In the first video, Asma Mundrawala, reads ‘Sahai’ a short story about a Muslim man who decides to move to Pakistan after a shocking revelation from his Hindu friend. According to some sources, this story was based on Manto’s own personal conversation with Shyam, a good friend of Manto’s from his Bombay days. It is often said about Manto that although he lived till 1955, his slow death began in 1947. The partition shook up Manto, and some of his best short stories are based around that time period. More Manto readings here.

Election 2012 will be all about preserving the imperial status quo, only more so. Come January 2013, regardless of which man takes the oath of office, we’ll remain a country with a manic enthusiasm for the military. Rather than a president who urges us to abhor endless war, we’ll be led by a man intent on keeping us oblivious to the way we’re squandering our nation’s future in fruitless conflicts that ultimately compromise our core constitutional principles.

For all the suspense the media will gin up in the coming months, the ballots are already in and the real winner of election 2012 will be the national security state. Unless you’re a denizen of that special interest state, we know the loser, too. It’s you. More here.

more testimonies here. also check out: In Tel Aviv, Nakba greeted by Hundreds of Kahanist.

“…he left me speechless when he said his notion of the perfect place to live would be where the religions of the children of Abraham all tolerate each other and where, in the peace of that tolerance, and in the shade and fragrance of orange trees, we could all sit and talk about philosophy and poetry. That, I said to him, is a place I know very well indeed. It existed in any number of different political configurations over nearly eight hundred years, and it was and has been called many names, all of them imprecise for different reasons: al-Andalus in Arabic, ha-Sefarad in Hebrew; the names of a half-dozen different cities when they were at its center; Castile at other moments. Never–I had to break it to him–had it ever been California, although parts of California’s manmade landscapes do echo and remember many of its loveliest features: the tiles, the courtyards with fountains, even the orange and palm trees. I am here tonight to talk about that place, a remarkable medieval culture rooted in pluralism and shaped by religious tolerance. And to show some of it to you, because despite its having existed in one form or another for nearly eight centuries, it is largely obscured from our view, because we most commonly tell political and ideological rather than cultural history.”
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More here.

Repression triggered the bloody communist coup of 1978.

The hastily devised People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) reforms were a casualty of an old rural–urban divide in Afghan society. The educated young urban idealists did not understand the rural world they sought to remake, and the world of the mud-walled villages did not understand urban officialdom. That the social and cultural dimensions of the reforms threatened the privileges of the traditional mullahs, maliks (village leaders) and large landowners is hardly surprising. What can be confusing is that the economically progressive aspects of the program were also widely rejected by the deeply religious peasantry. Afghanistan, though poor and unequal, was not marked by the extreme land inequality typical of pre-revolutionary Mexico or China. As Steele explains, peasants were in many ways “linked to their landlord by ties of religion, clan and family and were unready to flout his authority.” Rural society, always somewhat autonomous from Kabul, and feeling threatened at the root by reforms, turned increasingly to armed resistance, linking up with the Islamist parties that had decamped to Pakistan during Daoud’s repression.

Exacerbating the situation for the PDPA were certain technical mistakes. In their haste the urban communists of Kabul redistributed land but not water rights, a blunder that revealed their ignorance of local agriculture. They abolished the oppressive system of bazaar-based money lending but did not establish an alternative credit program to aid cash-poor farmers in planting. (Raja Anwar’s The Tragedy of Afghanistan is another valuable source on the revolution’s reforms and missteps.) For their part, the Soviets repeatedly advised Kabul to abandon or delay the more radical reforms.

The communists were not the first Afghan modernizers to face a rural backlash. The so-called Red Prince, Amanullah Khan, who ejected the British in 1919, was dethroned ten years later by a tribal rebellion that opposed his Turkish-inspired modernization efforts. He had imposed a modicum of land reform, given women the vote and started educating girls. Rural elites would accept good roads, but not the taxes to pay for them; the rural masses would accept agricultural improvements and education, but not an assault on patriarchy. Fifty years later, the PDPA faced the same sort of religious rebellion, and to quell it communist officials began making displays of public piety, praying and traveling to mosques. But it was too little, too late.
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More here.

The fact remains: the Obama administration has engaged in a process of rewriting the definition of “due process” so that the US can wage an unrestrained, lawless and immoral drone war in any sector of the globe. This is being done by the Justice Department in the same insidious way that the Bush Administration worked to rewrite the definition of “torture” so it could justify using torture against any person detained in the fight against “terrorists.”

In truth, this redefining of “due process” is a predictable result of the US government’s perpetual “war on terror.” The despicable and preposterous secrecy aims to further normalize another aspect of the government’s calculated assault on civil liberties. It adds another facade to the new normal, which both the Bush administration and the Obama administration helped to construct in the aftermath of 9/11. And that is why the effort to force the disclosure of information is so critical. More here.

Started in 2009, the portrait series “Picture an Arab Man” is part of a large body of work capturing semi-nude Arab men of diverse backgrounds. The project is meant to literally picture a new face for Arab males than the one we are so accustomed to perusing in the mainstream media. Breaking down stereotypes as to how Arabs have been represented in the West, as well as in the East, is one of the conceptual aims of this project. I attempt to do so by highlighting the sensual beauty of the Arab man, an unexplored aspect of their identity on the cusp of change in a society that reveres an out-dated form of hyper-masculinity. Moreover, it is an attempt to uncover and break the stereotypes imposed on the Arab male in a post 9/11 world, and provide an alternative visual representation of that identity. (Tamara Abdul Hadi)

Second, after mapping how these tropes are used to justify American Empire, I examine Islamophobia’s very real effects “on the ground” in the United States. In particularly, I examine how Islamophobia is used by the federal, state, and local governments, as well as law enforcement, universities, the print, cable and electronic media, the blogosphere, interest groups, PACS, and lobbies to establish an atmosphere of fear that manages dissent and erodes civil liberties, against the backdrop of a quiescent if not enthusiastic mainstream.

Finally, I demonstrate how President Barack Obama and his administration are Islamophobes, proactively deploying Islamophobic tropes and rhetoric to further US Empire abroad and systematize and institutionalize the abuses of civil liberties introduced by Presidents Clinton and Bush Jr.
…

I hope that the book will begin to aid the Muslim American community to understand Islamophobia in terms of the racial history of the United States and its history of imperialism. Understanding Islamophobia within these contexts, the contexts of control, capitalism, state power, global interests, and global hegemony, Muslim Americans will be able to assert their own struggle within the context of the struggle of people of color in the United States and globally. Such a conversation is already happening on the margins of the Arab and Muslim American communities.

Finally, I’d love the book to be read by people of color. The state of Muslims in the US is only a shadow of the economic, social, and cultural oppression suffered by Black, Latino, Asian, and Native Americans.

Humbly, I can only hope that my book helps to expand and further, even if in a minuscule way, the conversation between economic and racial “minorities” as to allow us to draw together the constellation of the similarities and particularities of our historical experience in order to compel us to collective solidarity and action.
…

More here.

Beirut, ornament of our world

Beirut, exquisite as Paradise’s gardens.

Those shattered mirrors once were

The smiling eyes of children,

Now are star-lit.

This city’s nights are bright.

and luminous is Lebanon.

Beirut, ornament of our world.

Faces decorated with blood

Dazzling, beyond beauty.

Their elegant splendor

Lights up the city’s lanes.

And radiant is Lebanon.

Beirut, ornament of our world.

Every charred house, every ruin

Is equal to Darius’ citadels.

Every warrior brings envy to Alexander.

Every daughter is like Laila.

This city stands at time’s creation.

This city will stand at time’s end.

Beirut, the heart of Lebanon.

Beirut, ornament of our world.

Beirut, exquisite as Paradise’s Garden.

(Translated from the Urdu by Vijay Prashad)
…

More here.

More here.

Many of the Muslims with whom I spoke know that many of their fellow citizens — the ones who are never subjected to these abuses — “reason” in a similar manner. Most are wallowing in the authoritarian assumption that the U.S. Government, while not infallible, is well-motivated and honest. Many Muslims thus know that they will stand almost entirely vulnerable if they are so targeted; few others will object or even care. That the Obama administration — in concert with Peter King — has been repeatedly insisting that the primary threat is now “homegrown Terrorism,” and has thus been importing War on Terror framework onto U.S. soil, means that citizenship is no longer any shield from even the most egregious abuses. So they are afraid, and are tempted to avoid doing anything, including exercising their most basic rights of free speech and assembly, to avoid attracting attention.

As is always the case, the government abuses justified in the name of Terrorism have expanded far beyond the Muslim community to which they were first applied. Domestic peace activists have been targeted by abusive applications of the Patriot Act; American advocates of WikiLeaks have been legally harassed in all sorts of ways; and just last week I detailed the persecution of filmmaker Laura Poitras for the crime of producing documentaries that reflect poorly on U.S. policy.

But American Muslims have borne the brunt of these assaults for a full decade now, and — more than a full decade after 9/11 — continue to bear them in increasingly oppressive ways. And it’s worthwhile, really necessary, to be reminded of the very personal ways that these actions harm the lives of innocent human beings. Blame undoubtedly lies first and foremost with the U.S. Government for perpetrating these attacks. But it lies as well with the American citizenry that — convinced that they will not be affected — permits and even cheers them. More here.

Let’s be clear: What killed the civilians walking the streets of Baghdad that day in 2007 was not “war crimes,” but war. And that holds for so many thousands of other Afghan and Iraqi civilians killed by drone strikes, air strikes, night raids, convoys, and nervous checkpoint guards as well. More here.

As a result of this undeniable censorship and intentional obfuscation of truth in service of propaganda by a mainstream media outlet and respected reporter, Mike Wallace won his 21st Emmy Award for the Ahmadinejad interview. More here.
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To be fair to Wallace, here is what he said when he himself was interviewed by Sean Hannity on the topic:

MW: He (Ahmadinejead) is not trying to project an image. Look, it’s very difficult. I know…I found it difficult to understand, but the more that I sat there, and the more time that I spent with the man, he is…I’m not suggesting…he despises, if you will…oh, he doesn’t despise, but he doesn’t like the United States. He doesn’t like the United States for the reason that it’s supporting the Zionist entity. He doesn’t talk about Israel.
SH: So you don’t think he’s an anti-Semite?
MW: He himself, an anti-Semite, an anti-Jew…anti-Jew?
SH: Yes.
MW: No, I don’t.
MW: I am with you 100% in what I perceived to be the individual that I was about to sit down and talk to. And he made his case, fairly rationally. It wasn’t…it was a conversation. He did not propagandize and so forth. He…when I began to talk to him about America, about the United States, and oppression, he had his facts down solid about why he feels sorry, he says, for President Bush. Why? And then he starts in about the polls of President Bush, and how they’re going down, and how he’s going to leave office, and it’s sad that he’s going to leave office and leave behind a people who don’t really approve of him. His approval ratings are what they are. And what is the standing of the United States in the world generally under President Bush. And it’s…we weren’t having an argument. I mean, we were having a discussion. And he was infinitely more rational than I had expected him to be.
SH: And would you deny, Mike, for example, if you ever sat down with Adolf Hitler, or Joseph Stalin…
MW: (laughing)
SH: Oh, wait. Hang on.
MW: No, look, I couldn’t agree with you more.
SH: Would they seem, perhaps, informed, smart, reasonable, even though they were evil?
MW: Well, it’s a perfectly sensible question. As far as I am…Adolf Hitler? Good Lord. I mean, the man was such a hateful, hateful man.
SH: So is Ahmadinejead, Mike. Listen to his statements.
MW: What…running a Holocaust, which the Iranians have not done, as you know, running a Holocaust, doing that sort of thing, slaughtering six million Jews, that’s not what this man is talking about doing.
SH: But Mike, but let me answer that. Mike, but his statements are such that he wants to go beyond that. His statements are annihilate, wipe off the Earth.
MW: No, no, no.
SH: The world.
MW: Hold it, hold it.
SH: Wipe off the map.
MW: Yes, he says wipe off the map, and of course I asked him over and over about that. He says in effect, hey, it’s perfectly sensible to do…pardon me. It’s perfectly sensible for them, and I’m not quoting directly, obviously, because I don’t have the translation in front of me, to…for them to…it’s perfectly sensible, if there is a Holocaust, and let’s buy the fact that there was a Holocaust. Where did the Holocaust take place? Did it take place in an Arab neighborhood? Did it take place in Jerusalem? No. It took place in Germany. Then it seems to me, under those circumstances, take Israel, the Zionist entity, he called it, move it to Germany. Move it to Europe. That’s where it happened.
SH: Do you agree with him?
MW: Move it to the United States.
SH: Do you think that’s a legitimate argument?
MW: It’s an argument. I’m not a commentator. You are.
SH: You think he’s a better man than we think? Do you think he’s a good man?
MW: I wouldn’t call him a good man, no. I think that he’s a more reasonable…he’s self-assured. He is self-righteous. He is savvy. He has studied. Do you know what he does? He has a PhD in civil engineering. And…
SH: Well, he certainly won’t let his people be free. There’s not the freedom…
MW: What does that mean, free?
SH: Well, I would argue that women…
MW: Are you suggesting that he wasn’t elected by his people?
SH: I don’t believe that those elections are honest in any way. No, I do not.
MW: Well, all I can tell you is…
SH: I believe if there was an honest election, people would…
MW: Khamenei, who is the supreme leader, really, in Iran, if there’s one man to whom this man, Ahma…you pronounce his name better than I do…that the president of Iran defers to, it is the man who they call the supreme leader, who is the ayatollah, the highest ayatollah. 27 years ago, I went to the holy city of Qum to talk to Khomenei, which is one of the reasons, I’m sure, that they decided that they were going to let me talk, or he was going to let me talk. I know that I am making him sound more human, more surely than I expected, and by all means, more human than you feel that he is. You feel that he’s dead evil, and there’s no doubt about it, and so forth. What you’re telling me is that some of your best friends are Jews, is that it? That’s not what I’m saying. He says, let the people who were responsible for the Holocaust, let the Zionists go there and establish their state.
MW: I think that Khomenei…Khomenei was much more, how to say, hard-minded, much more the kind of man that you’re describing than Ahma…
SH: Ahmadinejead.
MW: Ahmadinejead, correct, is. The…I ask you to bring not prejudice, not your own beliefs or prejudices. When you watch him, I’ll be curious to see whether you think that there’s anything reasonable about this man at all.

As feminists deeply committed to challenging racism and Islamophobia and how it differentially impacts black and Muslim (and black Muslim) communities, we wish to open up a dialogue about how to build solidarities across complex histories of subjugation and survival. This space is precisely what is shut down in this article. In writing this letter, we emphasize that our concern is not solely with Adele Wilde-Blavatsky’s article but with the broader systemic issues revealed in the publication of a work that prevents us from challenging hierarchies of privilege and building solidarity.
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More here.

So it was in a spirit of righteousness and even compassion that Democrats and Republicans joined together to reconfigure social programs to cure, not poverty, but the “culture of poverty.” In 1996, the Clinton administration enacted the “One Strike” rule banning anyone who committed a felony from public housing. A few months later, welfare was replaced by Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), which in its current form makes cash assistance available only to those who have jobs or are able to participate in government-imposed “workfare.”

In a further nod to “culture of poverty” theory, the original welfare reform bill appropriated $250 million over five years for “chastity training” for poor single mothers. (This bill, it should be pointed out, was signed by Bill Clinton.)
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Fifty years later, a new discovery of poverty is long overdue. This time, we’ll have to take account not only of stereotypical Skid Row residents and Appalachians, but of foreclosed-upon suburbanites, laid-off tech workers, and America’s ever-growing army of the “working poor.” And if we look closely enough, we’ll have to conclude that poverty is not, after all, a cultural aberration or a character flaw. Poverty is a shortage of money.
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More here.

antonio garcia introducing zizek.

slavoj zizek speaking at suny brockport.

my film "pakistan one on one" was part of the zizek conference.

Despite the geologists’ knowledge and craft,
mocking magnets, graphs, and maps—
in a split second the dream
piles before us mountains as stony
as real life.

And since mountains, then valleys, plains
with perfect infrastructures.
Without engineers, contractors, workers,
bulldozers, diggers, or supplies—
raging highways, instant bridges,
thickly populated pop-up cities.

Without directors, megaphones, and cameramen—
crowds knowing exactly when to frighten us
and when to vanish.

Without architects deft in their craft,
without carpenters, bricklayers, concrete pourers—
on the path a sudden house just like a toy,
and in it vast halls that echo with our steps
and walls constructed out of solid air.

Not just the scale, it’s also the precision—
a specific watch, an entire fly,
on the table a cloth with cross-stitched flowers,
a bitten apple with teeth marks.

And we—unlike circus acrobats,
conjurers, wizards, and hypnotists—
can fly unfledged,
we light dark tunnels with our eyes,
we wax eloquent in unknown tongues,
talking not with just anyone, but with the dead.

And as a bonus, despite our own freedom,
the choices of our heart, our tastes,
we’re swept away
by amorous yearnings for—
and the alarm clock rings.

So what can they tell us, the writers of dream books,
the scholars of oneiric signs and omens,
the doctors with couches for analyses—
if anything fits,
it’s accidental,
and for one reason only,
that in our dreamings,
in their shadowings and gleamings,
in their multiplings, inconceivablings,
in their haphazardings and widescatterings
at times even a clear-cut meaning
may slip through.

(Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak)

The Cold War played an incredibly significant role in determining the trajectory of domestic politics in Pakistan—this is not news to anyone familiar with Pakistani history. However, to the extent that people in the West do make this Cold War connection, they tend to do it with regard to the Afghan War of the 1980s. I wanted to remind people that the relationship between the Pakistani ruling establishment and the US, which was born of and sustained by the Cold War, went back to the very beginning of Pakistan’s history as a newly-independent postcolonial nation-state and influenced its political trajectory in crucial ways. I felt that it was important to highlight the link between this relationship and cultural politics within Pakistan for several reasons. First, because I felt that it was important to talk about culture in the Pakistani context, since part of what makes the discourse on Pakistan in the West so problematic is that it is seen as a place without culture, and hence, a barbaric place. Secondly, culture and politics are intimately connected, and nowhere has this been more obvious than during the Cold War.

…I wanted to show how important the Cultural Cold War was in postcolonial countries—especially postcolonial Muslim countries—such as Pakistan. The US saw newly-independent Muslim countries as crucial battlegrounds in the Cold War, because it believed political Islam—especially its conservative and reactionary forms—could be deployed as a Cold War asset, a potent weapon to neutralize the popularity of international communism in the poor nations of the world.

The Pakistani ruling establishment was itself invested in neutralizing the demands for social and economic justice made by ordinary Pakistanis. The relationship between the Pakistani establishment and the US—based on these shared vested interests—manifested itself explicitly within the cultural realm in Pakistan in the form of increasing state repression of Leftist writers, poets, and artists, and the elevation of right-wing, pro-establishment ones. (Saadia Toor)
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More here.

Forever

Pina

The agronomist

Awaiting for men

Youssou Ndour: I bring what I love

Wasteland

Capturing the Friedmans

No end in sight

We still live here

Jesus Camp

More here.

I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled
this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees.
…

In 1997 Adrienne Rich refused the National Medal for the Arts to protest the growing concentration of power in fewer and fewer hands. Adrienne Rich informed the Clinton administration of her decision in a July 3rd letter to Jane Alexander, the chair of the National Endowment for the Arts at the time, which administers the awards.

“Dear Jane Alexander,

“I just spoke with a young man from your office, who informed me that I had been chosen to be one of twelve recipients of the National Medal for the Arts at a ceremony at the White House in the fall. I told him at once that I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House because the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration. I want to clarify to you what I meant by my refusal.

“Anyone familiar with my work from the early Sixties on knows that I believe in art’s social presence—as breaker of official silences, as voice for those whose voices are disregarded, and as a human birthright. In my lifetime I have seen the space for the arts opened by movements for social justice, the power of art to break despair. Over the past two decades I have witnessed the increasingly brutal impact of racial and economic injustice in our country.

“There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice. But I do know that art—in my own case the art of poetry—means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage. The radical disparities of wealth and power in America are widening at a devastating rate. A President cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored. I know you have been engaged in a serious and disheartening struggle to save government funding for the arts, against those whose fear and suspicion of art is nakedly repressive. In the end, I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope. My concern for my country is inextricable from my concerns as an artist. I could not participate in a ritual which would feel so hypocritical to me.

“Sincerely,
Adrienne Rich”

Rather than simply encouraging, facilitating or transforming war, as Arquilla and Ronfeldt (1993) discuss, info tech is based in war. Indeed the wars over the resources of cyberwar and netwar are fought in the forms of cyberwar and netwar. The information age is rooted in the bloody killing fields of low-tech territories.

The shifts in how societies come into conflict and in the waging of war, as suggested by Arquilla and Ronfeldt (1993), are perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Netwar and cyberwar have influenced the context and conduct of that war. Ironically the shift to netwar and cyberwar has itself played a part in the Congo war, informed, shaped and driven by the need for the very resources required to wage netwar and cyberwar. It reveals the extent to which Arquilla and Ronfeldt have underplayed the extreme violence of netwar.

