Important historical context from the film’s website here.

“I feel like you need to insert yourself in more,” one reader, white like every other person in the room, told me.

“But the chapter is not about me,” I said, “and I want her story to stand on its own.”

“You know, I have never met another Muslim and I would love to know what it is like to be a Muslim, especially these days.”

I did not know how to respond. What did she mean by “these days”?

More here.

(Translated from the Urdu by Faisal Siddiqui, Christopher Kennedy, and Mi Ditmar)

Our most vocal and vociferous champions have been Africans and African Americans, from Desmond Tutu to Angela Davis, Alice Walker and Cynthia McKinney. No one would blame Tutu if he focused his fight for justice solely on the economic apartheid that still festers in his country. No one could blame Davis or Walker if they spent their energies combating the great social and economic injustices that are the enduring and bitter legacy of centuries of enslavement in the US. I could fill pages with examples of solidarity coming to us from communities and individuals who could so easily ignore us and immerse themselves in their own difficult struggles. Rarely will any of these examples be from our Arab brethren, particularly those in oil-rich nations, who have within their power the ability to affect real and significant change. I know that we, too, do emerge from the yoke of Israeli oppression and ethnic cleansing to show solidarity, whether with tsunami victims, the Rohingyas in Burma, or exploited factory workers in Bangladesh. But I think we can and should do more to give solidarity where it is needed, even if we have nothing to offer but heartfelt words written and broadcast from the ghettos of Bantustans and refugee camps. Because such is an essential beauty of being human. Because there is a kind of liberation that can only come from being a part of the liberation of others. More here.

More about the “pots and pans” theme:

“As I write this loud explosions are punctuating the call to prayer outside my window. People are shouting and screaming down the way. Our everyday soundtrack. I walk out onto the balcony. There are riot police all over the street. Then the old lady in the building next to me starts banging a pot, grinning. The police peer up at her. Then another pot is banged in the building across, then another. A young mother, high up, leans out her kitchen window. Then a young, smiling man leans from his. Another old woman. Bang, bang, bang. Soon it seems the noise is from everywhere, surrounding the officers like their noxious miasma has surrounded us for days. The message is clear: We live here. We are trying to live.”

poster by tyrone boucher

I have never been an advocate of ‘convincing’ a bigot to not be so supremacist, or one who believes that structural violence is a cognitive issue that would be solved simply by making people ‘more aware’.

My calmness comes from a covenant I make with time & ancestors to be diligent in our collective responsibilities, to cultivate dignity for the breathing & the buried, to not turn to those who have inter-generationally degraded loved ones, to validate love or life, & to remember:

“…if you are ever confused about where to invest energy, remember there is far more benefit in whispering beauty into a garden than shouting obscenities into a black hole.”

When I asked the people who invited me here why didn’t they invite a Palestinian woman, the answer was that it would make the discussion too localized.

I don’t know what is non-localized violence. Racism and discrimination may be theoretical concepts and universal phenomena but their impact is always local, and real. Pain is local, humiliation, sexual abuse, torture and death, are all very local, and so are the scars.

It is true, unfortunately, that the local violence inflicted on Palestinian women by the government of Israel and the Israeli army, has expanded around the globe, In fact, state violence and army violence, individual and collective violence, are the lot of Muslim women today, not only in Palestine but wherever the enlightened western world is setting its big imperialistic foot. It is violence which is hardly ever addressed and which is halfheartedly condoned by most people in Europe and in the USA .

This is because the so-called free world is afraid of the Muslim womb.

Great France of “la liberte égalite et la fraternite” is scared of little girls with head scarves. Great Jewish Israel is afraid of the Muslim womb which its ministers call a demographic threat.

Almighty America and Great Britain are infecting their respective citizens with blind fear of the Muslims, who are depicted as vile, primitive and blood-thirsty, apart from their being non-democratic, chauvinistic and mass producers of future terrorists. This in spite of the fact that the people who are destroying the world today are not Muslim. One of them is a devout Christian, one is Anglican and one is a non-devout Jew.

I have never experienced the suffering Palestinian women undergo every day, every hour, I don’t know the kind of violence that turns a woman’s life into constant hell. This daily physical and mental torture of women who are deprived of their basic human rights and needs of privacy and dignity, women whose homes are broken into at any moment of day and night, who are ordered at a gun-point to strip naked in front of strangers and their own children, whose houses are demolished , who are deprived of their livelihood and of any normal family life. This is not part of my personal ordeal.

But I am a victim of violence against women insofar as violence against children is actually violence against mothers. Palestinian, Iraqi, Afghan women are my sisters because we are all at the grip of the same unscrupulous criminals who call themselves leaders of the free enlightened world and in the name of this freedom and enlightenment rob us of our children.

Furthermore, Israeli, American, Italian and British mothers have been for the most part violently blinded and brainwashed to such a degree that they cannot realize their only sisters, their only allies in the world are the Muslim Palestinian, Iraqi or Afghani mothers, whose children are killed by our children or who blow themselves to pieces with our sons and daughters. They are all mind-infected by the same viruses engendered by politicians. And the viruses , though they may have various illustrious names–such as Democracy, Patriotism, God, Homeland–are all the same. They are all part of false and fake ideologies that are meant to enrich the rich and to empower the powerful.

We are all the victims of mental, psychological and cultural violence that turn us to one homogenic group of bereaved or potentially bereaved mothers. Western mothers who are taught to believe their uterus is a national asset just like they are taught to believe that the Muslim uterus is an international threat. They are educated not to cry out: `I gave him birth, I breast fed him, he is mine, and I will not let him be the one whose life is cheaper than oil, whose future is less worth than a piece of land.`

All of us are terrorized by mind-infecting education to believe all we can do is either pray for our sons to come back home or be proud of their dead bodies.

And all of us were brought up to bear all this silently, to contain our fear and frustration, to take Prozac for anxiety, but never hail Mama Courage in public. Never be real Jewish or Italian or Irish mothers.

I am a victim of state violence. My natural and civil rights as a mother have been violated and are violated because I have to fear the day my son would reach his 18th birthday and be taken away from me to be the game tool of criminals such as Sharon, Bush, Blair and their clan of blood-thirsty, oil-thirsty, land thirsty generals..

Living in the world I live in, in the state I live in, in the regime I live in, I don’t dare to offer Muslim women any ideas on how to change their lives. I don’t want them to take off their scarves, or educate their children differently, and I will not urge them to constitute Democracies in the image of Western democracies that despise them and their kind. I just want to ask them humbly to be my sisters, to express my admiration for their perseverance and for their courage to carry on, to have children and to maintain a dignified family life in spite of the impossible conditions my world in putting them in. I want to tell them we are all bonded by the same pain, we all the victims of the same sort of violence even though they suffer much more, for they are the ones who are mistreated by my government and its army, sponsored by my taxes.

Islam in itself, like Judaism in itself and Christianity in itself, is not a threat to me or to anyone. American imperialism is, European indifference and co-operation is and Israeli racism and its cruel regime of occupation is. It is racism, educational propaganda and inculcated xenophobia that convince Israeli soldiers to order Palestinian women at gun-point, to strip in front of their children for security reasons, it is the deepest disrespect for the other that allow American soldiers to rape Iraqi women, that give license to Israeli jailers to keep young women in inhuman conditions, without necessary hygienic aids, without electricity in the winter, without clean water or clean mattresses and to separate them from their breast-fed babies and toddlers. To bar their way to hospitals, to block their way to education, to confiscate their lands, to uproot their trees and prevent them from cultivating their fields.

I cannot completely understand Palestinian women or their suffering. I don’t know how I would have survived such humiliation, such disrespect from the whole world. All I know is that the voice of mothers has been suffocated for too long in this war-stricken planet. Mothers` cry is not heard because mothers are not invited to international forums such as this one. This I know and it is very little. But it is enough for me to remember these women are my sisters, and that they deserve that I should cry for them, and fight for them. And when they lose their children in strawberry fields or on filthy roads by the checkpoints, when their children are shot on their way to school by Israeli children who were educated to believe that love and compassion are race and religion dependent, the only thing I can do is stand by them and their betrayed babies, and ask what Anna Akhmatova–another mother who lived in a regime of violence against women and children–asked:

Why does that streak o blood, rip the petal of your cheek?

[Dr. Nurit Peled-Elhanan is an Israeli professor of language and education at Hebrew University. Her daughter was killed in the 1997 Ben Yehuda Street suicide attack in Jerusalem. This speech was made on International Women’s Day in Strasbourg, 2010.]

50 million people in the U.S.-one in four children-don’t know where their next meal is coming from, despite our having the means to provide nutritious, affordable food for all Americans. Directors Kristi Jacobson and Lori Silverbush examine this issue through the lens of three people who are struggling with food insecurity: Barbie, a single Philadelphia mother who grew up in poverty and is trying to provide a better life for her two kids; Rosie, a Colorado fifth-grader who often has to depend on friends and neighbors to feed her and has trouble concentrating in school; and Tremonica, a Mississippi second-grader whose asthma and health issues are exacerbated by the largely empty calories her hardworking mother can afford. Their stories are interwoven with insights from experts including sociologist Janet Poppendieck, author Raj Patel and nutrition policy leader Marion Nestle; ordinary citizens like Pastor Bob Wilson and teachers Leslie Nichols and Odessa Cherry; and activists such as Witness to Hunger’s Mariana Chilton, Top Chef’s Tom Colicchio and Oscar®-winning actor Jeff Bridges. Ultimately, A Place at the Table shows us how hunger poses serious economic, social and cultural implications for our nation, and that it could be solved once and for all, if the American public decides-as they have in the past-that making healthy food available and affordable is in the best interest of us all.

Imran Qureshi: Living in Pakistan is wonderful. I could never live anywhere else, honestly. I am very comfortable here in my country. The environment is very challenging of course, but the contemporary artists are really bold. They are talking about really core issues; I don’t think they are having any problems. Of course there are censorship issues and restrictions as there are even in the West, where paintings are stripped off the wall for sensitivity reasons. That happens here too. If the artist is intelligent, though, they can find their way of saying what they want. Pakistani contemporary art really moves you. More here.

Sign petition here.

“Germany’s national railway company, Deutsche Bahn, plans to test small drones to try to reduce the amount of graffiti being sprayed on its property. The idea is to use airborne infra-red cameras to collect evidence, which could then be used to prosecute vandals who deface property at night. A company spokesman said drones would be tested at rail depots soon. But it is not yet clear how Germany’s strict anti-surveillance laws might affect their use.” More here.

Claire Messud: I think there’s no question that there’s a reason why small children make great art and why slightly bigger children don’t. And it’s because small children don’t worry about what anybody else thinks and slightly bigger children start to worry about these things. So, we can call it selfishness, but I think these are often names that make us feel better: you know, wow, I would never be that selfish. But it certainly takes some single-minded commitment, whether that’s selfishness or selflessness I don’t know.

Having both a son and a daughter and watching them as they grow, you see it just in the way girls interact and the way boys interact. There’s a reason why trainspotters are not girls, there’s a reason why there’s the myth of the slightly autistic male genius, there’s a reason why Gertrude Stein believed that her self-presentation was male. One could argue that was Susan Sontag also. The things that we associate with femaleness are not the single-minded, exclusive pursuit of a vocation, whether it be art or anything else. It is not a model that is widespread in our culture, it’s not something we think of for women. More here.

“My name is Shawna, and I was a nuclear biological chemical specialist for a war that didn’t have any weapons of mass destruction. So I deserted. I’m one of 40,000 people that left the United States Armed Forces because this is a lie!”

“Hello. My name is Michael Thurman. I was a conscientious objector from the United States Air Force. I’m returning my Global War on Terrorism Medal and my military coins on behalf of Private First Class Bradley Manning, who sacrificed everything to show us the truth about these wars.”

“My name is Sabrina Waller. I’m a United States Navy veteran. I deployed under NATO orders to Kosovo in ’99. I’m also a mother of an 11-year-old. For over 10 years of his life, we’ve been waging war. And the only fight that I want to participate in is the fight to ensure that my son and his generation never have to fight another war.” More here.

Early Spring by Shuho Takai, 1936

Less than 24 hours after she interrupted President Obama’s major speech on the future of the secret drone war and Guantánamo, CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin describes why she repeatedly interrupted Obama’s address. Benjamin, the author of “Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control,” criticized Obama for failing to explain why a U.S. drone in Yemen killed the teenage U.S. citizen Abdulrahman al-Awlaki in 2011. “I was very disappointed. He said that his policy is to capture, not kill. That’s just not true. I know personally of many incidents where it would have been very easy to capture people, like the 16-year-old Tariq Aziz in Pakistan, who was in Islamabad at a well-known hotel, but instead was killed by a drone strike two days later,” Benjamin says. “I think the president is really justifying the use of drones, which will continue to happen under his administration and be passed on to the next.” More here.

I never agreed that this was a war against al-Qaeda in the traditional sense to which the laws of war apply. …could use force, a police action to stop al-Qaeda, bring them to trial, try them and imprison them. I never accepted the war paradigm at all. Obviously there was a war in Afghanistan. That was a war. And there was the Iraq War that was authorized separately. But as soon as you go outside of those zones–I never read the AUMF so broadly as to say you could attack anyone you wanted who they said was a threat to the United States. They then put in these terms – they’re associated forces to al-Qaeda. Well, they make it up. …what’s an associated force to al-Qaeda? Anybody who stamps the label on their lapel, I’m an associated force of al-Qaeda? It doesn’t make any sense to me. Those people are alleged terrorists – they are probably criminals if they’re convicted, but we’re not in a war with those people in any kind of traditional sense. And therefore the whole argument that somehow it’s legal to drop drones on people all over the world under our law, maybe it’s legal. They can argue that if they want ’cause of the way our courts interpret the law. But under international law, it’s not legal at all. More here.

…a few days after [Obama's] inaugural address, a C.I.A.-operated drone dropped Hellfire missiles on Fahim Qureishi’s home in North Waziristan, killing seven of his family members and severely injuring Fahim. He was just 13 years old and left with only one eye, and shrapnel in his stomach.

There was no militant present. A recent book revealed that Mr. Obama was informed about the erroneous target but still did not offer any form of redress, because in 2009, the United States did not acknowledge the existence of its own drone program in Pakistan.

Sadaullah Wazir was another victim of hope and change. His house in North Waziristan was targeted on Sept. 7, 2009. The strike killed four members of his family. Sadaullah was 14 years old when it happened. A few days after the attack, he woke up in a Peshawar hospital to the news that both of his legs had to be amputated and he would never be able to walk again. He died last year, without receiving justice or even an apology. Once again, no militant was present or killed.

Mr. Obama is scheduled to deliver a major speech on drones at the National Defense University today. He is likely to tell his fellow Americans that drones are precise and effective at killing militants.

But his words will be little consolation for 8-year-old Nabila, who, on Oct. 24, had just returned from school and was playing in a field outside her house with her siblings and cousins while her grandmother picked flowers. At 2:30 p.m., a Hellfire missile came out of the sky and struck right in front of Nabila. Her grandmother was badly burned and succumbed to her injuries; Nabila survived with severe burns and shrapnel wounds in her shoulder.

Nabila doesn’t know who Mr. Obama is, or where the Hellfire missile that killed her grandmother came from. As she grows older, she will learn about the idea of justice. But how will she be able to grasp it if she herself has been denied this basic right? More here.

It’s 2023—and this is America ten years after the first across-the-board federal budget cuts known as sequestration went into effect. They went on for a decade, making no exception for effective programs vital to America’s economic health that were already underfunded, like job training and infrastructure repairs. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

Traveling back in time to 2013—at the moment the sequester cuts began—no one knew what their impact would be, although nearly everyone across the political spectrum agreed that it would be bad. As it happened, the first signs of the unraveling which would, a decade later, leave the United States a third-world country, could be detected surprisingly quickly, only three months after the cuts began. In that brief time, a few government agencies, like the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), after an uproar over flight delays, requested—and won—special relief. Naturally, the Department of Defense, with a mere $568 billion to burn in its 2013 budget, also joined this elite list. On the other hand, critical spending for education, environmental protection, and scientific research was not spared, and in many communities the effect was felt remarkably soon. More here.

“More than 100,000 women were raped in the 36 years of the Guatemalan genocide in which at least 200,000 people died. In this video, photojournalists Ofelia de Pablo and Javier Zurita interview survivors.”

The Invisible Genocide of Women. by (Ofelia&Zurita) from Ofelia de Pablo & Javier Zurita on Vimeo.

tornado hits oklahoma, may 2013

Rios Montt, 86, was found guilty on May 10 of overseeing the killings by the armed forces of at least 1,771 members of the Maya Ixil population during his 1982-83 rule. He was sentenced to 80 years in prison. However, in a ruling on Monday, the country’s Constitutional Court ordered that all the proceedings be voided going back to April 19, when one of the presiding judges suspended the trial because of a dispute with another judge over who should hear it. It was unclear when the trial might restart. More here.

Kamisuki (combing hair) by Hashiguchi Goyo, 1920

2. Call me Ishmael. I was a young man of military age. I was immolated at my wedding. My parents are inconsolable.

3. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather. A bomb whistled in. Blood on the walls. Fire from heaven.

4. I am an invisible man. My name is unknown. My loves are a mystery. But an unmanned aerial vehicle from a secret location has come for me.

5. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was killed by a Predator drone.

6. Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His torso was found, not his head.

7. Mother died today. The program saves American lives.

More here.

Though Westernness feels like an immutable inheritance, whether a people sees itself as heir is actually a conscious decision that only later becomes an unconscious patrimony. Many of the Egyptians and Syrians of today are the descendants of Roman citizens, and yet they see themselves as non-Western. Many even consider themselves to be in a struggle against the West. Meanwhile the Germans, descended from the barbarians who sacked Rome, consider themselves heirs to Western civilization. A city such as Berlin, with its neoclassical museum buildings, is no different than St. Petersburg in its ex post facto writing of its people into the Western tradition. Berlin feels less Disneyfied than St. Petersburg only because the ruse has worked. While just 12 percent of Russians tell pollsters that they always “feel European,” no pollster would even think to ask the Germans whether they felt that way. It’s just accepted that Germans are Europeans.

more here.

more about chughtai’s style of painting which might explain this figure:

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”.

chughtai is considered to be one of the indian subcontinent’s greatest artists. salima hashmi: “he was part of the movement that started in the early part of the 20th century to establish an identity indigenous to the subcontinent. he rejected the hegemony of the british colonial aesthetic.”

Guarded Beauty by Abdur Rahman Chughtai

We uncovered some remarkable things that were unfamiliar to me, because you associate the Islamophobia industry with a small coterie of funders and activists who are very open about their opinions, but we found some more insidious groups who are playing still an effective role in pushing what I consider to be a right-wing, reactionary agenda.

And it started when I saw the interfaith ceremony after the Boston bombings, it was nationally-televised, Barack Obama spoke there, and the Muslim representative was supposed to be Iman Suhaib Webb, who is one of the foremost Islamic religious figures in the country, and he was replaced at the last second with someone named Nasser Wedaddy, who’s a Mauritanian internet activist who has really no … he’s unknown in the Muslim community. He works for a group called the American Islamic Congress. And I’d looked into who they were, got their funders, realized they were funded by people like Sheldon Adelson, the Bradley Foundation — which is a right-wing foundation behind Daniel Pipes and the whole Islamophobia industry that had Zuhdi Jasser, who testified at Peter King’s hearing, on their board — so we did a report for EI about this group that was clearly being put forward to create a wedge in the Muslim community and undermine mainstream Muslim organizing, also to take Palestine off the table.

This is a group that was heavily involved in promoting the Iraq war and received grants from the Bush administration, still receives grants from the Obama administration, and then it rolled into this next investigation into the Human Rights Foundation, which is this kind of shadowy human rights group run by figure named Thor Halvorssen. He’s a Venezuelan oligarch, he’s the son of an oligarchic family heavily-connected to the Venezuelan anti-Chavez opposition. More here.

