I've got no idea whether M.I.A. supports the Tamil Tigers, but I think the word 'ruthless' doesn't strike quite the right note when talking about an organization known to use child soldiers.

I completely agree. Our MSM have no idea what to do with a genuine, complicated artist when they see one. They should stick to writing about Britney's bad-hair day or J-Lo's bad ass day. MIA does not conform to the consumerist, ant-feminist paradigm and thus is relegated to an 'other'. Great job NYT!

I'm pretty sure it is her father who is the leader of or something like that. Either way she has said time and time again that she doesn't support or agree with what he does. She obviously is being accused of being a terrorist by association. Whoever did that article should of read up on her rather then believe the b.s. people told them.

Frankly, considering the horrific atrocities that the Sri Lankan Army and the majority Sinhalese Buddhist community have inflicted on the minority Tamil Hindus (including widespread use of gang rape of teenage girls as a weapon of war) it's not surprising that so many Tamil emigres support the LTTE.

Especially those like M.I.A. who spent time in Tamil refugee camps in India (that's where she spent a good part of her childhood).

Not to let the LTTE off the hook here - yes, they've used child soldiers, and they wrote the book on using suicide bombers as a weapon of war (a lot of their suicide bombers were young women who had been gang raped by Sri Lankan soldiers as teenagers) - but it's a case of "the hate that hate produced" here.

There's terrorism on both sides of the Sri Lankan civil war - but the state terrorism of the Sri Lankan government is funded by the American taxpayer, through military aid to the Sri Lankan Army.

At this very moment, the Sri Lankan Army is firing cannons at hospitals and machinegunning refugee camps in predominantly Tamil northern Sri Lanka - is it any wonder why the only Sri Lankan Tamil with a world media platform would use her fame to defend her people in their time of need?

To be fair, musicians with progressive-to-radical politics have always come under suspicion by a broad public, with the word "terrorist" thrown around all too loosely. Bob Dylan got it, in particular after releasing "Masters of War." Pete Seeger gets it still. Even Bruce Springsteen, when people realized the actual lyrics of "Born in the USA" and he started campaigning with Democratic politicians.

On the other hand, I can't remember any of them being labeled terrorist by a NYTimes writer. And especially in these times, people have GOT to get a grip on who and what they call terrorist. If he called MIA that without even talking to her, that's dangerously irresponsible at best.

I have to say, I think your reaction to the labeling of terrorist and the examination of M.I.A is a little knee-jerk. Not that you are wrong to be skeptical, but I think that the article is relatively balanced, and it does not at any point call M.I.A. a terrorist.

M.I.A. is absolutely entitled to her opinions about the political issues between the Sinhalese and the Tamils in Sri Lanka, but when she dubs herself the mouthpiece for Tamils and accuses the Sri Lankan government of genocide, the takes a public and political stance for which she can definitely be scrutinized. I don't know much about M.I.A.'s public statements about the Tamil Tiger's but I think the article is more two-sided than you give it credit for.

Lastly, the mainstream media is obviously influenced by social and political fads and deserves a critical look, but so do the actions of celebrities and public figures who adopt causes and public political stances. If M.I.A. is political about an issue and people are unquestioning of that, how is that any different than being unquestioning of the MSM?

I thought this article was a very evenly written examination of M.I.A. At no point does the author EVER insinuate that she is a terrorist. The opinions of the people being interviewed or of entire governments =/= the opinions of the journalist. You could argue that the author only interviewed people agreeing with some viewpoint of their own, but I think that is a stretch when the rest of the article is so careful to examine M.I.A.'s motivations (esp. her history).

"Would a white male folk singer be labeled the same if he were to show direct or indirect support for an international cause"

Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens) is a perfect answer to your question, so the answer is yes. Probably not a white straight male Christian folk singer however.

I think the jury's still out here. I personally don't think that MIA is being attacked because she's a transformational feminist. She has expressed some support for the Tamil's, who are undoubtedly one of the most ruthless, violent, extra-governmental political organizations on the planet. To be fair, the Sri Lankan response to the Tigers has been equally ruthless.