The death toll from the war in the DRC, which began in 1998, is higher than in any other since the Second World War, with an estimated 4.7 million killed in the last four years alone (Economist, 2003: 23). The International Rescue Committee (IRC), an aid agency based in New York, reports that the mortality rate in the Congo is higher than the United Nations (UN) rates for any other country on the planet (NewsAfrica, 2003: 6). Despite these horrible facts, the crisis has gone largely unnoticed and unreported in the West.

The UN Group of Experts on Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and other forms of Wealth in the Congo concluded that resource exploitation was directly responsible for the ongoing “an economy of war” in the region. Illegal exploitation of resources had established a predatory network of elites, including army and government leaders and multinational companies. Multinational companies played the crucial roles, both direct and indirect, in this situation. Indeed without the corporations the illegal mineral trade would not be possible.

Ismi (2002: 14) details the stunning extent of economic and political interests in Africa: “Nearly 80% of the strategic minerals the U.S. requires are found in Africa, including 90% of the world’s cobalt, 90% of the platinum, 40% of the gold, 98% of the chromium, 64% of the manganese, and one-third of the uranium.” Significantly, these minerals are all indispensable components in jet engines, missiles, electronic components and iron and steel – the raw materials of imperialist tools of conquest.

Of particular importance in understanding imperialist intentions in Congo are the interests of the mining company American Mineral Fields (AMFI). Ominously the industrial enterprises set up by AMFI are also “interested in the contract for the construction of the orbital platform around the world that is destined to replace the Russian station MIR” (Baracyetse, 2000). The space platform is a centrepiece of the proposed National Missile Defence system driven by George W. Bush and his Vice President Donald Rumsfeld. Indeed, the space station cannot be built without many of the rare metals located in eastern Congo’s mineral-rich Ituri province. The National Missile Defence system is projected as a $60 billion venture.

Central in the struggles for control of strategic minerals in DRC is a little-known but highly sought after mineral called columbite-tantalite or coltan. While an extremely rare mineral it is a virtually ubiquitous part of the information society. In processed form coltan is a crucial component in the manufacture of mobile phones, jet engines, night vision goggles, fiber optics and capacitors, air bags and computer chips. All of the new technologies cited by Arquilla and Ronfeldt (1993) as impelling a military technology revolution are reliant on coltan, most from the war ravaged mineral fields of Congo.

Coltan miners work long hours in extremely hazardous mining conditions. Most miners sell their labour to one of the many rebel groups in the area, which in turn sell the ore directly to multinational mineral companies (Vick, 2001). Battles over control of the coltan mines is the direct cause for much of the fighting in areas surrounding the concessions. “It is capitalism in its purest form,” according to Robert L. Raun, prseident of US-based Eagles Wings Resources, a company that has purchased Congolese coltan for several years. The price for a ton of coltan ranges from US$100-US$200,000

Illegal resource extraction has allowed for the constitution of criminal cartels, formed or protected by military commanders, in occupied areas. The UN report warns that these cartels, connected with global networks, pose the next serious security threat in the region.

The UN report notes, significantly, that the illegal plundering of eastern Congo has been facilitated by Western companies, governments, multilateral institutions and diplomats (Ismi. 2001). As one example, coltan exports from Rwanda were carried by Sebena, the national airline of Belgium while the necessary financial transactions were carried out by Citibank (Ismi, 2001). Deals between Rwandan coltan sellers and US companies were promoted by the US Honorary Consul in eastern Congo, Ramnik Kotecha, who himself was dealing in coltan (Ismi. 2001).

Lenin identified as a key basis for imperialism the extensive networks of close ties and relationships involving even very small capitalists. Recent discussions of cyberwar have brought back a focus on the importance of networks for the working of contemporary geopolitics. The state of disorder in Congo facilitated the emergence of new networks operating in areas where the formal state was in a process of collapse (Taylor, 2003). This situation encouraged the emergence of “warlord capitalism” and a “shadow state” (or states) “which retained enough substance to negotiate with and benefit from international capital’s willingness to conduct business with such entities” (Taylor, 2003: 51). Imperialist involvement in Central Africa has given rise to and instituted a form of informal regionalism comprising a “shadow network” of states, private armies, businesses and various elites, both inside and outside of Africa. The involvement of transnational business and state networks “were neither peripheral nor determinative in the political trajectories of Uganda, the Congo, and the Great Lakes region in general. They were, and are, constitutive” (Latham, Kassimir and Callaghy, 2001: 2).

The structural context that has nurtured the particular regional processes in the Congo has been conditioned by neoliberal globalization, notably through the imposition of structural adjustment programs in Africa. Neoliberal globalization has encouraged the formation of, often illicit, cross-border networks with multinational corporate linkages. Significantly, “instead of bringing about stability and (legitimate) growth, impulses generated by globalisation have contributed to the further deepening and development of criminal networks and decidedly quasi-feudal forms of political economy” (Taylor, 2003: 52).

It seems that it is no longer necessarily the case that presidents are dedicated to a project of establishing control over a specific recognised territory, with all the bureaucratic encumbrances and requirements to maintain some form of consensual balance…Now, the informalisation of economic and political activity can counterbalance the erosion of state capacity and power. By expanding internal and external clientistic networks, elites within conflict-ridden spaces pursue what Duffield refers to as ‘adaptive patrimonialism’ (Taylor, 2003: 52).

The war in Congo exhibits the complex character of cyber war and netwar and the vastness of networks composed of extensive relations between state and non-state, local, regional and global actors. Arquilla and Ronfeldt’s suggestion that states, far from diminishing in all of this, as Van Creveld (1991) supposed, will actually be transformed by these developments is also borne out by the Congo war. In the Congo war interconnected networks on the ground (and in the air) link up with corporate and state hierarchies in the metropole.

These new processes of state formation, rather than minimizing the state as neoliberal ideologues might suggest, present transformations of the state which may in fact facilitate its centralization. Structural adjustment it has created changes in the international system impelling a transformation of the Southern sate into an ‘enabling state’, creating forms of governance suited to the era of cyberwar (Biel, 2003: 80).

Taylor (2003: 52) argues that, rather than representing an anomalous form of regional project, “the type of alliances and transboundary networks currently reconfiguring Central Africa may well offer a prophetic vision of what may be in store for vulnerable and peripheral areas of the world.” As Arquilla and Ronfeldt (1993) have stated: “The future may belong to whoever masters the network form.”

In recent years the US has looked for new means of military intervention in Africa, a process that has intensified since September 11, 2001 (Biel, 2003). The US is not necessarily looking for large-scale military base facilities since force can be deployed directly from the US (Biel, 2003). Thus much attention has been placed on increased investment in long-range deployment strategies for agile and mobile forces (Biel, 2003). This has encouraged the emergence of new forms for the relationship with military proxies. “Like military bases, direct subsidiaries of the core firm are a thing of the past, but instead the structures would be more informal. The post-September 11th discourse indeed explicitly centres upon building a network, a ‘coalition of coalitions’” (Biel, 2003: 85).

A focus on cyberwar and netwar in the Congo requires a rethinking of the notion of state collapse in Africa which has long been used to justify US intervention. In cases of “failed states” the imperialist agenda may include the reconstitution of “new state machines” which will primarily benefit rebel groups (Biel, 2003). The most prominent model is probably the promotion to power by the US of Northern Alliance forces in Afghanistan. Indeed, Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz has openly confirmed this expectation with respect to finding “exactly those sorts of people” to play a similar role in Somalia (Biel, 2003).

In the Congo, Western imperialism has preferred informal or illicit governance structures through proxies and militias, in effect a militarization of society and governance. The imperialists’ preferred strategies are either to install obedient leaders or divide the area into minor enclaves, each led by leaders who can be influenced or intimidated to allow the mining companies to get what they want. They hope to achieve their objectives through the dismembering of Congo and its partition into a series of microstates lacking financial resources and economic infrastructure, what might be termed a form of balkanization.

Nkrumah (1965) long ago noted that neo-colonialism is the breeding ground for the “limited wars” that have marked the last half-century. Neo-colonialism undermines the formation of larger regional or continental units that would make “limited war” impossible. “Limited war” is only possible where small or weak states exist. In such cases a decisive result can be won “by landing a few thousand marines or by financing a mercenary force” (Nkrumah, 1965: xi).
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REFERENCES

Baracyetse, Pierre. 2000. “The Geopolitical Stakes of the International Mining Companies in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Ex-Zaire).” www.africa2000.com

Bayart, J-F, S. Ellis and B. Hibou. 1999. The Criminalisation of the State in Africa. Oxford: James Currey

Biel, Robert. 2003. “Imperialism and International Governance: The Case of US Policy towards Africa.” Review of African Political Economy. 95: 77-88

Bracking, Sarah and Graham Harrison. 2003. “Africa, Imperialism and New Forms of Accumulation.” Review of African Political Economy. 95: 5-10

Ferkiss, Victor C. 1966. Africa’s Search for Identity. Cleveland: Meridian Books

Griswold, Deirdre and Johnnie Stevens. 2001. “Bush, Clinton in the Web: Behind the Assassination of Kabila.” http://www.iacenter.org

Hartung, William D. and Dena Montague. 2001. “The Clinton Legacy: Uplifting Rhetoric, Grim Realities.” World Policy Institute. March 22

Ismi, Asad. 2001. “Congo: The Western Heart of Darkness.” Briarpatch. November.

Ismi, Asad. 2002. “The Ravaging of Africa: Western Neo-Colonialism Fuels Wars, Plundering of Resources.” The CCPA Monitor. October: 14-17

Nkrumah, Kwame. 1965. Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. New York: International Publishers

Reno, W. 2001. “External Relations of Weak States and Stateless Regions in Africa.” In African Foreign Policies: Power and Process, edited by G. Khadiagala and T. Lyons. Boulder: Lynne Reinner

Taylor, Ian. 2003. “Conflict in Central Africa: Clandestine Networks and Regional/Global Configurations.” Review of African Political Economy. 95: 45-55

Vick, Karl. 2001. “Vital Ore Funds Congo’s War.” The Washington Post. March 19

Shalabi is protesting being held in administrative detention. These detentions are quasi-legal action through which Israel incarcerates individuals without charge or proper trial. Israel inherited this undemocratic procedure from the British mandate, which enacted it as part of the 1945 emergency regulations.

International humanitarian law frowns on this procedure and Israel was asked by the international community on numerous occasions to end this practice. Over 300 Palestinians are presently held without charge. More here.

The persecution of Muslim Americans in the US court system is shown through the experience of Palestinian American Ghassan Elashi, who cofounded what was formerly the largest Islamic charity in the US, the Holy Land Foundation. He is now serving a 65-year sentence in a Communications Management Unit — special detention centers for terror convicts (this was the subject of Malek’s investigative feature”Gitmo in the Heartland” published by The Nation last year).

Elashi and four of his colleagues — dubbed the Holy Land Five — were subjected to two extraordinary trials that, amongst other court precedents, relied on testimony from an anonymous Israeli intelligence agent. The men were accused of providing material support to Hamas, a Palestinian political party declared a terrorist organization by the US State Department, by funding Islamic charitable committees in Palestine through the Holy Land Foundation.

Though the five were not accused of any violent acts, “prosecutors focused on the killing of Israeli soldiers and civilians by Palestinian elements, and specifically Hamas, as opposed to the actions of the HLF [Holy Land Foundation] or the defendants themselves”.
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More here.

someone compared it to kurosawa’s ikiru. i have seen ikiru and it blew me away. in fact, i liked it more than rashomon, which i understand is a classic in many ways (cinematography and the use of dappled light, the idea of telling the same story from diff perspectives, the unusual editing, etc) but it doesn’t have the compassion that ikiru has. in the same way, i found the seventh seal to be compassionate, not just cerebral. the portrayal of a simple, happy family is v warm indeed. so great comparison.

have not seen woody allen’s love and death but apparently it has a lot of references from the seventh seal. allen is a huge fan of the film. the criterion collection includes his comments.

Rob Crilly of the Telegraph is correct when he writes: “The problem is that his campaign stems from the same misguided analysis that brought us Kony 2012. It is an analysis that reduces Africa to simple notions of good versus evil, and suggests that outsiders hold the key to finding solutions”. Sudan is a country where a plethora of issues – such as tribal grazing rights, water availability, diversity of ethnicities and border demarcations – contribute to conflict. The situation is inflamed by decades of entrenched centralisation on the part of successive governments in Khartoum that have alienated the peripheries. Rebellion flares up in and is doused regularly, with fundamental grievances never addressed.

The current government in Sudan is not a benign one, and it might appear churlish not to support an out-and-out condemnation of its actions. But identifying the true nature of the problem enables us to come up with the right solutions. I would urge Clooney to team up with and extend resources to partners in Sudan who can influence the situation internally. It is his best chance of fulfilling his wish of ending up on the “right side of history”.
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More here.

Today I massaged her hands with moisturiser,
with drops of lavender mixed in it. Her arthritis
is really bad in her left hand. The thumb
closing over the palm. Her middle finger
thick ropey gristle beneath tissue transparent skin.

This is the first time we’ve done such a thing
Mother objects at first, but begins to enjoy
my fingers pressing her fingers; the muscle-root
in her forearm, the small marbles that roll
across the muscle.

Often these days we dance to Abba or Queen,
quick two minute waltzes on her green cat-haired
rug that’s always crooked. She’s not been touched
much in her life. I die if a day goes by without a love.

She never hugged us once we’d stopped being small
My sisters and I are knotty trees in
mum’s garden. Now I try to feed and care
for her with lavender oil and hands, hoping
some of the love I taught myself will soak
into her fingers, and backflow into
her body, through the fibres she has grown
over her untouched desire.
…

The Ríos Montt case is also making the US government a little nervous. WikiLeaks cables and unclassified documents indicate that the US government had information on the abuses taking place yet still supported the regime (in 1982 President Ronald Reagan famously complained that the dictator was “getting a bum rap”). Current US Ambassador Arnold Chacon brushed off the case, telling our delegation that most people he’s spoken with would prefer to look forward. The State Department would like to see restrictions on military aid lifted as it promotes the Central American Regional Security Initiative, a counternarcotics aid plan that would significantly increase the US presence in the region.
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More here.

Thus, slavery required a particular intellectual picture of Africa – to use human beings as one would a horse. Capitalism and improved technology on the other hand, rendered slavery inefficient. This created a necessity for free labor from coercive conditions. Therefore, the philosophy of colonialism about Africans had to be different from the philosophy of slavery – the African as a perpetual child only able to work under the whip of colonial authority. This philosophy justified and legitimised the structure of the colonial state to its home constituencies and to the colonised.

As colonialism ended, overt racism became repugnant having been discredited by Adolf Hitler and his NAZI allies who took it to the European mainland. The claim that Hitler began genocides disregards history. The German psychopathic dictator was following in a long European tradition of mass slaughter of native peoples by European conquerors in Latin and North America and Africa. But to return to Africa, although overt racism began to decline at the end of colonial rule, the imagery of studying and reporting on Africa was not transformed, it only changed manner of presentation. Overtly racial expressions were dropped. In their place, however, particular stereotypes have been introduced that have sustained the construction of Africa and Africans as some incompetent humans in need of external emancipation – by the white man.
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Steve Biko said that the greatest weapon in the hand of an oppressor is never his armies – these are secondary. It is the mind of the oppressed. The overlord uses control of communication channels (mass media, think tanks, universities, books, education curricula, religion, philosophy etc) to create a particular world view – what Antonio Gramci called hegemony. This is a mind-frame or belief system of what is normal, regular and right – as opposed to the abnormal, irregular and wrong. In other words, the production of knowledge is an important instrument of social control.

We African intellectuals and elites know about ourselves largely (not entirely) through the writings of non-Africans. So we go to Stanford and Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge to be taught who we are, what we are, what we think, what we want, what we do, how we do it etc. Most books and research work about us is produced by someone other than ourselves. We participate in its consumption, not its production. The biases, prejudices and stereotypes generated may not be driven by deliberate racial intent. However, research into cognitive bias shows that both conscious and sub-conscious biases lead to prejudiced views and actions even when the individual does not want to do so.
…

The point is that the knowledge created by western scholarship and mass media that is imparted to us shapes our self-perception. For example, there are many things our governments do as part of democratic deal-making that we claim are signs of failure of our democratic process. Yet these very same actions are seen in western democracies as costs of democratic compromise. Indeed, African elites are quick to see the specks in our societies and remain blind to the logs in western ones.

For example, elites in Africa may condemn Rwanda and Uganda occupation of DR Congo – a country with an absentee state just across the border. But they see nothing wrong with America and NATO occupation of Afghanistan some 10,000 miles away for over a decade. A few killings by an African army get so much coverage compared to hundreds of death at the hands of American and NATO aerial bombings in Pakistan and Afghanistan. We are therefore active participants in processes that encourage and reproduce stereotypes against us.
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More here.

The era of the Privatisation of Everything has made the Indian economy one of the fastest growing in the world. However, like any good old-fashioned colony, one of its main exports is its minerals. India’s new mega-corporations—Tatas, Jindals, Essar, Reliance, Sterlite—are those who have managed to muscle their way to the head of the spigot that is spewing money extracted from deep inside the earth. It’s a dream come true for businessmen—to be able to sell what they don’t have to buy.
…

After three years of “low-intensity conflict” that has not managed to “flush” the rebels out of the forest, the central government has declared that it will deploy the Indian army and air force. In India, we don’t call this war. We call it “creating a good investment climate”. Thousands of soldiers have already moved in. A brigade headquarters and air bases are being readied. One of the biggest armies in the world is now preparing its Terms of Engagement to “defend” itself against the poorest, hungriest, most malnourished people in the world. We only await the declaration of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), which will give the army legal immunity and the right to kill “on suspicion”. Going by the tens of thousands of unmarked graves and anonymous cremation pyres in Kashmir, Manipur and Nagaland, it has shown itself to be a very suspicious army indeed.
…

The Indian army might need to go on a recruitment drive so that it’s not taken unawares when it’s ordered to deploy all over India. In preparation for its role in Central India, it publicly released its updated doctrine on Military Psychological Operations, which outlines “a planned process of conveying a message to a select target audience, to promote particular themes that result in desired attitudes and behaviour, which affect the achievement of political and military objectives of the country”. This process of “perception management”, it said, would be conducted by “using media available to the services”.
The army is experienced enough to know that coercive force alone cannot carry out or manage social engineering on the scale that is envisaged by India’s planners. War against the poor is one thing. But for the rest of us—the middle class, white-collar workers, intellectuals, “opinion-makers”—it has to be “perception management”. And for this we must turn our attention to the exquisite art of Corporate Philanthropy.
…

When corporate-endowed foundations first made their appearance in the US, there was a fierce debate about their provenance, legality and lack of accountability. People suggested that if companies had so much surplus money, they should raise the wages of their workers. (People made these outrageous suggestions in those days, even in America.) The idea of these foundations, so ordinary now, was in fact a leap of the business imagination. Non-tax-paying legal entities with massive resources and an almost unlimited brief—wholly unaccountable, wholly non-transparent—what better way to parlay economic wealth into political, social and cultural capital, to turn money into power? What better way for usurers to use a minuscule percentage of their profits to run the world?
…

The Ford Foundation’s declared “goals for the future of mankind” include interventions in grassroots political movements locally and internationally. In the US, it provided millions in grants and loans to support the Credit Union Movement that was pioneered by the department store owner, Edward Filene, in 1919. Filene believed in creating a mass consumption society of consumer goods by giving workers affordable access to credit—a radical idea at the time. Actually, only half of a radical idea, because the other half of what Filene believed in was the more equitable distribution of national income. Capitalists seized on the first half of Filene’s suggestion, and by disbursing “affordable” loans of tens of millions of dollars to working people, turned the US working class into people who are permanently in debt, running to catch up with their lifestyles.
…

Many years later, this idea has trickled down to the impoverished countryside of Bangladesh when Mohammed Yunus and the Grameen Bank brought microcredit to starving peasants with disastrous consequences. Microfinance companies in India are responsible for hundreds of suicides—200 people in Andhra Pradesh in 2010 alone. A national daily recently published a suicide note by an 18-year-old girl who was forced to hand over her last Rs 150, her school fees, to bullying employees of the microfinance company. The note said, “Work hard and earn money. Do not take loans.” There’s a lot of money in poverty, and a few Nobel Prizes too.
…

By the 1950s, the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, funding several NGOs and international educational institutions, began to work as quasi-extensions of the US government that was at the time toppling democratically elected governments in Latin America, Iran and Indonesia. (That was also around the time they made their entry into India, then non-aligned, but clearly tilting towards the Soviet Union.) The Ford Foundation established a US-style economics course at the Indonesian University. Elite Indonesian students, trained in counter-insurgency by US army officers, played a crucial part in the 1952 CIA-backed coup in Indonesia that brought General Suharto to power. Gen Suharto repaid his mentors by slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Communist rebels.