Here is what Ambedkar said:

“What disturbs me, after hearing Mr. Gandhi, is that instead of confining himself to his proposition, namely, that the Minorities Committee should be adjourned sine die, he started casting reflections upon the representatives of the different communities sitting around this Table. He said the delegates were the nominees of Government, and that they did not represent the views of their communities for whom they stood. We cannot deny the allegation that we are nominees of the Government, but speaking for myself, I have not the slightest doubt that even if the Depressed Classes of India were given the chance of electing their representatives to this conference, I would all the same, find a place here. I say, therefore, that whether I am a nominee or not, I fully represent the claims of my community. Let no man be under any mistaken impression as regards that.”
Further he says:

“The Mahatma has been claiming, that the Congress stands for the Depressed Classes, and that the Congress represents the Depressed Classes more than I or my colleagues can do. To that claim I can only say that it is one of many false claims which irresponsible people keep on making”

And when you are confronted by non-Dalits smothering your expression by pointing to divisions among the Dalit communities, remind yourself of what Ambedkar had to say on Gandhi playing one community against the other. Here is that part of Ambedkar’s letter written from London to Times of India:

“We are, however, reliably informed that in carrying his negotiations with our Muslim friends, Mr Gandhi demanded that as one of the conditions for his accepting the fourteen points, they should oppose the claims of the Depressed Classes. To say in public ‘I will agree if all others agree’, then set out to work in private to prevent others from agreeing by buying off those who are willing to agree, is in our opinion,a piece of conduct unbecoming a Mahatma and to be expected only from an inveterate opponent of the Depressed Classes. Mr. Gandhi is not only not playing the part of a friend of the Depressed Classes, but he is not even playing the part of an honest foe.”

When an unlettered Dalit speaks up, protests, or organizes, the entire Indian establishment has ways of ignoring and subjugating him/her. So complete is this process from their side, it would seem as though there are no protests at all from the Dalits in the basti, in the cheri, in the offices, in the colleges, universities, hostels, on the construction site, in the quarries, and in all other places they labor and live in. Every democratic and undemocratic institution aligns itself seamlessly to suffocate their protesting voice.

In contrast, when literate Dalits speak up, they are aggressively told that they are ‘elite’, ‘products of affirmative action’, and do not and cannot represent the larger community interests. This is a petty ploy to dislodge Dalits by asking us to see logic in the Left as being the better and more genuine articulators of all Dalit communities. Much like Gandhi asserting that Congress was the better care- taker of the Untouchables. It is not just silly but it is essentially bullying by upper castes Marxists -overloaded on caste privileges and masquerading as class warriors. A child can see through this. We want every Dalit child to know how Ambedkar had worded this ploy of the upper castes and be able to recognize it in whatever garb they do it in. Therefore this note. A note with love for the Dalit Child.
…

ref: Proceedings of Federal Structure Committee and Minorities Committee, P 534.

From an interview of Aime Cesaire by Rene Depestres at the Cultural Congress of Havana, 1967

A.C.: I don’t deny French influences myself. Whether I want to or not, as a poet I express myself in French, and clearly French literature has influenced me. But I want to emphasize very strongly that—while using as a point of departure the elements that French literature gave me—at the same time I have always strived to create a new language, one capable of communicating the African heritage. In other words, for me French was a tool that I wanted to use in developing a new means of expression. I wanted to create an Antillean French, a black French that, while still being French, had a black character.

R.D.: Has surrealism been instrumental in your effort to discover this new French language?

A.C.: I was ready to accept surrealism because I already had advanced on my own, using as my starting points the same authors that had influenced the surrealist poets. Their thinking and mine had common reference points. Surrealism provided me with what I had been confusedly searching for. I have accepted it joyfully because in it I have found more of a confirmation than a revelation. It was a weapon that exploded the French language. It shook up absolutely everything. This was very important because the traditional forms—burdensome, overused forms—were crushing me.

R.D.: This was what interested you in the surrealist movement…

A.C.: Surrealism interested me to the extent that it was a liberating factor.

R.D.: So you were very sensitive to the concept of liberation that surrealism contained. Surrealism called forth deep and unconscious forces.

A.C.: Exactly. And my thinking followed these lines: Well then, if I apply the surrealist approach to my particular situation, I can summon up these unconscious forces. This, for me, was a call to Africa. I said to myself: it’s true that superficially we are French, we bear the marks of French customs; we have been branded by Cartesian philosophy, by French rhetoric; but if we break with all that, if we plumb the depths, then what we will find is fundamentally black.

R.D.: In other words, it was a process of disalienation.

A.C.: Yes, a process of disalienation; that’s how I interpreted surrealism.

R.D.: That’s how surrealism has manifested itself in your work: as an effort to reclaim your authentic character, and in a way as an effort to reclaim the African heritage.

A.C.: Absolutely.

R.D.: And as a process of detoxification.

A.C.: A plunge into the depths. It was a plunge into Africa for me.

R.D.: It was a way of emancipating your consciousness.

A.C.: Yes, I felt that beneath the social being would be found a profound being, over whom all sorts of ancestral layers and alluviums had been deposited.

Syrian artist Safwan Dahoul, Dreams 35, 2010

Did they get you to trade
Your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
And did you exchange
A walk on part in a war
For a lead role in a cage?

This week 40 American military nurses were drafted in to try to stem a mass suicide. The last Brit inside, Shaker Aamer, has said he is prepared to strike to his death. The US administration does its best to keep prying eyes from the unfolding tragedy but the The Independent has obtained first-hand reports. Twice a day, the 23 most weak are taken into a room. Their wrists, arms, stomach, legs and head are strapped to a chair and repeated attempts are made to force a tube down their noses into their stomachs. It is an ugly procedure as they gag and wretch, blood dripping from their nostrils. “They won’t let us live in peace and now they won’t let us die in peace,” said detainee, Fayiz Al-Kandari, a Kuwaiti held for 11 years without charge. More here.

A court in Guatemala has found former military leader Efrain Rios Montt guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity. A three-judge tribunal sentenced the 86-year-old to 80 years in prison. Rios Montt was convicted of ordering the deaths of 1,771 people of the Ixil Maya ethnic group during his time in office in 1982 and 1983. Survivors described horrific abuses committed by the army against those suspected of aiding left-wing rebels. More here.

I would also say that at this point in time, paying lip service to the two state-solution while blaming the Palestinians for avoiding peace cannot be considered opposing to the occupation, unless you want to include Lieberman and Netanyahu in the peace camp. We should be asking ourselves questions about political action as opposed to discussing our views: where do we contribute to the occupation and what form of actions do we consider legitimate in the fight against it?

Prof. Stephen Hawking responded to a Palestinian call for solidarity. This is also something to remember – that the oppressed have opinions too, and that empowering them is a worthy cause. In Strenger’s world, the occupation is a topic of internal political discussion among the Jewish-Israeli public. Some people support it, some people – more – are against it; the Palestinians should simply wait for the tide to change since “it is very difficult for Israeli politicians to convince Israelis to take risks for peace.” And what happens if Israelis don’t chose to end the occupation? (Which is exactly what they are doing, over and over again.) I wonder what form of Palestinian opposition to the occupation Prof. Strenger considers legitimate. My guess: none (code phrase: “they should negotiate for peace”). More here.

“A shocking new report by the Pentagon has found that 70 sexual assaults may be taking place within the U.S. military every day. The report estimates there were 26,000 sex crimes committed in 2012, a jump of 37 percent since 2010. Most of the incidents were never reported. The findings were released two days after the head of the Air Force’s sexual assault prevention unit, Lt. Col. Jeffrey Krusinski, was arrested for sexual assault.” More here.

BeeEye by Cat Ashworth – artist’s statement:

“The honeybee reminds us of the interconnectedness of all life. The intricate cellular structure that the honeybee makes in the hive reminds us that all things in life have a pattern. I want the audience to enter the hexagon cell and immerse themselves in the sights and sounds of the honeybee.

I became interested in the honeybee in 2006, when Colony Collapse Disorder was killing off hives all over the world. First I became a beekeeper then I started filming bees and other beekeepers. I started off making a traditional documentary, but as I was editing the material, I discovered I liked just watching the abstract flight patterns the bees made. I decided to take the project in a different direction, and create an artwork that is more abstract.

Honeybees speak in a language different from humans. Much of the practice of beekeeping relies on the power of observation. I tried to keep talking at a minimum in this project, so that the audience can begin to glimpse into a life form that is very different from humans. Although humans and honeybees have had a relationship for thousands of years, the honeybee remains wild, and many of her secrets remain hidden.”

BeeEye by Cat Ashworth

I grew up and became a political activist, participating in student struggles, the anti-war movement, and, most of all, in the movement for the liberation of African Americans in the United States. I later joined the Black Panther Party, an organization that was targeted by the COINTELPRO program, a program that was set up by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to eliminate all political opposition to the U.S. government’s policies, to destroy the Black Liberation Movement in the United States, to discredit activists and to eliminate potential leaders.

Under the COINTELPRO program, many political activists were harassed, imprisoned, murdered or otherwise neutralized. As a result of being targeted by COINTELPRO, I, like many other young people, was faced with the threat of prison, underground, exile or death. The FBI, with the help of local police agencies, systematically fed false accusations and fake news articles to the press accusing me and other activists of crimes we did not commit. Although in my case the charges were eventually dropped or I was eventually acquitted, the national and local police agencies created a situation where, based on their false accusations against me, any police officer could shoot me on sight. It was not until the Freedom of Information Act was passed in the mid-’70s that we began to see the scope of the United States government’s persecution of political activists.

At this point, I think that it is important to make one thing very clear. I have advocated and I still advocate revolutionary changes in the structure and in the principles that govern the United States. I advocate self-determination for my people and for all oppressed inside the United States. I advocate an end to capitalist exploitation, the abolition of racist policies, the eradication of sexism, and the elimination of political repression. If that is a crime, then I am totally guilty.

To make a long story short, I was captured in New Jersey in 1973, after being shot with both arms held in the air, and then shot again from the back. I was left on the ground to die and when I did not, I was taken to a local hospital where I was threatened, beaten and tortured. In 1977 I was convicted in a trial that can only be described as a legal lynching.

In 1979 I was able to escape with the aid of some of my fellow comrades. I saw this as a necessary step, not only because I was innocent of the charges against me, but because I knew that in the racist legal system in the United States I would receive no justice. I was also afraid that I would be murdered in prison. I later arrived in Cuba where I am currently living in exile as a political refugee.

The New Jersey State Police and other law enforcement officials say they want to see me brought to “justice.” But I would like to know what they mean by “justice.” Is torture justice? I was kept in solitary confinement for more than two years, mostly in men’s prisons. Is that justice? My lawyers were threatened with imprisonment and imprisoned. Is that justice? I was tried by an all-white jury, without even the pretext of impartiality, and then sentenced to life in prison plus 33 years. Is that justice? More here.

There are other checkpoints too. Like when walking down the street with my Yaqui friends in Mexican cities and to see people not move out of their way when walking. When I see men literally shove a shoulder into my Yaqui friends as they pass by. These are check points to see keep my friends “in check.”

When I rushed one of my godchildren who had fallen to the state funded clinic and was told by the Mexican doctor that, “perhaps these Indians should stop having kids if they cannot take care of them.” This checkpoint is seeing if I will say anything back and risk the care of the baby now in his control.

When the waitresses at restaurants only take the orders from me, not from my indigenous friends who I want to treat to a meal. They Mexican waitresses do not look them in the eye, not wanting to lower themselves by taking orders from an Indian. These are checkpoints. If we want to be served and not caused a scene, we will comply.

But at the end of the day, when all you wanted was a day to live your life, you cannot help feeling, in your body, the sum total of all the times you were checked at some point. This is a big one: you just feel fatigue. You just wanted to go visit your friends. You wanted to say hello for their birthday, or take them a gift. You want to just go do your work. And this fatigue is unshakable, like the heat, or the lack of fresh fruits and vegetables, or the lack of clean water. And this fatigue wears on your like the knowledge that life did not use to be this way. That someone came at a historical moment and did this; that others let it happen. This fatigue changes your body, changes how you want to love or be loved. And this fatigue, well, this fatigue is colonization.

[...] So when asked to come and speak about how I understand Palestinian rights to be indigenous rights, I did not want to once again refer to the International Court of Justice or the United Nations, or Desmond Tutu, or Jimmy Carter, Judith Butler, Angela Davis, or Noam Chomsky. I did not want to quote too many books or lecture you about theories of indigeneity or settler colonialism. I wanted to show up, in my body, and tell you how indigenous struggles feel, how colonization feels, as I empathize with native people being a person privileged by both race and nationality colonized by my education system, and epistemologically harassed by my incessant media. I empathize; I embody the feelings of fear, and of hope, because I do not need Frantz Fanon, or Aime Cesaire, or Linda Tuhiwai Smith to know that those holding the whip and the machine guns, those dispossessing and colonizing, they are proving themselves to be, again and again, the actual savages. More here.

To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a
Sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California,
The lovely woman from Laredo — we were all covered with the same
Powdered sugar. And smiling. There are no better cookies.

And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers —
Non-alcoholic — and the two little girls for our flight, one African
American, one Mexican American — ran around serving us all apple juice
And lemonade and they were covered with powdered sugar too.

And I noticed my new best friend — by now we were holding hands
— Had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing,

With green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always
Carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought,
This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.

More here.

[..] South Asia’s publics form a fractured palimpsest; the misconceived image of the region’s citizenry as an undifferentiated mass ignores all the complexities of society and self. Through classificatory technologies, colonialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reformulated traditional communities and established new hierarchies and subjectivities in place of those it inherited. The independent nation state has generated new social groupings since the mid-twentieth century, but this top-down process has been contested and redirected by major transformations on the ground such as hyper-urbanization, and the claims of marginalized peoples for justice and representation (appeals routinely suppressed by state violence).

[...] The discourses and practices of modern and contemporary art play out against the backdrop of the “popular.” In South Asia, the latter domain is immense, and constitutes a number of overlapping fields existing in productive tension and collaboration with each other. It encompasses tribal, folk, and artisanal practices6, incorporates diverse media and methods, and embraces “bazaar arts,” including religious and secular posters and other street-based forms. It also gestures toward widespread and continuous grass-roots social and political mobilization. The relation between high art and popular visual culture in South Asia is multiply determined, and cannot be reduced to theoretical dualities such as elite and kitsch, or to conceptions of the postmodern formulated in the context of late capitalism. More here.

also read charlotte silver’s “shocked conscience: the case of lynne stewart” here.

human rights

Nick Turse: It’s a difficult question to answer. I went out and interviewed well over 100 American veterans for this book, and read sworn testimonies of many more. I don’t know that I have a satisfactory answer. I talked to one veteran, he talked to me about the war. We were on the phone for several hours. He was very jovial. He had a really infectious laugh.

But he quieted down and said he wanted to tell me a story about a member of his unit. And he talked about how they were going through a village and burning it down, which was standard operating procedure. And in the midst of this, this woman runs up and grabs this GI by the sleeve, and is tugging at him and yelling at him—obviously because her home is being burned down, all her possessions are going up in flames. And she’s angry, scared, upset. And he said this GI just pushed her off, and then took his rifle and hit her squarely in the nose with the butt. And he said her face just erupted in blood. She was screaming. And the GI just turned around and walked away laughing. And he paused a second and said, “Do you know that GI was me?” He had such a tough time figuring out how he could have done it. All these years later. At the time he didn’t think anything of it, and in the years since, he couldn’t help but think of it on a constant basis. And it really haunted him. And I had the same problem trying to match up the man that I was talking to with his 19-year old self.

He told me about how the training that he went through dehumanized the Vietnamese to the point where they didn’t think of them as human. They thought of them as—they had a whole bunch of slurs that were used: dinks, slopes, slants, gooks. And he talked about how “I didn’t become exactly like a robot but it was like that.” You’re trained to kill, you chant “Kill, kill kill.” It psychologically readies you for this.
…

The Vietnam War was fought using an attrition strategy. This wasn’t a war like World War I, where you had two armies facing off across a well defined battlefield. It’s a guerrilla struggle, where the Vietnamese revolutionaries are radically outgunned. So they’re not going to stand toe to toe with the Americans. And the Americans aren’t trying to take territory or capture an enemy capital.

They were searching for some metric, some measure to show that they were winning a war. They settled on the attrition strategy which was used during the second half of the Korean War, and the main measure was body count. You would kill your way to victory by piling up Vietnamese bodies, and the Americans were always chasing this crossover point when they would be killing more Vietnamese guerrillas than the enemy could put into the field. And the idea was that at that moment, the enemy would give up the fight.

Because they would view the war as a rational effort the way the Pentagon did: this was a ledger sheet. And once the debits outweighed the credits, then they would end the war. They didn’t think the way the Vietnamese did, that this was a revolutionary struggle. The Vietnamese saw it as a continuation of their anti-colonial fight against the French.

The troops in the field, they were pressed for bodies. Their commanders were leaning on them heavily. You were told to produce Vietnamese bodies, and if you didn’t you were going to stay out in the field longer. They learned pretty quickly that the command wasn’t discerning about what bodies were turned in, that just about any Vietnamese bodies would do. This pushed American troops toward at least calling in all Vietnamese who were filled as enemies, and also to the killing of detainees and prisoners and civilians, and calling them in as enemy dead. More here.

in his book “the phenomenon of man” teilhard talks about a collective identity which develops as trade and the transmission of ideas increases. knowledge accumulates and is transmitted in increasing levels of depth and complexity. this leads to a further augmentation of consciousness and the emergence of a thinking layer that envelops the earth. he calls the new membrane the “noosphere” (from the greek “nous,” meaning mind). the noosphere is the collective consciousness of humanity, the networks of thought and emotion in which all are immersed. teilhard was reprimanded, censored and condemned by the church for his ideas.

it was sad that one of the panelists who discussed the play gave the example of the multi-media manhunt for the boston bombing suspect as being representative of teilhard’s collective human network. quite the opposite. we are v far still from achieving true mind and spirit human interconnectedness. i agree with teilhard that “we have reached a crossroads in human evolution where the only road which leads forward is towards a common passion… to continue to place our hopes in a social order achieved by external violence would simply amount to our giving up all hope of carrying the spirit of the earth to its limits.”

teilhad was played by l. john cieslinski who also wrote the play. thank u to my friend Sarita for this excellent treat!

here is a wonderful podcast discussing teilhard’s work from many different perspectives.

“No one is crying over the rights of the young man who is accused of killing innocent people, helping his brother set off bombs that were loaded to maim, and terrorizing Boston Thursday night and Friday. But the next time you read about an abusive interrogation, or a wrongful conviction that resulted from a false confession, think about why we have Miranda in the first place. It’s to stop law enforcement authorities from committing abuses. Because when they can make their own rules, sometime, somewhere, they inevitably will.”

Leave aside the fact that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been convicted of nothing and is thus entitled to a presumption of innocence. The reason to care what happens to him is because how he is treated creates precedent for what the US government is empowered to do, including to US citizens on US soil. When you cheer for the erosion of his rights, you’re cheering for the erosion of your own. More here.

And white privilege is being able to know nothing about the crimes committed by most of the terrorists listed above — indeed, never to have so much as heard most of their names — let alone to make assumptions about the role that their racial or ethnic identity may have played in their crimes.

White privilege is knowing that if the Boston bomber turns out to be white, you will not be asked to denounce him or her, so as to prove your own loyalties to the common national good. It is knowing that the next time a cop sees you standing on the sidewalk cheering on runners in a marathon, that cop will say exactly nothing to you as a result. More here.

piazza del duomo, catania

entrance to our apartment, off of via auteri

blood oranges – so yummy and gorgeous

no dryers, like in the rest of europe

catania harbor

sicily is as sumptuously green as iceland

greco-roman theatre with a view of taormina

I started working on “Detained” about one year ago, because of the lack of visual documentation on the subject. I contacted some human rights organizations, which put me in contact with a few children. Unfortunately, those children refused to be interviewed; having been contacted several times by journalists, they were afraid of repercussions. I then decided to contact people I knew from Palestinian cities like Nablus and Hebron where child detention is most prevalent. Through these friends, I was able to find and contact additional children. Sadly, it was quite easy to find them since it is such a common phenomenon.

