Mediaboss Marketing

Written by Peter Pedroncelli

Feb 12, 2020

Qatar Airways is set to own60 percent of Rwandas new international airportwhen it is fully built and is now in negotiations to buy49 percent of Rwandas state-owned carrier, RwandAir.

A stake in RwandaAir would increase Qatar Airways reach in one of the worlds fastest-growing aviation regions, according to the Financial Times.

Africa is set to be one of the fastest-growing aviation regions globally in the next 20 years with an annual expansion of nearly 5 percent, according to the International Air Transport Association.

The African aviation industry generates $80 billion in economic activity, supporting around 6.9 million jobs.

The RwandAir deal couldhelp Qatar Airways to bypass restrictions imposed on it by some Arab stateswhich force itto fly longer routes to avoid the forbidden airspace of some of its neighborsin the Gulf, Businesslive reports.

Due to a regional dispute,Qatar Airways has been banned from flying to 18 cities in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt since June 2017.Thosecountries cut ties with Qatarin 2017, accusing it of supporting terrorism.

The ban does not apply to foreign airlines flying to Qatar, according to Reuters.

This means that RwandAir could potentially carry passengers from Africa through the blocked airspace to Doha without any airspace restrictions.

Qatar Airways already owns a stake in International Airlines Group,a London-based company thatowns British Airways, Iberia, Aer Lingus, Vueling,and European low-cost airlineLevel as well as a stake in China Southern, Cathay Pacific, and Latam Airlines Group.

In December 2019, Qatar Airways agreed to buy a 60 percent stake in a new $1.3 billion airport that is under construction in Rwanda, AlJazeera reported.

TheBugesera International Airport in Kigali is expected to have the capacity for around 7 million passengers per year before expansion to 14 million passengers by 2032.

The Rwandan government hopes that the new airport will position the country as a regional hub.

Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 69: Jamarlin Martin

Jamarlin goes solo to unpack the question: Was Barack Obama the first political anti-Christ to rise in Black America? To understand the question, we have to revisit Rev. Wright and Obamas decision to bring on political disciples David Plouffe, Joe Biden and Eric Holder.

Rwanda will have serious competition from nearby Ethiopia which has announced plans to build a new $5 billion airportat Bishoftu that is expected to have a capacity of 100 million passengers per year, according to Bloomberg.

Ethiopia already has the Addis Ababa Bole International Airport and its capacity of 22 million passengers a year.

The state-owned Ethiopian Airlines is Africas largest carrier. It has an operating fleet of 111 planes, flying to more than 119 international passenger and cargo destinations, with more than 61 of those in Africa alone, according to BusinessInsider.

See original here:
Qatar Airways Plans To Buy 49 Percent Of Rwandas State-Owned Airline - Moguldom

Denizens of the darker corners of the Internetturned an innocent frog comic into a hate symbol of the "deplorable" alt-right.

"Pepe the Frog" first appeared in 2005 in the comic "Boy's Life" by artist and illustrator Matt Furie. The comics depictPepe and his anthropomorphized animal friends behaving like stereotypical post-college bros: playing video games, eating pizza, smoking potand being harmlessly gross.

In 2008, fans of the comic began uploading Furie's work online. In one comic, Pepe responds to a question about his bathroom habits with, "Feels good, man."

That reaction image and catchphrase took on a life of its own on the Internet, meriting a Know Your Meme entry by 2009. Alternate iterations of Pepe, including sad, smugand angry Pepes, followed. Pepe memes are ubiquitous across 4chan, Reddit, Imgur, Tumblr, and other social media and image-sharing sites.

It all seemed in good fun, but in late September, Pepe's green visage was designateda hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League.

The ADL's online hate symbol database is designed to help law enforcement, educators, and members of the general public identify potentially hateful images, explained Oren Segal, the director of the organization's Center on Extremism. He said that in recent years, hate symbols have proliferated online. Now, with things like Pepe the frog, anti-Semitic images are originating and circulating almost primarily on social media.