Twenty years later, young Chilean students, who came to be known as the Chicago Boys, were taken to the US to be trained in neo-liberal economics by Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago (endowed by J.D. Rockefeller), in preparation for the 1973 CIA-backed coup that killed Salvador Allende, and brought in General Pinochet and a reign of death squads, disappearances and terror that lasted for seventeen years. (Allende’s crime was being a democratically elected socialist and nationalising Chile’s mines.)
…

Scholars of the Foundation-friendly version of economics and political science were rewarded with fellowships, research funds, grants, endowments and jobs. Those with Foundation-unfriendly views found themselves unfunded, marginalised and ghettoised, their courses discontinued. Gradually, one particular imagination—a brittle, superficial pretence of tolerance and multiculturalism (that morphs into racism, rabid nationalism, ethnic chauvinism or war-mongering Islamophobia at a moment’s notice) under the roof of a single, overarching, very unplural economic ideology—began to dominate the discourse. It did so to such an extent that it ceased to be perceived as an ideology at all. It became the default position, the natural way to be. It infiltrated normality, colonised ordinariness, and challenging it began to seem as absurd or as esoteric as challenging reality itself. From here it was a quick easy step to ‘There is No Alternative’.

It is only now, thanks to the Occupy Movement, that another language has appeared on US streets and campuses. To see students with banners that say ‘Class War’ or ‘We don’t mind you being rich, but we mind you buying our government’ is, given the odds, almost a revolution in itself.
…

The transformation of the idea of justice into the industry of human rights has been a conceptual coup in which NGOs and foundations have played a crucial part. The narrow focus of human rights enables an atrocity-based analysis in which the larger picture can be blocked out and both parties in a conflict—say, for example, the Maoists and the Indian government, or the Israeli Army and Hamas—can both be admonished as Human Rights Violators. The land-grab by mining corporations or the history of the annexation of Palestinian land by the State of Israel then become footnotes with very little bearing on the discourse. This is not to suggest that human rights don’t matter. They do, but they are not a good enough prism through which to view or remotely understand the great injustices in the world we live in.
…

The hiving off of the liberal feminist movement from grassroots anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist people’s movements did not begin with the evil designs of foundations. It began with those movements’ inability to adapt and accommodate the rapid radicalisation of women that took place in the ’60s and ’70s. The foundations showed genius in recognising and moving in to support and fund women’s growing impatience with the violence and patriarchy in their traditional societies as well as among even the supposedly progressive leaders of Left movements.
…

In the NGO universe, which has evolved a strange anodyne language of its own, everything has become a “subject”, a separate, professionalised, special-interest issue. Community development, leadership development, human rights, health, education, reproductive rights, AIDS, orphans with AIDS—have all been hermetically sealed into their own silos with their own elaborate and precise funding brief. Funding has fragmented solidarity in ways that repression never could. Poverty too, like feminism, is often framed as an identity problem. As though the poor have not been created by injustice but are a lost tribe who just happen to exist, and can be rescued in the short term by a system of grievance redressal (administered by NGOs on an individual, person to person basis), and whose long-term resurrection will come from Good Governance. Under the regime of Global Corporate Capitalism, it goes without saying. Indian poverty, after a brief period in the wilderness while India “shone”, has made a comeback as an exotic identity in the Arts, led from the front by films like Slumdog Millionaire. These stories about the poor, their amazing spirit and resilience, have no villains—except the small ones who provide narrative tension and local colour. The authors of these works are the contemporary world’s equivalent of the early anthropologists, lauded and honoured for working on “the ground”, for their brave journeys into the unknown. You rarely see the rich being examined in these ways.
…

Martin Luther King Jr made the forbidden connections between Capitalism, Imperialism, Racism and the Vietnam War. As a result, after he was assassinated, even his memory became a toxic threat to public order. Foundations and Corporations worked hard to remodel his legacy to fit a market-friendly format. The Martin Luther King Junior Centre for Non-Violent Social Change, with an operational grant of $2 million, was set up by, among others, the Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Mobil, Western Electric, Procter & Gamble, US Steel and Monsanto. The Center maintains the King Library and Archives of the Civil Rights Movement. Among the many programmes the King Center runs have been projects that “work closely with the United States Department of Defense, the Armed Forces Chaplains Board and others”. It co-sponsored the Martin Luther King Jr Lecture Series called ‘The Free Enterprise System: An Agent for Non-violent Social Change’. Amen.
…

The proletariat, as Marx saw it, has been under continuous assault. Factories have shut down, jobs have disappeared, trade unions have been disbanded. The proletariat has, over the years, been pitted against each other in every possible way. In India, it has been Hindu against Muslim, Hindu against Christian, Dalit against Adivasi, caste against caste, region against region. And yet, all over the world, it is fighting back. In China, there are countless strikes and uprisings. In India, the poorest people in the world have fought back to stop some of the richest corporations in their tracks.

Capitalism is in crisis. Trickledown failed. Now Gush-Up is in trouble too. The international financial meltdown is closing in. India’s growth rate has plummeted to 6.9 per cent. Foreign investment is pulling out. Major international corporations are sitting on huge piles of money, not sure where to invest it, not sure how the financial crisis will play out. This is a major, structural crack in the juggernaut of global capital.

Capitalism’s real “grave-diggers” may end up being its own delusional Cardinals, who have turned ideology into faith. Despite their strategic brilliance, they seem to have trouble grasping a simple fact: Capitalism is destroying the planet. The two old tricks that dug it out of past crises—War and Shopping—simply will not work.
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More here.

this too is a little girl whose dreams were shattered, not by the taliban but by NATO bombs, watch here.

here are stories of other families affected by the war.

the major problem women and children face in afghanistan is not the taliban or the closing of schools but malnutrition. the country is staggering under the weight of a 30 yr war. that’s what needs to stop.

But that those who run military establishment have technological illusions, which many ordinary people share in this and other domains of human existence, keeps immense sums of money flowing to arms manufacturers and their minions. There is a very profound consensus between the two parties on arms spending, which began under the Democrats a half-century ago and it will not go away – no matter how neglected the bridges and infrastructure, health, or the like. Arms lobbies are not only very powerful in Washington but create crucial jobs in most states and military spending keeps the economy afloat. Weapons producers make money regardless of whether the Pentagon wins or loses its wars – and making money is their only objective. It is surely a key causal factor even if it is far from being the sole explanation of why the U.S. intervenes where it shouldn’t. More here.

More specifically, goodist-style contrasts between the civilised mores of the imperium and the incorrigible barbarism of the natives are as old as colonialism itself. The gunboat in the harbour always arrived for the ostensible benefit of the ‘new-caught, sullen peoples’ rather than the East India Company. Suttee in India, human sacrifice in the Americas, cannibalism in the Pacific, foot binding in China and so on: these (undeniably horrific) phenomenaon were all used, at various times, to rationalise conquest and to justify dispossession.

Césaire made the point particularly eloquently in Discours sur le colonialisme. Surveying Western accounts of the evils worked by native peoples, he wrote:

The conclusion is inescapable, compared to the cannibals, the dismemberers, and other lesser breeds, Europe and the West are the incarnation of respect for human dignity. But let us move on, and quickly, lest our thoughts wander to Algiers, Morocco, and other places where, as I write these very words, so many valiant sons of the West, in the semi-darkness of dungeons, are lavishing upon their inferior African brothers, with such tireless attention, those authentic marks of respect for human dignity which are called, in technical terms, ‘electricity,’ ‘the bathtub,’ and ‘the bottleneck.’

Today, Algiers and Morocco have been supplanted by Iraq and Afghanistan, and ‘the bathtub’ replaced by ‘the waterboard’, but the argument remains unchanged.
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In an oft-quoted passage, [Cesaire] declared:

We must study how colonisation works to decivilise the coloniser, to brutalise him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilisation acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a centre of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and interrogated, all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been instilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery.

To update the argument, you need only ask what political and cultural consequences you’d expect internationally from, say, the Bush administration’s normalisation of torture against Muslim detainees; the construction of Guantanamo to house Muslim prisoners indefinitely without charges or trial; the launch of a pre-emptive invasion, a war declared unlawful by most legal scholars, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, most of them Muslim; the routinisation of assassinations and other extrajudicial killings of Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen; and the persistent refusal to hold anyone accountable for any of these. Is it not likely that such measures would establish throughout the industrialised world certain ideas about Muslims and their place, certain notions about how they might be legitimately treated?

Let’s look, as Césaire suggests, to Europe.

In Holland, Geert Wilders, leader of the Freedom Party, seems set to play kingmaker for a new government. Wilders advocates banning the Koran, prohibiting immigration from Muslim nations and forbidding the construction of mosques. In Switzerland, a historic centre of tolerance, the state has constitutionally banned the building of new minarets. In Austria, the Freedom Party (yes, it’s a popular name), which polled 17.5 per cent at the most recent election, wants to do the same, while also outlawing face veils. France has already prohibited the burqa; similar laws are mooted in Italy and Belgium. The English Defence League marshals shaven-headed hooligans to chant ‘Muslims out!’ in towns across the nation. In Germany, former finance minister Thilo Sarrazin sold, in a month, 600 000 copies of a book claiming that high fertility rates among the Muslim community have diluted the country’s collective IQ.

Crucially, this rising tide of prejudice and hatred correlates not with anything Muslims might have done but rather with what is being done against them.
…

It is difficult to hear the ugly clamour of the new Islamophobia and not recall the traditional slurs against Judaism during Europe’s darkest days. Jews, said the bigots of the early twentieth century, were eternal foreigners, disloyal interlopers who bred uncontrollably and immigrated in swarms. They kept to themselves, they ate strange foods, they wore odd clothes, and their sinister religion mandated their involvement in criminality and political extremism.

Yes, today’s discourse against Islam marshals an identifiably pogromist vocabulary and, in Europe at least, it swells the ranks of groups with historic ties to the far Right or even neo-fascism. But Islamophobia also represents something new, since it deploys the ancient tropes of bigotry not in the form of blood-and-soil racialism, but in the politically correct vocabulary of contemporary liberalism.

The anti-Islam ideologues might be feminist (Ayaan Hirsi Ali), atheist (Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris) or even assertively homosexual (Pim Fortuyn famously denied being a racist on the basis of his penchant for Moroccan boys) but their formulations invariably contrast secular modernity – multicultural, tolerant of women’s rights, etc. – against Islamic backwardness and totalitarianism. Thus the group Stop the Islamisation of Europe can use as its slogan: ‘racism is the lowest form of human stupidity, but Islamophobia is the height of common sense.’
…

In a curious fashion, then, the anti-burqa feminists (we might also have mentioned Elizabeth Farrelly and Virginia Haussegger) become that which they oppose. In the name of combating a garment that, they say, silences women, treats women as objects and excludes women from the public sphere, they … silence women, treat women as objects and exclude women from the public sphere. Ostensibly championing freedom, in practice they seek to deny it.
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The connection between goodism abroad (humanitarian war) and goodism at home (burqa bans) becomes, then, clearer. The ideologues of Islamophobia are, as they repeatedly ensure us, impeccable liberals – doughty defenders of progress and enlightenment and rights for all. They are, however, liberals who have concluded that ‘free and equal discussion’ doesn’t apply to Muslims, the ‘barbarians’ of our contemporary age. Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with such people, and the same immaturity of Islamic faculties that legitimises military occupation overseas also mandates coercion at home.

‘An equation,’ said Césaire. ‘Colonisation = “thing-ification”.’

You can’t tell people what clothes to wear but you can do whatever you want to things, even those in human form.
…

To date, Islamophobia has not, within Australia, become the mass political force it is in Europe and, increasingly, the US. But the basis has been laid. The war in Afghanistan will not deliver liberal reforms to the people of Afghanistan. Rather, the longer it continues, the more it will foster anti-Muslim bigotry throughout the world, a bigotry promulgated under the rubric of liberalism.

From the campaign to civilise barbarism, said Césaire, comes ‘the negation of civilisation, pure and simple’. The tragedy of Afghanistan illustrates precisely what he meant.
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More here.

watch here.

The BBC collated testimony in 2010 from nine prisoners, confirming that human-rights abuses continued at Bagram. The prisoners independently described “a secret prison” inside the prison, called “the black hole”. Prisoners were still being subjected at the time to freezing temperatures, sleep deprivation and “other abuses”. One testified that a US soldier had used a rifle to knock out a row of his teeth and that he was forced to dance to music whenever he needed to use the bathroom.

Another investigation confirmed similar allegations in 2010 and last month, the BBC reported that Bagram’s prison population had reached 3,000, while an Afghan-led investigation found still more allegations of ongoing torture, including freezing temperatures and sexual humiliations.

Of course, since the US military can detain anyone in Afghanistan and hold him or her without charge in these conditions forever, the entire country lives under the shadow of torture at Bagram. The Quran burnings are a potent symbol of that systemic threat.

So, while Obama should continue to apologise for the Quran burnings, we must understand that Afghans’ rage is a response to an even deeper, rawer wound. Obama should also apologise for kidnapping Afghans; for holding them at Bagram without due process of law; for forcing them into cages, each reportedly holding up to 30 prisoners; for denying them Red Cross/Red Crescent visits; for illegally confiscating family letters; for torturing and sexually abusing them; and for casting a pall of fear over the country.

The Quran forbids that kind of injustice and cruelty. So does the Bible.
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More here.

kenneth turan’s review here.

love this. quite a bit of a paradigm shift. rather than think of success in terms of how our work is perceived by the world (how much recognition we get for it or what material rewards it produces), we should perhaps focus on who we have become (or r becoming) by virtue of what we do. that’s a much better gauge of “success.”

War at home and war abroad cooperated. Other nations’ sovereignties surrender to our impotence over what happens within our own. Most recently, the US presided over a massacre in Jamaica: local police and military killed dozens of civilians in order to capture a single drug lord who had offended against the Americans. What we ask of our allies in South America or the Caribbean is that they become slightly less chaotic versions of Waziristan.

This means, too, that the Wars on Drugs and on Terror amount in essence to a single War: the big one, on the Poor. Mike Davis wrote a decade ago about the coming urban landscapes where states will control unemployed and disenfranchised masses of migrants with force. That’s what you’ve got in Brazil. What the US pushed Jamaica’s government to do, Dilma Roussef did at her own discretion (with, to be sure, the added push of cleaning up Rio for the coming Olympics): she called in the military to invade and clean up the favelas.

The NYPD, I’m afraid, is onto something. It’s true that the closest thing to a terror attack on the city in the last decade was foiled, not by their millions in surveillance money, but by a T-shirt vendor who noticed an oddly smoking car in Times Square. But for Mayor Bloomberg, this only means we have to enlist the entire T-shirt vending community as permanent informers. Faced with the fact that “The NYPD routinely monitored the websites, blogs and forums of Muslim student associations at colleges including Yale, Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania,” he answered: “If going on websites and looking for information is not what Yale stands for, I don’t know.” We need an enemy, and if a sophomore blogger is what we’re stuck with, run with what you got. The watching cameras multiply. This is our new world, where all the wars are civil wars.
…

More here.

check out the interview with amanpour here.

PINA – Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost – International Trailer from neueroadmovies on Vimeo.

how beautiful is this?

love the interplay between the male and female dancers – something so vulnerable and heartbreaking yet beautiful in its complementarity. what a poetic representation of love. or perhaps life itself – its fragility has to be constantly cherished, protected, calibrated.

and this? heart-stopping.

More here.

More here.

Virtually without exception, the American judiciary has refused to allow any victims of America’s War on Terror abuses — whether foreign national or American citizen — to even have their claims heard in court….But consider the extraordinary — and now distinctly un-American — event that just happened in Pakistan, from CNN, today: Seven men detained by Pakistan’s spy agency, the ISI, appeared in court Monday in a landmark case that places one of the nation’s most powerful institutions under the scrutiny of its highest court… Yet this type of accountability just brought to Pakistan’s intelligence service is simply inconceivable in the United States. It is virtually impossible to imagine the U.S. Supreme Court ordering the CIA to disclose documents about its treatment of detainees or, even more unrealistically, to permit the victims of CIA abuse to have their grievances heard in court. More here.

…there are two odious aspects of the Surveillance State specifically highlighted by the NYPD’s program here.

First, Muslims generally — and, increasingly, American Muslims — are branded with virtually official non-person status under the law. On Monday, I wrote about the way in which core tyrannical powers — arbitrary detention, limitless spying, due-process-free assassinations — have become normalized in the U.S., Israel and its Western allies, but it is almost always Muslims who are the target of these abuses. Every serious episode of civil liberties assaults in American history was driven by the full-scale demonization of one specific group. There are still plenty of groups who perform that function, but there is no question that Muslims are the prime target now.

Second, this perfectly illustrates what I have often described as the one-way mirror dynamic of the American Surveillance State: it isn’t merely that the State knows more and more about the private activities of citizens, but worse, that happens at exactly the same time that citizens know less and less about the activities of the State. At exactly the same time that the Surveillance State has exploded into a sprawling, ubiquitous, unaccountable apparatus, the U.S. Government and its various agencies have erected an increasingly impenetrable wall of secrecy behind which it operates. This imbalance grows inexorably. That’s the essential expression of the American Surveillance State: we can and will know everything about what you do, and you will know virtually nothing about what we do.
…

More here.

Mirza Waheed: You look into it, the loss of collective conscience. You look into the moral landscape of these times and areas … what happens to normal behavior, the suspension of every day good behavior in a way which seems normal. We come to expect and then accept that this is how it’s going to be. It’s war, and these things happen in war. And then, as a novelist, as a writer, you do want to question that. And you want to explore … so how did we get to this place? What makes brutality banal? How do we come to accept violence as an everyday thing? And as a novelist, I want to explore those things and see … how do we come to a point where killing as many people as possible is a job? And what does it do to the person who’s doing the killing and, obviously, also to the people who are getting killed in that manner. You know, we live in this strange, bizarre age where the Nobel peace laureate has ended up as a proud assassin. More here.

Israeli philosopher Kasher has been explicitly frank about his contempt of current International Humanitarian Law. He, like some others at the conference, questioned why Israel should have more responsibilities towards what he perceived as the “enemy’s civilians” than towards its own soldiers. “IHL only cares about civilians, not about soldiers, and this is immoral,” Kasher said. For the former chief of Israeli military intelligence Amos Yadlin, the ethical norms of IHL do not fit Israel’s operations in Gaza. More here.

?’The very notion of war was wrenched from its dictionary meaning and became “our values versus theirs”. The perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, mostly Saudis who trained to fly in America, were all but forgotten. Instead, the “splashes of colour” were made blood-red – first in Afghanistan, land of the poorest of the poor. No Afghans were members of al-Qaeda; on the contrary, there was mutual resentment. No matter. Once the bombing began on 7 October 2001, tens of thousands of Afghans were punished with starvation as the World Food Programme withdrew aid on the cusp of winter. In one stricken village, Bibi Mahru, I witnessed the aftermath of a single Mk 82 “precision” bomb’s obliteration of two families, including eight children. “TB,” Campbell wrote, “said they had to know that we would hurt them if they don’t yield up OBL.”

The cartoon figure of Campbell was already at work on concocting another threat in Iraq. This “yielded up”, according to the MIT Centre for International Studies, between 800,000 and 1.3 million deaths – a figure that exceeds the Fordham University estimate of deaths in the Rwandan genocide.

And yet, Peirce wrote, “the threads of emails [and] internal government communiqués reveal no dissent”. Interrogation that included torture was on “the express instructions . . . of government ministers”. On 10 January 2002, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw emailed his colleagues to agree that sending British citizens to Guantan­amo Bay was “the best way to meet our counterterrorism objective”. He rejected “the only alternative” of repatriation to the United Kingdom. On 6 February 2002, Home Secretary David Blunkett noted that he was in “no hurry to see any individuals returned to the UK [from Guantanamo]“. Three days later, the Foreign Office minister Ben Bradshaw wrote: “We need to do all that we can to avoid the detainees being repatriated to the UK.” Not one of the people to whom they referred had been charged with anything; most had been sold as bounty by Afghan warlords to the Americans.

Immersed in its misadventure and lies, listening only to their leader’s crooned “sincerity”, the Labour government consulted no one who spoke the truth. Peirce cites one of the most reliable sources, the Conflicts Forum, run by the former intelligence officer Alastair Crooke, who argues that, to “isolate and demonise [Islamic] groups that have support on the ground, the perception is reinforced that the west only understands the language of military strength”. In wilfully denying this truth, Blair, Campbell and their echoes planted the roots of the 7/7 attacks in London.

Today, another Afghanistan and Iraq beckon in Syria and Iran, perhaps even a world war. Once again, voices such as Crooke’s attempt to explain to a media salivating for “intervention” in Syria that the civil war in that country requires skilled and patient negotiation, not the provocations of the British SAS and the familiar bought-and-paid-for exiles who ride in Anglo-America’s Trojan horse.’
…

More here.

“It is simply despicable and downright outrageous that Khader Adnan only managed to get media attention after 50 days of hunger strikie,” Al-Saafin says. “The media goes crazy over its portrait of Palestinian resistance fighters or dissenters as bearded terrorists with a bomb strapped to their torsos. Khader Adnan has surpassed Gandhi’s hunger strike legacy. The world’s silent complicity is telling.”

Steven Friedman, director of The Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Johannesburg, says Adnan’s hunger strike is set to reframe the conflict in the Middle East as a fundamental human rights issue. “It is an important departure, an attempt in a dramatic and tragic movement to reframe Palestinian rights. The Palestinian issue is not widely understood as a human rights issue. It is the illegitimate exercise of power by one party over another,” Friedman says. More here.

