It seems like there is a lot of propaganda going over this corruption accusation. At this point, I have no idea whether she was corrupt or not, and don't have an authority I can easily trust on the subject. I'm not sure it matters very much if she was corrupt. What does seem important is who killed her (whether by sunroof lever or bullet) and what happens next for Pakistan. Musharraf seeming to hinder an investigation incriminates him. If Bhutto had been killed by extremist, you'd think he'd make the investigation as vigorous and transparent as possible to give the public confidence that he should be more greatly empowered to secure the country against terrorist forces. Interesting side-note, my father-in-law graduated in the same class at Harvard as Bhutto and was an acquantance.
i did not catch that. unfortunate, because i'm guessing/hoping the folks who made this movie never intended to communicate that there's only negatives from asians. and it's certainly not what i intended to communicate with my post.
Dude was in disguise. The 9/11 dudes didn't walk on the plane dressed like bin laden. However, the SUNGLASSES should have given it away, like in all the movies.
I am not surprised that the blatant anti-Asian stereotypes in the movie Crash eluded you as well as the majority of non-Asians (heck, even some Asians), but I am sure that there is no ill intent in your post. Can't say the same about the maker of Crash, the Academy members that handed out the Oscar, and those professional movie reviewers that heaped praises upon that piece of crap. Their subtle yet deep-rooted racism is in full display. I challenge anyone on this board to dispute that.
I guess the director felt Asians were too much of a positive model minority and used his power to balance things out. Using Asians as a balance or gimmick happens a lot in the media, but I think the perception is changing. Not sure this convo belongs in the topic though.
The interesting thing about that movie was how it portrayed so many different racial groups in LA in a negative light....with one notable exception conveniently left out...
It IS out of topic here but I really wish what you described Asian-americans as Positive model minority is the perception of most Americans. If that positive perception is true, Asian-american shouldn't mind how crash portrays them. However, there is just not much of positive image in American mass media (especially hollywood and TVs). On the other hand, we all know that Jewish people produced some of the greatest scientists, artists, and money-makers, should we balance this positive image by portraying them as greedy and money-tight? What's the ratio of positive VS. negative images of african-americans in the media? Many of us hold the stereotype that they are great in sports and music, should we balance it out in media by saying they made less significant contributions to science and technology? Are we using the same standard at all? My point is, there are too many lopsided negatives about Asian-americans as REGULAR AMERICANS in the media. Do we treat them as Citizens with equal civil rights at all or do they need to fight more aggressively for them?
You do know this woman is considered the "Mother of the Taliban" right? I found it quite ironic that she pretty much helped create and support the Taliban, but she comes back from exile a couple years later to fight against Islamic Extremism. Political Opportunism at its finest. Whats the one thing more desirable then money? Power. You don't think corruption in a former/present candidate for Prime Minister matters? Its a big deal to Musharraf and the Pakistani People (specifically PPP supporters) on how she died. A lot of Bhuttos supporters blame Musharraf for her death, not because he was behind it, but because he didn't do much to protect her, like supplying here with broken radio jammers (she should have bought em herself with the millions she stole), which is pretty bad considering she had a chance to become the next PM. If she died from a skull fracture resulting from the force of a suicide bomber then it wouldn't be as bad for Musharraf since, he himself, said that theres noway to defend against suicide bombers in general. But if she was killed by an assassin's bullet, then a lot of people are going to ask how security allowed an armed assassin to come within 5 feet of her, aim his weapon and squeeze off 3 rounds. Hopefully this just blows over , elections come and go and Musharraf finally has an excuse to drop the hammer on the extremist once and for all. But knowing the Middle East its just going to get much worst for Musharraf and company.