In most cases, I found children who suffer from various traumas. Some were not able to talk about what had happened in prison; others burst into tears, and it was sometimes hard for me to hold my own tears back as I was conducting the interviews. Many children agreed to talk to me “off the record”; I thus know their stories but was not able to officially interview them or take their pictures. In some cases, I was able to talk to the parents once the child left the room, and thus obtained more detailed information about how the children were dealing with what had happened to them. More here.

Israelis:
I am Samer Issawi on hunger strike for eight consecutive months, laying in one of your hospitals called Kaplan. On my body is a medical devise connected to a surveillance room operating 24 hours a day. My heartbeats are slow and quiet and may stop at any minute, and everybody, doctors, officials and intelligence officers are waiting for my setback and my loss of life.

I chose to write to you: intellectuals, writers, lawyers and journalists, associations, and civil society activists. I invite you to visit me, to see a skeleton tied to his hospital bed, and around him three exhausted jailers. Sometimes they have their appetizing food and drinks around me.
The jailers watch my suffering, my loss of weight and my gradual melting. They often look at their watches, asking themselves in surprise: how does this damaged body have an excess of time to live after its time?

Israelis:
I’m looking for an intellectual who is through shadowboxing, or talking to his face in mirrors. I want him to stare into my face and observe my coma, to wipe the gunpowder off his pen, and from his mind the sound of bullets, he will then see my features carved deep in his eyes, I’ll see him and he’ll see me, I’ll see him nervous about the questions of the future, and he’ll see me, a ghost that stays with him and doesn’t leave.

You may receive instructions to write a romantic story about me, and you could do that easily after removing my humanity from me, you will watch a creature with nothing but a ribcage, breathing and choking with hunger, losing consciousness once in a while.

And, after your cold silence, Mine will be a literary or media story that you add to your curricula, and when your students grow up they will believe that the Palestinian dies of hunger in front of Gilad’s Israeli sword, and you would then rejoice in this funerary ritual and in your cultural and moral superiority.

Israelis:
I am Samer Issawi the young “Arboush” man according to your military terms, the Jerusalemite, whom you arrested without charge, except for leaving Jerusalem to the suburbs of Jerusalem. I, whom will be tried twice for a charge without charge, because it is the military that rules in your country, and the intelligence apparatus that decides, and all other components of Israeli society ever have to do is sit in a trench and hide in the fort that keeps what is called a purity of identity – to avoid the explosion of my suspicious bones.

I have not heard one of you interfere to stop the loud wail of death, it’s as if everyone of you has turned into gravediggers, and everyone wears his military suit: the judge, the writer, the intellectual, the journalist, the merchant, the academic, and the poet. And I cannot believe that a whole society was turned into guards over my death and my life, or guardians over settlers who chase after my dreams and my trees.

Israelis:
I will die satisfied and having satisfied. I do not accept to be deported out of my homeland. I do not accept your courts and your arbitrary rule. If you had Passed over in Easter to my country and destroyed it in the name of a God of an ancient time, you will not Passover to my elegant soul which has declared disobedience. It has healed and it flew and celebrated all the time that you lack. Maybe then you will understand that awareness of freedom is stronger than awareness of death.

Do not listen to those generals and those dusty myths, for the defeated will not remain defeated, and the victor will not remain a victor. History isn’t only measured by battles, massacres and prisons, but by peace with the Other and the self.

Israelis:
Listen to my voice, the voice of our time and yours! Liberate yourselves of the excess of greedy power! Do not remain prisoners of military camps and the iron doors that have shut your minds! I am not waiting for a jailer to release me, I’m waiting for you to be released from my memory.

Translated from the Arabic by Gideon Levy.

Samer Issawi

Jeremi Suri: Destroying the North Korean missile before it is launched is the best of bad options on the Korean Peninsula. A prolonged crisis would undermine regional security and global efforts to stop nuclear proliferation. And a future war would be much worse. The most prudent move is to eliminate the most imminent military threat in self-defense, establish clear and reasonable limits on future belligerence, and maintain allied unity for stability — not forced regime change — in the region. This is the kind of pre-emptive action that would save lives and maybe even preserve the uneasy peace on the Korean Peninsula. More war mongering here.

Civil society organisations spend most of the time writing reports, managing reports, making pre-reports, drinking with funders (advocacy) – but this is the best way to ensure a thing called Transparency – which is important because the reports go to Europe for custody where they are put in a museum for safekeeping because the grassroots are too stupid to know what documentation and transparency mean but when the wild grassroots learn to become a dutiful and dependant lawn, mother Europe will transfer the files.

Sorry Madonna, I digress. As a civil society activist working on the African girl child I would love to talk with you about coming to Kenya where the girl child needs you very much. She is surrounded by wild animals! And corruption!

Kenya is full of vibrant organisations who make wonderful reports but who struggle to get Kenyans to listen to them because Kenyans need a lot of European funding to become ready for democracy and more and more institutions need to be built until the fools learn. Those rebellious Kenyans who keep wanting to do business with the Brics need a good awareness workshop and some focus goups!

Meanwhile, Nato and America will circle our shores to protect us from bad Asians and South Americans. Invest your love Madonna. Invest in love for Africa. For … for our children. Much Love. More here.

“When I look in the mirror, I don’t see a Lindsay. I never have, even when I still called myself that, still told other people to call me that. I always felt like I was a fraud, like the name didn’t belong to me—it belonged to someone else, and I needed to give it back. I needed to get rid of it.” More here.

silas interviewed on NPR here.

The exhibit will be in place from April 9th-12th at the CAP GALLERY (HNES 283, 4700 Keele Street York University) with a special opening event on Tuesday April 9th at 7:00pm. We encourage you and yours to witness the exhibit and contribute to conscious dialogue amongst other visitors and the artists, both through words and with the mediums provided.

The exhibit will include transparent life size sculptures complimented by light, projection, shadow, and sound together creating a multi-medium experience. The transparent nature of the sculptures contributes to the meaning of the piece in the way that the loss of these lives has been made invisible, and only through the reflection of the surrounding is there an adequate lens from which we can observethe extent of devastation, and the cruel intent supporting its continuation.

It is suggested that what symbolizes a states sovereignty is its right to declare war, also described as the “…right to kill.” (Mbembe 2003:6) While the actual count of civilian death is contested, the covert ‘targeted’ overhead drone killing conducted by the United States since 2002 (escalated in 2008 under President Barack Obama’s administration) through the states ‘unofficial’ drone warfare program has resulted in the loss of over 3000 lives without justification, or recourse. (Marsden 2013:2)

Are the methods and morale behind what is nothing short of a “…lethal game of toy story,” (Marsden 2013:2) not best summarized in Foucault’s notion of biopolitics? By continuing to conduct illegal killings through the practice of drone warfare despite international legal criticism is the United States administration implying that some lives are more important than others?

As developed by Michel Foucault in ‘Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76,’ biopolitics refers to the moral philosophy that some lives are more valuable than others, more specifically determining those who must live and those who must die. (Mbembe 2003: 6) We are living right now to witness the crux of a neoliberal capitalist system, with insatiable greed for resources being the precursor for pre-emptive war, mass murder, and the destruction of the lives and livelihood of ‘Other’ bodies, mostly non-white Muslim bodies, bodies when killed referred to by the White House as ‘bugsplat’ (Marsden 2013:2). More here.

the first picture in this article encapsulates the repugnant overlap between femen, racism, orientalism and downright islamophobia. the thin, white, european, bare-chested woman in the picture is trying to bring equal rights to women in muslim countries by making fun of their religion.

she’s sporting a fake black beard (something used to identify/otherize muslim men, like the ones being droned in waziristan, tortured at bagram and languishing in solitary confinement at guantanamo – has femen ever thought about how their mothers, wives and daughters would respond to such crude stereotyping?)

this brave femen protester has the islamic star and crescent scrawled on her chest, in case there was any confusion. the most repulsive racist trope she’s flaunting however is the towel around her head. how literal can one get?

those who talk about freedom of speech (and freedom of un/dress) pls read the comments posted by femen supporters on a picture of zarah sultana who held a sign saying:

‘i am a proud muslimah. i don’t need “liberating”. i don’t appreciate being used to reinforce western imperialism. you do not represent me!’

one of the most civil reactions from freedom-of-expression feminist warriors was: “grab your ankles and remain silent”. funny how anti-muslim, anti-woman hate spills out of the most radical, liberal, “feminist” spaces.

as far as solidarity, let me quote roqayah chamseddine:

‘When it comes to non-natives speaking in regards to native issues – it is a path that must be tread upon lightly in order to avoid (a) tokenization and (b) the usurpation of native voices. Solidarity is great, but it is when campaigns turned publicity stunts like the ones FEMEN indulges in begin using brown bodies as props while at the same time perpetuating orientalism and engaging in blatant prejudicial acts to promote their idea of ‘liberation’. FEMEN, and other such groups, offer no solution to the undeniable subjugation of women present in the Middle East-North Africa, it is all a show of thin, white grandeur.’

finally, on white feminism and its links to imperialism, i quote sara salem:

‘By clearly delineating the boundaries of what is “good” and “bad” feminism, Femen is using colonial feminist rhetoric that defines Arab women as oppressed by culture and religion, while no mention is made of capitalism, racism, or global imperialism. It is actively promoting the idea that Muslim women are suffering from “false consciousness” because they cannot see (while Femen can see) that the veil and religion are intrinsically harmful to all women. Yet again, the lives of Muslim women are to be judged by European feminists, who yet again have decided that Islam – and the veil – are key components of patriarchy. Where do women who disagree with this fit? Where is the space for a plurality of voices? And the most important question of all: can feminism survive unless it sheds its Eurocentric bias and starts accepting that the experiences of all women should be seen as legitimate?”’

pls read the article here. thx.

Articulated at a time when Western liberal democracies are loudly decrying women’s lack of freedom in the Muslim world while lionising gender equality in their own societies, it actually makes a kind of cultural sense to shift the conversation away from the gendered division of labour and profound social injustices upon which US liberalism itself is constituted. The turn to the language of balance, internalising the revolution and a happiness project, in other words, puts the burden of unhappiness, failure and disequilibrium once again on the shoulders of individual women while diverting attention away from US self-scrutiny with respect to its own “woman problem”. More here.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, Femen’s point is precisely about attracting attention — using women’s bodies as a way to sell an idea (how novel). Maybe the women involved don’t really think they’ll directly cause actual change, but rather they — and their breasts — can get people to see the issues (I’m trying very hard not to pun). That’s all fine and well, but I can’t possibly be the first person to point out that taking your unsheathed bosoms to a mosque and using them as a way to force men to think about options for their daughters and sisters and wives seems … screwed up (and let’s not even talk about the gross, racist under- and overtones of International Topless Jihad Day). More here.

The pitmen, the steel workers, the rail employees, the hundreds of thousands of employees in state sector business thrown on the scrapheap in the name of privatised profits. Businesses now – like water and electricity – largely in the hands of foreign owners ripping off the British consumer.

I lived through the Thatcher years as a London-based journalist for The Times and The Observer, when I reported on all the major industrial, political and social upheavals of her rule. I do not look back on those times through the rose-tinted spectacles of her admirers. I remember instead the young lads throwing themselves off the Tyne bridges in Newcastle because they had no work.
…

thatcher and reagan were cut from the same cloth, both in terms of domestic and foreign policy. their pakistani best friend was general zia ul haq. he died much earlier in a plane crash but his legacy continues to dictate pakistan’s future.

“In Pakistan, Margaret Thatcher was best known for supporting General Zia ul Haq’s military dictatorship,” tweeted Time magazine’s Pakistan correspondent Omar Waraich yesterday, referring to the Iron Lady’s anticommunist alliance with the country’s vicious, Islamist dictator. In a speech at a banquet hosted by Zia in 1981, Thatcher praised the general’s “courage and skill” and toasted “the health and happiness of His Excellency”. She made no reference to the need for democracy or elections in the self-styled “Islamic Republic”. More here.

this picture was taken by my son while we were having some delicious arancini in the piazza del duomo, in catania, a few days back. it’s v close to our apt on via auteri.

piazza del duomo

lithograph by syrian artist anas al-mahroos

Most GM crops (over 75%) are engineered to tolerate applications of herbicides. Where such GM crops have been adopted, they have led to massive increases in herbicide use.

Roundup, the herbicide that over 50% of all GM crops are engineered to tolerate, is not safe or benign as has been claimed but has been found to cause malformations (birth defects), reproductive problems, DNA damage, and cancer in test animals. Human epidemiological studies have found an association between Roundup exposure and miscarriage, birth defects, neurological development problems, DNA damage, and certain types of cancer. More here.

Liquor had come to Africa with colonialism. Production of rum propelled the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Later Africa had made a double-edged European import its own. And the history of all that was printed, in shorthand, in the brand names on the bottle tops: Bakassi, Chelsea, Dark Sailor, Ebeano.

In addition, crucially, the metal was visually magnetic. The colors — reds, yellows, silvers, golds — were bold and bright. And it was easy to manipulate, to “fold, crumple, crush,” to quote the title of a documentary film on Mr. Anatsui made in 2011 by Ms. Vogel, a curator and former professor of African art and architecture at Columbia University.

Finally the bottle caps answered Mr. Anatsui’s growing interest in expanding the scale of his art. Pressed flat, twisted, or cut into circles, then punctured, the caps could be wired together into panels or blocks, which were joined to form pliant, fabriclike sheets, each sheet a whole made of fragments, and, potentially at least, endlessly expandable. “When I started working with the bottle caps,” he said recently during a trip the United States, “I thought I’d make one or two things with them, but the possibilities began to seem endless.”The labor involved was arduous but communal, a kind of three-step performance. Studio workers in Nsukka made the initial blocks. Mr. Anatsui determined the configuration of the blocks into a larger works. Whoever installed the finished piece could hang and drape it as they pleased. No way was the only way, no way was permanent.

And when a piece, no matter how large, came down, it could be folded up to fit in the equivalent of a suitcase or trunk. More here.

holi 2013

We returned to the United States with new perspectives on our seemingly endless “War on Terror.” Now, when we think of Pakistan, we first think about the warm smiles, gentle handshakes, bright patterns of fabric, and hours of laughter with students, faculty, and new friends. When we think of the U.S. drone strikes, we no longer see the thousands of people killed as a cold statistic but rather as a series of individual and devastating stories of mothers, fathers, and children. As two individuals, we don’t have the power to stop the drones ourselves. We do, however, have the ability to ask provocative questions to spread social awareness: If we can send unmanned aerial vehicles over a sovereign country to kill thousands of people without judge or jury, what is to prevent another country from doing that to us? What would drone strikes look like if we were the targets rather than unknown people in a place too distant to imagine? More here.

defend equality. love unites.

Also check out this excellent podcast on the subject:

As Same-Sex Marriage protection is extended in more and more states and captivates the attention of the media and the LGBT community, radical Queers are asking, Why is gay marriage the primary issue of the Gay Community and what effect does the funding and emphasis on Same Sex Marriage have on other crucial life and death LGBT issues ? This Monday KPFA radio’s Women’s Magazine presents a special radio documentary produced by Lisa Dettmer, called “Beyond Gay Marriage” which features the voices of LGBT scholars and activists seldom heard in the media, all of whom provide a cutting edge critique of the “Gay Marriage” movement and the mainstreaming of gay politics and talks about what progressive Queers are working on instead. More here.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind – A visualization of all documented drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004. More here.

photograph by ayesha vellani, from the series “kashmir”

“The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers and our clan can no longer act like one,” says Okonkwo’s friend, Obierika, in the novel.

The poet Jackie Kay hailed Achebe as “the grandfather of African fiction” who “lit up a path for many others”, adding that she had reread Things Fall Apart “countless times”.

[...] The author is also known for the influential essay An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1975), a hard-hitting critique of Conrad in which he says the author turned the African continent into “a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognisable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril”, asking: “Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind?”

According to Brown University, where Achebe held the position of David and Marianna Fisher university professor and professor of Africana studies until his death, this essay “is recognised as one of the most generative interventions on Conrad; and one that opened the social study of literary texts, particularly the impact of power relations on 20th-century literary imagination”. More here.

DAHR JAMAIL: I don’t agree. I think all of this is a direct result of—either direct or indirectly a result of the U.S. invasion and occupation and the strategy applied. I mean, we saw something come out just last week in a joint investigation of BBC Arabic and The Guardian, which gave hard evidence, insider evidence, of the machinations of the U.S. using retired Lieutenant Colonel James Steele, infamous during the Reagan administration of orchestrating so many of the death squads in Central America along with Negroponte. Well, Negroponte happened to be the U.S. ambassador to Iraq for some of the occupation and, of course, brought in his old buddy James Steele to set up the same types of tactics, the detentions, the types of torture techniques that we’re seeing rampant across today—across Iraq today, the blatant attempts to foment sectarian violence, sort of a divide-and-conquer policy. Even Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld under Bush, back around 2006, 2007, referred to kind of casually using the “Salvador Option” in Iraq, and that’s precisely what he was describing. So, the sectarianism fomented where, you know, we don’t have a natural sectarianism or animosities between the sects in Iraq, but it was only after the occupation began and these strategies were applied by the Bush administration that we saw the violence, the purging in the mixed neighborhoods, that continues to this day, and the sectarianism, and basically turning Iraqis against one another very effectively. And this is a direct result of the Bush administration policy, as well as bringing in Maliki as prime minister himself.

More here.

nowruz 2013

… for corporate media mouthpieces like [Time magazine], the debates raised over books like Sandberg’s represent another chapter in what they see as a “post-feminist” era–a time and place decades removed from the women’s movement, in which women are now struggling just to be women, balancing the pressures of work and family and dealing with the resulting dilemmas that the movement of the 1960s supposedly never prepared them for.

The media drumbeat about this “post-feminist” era is filled with articles and books with titles like “The Mommy Wars” or “Opt-Out Generation.” They rarely address the concerns of the vast majority of women who are a part of the working class. And they almost never address the ways that the women’s movement of the 1960s was, in fact, a very good thing–and not a problem–for women.

They measure the success of women at large by the success stories of a few corporate executives or political officials at the top–and argue that these examples of “having it all” will eventually trickle down to all women.

The inevitable focus of these articles and books is what women can do personally to succeed.

The answers they provide are insufficient for working-class women who are nowhere near the glass ceiling. And for that matter, they don’t even do much to address the issues facing women at the top–because they ignore the institutional gender inequality that is at the heart of U.S. society. (Elizabeth Schulte)

More here.

“Mom, it won’t wash off,” he said.

“What are you talking about?” she replied.

“The blood. It won’t come off.”

On 20 March last year, the soldier’s striving for self-cleanliness came to a sudden end. That night he locked himself in his car and, with his mother and two sisters screaming just a few feet away and with Swat officers encircling the vehicle, he shot himself in the head.

At the age of 23, William Busbee had joined a gruesome statistic. In 2012, for the first time in at least a generation, the number of active-duty soldiers who killed themselves, 177, exceeded the 176 who were killed while in the war zone. To put that another way, more of America’s serving soldiers died at their own hands than in pursuit of the enemy. More here.

* The total number of dead – a figure impossible to fathom, somewhere near a million or maybe higher (the Lancet’s figure from 2006 if updated would lead us higher yet).

* The total number of refugees – around seven million according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Many fled to Syria, where the two-year bloody war has now left these Iraqis in a position of great peril.

* The destruction of infrastructure – now reconstructed on lines that favor the sectarian impulses of the new political class.

* The war crimes – Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, the very rush to war itself.

More here.

The Pentagon sent a US veteran of the “dirty wars” in Central America to oversee sectarian police commando units in Iraq that set up secret detention and torture centres to get information from insurgents. These units conducted some of the worst acts of torture during the US occupation and accelerated the country’s descent into full-scale civil war. More here.