Testing can provide useful information, showing students and teachers what is and is not being learned, and scores can be used to diagnose learning problems. But bad things happen when tests become too consequential for students, teachers, and schools, such as narrowing the curriculum only to what is tested or cheating or lowering standards to inflate scores. In response to the federal and state pressure to raise test scores, school districts across the nation have been reducing the time available for the arts, physical education, history, civics, and other nontested subjects. This will not improve education and is certain to damage its quality.

No nation in the world has eliminated poverty by firing teachers or by handing its public schools over to private managers; nor does research support either strategy.2 But these inconvenient facts do not reduce the reformers’ zeal. The new breed of school reformers consists mainly of Wall Street hedge fund managers, foundation officials, corporate executives, entrepreneurs, and policymakers, but few experienced educators. The reformers’ detachment from the realities of schooling and their indifference to research allow them to ignore the important influence of families and poverty. The schools can achieve miracles, the reformers assert, by relying on competition, deregulation, and management by data—strategies similar to the ones that helped produce the economic crash of 2008. In view of the reformers’ penchant for these strategies, educators tend to call them “corporate reformers,” to distinguish them from those who understand the complexities of school improvement.
…

In the 1980s, envious Americans attributed the Japanese economic success to its school system. Now the most favored nation is Finland, and for four good reasons.

First, Finland has one of the highest-performing school systems in the world, as measured by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which assesses reading, mathematical literacy, and scientific literacy of fifteen-year-old students in all thirty-four nations of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), including the United States. Unlike our domestic tests, there are no consequences attached to the tests administered by the PISA. No individual or school learns its score. No one is rewarded or punished because of these tests. No one can prepare for them, nor is there any incentive to cheat.

Second, from an American perspective, Finland is an alternative universe. It rejects all of the “reforms” currently popular in the United States, such as testing, charter schools, vouchers, merit pay, competition, and evaluating teachers in relation to the test scores of their students.

Third, among the OECD nations, Finnish schools have the least variation in quality, meaning that they come closest to achieving equality of educational opportunity—an American ideal.

Fourth, Finland borrowed many of its most valued ideas from the United States, such as equality of educational opportunity, individualized instruction, portfolio assessment, and cooperative learning. Most of its borrowing derives from the work of the philosopher John Dewey.

In Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland?, Pasi Sahlberg explains how his nation’s schools became successful. A government official, researcher, and former mathematics and science teacher, Sahlberg attributes the improvement of Finnish schools to bold decisions made in the 1960s and 1970s. Finland’s story is important, he writes, because “it gives hope to those who are losing their faith in public education.”
…

More here.

She is the elected head of Harmara Panchayat (a local council), Rajasthan, India. She, a dalit (bottom of the caste structure), won by 735 votes in February 2010, – a very large margin in Panchayat elections. Her name is Naurti. When the elite dismiss the electoral process and talk of changing the pattern of democratic governance, I resent their arrogance, which dismisses the courage, opinions and views of hundreds like her. Corrupt as the system is, people like Naurti demonstrate that all hope is not lost. Women and men from rural India understand the working of electoral politics better than us. Their lack of privilege has forced them to see life as it is. They do not have the luxury of distancing themselves from that reality. Yet, knowing all, they choose to continue to have faith in electoral politics. The vote is steadily becoming a powerful tool to establish the rights of women like Naurti. Their ideal therefore is political representation with transparency and accountability. That is why, despite frustrations, they have not talked of trashing parliamentary democracy. More here.

How crucial Balochistan is to Washington can be assessed by the study “Baloch Nationalism and the Politics of Energy Resources: the Changing Context of Separatism in Pakistan” by Robert Wirsing of the US Army think-tank Strategic Studies Institute. Predictably, it all revolves around Pipelineistan.

China – which built Gwadar and needs gas from Iran – must be sidelined by all means necessary. The added paranoid Pentagon component is that China could turn Gwadar into a naval base and thus “threaten” the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean.

The only acceptable scenario for the Pentagon would be for the US to take over Gwadar. Once again, that would be a prime confluence of Pipelineistan and the US empire of bases.

Not only in terms of blocking the IPI pipeline and using Gwadar for TAPI, control of Gwadar would open the mouth-watering opportunity of a long land route across Balochistan into Helmand, Nimruz, Kandahar or, better yet, all of these three provinces in southwest Afghanistan. From a Pentagon/NATO perspective, after the “loss” of the Khyber Pass, that would be the ideal supply route for Western troops in the perennial, now rebranded, GWOT (“global war on terror”).
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More here.

In 2001 I travelled to Bangladesh as part of my plan to educate myself on South Asia so that I could teach it better. Once in Dhaka, I decided to visit Dhaka University in memory of my father but instead I ended up in a place called ‘Camp Geneva’ where the “stranded, stateless Biharis” live. It was here that I first encountered a horrific and troublesome story told by two middle-aged women. They were young in 1971 but witnesses to the brutal murder of their families by local freedom fighters. The son of one of these women told me, “My parents will go to their graves without anyone knowing their story. Why must we suffer for the crimes of another generation?” This stunned me and made me aware of the negative power of history on people’s lives. (Yasmin Saikia)
…

More here.

George Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda (1876) – The unusual thing about the book is that its main subject is Zionism, although the novel’s principal themes are recognizable to anyone who has read Eliiot’s earlier fiction. Seen in the context of Eliot’s general interest in idealism and spiritual yearning, Zionism for her was one in a series of worldly projects for the nineteenth-century mind still committed to hopes for a secular religious community.

…Zionism is to be a dramatic lesson for mankind. But what ought to catch the reader’s attention about the way Mordecai illustrates his thesis is his depiction of the land:

“[The Jews] have wealth enough to redeem the soil from debauched and paupered conquerors; they have the skill of the statesman to devise, the tongue of the operator to persuade. And is there no prophet or poet among us to make the ears of Christian Europe tingle with shame at the hideous obloquy of Christian strife which the Turk gazes at [the reference here is to the long history of European disputes about the Holy Land] as at the fighting of beasts to which he has lent an arena? There is a store of wisdom among us to found a new Jewish polity, grand, simple, just like the old–a republic where there is equality of protection, an equality which shone like a star on the forehead of our ancient community, and gave it more than the brightness of Western freedom amid the despotisms of the East. Then our race shall have an organic centre, a heart and brain to watch and guide and execute; the outraged Jew shall have a defence in the court of nations, as the outraged Englishman or American. And the world will gain as Israel gains. For there will be a community in the van of the East which carries the culture and the sympathies of every great nation in its bosom; there will be a land set for a halting-place of enmities, a neutral ground for the East as Belgium is for the West. Difficulties? I know there are difficulties. But let the spirit of sublime achievement move in the great among our people, and the work will begin.”

The land itself is characterized in two separate ways. On the one hand, it is associated with debauched and paupered conquerors, an arena lent by the Turk to fighting beasts, a part of the despotic East; on the other, with “the brightness of Western freedom,” with nations like England and America, with the idea of neutrality (Belgium). In short, with a degraded and unworthy East and a noble, enlightened West. The bridge between those warring representatives of East and West will be Zionism.

Interestingly, Eliot cannot sustain her admiration of Zionism except by seeing it as a method for transforming the East into the West. This is not to say that she does not have sympathy for Zionism and for the Jews themselves: she obviously does. But there is a whole area of Jewish experience, lying somewhere between longing for a homeland (which everyone, including the Gentile, feels) and actually getting it, that she is dim about. Otherwise she is quite capable of seeing that Zionism can easily be accommodated to several varieties of Western (as opposed to Eastern) thought, principal among them the idea that the East is degraded, that it needs reconstruction according to enlightened Western notions about politics, that any reconstructed portion of the East can with small reservations become as “English as England” to its new inhabitants. Underlying all this, however, is the total absence of any thought about the actual inhabitants of the East, Palestine in particular. They are irrelevant both to the Zionists in Daniel Deronda and to the English characters. Brightness, freedom, and redemption-key matters for Eliot-are to be restricted to Europeans and the Jews, who are themselves European prototypes so far as colonizing the East is concerned. There is a remarkable failure when it comes to taking anything non-European into consideration although curiously all of Eliot’s descriptions of Jews stress their exotic, “Eastern” aspects. Humanity and sympathy, it seems, are not endowments of anything but an Occidental mentality; to look for them in the despotic East, much less find them, is to waste one’s time.

Two points need to be made immediately. One is that Eliot is no different from other European apostles of sympathy, humanity, and understanding for whom noble sentiments were either left behind in Europe, or made programmatically inapplicable outside Europe. There are the chastening examples of John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx (both of whom I have discussed in Orientalism), two thinkers known doctrinally to be opponents of injustice and oppression. Yet both of them seemed to have believed that such ideas as liberty, representative government, and individual happiness must not be applied in the Orient for reasons that today we would call racist. The fact is that nineteenth-century European culture was racist with a greater or lesser degree of virulence depending on the individual: The French writer Ernest Renan, for instance, was an outright anti-Semite; Eliot was indifferent to races who could not be assimilated to European ideas.

Here we come to the second point. Eliot’s account of Zionism in Daniel Deronda was intended as a sort of assenting Gentile response to prevalent Jewish-Zionist currents; the novel therefore serves as an indication of how much in Zionism was legitimated and indeed valorized by Gentile European thought. On one important issue there was complete agreement between the Gentile and Jewish versions of Zionism: their view of the Holy Land as essentially empty of inhabitants, not because there were no inhabitants–there were, and they were frequently described in numerous travel accounts, in novels like Benjamin Disrael’s Tancred, even in the various nineteenth-century Baedekers–but because their status as sovereign and human inhabitants was systematically denied. While it may be possible to differentiate between Jewish and Gentile Zionists on this point (they ignored the Arab inhabitants for different reasons), the Palestinian Arab was ignored nonetheless. That is what needs emphasis: the extent to which the roots of Jewish and Gentile Zionism are in the culture of high liberal-capitalism, and how the work of its vanguard liberals like George Eliot reinforced, perhaps also completed, that culture’s less attractive tendencies.

Cat in an Empty Apartment

Wis?awa Szymborska, translated from the Polish by Stanis?aw Bara?czak and Clare Cavanagh

Die—you can’t do that to a cat.
Since what can a cat do
in an empty apartment?
Climb the walls?
Rub up against the furniture?
Nothing seems different here
but nothing is the same.
Nothing’s been moved
but there’s more space.
And at nighttime no lamps are lit.

Footsteps on the staircase,
but they’re new ones.
The hand that puts fish on the saucer
has changed, too.

Something doesn’t start
at its usual time.
Something doesn’t happen
as it should.
Someone was always, always here,
then suddenly disappeared
and stubbornly stays disappeared.

Every closet’s been examined.
Every shelf has been explored.
Excavations under the carpet turned up nothing.
A commandment was even broken:
papers scattered everywhere.
What remains to be done.
Just sleep and wait.

Just wait till he turns up,
just let him show his face.
Will he ever get a lesson
on what not to do to a cat.
Sidle toward him
as if unwilling
and ever so slow
on visibly offended paws,
and no leaps or squeals at least to start.

A Mirror for the Twentieth Century

A coffin that wears the face of a child,
a book
written inside the guts of a crow,
a beast trudging forward, holding a flower,
a stone
breathing inside the lungs of a madman.
This is it.
This is the twentieth century.

…

A Prophecy

To the country dug into our lives like a grave,
to the country etherized, and killed,
a sun rises from our paralyzed history
into our millennial sleep.

A sun without a prayer
that kills the sand’s longevity, and the locusts
and time bursting out of the hills,
and time drying out on the hills
like fungus.

A sun that loves maiming and murder,
that rises from there, behind that bridge…

…

Adonis was born in Al Qassabin, Syria, in 1930. He is the author of more than twenty collections of poetry. These poems are from Selected Poems, which will be published later this year by Yale University Press.

Khaled Mattawa was born in Benghazi, Libya, and has translated many Arabic poets. His most recent collection of poems is Amorisco (Ausable Press). Tocqueville (New Issues Press) will be published later this year.

i got a bit verklempt while reading john siddique’s v moving and v poetic piece on partition. a big thank u to my friend nancy ghertner for shooting this video.

On Thursday, Feb. 9, at 7 p.m., Mara Ahmed will introduce the community to her new film at the Little Theater, 240 E. Ave. in Rochester. In addition to showing clips from the in-progress film (currently in post-production), there will also be a panel discussion focusing on the history of post-colonial India and Pakistan, and live music from Sunny Zaman.

Filmmaker and Pittsford resident Mara Ahmed has always been fascinated with the differences between people, but never in the divisive sense. Instead, through her filmmaking, she has been working actively to reconcile those differences and demonstrate how they ultimately make us one human race. Her first film, a documentary titled “The Muslims I Know,” is one example of her striving toward that goal. In that film, she chronicles the lives of Muslims living in the greater Rochester area, presenting them as everyday people first, Rochester residents second and everything else afterwards.

It is with that goal of reconciliation in mind that Mara Ahmed began producing her third film, an as-yet-untitled documentary about a particularly tumultuous time in the history of South Asia: the British post-colonial partition of the Indian subcontinent into the modern-day nations of Pakistan and India. Ahmed’s mother’s family, which originally hailed from India, is one of many sources of stories cited in the film, all of which center around the bitter divisions that arose as a result of the partition, in spite of the coexistence that preceded it.

Tell us more about your upcoming film? What is it about, and what can audiences expect?

This will be my third documentary film, and it is about stories of partition. The British, upon their departure from India, divided the nation into three parts: East and West Pakistan, and India, the basis being religious demographics. … It’s essentially the trauma of the Indian subcontinent. I wanted to make this film because my mother’s family immigrated from India during this tim,e and I grew up hearing their stories. When I encountered fellow filmmaker Surbhi Dewan at the Rochester Institute of Technology, whose family made the same journey in the opposite direction, we decided to collaborate on this film to preserve people’s personal stories.

Who is involved in the production of this film?

In addition to myself as director and Surbhi Dewan as co-producer, we’re also collaborating with animator Gayane Bagdasaryan, an RIT graduate who is currently working for the Alexandr Petrov Animation Studio in Russia. Her animation for this film is about re-creating the time before the partition, when the various peoples of the Indian subcontinent were able to coexist peacefully. In addition, for post-production, we’ll work with Dave Sluberski of West Rush Productions, based in Rush, and Chuck Munier of NXT Media in Fairport. We’re also working with Sunny Zaman, a musician from Pittsford, who will contribute original music to the film.

What do you feel this film can teach the greater Rochester community at large?

This film has lessons that everyone can and should learn regardless of background. What happened in India during that time could be applied to many conflict zones around the world: Iraq, Bosnia, Libya, anywhere. It’s also a lesson for all of America in light of the anti-Muslim sentiment that has arisen after 9/11. Cultural diversity is an asset, not a liability, and it’s important to learn about and respect those differences. It’s especially important to learn this in today’s modern world, with the advent of globalization and the intermixing it encourages.

What has it been like working with the greater Rochester community to produce your films?

It has been a really wonderful experience doing this kind of work in Rochester.The Rochester community has been very supportive, very helpful. When you’re working on films that teach people to see others as humans first, other people are naturally attracted to work on such projects. Also, Rochester, as an audience, has been a very responsive and welcoming community.

More here.

In this work, we see the history of the Middle East unfolding as a wide-ranging, passionate, sometimes discordant conversation. I was consistently struck by the interiority of the voices and how rarely, in these days when the “Middle East” is often the lead story in the news, we are given any sense of the intimate and varied intellectual and emotional life of its people. The anthologist’s job is about creating borders, be they historical, formal, chronological, etc. As an editor, Aslan makes a double music as he pushes against the notion of border and statehood imposed by the West while using the historical reality of partition and colonialism to bring forward the very specific ideas of exile and isolation that recur in almost all of the poems and stories in this book.
…

I truly do believe that art is the universal language. I’ve spent the last ten years trying to build bridges between the peoples and cultures of the West and of the Middle East, trying to educate Americans about Islam and about Middle Eastern cultures. Yet anti-Muslim sentiment is even higher today than it was after 9/11. So, it’s hard not to feel like a failure.

So with BoomGen Studios [a film production company] and with my new focus on art and literature, I’ve recognized that minds are changed, perceptions are re-framed, not through knowledge, not through information, but through relationships—through stories. And that’s where the arts come in. You need the arts—literature, music, film—as a universal language that allows people to see beyond the walls that separate us. To stop thinking of each other as different religions, or different cultures, or different ethnicities, or nationalities, and start thinking of each other as human beings. As people with the same aspirations, and the same dreams, the same conflicts and the same issues. It’s only through that recognition of same-ness that you really do change people’s minds.
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More here.

Keeping the definition of corruption deliberately vague, and speaking of it in mostly moral and sentimental terms, Hazare’s campaign acquired some support from the urban poor, even as he worked to put the democratic system at the mercy of a few self-appointed guardians of morality. Hazare never focused on the distress resulting from income inequality, which has doubled in the last two decades, or on the gross abuses of corporate as well as state power: the dispossession, for instance, of the rural poor by mining companies, or human rights abuses by Indian security forces in Muslim-majority Kashmir. There was more clarity to be had about the aims of Hazare’s movement from its affluent supporters, which included glamorous figures from Bollywood, the media, and India’s iconic companies. Many of them call for an end to the state’s subsidies for the poor and low-caste Indians. These “rising” Indians see social welfare programs as wasteful, and endangering the apparently smooth working of the free market, even though, as Amartya Sen recently observed, they “don’t question things such as subsidy on diesel for rich people… Whenever something is thought of to help poor, hungry people, some bring out the fiscal hat and say, ‘My God, this is irresponsible.’”
…

Few assumptions about India’s middle class, or even about the “free” Indian media, as carriers of democratic values have emerged unscathed from his movement. The social media networks that helped Hazare were far from being hard-wired for democracy. Citing an extensive survey that revealed urban youth in India to be profoundly right-wing, the Indian novelist and TV anchor Sagarika Ghose pointed out recently that Facebook and Twitter, crucial to the Tahrir Square uprising in Egypt, are “dominated” in India “by young people openly pouring scorn on ‘pseudo-secular liberals,’ minorities and the so-called ‘anti-nationals.’”
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More here.

The involvement of the US and the Soviet Union had put an end to any chance of Korean autonomy, but Soviet prestige was still high and many believed that the Russians would help liberate and reform the whole country. Few believed partition was permanent. Kim Il-sung, installed as leader of the People’s Committee by the Soviets, was barely known, but local Communists had no reason to doubt him.

Growing popular anger in the South and an overwhelming desire for reunification triggered the invasion of the South by the North in 1950. Lacking popular support, the Rhee government collapsed and had to be rescued by US troops. The Soviet Union boycotted a Security Council session at which they could have vetoed America’s war, conducted under the UN flag. The Chinese revolution had panicked Washington. It couldn’t be allowed to spread.

US troops and their allies (including the Japanese navy) pushed the North Korean army back. The Chinese revolution was less than a year old and its leaders saw the war in Korea as an attempt to reverse events in China. A Politburo meeting determined to save the Koreans. Chinese troops under the command of General Peng Dehuai crossed the Yalu River in droves. The Americans and their allies were driven back to the 38th parallel. General MacArthur declared that it might be necessary to nuke Chinese air bases; Truman sacked him. In 1953 a truce was signed at Panmunjom on the 38th parallel. Around a million soldiers and two million civilians had died (there are many different estimates). One of them was Mao’s oldest and favourite son.
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Twenty years later I was about to cross the Yalu River on a Chinese train. At Sinuiju, I was welcomed onto the sacred soil of the DPRK with a bunch of flowers. Standing in front of a life-size statue of Kim Il-sung, my host told me that he was a bit disturbed by the scale of the personality cult in China. In Pyongyang a Young Pioneer gave me another bouquet of flowers. I was shocked at what I saw as we drove through the city: we could have been in Eastern Europe after the Second World War. Then I remembered that what General Curtis LeMay had threatened to do to North Vietnam had already been done to North Korea: it had been bombed into the Stone Age. There were no protests in the West against the heavy bombing of Pyongyang at only 15 minutes’ notice: 697 tons of bombs were dropped on the city, 10,000 litres of napalm; 62,000 rounds were used for ‘strafing at low level’.

Three years earlier in Phnom Penh the Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett had told me that what I had seen in Vietnam was ‘nothing compared to what they did to Korea. I was there. There were only two buildings left standing in Pyongyang.’ It was alleged that the US had used germ warfare, and although the US dismissed these claims as ‘outrageous’, on 9 August 1970 the New York Times reported that chemical weapons had been considered after ‘American ground forces in Korea were overwhelmed by Chinese Communist human wave attacks near the Yalu River’. Pentagon policymakers wanted to ‘find a way to stop mass infantry attacks’, so ‘the army dug into captured Nazi chemical warfare documents describing sarin, a nerve gas so lethal that a few pounds could kill thousands of people in minutes if the deadly material were disbursed effectively.’ Was it used in Korea? Probably not, though germ warfare tests were conducted in US cities. In one test ‘harmless’ bacteria were introduced into the Pentagon’s air-conditioning system.
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More here.

Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto worked with the company [Blackwater] when she returned to Pakistan to campaign for the 2008 elections, according to the documents. In October 2007, when media reports emerged that Bhutto had hired “American security,” senior Blackwater official Robert Richer wrote to company executives, “We need to watch this carefully from a number of angles. If our name surfaces, the Pakistani press reaction will be very important. How that plays through the Muslim world will also need tracking.” Richer wrote that “we should be prepared to [sic] a communique from an affiliate of Al-Qaida if our name surfaces (BW). That will impact the security profile.” Clearly a word is missing in the e-mail or there is a typo that leaves unclear what Richer meant when he mentioned the Al Qaeda communiqué. Bhutto was assassinated two months later. Blackwater officials subsequently scheduled a meeting with her family representatives in Washington, in January 2008.
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More here.

TARIQ ALI: Bemusement. I mean, they are basically suffering because Obama, arrogantly, escalated the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan and thought he could get away with it. That has now blown up in his face. The candidate who people take quite seriously is Ron Paul, but simply because he says he’s in favor of withdrawing U.S. troops from all over the world and ending the imperial role. And that, of course, is very popular all over the world. And people are not aware of some of his other positions, but this one they concentrate on, because they say no other candidate is even talking about America as an empire. More here.

Second — There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you — of kindness and consideration and respect — not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had. More here.

Malcolm’s Islam was a symbolic and spiritual orientation to an Afro-Asiatic anti-colonial internationalism that struck a claim on politics outside the state’s monopoly of legitimate power. His transgressions, mental, criminal, and spiritual, are widely understood. But against Martin’s easy incorporation, we should remember that he, too, transgressed. It is true that the familiar and domestic language of Christianity of Martin made him acceptable to many Americans. However, couched in that language was the vernacular of a long tradition manifested in black liberation theology that signified on the master’s religion, developing a sometimes dormant, sometimes active opposition to white power. It is a lineage emerging from people like Richard Allen, who started the African Methodist Episcopalian Church in 1816 to create autonomy for black congregations. There are the likes of Henry McNeal Turner, an early “back to Africa” advocate and missionary who once said that “Hell is an improvement upon the United States where the Negro is concerned.” Turner’s own theology understood the symbolic power of the state’s gods:

“Every race of people who have attempted to describe their God by words, or by paintings, or by carvings, or any other form or figure, have conveyed the idea that the God who made them and shaped their destinies was symbolized in themselves, and why should not the Negro believe that he resembles God as much as other people?”
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More here.

Multi-media presentation centered on an upcoming documentary about the partition of India, followed by a discussion with director Mara Ahmed and guest panelists Dr Victoria Farmer (SUNY Geneseo), Dr Neeta Bhasin (Hobart and William Smith Colleges) and Dr Aitezaz Ahmed. More here.

Ultimately, what is most worrisome about the Obama administration’s strategic shift—which no doubt is dictated as much by domestic as foreign policy considerations, including the need to counter jingoistic appeals from GOP presidential candidates and to preserve high rates of military spending—is that it will trigger a similar realignment within Chinese policy circles, where military leaders are pushing for a more explicitly anti-American stance and a larger share of government funds. The most likely result, then, will be antagonistic moves on both sides, leading to greater suspicion, increased military spending, periodic naval incidents, a poisoned international atmosphere, economic disarray and, over time, a greater risk of war.
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More here.

The international land convoys & flotillas have all contributed to gradually ending the siege of Gaza & the isolation & delegitimisation of Apartheid Israel . After the Asian Convoy to Gaza, we Indians & Asians, reassessed our strategy in the aftermath of the Arab Spring & over a period of 10 months, in a series of consultative meetings with the Palestinians, the key Arab & international allies, it was decided that it was now time to counter the Judaisation of Jerusalem & stand in solidarity with the Palestinian masses.

It is out of that endeavour that was born the idea of the Global March to Jerusalem, scheduled for the 30th of March 2012 .

The Palestinians cannot & will never accept a Palestinian state without Jerusalem, which lies at the very heart of the historical & cultural consciousness & which Israel has unilaterally declared as its eternal capital, in violation of UN Resolutions & International Law.

Thus We now need to draw the international focus onto Jerusalem, which is the core issue & lies at the centre of the conflict.

The objective of the GMJ is to raise the global consciousness& awareness on the threat to Jerusalem, posed by the incessant Judaisation & the Settlement Blocks , as well as the monstrous Apartheid Wall , which have cut-off Jerusalem from the West Bank.

Our convoys will converge from across the three continents of Asia, Africa & Europe & will amass on the borders of Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon& Syria, with delegations that will join us from the rest of the continents & the majority of the nations of the world.

The Asian convoy will once again commence from New Delhi in early March & across a period of 20-25 days, we will traverse across Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Syria & Jordan. The African convoy will start from Morocco & travel to Egypt, whilst the European convoy will commence from London. The delegates from North & South America, Australia-Oceania will join the convoys, or fly directly to the bordering nations.

Thus in order to discuss & plan the Indian & the Asian convoy for the GMJ, we need to form & establish a GMJ-India National Committee that will undertake the responsibility to organize the convoys & the various related programmes in India & even seek to widen the participation in the international process.

We thus call upon all the leaders & representatives of the various social movements, across all the ideologies committed to the universal ideals of equality, social justice & democracy, to attend & participate in the meeting, so that we can create a vibrant & active Palestine solidarity movement in India, of which the GMJ is an integral part.

In Solidarity,

Feroze Mithiborwala & Sandeep Pandey

+91 9820897517 / +91 522 2347365

feroze.moses777@gmail.com / ashaashram@yahoo.com

National Alliance of People’s Movements – International Affairs Committee &

The Palestine Foundation (India)

“The US has embezzled us of money owed to the CSF; it has imprisoned innocent Pakistanis in Guantanamo Bay; its citizens have used violence against innocent Pakistanis in the US; it has murdered our innocent tribals in drone attacks; the list goes on. But before we are accused of depriving the US soldier of his basic human rights by the many US assets now come to live in Pakistan, and purely on humanitarian grounds, let us not stand in the way of the US soldier and his diaper!” the press release concluded. More here.

?What do you read when you sit down with a book? Novels? I ask, leading to an inadvertent and interesting aside – Musharraf, it turns out, is an Ariel Sharon fan. More here.

“As doctors, we know Mercury, Uranium and Bismuth can contribute to the development of congenital abnormalities, and we think it could be related to the use of prohibited weapons by the Americans during these battles,” Alani said. In July 2010, Busby released a study that showed a 12-fold increase in childhood cancer in Fallujah since the 2004 attacks. The report also showed the sex ratio had declined from normal to 86 boys to 100 girls, together with a spread of diseases indicative of genetic damage similar to but of far greater incidence than Hiroshima. More here.

After my piece on Jane Hammond’s Fallen ran in the Daily, my editors asked me if I thought that the memorial, or my piece about it, should mention the Iraqi civilians killed in the war. Though I find it nothing short of horrifying that probably more than 114,212 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the American invasion, my answer to that question is no. When considering a work of art, I believe the critic has a responsibility to accept the piece on its own terms. This means experiencing, judging, and thinking about the process and the product before me—figuring out what works about it, what doesn’t, and why. A good reviewer enters an artwork and crawls around inside it; a bad one stands outside and says, “I would have done it this way.” Unless I see what I consider a glaring omission—and in the case of Fallen, I don’t think there is one—it’s not my place to tell the artist what she should or shouldn’t include. More here.
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my letter to the editors:

‘When considering a work of art, I believe the critic has a responsibility to accept the piece on its own terms. This means experiencing, judging, and thinking about the process and the product before me—figuring out what works about it, what doesn’t, and why. A good reviewer enters an artwork and crawls around inside it; a bad one stands outside and says, “I would have done it this way.” Unless I see what I consider an glaring omission—and in the case of Fallen, I don’t think there is one—it’s not my place to tell the artist what she should or shouldn’t include.’

that’s such a cop-out. by those standards, all reviewers of art are bad unless they’re in love with the work they’re reviewing. steinhauer can explain why she doesn’t agree with the inclusion of iraqi casualties (which are more than the number she chooses to quote – always a sticky issue when the dead are “others” and their deaths our fault) but she doesn’t delve into why that is not a glaring omission – except by comparing the artwork to maya lin’s memorial and making the judgment: ‘For some of us, it’s easier to care about dead Iraqis than dead American soldiers. I understand this impulse.’
for v few of us actually. for the vast majority of us, it’s ok to “support our troops” and be “patriotic” rather than talk about the difficult subject of what exactly it is that the troops are doing overseas.

yes, any loss of life is regrettable, a tragedy, but u.s. soldiers get the option of signing up for military combat whereas invaded/occupied people don’t. war in the 21st century is very much about well-equipped, trained armies fighting, harassing and torturing civilians. memorials that don’t tell the whole story help perpetuate national myths forever.

joseph nechvatal said it best: “my deep feeling is that today art must indict, or at the very least, play the role of the jester who unmasks the unspeakable lies of the powerful. americans have been deceived and victimized by our government’s propaganda, and if art cannot rebuff and contest this grave situation by fueling the political will and imagination of resistance, I wonder why we need it at all.”

Alia Amirali is the general secretary of the Student Federation in the Punjab. She is a second-generation change agent in a society that’s stuck. Her project, she begins, is to “rebuild the left” in Pakistan. She is giving us just a hint of a program, and finally a sort of plea to her alienated family and friends: go out and meet a real Pakistani for a change. More here.

pictures below:

1) elvis is everywhere in las vegas.
2) the beautiful lake mead on the way to arizona.
3) the grand canyon, close to sunset.
4) ravens are much bigger and shinier than crows.
5) a view of the grand canyon from the old watchtower.
6) the havasupai people have lived on the southern rim of the canyon for centuries.
7) with my son.

It has been seven years since the end of the second siege of Fallujah – the US assault that left the city in ruins, killed thousands of civilians, and displaced hundreds of thousands more; the assault that poisoned a generation, plaguing the people who live there with cancers and their children with birth defects.

It has been seven years and the lies that justified the assault still perpetuate false beliefs about what we did.

The US veterans who fought there still do not understand who they fought against, or what they were fighting for.

I know, because I am one of those American veterans. In the eyes of many of the people I “served” with, the people of Fallujah remain dehumanised and their resistance fighters are still believed to be terrorists. But unlike most of my counterparts, I understand that I was the aggressor, and that the resistance fighters in Fallujah were defending their city. (Ross Caputi)
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More here

“I Got Kin” by Hafiz (translated by Daniel Ladinsky)

Plant
So that your own heart
Will grow.

Love
So God will think,
“Ahhhhhh,
I got kin in that body!
I should start inviting that soul over
For coffee and
Rolls.”

Sing
Because this is a food
Our starving world
Needs.

Laugh
Because that is the purest
Sound.
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“Fragrance” by Abdur Rehman Chughtai (1894-1975), etching on paper.
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this is what houria bouteldja, spokeswoman for the PIR (parti des indigènes de la république) likes to call the privilege of white solidarity. on being asked about feminism and if she had any advice for white women interested in solidarity, she explained:

“my advice is that they should not forget their own oppression and they should cease to be maternalistic, meaning that they should cease to consider women in the south as simple victims. women in the south, women from third world countries, know how to take care of themselves. white women have this privilege of solidarity – they think that there is a need to help women in southern countries because they assume that these women r more oppressed, more alienated. this is not completely false – women from southern countries need solidarity from all women across the globe. but i think that the demand from these women, from these people [in third world countries] is that women from the north, from the occident, fight against imperialism in their own societies. for palestinian women for example it is about asking people from western countries to fight against zionism, and against the pro-israeli policies of their govts. when palestine is liberated, palestinian women will take responsibility for their own future and decide what their emancipation will look like as they negotiate with their own society. personally, what i don’t like is the interference.”

so when i read about this u.k. based solidarity outfit the first thing that came to mind was, what about a non-profit called “women fighting imperial wars.” makes a lot of sense considering that one in three u.s. servicewomen get raped. in fact they are more likely to get raped by fellow soldiers than be killed by the enemy. this becomes even more terrifying when it is estimated that 90% of military rape cases go unreported.

if we must be religion-specific, then how about donating to “women under jewish occupation” or better still “women under christian drones”?

in today’s world when wars and occupations and their impact on women are documented with vivid, multi-media precision, available to all at the click of a mouse, it is truly astounding how the west can continue to live in la la land and pretend that it can fix the world by bombing it or bringing “stability” in the guise of multinational-friendly dictators, whilst donating to solidarity with the ones being bombed or repressed – at least the female half of that civilian population. as bouteldja illustrates so beautifully, western feminists need to focus on the oppression of white women first and then stand in solidarity with their sisters around the globe by resisting the violence committed by their societies on other countries and people – including women living under muslim laws.
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Occupy the Holidays, Katha Pollitt, January 2, 2012 edition of The Nation

Houria Bouteldja Interview

Rape shame of the US military, Ellie Mae O’Hagan, July 21, 2011, The Guardian

Covered up: More than 1/3 of American woman soldiers raped, Ronald West, October 26, 2010, Alternet.org
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?…there is something deeply disturbing in the fact that so many commentators were able to “look past” Hitchens’ support for the war in order to praise his prose style or his contrarian nature. This fact “tells us something about the culture he helped create and has left behind. It’s a culture that has developed far too easy a conscience about, and sleeps too soundly amid, the facts of war.” This is true in general, as one of the effects of the War on Terror: it has bequeathed us a population in the US that, while eventually manifesting opposition to the war in Iraq, has shown little sustained opposition to the ongoing war in Afghanistan, and little or no sense of shame or outrage over the death by drone bombing of large numbers of civilians in Pakistan, nor over the assassination of US citizens by the Obama administration in Yemen.
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The “wrongness” of the Iraq war, for most Americans, to this day still has little or nothing to do with its effects on Iraqis; it has much more to do with the “costs” to the US, whether in American lives or in economic terms—in other words, with American self-interest. As Younge points out, “the most important single factor shaping Americans’ opinions about any war is whether they think America will win.” In attempting to sway public opinion against the war by appealing to notions of self-interest, the anti-war movement as a whole lost a chance to undo this form of solipsistic thinking, which might have given way to a form of internationalism that would have understood the war to be wrong first and foremost for, and from the perspective of, the Iraqis were the objects of the US-led attack. Instead, we are left today with a context in which the withdrawal of US forces means, for most Americans, that the war is now over, and with it, any requirement to think further about Iraq—summed up by The Onion, with its usual bitter brilliance, through the satirical headline: “Fifty-four Iraqis Die in Not Our Problem Anymore.”
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One of the rallying cries of the Occupy movement has been a call for accountability, a call for bringing the criminals who make up the one percent to justice. So let this call for accountability extend to the crimes committed by the US government and its supporters against the people of Iraq through years of war and sanctions. And let this be part of the forging of a larger international solidarity on the part of the US left, the making of a popular movement that could both take up the fight to end US hegemony in the Middle East (need I remind readers that the military junta that is currently slaughtering protesters in Cairo is being armed in the most direct way by the US government, and that some of the same war criminals who were the architects of the attack on Iraq are now drumming up support for US intervention to protect “America’s interests” in Syria?) and, simultaneously, find creative ways to work in solidarity alongside and in support of popular movements throughout the region? The legacy of internationalism (including the legacy of Orwell) has for too long been held captive by the likes of Hitchens and his ilk; it’s time to put it back to work.
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More here.

A Space Exodus from larissa sansour on Vimeo.

One striking spatial and visual component of the SCAF’s handling of these episodes of urban crisis is the erection of walls. The concrete wall erected at the Israeli Embassy on the eve of its attack was reminiscent of the Egypt-Gaza barrier, the Israeli West Bank barrier, or the Green Zone wall in Baghdad.
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Secondly, no one has been held accountable for the loss of human life since the SCAF took control. In every incident described above, the authorities have completely evaded responsibility, despite claims that investigations would take place. Hundreds of documented deaths and thousands of injuries later, not a single investigation yielded any results.
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The third tool of occupation is the unprecedented use of the human body as a political battleground. From virginity tests and sexual molestation of both male and female activists, to beatings and mutilation, the rulers of Egypt during the “transitional period” are resorting to a cornerstone in colonial occupation. Bodily violence has been a consistent feature of colonialism from the German occupation of southwest Africa to the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse scandal. The purpose of inflicting pain is to ensure compliance and intimidation. Such violence took place extensively during Mubarak’s tenure. However, the recent shift has been the marked publicity of such actions where torture and physical violence occur in streets and public squares in the presence of cameras and eyewitnesses.
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More here.

What do you get when you take America’s overly-broad conspiracy and material support laws and mix them with efforts by federal prosecutors to criminalize unpopular speech? In the short run, you get easy jury verdicts against guys like Tarek Mehanna. In the long run, you get an attack on freedom of speech itself. And that’s a threat to all of us. More here.

I set out a year ago hoping to learn some of the accounts of these women. What I found was a whole other history from the one that I had read about in books and papers.

The project started as a kernel of an idea, sparked by photographs I saw in Drik Photo Agency’s 1971 archives: images of Bangladeshi women in beautifully draped white sarees, marching in perfect lines, rifles perched on their shoulders. Images led to questions – What was the role of women in this war? Why isn’t their history as readily known as other narratives in the mainstream? – that blossomed into an oral history and photography project – “A Woman’s War” – the images and words that you see now.
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More here.

Roden was born in Cairo. She has lived in London for more than fifty years, and she carries a British passport, holds respectably British left-wing views, owns a big house in Hampstead Garden Suburb, and has written ten cookbooks in the English language, including “A Book of Middle Eastern Food” and “The Book of Jewish Food,” and is finishing an eleventh, about the food of Spain. But if you ask where she’s from she says “Cairo” and if you ask her about the soup she says, “Melokhia, a soup no one but we Egyptians like”—which, she also says, is why she followed the smell to a stranger’s door that day, rang the bell, introduced herself to the Egyptians inside (they were not at all surprised), and was promptly invited in for lunch. More here.

I support BDS because it is a nonviolent means of pressuring governments. People, institutions and governments abroad can participate in BDS: sanctions by governments; divestment by governments and institutions, like pension funds or universities. To be effective, the boycott should apply across the board and include academic, cultural, and government institutions as well as corporations and private businesses. I do not believe that individual academics should be boycotted, but the universities definitely should be; they cooperate fully in the militaristic aims of Israel’s government.

My idea of boycott is not merely for economic reasons. Israelis will begin to feel that Israel is being delegitimized if enough artists and sports teams refuse to cross the picket line and perform in Israel so long as it refuses to agree to justice for Palestinians and peace and security for all. Cultural boycott, should it become widespread, will of course anger many Israelis, but perhaps it will also cause some of them to think and then to question.

I think that economic pressure as divestment, if it spreads widely enough, will potentially have impact on the government via pressure from the private business sector. Just recently a major Dutch pension fund, PFZW, decided to divest from 13 Israeli companies to the sum of about 97 billion Euros – a considerable amount of money.37 Should this kind of divestment spread widely, it will hit Israeli companies hard, but that gives me no pleasure. Members of my own family and many other families in Israel, including poor ones, will be hurt by it. But, since I believe that BDS is the most potent nonviolent means of pressuring governments, and since I hope it will be able to bring about change, I feel strongly that we must pursue it.
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More here.

Equally problematic, the law puts Congress’s stamp on a dubious—and untested—interpretation of military detention authority. The law provides that indefinite detention without charge may be imposed on anyone who has provided “substantial support” to groups that are “associated forces” of al-Qaeda; but it leaves undefined what constitutes “substantial support” and which groups might qualify as “associated forces.”
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Most disturbingly, the law still effectively prevents President Obama from closing Guantanamo. He can’t use any funds to build or modify a facility in the United States to house Guantanamo detainees—a necessary precondition to closing the prison. He cannot transfer any Guantanamo detainee to the United States, even to face criminal trial. And he cannot release any detainee to another country without meeting onerous certification requirements regarding that country’s security measures that, until now, have proven impossible to meet. The military has determined, after careful review of all the remaining detainees at Guantanamo, that more than half of them don’t need to be there. They have been cleared for release.
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More here.

This is where the surprise came for me. I had the read the volume of their correspondence, all 800 pages of it, and found myself impatient with Stieglitz’s voice, which I found pompous, self-indulgent, condescending, and repetitious. But Patti Smith found an unexpected lyricism in Stieglitz’s declamatory repetitions, not unlike the incantatory and intimate lyrics of her own songs. She was also able to convey, with the tilt of her head and the tone of her voice, what it might have been like to receive these letters—to be, as she expressed it in Just Kids, the photograph. More here.

Accusations of being in cahoots with the military establishment have been levelled against him, but his policy positions on many issues belie those accusations. His long-standing opposition to military operations in the tribal areas, his conciliatory approach to quelling the Balochistan insurgency and above all his proposed guarantee of preventing any militants from slipping into Indian-occupied Kashmir put him diametrically opposed to perceived military policy on all these issues . What’s more, he has vowed to bring the army under civilian control and has said that he would resign if he failed to do so. He has gone as far as to say that if he comes to power he will be General Kayani’s boss.
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Cynicism can be fun. It furnishes many enjoyable “I-told-you-so” moments to revel and gloat in. But cynicism can not be an end in of itself. There comes a point when you have to look at things through the eyes of a wide-eyed freshman and risk being proven wrong. A positive and constructive attitude demands that we dig deep within ourselves and find the courage to overcome the inertia that has plagued us for ages. We need to take stock of realities as they stand and act not on the basis of what has been, but on the basis of what can be. We also need to latch on to any straws of hope that present themselves, and that’s where Imran Khan comes in.
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More here.

sign petition here.