In some instances, Pepe wears a Hitler mustache, and his signature message is replaced with "Kill Jews Man." In others, Pepe poses in front of a burning World Trade Center, dressed like an Orthodox Jewish person with a yarmulke and payot. He's also been spotted wearing a Nazi soldier's uniform and in a KKK hood and robe.

In May, the Daily Beast spoke to a white supremacist who said there had been a concerted effort on the site 4chan to "reclaim Pepe" from normal people in late 2015. Pepe had gone mainstream: He's been tweeted by Katy Perry, who said she has a "Pepe file" on her computer, and has made multiple appearances on Nicki Minaj's Instagram. So the supremacist groupremixed him with Nazi propaganda for a laugh.

It originated on /rk9/, the 4chan message board associated with some of the least savory elements of the Internet. Last fall, people on that board purposefully framed two innocent individuals for the Umpqua Community College shooting. It's allegedly where Isla Vista shooter Elliot Rodger announced his shooting before it took place in a post with aPepe meme.

Nazi Pepe made its way to Twitter, where people who regularly tweeted messages supporting white nationalism and anti-immigrant views quickly absorbed it into their Internet repertoire. People who identify with those movementsadd the frog emoji to their Twitter name.

In August, Hillary Clinton gave her now-infamous speech denouncing some of Donald Trump's supporters, particularly the segment known as the alt-right, as a "basket of deplorables."

A couple weeks later, Trump's son Donald Trump Jr. posted a photo on Instagram that depicted him and other supporters as "The Deplorables" -- a play on the poster from the movie "The Expendables." In the lineup? Pepe.

Two weeks after that, the ADL made its official designation. Segal, the representative for the organization, said that while the ADL was researching harassment of journalists on Twitter -- particularly the use of the triple-parenthetical (((echo))) around names to designate Jewish people -- they began to notice Pepe's face coming up more frequently.

He said people on his staff were aware of Pepe's original, inoffensive incarnation, but it was clear that the frog had become associated with anti-Semitic opinions online.

"When we felt that [Pepe]was reaching that point of the hateful version becoming more widespread, that's a criteria for adding it to our hate symbols database," he explained.

Hopefully, he says, the Pepe meme will be able to move past this dark point in its history and go back to just being fun. If enough people share positive -- or at least non-hateful -- Pepe memes, to the point where few people encounter Nazi Pepe online, it wouldn't be a hate symbol anymore.

"The hate symbol database isn't the final stop for this meme," he said.

That came as a big relief to Furie, the artist who created Pepe. He has been understandably devastated by the turn his creation has taken.

"To have it evolve into what it is today, it's a nightmare," Furie said. "It's kind of my worst nightmare ... to be tangled in forever with a symbol of hate."

I would love to help the ADL and do my part by flooding the Internet with positive Pepe memes,he added.

He's not evena particularly political guy. Prior to the ADL's hate symbol announcement, he had never heard of the alt-right or the nascent white supremacist movement that's sprung up around Trump. Though he'd heard of Pepe being used as a meme as far back as 2008, he never made the memes himself. He says he plans to vote for Hillary Clinton.

"I'm a lifelong artist," said Furie, who lives in Los AngelesKoreatown neighborhood. "Hate and racism couldn't be further from something on my radar. I try to focus on positivity and nature and animals."

Furie stopped drawing Pepe about sixyears ago, though he did revive him recently for a very special drawing on his Tumblr. It depicts the frog wearing a "Make Pepe Great Again" hat, urinating on a green-faced Trump.

Reclaiming your own work from anti-Semites: Feels good, man.

@jessica_roy

jessica.roy@latimes.com

ALSO

Live updates from the campaign trail

Trump is encouraging and amplifying the message of a 'radical fringe' of conservatives, Clinton says

Link:
How 'Pepe the Frog' went from harmless to hate symbol ...

