Melawan Kufr dengan Kasut, Apa yang hilang ?

Tanpa Kasut Tanpa Mengenal Musuh Diri, Akal,Bangsa, Negara atau Kufr

By Abdas Samad Clarke

A shoe was thrown. It was thrown because of the destruction of Iraq, its infrastructure, and the million deaths of men, women and children, and the exile of substantially more people as refugees, because of the theft of Iraq’s resources and their being handed over to crony capitalism by what they like to call the ‘US government’, a rubric for what has been a kind of gangsterdom long before Mr Bush the clueless assumed the helm and which will certainly continue to be so with the next incumbent.

Now the man who threw the shoe is regarded as bad mannered, and possibly an extremist. So to throw a shoe is extremism but to kill a million people is not. And in other eyes, he is a new hero, a Saladdin. One man will buy the shoe for $10 million and another has offered his willing daughter in marriage.

However, if we now campaign for the one man who threw the shoe, to stop him being beaten in an Iraqi jail, where were we when the million people were being murdered, the millions exiled to suffering and poverty? Surely our efforts should have been many million-fold stronger on their behalf. This is a classic case of how information levels, it makes each crime seem the same: the throwing of a shoe-thrower in jail equates to the murder of a million people. The outrage felt is equivalent in both cases.

In reacting to the shoe, we are simply reacting to the signal fed us by the apparatus ironically called the ‘media’, ironically, since media are what transmit signals to the public, but this apparatus largely blocks real and true signals from getting to us. But how can that be?

The media came to the forefront in history during the French Revolution, for after all, the word journalism comes from the French word jour ‘a day’. They are a part and parcel of the theory of democracy, for how can you have a citizenry voting on the affairs of state and those who are to represent them in making decisions if the citizenry are not well informed? Theoretically the media are crucial in this process. But something has gone wrong, horribly wrong.

That wrongness comes from something so simple and so obvious that few people can see it, and if they are shown it they refuse to see it. Just as in this theory there is a need for media to inform the citizenry, there is clearly a need for journalists, staff, editors, printers, distributors, and a whole host of others to produce, sell and distribute the ‘news’, and equally there is a need for a great deal of technology, not least printing machines, but today PCs, faxes, and a host of other devices, and this costs a great deal, capital expense.

Our age in its lemming-like rush to extinction sees no alternative to taking loans that grow exponentially and destroy their host just as parasites do. That necessarily means that the whole apparatus of the news must think first and foremost about sales, rather than about informing people. Actions are by intentions. The news has become a matter of sales and is not about informing.

That is a great part of why, although there has never been a people so over-informed as we are today, it results in us being absolutely ineffective and impotent, until finally one of our number, one of the swarm of the impotent, after being thoroughly searched for any possible dangerous object, simply lost it and threw his shoes and he did not even hit the target. And we, right across the globe, have felt a rush of sympathy and support for this pathetic brave man who simply responded humanly to the awful liar, mass murderer and war criminal he saw before him. And he threw his shoes.