A Quote by Tariq Ali

The U.S. is telling the Northern Alliance to kill Taliban prisoners. It's totally a breach of all the known conventions of war. Western television networks aren't showing this, but Arab networks are showing how prisoners are being killed and what's being done to them. Instead, we're shown scenes that are deliberately created for the Western media: a few women without the veil, a woman reading the news on Kabul television, and 150 people cheering.
Some of the guys in the Northern Alliance are war criminals. One of the Northern Alliance commanders ran a slave girl network in Kabul in 1994. Remember that there was a period when every woman on the streets was at risk of being raped. This was the Northern Alliance period of glory.
Human-rights advocates, for example, claim that the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners is of a piece with President Bush's 2002 decision to deny al Qaeda and Taliban fighters the legal status of prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions.
After 'Paths to Freedom,' I met some people who used to teach drama in Mountjoy and they said that the prisoners loved 'Rats.' We went back to Mountjoy to research this film and the governor was showing us around and he introduced us to a few prisoners.
Unfortunately, the United States and a few other governments have used the war on terrorism as a way of violating human rights. I am referring to the case of the Guantánamo Bay prisoners. This violation of the rights of prisoners has been so unbelievable that the United Nations has reminded the United States repeatedly that the treatment of prisoners should take place according to the preestablished conventions of the United Nations.
There is state-run television in Russia, which is more loyal to the state, as it always is with state television in any country. We have private owned networks; some of them are oppositional. We have thousands of regional networks that, in their regions, are more watched than the so-called federal stations.
These 2.3 million prisoners, somehow we've convinced ourselves that's normal and rational, more prisoners than soldiers, more prisoners than China, more than one per cent of the adult population, seven times the incarceration rate of Canada or any Western European country.
When a television show like 'Scandal' becomes the biggest show in recent history, suddenly advertisers and networks want to jump on that. And what it's showing is that people want to see diversity.
I think showing people being messy and showing them being wrong and showing them in their humanity is something that we can do, but it becomes difficult because there's this weight put on comedy to be part of change and I'm like, 'I don't think it changes anything.'
I think its going to be continually tougher on the big networks as more cable channels do really interesting television. The big networks have a choice to make: Do we try to be all things to all people and get the shows that will deliver 20 million viewers a week? Are we the McDonald's of television? Or are we going to try to be more specific?
I think a lot of people in television news look at the cable networks with great envy.
Showing women being scientists on television can have a great impact on who actually goes into science as a profession.
When you're young, you look at television and think, there's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want.
The one thing I would say is, I do think women are evaluated differently than men. How we look, what is our age? Do you see a ton of 55-year-old women in sports television? No. But there are men in their 60s and 70s across many networks who are still in sports television.
This is the evolution of television. It just keeps evolving from three networks, four cable networks, satellite. Now there's Internet channels and the phone.
Of course, no state accepts [that it should call] the people it is imprisoning or detaining for political reasons, political prisoners. They don't call them political prisoners in China, they don't call them political prisoners in Azerbaijan and they don't call them political prisoners in the United States, U.K. or Sweden; it is absolutely intolerable to have that kind of self-perception.
There hasn't been a lot written about it in the Western media. But in the Arab world, and Western Asia as a whole, Baghdad was always known as a famously bookish, intellectual city. There's an old saying that Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, and Baghdad reads.
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