Undying Benefactor be generous

Lightened up and t shirtified
White supremacist Neoliberalism strikes again with ironic splendour.

A Queer universal chord
Struck across developmentshire
From core to semiperiphery,
Universal exclusivity.
Tormenting the other men and women put in their graves, pyres and asylums
By this regime of epic homocide.

We mourn and mark
With prayer and resolve.
For all souls and hopes
In His way.
Keep those selfies for Benazir.

Shaytan,
Ustad of hypocrisy
Laughs his head off.
"What do you know about justice?"

The death of two shall outweigh that of the hundreds thought massacred in Dhaka just three years ago at Shapla Chottor .
Two human bodies over hundreds invisible subhuman bodies

Monitoring & Evaluation report
Their value
multiplied by white
to the power three.
Upper middle class,
foreign embassy staff,
lgbt.

Shaytan,
Ustad of misdirecting rage
Laughing his head off again,
begins to fill in a very important
Socio-spiritual Impact Self Assessment form.
And abandons his tools to their fate.

Hacking Bangladesh to Pieces with Representations of Inequality

An  Islamic blogger (Dark Malekith) and an allegedly atheist blogger ( Washiqur Rahman AKA Kutshit Hasher Chhana) are attacked by assailants with machetes within days of each other in Bangladesh.

Which incident has gone global? and why?

Whether they are bloggers in the sense of having their own sites, or worked within a very Facebook based ecology is probably not a productive angle of enquiry. They were young men on journeys who communicated with audiences by pressing electronic keys. There lives are deemed expendable fuels for the flames of ignorance.

Inequality of representation

The inequality of the worth of human life and representation is essential to challenge here as it warps analysis and feeds the nonsense engine that haunts and taunts Sally and Sam Rahman and their quest to survive and thrive in Bangladesh.

To collide a Spivakism with a Fanonity, unless you are a well placed individual, you inhabit the zone of nonbeing.

The first attack is said to have occurred Lalmonirhat, a border district town in the north west, we don't know much about it yet.  We won't from the corporate press as there is no money in the Muslim victims of apparent secular violence sector. I invite people to post any details/ here.

The second attack occurred in the capital. Washiqur Rahman was 27 and the usually useless Dhaka police say that have apprehended 2 of the 3 culprits, extracted confessions from them and have the name of the third.  Late Washiqur Rahman's slashed body circulates the social media, slashing all those it comes into contact with, those who haven't been numbed already by the ultra violence of this society which nobody seems able to address.

Condolences to the families and justice for the victimised.

Difficulty Trusting the Police and the Awami League narratives

Luckily for the police, their two detainees come from the community madrassas that they committed massacre against on 5-6th May 2013.  It is as if someone wants to open up and benefit from a new front in the war on terror.

As we speak, this same police force is regularly torturing and disappearing people as part of the government's general programme of not just ensuring its survival, but crushing even the possibility of something alternative growing.

Delivering results to political masters is very good for your career. The Dhaka Met Police is packed full of Awami League loyalists and people from the Prime Minister's home district Gopalganj. Exceptional performance is rewarded with promotion, as we saw from the Commissioner Benazir Ahmed's rise to directing the Rapid Action Battalion. He had command responsibility for the Motijheel Massacre that nobody has forgotten and that nobody speaks openly about.

The FBI are in town investigating the murder of another atheist blogger Avijit Roy who was an American citizen, and there is growing concern with the integrity of the story lines being pursued.

Berk: Cockney Rhyming slang for Berkshire Hunt

International reporting on this stuff has been atrocious. As we might expect, the Shahbag movement are calling for the hanging of the perpetrators and appearing all over the place and nobody else is getting a look in.  All the usual Indian outlets have suspended their critical faculties and atheist / secular / journalist / free speech affinity groups are doing their thing.

Jason Burke's piece in the London-based Guardian was really awful and misleading. There is something systematically wrong in that institution on Bangladesh affairs. It quotes the pro-government Dhaka Tribune's analysis of the victim's Facebook preferences and the Prime Minister's advisor HT Imam (who Ajmal Masroor challenged successful on Al Jazeera after the 5th May Massacre, earning himself a ban on travel to Bangladesh). It doesn't include a single voice that challenges the 'Muslim fundamentalist perpetrator' explanation coming from officials. Given the Guardian's role in helping the Bangladesh government to stitch up Londoner Samiun Rahman as an ISIS recruiter, this is not surprising.

