MIA: Born Free

M.I.A, Born Free from ROMAIN-GAVRAS on Vimeo.

WARNING: Some nudity, drug use and violence against redheads. 

NEW YORK TIMES: Within a day of its splashy and widely discussed debut on the Web, the video for M.I.A.’s song “Born Free” has been pulled from YouTube on the American and British versions of the site, BBC News reported. The video, made for the first single of M.I.A.’s coming album and directed by Romain Gavras, the son of Costa-Gavras, depicts an unspecified military force, with some members wearing American flags on their uniforms, rounding up red-headed men from an apartment complex and taking them to a desert to be tortured and executed. MORE

RELATED: Russell Pearce is the quintessential Arizona Republican. He wears stars-and-stripes shirts and has clips of John Wayne and Ronald Reagan on racial-profiling.jpghis website. He loves guns, his family, his Mormon faith, his country and the law, which he enforced for many years as deputy sheriff of Maricopa County. He jokes that being Republican, and thus not having a heart, saved his life when he got shot in the chest once. But his main passion is illegal immigrants, whom he calls “invaders”. He loathed them even before his son Sean, also a sheriff’s deputy, got shot by one. But now it is personal. Mr Pearce, a state senator, has sponsored an Arizona law that, if enacted, would be the toughest in the country. It is so brazen it has caused outrage. Illegal immigration is a federal crime. Mr Pearce’s law, however, would also make it a state crime and would require the police, as opposed to federal agents, to make arrests and check the immigration status of individuals who look suspicious to them. Citizens who think their cops are not vigilant enough would be encouraged to sue their cities or counties, and no city or county may remain a “sanctuary” where this law is not enforced. In Mr Pearce’s opinion his law merely “removes the handcuffs” from the police and sheriffs’ deputies so they can do their work. To a great many other people, however, it screams racial profiling. Arizona is an overwhelmingly white state, and virtually all illegal immigrants—perhaps about half a million in the state—are Hispanic. Whom else would cops suspect and arrest but the brown ones? MORE

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