Many people close to the violence in Sri Lanka have attacked MIA for her positions, so the NYT is a little late to this story. Personally I try not to judge artists based on their political positions. I find it hard to enjoy any art when I start thinking about the politics, but this doesn't mean that I think other people shouldn't investigate this either. Like I say, jury's still out.

there are plenty of people, outside of the NYT, who are calling her a terrorist because of what they *percieve* some of her lyrics to be.
not even her words from interviews, but her lyrics, which are not necessarily autobiographical. this is incredibly problematic and an incredibly racist ideology rearing its head...because of her cultural background and very sketchy information about her father....and little else, save incredibly abstract references to violence. did people call Rage Against the Machine terrorists for wearing Che tshirts or support for Cuba, etc? If I recall correctly, they still recieved great support despite their political views.

I agree we should always scrutinize Western media and governments when they call a group terrorist, but the Tamil Tigers have spawned more suicide bombers than any other group in history, more than Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and al-Qaeda combined. They have massacred civilian men women and children, murdered Buddhist monks, and slaughtered 146 men and boys in a mosque.

Whether or not their cause is just, their methods cannot be condoned.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_Tigers_of_Tamil_Eelam

The race and class issues are more subtle than just "is the artist white and male?" I'm not sure that m.i.a. has done more to show sympathy with the Tamil Tigers than many Celtic artists have done to show sympathy for the IRA. Does the US media call Black 47 terrorist sympathizers? Not that I can recall. It has a lot to do with how much support the particular group has among white Americans.

On my account, also, support for a political movement is not necessarily support for the methods of its proponents. Whether that distinction gets recognized seems to me a very political and inconsistent matter.

I agree with some of the above commentators who have criticized aspects of Samhita's post, but let's not be naive about the power that journalists, esp. of the NYT, wield - even if they're writing is not directly representative of the opinions of "entire governments."

While the author of the article did not intend to imply that MIA is herself a terrorist, the word itself has come to be a sort of trigger in Americans' minds that, if used, immediately shuts down all intellectual questioning and dredges up images of 9/11 and the "kind of people" that made it happen.

Language is powerful, which means that objective journalists need to be more careful in their use of such a heavy word. This is not to say that the usage was inappropriate in its application to this group, but the author must still be wary of how the word is then easily associated with the subject of the article - MIA. To his credit, the NYT writer did not employ the word entirely recklessly -- he described the group as having been "branded by the United States and European nations as a terrorist group."

Aside from all of the other issues, if you are going to write a piece about a fairly complex situation that most Americans are unfamiliar with, you should at least allot enough space to discuss its history. The space was far too short to adequately even begin an explanation of Sri Lankan politics, let alone sandwiching that history in between vaguely written explanations of M.I.A.'s connection to the Tamil Tigers.

I really get frustrated with posts like this because a lot of them show basic misunderstandings of how newspapers work:

- Reporters rarely write their own headlines. Copy editors usually do. They generally work late at night when the reporter isn't around. Often, they have to play Procrustes just to find something that'll fit into their allotted headline space. A lot of times, they don't know much about the subject of the article.

So Thomas Fuller probably had nothing to do with the headline. Saying that he, or "we" -- seriously, what? Don't drag me into this! -- are calling M.I.A. a terrorist" is incorrect and unfair. Moreover...

- Every use of the word "terrorist" was attached to an "according to" statement. That's attribution. Words like that, furthermore, are tricky to use synonyms for, because there really aren't any. There are so many connotations that putting in a synonym changes the meaning. Notice, furthermore, that the first reference to the Tigers uses the less loaded "separatist."

- Scare quotes generally don't go into news articles. It would be editorializing.

"Would a white male folk singer be labeled the same if he were to show direct or indirect support for an international cause?"

If he was a liberal activist and the GOP-dominated MSM had actually heard of him, likely.

I think this is more the media loving a controversy than anything more than a passive racism.

"Every use of the word "terrorist" was attached to an "according to" statement. That's attribution."

Which we do too much of. Why do we have to hear that Obama is "believed to be a foreign Muslim terrorist" over and over and over in the news? Less so than during the election, but propagating lies is still propagating lies, regardless of attribution. It's just cowardly.

I'm conflicted on this issue - I'm less troubled by MIA's direct connections to EROS (her father) than to her use of the LTTE's tiger symbology and, more damningly, her small Sri Lankan map on the cover of Arular, which features the borders of territory controlled by LTTE when that group was at their largest extent. She makes casual, at times glib references to terrorism and guerilla action in her lyrics.