For years his political ambitions have been overshadowed by his cricket career. Now, his popularity as a politician has suddenly increased massively and his message to get rid of corruption and to cut military links with the US is resonating with Pakistanis. Could Imran Khan become the next prime minister or even president of Pakistan? And how would he end corruption and violence in his country?

Imran Khan, the former cricketer and politician talks about his election campaign, fighting corruption and the future of Pakistan.

“Corruption is destroying the country. For the first time people feel, that their survival is at stake. People feel that the country is a failed state. If we don’t do something, the future of our children is bleak,” Khan says.
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Interview with David Frost here.

In the case of Libya, run by the fiercely independent and eccentric Qaddafi, much of the world’s press credulously rushed to print every rumor about regime excesses, many of them never verified and seemingly untrue.

The media quickly took to—and stayed with—the uprising in Egypt, one of the poorest countries in the region, where the West lost an ally but quickly found a new collaborator in a similarly-inclined military junta.

In the case of the mother of all petro-allies, Saudi Arabia, however, protests have been met with near silence by the media and no expressions of sympathy for the dissenters by Western governments.
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The salient point in Saudi Arabia, however, is not really ethnic discrimination, which exists throughout the world. It is the story of the avarice and brutality through which one extended family dominates a country.

In Libya, the uprising was dominated by a distinct tribal opposition, yet it was quickly characterized as representing broad national sentiment, with a kind of nobility and inevitability. Not so (up to now) with reporting on the Saudi protests. In truth, dissatisfaction with the Saudi royal family is hardly limited to the Shiites, and the levels of anger are probably as great and perhaps greater than that felt by the average Libyan toward Qaddafi.

Those wanting a closer look at what is going on in Saudi Arabia can go to the site Liveleak, where there’s highly disturbing video accompanied by this text: “Qatif—Firing live bullets at the demonstrators November 21, 2011: Video shows the brutal style Saudi security forces in dealing with the demonstrators by firing live bullets.” Another source is a blog called Angry Arab News Service, which features video in which a large and vocal group in Qatif are apparently chanting “Death to the House of Saud.”
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More here.

Richard Ross decided to use his award-winning photography skills and decades of access-negotiating experience to visit and document America’s juvenile detention facilities. Now, by giving his images away for free, he’s passing on his good fortune and helping decision-makers build better policy.

Thanks to a years sabbatical from the University of California and the award of a Guggenheim fellowship, Ross was freed of time and money pressures and over a five-year period, visit more than 350 facilities in 30+ states and interviewed approximately 1,000 children. He hopes Juvenile-In-Justice will change the national debate.

Ross has partnered with the Anne E. Casey Foundation, but it’s not an exclusive relationship; he is open and willing to share his archive with any group working to improve transparency in the system and improve the confinement conditions for our nations incarcerated youth. More here.
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India’s hidden wars of counterinsurgency, are coeval and coterminous with the sixty-four years of Indian independence and cannot be dismissed as temporary lapses from democratic rule. They represent a consistent policy for dealing with the religious and ethnic minorities who inhabit the northeast borderlands. That these policies have rarely been challenged—despite the existence in India of a free press, an independent judiciary and thriving civil society institutions—speaks of a consensus in Indian society that cuts across political lines. Indian acquiescence in the maintenance of authoritarian rule in the border regions overlooks the very real danger that the principle of absolute power will not remain confined there, but has in fact already moved to the Indian heartland, as a method for dealing with tribal and agricultural populations who stand in the way of “economic development.”

The full story of abuses under AFSPA will likely never be told; those remembered by the Manipuris, the Nagas, the Kashmiris and others are unknown. A recent booklet put together by the Campaign for Peace and Democracy (Manipur) on the Manipuri experience under AFSPA brings together a remarkable collection of documents: debates in the Indian Parliament on AFSPA with nearly unanimous support for unchecked military power; letters from the first Home Minister of independent India, Sardar Patel, to Nehru which record Patel’s view of the inhabitants of northeastern states as untrustworthy on account of “Mongoloid” sympathies; the destruction of villages and crops by the Indian army, torture, forced labor, exile, rape and the haunting letter written to her boyfriend by Chanu Rose, a young woman who committed suicide after she was gang-raped by Indian army officers in 1974. Together they evoke the continuous struggle by the people of Manipur for a life of peace and dignity. It shows how military violence, intended to terrorize a population into submission, has achieved the opposite. In this compendium, memory and lived experience merge to produce a resolve to end state terror and the political conditions that support it.

Indifference and silence, within and outside India, have been the strongest weapons supporting these policies. After generations of silence, the stories of abuse and violence in Kashmir and Manipur are finally being told. They have struggled to gain attention in India where the typical reaction is denial, boredom, self-pity and justification. Abroad the international community remains entranced by what anthropologist Cynthia Mahmood has called “an Alice in Wonderland” image of the country’s mystic pacifism. In much political commentary on South Asia, Pakistan is derided and dismissed as a failed state. It remains to be recognized that the success of the Indian state in controlling border regions through military force and in covering the traces of its violence makes it a danger to those it claims as its citizens and to regional peace and stability.
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More here.

Here is a truly frightening state. The Israeli military pilot climbs the skies over any Palestinian city and flies his intimidating F-16 or Apache with as much peace of mind as if he were piloting a Swissair or an Air France plane, and releases his cluster, fragmentation, and phosphorus bombs and aims his ‘smart’ rockets at any target he wishes. The city is fair game, an easy target spread out beneath him. The Palestinians do not have anti-aircraft weapons. The pilot has become a deadly sky and we a murdered earth. The pilot returns safe to his wife or girlfriend in Tel Aviv and talks to her of his ‘victory’ over the Palestinians! Despite this, Israel behaves like a state that is truly terrified and fills the world with cries that its existence is threatened. Could Orwell have imagined a more flagrant abuse of language than this?
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The crossing point is the place where everyone is afraid for everyone else, a place of ambiguities that wear down the nerves. Here decisions are made that no one explains to you and procedures whose nature and extent you do not know are applied to you by human beings against whose authority there is no appeal. Here crouches a well-muscled, sharp-eyed wolf, a wolf that may leap at you with open jaws or pass you by to savage your neighbor in the line, when you barely have time to rejoice in your own escape before grieving that he has pounced on another. And you can’t be sure he won’t pounce on you until you’re safely out of the place.

The crossing point nullifies the fatherhood of fathers, the motherhood of mothers, the friendship of friends, and the love of lovers. Here it is difficult to practice tenderness. Here the possibility of solidarity and rescue are negated. Here I can neither help my son nor protect him as a father.

Dictatorship, like the Occupation, nullifies fatherhood, motherhood, friendship, and love. I ask myself how many times do I have to feel powerless to protect the ones I love.
…

One of the Occupation’s crimes is to compel people to wait. To wait at crossing points, borders, and checkpoints. To wait while permissions and permits are issued. To wait for the hours of opening and closing and of the curfew and its lifting. To wait for the hellish interrogation to end. To wait for the prison sentence to end. To wait for the electricity to come back on and for the water to come back on. To wait for all the dates and extensions to dates set for negotiation by the mysterious power that holds the Authority in its grip through the permanent concealing of its intentions. In addition and before all, to be forced to spend their lives waiting, year after year and generation after generation, for the Occupation itself to disappear.
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More here.

Thanks, families of dead Iraqis, for your sacrifice.

Thanks, maimed Iraqis, for your sacrifice.

Thanks for your sacrifice, families of the maimed.

Thanks, babies born with two-heads, for your sacrifice.

Thanks, families of the genetically mutated, for your sacrifice.

Thanks for your sacrifice, all the displaced.

Thanks for your sacrifice, Iraq. Perhaps, if you’d had serious armaments, five or six nukes instead of frogs, snails, puppy-dogs’ tails, nails, shrapnel, and something to make them BOOM, we wouldn’t have used your landscape, airspace, and people for our WMD testing. Kudos, though, to you, because during nine years, you mounted a valiant an impressive fight against the U.S. military/industrial/security complex.

Sorry for your loss.
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More here.

Sami Rasouli: But to see what we’ve gotten from this war, after the violence went down dramatically and the dust of war has been settled, now we see the damage clearly everywhere in Iraq, where the electricity high—still the basic public services is almost not there, in terms of the electricity, never has been advanced by the two terms of the Iraqi government or even with the—no intervention by the U.S. efforts to improve these needed public services for an average Iraqi. The healthcare system has been really destroyed. As you mentioned, the infrastructure is a total catastrophe that began not only since 2003, and actually, it’s more than 20 years since 1991.

You know, we should not forget the effect of the sanction before the invasion. The Iraqi people have suffered a lot, and many of them have died. And now, death is not stoppable, because of many unknown diseases that’s caused by poisons that the U.S. military has been—has used against major cities in Iraq. In 2001 and, as well, in 2003, tons—hundred tons of depleted uranium has been—have been thrown on the city of Fallujah, where women today cannot get pregnant due to the deformation of their newborn babies.
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More here.

First, the troop withdrawal is required by an agreement which George W. Bush negotiated and entered into with Iraq and which was ratified by the Iraqi Parliament prior to Obama’s inauguration.

Second, the Obama administration has been working for months to persuade, pressure and cajole Iraq to allow U.S. troops to remain in that country beyond the deadline. The reason they’re being withdrawn isn’t because Obama insisted on this, but because he tried — but failed — to get out of this obligation.

Third, there will still be a very substantial presence in that country, including what McClatchy called a “small army” under the control of the State Department. They will remain indefinitely, and that includes a large number of private contractors.
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More here.

in my view most conflicts in the world are about other things – things like land, resources and power. but unfortunately such conflicts are often cloaked in the language of religion. it’s the “us” vs “them” syndrome, the clash of civilizations narrative. the trick is to dehumanize the other in order to strip them of rights we take for granted for ourselves. without such dehumanization, the cruelty that human beings perpetrate on one another would be impossible.

and this is where interfaith dialogue comes in. instead of being used as an excuse to “otherize” vast sections of humanity, religion can be used most effectively to humanize, to affirm those who have been reduced to being two-dimensional, cardboard stereotypes. religion is invested with both spiritual meaning and moral authority and it is therefore brilliantly poised to counter inequality-based rhetoric and violence.

interfaith dialogue provides us a safe space to interact with and get to know the other. that in and of itself is an invaluable service to the community.
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1) daan braveman, president of nazareth college
2) brian and jean hickey to whom the center is now dedicated
3) dr shafiq, the heart and soul of the center
4) my speech…
…

It’s impossible to find adequate words to describe Martina Davis-Correia. Indomitable. Courageous. Warrior. Hero. Words don’t do justice to force of nature that was (that is) Martina.

I first saw Martina on Democracy Now! in July 2007, just after her brother Troy Davis had survived his first execution date, coming within 23 hours of death by lethal injection by the state of Georgia, despite a strong case of innocence. She spoke about her twin struggle for her brother’s life, and for her own life. Martina had been diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer on March 29, 2001. At that time, she was given six months to live.

On March 28, 2011, Martina woke up with the knowledge that she had, on that very day, survived 10 years, rather than the predicted six months. Her joy was short-lived. Later that day, she received a call from Troy’s lawyers. The US Supreme Court had denied Troy’s final appeal, paving the way for his execution.

Martina’s fight for her own life and for Troy’s life were always intertwined. Martina and Troy had always been, as their mother Virginia said, two peas in a pod. “Twin struggles,” Martina told me once. “Twin souls.”

When the state of Georgia set Troy’s execution date, for September 21, Martina all but busted out of the hospital in order to be there, with and for Troy, in his final days. She was physically weak, she was wheelchair-bound, but her spirit was larger than life. At a press conference across the street from the prison, just hours before the scheduled time of execution, Martina steadied herself by putting her hand on her son De’Jaun’s shoulder. “I am here to tell you that I’m going to stand for my brother today,” she said, rising from her wheelchair. “I am Troy Davis. You are Troy Davis. We are Troy Davis.”

There were three excruciating hours that night in the prison yard, waiting for the Supreme Court to make a decision on whether or not the execution would be stayed. At approximately 10:30pm, the answer came down: there would be no stay. The execution of Troy Davis would proceed, effective immediately. There was no way to know, in the minutes that followed, the exact timing of what was happening to Troy. We could only imagine–or try not to imagine–what stage in the process of the execution was occurring.

Just after 11pm, I was standing with Laura Moye, Amnesty International’s death penalty abolition campaign director. Martina was sitting in her wheelchair a few feet away. “Laura, come here, I need to tell you something,” she said in a voice so weak I had to strain to hear her. Laura and I exchanged a quick glance. Whatever Martina needed to tell her at that moment, it must be profound. Martina took the arm of a young woman standing next to her as Laura approached. “I want you to meet this woman. She drove all the way from San Francisco by herself to be here tonight. I want you to get her hooked up with the activists in California, make sure she’s a part of the movement.”

As Laura and the young woman exchanged contact information, photojournalist Scott Langley snapped a picture. The photo was taken at 11:08pm.

11:08pm, we later learned, was the exact moment that Troy succumbed to lethal injection.

What was Martina Davis-Correia doing at the exact moment Troy was killed? She was enlisting another recruit to bring down the system that killed her brother. She was bringing one more soldier to the fight for justice.

That was the essence of Martina. That was the spirit of Martina. There are hundreds of us, if not thousands, who have been touched by Martina, changed by Martina. And Martina’s essence and spirit will be in all parts of our struggle for a more just world.

We will never forget all that you taught us, Martina, and all that you meant to us.
And we will never stop fighting for all that you fought for until your very last breath, and beyond.

In solidarity and with great sorrow,
Jen Marlowe

…to even get to the tar sands, they have to remove boreal forest, old-growth forest. And they call it overburden. They just scrape it off and get rid of that, and then they dig down and move so many tons of earth. And then they squeeze out the last little 10 percent of oil that’s actually in the sand. And then they have to use chemicals to make it liquid enough to be able to put it through the pipelines. It’s much more toxic than any other kind of sweet crude oil. So it’s even worse. And it is about four barrels of water to every one barrel of oil. It’s immensely toxic. Not only that, it doesn’t make any sense. They’re actually using coal-fired power plants to get out the tar sands oil. They’re using natural gas to get out the tar sands oil. And now they’re talking about nuclear energy, building nuclear plants, to be able to get out more of the tar sands oil.
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More here.

Given the extensive violence and aggression the U.S. has perpetrated, and continues to perpetrate, on numerous countries in that region, one might think that not even our political culture could sustain the propagandistic myth that it is Iran that is the aggressor state and the U.S. that is its peace-loving victim. But, of course, one who thought that would be completely wrong. Not only is it a widespread belief, but it’s virtually mandated orthodoxy. But none of that should be at all surprising or confusing, given that 66 years ago, George Orwell — in his 1945 Notes on Nationalism — explained exactly the warped form of thinking that creates this mindset:

All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side… The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

I’ve cited that passage before, but it really does explain so very much (and that form of thinking extends beyond nationalism to all tribal loyalties). It’s how a country that has repeatedly invaded, occupied, bombed, and killed civilians in numerous other nations over the last decade can look at a country that has done little or none of that (but has been practically surrounded by all that aggression) and be convinced: they are the Evil aggressors and must be stopped at all costs.
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More here.

The mural is located at a public place, making it accessible to all people. It captures human intellectual advancement through the course of history by highlighting Greek philosophers, European luminaries of the Renaissance, Arab scholars, and twentieth century stalwarts.

This section of the mural pays tribute to Muslim artists and scholars. Shown here are Al-Beruni, Al-Khawarizmi, Omar Khayyam, Ibne Rushd, Sadequain, Ibne Zakaria, Rumi, Al-Idrisi, Hafiz, and Ibne Khaldun.

Visual Diary in Time Waste Palace-XLVIII | Pen and Ink on paper | 7.5 by 7.5 inches | 1997
…

The stain of love
Is upon the world.
Yellow, yellow, yellow,
It eats into the leaves,
Smears with saffron
The horned branches that lean
Heavily
Against a smooth purple sky.

There is no light—
Only a honey-thick stain
That drips from leaf to leaf
And limb to limb
Spoiling the colours
Of the whole world.

I am alone.
The weight of love
Has buoyed me up
Till my head
Knocks against the sky.

See me!
My hair is dripping with nectar—
Starlings carry it
On their black wings.
See, at last
My arms and my hands
Are lying idle.

How can I tell
If I shall ever love you again
As I do now?

Ever since the US Navy swoop on OBL early in May, the risk in Lieven’s eyes was that the US would overplay its hand with demands on the thoroughly alienated Pakistani Army.

The American demand-too-far (Lieven is saying emphatically today) is that the Pakistani Army go to war on the Taliban home bases in the Pashtun tribal wilderness. That demand cannot, will not, be met:

(a) because the Taliban is a big part of the network that Pakistan counts on to protect and project its interest in Afghanistan when the US forces shrivel, then leave; and

(b) because the big majority of Pakistanis — army, elite and masses — see the Taliban in Afghanistan as a legitimate resistance force fighting foreign occupation, like the mujahedeen who fought the Soviets, or Communist guerillas who fought Nazis in Europe.

When Pakistan under Pres/Gen Musharraf undertook a half-way offensive against the Taliban in the border wilderness, “they set off an Islamist rebellion inside Pakistan which continues to this day… The Pakistanis do have a case: thanks to the U.S., they have a civil war inside Pakistan which has claimed far more Pakistani lives than Americans killed on 9.11. … We keep talking about wanting to support democracy. Well, the democratic majority in Pakistan wants us to go to hell.”

More here.

Wordsworth argued that poetry should be written in the natural language of common speech, rather than in the lofty and elaborate dictions that were then considered “poetic.” He argued that poetry should offer access to the emotions contained in memory, that the first principle of poetry should be pleasure – the chief duty of poetry is to provide pleasure through a rhythmic and beautiful expression of feeling—for all human sympathy, he claimed, is based on a subtle pleasure principle that is “the naked and native dignity of man.” More on Wordsworth’s poetry here.

A feminist curiosity can further be of use in examining and unpacking the power system enshrined in that political category termed ‘gender’, in which male/female symbolises an intrinsic relationship of inequality. Here, I want to move the discussion beyond personal relationships to the issue of masculinism – that is, to a way of doing/thinking/conceptualising/articulating infused with an outlook resulting from a hegemonic view of the world deriving from privileging traits associated with middle-class white masculinity, while those associated with femininity are correspondingly devalued.
…

?Masculinism has long been used to devalue men of the global south, portrayed as effeminate or hypermasculine, both negative terms used in comparison with the ideal white middle-class European male, as well as lower-class white men.
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Masculinism is further intrinsically involved in the language of militarism, with phrases that practically cry out for dissection, such as ‘collateral damage’, ‘friendly fire’ and ‘failed states’. Thus, the effects of the binary divisions discussed above go far beyond the meanings ascribed to male and female bodies and the resulting power inequalities, to the way gender ‘functions as a symbolic system: our ideas about gender permeate and shape our ideas about … politics, weapons, and warfare’.
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More here.

my brilliant friend judy to face jail time for protesting drones:

Judy Bello of Webster, was sentenced to stay in jail until 5 p.m. Sunday because Gideon said her actions — including bringing so-called “bloody shrouds” to the protest — were premeditated. She said it was no different from wearing a T-shirt.

Defendant Daniel Burns of Ithaca, said it was “outrageous” for Bello to be jailed because she was one of the weakest defendants. He practically dared Gideon to give him the same jail sentence, and the judge complied, citing his record of previous arrests.

“My children (age 9, 6 and 7 months) will be fine (because he is married and has a large extended family),” Burns said. “It’s the children of Iraq and Afghanistan that won’t be fine.”
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More here.

It was part of the movement’s overall effort to show the world a better, more humanitarian form of democracy, and to do so on an inhospitable apron of concrete in the middle of the nation’s premier financial district.
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The day after the snowstorm, I had coffee with Alec, a young medical doctor. At various points during our conversation, he quoted Virginia Woolf, the Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moraes, the futurist Filippo Marinetti, and the scientist John Holland, developer of “genetic algorithms.” Talking with him, as with Katie, I was reminded of the so-called Tercer Mundista priests I met in Mexico in the early 1970s, who broke with the Vatican and actively supported revolutionary movements in Central America. Both Alec and Katie possessed that calm sense of devotion to a higher calling—not a certainty of belief so much as a certainty of purpose. They both spoke of the movement in unabashedly spiritual terms. And while neither talked explicitly of religion, they seemed to have faith that they were progressing toward the kind of social system that would provide participants a measure of peace and “mental fulfillment.”
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More here.