The following was posted to a blog by Richard Sale, who is an intelligence correspondent for United Press International, and has written several books on political/intelligence intrigue. It is very long but the description of the situation seems shaded and complex enough to me that I can believe it. Essentially, it states that the low level guys in the ISI and generally the military are on the same side as the Taliban and al Qaeda, and so differentiating between the military and al Qaeda here as the source of the assassination isn't really valid. But at the same time, when you say the military assassinated her, it doesn't mean that Musharraf knew or took part or issued orders, despite his ties to the military, nor does it mean that all of the military is lined up, taking a side, and distributing orders to assassinate people. Essentially there is a large group of junior and mid level officers sympathetic with the Taliban, and while these people dislike Musharraf as not hard core enough, they seriously hated Bhuto as a heretic, and that it was probably a plot that was in large part a cabal among these officers. It’s really not really anything new, but I think it sums it up in a way that paints a realistic picture of the complex situation. [rquoter] The chief suspects in the Bhutto assassination, as of forty eight hours ago, were lower and mid-level officers of Pakistan’s ISI, intelligence agency, and the Pakitani army. Bhutto’s history with the ISI is long, tangled and, on the ISI’s side, murderous. The ISI or Inter-Service Intelligence agency was created in 1948, manned by officers from the three armed services. Pakistan became a fundamentalist Islamic state under the 1980s leadership of Gen. Zia-ul-Haq who assigned it to keep an eye on Bhutto’s Pakistan’s Peoples Party (PPP) among other things. In fact, according to an Indian counterintelligence source, B Raman, with whom I used to stay in close touch, the ISI’s Internal Political Division poisoned two of Bhutto’s brothers on the French Rivera in 1985, to try to scare her out returning to Pakistan in order to run not only the PPP but another group she had started, the Movement for Restoration of Democracy (MRD). She ignored Zia and returned. When Bhutto entered her first term as PM in 1988, she tried to reduce the ISI’s powers and boost the clout of the Intelligence Bureau or IB founded in 1947. Usually a Lt. Gen. heads the ISI, but Bhutto put in a major general close to her father. This was bitterly resented. When she became PM again in 1993, Bhutto followed the custom of letting an Lt. General of the Army head the ISI. But she transferred the handling of operations supporting the Taliban from ISI to the Interior Ministry. It was at this time she began to work with Gen. Musharraf who was ISI’s DG of Military Ops. But factions within the ISI detested her, and in 1996, assassinated her only remaining brother outside his house Karachi in September, according to former US officials. A former ISI station chief in New Delhi hatched a plot to assassinate her in 1995, but the plan was foiled. Once Bhutto was in exile, Musharraf toppled PM Narwaz Sharif in 1999, and in the tradition of Zia, Musharraf, tied to weaken the PPP which has its chief base in Sind, the Sindhis basically a group with a lot of Sufi influence and given to religious tolerance. Musharraf set up a secret task force to wreck the PPP and scatter the Sindh nationalists. To do this it began to collaborate with the Jamiat-ul-Ulema Islam (JUI), which is a jihadi group with ties to bin Laden.Musharraf also boosted collaboration with other dangerous terrorist organizations in aiding the Taliban. In fact, in 2001, US intelligence analysts had targeted Gen. Mohammad Aziz of ISI, Lt. Gen. Hami Gull, Lt. Gen. Avid Nadir and others. All had ties to al Aida and after the attacks of 9/11, they were removed thanks to US pressure. I remember talking to a State Dept official about these generals, and he said, "That’s interesting – fifteen minutes ago those names were on my classified briefing screen." There were other groups just as dangerous such as the Hizbut-Tehrir that has many followers in the lower levels of the army does the Harkat-ul-al-Islami September 11 changed everything,.and Musharraf had to abruptly stand his policy towards Afghanistan on its head. The ISI still supported the Taliban, but by then bin Laden had bought the group for $100 million, according to CIA officials. Suddenly Pakistan was a major front in the war on terror and the US soon installed and still maintains four military bases on Pakistani soil that no Pakistani can set foot in. Naturally, many of the old Zia loyalists and bin Laden sympathizers saw Musharraf as a turncoat and they have tried to kill him for being an American tool. But for many ISI segments its closeness to othe jihadis hardly changed because of America’s tragedy. As a serving US intelligence analyst said to me in 2003, "It’s worrying when half of your lower and mid-level Pakistani intelligence analysts have bin Laden screen savers on their computers." In any case, attacks on Musharraf were stepped up. When he visited Rawalpindi in December of 2003, rockets were fired at his car. In early 2007, there was an attempt to shoot down plane using anti-aircraft fire. After Musharraf ordered a bloody commando raid on the Red Mosque in Islamabad last July, there were two suicide attacks on the army’s general HQ and two attacks on the ISI offices. Following the attacks, lower ranking army and air force officers were arrested and it was revealed they had ties to Jaish-e-Mohammed, a jihadi group. But the investigations stopped at the bottom. No senior officers were arrested and the probe is dead is as dead Julius Caesar. Bhutto was certainly a marked woman from the time she returned to Pakistan. If parts of the ISI detested Musharraf, they abominated her. She said two things that sealed her fate. She said that if elected PM, she would allow US forces to hunt for bin Laden on Pakistani soil, and