Can a meme be redeemed? Thats the central question in Arthur Jones Feels Good Man a documentary that premiered at Sundance this year charting the course of the creator of Pepe the Frog, a comic book character turned universally recognized meme, as he attempts to reclaim it from racists and shitposters.

The sweet, gentle pacing of the doc fits well with the calm, sensitive demeanor of its creator Matt Furie . Furie is described as ethereal by one of his friends in the piece and thats mostly true. As Pepe is created, then coopted by the residents of 4chan and turned into a meme representing ennui, disenfranchisement and white supremacy in turn, Furie takes it mostly in stride.

But hes not without passion, as lines begin to be crossed and Pepe becomes registered as hate speech by the Anti-Defamation League, Furie sees an opportunity to try to reclaim his symbol. Hes unsuccessful for the same reason anything is popular on the internet there are simply too many nerve endings to properly anesthetize them all.

The vast majority of the people that use Pepe are completely unaware of its origins. And the general community of Internet people that communicate via memes go a step beyond that to being un-able to even grasp the concept of ownership. Once something has entered into the cultural bloodstream of the Internet, its origins often dwindle to insignificance.

That doesnt, of course, stop a creator from existing or caring how their creation is used. And the portrait painted here of a gentle and caring artist forced to watch the subversion and perversion of his creation is heartbreaking and important.

Feels Good Man stands above the pack of docs about internet cultural phenomenon. It peels back enough of the layers of the onion to be effective in ways that analysis of culturally complex idioms born online are often deficient.

Too many times over the years weve seen online movements analyzed with an overly simplistic point of view. And the main way they typically fall down is by not including the influence and effect of that staple of online life: trolls. People doing things for the hell of it who then become a part of a larger movement but always have that arms length remove to fall back on, able to claim that it was just a gag.

Jones mentioned during a Q&A after the screening that they wanted Furies art to be a character, to have a part to play throughout the film. In addition to scenes of Matt drawing, this is best accomplished by the absolutely gorgeous animation sequences that Jones and a team of animators created of Pepe and the rest of the Boys Club characters. Theyre delightful and welcome respite from the somewhat hammer-like nature of the dark places Pepe is unwittingly drawn by the various subcultures he is adopted by.

Its not a perfect film; the sequences with an occultist are goofy in a way that doesnt fit with the overall flavor of the piece. But its probably one of the better documentary films ever made about the Internet era and well worth watching when it gets picked up.

See the article here:
Sundance: Feels Good Man charts a path of redemption for Pepe - TechCrunch

On August 11, 2017, hundreds of alt-right white nationalists marched in Charlottesville, VA in the Unite the Right Rally. The next day, their calls for a white ethnostate drew counterprotesters. At first, the meetings were mostly peaceful. Later on, however, one white nationalist turned the situation violent when he drove a car through a crowd of opposing demonstrators, injuring 19 and killing one. After the attack, the public saw the true evil that was present in the alt-right, and its members retreated. However, recent months have seen this racist ideology rear its ugly head again.

Members of the alt-right 2.0, the groypers as they call themselves, have started to become a nuisance for Young Americas Foundation (YAF) and Turning Point USA (TPUSA), two conservative student organizations who have denounced their movement. One groyper website, The Daily Stormer, published a calendar of YAF and TPUSA college lectures and called for its soldiers to challenge the mainstream conservatives who came to speak. When Congressman Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) came to Texas A&M, one groyper asserted to him that America should not be giving aid to the Jewish state of Israel because they hate Christianity. Another asked TPUSA Chairman Charlie Kirk, who was holding a panel with gay Iraq War veteran Rob Smith, How does anal sex help us win the culture war? Even the University of Michigan was a target in the Groyper War. Among the speaking events on The Daily Stormers calendar was YAF Speaker and Daily Wire author Elisha Krausss Pro-Life is Pro-Woman lecture. Luckily, none came to disrupt the event.