And yet, given the hateful nature of a lot of mainstream hip-hop lyrics toward women, I'm troubled by the inordinate amount of critical coverage given to this woman's work. I guarantee you that the negative externalities of MIA's complex relationship with LTTE terrorism in Sri Lanka is much less damaging than the effect of the violent misogyny found in a lot of hip hop.

Well, I'm late to this stream, but I'm Sri Lankan. And I’m Sinhalese. And I want to be proud of MIA because of her work and her heritage, but I just can't.

Her first album is called Arulan, the code name for her father who was a big shot in the LTTE.

Her imagery shows the tamil tiger everywhere. Either she's conscious of the hate and fear that it symbolizes or she lacks the ability to realize that while that image may have at one time, meant freedom and a homeland, too many civilians and innocents have died for it to mean anything other than destruction and war.

[And Gregory A. Butler, you tread where even the ICRC and AMnesty wont go - which is blaming the army for shelling civilians and the hospital up north in Sri Lanka. I'm glad that you can pick out who did what when experts on the ground cannot. And what about the terrorist who blew herself up amongst her fellow tamil refugees? What about civilian reports about being forbidden to leave by the LTTE so that they can remain human shields? You want to throw things out there, you better be able to back it up. There is no black and white here, there are only shades of grey.]

The history is this - The Brits divide and conquer and put up a minority in positions of power. In Sri Lanka, this meant that in colonial times, Tamils had a ton of power. After independence, the sinhalese majority took power, and didn't share it well at all. That was a time when we could've forged a common bond, but instead, so proud to be our own, we made Buddhism the official religion, and sinhala the official language without any reference to tamils and hindus (much less the muslims and christians in our country).

So slowly over time, the sinhalese majority pushed the tamils to ever more marginalized corners until finally, a group of them, decided that politics and words don't work, let's try violence.

So at one point, yes, let's call them freedom fighters. But not today - they've killed their own wonderful leaders, Chelvanayakam, Kadirgamar, numerous others. They’ve killed anyone who wanted to try a peaceful way, who refuted them, who actually spoke for the tamil people.

And today the gov’t has made offers and devolution plans that should’ve been offered earlier. But there’s nobody to talk to – Prabhakaran is a killer, he’s not out to discuss options anymore.

They don’t speak for the Tamils. I can’t imagine that being forced to fight, to send your children to fight, is what any Tamil would want. I don’t know, but I hope, that they don’t.

In Sri Lanka, you have to go through tons of check points. And always, the army or police, they see my family’s faces, they see our names – both are very typical Sinhalese... And their faces relax, they smile, and they wave us through. And I was always glad. But my sister’s face would always get dark and upset, and I asked her why. She has a friend who’s mother is Tamil and every time they would be stopped at a checkpoint, her mother would not get the smiling face – she would get the stern glare, the suspicious look. She could be a terrorist, that car could be laden with bombs, true, but she’s just another Sri Lankan lady and can you imagine the pain of being looked on as a threat in the country that was your home? I felt it a little after 9/11, and I don’t wish that on anybody.

This is not an excuse, this is my complicated relationship with M.I.A. who I don’t listen to, and whose CDs I will not buy because I don’t support what she says both inside and outside her music about the conflict – I feel that she could be a powerful voice for change and call for conversation and conciliation where there is now gunfire. She can give her child the chance to walk in land without checkpoints but I fear she may train another soldier.

But in my small way, I’m trying to overcome my prejudice and anger, by also being proud of MIA because in the end, she’s a Sri Lankan kicking ass and breaking down boundaries. And I’m a Sri Lankan too.

Thanks Samhita for your response. I just think while mainstream media doesn't cover this issue, we shouldn't rely on what MIA says as gospel either -- she's an artist, not a historian and there's no truth to her comment about genocide - there is no gov't sponsored extermination of a race - there's loss of life, to be sure, but at the hands of the terrorists as well as the army. We have tamils in the highlands of Sri Lanka, where the tea plantations are. They aren't being exterminated, and they don't even sympathize with the LTTE either. In the end, its the poor tamil family living in the war zone that loses out. And the rest of us who have to see a beautiful island ravaged.

she makes me crazy. I want to love her, but how could I buy an album that has Arular as its title? She's cut me out, and any dialogue with any other moderate Sri Lankan. Which is just what the LTTE has done.

I'm having deja vu in relation to this endorsement of the PKK:

http://www.feministing.com/archives/011472.html