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines—

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches—

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined—
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance—Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken

[1923]

?[Islamic art displayed at the Met] is a forest of many avenues that reach in many directions. We can go back to the centuries before Islam, through Persian tales of pre-Islamic rulers, among them Alexander the Great, in the illustrations of the Shahnama—Book of Kings—of Firdausi (940–1020) and in the courtly tales of Nizami (1141–1209). We can look out across Eurasia, through scenes set in Persian renderings of Chinese landscape painting. We can look over the western boundaries of the Islamic world, by following the life of the great poet Jal?l al-D?n R?m? of Konya (1207–1273), a mystic perched on the frontier with Byzantium. His Sufi music entranced neighboring Christians and his love of God found room for all faiths. In one miniature we meet the figure of Jesus, his head wreathed in the flames that marked him out as a prophet acclaimed by the Koran.
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More here.

More here.

One of the concerns of my work, both in fiction and outside of it, is to examine how the perpetrator of such random and ruthless violence objectifies the victim. This is germane to all conflicts between the powerful and the weak: The perpetrator has to ‘otherise’ the victim – how else does a member of the security forces come to bludgeon a nine-year-old to death, as we saw in the killing of Samir Rah in Srinagar last year?
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More here.

But I never lost my skepticism altogether thanks to fixtures of the identity-brand curse, from classic Orientalism 101 to auto-exoticization. As the “Iranian-American” ascended as an entity in the ’00s, the discourse churned out by seemingly intelligent American outlets often had the cultural cachet and anthropological depth of a slightly browner Not Without My Daughter. When was the last time you saw a book by an Iranian author that did not feature on its cover a Persian carpet, pomegranates, faux Middle Eastern arabesque fonts, or a woman in some sort of headscarf?
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Given these qualms and reservations, you might wonder: could Guernica have made a worse choice for the curator and editor of their first Iranian-American issue? But in putting this issue together, I found that the contrarian instinct in me was useful for soliciting a broad spectrum of writers and writings for a reader unfamiliar with the work of diasporic Iranians. Instead of showcasing commonalities in crude clumps and bulging brands, I wanted to present a collection that’s testament to the fact that ethnic origin is where oneness ends. In this way, the grouping is intentionally unsettling. It reaches way past my personal tastes and preferences—and hopefully the tastes and preferences of any one person—as any good anthology should.
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More here.

i was struck by so many things in this wonderful film: how our bodies and spirits r deeply connected to our ancestors, how language articulates our culture and identity and is our link to the past and future, and therefore, how the loss of one’s language can mean a loss of one’s narrative, one’s history.

it is ironic that translations of the bible into wampanoag (the purpose was to replace one culture/belief system with another) were instrumental in reviving the wampanoag language, which had been dead for over a century.

i was surprised by the large number of legal documents that were submitted by the wampanoag people, in their own language, to boston courts, asking for justice and a stop to the theft of their land. the wampanoag did not have horses or carriages and so their feet were literally rooted to the land. in wampanoag the expression for losing one’s land can only be translated in english as “falling away” such that there is no ground under one’s feet.

talking about land theft, the point was made that the white settlers developed an incredibly complex legal system which made it possible to proceed with the pilfering thru legal justification and window dressing. that’s not so different today. western laws can justify and obfuscate anything – torture, preemptive solitary confinement, profiling, entrapment, sanctions, war, occupation and sundry drone attacks. if it sounds marginally legal, it’s ok.
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more here.

an idiotic picture
except it was all I recognized
the wall lived for me in that picture
I clung to it as a fly

From his book “Pictures From Brueghel and Other Poems,” 1962.

More here.

more here.

more here.

The cause has been taken up by New Statesman writer Helen Lewis-Hasteley, who invited other women to share their experience. “I wanted to have several writers addressing the issue at the same time because these threats are frightening but they are also embarrassing,” she told the Observer. “I know many people will say that every commentator on the internet gets abuse, but what really came through to me when I was looking at this was the modus operandi of the attackers, which was to use the rape threat.”
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Linda Grant, who wrote a regular column for the Guardian in the late 1990s, has stopped writing online because of the unpleasant reaction. “What struck me forcibly about the new online world were the violence of three kinds of attitude: islamophobia, antisemitism, and misogyny. And it was the misogyny that surprised me the most. British national newspapers have done little, if anything, to protect their women writers from violent hate-speech.”
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More here.

Pls sign petition here.

: Oh, grow to know me. I am not happy. I will be open:
Now I am thinking of white sails against a sky like music,
like glad horns blowing, and birds tilting, and an arm about me.
There was one I loved, who wanted to live, sailing.

: Speak to me. Take my hand. What are you now?
When I was nine, I was fruitily sentimental,
fluid : and my widowed aunt played Chopin,
and I bent my head to the painted woodwork, and wept.
I want now to be close to you. I would
link the minutes of my days close, somehow, to your days.

: I am not happy. I will be open.
I have liked lamps in evening corners, and quiet poems.
There has been fear in my life. Sometimes I speculate
on what a tragedy his life was, really.

: Take my hand. Fist my mind in your hand. What are you now?
When I was fourteen, I had dreams of suicide,
I stood at a steep window, at sunset, hoping toward death :
if the light had not melted clouds and plains to beauty,
if light had not transformed that day, I would have leapt.
I am unhappy. I am lonely. Speak to me.

: I will be open. I think he never loved me:
he loved the bright beaches, the little lips of foam
that ride small waves, he loved the veer of gulls:
he said with a gay mouth : I love you. Grow to know me.

: What are you now? If we could touch one another,
if these our separate entities could come to grips,
clenched like a Chinese puzzle . . . yesterday
I stood in a crowded street that was live with people,
and no one spoke a word, and the morning shone.
Everyone silent, moving . . . Take my hand. Speak to me.

A group of Pakistanis met in Islamabad late last month to discuss the impact of U.S. drone strikes in their communities. One of the attendees was a 16-year-old boy named Tariq Aziz, who had volunteered to learn photography to begin documenting drone strikes near his home. Within 72 hours of the meeting, Aziz was killed in a U.S. drone strike. More here.

“…it was this imperialist hubris and unabashed Orientalism that originally motivated me to write the book, which stars Friedman as mascot for the degenerate mainstream media in the US. Friedman’s treatment of the Arab/Muslim world is the subject of the book’s second section; the first deals with his views on the need for US dominance in the world and the third deals with his special relationship with Israel.” More here.

more here.

she speaks fast and jumps from one world event to another. she is knowledgeable and witty but what i related to most was her passion. u can feel it in everything she says – in her excitement about people’s movements, in her commitment to truth and justice. it’s palpable. it’s contagious. i told her about my documentary work and about how, when i speak to students on college and university campuses, the first thing i urge them to do is to watch democracy now. she was v pleased and introduced me to her producers who r also pakistani-american. on the way out i met dear, like-minded friends and got to catch up with them. the air was brisk but not too chilly and the city of syracuse lit up the view from the campus. a lovely evening…

For a long time we have dreamed the end of capitalism. The twenty-first century is the time in which that dream will come true. We are waking up, and we are learning again, among one another, how to use our tired bodies. This is what it feels like to wake in a tent on the grass of Oscar Grant Plaza. Comrades in Baltimore write, “this occupation is inevitable, but we have to make it.” Nothing of that dialectic can be displaced by the police.

“The revolution” does not exist. It is not a horizon to be struggled toward, and no movement in the history of struggles has “failed.” The real movement is the movement of bodies, working on what exists. If the occupation is inevitable, it is because it is what is happening everywhere, now. If we have to make it, it is because our bodies are the material collective that it is. If it is repressed, its inevitability remains. The twenty-first century is the time of that inevitability, because the limit it surges against, repression, is also the dynamic of its movement: in its death throes, the openly repressive forces of capital are the manifestation of its own weakness, returning people to the destitution from which they revolt. “This occupation is inevitable, but we have to make it,” because in a time of mass debt, of mass foreclosures, of ruthless austerity, of sprawling slums, there will be no alternative to the material necessity of taking what we need and using it amongst ourselves.

None of this makes a difference this morning, while the enemy guards its ruins and our comrades are in jail. But if we knew this morning would come, we also know that the clocks have already stopped, that the real movement continues, and that time is on our side.

More here.

Occupy Wall Street received a surprise visit Monday from several leading Egyptian activists, including 26-year-old Asmaa Mahfouz. She is one of the founders of the April 6 Youth Movement, which is the group credited with helping to organize the January 25 protests that eventually toppled the regime of former president Hosni Mubarak. Prior to the protest in January, Mahfouz recorded a YouTube video urging people to fill Tahrir Square. Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman spoke to her at Occupy Wall Street. “Many of U.S. residents were in solidarity with us,” Mahfouz said. “I am here to be in solidarity and support the Wall Street Occupy protesters, to say to them, ’the power to the people,’ and to keep it on and on, and they will succeed in the end.” More here.

Friedman’s postulation that “green is the new red, white, and blue, oh yes it is, baby” is meanwhile only subsequently amended to reflect the geographical circumstances: “And it’s the new red and white in Turkey”. No relevant amendment is available, however, when it comes to Friedman’s declaration of political identification not as a Democrat or a Republican but rather as a believer in billionaire investor Warren Buffett’s theory that “everything I got in life was because I was born in this country, America, at this time, with these opportunities and these institutions”. Given that what Friedman got in life includes marrying into one of the 100 richest families in the US, owning a house valued in 2006 at $9.3m, and accruing $75,000 per speaking appearance, non-billionaires and foreign audiences might be excused for failure to sympathise completely with Friedman’s stated aim to pass on a similar climate of opportunity to his own children.
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As author and current congressional candidate Norman Solomon has pointed out:

“It’s reasonable to ask whether Friedman – perhaps the richest journalist in the United States – might be less zealously evangelical for ‘globalisation’ if he hadn’t been so wealthy for the last quarter of a century. Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that the corporate forces avidly promoting his analysis of economic options are reaping massive profits from the systems of trade and commerce that he champions”.

A simple example of the incestuous relationship fostered by Friedman’s incessant bleating in favour of free-market capitalism and neoliberalism is his receipt of the first annual £30,000 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award for The World Is Flat, itself written under the guidance of CEOs and other corporate officials.
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This feel-good sycophantism vis-a-vis the US war machine, which Friedman incidentally nominates for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 alongside Barack Obama, is compounded by Friedman’s signature portrayal of the armed forces as a bastion of multiethnic teamwork and a pioneer in the realm of racial and gender equality. The cheery cohesion of the military is of course cast into doubt by such phenomena as widespread rape among soldiers and a 2010 army report according to which approximately 18 veterans are committing suicide per day. Friedman’s ecstasy over the possibility of a “Pentagon-led green revolution” via the introduction of aviation biofuel made from pressed mustard seeds meanwhile fails to alter the fact that the US Defense Department presently holds the distinction of being the worst polluter on the planet.

As for Friedman’s explanation of the 2005 execution by US Marines of 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians in Haditha (“occupations that drag on inevitably lead to Hadithas”), this does not stop him from haughtily asserting two years later with regard to the “melting pot” that is the US military: “We don’t deserve such good people – neither do Iraqis if they continue to hate each other more than they love their own kids”.
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More here.

So congratulations to the “international community” – which as everyone knows is composed of Washington, a few washed-up NATO members, and the democratic Persian Gulf powerhouses of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This community, at least, loved the outcome. The European Union (EU) hailed “the end of an era of despotism” – when up to virtually Thursday they were caressing the helm of Gaddafi’s gowns; now they are falling over themselves in editorials about the 42-year reign of a “buffoon”.

Gaddafi would have been a most inconvenient guest of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, as he would have relished recalling all the hand-kissing, the warm embraces and the juicy deals the West was begging to clinch after he was promoted from “Mad Dog” (Ronald Reagan) to “our bastard”. He would also relish detailing all the shady backgrounds of those opportunists now posing as “revolutionaries” and “democrats”.

As for the concept of international law, it lies in a drain as filthy as the one Gaddafi was holed up in. Iraqi dictator Saddam at least got a fake trial in a kangaroo court before meeting the executioner. Osama bin Laden was simply snuffed out, assassination-style, after a territorial invasion of Pakistan. Gaddafi went one up, snuffed out with a mix of air war and assassination.
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More here.

Asia Society Museum presents an exhibition of spectacular Buddhist sculptures, architectural reliefs and works of gold and bronze from the Gandhara region of Pakistan, most never exhibited before in the United States. These artworks show the rich artistic heritage of Gandhara as a geographical and historic region and as a particular style of art. The Buddhist Heritage of Pakistan: Art of Gandhara reveals the complex cultural influences—from Scytho-Parthian to Greco-Roman traditions—that fed the extraordinary artistic production of this region from the first century B.C.E. through the fifth century C.E.

At its height, Gandhara—whose center was situated in present-day Peshawar in northwest Pakistan—encompassed Bamiyan in Afghanistan, Bactria, the Hindu Kush, and the Punjab region of northwest India. The majority of Gandharan art known today is Buddhist in origin. Buddhism reached Gandhara as early as the third century B.C.E., and began to flourish in the first century C.E. as Silk Road trade and cross-cultural connections from the Mediterranean to China fostered its spread.
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More here.

U.S. coal-fired power plants pump more than 48 tons of mercury into the air each year. Roughly a third of our emissions settle within our borders, poisoning lakes and waterways. The rest cycles through the atmosphere, with much of it eventually winding up in the world’s oceans.
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The symptoms of mercury toxicity are fairly well established. They include lack of balance and coordination, trouble concentrating, loss of fine motor skills, tremors, muscle weakness, memory problems, slurred speech, an awkward gait, hearing loss, hair loss, insomnia, tingling in the limbs, and loss of peripheral vision. Long-term exposure may also increase the risk of cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases and reduce the concentration and mobility of sperm.
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Nancy Lanphear is a behavioral developmental pediatrician who works at a clinic in Vancouver for children with disabilities like autism or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Several years ago, a mother came into her clinic with a four-and-a-half-year-old girl who had cerebral palsy as well as speech and motor delays. But what attracted Lanphear’s attention was that the child was drooling.

“I’m looking at this four-year-old and saying, ‘This is mercury,’” Lanphear recalls, hypersalivation being a classic sign of mercury poisoning. The child’s chart showed that a heavy metals screening at age two had found high mercury levels in both mother and child, as well as in the child’s grandfather. The mother recalled being encouraged by her physician to eat fish during her pregnancy; she ate tuna or other seafood two to four times a week, sure that she was helping her baby’s development.
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More here.

“I think [Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit] should have been released a long time ago. But there’s something missing from this whole story. There’s no pictures of Palestinian women, and no discussion, in fact, in the story of—what about the Palestinian prisoners being released? Where do they come from?” Chomsky says. “There’s a lot to say about that. So, for example, we don’t know—at least I don’t read it in the Times—whether the release includes the elected Palestinian officials who were kidnapped and imprisoned by Israel in 2007 when the United States, the European Union and Israel decided to dissolve the only freely elected legislature in the Arab world.”
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Chomsky also discusses the recent U.S. assassination of U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. “Almost all of the critics, of whom there weren’t many, criticized the action or qualified it because of the fact that Awlaki was an American citizen,” Chomksy says. “That is, he was a person, unlike suspects who are intentionally murdered or collateral damage, meaning we treat them kind of like the ants we step on when we walk down the street. They’re not American citizens, so they’re unpeople, and therefore they can be freely murdered.”

More here.

MUHAMMAD ABDUL REHMAN CHUGHTAI (1894-1975) gave the message of religious harmony through the medium of his paintings when, during the 1920s and 1930s, he painted more than 200 Hindu and Buddhist subjects. His masterpieces include Dance of Shiva, Saint Tulsi Das, Temptation of Buddha, etc. Chughtai’s rendition of An?rkali in 1922 is one of the most famous paintings of the courtesan. The painting was used as a cover for Syed Imtiaz Ali Taj’s play Anarkali, a landmark in Urdu drama writing, later adopted into films in India and Pakistan. His painting of Radha and Krishna was sold by Sotheby’s for a record price of $56,400.

Chughtai, who was born in Lahore, began with making woodblocks in Gumti Bazaar, trained in tiles at the Wazir Khan mosque and received formal education at the Mayo School of Art (now the National College of Art), Lahore. Then, he moved to Kolkata and worked there for several years. He began painting in the Bengal School style under the influence of Abandranath Tagore, a nephew of Rabindranath Tagore. Later, he studied etching at the School of Photo-engraving in London.

In the 1920s, he started using watercolours in the Bengal School style and specialised in watercolour wash, in which he integrated the traditional Mughal painting techniques with the Japanese wash method. He painted elegant, elongated stylised figures with luscious, half-closed oriental eyes having erotic overtones, in a linear iconography. This was supported by a decorative background based mostly on Saracenic architecture, created in mellow colours and composed in carefully balanced soothing harmonies in a soft wash. This resulted in an ethereal ambience. This peculiar mode of painting was best known as “Chughtai Style of Art”.
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His diverse subject matter included heroes and heroines from the Islamic history and heritage, kings and queens, episodes from Hindu mythology and Punjabi legends like Heer Ranjha, Sassi Punnu and Sohni Mahiwal. By painting these themes in the colonial milieu, Chughtai played a constructive role in establishing the historical and cultural identity of the Punjabi people.

More here.

Khutbah given by Imam Ayyub Abdul Baki of the Majlis Ashura’s Leadership Council’s Justice committee. The Imam asks Muslims present to wear white for the occassion. “We will be feeding protestors and the hungry with the collaborative efforts of invited Muslim charities.” For more info: eccmajlisshura@gmail.com.

The strength of Amin’s theory of eurocentrism lies in his ability to demonstrate that ‘Europe’ is a culturalist construction that masquerades as universal. That is, rather than presupposing that the binary of West/East––or Europe and its Other––existed in the pre-modern world, he argues that European civilization is an ideology that developed after 1492, the epoch of modern colonialism. Since the nation-states of the European continent were the colonial masters, eventually they began to conceive of themselves as a superior and united civilization. Eurocentric thought emerged when scholars in this continent began to mine the past and construct precedents for their supposedly superior civilization. This led to the invention of ‘an eternal West, unique since its moment of origin. This arbitrary and mythic construct had as its counterpart an equally artificial construction of the Other (the Orient), likewise constructed on mythic foundations’.
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Amin further bolsters his position by examining the historical development of European capitalism and the Enlightnment break from metaphysics. Although he remains a staunch advocate for modernity, he points out that capitalist modernity is flawed by European culturalism. Rather than seeing modernity (the understanding that humans rather than supernatural forces make history) as a world project, the eurocentric position holds that European culture is the universal grounds for modernity. In fact, eurocentrism is a cultural particularism that masquerades as universal. Once again, Amin sets himself against the postcolonial position by rejecting the idea that universal values are exclusionary and violent. Rather, he asserts that the culturalisms that masquerade as universal are exclusionary in that they promote difference. The solution is to pursue a universal project free from European particularism, a ‘modernity critical of modernity’.
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Therefore, the progressive response to eurocentrism should not be based on a flight back into cultural difference, where one embraces particular ethnic identities and metaphysical notions of the world, but the pursuit of a modern project premised on universal values freed from the eurocentric vision of the world. The strength of this argument rests on Amin’s historical exposition of how European capitalism developed against the backdrop of other non-European cultures that, at that period of time, formed different centres of human civilization. Thus, although the values of modernity would eventually emerge in a European context, intrinsically connected to the birth of capitalism, the seeds of these values were evident elsewhere. The eurocentric annexation of the world, however, created the culturalist myth that modernity was a product of some Platonic European essence.
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More here.

The core of Barlas’s argument lies in her discussion of texts pertaining to the two sexes/genders. She states that the Qur’an does not define men and women as two “binary oppositions,” men as the Subject and women as the Other, but as “two complete differences”. She illustrates this by examining the Creation story in the Qur’an. “The theme that women and men commenced from a single Self and constitute a pair is integral to Qur’anic epistemology”.

This is also evident in the discussion of the veil. Barlas notes that the Qur’an’s distinction of the gaze and the body pertains to both men and women. “Thus, many commentators of old, who took this Ayah to mean that the gaze was the messenger of fornication, sought to mitigate it not as the Qur’an does by counseling modesty for both men and women, but by segregating and veiling women in order to protect men’s sexual virtue…. The Qur’an however, rules out both male and female scopic activity. Moreover, its injunction to cast down one’s eyes establishes that people must, in fact, be free to look upon one another publicly”.

Barlas clearly lights a path in the Qur’an that allows Muslim women to break free of many patriarchal readings previously established. However, she acknowledges that precedent, established since the time of the Abbasids, is difficult if not impossible to change. Her hope is that her work will facilitate discussion among Muslims. “We cannot reinterpret Islam without rereading the Qur’an, and many Muslims do in fact recognize the urgency of such an exercise given its abuses at the hands of many Muslim clerics and states to oppress women”.

More here.