In retrospect, I realize I was delusional in the early 90s in Sarajevo. I was young and there were many misconceptions I depended on. For one thing, I believed in a kind of urban solidarity—in a fault line separating urban from rural. I had a notion that if you listened to rock ‘n’ roll, you had a bond with others that couldn’t be broken. The people who listened to rock ‘n’ roll, I thought, were bound together against the people who didn’t listen to rock ‘n’ roll. That, of course, didn’t work at all. Your taste in rock ‘n’ roll does not say anything about you, morally or otherwise. My misconception was closely connected to the misconception that art makes you better. That is: you expose yourself to it, you read books and read Shakespeare and watch all the right movies, and when the tough time comes, you’re likely to make the correct decision because you were ennobled by art. There’s no basis in reality for that at all. There’s no connection between consumption of art and moral stamina at all. [...] But despite all that I know rationally, and everything that I can put into words, I can say that I have difficulty giving up the notion of the nobility of art. I make money doing this, and I want to make money, and I would like to have a lot of money, but I still believe that the only reason to write is that somehow it will make something or somebody better. I do believe—and I know I shouldn’t—that art transcends money and success and any of that. You can still do it if you’re not clinging to the notion of nobility. But I am, I’m clinging to it by my nails. I really can’t justify it intellectually. I’d argue against it rationally. Yet, if it wasn’t for that—what would this life be? What would this world be? What the fuck would we do? I’m fully aware that it’s something that cannot be accomplished by me or anyone, but it’s something to strive for, and fail at, daily. More here.

Iraqi-born Syrian Artist Riyadh Neama, 2010

Iraqi-born Syrian Artist Riyadh Neama, 2010

Iraqi-born Syrian Artist Riyadh Neama, 2010

But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your 20 million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your 6-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a 5-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos, “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”; then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. (Martin Luther King Jr)

Interview here.

Begun two years before in the fall of 1845, the potato blight and subsequent famine had reached its height in 1847. It was, of course, much more than a mere natural disaster. British colonial policies before and during the crisis exacerbated the effects of the potato blight, leading to mass death by starvation and disease. For example, in March of 1847, at the time of the Choctaw donation, 734,000 starving Irish people were forced to labor in public works projects in order to receive food. Little wonder that survivors referred to the year as “Black ’47.”
First through letters and newspaper accounts, and later from the refugees themselves, the Irish in America learned of the unfolding horror. Countless individuals sent money and ship tickets to assist friends and family. Others formed relief committees to solicit donations from the general public. Contributions came from every manner of organization, from charitable societies and businesses to churches and synagogues. By the time the famine had ended in the early 1850s, millions in cash and goods had been sent to Ireland.
What made the Choctaw donation so extraordinary was the tribe’s recent history. Only 16 years before, President Andrew Jackson (whose parents emigrated from Antrim) seized the fertile lands of the so-called five civilized tribes (Chickasaw, Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, and Choctaw) and forced them to undertake a harrowing 500-mile trek to Oklahoma known as the Trail of Tears. Of the 21,000 Choctaws who started the journey, more than half perished from exposure, malnutrition, and disease. This despite the fact that during the War of 1812 the Choctaws had been allies of then General Jackson in his campaign against the British in New Orleans.

Perhaps their sympathy stemmed from their recognition of the similarities between the experiences of the Irish and Choctaw. Certainly contemporary Choctaw see it that way. They note that both groups were victims of conquest that led to loss of property, forced migration and exile, mass starvation, and cultural suppression (most notably language).
Increased attention to the Great Famine in recent years has led to renewed recognition of the Choctaw donation. In 1990 a delegation of Choctaw officials was invited to participate in an annual walk in County Mayo commemorating a tragic starvation march that occurred during the Famine. In honor of the special guests, the organizers (Action From Ireland, or AFRI) named the march The Trail of Tears. Two years later, two dozen people from Ireland came to the U.S. and retraced the 500-mile Trail of Tears from Oklahoma to Mississippi. That same year the Choctaw tribe made Ireland’s President Mary Robinson an honorary chief.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of these events is that while they commemorate dark chapters of the past, they are focused on the present and future. In other words, they seek to dramatize the need to stop starvation and suffering worldwide. As the plaque on Dublin’s Mansion House which honors the Choctaw contribution reads: “Their humanity calls us to remember the millions of human beings throughout our world today who die of hunger and hunger-related illness in a world of plenty.

Irish Famine – The Choctaw Send Aid

more about urban violence and the grabbing of land in karachi here.

More than 100 detainees held in the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay are reportedly entering their fifth week of a hunger strike sparked by deteriorating conditions. News of the hunger strike first emerged last week, but it appears the action involves far more prisoners than previously thought. In a letter to his attorney, one detainee wrote: “We are in danger. One of the soldiers fired on one of the brothers a month ago. Before that, they send the emergency forces with M-16 weapons into one of the brothers’ cell blocks. … Now they want to return us to the darkest days under [George W.] Bush. They said this to us. Please do something.” We’re joined by Pardiss Kebriaei, senior staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights and counsel for one of the hunger strikers. More here.

While navigating my own relationship to Delhi and home, it has been infuriating to read Orientalist renditions of South Asian women needing saving from barbaric South Asian men. South Asian women, we are led to believe, are all subjected to honor killings and dowry deaths, coerced into arranged marriages and into killing their female babies. Cultural imperialism has essentialized communities of color as innately reactionary towards women, who are themselves constructed in inherently infantilizing ways devoid of any agency. Maintaining the myth of Western superiority requires a facade of gender equality ‘at home’ that invisibilizes, for example, the gruesome gang rape in Steubenville, Ohio, and US representative Todd Akin’s comments about ‘legitimate rape,’ and the ritualized colonial violence against Indigenous women murdered at alarming rates, and Black women in prisons and migrant women in detention centers, and women of color, poor women, transfolks, and sex workers. Low conviction rates are thrown around as somehow unique to India, ignoring equally low conviction rates in North America and Europe. Media reports also fail to mention how India’s legal regime is a colonial legacy from 1862 that sets strict evidentiary requirements on a survivor. More here.

A historic trial underway in Argentina is set to reveal new details about how Latin American countries coordinated with each other in the 1970s and ‘80s to eliminate political dissidents. The campaign known as “Operation Condor” involved military dictatorships in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay. They worked together to track down, kidnap and kill people they labeled as terrorists: leftist activists, labor organizers, students, priests, journalists, guerilla fighters and their families. The campaign was launched by the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, and evidence shows the CIA and former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were complicit from its outset.” More here.

btw kissinger’s presence has been requested at the trial. the obama administration has not responded.

Over the years, this or that leftist has pronounced themselves “disillusioned” with Chávez, setting out some standard drawn, from theory or history, and then pronouncing the Venezuelan leader as falling short. He’s a Bonapartist, wrote one. He’s no Allende, sighs another. To paraphrase the radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens in Lincoln, nothing surprises these critics and therefore they are never surprising. But there are indeed many surprising things about Chavismo in relationship to Latin American history.

First, the military in Latin America is best known for its homicidal right-wing sadists, many of them trained by the United States, in places like the School of the Americas. But the region’s armed forces have occasionally thrown up anti-imperialists and economic nationalists. In this sense, Chávez is similar to Argentina’s Perón, as well as Guatemala’s Colonel Arbenz, Panama’s Omar Torrijos and Peru’s General Juan Francisco Velasco, who as president between 1968 and 1975 allied Lima with Moscow. But when they weren’t being either driven from office (Arbenz) or killed (Torrijos?), these military populists inevitably veered quickly to the right. Within a few years of his 1946 election, Perón was cracking down on unions, going as far as endorsing the overthrow of Arbenz in 1954. In Peru, the radical phase of Peru’s military government lasted seven years. Chávez, in contrast, was in office fourteen years, and he never turned nor repressed his base.

Second and related, for decades now social scientists have been telling us that the kind of mobilized regime Venezuela represents is pump-primed for violence, that such governments can only maintain energy through internal repression or external war. But after years of calling the oligarchy squalid traitors, Venezuela has seen remarkably little political repression—certainly less than Nicaragua in the 1980s under the Sandinistas and Cuba today, not to mention the United States.

Oil wealth has much to do with this exceptionalism, as it also did in the elite, top-down democracy that existed prior to Chávez. But so what? Chávez has done what rational actors in the neoliberal interstate order are supposed to do: he’s leveraged Venezuela’s comparative advantage not just to fund social organizations but give them unprecedented freedom and power. More here.

Your body has passed.
Like Simón Bolivar, your spirit will live on.
Thank you for reigniting a continent’s imagination.

*MGis | Mark Gonzales

Hugo Chavez

Numbers [always] helped resolve a chief anxiety of colonial administration: the fear of administrative impotency: do we (the British) understand the colony? Can we govern it? The unwieldy detail of prose opened more questions than it answered. It made policy prescriptions difficult. Numbers, on the other hand, reduced a complex reality to precise arithmetic. They made the complications of daily life and local knowledge pliable to comprehension, making policy-planning easier. Numbers helped allay the colonizers’ fears that they could not administer—or rule—properly. Distinct from whether numerical representation actually provided accurate insight, it “created a sense of controlled ingenious reality,” argues Appadurai. Numbers could be debated, discussed and decided upon, far away from the intractable realities of the colonized. With numbers, the empire could sweep troublesome detail under the rug and feel in control.

The American state needs numbers in order to ignore grappling with its own actions in the past and their intense, negative fallout today. Numbers also facilitate America’s imperial fantasy of administrative control. Statistics crowd out descriptions of the historical realities of FATA that would expose the arbitrary underpinnings of the categories of “militant” and “innocent” that exist divorced from American violence. In truth, the dynamics of violence are inextricably linked to American militarism in the region. A thorough and engaged understanding of the racial, class and political aspects of violence is necessary for a broader discussion on drones. We need to understand that, for the most part, no clear distinctions exist between “terrorist” and “civilian,” that these are categories that are created by and are intrinsic to American violence. The world that numbers provide, in which “militants” and “innocents” are neatly disaggregated, doesn’t quite exist on the ground. But, such truths certainly make imperial rule more complicated. So, the U.S. scuttles historical and political detail by focusing on statistics and debating the correct calibration of its killing policy. More here.

[...] Arafat was killed under torture. Torture is routine. But the following is not routine: upon the announcement of his death, thousands of Palestinians, already unified in solidarity with the arduous struggle waged by Palestinian hunger striking prisoners, responded in force. At least 3,000 prisoners refused their meals; thousands poured into the streets of Gaza and impassioned demonstrations erupted across the West Bank. While the State of Israel continues to deploy its deadly arsenal of weapons to repress Palestinians, the banality of the evil of this regime is, as it will always be, eclipsed by the mighty Palestinian will for self-determination. (Charlotte Silver) More here.

Georgia’s difficulties procuring execution drugs is a reflection of the gradual stranglehold that is being put on the US death penalty by authorities and companies around the world refusing to act as accomplices in the death sentence. The European commission, following unilateral action by the UK, has imposed restrictions on the export of medicines to all US corrections departments.

As a result of the European squeeze, Hospira, the only US manufacturer of sodium thiopental, an anaesthetic that was used widely in the triple cocktail of lethal injections, ceased production in 2011. [..] As legal routes for the procurement of medical drugs have been successively shut down, several of the 33 states that still practice the death penalty have resorted to shady methods for acquiring them. Georgia was exposed in 2011 as having been one of the states that bought lethal injection drugs from Dream Pharma, an unlicensed company that operated out of a driving school in west London. (Ed Pilkington) More here.

“An 18-foot-long rhinestone covered replica of a U.S. Predator drone will be the center of new multimedia art exhibit opening on Friday, March 1, at the Hampden Gallery at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The exhibit, titled Home Drone, challenges viewers to imagine their reaction if thousands of deadly drones had struck in the U.S.—specifically Massachusetts—rather than in Pakistan, Yemen, and Afghanistan.” More here.

These Asian immigrants inhabited a nether zone and confused the forces of segregation, which did not know how to classify “in-between” people. Bengali migrant’s skin tones were classified by every shade: “Mulatto” and “White” in a 1900 census; “dark,” “copper,” and “ruddy” in a 1910 passport application processing; “Black,” “Oriental,” “Turkish” or “Malaysian” during the draft registration of the first World War. This shape-shifting sometimes went both ways. Some African Americans began to pretend to be “Hindoo” and cross the lines of segregation. Thus, a black man named Joseph Downing played a spiritualist named “Joveddah de Rajah” in the 1900s. Another African American man, the Reverend Jesse Routte, traveled in the deep south without being accosted, because he had taken to wearing a velveteen robe and a turban. Activist Mary Church Terrell tells a similar story, in her book A Colored Woman in a White World, of an African American who travels with an exposition through Charleston as a “Hindu Fakir.” (Naeem Mohaiemen) More here.

Bengali Harlem

While they maintain great respect and concern for the Hazara community, observers and analysts have expressed increasing dissatisfaction with the imposition of Governor’s rule, and the army’s increased role in Balochistan. Nationalists, leftists and even laymen with information of the past 30 years know that our army has, more often, been part of the problem rather than the solution. This is no exaggeration in Balochistan. Hazaras, however, rightly retort by asking the critical non-wardiwalas what they recommend instead.

From where I stand, there is only one way forward: genuine representatives of the people of Balochistan should be entrusted and allowed to run the affairs of Balochistan. More than anyone else, it is these representatives who have a genuine stake and an honest attachment with the poor masses. (Sajjad Hussain Changezi) More here.

Free Samer Issawi!

“Shahnameh: The Epic of the Persian Kings is a new illustrated edition of the classic work written over one thousand years ago by Abolqasem Ferdowsi, one of Persia’s greatest poets. This new prose translation of the national epic is illuminated with over 500 pages of illustrations and will be published in March 2013 to coincide with the Persian New Year, Nowruz. The lush and intricate illustrations in this edition have been created by award-winning graphic artist and filmmaker Hamid Rahmanian, incorporating images from the pictorial tradition of the Persianate world from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries. The new translation and adaptation by Ahmad Sadri, retells the mythological and epic stories of the original poem in prose format. This Shahnameh is an extraordinary literary and artistic accomplishment.” More here.

Brazil, which was the fifth largest importer of Israeli arms between 2005 and 2010, has been a profitable ally to Israeli security companies. Elbit Systems and Israeli Aerospace Industries now provide Brazil with automated turrets, drones and perimeter defence systems that control the favelas (Brazil’s poor urban neighbourhoods) without putting Brazilian soldiers at risk, according to Hever.

“Countries with extreme inequality (Brazil, India, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, etc) seem to be the natural market for homeland security products. This is where technology can be used to repress impoverished people, enraged about the inequality and exploitation,” said Hever.

And while contracts have not yet been awarded, Israel is expected to be Brazil’s top choice as it prepares its estimated $3bn worth of security projects for the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics. Providing “security” for these mega-sports events really means sweeping the host city “clean” of the unattractive indigent communities that make their homes there. (Charlotte Silver) More here.

And then we have all the other forms of violence in this country that we don’t really call violence, but they are acts of violence. When you—when you make sure that 50 million people don’t have health insurance in your country and that, according to the congressional study that was done, 44,000 people a year die in America for the simple reason that they don’t have health insurance, that’s a form of murder. That murder is being committed by the insurance companies. When you evict millions of peoples—millions of people from their homes, that’s an act of violence. That’s called a home invasion.

All the wrong people are in prison in this country. I can’t believe we’re just standing blocks away from the biggest criminal operation that this country has ever seen, right down that street, and not one of them has gone to prison for what they’ve done. When you have eliminated so many millions of jobs, when you’ve ruined communities like mine, Flint, Michigan, you have killed people, because—because having seen firsthand the effects of these corporate decisions—the alcoholism, the drug abuse, divorce, suicide, all the social problems that go along with this act of violence—but we don’t call it violence, and no one’s ever arrested for it—I think it’s a real shame. And frankly, as an American, this is not how I want to be remembered. (Michael Moore) More here.

“Never being hand-cuffed by a clock on my wrist
and I will never be addicted to watching the watches and clicks
They say time is of the essence
but that essence is us
Sunrise, sunset
that’s all we need – that’s enough
We time our whole lives to a paradigm we don’t trust
we don’t realise that that paradigm was designed by us”

The effort took a devastating step backward yesterday, with the news that six public-health workers were killed in Pakistan; all had been administering polio vaccines. Earlier this year, the World Health Organization declared the eradication of polio to be a world-wide health emergency (a designation which makes it easier to release funds). It did so primarily because the end seemed in sight. Just three countries continue to report infections: Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nigeria. As soon as the news of the murders spread, however, the health minister for Pakistan’s southern Sindh Province put a halt to the vaccination program, which had employed more than twenty-four thousand aid workers. The risks of this detour, which will leave tens of thousands of people vulnerable to new infections, cannot be overstated.

Nobody has yet claimed responsibility for the coördinated attacks, but the Taliban has opposed polio vaccination vigorously. Taliban leaders have issued several religious edicts saying that the U.S. runs a spy network under the guise of a vaccine program. Now, there is no question that this is a depraved, heartless, and sickening act. But, as I wrote in a post here more than a year ago, the claim about the C.I.A. is not entirely untrue. In 2011, American intelligence, in a stunning display of arrogance, stupidity, or both, faked a vaccination drive as a cover for its attempt to pin down the location of Osama bin Laden. (The idea was to get DNA samples from the children in the Abbottabad compound while injecting them with a dummy vaccine, and then compare them to those of bin Laden’s relatives.) More here.

Yet that context – the unprecedented legitimation of violence provided by years of brutal war – almost never enters the debate. If, as Ballard once said, the suburbs now dream of violence, shouldn’t the first question be why? Consider: after the Colorado shootings, well-meaning journalists anguished about how the news might be reported without inspiring fresh crimes. Their worries were not unfounded – immediately after the massacre, tribute pages to the killer proliferated on Facebook; within a few days, a would-be copycat was arrested. But what does it say about a society if random acts of murder now exercise so great an attractive power that it becomes dangerous to even speak of them?

White men from prosperous families grow up with the expectation that our voices will be heard. We expect politicians and professors to listen to us and respond to our concerns. We expect public solutions to our problems. And when we’re hurting, the discrepancy between what we’ve been led to believe is our birthright and what we feel we’re receiving in terms of attention can be bewildering and infuriating. Every killer makes his pain another’s problem. But only those who’ve marinated in privilege can conclude that their private pain is the entire world’s problem with which to deal. This is why, while men of all races and classes murder their intimate partners, it is privileged young white dudes who are by far the likeliest to shoot up schools and movie theaters. (Hugo Schwyzer) More here.

kwame nkrumah on neocolonialism in 1965:

(1) it continues to actively control the affairs of newly independent states. (2) it is manifested through economic and monetary measures. (3) while neocolonialism may be a form of continuing control by a state’s formal colonial masters, these states may also become subjected to imperial control by new actors (the US, international financial and monetary organizations, etc). (4) conflicts are in the form of “limited wars” and neocolonial territories are often the places where these “limited wars” are waged. (5) as the ruling elite pay constant deference to their neocolonial masters, the needs of the population are often ignored, leaving issues of education, development, and poverty unresolved.

bingo.

our christmas tree in 2012

Ambreen Butt. Untitled, from the series Dirty Pretty, 2008.

This is not the first or only case where the state has interfered in the lives of people who have limited means of resistance. And as in other cases, the system that carried out this policy is extremely sophisticated, so it is hard to find a specific person who is responsible or a signed and written order. But the televised investigation, conducted with researcher Sava Reuven, found that more than 40 women have received the shot.

Depo-Provera has a shameful history. According to a report by the Isha L’Isha organization, the injections were given to women between 1967 and 1978 as part of an experiment that took place in the U.S. state of Georgia on 13,000 impoverished women, half of whom were black. Many of them were unaware that the injections were part of an experiment being conducted on their bodies. Some of the women became sick and a few even died during the experiment.

There are many examples across the world of efforts to reduce birthrates among disadvantaged populations that lack the resources and the capability to resist. During the 1960s, the U.S. was concerned by the increase of the population in Puerto Rico. In 1965, it was reported that 34 percent of Puerto Rican mothers aged 20 to 49 had been sterilized. (Efrat Yardai) More here.