that she would allow the Vienna-based IAEA to interrogate the rogue nuclear scientist, AQ Khan about his nuclear smugglings to North Korea, Iran, Libya, etc. After those statements, she had no chance of surviving. Pakistan’s deteriorating internal situation and its role in helping to destabilize Afghanistan were part of the reason the US wanted to reinsert Benazir Bhutto as the new prime minister. According to the South Asia Analysis think-tank, incidents of suicide terrorism in Afghanistan increased from 17 in 2005 to 123 in 2006 and has already touched 140 so far this year. The fact that these assaults were launched and coordinated from Pakistan was their most ominous element. Pakistan was known to be providing camps for terrorists and helping to train them, allegedly with ISI assistance, US officials said. But worst of all was the fact that within Pakistan terrorist incidents had dramatically increased. There has been an average of four acts of suicide terrorism per month in Pakistani territory as against 12 per month in Afghan territory, and some of those in Pakistan were particularly grisly like the attack of Dec. 17 where nine members of the Pakistan Army soccer team were killed in Khoat in the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP). In all, there have been within Pakistan 54 attacks to date. Thirty four of these were against military targets, including one against the US-trained Special Services Group (SSG) in Tarbela, the two against the Inter-Services Intelligence, the two against the General Headquarters of the Army in Rawalpindi, one against the Air Force in Sargodha. Ten attacks were made on the police, and four were made against civilians, including the Oct. 18 attack on Bhutto that killed 140. The NWFP was Bhutto’s political base, and her main strength was in the rural Sindh. Bhutto used to have strength among the the Seraikis in the Punjab but she lost ground among the Pashtuns when Musharaff seduced from Bhutto’s ranks one Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao, a pro-Musharraf Pashtun leader of the NWFP. As his reward, Sherpao got the interior ministry and set up his own PPP in rivalry with Bhutto. Two attempts were then made to kill him, along with Amir Muqam, another pro-Musharraf Pashtun leader who was targeted by a suicide bomber. Both escaped. The Pakistani armed forces have been waging bloody clashes in the Swat valley in NWFP but Pakistani control there is tenuous at best. Not only were the terrorists gaining ground in the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), but jihadi activity had in fact spread to the Provincially-Administered Tribal Areas (PATA) of the Northwest Frontier Provinces NWFP. Bhutto was to change this as prime minister. She would get additional US intelligence assistance, and the NWFP would be the base for a new counter offensive against jihidi groups such as the new pro-Al Qaeda Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM) of Maulana Fazlullah, popularly known as Maulana FM Radio But Bhutto had profound enemies in the army and air force where she was seen as a front man for American interests, a proxy, "a bought dog," as one former Pakistani official said to me. If I can offer an opinion, I think the Bush diplomacy that resurrected her was purblind to the point of dense stupidity, and, under the guise of promoting democracy, she was misled by her own sense of vanity and invulnerability and her liking to be liked by Americans. When I think of her dying in the way she did, one can only fill with painful sorrow. With greetings to all, Richard Sale [/rquoter]
To continue with the derailment. I've never been that comfortable with the "model minority" stereotype and think we have been seeing some backlash towards it. I've also never felt that it was a disservice to Asians as it painted us as being simplistic and we were expected to act and behave a certain way when we are fare more complex as a community and individually. Overall stereotypes both negative and positives are good things and I'm not that bothered if there are some negative portrayals of Asians if that balances things out from all of the model minority portrayals. What I would rather see though is acceptance that we Asians are like any other group with good and bad people.
LOL ... you mean Hispanic? Considering the biggest share of gang violence and illegal immigration in Southern California and given the highly positive characters of Hispanic race portrayed in the movie, every neutral observer would agree it's indeed interesting. But I personally have no problem for positive depiction of Hispanics in Crash. The problem I have, as I stated previously, is that every other character in the movie comes in full circle, gaining some redemption at one moment or another, except for Asians, whose sinfulness saw no resolution or was given no explanation other than outright prejudice, greed, and good ol' steorotypes. For this movie to be awarded the Oscar, it just shows the crappy state of the mind of film industry and the Academy.
I don't know what happened to the edit function but I did a terrible job proofreading when I posted this. To edit. [edit]To continue with the derailment. I've never been that comfortable with the "model minority" stereotype and think we have been seeing some backlash towards it. I also felt that it was a disservice to Asians as it painted us as being simplistic and we were expected to act and behave a certain way when we are fare more complex as a community and individually. Overall stereotypes both negative and positives are not good things and I'm not that bothered if there are some negative portrayals of Asians if that balances things out from all of the model minority portrayals. What I would rather see though is acceptance that we Asians are like any other group with good and bad people.[/edit]
Oh no, I was alluding to a group that is not even represented by any character in the movie.....let's just say the film's makers know where to draw the line
