrorist’ in their emails that it may trigger automatic surveillance. These fears may well be true and not without foundations, but remaining behind the bunkers carries even more disastrous consequences both for current and future Muslim generations.

 

Fayyaz Sheikh

  

 

What is general relativity? by David Tong

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It is one of the best simple understandable explanation from Newton’s law of gravity to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, Watch video below or continue to read below(f.sheikh).

The general theory of relativity describes the force of gravity. Einstein wasn’t the first to come up with such a theory — back in 1686 Isaac Newton formulated his famous inverse square law of gravitation. Newton’s law works perfectly well on small-ish scales: we can use it to calculate how fast an object dropped off a tall building will hurtle to the ground and even to send people to the Moon. But when distances and speeds are very large, or very massive objects are involved, Newton’s law becomes inaccurate. It’s a good place to start though, as it’s easier to describe than Einstein’s theory.

Suppose you have two objects, say the Sun and the Earth, with masses $m_1$ and $m_2$ respectively. Write $r$ for the distance between the two objects. Then Newton’s law says that the gravitational force $F$ between them is

\[ F=G_ N\frac{m_1 m_2}{r^2}, \]

where $G_ N$ is a fixed number, known as Newton’s constant.

The formula makes intuitive sense: it tells us that gravity gets weaker over long distances (the larger $r$ the smaller $F$) and that the gravitational force is stronger between more massive objects (the larger either of $m_1$ and $m_2$ the larger $F$).

Different force, same formula

There is another formula which looks very similar, but describes a different force. In 1785 the French physicist Charles-Augustin de Coulomb came up with an equation to capture the electrostatic force $F$ that acts between two charged particles with charges $Q_1$ and $Q_2$:

\[ F = \frac{1}{4 \pi \epsilon _0} \frac{Q_1 Q_2}{r^2}. \]

Here $r$ stands for the distance between the two particles and $\epsilon _0$ is a constant which determines the strength of electromagnetism. (It has the fancy name permittivity of free space.)

The problem with Newton

Newton’s and Coulomb’s formula are nice and neat, but there is a problem. Going back to Newton’s law, suppose you took the Earth and the Sun and very quickly moved them further apart. This would make the force acting between them weaker, but, according to the formula, the weakening of the force would happen straight away, the instant you move the two bodies apart. The same goes for Coulomb’s law: moving the charged particles apart very quickly would result in an immediate weakening of the electrostatic force between them.

But this can’t be true. Einstein’s special theory of relativity, proposed ten years before the general theory in 1905, says that nothing in the Universe can travel faster than light — not even the “signal” that communicates that two objects have moved apart and the force should become weaker.

Why we need fields

This one reason why the classical idea of a force needs replacing in modern physics. Instead, we need to think in terms of something — new objects — that transmit the force between one object and another. This was the great contribution of the British scientist Michael Faraday to theoretical physics. Faraday realised that spread throughout the Universe there are objects we today call fields, which are involved in transmitting a force. Examples are the electric and magnetic fields you are probably familiar with from school.

EinsteinAlbert Einstein (1879-1955) in 1921.

A charged particle gives rise to an electric field, which is “felt” by another particle (which has its own electric field). One particle will move in response to the other’s electric field — that’s what we call a force. When one particle is quickly moved away from the other, then this causes ripples in the first particle’s electric field. The ripples travel through space, at the speed of light, and eventually affect the other particle. In fact, the particle that is moved also generates a magnetic field and emits electromagnetic radiation. The end result is a complex interaction of rippling fields — but the point is that the force is really one particle being affected by ripples propagating through the field of the other.

It took scientists a long time to fully develop this field picture of electromagnetism. The main credit goes to the Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell, who not only realised that the electric and magnetic forces were two aspects of a unified force of electromagnetism, but also replaced Coulomb’s simple law of electrostatics with four equations that describe how electric and magnetic fields respond to moving charged particles. Maxwell’s four formulae are some of the most amazing equations in physics because they capture all there is to know about electricity and magnetism.

Gravity and spacetime

So what about gravity? Just as with electromagnetism there needs to be a field giving rise to what we perceive as the gravitational force acting between two bodies. Einstein’s great insight was that this field is made of something we already know about: space and time. Imagine a heavy body, like the Sun, sitting in space. Einstein realised that space isn’t just a passive by-stander, but responds to the heavy object by bending. Another body, like the Earth, moving into the dent created by the heavier object will be diverted by that dent. Rather than carrying on moving along a straight line, it will start orbiting the heavier object. Or, if it is sufficiently slow, will crash into it. (It took Einstein many years of struggle to arrive at his theory — see this article to find out more.)

Another lesson of Einstein’s theory is that space and time can warp into each other — they are inextricable linked and time, too, can be distorted by massive objects. This is why we talk, not just about the curvature of space, but about the curvature of spacetime.

The equation

The general theory of relativity is captured by a deceptively simple-looking equation:

\[ R_{\mu \nu } - \frac{1}{2}Rg_{\mu \nu } = \frac{G_ N}{8 \pi c^4}T_{\mu \nu }. \]

Essentially the equation tells us how a given amount of mass and energy warps spacetime. The left-hand side of the equation,

\[ R_{\mu \nu } - \frac{1}{2}Rg_{\mu \nu }, \]

describes the curvature of spacetime whose effect we perceive as the gravitational force. It’s the analogue of the term $F$on the left-hand side of Newton’s equation.

