whaaaat

I disagree that he comes off as a dumbass. But I understand why you feel that way. People are painted off as idiots if they don’t follow a popular line of thinking. Yes, Rushdie and Hitchens are more eloquent, that goes without saying. But that does not make them any more intelligent. The difference between Rusdie/Hitchens and Mos Def, is that the latter was/is not indoctrinated by those “facts” everyone accepts as truth because everyone accepts them as truth, which in today’s world is one of the major problems. Everyone acts like they’re thinking for themselves, and they are probably convinced that they are, but from a very young age we are taught not to. It takes either a peculiar environment, or years of unlearning, to get rid of that indoctrination which makes us accept popular believes and trust whatever is served to us simply because everyone around us does.

When I listen to Mos Def I hear a person that has reached that stage of having unlearned the indoctrination. And for that reason, I would rather talk to him than anyone else on the panel who, to put it quite frankly, come off as braindead drones.

To give you an example, Hitchens attacks Mos Def pretty hard for never having watched a Bin Laden video. If he himself however, had payed more attention to those video’s, he would’ve known that Mos Def hit the nail on the head with his comments about him. In this example alone, it is obvious that although Hitchens appears more intelligent at first sight, it is merely skin-deep. The problem is that, these days, noone is interested in anything but the skin-deep, so we all agree with whomever coughs up the skin-deep, in the most eloquent way.

And without pointing any fingers I want so say, here’s to all the people who do not swallow what is served pre-chewed.

It’s possible to “not swallow what is served pre-chewed” while still making even a token effort to educate one’s self, which MD obviously has not done. Trying to draw a parallel between the media’s malignment of the black panthers and Al Qaeda or the Taliban is asinine, sorry. MD made it clear he didn’t really even realize the difference between Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and didn’t seem particularly interested in learning, despite the (initially) patient attempt at explanation.

I mean, for fuck’s sake, if you actually wanted to learn about the subtleties of the goals of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and the differences between, you could hardly ask for a better person to have in the room than Salman Rushdie, but he wouldn’t shut the fuck up long enough to hear anything they were saying.