The commander-in-chief of the Groyper War is YouTuber Nicholas J. Fuentes. TPUSA Chief Creative Officer Benny Johnson has created an effective Twitter thread that catalogs Fuentess misdeeds. For one, he has heaped heavy praise on the Unite the Right Rally (which he attended). He has claimed that racial segregation was better for [black people]. He has called Daily Wire host Matt Walsh a race traitor who works for Jews. Finally, he has stated that there is little difference between himself and Richard Spencer in terms of evaluating the problem.

The problem for him is that there are too many minorities in America. Fuentes and his ilk claim that as our population becomes more diverse, it becomes more difficult to elect Republicans. As evidence, they point to the overwhelming tendency of minorities to vote for Democrats. However, this argument relies on a false assumption that correlation equals causation. Data from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies suggest that black people, for example, have not always voted Democratic. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, African-Americans were split in party identification, with as many associating with Democrats as with Republicans. 1948 represented the start of the disparity. One main reason for the split was that Democratic president Harry Truman desegregated the military just months before the election. Later, Lyndon B. Johnson issued the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. These policies allowed Democrats to cater especially well to black voters and paint themselves as civil rights champions. The right should take note. In order to get more conservatives elected, Republicans need to focus on better marketing to minorities, not create movements that claim that minorities should not be allowed into the country because of their race. The Republican Party platforms of the early 1940s called for the fostering of free enterprise, lower taxes, and a strong national defense. They backed up these ideas by appealing to the values of the Founding Fathers. African-Americans can resonate with these policies; they have in the past. The first step in winning over minority voters is debunking the far-left lie that Republicans are racist. That becomes much more difficult if we embrace movements like Fuentess.

The problem for him is that there are too many minorities in America. Fuentes and his ilk claim that as our population becomes more diverse, it becomes more difficult to elect Republicans.

So what caused the rapid rise of the groypers? First, these new alt-righters have a different core philosophy than their predecessors. Conservatives could easily fight back against the first wave by pointing out that these people were simply not conservatives. The first alt-rights members were radically pro-abortion, heavily opposed to an alliance with the Jewish State of Israel, and highly critical of Christianity and its message that all people are created in Gods image. Now, Fuentes followers espouse a much more seductive message. They claim to be trying to save American conservative values under an apparent America First ideology. Indeed, their philosophy is better described as White People First. They espouse a racist message which masquerades as conservative, and their supposed fervor to elect more Republicans has fooled many.

While the right must put its own house in order, the radical left also shares culpability for the growth of the groyper movement. On the far left, a tendency exists to label ordinary conservative thought-leaders as racists. For example, when conservative pundit Ben Shapiro came to speak at Stanford University, the schools Coalition of Concerned Students released a statement calling Shapiro a white supremacist. Shapiro is one of the alt-rights strongest critics and, according to the Anti-Defamation League, the number-one journalistic target of anti-semitism online. Moreover, the Coalition decided to interrupt Shapiros speech at the most inopportune time possible. As Shapiro was condemning the same racist movement that I am now, the protestors shouted him down. Shapiro responded to the hecklers by asking them if they were responding to the part where he condemns Nazis.

As conservatives, we must cast off any hint of bigoted cancer that exists in our movement and stay true to the exceptional American ideals of liberty and justice for all.

The far-left has created a boy-who-cried-wolf scenario. By levying unfounded accusations of racism on mainstream figures, it has allowed actual racists to slide under the radar. When YAF and TPUSA came out against them, groypers claimed that the allegations were characteristic of those conservatives hear generally and labeled members of the two organizations whiny leftist snowflakes.