The term $T_{\mu \nu }$ on right-hand side of the equation describes everything there is to know about the way mass, energy, momentum and pressure are distributed throughout the Universe. It is what became of the term $m_1 m_2$ in Newton’s equation, but it is much more complicated. All of these things are needed to figure out how space and time bends. $T_{\mu \nu }$ goes by the technical term energy-momentum tensor. The constant $G_ N$ that appears on the right-hand side of the equation is again Newton’s constant and $c$ is the speed of light.

What about the Greek letters $\mu $ and $\nu $ that appear as subscripts? To understand what they mean, first notice that spacetime has four dimensions. There are three dimensions of space (corresponding to the three directions left-right, up-down and forwards-backwards of space) and one dimension of time (which only has one direction). If you want to understand how a moving bit of mass affects spacetime, you need to understand how it affects each of those four dimensions and their various combinations.

(As an analogy, think of the way you’d describe an object moving at constant speed along a straight line in Newton’s classical physics. You need two pieces of information: the direction and the speed of the motion. The direction is given by three numbers, each telling you by how much the object moves in each of the three directions of space. Therefore, the motion is described by a total of four numbers, three relating to space and one giving the speed. Since speed is distance covered per unit time, we need three bits of information relating to space and one to time, in order to describe the motion.)

Click link below for full article;

https://plus.maths.org/content/what-general-relativity

‘America’s Blue-Collar White People Are Dying at an Astounding Rate’ By Barbara Ehrenreich

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Could the bump in white working class deaths be the result of widespread despair?

The white working class, which usually inspires liberal concern only for its paradoxical, Republican-leaning voting habits, has recently become newsworthy for something else: according to economist Anne Case and Angus Deaton, the winner of the latest Nobel Prize in economics, its members in the 45- to 54-year-old age group are dying at an immoderate rate. While the lifespan of affluent whites continues to lengthen, the lifespan of poor whites has been shrinking. As a result, in just the last four years, the gap between poor white men and wealthier ones has widened by up to four years. The New York Times summed up the Deaton and Case study with this headline: “Income Gap, Meet the Longevity Gap.”

This was not supposed to happen. For almost a century, the comforting American narrative was that better nutrition and medical care would guarantee longer lives for all. So the great blue-collar die-off has come out of the blue and is, as the Wall Street Journal says, “startling.”

It was especially not supposed to happen to whites who, in relation to people of color, have long had the advantage of higher earnings, better access to health care, safer neighborhoods, and of course freedom from the daily insults and harms inflicted on the darker-skinned. There has also been a major racial gap in longevity—5.3 years between white and black men and 3.8 years between white and black women—though, hardly noticed, it has been narrowing for the last two decades. Only whites, however, are now dying off in unexpectedly large numbers in middle age, their excess deaths accounted for by suicide, alcoholism, and drug (usually opiate) addiction.

There are some practical reasons why whites are likely to be more efficient than blacks at killing themselves. For one thing, they are more likely to be gun-owners, and white men favor gunshots as a means of suicide. For another, doctors, undoubtedly acting in part on stereotypes of non-whites as drug addicts, are more likely to prescribe powerful opiate painkillers to whites than to people of color. (I’ve been offered enough oxycodone prescriptions over the years to stock a small illegal business.)

Manual labor—from waitressing to construction work—tends to wear the body down quickly, from knees to back and rotator cuffs, and when Tylenol fails, the doctor may opt for an opiate just to get you through the day.

The wages of despair

But something more profound is going on here, too. As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman puts it, the “diseases” leading to excess white working class deaths are those of “despair,” and some of the obvious causes are economic. In the last few decades, things have not been going well for working class people of any color.

I grew up in an America where a man with a strong back—and better yet, a strong union—could reasonably expect to support a family on his own without a college degree. In 2015, those jobs are long gone, leaving only the kind of work once relegated to women and people of color available in areas like retail, landscaping, and delivery-truck driving. This means that those in the bottom 20% of white income distribution face material circumstances like those long familiar to poor blacks, including erratic employment and crowded, hazardous living spaces.

White privilege was never, however, simply a matter of economic advantage. As the great African-American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1935, “It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage.”

Some of the elements of this invisible wage sound almost quaint today, like Du Bois’s assertion that white working class people were “admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools.” Today, there are few public spaces that are not open, at least legally speaking, to blacks, while the “best” schools are reserved for the affluent—mostly white and Asian American along with a sprinkling of other people of color to provide the fairy dust of “diversity.” While whites have lost ground economically, blacks have made gains, at least in the de jure sense. As a result, the “psychological wage” awarded to white people has been shrinking.

For most of American history, government could be counted on to maintain white power and privilege by enforcing slavery and later segregation. When the federal government finally weighed in on the side of desegregation, working class whites were left to defend their own diminishing privilege by moving rightward toward the likes of Alabama Governor (and later presidential candidate) George Wallace and his many white pseudo-populist successors down to Donald Trump.

At the same time, the day-to-day task of upholding white power devolved from the federal government to the state and then local level, specifically to local police forces, which, as we know, have taken it up with such enthusiasm as to become both a national and international scandal. The Guardian, for instance, now keeps a running tally of the number of Americans (mostly black) killed by cops (as of this moment, 1,209 for 2015), while black protest, in the form of the Black Lives Matter movement and a wave of on-campus demonstrations, has largely recaptured the moral high ground formerly occupied by the civil rights movement. Click link for full article;

http://inthesetimes.com/article/18638/barbara-ehrenreich-americas-blue-collar-white-people-are-dying-at-astoundin

posted by f. sheikh