America has always had a critical thinking deficit, in that it has a long tradition of anti-intellectualism. This is particularly perverse, maddening and contradictory, since America’s Founders were the most intellectual group that ever founded any nation we know of, and the desire to foster free and critical thinking, both in government and in the society at large, was one of their notable goals, as a direct consequence of the Enlightenment heritage on which America’s Founders depended.
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Our imagination deficit is closely tied to our critical thinking deficit. Minds that are perpetually muddled in uncritically accepted ideas and psuedo-facts, incapable of grasping clear-cut truths are hardly prepared to grasp projected possibilities and judge them soundly. This was strikingly obvious in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, for example. Calls for critically examining the reasons behind the attacks were quickly demonised, with a leading role played by a centre-right organisation – the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) – that pretended to stand for academic excellence.
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The Democracy Deficit: A 2010 paper, “A World Upside Down? Deficit Fantasies in the Great Recession”, by political scientist Thomas Ferguson and economist Robert Johnson, identifies three oligopolies in particular – the military-industrial complex, the medical-industrial complex, and the financial sector. However, at a deeper level of analysis, Ferguson had earlier explained how organised economic special interests largely control American democracy, creating a constant condition of democracy deficit, regardless of outward appearances, and our constant pretension to be the foremost democracy in the world.
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More here.

Qawal Najmuddin Saifuddin & Brothers – Meri Naiya Laga Do Par from nofil naqvi on Vimeo.

“My whole issue was that only something with an ethnic label was going to be recognized as Pakistani. I thought: if this is the way it’s going to be I’m going to subvert the idea with what I want to say and do. So I showed them a miniature painting they wanted to see, and made it with the immediate visual culture of my city today. And that’s how a journey of documenting paradoxes and dealing with duality started in this formal and conceptual device.”

listen to his interview here.

Thousands of US servicemen – men who handled the herbicide and who operated in areas where it was deployed – were affected too, and they and their families eventually won compensation through the courts. But attempts to get similar US financial aid for the Vietnamese victims, or even much help with a clean up of polluted land, have been less successful.

With many areas of Vietnam still poisoned by the dioxin and the country’s hard pressed health and welfare services struggling to support those suffering, this film by Risto Vuorinen tells the remarkable story of the children of Agent Orange and a group of US veterans in Vietnam who are trying to atone for the mistakes of the past.
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More here.

Only now can I relate
the many dreams in which they’ve wandered, the many throngs
in which I’ve pulled them out from under wheels,
the many death-throes where they have collapsed into my arms.
Cut off – they would grow back crooked.
Absurdity forced them into masquerade.
Small matter that this could not hurt them outside me
if it hurt them inside me.
The gawking rabble of my dreams heard me calling “mamma”
to something that hopped squealing on a branch.
And they laughed because I had a father with a ribbon in his hair.
I would wake up in shame.

Well, at long last.
On a certain ordinary night,
between a humdrum Friday and Saturday,
they suddenly appeared exactly as I wished them.
Seen in a dream, they yet seemed freed from dreams,
obedient only to themselves and nothing else.
All possibilities vanished from the background of the image,
accidents lacked a finished form.
Only they shone with beauty, for they were like themselves.
They appeared to me a long, long time, and happily.

I woke up. I opened my eyes.
I touched the world as if it were a carved frame.

Hundreds continue to camp out in a park in Manhattan’s Financial District for the “Occupy Wall Street” protest. The encampment got a boost this week when one of New York City’s largest unions, the Transit Workers Union, announced its backing. In this report, Democracy Now! producer Mike Burke gets a tour of the private park, open to the public, that people have occupied, and and speaks with demonstrators, including a woman who was pepper sprayed by New York City Police Department Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna last Saturday. Special thanks to Hany Massoud. More here.

Some critics have expressed frustration at the protest’s lack of a clear and unified message. But the Princeton University professor emphasized that “you’re talking about raising political consciousness so it spills over all parts of the country, so people can begin to see what’s going on through a set of different lens, and then you begin to highlight what the more detailed demands would be. Because in the end we’re really talking about what Martin King would call a revolution: A transfer of power from oligarchs to everyday people of all colors. And that is a step by step process.” Dr. West also called on President Obama to apologize for calling on members of the Congressional Black Caucus to “stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying” when unemployment among African Americans has reached record highs and two of five Black children live in poverty. This video features Amy Goodman’s interview with Dr. West, along with his address to Occupy Wall Street protesters.
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More here.

“He Prayeth best, who loveth best; All things great and small; For the dear God who loveth us; He made and loveth all.” (Coleridge)

Less than a year ago, American academic Richard Shapiro was similarly deported upon arrival from the Indira Gandhi International airport. His crime, presumably, was an article on the human rights situation in Kashmir. Earlier this month, the journalist David Devadas was assaulted by the Jammu and Kashmir police.
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More here.

nyt article here.

my comments:

that’s natalie abbassi trying to make sense of her identity. such questions might be more pertinent for newer immigrants and certainly for people who have truly lived bi-culturally, as she has, especially when one of the cultures they r rooted in is perceived as the opposite of the other. iran is not just another country – it comes with a lot of stereotypical baggage in america. and i’m sure that the same is true of being an american in iran – altho perhaps to a lesser degree on account of american cultural hegemony. i find the formation of cross-cultural identities to be fascinating (perhaps because that’s something i think about a lot) and its artistic treatment is most interesting to me. i like what she has done. she has expressed her “duality” quite literally.

mixed identities have always existed, but they have never been immersed in such a global, complex, propagandized environment as today. the exploration of one’s identity is a way to come to terms with oneself especially if one part of ur identity is being articulated/mutilated for u on a daily basis. as far as those sharing in that exploration, i think that it can be an equally rich experience for them. it creates empathy, it widens one’s world. it’s a bit like learning a new language.

Opportunity? Achievement? The irony was almost outrageous. The hallway was in the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison and I was walking down it with the Davis family en route to visit death row inmate Troy Davis.

Though I had been corresponding with Troy for years via letters and phone, December 2009 was my first visit. I knew I would not have the opportunity to be sitting in the same room as Troy; contact visits had been taken away from death row inmates a few months earlier. Instead, I spoke to Troy through a black iron grate, alongside his mother, sisters and teen-aged nephew. At the end of every visit, the Davis family would form a prayer circle, holding hands, Troy leading a prayer thanking God for their blessings and praying for the strength to continue their quest for justice. Now that contact visits had been revoked, Troy could not hold hands with the rest of his family. Instead, he pressed his hands flat against the black iron grating. His family and I formed a semi-circle. Troy’s mother pressed her hand on the opposite side of the grate as Troy’s right palm, and his nephew did the same on the left. Everyone bowed their heads, closed their eyes and offered prayers. I couldn’t help but take a peek. Troy looked like a silhouette through the dense iron grill, his head bowed, his hands pressed against the grate, with his mother and nephew’s hands pressed just as firmly on the other side, finding a way, despite the steel and bars, to maintain their circle of prayer.

Georgia is preparing to kill Troy Davis at 7 p.m. tonight. He has refused his last meal, opting to fast and pray. If the state carries out his plans, he will be strapped to a gurney. Needles will be thrust into his arms, so that three different lethal injection drugs will flow through his veins. If there is no last-minute intervention, Troy will die.

Tonight’s expected execution of Troy Davis brings inconceivable pain and loss to his family and friends. But it should also bring deep self-probing to us as a country, forcing us to ask ourselves agonizing questions: How can our system of justice be comfortable executing a man despite such substantive doubts as to his guilt? How can our country possibly justify taking an unarmed, captive human being, and killing that human being? Who are we as a people if we, sanctioned by the state, intentionally and with premeditation wreck a family with grief?

I will be outside the prison as the hours and minutes tick towards 7:00pm, joining with hundreds of others, including Troy’s family, in prayerful protest. I will be thinking of the words that Troy asked my colleague, Wende Gozan-Brown of Amnesty International, to share when we visited him this morning:

“The struggle for justice doesn’t end with me. This struggle is for all the Troy Davis’s who came before me and all the ones who will come after me. I’m in good spirits and I’m prayerful and at peace. But I will not stop fighting until I’ve taken my last breath.”

As 7 pm approaches, I do not intend to picture Troy strapped onto a gurney. Instead, I will focus on the image which has been seared into my brain since December 2009:

Troy standing in silhouette, arms outstretched and palms pressed against the iron grating, his mother’s hand pressed against his on one side, his nephew’s on the other, the rest of the family holding hands in between, as he leads a circle of prayer, thanking God for the blessings they have received, and asking for the strength to continue the struggle for justice.

In solidarity,
Jen Marlowe

Initial Development Trailer: Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists from Open Letter Productions on Vimeo.

For many years I did solidarity work. In 1980 I returned to Beirut for a short period to work with Palestinian women who had established embroidery workshops in order to support themselves and lead as much of a productive life as possible.

The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 horrified me. American weapons were being used to maim and kill helpless Palestinian and Lebanese civilians and refugees. Israeli soldiers were preventing food, water, and much-needed medical supplies from entering West Beirut. The hurt and suffering of those in pain was unattended to; no dignity was even given to the dead.

I arrived in Beirut on September 2, 1982. The ashes were still smoldering. The invasion was over, the PLO fighters and administration had been evacuated, the Israeli forces had pulled back from the city.

I was assigned to a hospital, called “Gaza,” in Sabra camp. The Sabra and Shatila camps of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) lie side by side in West Beirut. They are two of the 12 camps established in Lebanon since 1948 by UNRWA to shelter Palestinians exiled from their homes because of the creation of Israel. Before the 1982 invasion about 90,000 people lived there, a fourth of them poor Lebanese. The houses were mainly one-storey concrete dwellings with corrugated iron roofs. Camp buildings and homes were tightly packed together, separated by numerous narrow alleyways.

The camp inhabitants lived and worked together. A welfare and educational system, municipal councils, and trade unions existed. Committees organized vocational training in such areas as embroidery and carpentry and operated kindergartens. By the time I arrived in Beirut, the camps’ population had shrunk to about 10,000.

The Israeli army had left behind the effects of the U.S. implements of war. Shrapnel, ammunition, rocket casings, and other such armaments, many of them “made in USA,” were everywhere. Because of them, the hospitals were filled with victims of chemical burns, with dehydrated babies, with recovering amputees. Supplies were limited, conditions poor. For example, because the electrical supply was irregular, we sometimes had to hold flashlights to finish an operation.

On September 14, the newly elected president of Lebanon, Bashir Gemayel of the Phalange Party, was assassinated. The next day Israeli war planes flew over West Beirut. Machine-gun fire increased as the day went on. On September 16, Israeli planes again flew over the camps; light artillery fire continued, but it was now accompanied by heavy artillery. Thousands of refugees sought security in and around the hospital. They were panic-stricken; they screamed, “Israel! Phalange!” and made a slashing motion across their throats. That evening, I watched from the tenth floor of the hospital as flares were shot into the air, lighting up neighborhoods of the camp. Sounds of machine-gun fire followed each illumination.

On the morning of the 17th, those who had sought refuge at the hospital disappeared and all the patients who could walk fled. By afternoon, all of the Palestinian and other Arab staff members were gone; their administrator had told them that the hospital was no longer safe for them.

The high explosives were coming so close that we had to move the remaining patients to the lower floors. Smoke poured in the windows, windows cracked, doors slammed, equipment reverberated. Everything was shaking. By evening, we heard only the sounds of machine-gun fire. Tending to the very ill was more difficult than usual; to some, the bombardment made the difference between life and death.

That evening a few severely wounded people managed to be brought to the hospital. Among them was a child of 12 who was suffering from shock, a bullet injury in his leg, and an open wound on his hand where a finger had once been; his name was Mounir. Treatment of his leg began immediately to prevent amputation. Later that evening, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was allowed to evacuate a small number of wounded children to a hospital outside of the camp area; Mounir was chosen.

Early the next morning, all the health care workers were told that the “Lebanese Army” was downstairs and that we must assemble at the hospital entrance. The armed militia we found below were in fact not the Lebanese Army but Phalangists. (These were the military wing of the Phalange Party, a nationalist Christian party founded in the 1930′s on the model of European fascist groups.) They allowed us to leave one medical student and one nurse behind in the Intensive Care Unit. They marched the rest of us down the main street of Sabra and Shatila, past dead bodies and hundreds of camp residents guarded by armed militiamen. One woman tried to pass her baby to one of the physicians, but the militiamen stopped her. Sporadic machine-gun fire could still be heard as we marched. Bulldozers, at least one marked with a Hebrew letter, were busy: homes that had stood at the edge of the camp were now rubble. As we walked along, our captors called us names — “dirty people,” “un-Christian” (because we were treating “terrorists who kill Christians”), “Communists,” “Socialists.”

The militiamen lined us up against a bullet-riddled wall just outside the camp. Rifles ready and aimed towards us, they paused, then filed back into the camp.

Other militiamen came and took us to a courtyard on the road to what had been a United Nations building. The courtyard was littered with Israeli products and newspapers. There they questioned us about why we had come and who had sent us. Afterwards, they marched us over to a building occupied by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). From its roof, Israeli soldiers with binoculars were looking down on both Sabra and Shatila. Here the Lebanese turned us over to the Israelis.

Israeli soldiers drove us into West Beirut and dropped us off near the American Embassy. I went in and reported to an embassy official that “something wrong was going on in those camps.” He said the man in charge was out: “Come back later.”

That afternoon, many of the health care workers began searching for our patients. We found that the ICRC had eventually been able to evacuate all of them to other medical facilities around Beirut.
The next day I returned to the American Embassy and gave an accounting of what I had seen.

Resistance is to be found not in one political issue but in a collective reclamation of dignity. This comes differently for each artist. The solo albums of Omar Offendum, Lowkey, KhaledM, and Arabian Knightz represent a range of identities and experiences and differ very much from each other: not just in the lyrical approaches of each artist, but in where and how each poet locates and articulates strength or pride. Offendum wraps himself in an Arabesque mystique, much of it informed by classic twentieth-century poets like Nizar Qabbani; Narcy tends towards the more ostentatiously confrontational:

“Word, I’m cocky/ the Iraqi Rocky/ Trying to shake the terror off me/ Truth I see it rarely, achi…” (from “Good Night!!!” on the self-titled album);

and Shadia Mansour, one of the most prominent female MCs in this genre, combines R&B and verse to terrific effect.
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?”Arabs and Muslims worldwide were forced to defend their stance of being. No longer were we allowed to exist without first discrediting the angst in our war-torn cities and nations, or even disassociating our thoughts from those who are less fortunate in their will to be ‘free.’”
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More here.

All three soldiers say they hope Americans will learn the right lessons from the WikiLeaks video. “We acknowledge our part in the deaths and injuries of your loved ones as we tell Americans what we were trained to do and what we carried out in the name of ‘god and country,’” write McCord and Stieber in their open letter. “The soldier in the video said that your husband shouldn’t have brought your children to battle, but we are acknowledging our responsibility for bringing the battle to your neighborhood, and to your family. We did unto you what we would not want done to us.”

“Our heavy hearts still hold hope that we can restore inside our country the acknowledgment of your humanity, that we were taught to deny.”
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More here.

more here.

In that same year Idris gave up his medical career to accept an administrative post in Egypt’s Ministry of Culture. He was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, in part, perhaps, because of his ability to describe surreal situations with a detached surgeon’s eye.

In his short story “The Aorta”, the main character is a petty thief who claims the government removed his aorta on the bizarre ground that the organ hosted a disease that threatened to infect all Egyptians. The crowd who captures him will have none of his absurd lie and strip him in a butcher’s shop to see for themselves. It is a cautionary tale of mob mentality: how people who seek to justify anger and revenge may mutilate their own humanity in the process.

EXCERPT FROM “THE AORTA”

There was no direct agreement, no words spoken, just an all-encompassing eagerness that aroused and engrossed us: we were excited, enjoying ourselves as though now quite certain we had discovered our goal… It was there in that sinner, still carrying with him the sin he had committed. He had to get his just deserts. We would gratify all the goodness in us by punishing him, by seeing justice done. And we would gratify all the evil in us by applying justice ourselves, with our own hands, by giving evil a completely free rein, by causing pain and hurt under the guise of proper retribution.

(Mikel Dunham)

Takin’ it to the Streets 2010! from sean fahey on Vimeo.

More here.

while the city of rochester flocked to see bill clinton at the u of r, some of us made a beeline to hear kathy kelly. as clinton’s govt imposed murderous sanctions on iraq, kathy kelly traveled to that country with food and medicine in violation of the sanctions. she and other activists were threatened with separate 12-year prison sentences and fines of one million dollars each. but they persevered. kathy now travels to afghanistan and pakistan and brings back first hand knowledge about the wars.
…

she is a light. was completely entranced by her emotive description of the wars in afghanistan and pakistan.
…

bought david smith-ferri’s book of poetry called “with children like ur own”. he accompanied kathy and read poigant poems from his book. one of them was called “something to say” – it’s written in the voices of drone victims:

“we have something to ask people in the US:
do u think we r animals
to be hunted and killed?
did the murder of our sisters and brothers and children
cause even a ripple
in the smooth pool of ur conscience,
even a small interruption
in ur routine,
in ur pursuits?”
…

kathy insisted on meeting my mother. she told her she loves lahore.
…

kathy kelly has been nominated three times for the nobel peace prize. but obama got it instead.
…

photograph by al brundage.

do you know
that the womb’s window
overlooks
a confiscated land?

do you know
that your tomorrow
has no tomorrow?
that your blood
is the ink
of new maps?

do you know
that your mother is weaving
the slowness of her moments
into an elegy?
And she is already
mourning you?

don’t be shy!
your funeral is over
the tears are dry
everyone’s gone

come forward!
it’s only a short way
don’t be late
your grave is looking
at its watch!

don’t be afraid!
We’ll arrange your bones
which ever way you want
and leave your skull
like a flower
on top

come forward!
your many friends await
there are more every day
. . .
your ghosts
will play together

come on!

New York, December 2002
Translated from the Iraqi by the poet

…

?”It’s to be noted that class meant little to the terrorists: they saw only two human categories, believer and heathen.” — she casts her entire argument as a “clash of civilizations” which is embarrassing, today 10 yrs after 9/11.

btw what is the war on terror about? isn’t it about believer vs heathen? is it just a coincidence that the victims of the war (99% of them) r muslim civilians and those bombing/raiding/invading them (99% of them) r “judeo-christian”? interesting how that never comes up.

and what if class did mean something to the terrorists/imperialists – would that make them more evolved? it’s true that imperialists invade the poorest countries of the world and even within those countries they drone the most economically disenfranchised. is that supposed to be a better approach – i.e. seeing only two human categories, monied and indigent?

Then am I
A happy fly,
If I live,
Or if I die.
…

The conflict in Kashmir, which has its roots in the 1947 decolonization and partition between the current states of India and Pakistan, entered its bloodiest phase in 1989. Popular disenchantment with the Indian electoral system spurred a groundswell movement for Kashmiri secession from India. Simultaneously, armed militants, some backed by Pakistan, became the violent face of the self-determination movement. Indian government passed security legislation giving armed forces sweeping powers to suppress insurgency and significantly fortified military presence in the region. The exceptional legal and militaristic treatment of Kashmir continues even today, though by the government’s own estimates, the number of active militants in the Valley does not surpass 500. The past 22 years of conflict have seen more than an estimated 70,000 dead.
…

In her assessment of the situation, Haseena does not comment on the armed militancy, which continues even today, at a comparatively miniscule scale. But her omission is not out of fear or even strategy, but rather honesty. In Srinagar, and now most of Indian-administered Kashmir, the conflict is not between armed militants and government forces. It is in a large part between Kashmiri civilians, disgruntled men, women, and children, and the government’s deployed forces.
…

More here.

do the dead care how their graves r decorated?
does the goat think about its pastures
as it is being readied for slaughter?
what r the merchants of al shams [syria] cooking on hell’s fire?
the plague is imminent
when a troubled star full of holes appears
it emits a deadly light
that illuminates the eye sockets of a skull
the wind flickers and plays inside it
at tal al-zaatar. [massacre at palestinian refugee camp in lebanon besieged by christian phalangist forces]

all the dust of the world
cannot close the eyes of a skull
searching for a homeland.
the capital of the poor [beirut] has fallen, just a little while ago
and in response?
impotent castanets r clicking and jangling all the way to the
white house
the testicles of the arab leaders trembled with pride.
…

more on al-nawwab:
Stirring words: traditions and subversions in the poetry of Muzaffar al-Nawwab by Carol Bardenstein

Poulet Aux Prunes TEASER (Chicken With Plums) from Atelier VFX on Vimeo.

(Translated from the Arabic by Sinan Antoon)

Write down!
I am an Arab
Employed with fellow workers at a quarry
I have eight children
I get them bread
Garments and books
from the rocks …
I do not supplicate charity at your doors
Nor do I belittle myself at the footsteps of your chamber
So will you be angry?

Write down!
I am an Arab
I have a name without a title
Patient in a country
Where people are enraged
My roots
Were entrenched before the birth of time
And before the opening of the eras
Before the pines, and the olive trees
And before the grass grew

My father … descends from the family of the plow
Not from a privileged class
And my grandfather … was a farmer
Neither well-bred, nor well-born!
Teaches me the pride of the sun
Before teaching me how to read
And my house is like a watchman’s hut
Made of branches and cane
Are you satisfied with my status?
I have a name without a title!

Write down!
I am an Arab
You have stolen the orchards of my ancestors
And the land which I cultivated
Along with my children
And you left nothing for us
Except for these rocks …
So will the State take them
As it has been said?!

Therefore!
Write down on the top of the first page:
I do not hate people
Nor do I encroach
But if I become hungry
The usurper’s flesh will be my food
Beware …
Beware …
Of my hunger
And my anger!