…

this article mentions radiation that was administered until the 60s as a way to prevent ringworm in jewish immigrants from arab countries. here is more info on that:

The government radiation campaign began in the late 1940s, when a fear arose in the country of an outbreak of a plague of ringworm, a skin disease that grows in the roots of the hair and quickly spreads among children who live in crowded conditions, with poor hygiene. The prejudices of the establishment toward the Mizrahi (Jews of North African and Middle Eastern origin) immigrants contributed both to intensifying this fear and to the means used to solve the problem.

The top echelons of the Ministry of Health and the Medical Corps of the Israel Defense Forces decided to begin a comprehensive treatment and prevention campaign, which was to include radioactive treatments of the heads of all the children up to age 15 who had immigrated from Arab countries. In all, about 100,000 children underwent these treatments.

At a certain stage of the campaign, which lasted until 1960, it was also decided to transfer radiation machines to the Jewish Agency transit camps in Marseilles and other places in Europe and to carry out the treatments there, while the children were still in transit from North Africa to Israel. The medical world at the time, even outside Israel, was as yet unaware of the future damage involved in these radiation treatments; the connection between such treatments and cancer and other illnesses was discovered only years later.

Many people have testified that the radiation campaign caused the children serious emotional harm. Without any explanation, they were brought to clinics where the hair on their heads was shaven, the hair that remained was pulled out with hot wax, and the roots were eliminated with x-rays.

The exact number of Israelis who have suffered from various types of cancer because of radiation against ringworm is not known. However, Prof. Baruch Modan, who researched the subject when he was the head of the Department of Clinical Epidemiology at the Sheba Medical Center in Tel Hashomer, discovered over 30 years ago that their number was more than double that in the general population. The treatments caused many other illnesses: sterility, the loss of teeth and hair, and severe and ugly scars on the scalp and on other parts of the body. According to the most recent estimates, tens of thousands of people contracted cancer or other illnesses as a result of the radiation campaign. More here.

“The humanisation campaign consists not only of conveying the personal stories of Indian farming families but also pinpointing the direct link between those of us who buy certain clothes and those of us who perish in the clothes-making process.”

According to filmmaker Leah Borromeo, director of the forthcoming Dirty White Gold about cotton and fashion, the dearth of international concern over the issue is also a result of the fact that “people haven’t made the connection between our consumer habits and the lives and deaths of farmers”.

The objective of the film, which shines a light on the entire cotton supply chain, is to help force legislation that will “make ethics and sustainability the norm in the fashion industry”. (Belén Fernández) More here.

The African student, thanks to the color of her skin and to her origins – a continent seen as backward by that same Indian middle class that is widely lauded for joining global modernity – is subconsciously slotted alongside those ‘lower classes’ of society.

In this country of largely brown-skinned people once colonized by white men, the color of skin remains a point of discrimination. “Fair skin” is considered an asset, and is prominently mentioned in matrimonial advertisements. One of the hottest-selling of all cosmetics in the country is Hindustan Unilever’s “Fair and Lovely” skin-lightening cream for women in India. The product was launched with television commercials showing depressed, dark-complexioned women ignored by men, who use the product and then suddenly find boyfriends and better careers. (The ads were criticized as racist and withdrawn in 2007.) More here.

…

“PLEASE RESIST ME” BY LUKA LESSON

Please resist me, colonise me, compromise me and conflict me
please don’t risk me
if you see me at the airport, please come and frisk me

Please resist me, colonise me, compromise me and conflict me
please don’t risk me
please call me stupid
because your resistance brings my evolution

Please resist me, call me a wog
It’s brought us so close together I could call me a squad

Please resist me, lock me in solitary confinement
I’ll close my eyes and admire the quality of the silence
I’ll write rhymes in my mind honestly and define them
solidly redefine and memorise them
until like a diamond when I come out I’ll be better than when I arrived in

Please resist me, keep me under the thumb
Keep me down trodden Keep me under the gun
Keep me working harder under thunder and sun
Son – haven’t you heard?
I’m becoming a gun

Please resist me, because resistance brings evolution
and you’ve resisted me consistently
I thank you for your contribution
I’m a happy man, your stupidity has made me strong
I’ve developed wings, a thick skin and this here opposable thumb
It holds my pen which loads my explodable tongue
So without loading a gun
I’m killing high quotas of unemotional … punks

Sorry, you also taught me to speak French
I learnt it when you kept keeping me at arms-length
And then I learnt Italian just to expand my head
And Greek to learn from where my ancestors had fled
And then I learnt some Yanyuwa to show the people of this land respect
You see it’s been your example that has led me to leave you for dead

So don’t trust me, I’m risky
Insurmountable unaccountable
I’m an undeniable unreliable maniacal liability
I fire soliloquies and my liturgies
literally leave a literary litany

You see when I was little
They told me I was Illegitimate, illiterate and limited
Little did they know that in a minute I’d be killing it
I’m vivid like in cinemas so my synonym is vividness
I stick it like I’m cinnamon and kill it like a militant
I live it like a citizen – you live a life like imprisonment
Besides Indigenous, immigrant might be the most legitimate of citizens
So it’s better to live a life like us. Isn’t it?

So I started with Israeli practices of confinement in Lebanon and Palestine and US detention and incarceration practices in its War on Terror and started going back in history. With each layer of history of confinement that I excavated, I felt like had to go back deeper. In the end, the subsoil of the project turned out to be the Boer War, and the contemporaneous Spanish War on Cuba, and their concentration camps. The two or three wars that ended up mattering a great deal were the ones that today’s counterinsurgents themselves claim as the originary wars. For the US, it always goes back to the British Emergency in Malaya, the Algerian War of Independence, and of course the Vietnam War. For the Israelis, so much is an echo of the various British counterinsurgencies in Palestine, primarily in the 1930s against the Palestinian Arab Revolt, but also against Jewish insurgents in the 1940s. (Laleh Khalili) More here.

my comments about the symposium on “honor crimes”: i didn’t have as much time as i would have liked but i talked about the islamophobic implications of using a loaded term like honor killings instead of locating such crimes w/i the realm of gender-based violence. also discussed the culturalist approach of understanding domestic violence in minority groups vs confronting racism and analyzing economic as well as political factors that keep certain communities oppressed. it’s good to remember that discrimination reinforces patriarchy.

As one who deals with language & the worlds it creates, I remind you that some of the most intense amounts of dissonance occur when numerous people use the same word, yet with very different definitions.

This is increasingly clear in days where corporations are legally ‘people’, individuals defend nation states like lovers, and bigotry is exported overseas in the name of “freedom loving people” and “women’s rights.”

For in the absence of a shared definition, talking heads will attempt to bruise beautiful ones in the seconds after they are barely born, using some perverted idea of ‘love’ as an excuse. Whatever they tell you, I ask you to not forget:

…love is not violent,
…cupid does not drive a predator drone.

*MGis | Mark Gonzales

But up close war is a soulless void. War is about barbarity, perversion, and pain. Human decency and tenderness are crushed, and people become objects to use or kill. The noise, the stench, the fear, the scenes of eviscerated bodies and bloated corpses, the cries of the wounded all combine to spin those in combat into another universe. In this moral void, naïvely blessed by secular and religious institutions at home, the hypocrisy of our social conventions, our strict adherence to moral precepts, becomes stark. War, for all its horror, has the power to strip away the trivial and the banal, the empty chatter and foolish obsessions that fill our days. It might let us see, although the cost is tremendous. (Chris Hedges) More here.

Total surveillance would indeed appear to be a prominent NYPD aspiration given the comprehensiveness of its list of common “radicalisation incubators” for germinating terrorists: cafes, student associations, non-governmental organisations, butcher shops, book stores, and so on.

According to the official “Homegrown Threat” manual [PDF], “[g]iving up cigarettes, drinking, gambling and urban hip-hop gangster clothes” may indicate a Muslim’s “progression along the radicalisation continuum” toward “Jihadisation”. The report fails to advise persons who continue to sport hip-hop gangster attire on how to go about avoiding disproportionate subjection to other violations of civil rights in the form of the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk campaign.

Discriminatory mapping of Muslims clearly does nothing to resolve such homegrown threats as were on display during the December 2012 massacre in Connecticut, though it presumably contributes to the surge in anti-Muslim violence in the US – a natural byproduct of the selective elimination of human rights in favour of a narrative of fear. As the current legal motion by US civil rights lawyers reminds us once again, the only unviolated Muslim right in this country is the right to oppressive surveillance. (Belen Fernandez) More here.

The lesson here is clear. Politicians would like to avoid dealing with social problems and human right issues, especially if they identify their roots in their own political “base.” But the case of Beitar Jerusalem – for years, written off as a lost cause – teaches us that on human right issues, outside intervention is effective (perhaps it’s the only effective thing); and that public opinion and local institutions are more attentive and receptive to pressure than it seems, as long as its presented in a clear and effective way. (Noam Sheizaf) More here.

The real story and the tragedy of what happened to Guru is too immense to be contained in a courtroom. The real story would lead us to the Kashmir valley, that potential nuclear flashpoint, and the most densely militarised zone in the world, where half a million Indian soldiers (one to every four civilians) and a maze of army camps and torture chambers that would put Abu Ghraib in the shade are bringing secularism and democracy to the Kashmiri people. Since 1990, when the struggle for self-determination became militant, 68,000 people have died, 10,000 have disappeared, and at least 100,000 have been tortured.

What sets Guru’s killing apart is that, unlike those tens of thousands who died in prison cells, his life and death were played out in the blinding light of day in which all the institutions of Indian democracy played their part in putting him to death. Now he has been hanged, I hope our collective conscience has been satisfied. Or is our cup of blood still only half full? (Arundhati Roy) More here.

[...] I have come to realize that the issue of Palestine has a much broader significance for left politics in Pakistan, and more generally, for anti-imperial politics, globally. Palestine often becomes a convenient rhetorical tool in Pakistan, as elsewhere in Muslim societies and the Arab world, to unify disaffected masses by those voices—religious as well as secular–who do not always themselves engage in real struggle for the rights of people in Swat, Sindh, or Balochistan, or in anti-imperial politics more generally. The absence of a radical, left anti-imperial critique in the current moment makes it even more difficult to speak of Palestine in a society in which this critique has been marginalized and stamped out so that distinguished left Pakistani activists can openly support U.S. imperialism’s bloody yet “smart” wars. The racialized specter of the “Muslim terrorist” haunts us in every corner, from Gaza to Rawalpindi, and those who wish to distance themselves from it run so far in the opposite direction they fall off the cliff of Orientalism, succumbing to stereotypes of their own culture as inherently barbaric and in need of the West’s “humanitarian” wars. (Sunaina Maira) More here.

Remember, those ever-multiplying drones that are flying now all over Africa, Asia and the Middle East, spying on the activities of the peoples of many nations and blowing up men women and children by the hundreds, are already coming back here to America. Mark my words: just like the violations of our vaunted freedoms enumerated above, these drones, which will first be used to monitor and spy on our hitherto Constitutional protected activities, will eventually carry the same Hellfire missiles that have been blowing up men women and children in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya and Somalia, and will begin blowing us up here in America too.

It’s only a matter of time.

If you think that is hyperbole, just imagine back to the year 2000, and try to recall if you ever could have imagined the US as a nation where the president could just order the termination of an American citizen or a 16-year-old kid on his own whim, or maintain a lengthy “kill list” in the Oval Office.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has famously declared that the Constitution is not a living document, but rather a “dead” one. In saying that, he was trying in his inelegant way to suggest that it should not be interpreted in the light of current society but only can be what its authors intended. If President Obama is not challenged by an impeachment effort for his violations of the Constitution, that document may be far more dead than even Justice Scalia imagines. (Dave Lindorff) More here.

The reason this is so fitting is because, as I’ve detailed many times, it was these same early Bush/Cheney theories that made me want to begin writing about politics, all driven by my perception that the US government was becoming extremist and dangerous. During the early Bush years, the very idea that the US government asserted the power to imprison US citizens without charges and due process (or to eavesdrop on them) was so radical that, at the time, I could hardly believe they were being asserted out in the open.

Yet here we are almost a full decade later. And we have the current president asserting the power not merely to imprison or eavesdrop on US citizens without charges or trial, but to order them executed – and to do so in total secrecy, with no checks or oversight. If you believe the president has the power to order US citizens executed far from any battlefield with no charges or trial, then it’s truly hard to conceive of any asserted power you would find objectionable. (Glenn Greenwald) More here.

A striking example is the eastern Congo, a treasure trove of strategic minerals, controlled by an atrocious rebel group known as the M23, which in turn is run by Uganda and Rwanda, the proxies of Washington.

Long planned as a “mission” for Nato, not to mention the ever-zealous French, whose colonial lost causes remain on permanent standby, the war on Africa became urgent in 2011 when the Arab world appeared to be liberating itself from the Mubaraks and other clients of Washington and Europe. The hysteria this caused in imperial capitals cannot be exaggerated. Nato bombers were dispatched not to Tunis or Cairo but Libya, where Muammar Gaddafi ruled over Africa’s largest oil reserves. With the Libyan city of Sirte reduced to rubble, the British SAS directed the “rebel” militias in what has since been exposed as a racist bloodbath.

The indigenous people of the Sahara, the Tuareg, whose Berber fighters Gaddafi had protected, fled home across Algeria to Mali, where the Tuareg have been claiming a separate state since the 1960s. As the ever watchful Patrick Cockburn points out, it is this local dispute, not al-Qaida, that the West fears most in northwest Africa… “poor though the Tuareg may be, they are often living on top of great reserves of oil, gas, uranium and other valuable minerals”.

Almost certainly the consequence of a French/US attack on Mali on 13 January, a siege at a gas complex in Algeria ended bloodily, inspiring a 9/11 moment in David Cameron. The former Carlton TV PR man raged about a “global threat” requiring “decades” of western violence. He meant implantation of the west’s business plan for Africa, together with the rape of multi-ethnic Syria and the conquest of independent Iran. (John Pilger) More here.

“Great riches are being taken from our land for the benefit of a few, including the government of Canada and Ontario, who receive large royalty payments, while we receive so little,” outlines Chief Spence in a 2011 speech.

Today the annual median income for aboriginal people is 30 percent lower than the Canadian average, according to recent national census data. In reality the development of extraordinary mineral and energy wealth on First Nations territories, has done little to address the intense poverty and political marginalisation for the majority of aboriginal people.

Idle No More sounds an alarm on this colonial reality, accurately highlighting Canada’s relative economic success as dependent on harvesting land and resources on indigenous territories without meaningful consultation, consent or remittance. (Stefan Christoff) More here.

That’s why, in the Washington, DC, area, black kids are two to five times more likely to suspended or expelled from school than their white classmates, and why in New York City, over the course of a four-month period in the summer and fall of 2011, all but four of the sixty-three students arrested in school were black or Latino. They aren’t disproportionately more disruptive, but their behavior is interpreted as such.

This is how you end up with Trayvon Martins and Jordan Davises. We create these images of monsters and then wonder why people go out slaying them.

This is part of the reason why the current gun control debate is so disingenuous. We want universal background checks to ensure criminals don’t have access to guns, but then don’t look at the ways in which we create criminals. We want mental health checks, but show little-to-no concern for the trauma visited upon black and brown youths caught in the crosshairs of violence and racism. But none of this is surprising.

Which is perhaps the most infuriating aspect of it all. I wasn’t shocked when I read about Diaz, though I wanted to be. I’ve come to expect news like this to hit me in the face before I’ve even had breakfast. Too many of us have, and we know that it will continue to be that way as long as our fellow citizens continue to see young people of color as little more than a bunch of thugs in waiting. (Mychal Denzel Smith) More here.

The dominant 1990s narrative of Afro-pessimism—famine! war! strife!—is currently being swapped out for an equally simplistic narrative of Afro-optimism—mobile phones! emerging markets! Chinese investment! Ultimately, Afro-pessimism and Afro-optimism are both predetermined narratives with pat conclusions. Some critics of the old pessimism now claim that media coverage of Africa is getting better. But what does better media coverage of Africa mean? With a proliferation of different types of images, perhaps we can look past simple conclusions and find a more complicated narrative that leaves space for simple moments, like a woman doing laundry.

[...] Using the iPhone to photograph Africa takes the political act of representing a place whose “otherness” usually allows it to be a repository for our stereotyped narratives and instead renders them in the same color palette as yesterday’s summer afternoon BBQ.

We have so many ideas about what Africa looks like. Using an iPhone circumvents these preconceived notions and makes a distant place accessible and familiar. We don’t just need photojournalism about Africa; we need a whole new visual literacy. The iPhone’s shortcomings as a tool of photojournalism might be its strength in a battle against stereotypes—it normalizes images of Africa by participating in today’s dominant visual aesthetic. And this makes it revolutionary. (Glenna Gordon) More here.

As Salon.com explained, “Mere hours earlier, a US drone dropped missiles over Yemen, killing two [alleged] al-Qaeda militants as part of an intensified airstrike campaign which began last month.” The article added, “It has been well-established in reports (like those from the Washington Post‘s Greg Miller) that the Obama administration has set up a national security apparatus ensuring, contra the president’s words Monday, a perpetual war.”

But then again, Obama’s is a modern political success story — one based on spin rather than substance. On Guantánamo, as on other topics of concern when it comes to national security, including the use of drones — the President needs to be told that spin will not secure a meaningful legacy when what is being spun is illegal, unjust, or both. (Andy Worthington) More here.

this is one of the most illuminating interviews i’ve heard in a while – it includes obama’s track record, the realities of occupation in afghanistan, the drone war in yemen, american collaboration with warlords in somalia, the new covert war in mali, CIA-hollywood projects such as zero dark thirty, the persecution of investigative journalists and much more. the brilliant jeremy scahill and rick rowley have produced a new documentary “dirty wars: the world is a battlefield” which has just opened to packed audiences at sundance. we should do everything to bring this film to our towns and cities and into american consciousness. More here.

‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time . . . .

Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.’” – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

A section of the Northern Mali population is Tuareg. The Tuareg, like other colonised nations, are split across the artificial borders constructed by the French, specifically where Northern Mali meets Niger. Tuareg on both sides of this border have been campaigning and fighting for secular autonomy since independence in the 1960s, and there has been a resurgence following the ethnic cleansing of Tuareg and other sub-Sahara Africans from Libya by the NATO-backed, Al-Qaeda affiliated rebels. In this context, a united Tuareg resistance has the potential to erode power from the central Mali government, and even control areas of land in which the Tuareg live, but the French want to mine.

In order to justify the invasion, the threat of Islamist terror had to at least appear tangible. According to Dr Jeremy Keenan, of SOAS, University of London:

“In 2004, President Tandja attempted to provoke the Tuareg into actions which could be portrayed to the Americans as ‘former rebels turning to terrorism’. He arrested and gaoled Rhissa ag Boula, the former leader of the rebel Front de Libération de l’Azawak et de l’Aïr (FLAA) and its signatory to the 1995 Peace Accord and subsequently a government minister, on a trumped up murder charge. He was released without charge after 13 months, but not until a number of Tuareg had been provoked into taking up arms. That enabled the government to send some 150 of its newly US-trained troops into the Tuareg stronghold of the Aïr Mountains”. (Adam Elliott-Cooper) More here.

syrian artist, bahram hajo, paar/couple 2012

I am the artist from Dawn.com on Vimeo.

Boas lived to see his ideas inform much of social anthropology, but it wasn’t until more than half a century after his death that modern genetics proved his intuitions to be true. Studies of the human genome leave no doubt that the genetic endowment of humanity is a single continuum. Race is a fiction. We are all cut from the same genetic cloth, all descendants of a relatively small number of individuals who walked out of Africa some 60,000 years ago and then, on a journey that lasted 40,000 years, some 2,500 generations carried the human spirit to every corner of the habitable world.