As both sides learn lessons from the movements rise, conservatives especially must note the difference between the bigoted ideology of blood-and-soil nationalism and that of credal patriotism. The former presumes that American exceptionalism is intrinsically connected to the race of the people and the land they live on. According to those who subscribe to this theory, the Founding Fathers could not have created a liberal democracy if they were not white. This idea simply does not have a connection to reality. Japan, for example, has seriously liberalized since World War II. The Hong Kong protests would also undercut this viewpoint, as they exhibit a case of non-white people demanding their rights from a tyrannical government. Russia, however, has had a long history of standing in opposition to western ideals despite being a majority white country. The country did not abolish serfdom until the mid-19th century, and any attempt to liberalize it failed, eventually leading to the formation of the Soviet Union. Credal patriotism, on the other hand, connects the love of country to the ideals on which it was founded. For Americans, these ideals are Jeffersons self-evident truths that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. The philosophy that Fuentes and his followers espouse is antithetical to American founding values, and, therefore, antithetical to conservatism. As conservatives, we must cast off any hint of bigoted cancer that exists in our movement and stay true to the exceptional American ideals of liberty and justice for all.

(Visited 138 times, 20 visits today)

Read the original here:
Conservatives, Time for Us to Renounce the New Alt-Right - The Michigan Review

Several months before Gebert tweeted the swastika photograph, he appeared on Vaughns podcast to, in his words, defend the movement, to defend my friends. (It should be noted that Vaughn, whose given name is Douglass Mackey, has come under attack from fellow alt-righters for not being adequately alt-right and that, not long after the podcast aired, Nehlen, the Republican congressional candidate, doxxed him, sending Mackeys life into a tailspin.) Gebert was angry with Vaughn for sowing discord among the alt-right. He was against infighting. He said, more than once, that it was important that alt-righters name the Jew, alt-right speak for using openly anti-Semitic terms. Vaughn said Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson were susceptible to Zionist propaganda, which Gebert appeared to agree with, but then Gebert said, The service that Tucker is doing on Fox News is unquestionably of value to the boomers sitting in their Lazy Boys and watching it every night and dropping those bombs.

At one point in the conversation, Gebert turned somber. He was discussing his double life. He sounded like a quarterback addressing his teambloodied, exhausted. I take these risks because I have a grave sense of foreboding that this country and all of the white countries on earth are on a collision course with perdition, with disaster, he said. The only reason Im taking this risk is so that my kids can grow up in a whiter country, if not an actual, explicit, white-exclusionary country at some point in their lives or their grandkids.

In 2018, Geberts security clearancea Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information clearance, which gave him access to an array of highly sensitive intelligence across the U.S. governmentwas re-upped. None of these interviewers ever, I would say, was an impressive human being, but this was truly unbelievable, one of Geberts former colleagues said. Another former colleague added, How could you not connect the dots?

I attempted many times to reach out to Gebert for comment for this story, first through email, then through a phone number I believed to be his, then through his family members, none of whom replied to my messages. I tried knocking on his door, and leaving my contact information with a neighbor, all to no avail.

For years, Gebert took a combination of trains and buses into D.C., went to work, came home, logged on. He and his wife were model neighbors. They didnt play loud music. They could be relied on, in a pinch, for sugar or milk. (Ive had Nazi milk, one neighbor said. Jesus, to think of that.) They adhered to the homeowners association bylaws and painted their house one of the colors in the Duron Curb Appeal Exterior approved accent palettein this case, wheat, or maybe amber white, with forest green trim. His neighbors either liked or had never met him. But none of the neighbors I spoke to disliked him.

Then, on the morning of August 7, 2019, Hatewatch reported that Gebert was the leader of an alt-right cell in Northern Virginia, and that he had posted anti-Semitic comments on white-nationalist forums and been a guest on a now defunct podcast called the Fatherland, which addressed issues like white demographic decline and the subversiveness of girl power.

Within minutes of publication, the story was being read on most of the screens in the building, a State Department employee said. It didnt take long for the story to start ping-ponging around the globe, from one U.S. embassy to another. As far as the higher-ups at State were concerned, there were two very big problems with Gebert being a civil-service officer. The first was that no one wanted to work with him. His unmasking had made him repugnant and toxic. The second was Russia. Multiple State Department sources suggested that Geberts apparent affinity for Slavic culture, particularly as related to his white-nationalist leanings, would be considered problematic.

Link:
How Could You Not Connect the Dots?: Inside the Red-Pilling of State Department Official Matthew Gebert - Vanity Fair