The Rentu Memoirs: A portrait of Sheikh Hasina and her party/family

The envelope of possibility and impunity is huge in Dhaka.  I suspect that this horrible incident will turn out to be yet another sabotage attack from the Awami League. It follows the pattern of thought that I found in the Rentu Memoirs (English translation here) which were written by an ex-aide to Hasina, Motiur Rahman Rentu who blew the whistle on her and the Awami League about 15 years ago.

In the absence of a competent and honest investigatory team, or even the conditions to investigate, it is unsurprising that people shrug, switch off and struggle on with their lives. Bravery, like Rentu's but better is what Bangladesh needs now, between foolhardiness and courage. A creative bravery less bloody but in the ballpark of Col Farooq and Rashid's tank bluff in 1975.

The Murder of Nahid Al Manea

A 32 year old aspiring scientist Nahid Al Manea arrived in Colchester Essex a few months ago from Saudi Arabia. Yesterday, she was  murdered in what is likely to be an Islamophobic attack.  I do not have any (proxy) funeral prayer details and it looks like they are going to do the autopsy today.

It is impossible right now not to read this event in the context of rising anti-Muslim agenda being normalised by powerful politicians, journalists and interests in Britain. The tip of this iceberg assemblage has become increasingly clear in recent months and includes the Conservative Education Minister Michael Gove, The Telegraph's Andrew Gilligan, The Henry Jackson Society and the Quilliam Foundation.

Colchester is not renowned as a bastion of hearty cosmopolitan dignity, and they and the University of Essex are in for some challenging times right now. Places, communities and institutions get stained in sins like these for decades, thinking of Eltham and the murder of Steven Lawrence, though it depends on the stink that get kicked up. The University's own press release was quite machine-like for starters.

• Who did this and what were their motivations?
• How does the misframing of Muslims make them structurally more vulnerable to attacks like this?
• What was the impact of the recent Trojan Horse reiteration of the Scheming Muslim narrative on the perpetrator?
• Will politicians, editors and journalists reflect on their role in creating these unsafe conditions and their responsibilities to rectify them and return the Muslims voices to them?

Little investigatory appetite

Talk about the murder yesterday was generally prayerful but also sardonic, that if the victim were white and the act's originator apparently Muslim that this would be all over the news everywhere.

The artists at OOMK were spot on, tweeting,

Wondering why a Brazillian Noodles feature made it onto the @BBCNews homepage while the violent stabbing of a Muslim didn't... #Colchester

Last year, the 25 year old machine gunner and Afghanistan war veteran Lee Rigby's grisly murder was hugely impactful on the media and the country. As a forces guy, his honour was never disputed and the Muslim apology machine was swift into 'action'. However, that crime was on a very public street, in a metropolitan area and executed with social media narcissism and false pride that brought the edge of the moral sickness straight to our eyes.

This death context is that much harder to know about, and we really need to know. Dear Nahid was attacked at 1040 in the morning on a path by a nature conservation area by someone who doesn't want to be known just yet. As we saw in the recent floods, London news teams rarely venture out of their safety zones. As we have come to know over the years, they are generally peopled by feckless and careerist toerags.

It seems to me like it is easier to know about Mosul than it is Colchester.

Remembering Laurent Bonomo and Gabriel Ferez

I remember the hideous double murder and burning of French postgraduate researchers Laurent Bonomo and Gabriel Ferez in New Cross, South London in 2008. There were significant French protests at their deaths, families campaigned and twitter raged and their home institutions and students honoured their memory. Eventually, two were sentenced to a total of 75 years over the incident, a senior minister Jack Straw apologised for failings in the probation service and David Scott, London's chief probation officer resigned.

Fast forward to 2014, and the secret services are run by right wing nutters, there have been severe cuts in public services, Islamophobia underpins so much at play here and that the victim was a Saudi lady, not French.

Its hard to have any expectations of how the Saudi state will respond to this and their particular calculus of life. Therefore it is more important to locate the social justice and equality hunt right here in the UK amongst as broad a community as possible.

Decolonial Hopening

Below is a really well thought out 12 speech on the situation facing Muslims in the UK today.

Allahumma grant safety and dignity to all your creatures.