It follows, as Boas believed, that all cultures share essentially the same mental acuity, the same raw genius. Whether this intellectual capacity and potential is exercised in stunning works of technological innovation, as has been the great historical achievement of the West, or through the untangling of the complex threads of memory inherent in a myth – a primary concern, for example, of the Aborigines of Australia – is simply a matter of choice and orientation, adaptive insights and cultural priorities. There is no hierarchy of progress in the history of culture, no Social Darwinian ladder to success. The Victorian notion of the savage and the civilised, with European industrial society sitting proudly at the apex of a pyramid of advancement that widens at the base to the so-called primitives of the world, has been thoroughly discredited – indeed, scientifically ridiculed for the racial and colonial notion that it was, as relevant to our lives today as the belief of 19th-century clergymen that the Earth was but 6,000 years old. (Wade Davis) More here.

But that globality is no more – people from every clime and continent are up and about claiming their own cosmopolitan worldliness and with it their innate ability to think beyond the confinements of that Eurocentricism, which to be sure is still entitled to its phantom pleasures of thinking itself the centre of the universe. The Gramscian superimposed “similar conditions” are now emerging in multiple cites of the liberated humanity.

The world at large, and the Arab and Muslim world in particular, is going through world historic changes – these changes have produced thinkers, poets, artists, and public intellectuals at the centre of their moral and politcial imagination – all thinking and acting in terms at once domestic to their immediate geography and yet global in its consequences.

Compared to those liberating tsunamis now turning the world upside down, cliche-ridden assumption about Europe and its increasingly provincialised philosophical pedigree is a tempest in the cup. Reduced to its own fair share of the humanity at large, and like all other continents and climes, Europe has much to teach the world, but now on a far more leveled and democratic playing field, where its philosophy is European philosophy not “Philosophy”, its music European music not “Music”, and no infomercial would be necessary to sell its public intellectuals as “Public Intellectuals”. More here.

Zero Dark Thirty, nominated for the “best picture of year” Oscar award, is a harbinger of things to come. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) signed into law by Obama earlier this month includes an amendment, passed in the House last May, that legalizes the dissemination of propaganda to US citizens. Journalist Naomi Klein argues that the propaganda “amendment legalizes something that has been illegal for decades: the direct funding of pro-government or pro-military messaging in media, without disclosure, aimed at American citizens.”

We can therefore expect not only more such films, but also more misinformation on our TV screens, in our newspapers, on our radio stations and in social media websites. What used to be an informal arrangement whereby the State Department and the Pentagon manipulated the media has now been codified into law. Be ready to be propagandized to all the time, everywhere.

We live in an Orwellian world: the government has sought and won the power to indefinitely detain and to kill US citizens, all wrapped in cloud of secrecy, and to lie to us without any legal constraints. The NDAA allows for indefinite detention, and a judge ruled that the Obama administration need not provide legal justification for extra judicial killings based on US law thereby granting carte blanche authority to the president to kill whoever he pleases with no legal or public oversight. Such a system requires an equally powerful system of propaganda to convince the citizenry that they need not be alarmed, they need not speak out, they need not think critically, in fact they need not even participate in the deliberative process except to pull a lever every couple of years in an elaborate charade of democracy. We are being asked, quite literally, to amuse ourselves to death. (Deepa Kumar) More here.

Aaron Swartz keynote – “How we stopped SOPA” at F2C:Freedom to Connect 2012, Washington DC on May 21 2012:

today “julius caesar” at the donmar (love the idea of an all female cast) and harold pinter’s “old times” with kristin scott thomas and rufus sewell. thank u to dr russell peck and his beautiful wife ruth for inviting me to be a part of this theater course. it was a once in a lifetime experience. this is professor peck’s last trip to london as a leader of this class. he’s been doing it for 23 yrs. we gave him a much deserved standing ovation (along with some chocolate cake). long live thought-provoking theater!

ruth peck, mara ahmed and russell peck

more here.

bahadur shah zafar, the last mughal emperor of india

[...] From this point of view, ‘bad Muslims’ were clearly responsible for terrorism.

[...] The good Muslims are the assimilated ones; they berate other Muslims for their cultural backwardness and, most particularly, they berate the women for revealing such backwardness by wearing the headscarf, the chador, or the veil. These good Muslims are styled (and style themselves) as the anti-hijabis. They acquiesce to American imperial interests, vociferously defend these, and know their proper place as supplicants to the west. They are appropriately grateful for having been allowed to partake in its civilizational project, and they want to aid the west in its quest to liberate their co-religionists, especially the women, around the world.

However, significant media coverage was also given to the bad Muslim woman, the one who dares to defy western gender norms, who refuses to condemn her religion and its adherents. This is the woman who is not imperilled, but who imperils the west by her embrace of Islam, or by her resistance to occupation and imperialist aggression. She is the ‘Black widow’ of Chechnya , the suicide bomber of Palestine, the ‘Doctor Germ’ and ‘Mrs Anthrax’ of Iraq.

This Muslim woman is not to be rescued: she is unrepentent. The worst of these women, as depicted in the photograph discussed at the beginning of this chapter, are the ones who refuse to unveil themselves. They are labelled as fanatical and oblivious to male domination. Their embrace of Islam is seen as an affront to the freedoms enjoyed by western women. Such an embrace of Islam is only tolerable to the nation of civilized subjects if it is accompanied with the simultaneous, but more ardent, embrace of superior western values and norms. More here.

More here.

In the end, what truly mattered was setting the record straight and acknowledging that Palestinians are native sons and daughters who have been cruelly dispossessed of home, history, heritage and story. What mattered was the acknowledgement. Uttering the truth, no matter how painful, is what I needed to hear. Because it was in that admission that Miko Peled became a man I could embrace as a brother and fellow countryman.

In that sense, it can be said that this book is about how Miko Peled was transformed from being the general’s son to being a native son of the land. (Susan Abulhawa)

More here.

Pakistani artist Ambreen Butt, Untitled (Ladybugs), from the series Daughter of the East, 2008.

Now, those of us who are following this closely knew this from Bahrain. Bahrain is really the critical question. As soon as Bahrain activists were denied access into Egypt, antennas went up that Mohamed Morsi is having an understanding with the Saudis because of the money that he needs from the Saudis and the Qataris not to allow Bahraini activists to enter Egypt in order to consolidate with their Egyptian counterparts and do what Egyptians have done in Egypt, to do it in Bahrain.

So there is no doubt that the Saudis and the Qataris and the other Gulf areas, they are scared by these revolutions. These are massive and open-ended revolutions, and anything that can happen. (Hamid Dabashi)

More here.

“Sheehi’s analysis of Islamophobia as an ideological formation brings a much needed dose of fresh air, and analytical clarity, to the burgeoning field of research on how the a deep-seated psychological fear of Islam and Muslims has been produced and circulated to enable not merely war, but a globalized militarism of historically unprecedented scale that most Americans have come to take for granted as necessary and inevitable in the post-September 11 world. A worthy update of Said’s seminal discussion of Orientalism and one that leaves few players in the contemporary foreign policy establishment, in particular so-called liberals, unscathed.” (Mark LeVine, author of Why They Don’t Hate Us and Heavy Metal Islam)

Nazareth College’s Hickey Center for Interfaith Studies and Dialogue presents:

Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims
When: Wednesday, November 28th at 7:00pm
Where: Gerald G.Wilmot Hall, Arts Center, Nazareth College

The Arab Spring And Foundation Of Modern Arab Identity
When: Thursday, November 29th at 12:15pm
Where: Galisano Academic Center, Room 38, Nazareth College

Speaker: Dr Stephen Sheehi

Stephen Sheehi is Associate Professor of Arabic and Arab Culture and the Director of the Arabic Program at the University of South Carolina. He is also core faculty in USC’s Comparative Literature Program and the Islamic World Cultures Program. In addition to Arabic, he teaches courses on the intellectual, literary, cultural, artistic and food heritage of the modern Arabo-Islamic world. His work interrogates various modalities of self, society, and political economy within Arab modernity but takes particular interest in cultural, literary and intellectual history, photography and art of the Arab Renaissance. Prof. Sheehi’s latest book is Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2011). The book examines the rise of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiments in the West following the end of the Cold War.

The Event is free and open to the public. Pls park in Lot A of the Arts Center, Nazareth College.

Co-sponsored by: International Studies Program and Department of Religious Studies

dr stephen sheehi

La passion de la peinture (passion, don, obsession…peu importe), me vient de ma mère et de mes frères aînés (tout le monde peignait, plus ou moins dans la famille… atavisme?); tandis que la passion du verbe, des mots me vient de mon père. Très tôt, j’ai opté pour la peinture, inconsciemment au début, bien sûr, et plus consciemment plus tard, sans pour autant entreprendre d’ études académiques. Je suis donc ce que l’on appelle: autodidacte, même si ce terme n’est pas tout à fait exact.

artwork by syrian artist nihad wicho

Helen Benedict: The suit is on behalf of fifteen women and two men who were sexually assaulted and/or raped in the military, not just the army. It was inspired, in part, by The Lonely Soldier, which described the rates of sexual harassment, assault, and rape within the military of female and male soldiers, perpetrated by their comrades, not by the enemy, not by outsiders. The statistics are horrifying. Somewhere between one in five and one in three women are sexually assaulted while serving alongside their comrades.

Richard Wolinsky: There’s a scene where two soldiers assault Kate.

Helen Benedict: It isn’t an exact replica of any one story I heard any more than the characters are. They’re not conglomerate characters or disguised real people, but I heard many, many stories of rape.

Richard Wolinsky: At one point, Kate goes to the bathroom and sees these horrendous epithets on the wall, including “sand queen.” Is sand queen an actual term they use?

Helen Benedict: It’s a derogatory term that’s specific to the Iraq war, which comes mainly out of the army. It means an unattractive woman who is the object of a lot of attention from men because women are so scarce. It goes to her head, she gets very arrogant, and she also allows herself to be used by these men who wouldn’t look at her twice at home. As one soldier said, “She’s a mattress.” The language they use about women is so horrific. I decided to use it not only because somebody says that about Kate, but because it summarizes the denigrating attitude that so many military men have towards military women. More here.

More here.

Manto’s short story ‘Toba Tek Singh’ was my closest glimpse of the scars of Partition that my father never shared with us. His family came to Lahore in 1947 from a tiny village near Amritsar; his grandparents were beheaded before his mother’s eyes. I think he let his children see his past through reading ‘Toba Tek Singh’, a satirical account of the inmates of a mental asylum who have nowhere to go at Partition, but are forever left in limbo, between Pakistan and India.

The story made me deeply suspicious of easy categorization, particularly along ethnic and religious lines. It also made me understand that I come from a country that wasn’t shaped by those who migrated to it, like my parents, nor by the many indigenous tribes who’d lived there long before any one presumed to scratch lines across their land. Mine is the first generation of writers to be born in Pakistan, so, like my parents, I also carry the weight of beginning. The need to look in Pakistan’s looking-glass and know the slippery ghosts of my history has been imperative for me as a writer. I don’t think I’ve ever stopped hungering to know my place in these chaotic layers. It’s the hunger to make up for what was never said. It’s the terror of being left as voiceless as the inmates of the asylum.

More here.

First Nations still exist. So does the language of sovereignty. The global Indigenous have not forgotten. We teach our children to not only remember but reclaim.

If for these reasons alone, I am grateful and ‘give thanks’.

*MGis | Mark Gonzales

He is your blue-colored shirt, my cup and fork, my
balcony, the din of silence in the void, my closed eyelids,
the bird that shall bear me to the grave, he is the grave.

How often they have wrangled with mountains on my lips. Hands
that burn are extinguished in wine, rivers that run dry are pinned
to the walls, parched earth tries to imprison
your voice, your voice.

I have not been dreaming that I would have courage one
day and kill myself. A feather, fields, handkerchiefs.
I shall kill myself! Like a sun throwing itself into a sea,
Have you the courage to dance on a mirror? Have you more
strength than the brilliance of a bee upon its knees, than
the kiss of pearls shoulder to shoulder? Have you the
courage for blood?

Do you spell out tears as I set forth a tree?
From the ledge of each well, pots of hyacinth fly
in all directions. As though temples exploding, they
cross the marble to the final star, like the grasses that
glitter in a pebble. I watch her veiling herself,
I strangle her asleep at my cheek, in vain I pluck her
at the shoot.

Pots of hyacinth.
On my clothes I write God, I write heaven.
This is me. And this is you.
I open my eyes. I open my hands. I see my fingers
Cut off.
Cut off.

The sun’s valleys have no color. Children’s nails
Have no color.
Bracelets of fire have no color.
Screaming has no color.
Beirut…you are screaming.
Like one who lives on a seesaw, I live in the
pupil of your eye.
Come morning you destroy me like an arrow, come evening
I yield to you, without a struggle I turn to dust. I
say he is a mountain that bears a city, I say he is
a horse that gallops in the sun.

Like one who lives in deceit, I stone myself
and call for help

Is there a terror greater than veiled fear, than
a deserted evening, than feet that tread on heaven,
than waves sketched like rainfall, than signs of thunder,
than a cage without a bird, a bird without wings, wings
without love, without love?

From your two hands I gather tenderness at night,
from your two hands I grant a smile to each star, from
your two hands I bury my head on your breast, from your
two hands I search for my prayer.

I draw halos around you, as if you are the foe, as
if you are the Messiah. If you were alone, I tell you, I would
prostrate myself to you. If just ten, I would hide you
in my lungs. Since you are a thousand, I shall give you
to drink from my blood. Your wound grows and grows.
it slits my throat from vein to vein. I put sand in your
wound. I put your wound in a giant, and around myself I
light the fire.

Who are you, that I should love you in the space I love you, in
the wound?
The stones are whispering:
There is no myth save in a wrestling goddess, a moon fragmenting. The
statues are countless, beyond all computation. The poison is a single
dose placed in a cup.
I pluck suns from between your eyes, I pluck thorns. I kindle the
twigs of the dream alight, melt the years and the bloodgroups, the
necessities of war and necessities of peace. I cordon off a blue volcano
to right and left, watching me with its white fangs.

Twilight, is it some calamity that brings you, or a flood?

The desert is turning black, the desert is turning green.

Orbits, be scattered beyond time, beyond weapons, beyond vipers, Be
in harmony with the strength of gods, with mercy like the gods, with
optimism like the gods. Upon the trackless sand each teardrop has a
garden, the birds a small handful of honey.

We die, oh, how many we die!

In death I find nothing but you,

In the breeze too, and the scythe and the drizzle, the barricades and
handguns and men in hoods, in live broadcasts and telephones cut dead,
In bulletins of news, the safe roads and the unsafe, interrogations,
delays, prayerbooks and beads, chess pieces, tranquilizers, pine and
saffron, weddings, births and spare time, and arguments, arguments,
arguments.

I find none but you.
Here am I bending down to drink and I lose my memory.

I have not let my face leap like a bat, I have not kicked my foot
against the place of my exile, I did not move like phantoms over the
rooftops, I did not try child hunting, I did not steal the sea’s wings,
I did not break glass over a breast, I did not eat my flesh that burns,
I have not withdrawn into despair, I did not go mad in gathering honey,
I did not go mad, I did not go mad, I did not go mad.

No need for my corpse.

No need for the flanks of suffering, for my armor.

No need for my charred body. A ship carries us to the end of the world.
Rivers push us seaward. A destiny in which I dress. Nets by which I am
woven. Statues I destroy. A debt I pay. Flocks of birds.

A disaster. An earthquake. Travel. Return.

Return. Return. Return.

O Jerusalem! From thou…we shall ascend!
Forgive me O Lord,

Plains accepting no death, a shore gathering pearls, a white
horse enfolding me and taking wing, a bird that immolates me as I am
warmed by its eyes, eyes in which I pray and weep, my ribs that are
translucent, trees of emerald, the rose of compassion above unity,
the dissension of daybreak’s crown, the willfulness of nightly grandeur,
the sanctity of pain, roses raining down,

him, him, him.

I grasp the wave and I tumble

A divine vigilance in my eyes?

I leave at your door the burnt moments of time, the sunset, the harvest
of error, and endless slipping, the grasp of truth, ingots of gold, faces
of those who have died, faces of those who will die, footsteps of the
prophets, shadows of the priests, the thinness of words, the misfortune
of the world, the secrets of the fields,

my love for you, your hatred for me,
and the white lilies
and the white lilies.

I grasp the wave and I tumble…
I Remember I was a point, I was a circle.

She is a voice…any voice.
He is a land…not every land.

Translated from the Arabic by Tim Mitchell

artwork by syrian artist zuhair hassib

The two-state solution that has long been the focus of would-be peacemakers has been fatally undermined by the expansion of settlements in the occupied territories. The tripling in the number of Israeli colonists in the West Bank and the entrenchment of the settlement enterprise under the Oslo “peace process,” which began in the nineties, merely had the effect of processing the proposed Palestinian state into pieces. And so a shift toward a new paradigm must take place, one that is based on equality for all the people in the land from the river to the sea. Today, we are left with the options of occupation forever—meaning continued conflict within an apartheid state—or a representative and democratic single state.

Jabotinsky and his modern-day disciples might say yes to apartheid—dismissing the values of equality and democracy—in the name of maintaining Israel’s identity as a Jewish state above all. But his century-old thinking is as morally debased as it is antiquated. In the twenty-first century—and that is the century we are living in, despite Halutz and Yishai’s attempts at time-travel—Jabotinsky’s values are unacceptable. The road might be long, and it will certainly be difficult, but only two things are certain at this point: the trajectory toward a one-state outcome becomes clearer by the minute and the use of force will not help Israelis get there safely. (Yousef Munayyer)

More here.

In Gaza, a narrow strip of land forty kilometers long and on average less than a quarter of that in width, the military presence is not visible but it is there all the same. From the rooftop terrace of our hotel in Gaza City I stare at a row of harsh white spotlights far out at sea. It takes me a while to work out that these banks of lights are marker buoys. Over the years the distance a Palestinian fisherman can go in search of a decent catch has been whittled down from the twenty-nautical-mile limit established in the Oslo Accords to the three-mile limit imposed by the Israelis as of January 2009. This makes 85 percent of Gaza’s waters inaccessible to local fishermen. Of the ten thousand local fishermen in 2000, there are only around 3,500 today. The lights have the effect of drawing the fish to the surface, which means that the best fishing is as close to the line as possible. It’s a dangerous task. Israeli patrol ships run circles around the smaller fishing boats so as to tip them over. They regularly fire upon fishing boats with live ammunition.

The historian Ilan Pappé described what is happening in Gaza as “slow-motion genocide.” (Jamal Mahjoub)

More here.

for gaza by abdel rahman

The two-state solution that has long been the focus of would-be peacemakers has been fatally undermined by the expansion of settlements in the occupied territories. The tripling in the number of Israeli colonists in the West Bank and the entrenchment of the settlement enterprise under the Oslo “peace process,” which began in the nineties, merely had the effect of processing the proposed Palestinian state into pieces. And so a shift toward a new paradigm must take place, one that is based on equality for all the people in the land from the river to the sea. Today, we are left with the options of occupation forever—meaning continued conflict within an apartheid state—or a representative and democratic single state.

Jabotinsky and his modern-day disciples might say yes to apartheid—dismissing the values of equality and democracy—in the name of maintaining Israel’s identity as a Jewish state above all. But his century-old thinking is as morally debased as it is antiquated. In the twenty-first century—and that is the century we are living in, despite Halutz and Yishai’s attempts at time-travel—Jabotinsky’s values are unacceptable. The road might be long, and it will certainly be difficult, but only two things are certain at this point: the trajectory toward a one-state outcome becomes clearer by the minute and the use of force will not help Israelis get there safely. (Yousef Munayyer)

More here.

A doctor at Ramallah hospital confirms Rushdi Tamimi has died. Israeli forces shot Tamimi, a Palestinian police officer, on Saturday at a protest in Nabi Saleh, near Ramallah [West Bank], against Israeli attacks on Gaza. More here.

Alas, none of this is surprising. We live in a militarized culture and US mainstream media is ideologically, if not materially, embedded with the aggressors. In all fairness, however, Engel’s empathy (or attempts at) with Palestinian civilians was evident in one of his tweets. On 16 November he tweeted the following jewel from Gaza city:

“So many drones over #Gaza city it sounds like everyone is out mowing their lawns in the dark”

The drones hovering over Gaza (and those guiding them) would be quite giddy to know that their good work is likened to that of lawnmowers (weeding out unwanted growth and making sure the terrain is green.) Mowing life is more like it. (Sinan Antoon)

More here.

In the new global landscape, as in Israel’s occupied territories and the United States’ own imperial projects in Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Afghanistan, massacres of thousands of defenseless innocents are labeled wars. Resistance is called a provocation, terrorism or a crime against humanity. The rule of law, as well as respect for the most basic civil liberties and the right of self-determination, is a public relations fiction used to placate the consciences of those who live in the zones of privilege. Prisoners are routinely tortured and “disappeared.” The severance of food and medical supplies is an accepted tactic of control. Lies permeate the airwaves. Religious, racial and ethnic groups are demonized. Missiles rain down on concrete hovels, mechanized units fire on unarmed villagers, gunboats pound refugee camps with heavy shells, and the dead, including children, line the corridors of hospitals that lack electricity and medicine. (Chris Hedges)

More here.

More here.

More here.

artwork by syrian artist abdul karim majdal al beik.

2nd gaza solidarity rally, rochester, ny – november 17, 2012

Many Gazan children are now the grandchildren of Palestinians BORN in the refugee camps – so called “temporary” shelters. Temporary for over 50 years now..

Gaza is today, effectively, a city imprisoned without trial. We ask you to add your voice to those already campaigning and lobbying for a peaceful and urgent resolution to this desperately unfair situation.

When it comes to looking behind the scenes of Israeli military assaults on Gaza (or Lebanon), there is always a general hoping for a promotion, a politician looking for votes, and an arms dealer making profits, but the rationale that enables that triumvirate to enact the lethal policies we are seeing play out in Gaza right now is the same one that allows the Israeli government to calculate how many calories each Palestinian in the Gaza Strip needs to survive, and to then intentionally allow fewer trucks and supplies in to meet that need.

And it’s the same rationale that motivates the Israeli occupation authorities to prevent construction in Area C of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, to encourage widespread drug addiction in Area B, and to make near-daily incursions into Area A to arrest political leaders, activists and journalists.

It’s the rationale of a coloniser, who wants land but not the people on it. When the media starts speaking about this, then we’ll know there’s been a sea change. (Charlotte Silver)

More here.

Israel has employed this strategy since its founding in 1948, and both Cast Lead and Pillar of Defence are examples of it at work. In other words, Israel’s aim in bombing Gaza is not to topple Hamas or eliminate its rockets, both of which are unrealisable goals. Instead, the ongoing attacks in Gaza are part of a long-term strategy to coerce the Palestinians into giving up their pursuit of self-determination and submitting to Israeli rule in an apartheid state.

Israel’s commitment to the Iron Wall is reflected in the fact that its leaders have said many times since Cast Lead ended in January 2009 that the IDF would eventually have to return to Gaza and inflict another beating on the Palestinians. The Israelis were under no illusion that the 2008-9 conflict had defanged Hamas. The only question for them was when the next punishment campaign would start. (John Mearsheimer)

Jabotinsky

Drones and F-16s are dropping bombs over densely populated Gaza, which continues to be under Israel’s control from infrastructure to border. Twenty Palestinians have been killed. Rockets being launched out of Gaza have killed three Israeli civilians.

This Operation “Pillar of Defense” is being paid for thanks to the blank check the Israeli military receives from the US government. Even as we take to the streets to call for an immediate cessation of the bombings into Gaza, the rocket attacks into civilian communities in Israel, and an end to the ongoing siege of Gaza, we are aware that more is required.
Now is the time to demand Obama take decisive action that honors all the lives being lost.

Tell your friends to sign this open letter to Obama.

gaza solidarity rally today in rochester, ny – november 16, 2012

But they have served to remind the world that Israel is a democracy where politicians may order the murder of children to score electoral points. Palestinian children, true. But the citizens of the world don’t make racist distinctions. On Thursday there were protests for Gaza across the world. They continued today. And there will be many more.

In every Arab country where the people rise up to demand their rights, they demand action on Palestinian rights as well. Tunis has just announced that its foreign minister is heading for Gaza. In Jordan today, hundreds of thousands were on the streets and, as well as demanding the fall of their own regime, they’re also calling for justice for Palestine. Protesters are out in Libya. In Egypt, people are heading for Rafah. We are heading for true representation of the people’s will in the region and, in the coming years, governments will need to follow the road shown to them by their people. (Ahdaf Soueif)

More here.

So why the escalation? Israeli military and political leaders have long made clear that regular military attacks to “cleanse” Palestinian territories (the term was used by Israeli soldiers to describe their role in the 2008-09 Israeli assault on Gaza) is part of their long-term strategic plan. Earlier this year, on the third anniversary of the Gaza assault, Israeli army Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz told Army Radio that Israel will need to attack Gaza again soon, to restore what he called its power of “deterrence.” He said the assault must be “swift and painful,” concluding, “we will act when the conditions are right.” Perhaps this was his chosen moment.

It is an interesting historical parallel that this escalation—which almost certainly portends a longer-term and even more lethal Israeli assault—takes place almost exactly four years after Operation Cast Lead, the last major Israeli war on Gaza, which left 1,400 Gazans dead in 2008–09. Then, as now, the attack came shortly after the US presidential elections, ending just before President Obama’s January 2009 inauguration.

But the timing for this escalation is almost certainly shaped more by Israel’s domestic politics than by the US election cycle. The most likely timeline is grounded in Netanyahu’s political calendar—he faces re-election in January, and having thoroughly antagonized many Israelis by his deliberate dissing of President Obama, needs to shore up the far-right contingent of his base. (Phyllis Bennis)

More here.

The following fact sheet provides a brief overview of some of the most high profile and consequential ceasefire violations committed by the Israeli military over the past six decades. (Adam Horowitz)

More here.

And it’s a lie. More here.

Of course, Beirut’s Parisian charm has tended to become less apparent during periods of mass sectarian slaughter. In the introduction to his seminal text Orientalism, the late Edward Said notes repercussions of civil conflict in Lebanon on the European consciousness:

The civil war may indeed have upset a regional landscape constructed over time by European scholars, poets, travellers and other self-appointed authorities, who, as Said argues, helped institutionalise Eurocentric prejudice, deny agency to the actual inhabitants of the romanticised exotic lands and thus facilitate imperial and colonial conquest.

The civil war did not, however, halt Orientalist traditions – something that was made quite clear in manuscripts like From Beirut to Jerusalem, unleashed to wide acclaim in 1989 by former New York Times Beirut bureau chief Thomas Friedman.

According to Friedman’s account, civil war-era Lebanon was populated by “buxom, Cleopatra-eyed Lebanese girls”, whose presence threw invading Israeli soldiers for a loop: “This was not the Sinai, filled with cross-eyed Bedouins and shoeless Egyptian soldiers”. That such caricatures were permitted to pass as insight exposes the delusional nature of Friedman’s subsequent complaint that “a toxic political correctness infected the academic field of Middle Eastern studies”. (Belen Fernandez)
…

The point of taking issue with such idealised odes to money and fashion is not to deny the affluence that exists in the city or the comparatively liberal nature of its society. However, the marketing of a Beirut brand of “joie de vivre” that is so blatantly equated with material wealth becomes morally problematic when we acknowledge the glaring economic disparity in the country, visible in the capital itself.

Consider, for example, the aesthetic differences between the refurbished downtown and the overcrowded and neglected Palestinian refugee camps and primarily Shia southern suburbs, where recent infrastructure projects have included the rampant flattening of apartment blocks by the Israeli air force in 2006.

Needless to say, less sanitary aspects of life in Lebanon – such as the enslaved status of many migrants employed in the domestic help sector – have no place in the portrait of Beirut as a paradise of wealth, where tantalising opportunities await foreign visitors and their pocket-books.
…

[T]he representation of Beirut as a Middle Eastern Paris brimming with wealth and cleavage – in other words, a place the West can relate to on account of its fervent materialism – can also function on behalf of imperialism, eliminating as it does all context legitimising other aspects of Lebanon’s identity, like resistance to Israeli regional designs.

More here.

photo series: “other” families are beautiful too, #11 – sikh family

dreaming of palestine

Angola’s post-war economy is booming and its capital, Luanda, is the most expensive city in the world after Tokyo. Although the country is Africa’s second-biggest oil producer, most Angolans live on less than $2 a day. Meanwhile, the country’s president and his ruling party have clung on to power for over three decades, gaining tight control of both the public and private sectors, and stifling dissent and protest. But in 2011 – inspired by the Arab uprisings – a group of young Angolan activists took to the streets, demanding an end to decades of mismanagement and corruption. Arrested, harassed, beaten – the activists refuse to step down. This is the story of the birth of their movement. (Ana de Sousa)

More here.

There was a major – reprehensibly small and weak, but a major and significant peace and justice movement by 2005 and 2006 (you read Bush’s memoirs, and the top Republican in the Senate is running to him secretly and saying, we must get out of Iraq, the public is turning against us), and as the Democrats came into power in Congress in ’07. And then it became a presidential election year in ’08, which always shuts down all useful activism. The movement faded away, disappeared, dried up, and was defunded. And it should not have. We should not go through these cycles of being willing to stand up in large numbers in serious ways for what we care about based on who’s in office and whether there’s an election.
…

There is a very small number of people who are very well informed about Obama’s crimes, and are even engaged in active resistance, who nonetheless say we should vote for Obama. I’m not slandering those people by suggesting they are ignorant or uninformed or not engaged in activism; I’m suggesting that the activist movement as a whole is dramatically weakened when its position is we denounce your war crimes and we will vote for you if you continue and escalate them, that that is a weak stand to be building a movement from. (David Swanson)

More here.

More here.

That’s what Mugur Varzariu was often warned when he was growing up in Bucharest, Romania. Years later, working as a marketing strategist, he regularly heard — in “polite society,” no less — that the Roma people were lazy or criminals.

The Roma are often referred to as Gypsies, a term many consider offensive. Their ancestors, who came to Europe from India, have faced oppression and violence for centuries in Europe. They share language, culture and — until the 20th century — a nomadic way of life.

Mr. Varzariu, 42, knew very few Roma before he switched careers two years ago to become a photographer. In July 2011, after hearing that the mayor of Baia Mare, a small city in northern Romania, was building a 6-foot wall to separate a Roma community from its neighbors — creating a ghetto — Mr. Varzariu traveled there to see for himself. The Roma he met were different from the racist stereotypes he was raised with.
…

Though detested by the Roma, the wall was quite popular among most of Baia Mare’s population. And it proved to be a smart political move for the mayor, Catalin Chereches, who was overwhelmingly re-elected this year.

After building the wall, the mayor forcibly evicted another community of Roma on the outskirts of Baia Mare in May and June of this year. They were moved into a former office building and laboratory that was part of an abandoned copper factory. Cyanide and other toxic chemicals lingered in the walls and floors, and many of the Roma fell ill. More here.

artwork by syrian artist kevork mourad

Six-time presidential candidate Ralph Nader blames the absence of awareness of the Green Party among most Americans on what he calls an “electoral system dominated by a two-party tyranny” and “a duopoly of the Republicans and Democrats”.

“The Green Party not having a chance in this election is not because its proposals aren’t supported by the majority of Americans,” Nader told Al Jazeera. “Polls show their proposals like a living wage, cracking down on corporate crime, ending corporate bailouts, campaign finance reform, and many others, are what most people want. But since the two main parties are dialing for the same corporate dollars, they are the two heads of the corporate party, and this makes it nearly impossible for people to get on the ballot if they aren’t in one of those parties.” More here.

“This heirloom,
his skeleton under my skin, passed
from son to grandson,
generations of snowmen on my back.
They tap every year on my window,
their voices hushed to ice.”

new collage series “this heirloom” by mara ahmed

“I attempt through this exhibition as well as with all my other work to reach some state of balance and harmony between the expressive aspect of my work – which is conveyed through simplifying forms and strongly showing the expressions of the lines and touches of color – with the abstract aspect of my work through which I address vast spaces by creating visual rhythms… I try to create that [balance] by spontaneously moving the paint brush on an empty canvas until I reach a free and quick outcome.” (Adel Dauood)

mixed media on canvas by syrian artist adel dauood

Sahara Donahue and activists were evicted by the Idaho Springs Sheriff department around 3 p.m. on October 30, 2012. Yesterday, Donahue went to US Bank’s main office in downtown Denver and spoke with a VP about getting a 60 day extension before being evicted from her home. US Bank declined to extend the eviction date and forwarded her to Vericrest Financial. [...] It was reported that at around 3 p.m. the SWAT team arrived, forcing activists and the media to the ground. 3 arrests were made but soon released with citations. Sahara Donahue is currently seeking a place to rent and to secure her belongings. More here.

‘The War on Terror has gripped the Western world with internally discriminatory laws and policies, ranging from the denial of habeas corpus rights to restrictions on wearing hijab in public spaces. Sherene Razack’s new monograph demonstrates, however, that much more than discrimination is at work. Casting Out highlights how political community is being reconfigured through the socio-legal abandonment of “Muslim-looking” people who increasingly lack “the right to have rights.” Central to Razack’s analysis is Hannah Arendt’s concept of race thinking, a world view that differentiates between two orders of humanity, promoting the exclusion of one for the “survival” of the other. Today this thinking circulates as a popular narrative that sees the West as besieged by a Muslim threat. Razack draws on the work of Giorgio Agamben, showing how the resultant exclusion of Muslim peoples gives rise to the “camp”—a state of exception wherein the rule of law, that is, the rules of political community, do not apply.’ More here.

This is the shape of the system Obama has designed. It is intentional, it is the modern American order, and it has a certain equilibrium, the kind we identify in Middle Eastern resource extraction based economies. We are even seeing, as I showed in an earlier post, a transition of the American economic order toward a petro-state. By some accounts, America will be the largest producer of hydrocarbons in the world, bigger than Saudi Arabia. This is just not an America that any of us should want to live in. It is a country whose economic basis is oligarchy, whose political system is authoritarianism, and whose political culture is murderous toward the rest of the world and suicidal in our aggressive lack of attention to climate change. (Matt Stoller)
…

At some point soon, we will face yet another moment where the elites say, “Do what we want or there will be a meltdown.” Do we have enough people on our side willing to collectively say “do what we want or there will be a global meldown”? This election is a good mechanism to train people in the willingness to say that and mean it. That is, the reason to advocate for a third-party candidate is to build the civic muscles willing to say no to the establishment in a crisis moment we all know is coming. Right now, the liberal establishment is teaching its people that letting malevolent political elites do what they want is not only the right path, it is the only path. Anything other than that is dubbed an affront to common decency. Just telling the truth is considered beyond rude.

We need to build a different model of politics, one in which people who want a different society are willing to actually bargain and back up their threats, rather than just aesthetically argue for shifts around the margin. The good news is that the changes we need to make are entirely doable. It will cost about $100 trillion over 20 years to move our world to an entirely sustainable energy system, and the net worth of the global top 1 percent is $103 trillion. We can do this. And the moments to let us make the changes we need are coming. There is endless good we can do, if enough of us are willing to show the courage that exists within every human being instead of the malevolence and desire for conformity that also exists within every heart.

Systems that can’t go on, don’t. The political elites, as much as they kick the can down the road, know this. The question we need to ask ourselves is, do we? More here.

The Holy Land Five’s appeal could be a game changer in how “terrorism” cases are prosecuted. During the 2008 trial, for the first time in a U.S. criminal court “secret evidence” was used by an anonymous source. A so-called Israeli intelligence expert testified under a pseudonym and said that the defendants had ties to Hamas. How did “Avi,” the Israeli intelligence officer, prove a “terror” affiliation? Elashi told me, while on the stand Avi said he “could smell Hamas.” More here.
…

unfortunately, the bush doctrine continued, unabated. v sad indeed.

MLFA Troubled by Court’s Decision to Not Hear Sixth Amendment Case: more here.

“A funeral in Deir Ezzor” by Syrian artist Mohamad Omran

“The Mosque of Wuzeer Ulee Khan,” published by the Illustrated London News, 1858

Everything I am about to describe is verifiable in a variety of credible sources. If you question the sources that I provide to support my claims, I encourage you to research the stories independently. I trust you will find that I have taken nothing out of context, I have made no distortion to the record, and I have made no attempt at manipulation. I have no reason to defame or impugn President Barack Obama. (DAVID MASCIOTRA)

More here.

The absence of effective financial regulation, true to this day, as seen in the feckless operations of the SEC, is only one dimension of basic agreement between the candidates. Others include such diverse areas (yet forming a unitary perspective of conservatism if not reaction) as gun control, climate change, oil drilling, the inclusion of coal mining in the energy mix, and despite nuances, immigration policy, and, although Romney is mum on the subject, their common disregard for civil liberties, justified as necessary by the threat of terrorism. On the last-named, it would be difficult for Romney to exceed or match Obama’s record in erecting the state secrets doctrine as a first principle of governance, leading to the creation of the National Security State, use of the Espionage Act to discourage whistleblowers, widespread surveillance, the practice of rendition, assault on habeas corpus rights, and, not to be forgotten, approval of indefinite detention–a new outburst equal to the Palmer Raids and McCarthyism in undermining the Constitution.

Withal, Obama appears untouchable; his genius for manipulating the American public, or rather, his base, including the many in distress, is critical to his leadership role in advancing American financial and business interests. The base, resting in adulatory mode, refuses to recognize potential long-term trends that have now been set in motion, e.g., further deregulation or that which proves inefficacious (as witness FDA and Interior Department policies), privatization, and weakening of the social safety net. In symbolic terms, the drone may well define the Obama presidency. One does not know whether Romney would closet himself with his advisors and personally authorize targeted assassination. Hopefully not, given that this barbaric act is the antithesis of due process and rule of law—a leap into moral vacuity that he would find difficult to match or surpass.
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More here.

We are so bound up in discord
The centuries cannot disentangle us—
I’m a warlock, you’re a wolf. We’re close
In the continuous dictionary of earth.

Shoulder to shoulder, like the blind,
And led along by destiny,
In the undying dictionary of this country
We’re both condemned to die.

When we sing this Russian song
We trade our kindred blood in drops
And I become your night prey.
This is why we exist, wolf and warlock.

The snow smells sweet as a slaughterhouse
And not a single star shines above the steppe.
Old one, there’s still time to get your face
Broken in two by a lead-tipped whip.

(Translated from the Russian by Philip Metres and Dimitri Psurtsev)

More here.

hajj 2012

Instead of ruling al-Awlaki‘s killing an accident, or even manufacturing him as a terrorist threat, Gibbs retorts, ‘I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they’re truly concerned about the well-being of their children.’ This is what should be called the Dr. Seuss economy of death. Don’t be sad ’cause he had a bad, bad dad.

Leaving aside the open lies and distortions peddled here, in the brief glimpses of clarity that belie the greater secrecy matrix (if the CIA sometimes kill people without knowing their identities, why should you?), Gibbs’ claim is profound. The last time I saw this line of thinking put forward as a logical argument was on a segment of Al Jazeera’s The Stream. Pakistani journalist Madiha Tahir asked Georgetown professor Christine Fair (at 15:19), who referred to bin Laden’s wives as ‘terror mamas’ and his children as ‘terror spawn’: ‘At what point does someone become a legitimate target for you?’

After dismissing Tahir as an ‘obnoxious troll,’ Fair responds to the show host (who asks whether she actually called bin Laden’s kids ‘terror spawn’) by saying, ‘Yeah, technically they are the spawn of terrorists and I’m not gonna back down by that.’ (MARYAM MONALISA GHARAVI) More here.
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similarly reprehensible logic was offered by joe klein, an avid (or rabid) obama supporter. it can be summarized as “it’s either their children or ours.” as glenn greenwald explains in his brilliant piece “Joe Klein’s Sociopathic Defense of Drone Killings of Children” this argument is a sham in many ways: first of all it’s hardly a level playing field so that americans r worried about the survival of their children; secondly, killing someone else’s children cannot guarantee one’s security; and finally, justifying the killing of children, for any reason whatsoever, is simply morally disgusting.

Abaya with Flag Pin by Lebanese-American artist Helen Zughaib (2008)

“Dimensions” by Sargon Boulus (translated from the Arabic by Sinan Antoon)

The musician is in his corner

Gently embracing his oud, as if listening

to a pregnant belly

His fingers torture the strings

The dancer’s body is utterly seized

under the lights

Bending in the fourth dimension

Where no tickets are sold

We, the spectators, stay here with our chairs

The stage is empty

painting by syrian artist, bahram hajo

photo series: “other” families are beautiful too, #9 – pakistani family

artwork by syrian artist fadi yazigi

“an oppressive sorrow, which, to wit, so weighs upon man’s mind, that he wants to do nothing.” (thomas aquinas)

“the height of joy, the moment when the world can improve no further, is both the end of joy and the beginning of melancholy.” (christopher john murray)

“profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, and inhibition of all activity” (sigmund freud)

watched lars von trier’s “melancholia” and liked it. what a stunning idea to depict melancholia as an actual planet, hidden behind the sun, which is about to crash into earth and annihilate all life. the film is suffused with cosmic imagery and the music of wagner. moonlit landscapes are bathed in blue light. startled birds take flight in a flurry of feathers and precipitate snow flakes. even family scenes emit the heightened, almost grotesque, drama of myths. as the end of the world nears, melancholia seems to make much more sense – perhaps it’s the longer view of life and our role in the universe. masterful performance by kirsten dunst.

melancholia

The most memorable – and vicious – atrocities saw policemen herding panicking crowds on to Paris’s bridges, where many were tossed into the Seine. Normally a romantic symbol of the most popular tourist city in the world, the river became a watery morgue for scores of victims, whose lifeless bodies were washing up for weeks afterwards.

Others died in police stations, or in nearby woods, where their mutilated bodies testified to truncheon and rifle-butt injuries. The officers had been incensed by an illegal protest by 30,000 men, women and children organised by the National Liberation Front (FLN) – the main Algerian nationalist group in their country’s war of independence with France.

Fifty years will seem like a long time to many of the young French Algerians who mark the anniversary today, but in many ways it seems very recent. Maurice Papon, the Paris police chief who instigated the killings, only died four years ago, aged 96; and some of his unrepentant and unpunished henchmen still remain at large. (Nabila Ramdani)

More here.

Furthermore, it has profound implications for movements resisting the War on Terror, particularly feminist movements. As Pakistani activist Farida Shaheed commented, the “self-serving use of women’s rights as a U.S. flagstaff” for the war on Afghanistan or other interventions in the Middle East is dangerous for indigenous feminist movements, for it can lead to the perception that they are complicit with U.S. imperial policies, creating false polarities on the ground.47 However, if what was hijacked on September 11, 2001, was not just the airplanes that crashed into the World Trade Center and Pentagon but also a particular feminist discourse, there are strategies for walking the fine line between apologizing for fundamen- talism and patriarchy and justifying imperial policies that depend on a deeper analysis of the linkages between Orientalism, feminism, and U.S. imperialism. (Sunaina Maira)
…

“Good citizenship” is performed by Muslim American individuals and organizations in a variety of ways, testifying loyalty to the nation and asserting belief in its democratic ideals, often through public testimonials that emphasize that Muslims are peaceful, loyal U.S. citizens. An “imperative patriotism” that deems dissent against state policies unpatriotic has long been used by the United States to suppress radical movements, such as the American Indian movement and the Black Panthers, which were considered enemies of “American values.” Although the hyperpatriotic nationalism of the post-9/11 moment has been widely acknowledged, Steven Salaita traces this imperative patriotism to the history of settler colonialism and the “need to create a juridical mentality that professes some sort of divine mandate to legitimize [the settlers’] presence on indigenous land” by dividing chosen peoples from uncivilized savages. These foundational myths continue to underwrite discourses about barbarism and civilization that legitimate the occupation of Muslim and Arab nations and the regulation, surveillance, and torture of Muslim and Arab subjects. U.S. Orientalism has legitimated imperial interventions overseas that, unlike older European forms of colonialism, often rest on covert interventions, indirect control, and a discourse of benevolent em- pire that masks the internal exclusion and violence against native peoples, African Americans, and others.
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The politics of rescue of Muslim women is also steeped in liberal concepts of individualism, autonomy, and choice that shape a binary and neo-Orientalist world view. A resurgent imperial feminism assumes that it is the United States or Western culture that must bring “freedom” to certain areas of the world, even if paradoxically via a military force– another case of white men (and white women) trying to save brown women from brown men. Missionary feminism has long produced a cultural discourse of saving Muslim women in different colonial encounters with terrorists or insurgents, ignoring the indigenous women’s movements and the complexities of race, nationalism, and class at work.
…

As Razack observes, contemporary imperial feminists are only con- cerned with the violence against Third World women associated with patriarchal traditions and not with “the violence of poor educational and job access or the dislocation and forced migration of large numbers of Muslims through war.” These material issues of globalization and imperi- alism trouble “culture talk” and raise questions about the role of the United States. Such imperial feminists show little sympathy for the Afghan (and now Pakistani) women and children bombed by the United States and U.S.-backed forces, for girls who were raped and murdered by U.S. soldiers in Iraq, or for Palestinian women who live under an illegal occupation funded and supported by the United States.
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Native informants/Orientalists are crucial for this project of co-opting the liberal discourse of rights, based on gender as well as sexuality. Joseph A. Massad and Jasbir Puar have shown how the internationalizing of Western feminism has been paralleled by a universalizing discourse of rights for queer subjects that focuses on the “liberation” of gays and lesbians in the Muslim countries. NGOs focusing on gay rights have promoted a culturally specific epistemology and ontology of “rights and identities” to be imposed on non-Western societies, according to Massad, and have also collaborated with the U.S. State Department and Congress to threaten sanctions against Arab nations for their policies toward gay men; what Massad calls the “Gay International,” like international feminism, is embroiled with U.S. foreign policy. These critics do not deny that homophobia and patriarchy exist in Muslim and Arab societies, but they high- light the colonialist and Orientalist impulses that often underlie activism targeting gender and sexual politics in these societies or diasporic communities and the generally obscured ways these are linked with state policies. Feminism needs to account for state-sponsored violence and state-sanc- tioned terror inflicted on women or queers–not just abuses associated with cultural “tradition” or religion–as radical and anti-imperialist feminists have long argued.

More here.

photo series: “other” families are beautiful too, #8 – yemeni family

The system of colonial exploitation has been based on unequal exchange, that is, the exchange of manufactured products, sold very expensively in the colonies by commercial monopolies supported by the State, for the purchase of products or primary products at very low prices, since they were based on labour that was almost without cost – provided by the peasants and workers located at the periphery. During all the stages of capitalism, the plunder of the resources of the peripheries, the oppression of colonized peoples, their direct or indirect exploitation by capital, remain the common characteristics of the phenomenon of colonialism.

The reality remains – in other words the hyper-exploitation and plunder of the South. In this respect, how are we to describe the WTO if not as the multinationals’ club for looting the Third World, a sort-of global Super-Ministry of the Colonies? Is it really an organization responsible for facilitating world trade, as it pretends to be, or an organization for defending the monopolies of the imperialist capitalist nations by providing excessive protection for so-called industrial and intellectual property rights, through setting up a false symmetry – opening up markets for the plunder of resources in the South without giving the South access to markets in the North? I call this apartheid on a world scale, the extension of colonialism into today’s world. (Samir Amin)

More here.

But it was the September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington and the subsequent US-led takeover of the former British imperial zone of Afghanistan that finally outed into the political mainstream the policy that had until then dared not speak its name. By spring 2002 Blair’s foreign policy adviser and Afghan envoy, Robert Cooper published a pamphlet making the case for “a new kind of imperialism, one acceptable to a world of human rights and cosmopolitan views”… (Seumas Milne)
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Such political adventurism has had to be at least temporarily reined as a result of the political and human disaster of the Iraq war and occupation. But the more favourable climate for this retro reactionary chic created by western military interventions has been seized by Britain’s conservative commentators and historians, such as Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts, both to champion the cause of the new imperialism and rewrite the history of the colonial past. Ferguson is an open advocate of a formal US-run global empire. [...] Roberts is an open advocate of the recolonisation of Africa and insists that “Africa has never known better times than during British rule”.

It would be interesting to hear how Roberts – or Brown – balances such grotesque claims with the latest research on the huge scale of atrocities committed by British forces during the Mau Mau rebellion in colonial Kenya in the 1950s: the 320,000 Kikuyu held in concentration camps, the 1,090 hangings, the terrorisation of villages, electric shocks, beatings and mass rape documented in Caroline Elkins’s book Britain’s Gulag – and well over 100,000 deaths. This was a time when British soldiers were paid five shillings (equal to $9 in today’s money) for each Kikuyu male they killed, when they nailed the limbs of African guerrillas to crossroads posts. And when they were photographed holding severed heads of Malayan communist “terrorists” in another war that cost over 10,000 lives.

Even in the late 1960s, as veterans described in a recent television documentary, British soldiers thrashed, tortured and murdered their way through Aden’s Crater City; one former squaddie explained that he couldn’t go into details because of the risk of war crimes prosecutions. All in the name of civilisation. The sense of continuity with today’s Iraq could not be clearer.
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Such evidence is a timely corrective to the comfortable British mythology that, in contrast to France and other European colonial powers, Britain decolonised in a peaceful and humane manner. It’s not as if these end-of-empire episodes were isolated blemishes on a glorious record of freedom and good governance, as Ferguson and other contemporary imperial torchbearers would have us believe. Britain’s empire was in reality built on genocide, vast ethnic cleansing, slavery, rigorously enforced racial hierarchy and merciless exploitation. As the Cambridge historian Richard Drayton puts it: “We hear a lot about the rule of law, incorruptible government and economic progress – the reality was tyranny, oppression, poverty and the unnecessary deaths of countless millions of human beings”.

Some empire apologists claim that, however brutal the first phase might have been, the 19th- and 20th-century story was one of liberty and economic progress. But this is nonsense. In late 19th-century and early 20th-century India up to 30 million died in famines, as British administrators insisted on the export of grain (as they had done during the Irish famine of the 1840s) and courts ordered 80,000 floggings a year. Four million died in the avoidable Bengal famine of 1943 – there have been no such famines since independence.

What is now Bangladesh was one of the richest parts of the world before the British arrived and deliberately destroyed its cotton industry. When India’s Andaman islands were devastated by December’s tsunami, who recalled that 80,000 political prisoners had been held in camps there in the early 20th-century, routinely experimented on by British army doctors? Perhaps it’s not surprising that Hitler was an enthusiast, describing the British empire as an “inestimable factor of value”, even if it had been acquired with “force and often brutality”. More here.

nadia, 10 yr old drone victim.

my comments:

what happened to malala is horrific – it should never have happened in the first place. it was not malala’s dream to “blog” about her life, little girls in swat don’t necessarily subscribe to this western idea of publicly articulating their liberation on the web. it was a bbc reporter’s idea. he approached malala’s father to find a girl who would be able to do this project for the bbc. malala’s dad runs a school in swat. he approached some of the most capable girls in the school but they (and their families) refused. he then offered the services of his own 11 yr old daughter. the bbc agreed. initially, her name was kept anonymous. but later malala’s father wanted to nominate her for an intl peace prize and he decided to reveal her identity. i find all these decisions taken by adults, about an 11 yr old child, to be irresponsible, in fact downright reckless. now, once again, this little girl is being celebrated by adults as their heroine. it might have been better to have allowed her to be a normal little girl, not some kind of symbol. more on this background here.

the connection between malala and nadia is inexorable. when people like christine fair come out of this tragedy with “drones r the only option” or pakistani liberals (much like their american liberal counterparts) come out on the streets with placards that read “drones must kill so malala can live” then it becomes impossible not to talk about nadia and her tragedy. she was supposed to be the sacrificial lamb for liberals all over the world, in their determined fight against extremism. unfortunately, malala could still not be saved.

it’s not just malala who wanted to go to school and become a doctor. many little girls (and little boys) in the world aspire to great things. all their dreams should be equally important to us.

we can’t stop the taliban (in fact the war on terror has been a boon to them), but we can try to stop the drone attacks ordered by our elected president and paid for by our tax dollars.

This two-day symposium at UC Berkeley will explore the uses of race and religion to establish war as a strategy of political power, and conversely the uses of war to stabilize the epistemologies of race and religion as intimately linked organizing categories of social life—what we might call the “race/religion/war” nexus. This inquiry finds its proximate cause in the racialization of Islam that has animated the contemporary U.S. led “war on terror,” as well as its doppelgangers in places like London, the Parisian Banlieues, Chechnya, Palestine, Darfur, Kashmir, and the Huiger regions of China. Our aim, however, will be to consider how the race/religion/war nexus coheres in the present precisely because of a set of much longer historicotheoretical processes. That is, multiple overlapping genealogies mutually determine our political present: from the medieval religious wars of the Crusades to the formation of race in the conquest of the Americas; from the birth of the modern state-system in its deployment of antisemitism to the racializing rubrics of development in the capitalist world system; from the colonial wars of high imperialism to the significance of third world proxy wars for the purportedly secular rivalry of the Cold War. More here.

Finally, and most problematically, Half the Sky replicates the same dynamic of that dreadful pilot photo by focusing solely on the oppressions of the Global South. Although a few passing comments are made about rape, coerced sex work, and other gender based violence existing everywhere in the world – including in the U.S., hello?! – the point that is consistently reiterated in the film is that gender oppression is “worse” in “these countries” — that it is a part of “their culture.” In fact, at one point, on the issue of female genital cutting, Kristof tells actress Diane Lane, “That may be [their] culture but it’s also a pretty lousy aspect of culture.” There’s nothing that smacks more of “us and them” talk than these sorts of statements about “their culture.” Postcultural critic Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak, in fact, coined the term “white men saving brown women from brown men” to describe the imperialist use of women’s oppression as justification for political aggression. (Sayantani DasGupta)

More here.

So, how can we debate caste without naming the caste location of the debaters?

Let us consider the possibility that the bearers of the words and actions of caste exclusion, humiliation and indignity towards fellow humans are sometimes unaware of the extent to which caste animates their being. They are genuinely puzzled by the sharp reactions from assertive members of the lower castes and outcastes. And therefore are very hurt by the politics of the marginalized communities. My sympathies to them.

But, is it our burden to educate them towards obtaining the skills of civil conversations with fellow citizens? Is it our responsibility to educate them to become aware of the elemental truth about human equality, and that it ought to reflect in their language and actions? The marginalized has to also play a parental role? (Anu Ramdas)

More here.

“We believe there a climate that’s been created in the political sphere and the far-right media blogosphere that gives a green light to extremists to act out and commit hate crimes against religious institutions and their members,” she said.

“I don’t think we’ve seen this kind of intolerance toward religious minorities since before the civil rights movement.”

More here.

Regardless of our individual points of view on the matter, we need to recognise a simple reality first and foremost: the Baloch feel like a colonized people, whether or not you or I agree that they are so. [...] If we are able to understand the Baloch psyche, our heads will drop in shame at the realisation that it is our country, our military, and of course our silence, which is primarily (though not solely) responsible for what is happening in Balochistan today. Our responsibility in the present scenario is not to be the criminal investigators or the arbiters of justice. Our responsibility is, as the people of Pakistan, to oppose the colonial domination of Balochistan and accept the wishes of our Baloch brethren, whatever those wishes may be. The State will never do this, but we – the people – can. (Alia Amirali)

More here.

cover photo series: “other” families are beautiful too, #7 – uyghur chinese family

Israel is the world’s largest exporter of drones and drone technology, and the state-owned Israeli Aerospace Industries has sold to countries as varied as Nigeria, Russia and Mexico.

[...] Sweden, Greece, Switzerland, Spain, Italy and France are working on a joint project through state-owned aeronautical companies and are in the final stages of developing an advanced armed drone prototype called the Dassault nEURon, from which the France plans to derive armed drones for its air force.

And Pakistani authorities have long tried to persuade the United States to give them armed Predator drones, while India owns an armed Israeli drone designed to detect and destroy enemy radar, though it does not yet have drones capable of striking other targets.

The Teal Group, a defense consulting firm in Virginia, estimated in June that the global market for the research, development and procurement of armed drones will just about double in the next decade, from $6.6 billion to $11.4 billion. More here.

More here.

Addressing a press conference, Khan said 30 people, including civil society members and parents of US Army soldiers were in the delegation. They will go along with the PTI to South Waziristan, he added. Accompanied by Anne Wright, a former US Army colonel and former US ambassador, who is leading the delegation, Khan said the tribal leaders had also assured the security of the rally. He complained that the government was not issuing visas to the foreign journalists and human rights activists who wanted to attend the rally.

Head of the US delegation, Anne Wright, resigned from army when US started war against Iraq in March 2003. Now she is an antiwar activist and a member of the US civil society organisation working for peace in the world.

She said drone attacks were against principles of human rights and the delegation was attending the rally to register its protest against the attacks. She said, “We came from US for this historic march against drone attacks. We also went the places in US from where the drones are operated and we registered our protest. We are also protesting US war policies and we are telling you that US people are also against these attacks. We want to say to you that we Americans are protesting against US government and we request you to raise protest against your government.”

The PTI chairman also appreciated the steps she had taken for her solidarity with Pakistan.

Khan said the people who were against PTI’s peace rally did not want peace. He accused the government of not issuing visas to foreign journalists and human rights activists who were willing to attend the rally. “The government on the one side is protesting against drone while on the other not allowing foreign journalists to participate in this march. If the government is sincere and wants that drones should be stopped, they should allow the foreign journalists,” he added.

Meanwhile, explaining the route of the rally, PTI Vice Chairman Shah Mehmood Qureshi said the march would start from Islamabad’s Blue Area and would proceed towards Balkasar, Talagang, Mianwali and DI Khan on October 6. On October 7, the rally would gather at Tank and then head towards South Waziristan, where a public meeting would be held at Kot Kai, he added.

the american delegation joins imran khan, sept 30, 2012.

With the help of the Idea, the ugly facts of conquest can be tucked away from sight. ["The Black Hole of Empire"] shows that colonialism cannot be viewed only as the deplorable past; its ideology and practices endure and continue to shape our present. With masterful synthesis, it shows that the process of justifying acts of conquest produced enduring political theories of empire and the modern state. So much so that in a world without colonies, the right to declare an exception is still an imperial right. Great powers can still march into sovereign territories, claiming an exceptional right to intervene. We still live in a world where the exercise of power over others is redeemed by the Idea. More here.

More here.

cover photo series: “other” families are beautiful too, #6 – afghan family (from afghanistan in photos).

typical nyt reporting – we know what’s best for u and by god, we’ll shove it down ur throat. he doesn’t even mention how micro-finance, for the most part, has enslaved women into a never-ending cycle of debt, not liberated them.

he uses words like “scorched-earth offensive” to describe hasina’s “persecution” of yunus. the cia backed a scorched earth campaign in guatemala in which more than 400 villages were destroyed, 150,000 people killed and one million displaced. women were raped as a deliberate policy – in order to decimate guatemalan society. this horrible legacy still haunts guatemala, where the murder and rape of women remains incredibly well-entrenched. extremely offensive for kristof to make such a comparison, esp since he’s a self-appointed defender of women’s rights all over the world.

his explanation of why hasina might be going after yunus: “One theory is that she is paranoid and sees Yunus as a threat, especially since he made an abortive effort to enter politics in 2007. Another theory is that she is envious of his Nobel Peace Prize and resentful of his global renown.” lol. yeah, she’s also emotionally unstable and suffers from frequent bouts of hysteria. and she keeps her smelling salts handy in case she’s overwhelmed by fainting spells. seriously.

kristof’s article here and more about india’s micro-finance suicide epidemic here.

More here.

Yet Muslims around the world wondered where were these protections of freedom of speech when several American Muslims were indicted and sentenced to as much as life in prison in the U.S. for exercising First Amendment activities, including an American Muslim pharmacist of Egyptian descent in Boston who was sentenced to seventeen years in 2012 for translating passages and uploading videos to the internet, and a cable operator of Pakistani descent who was sentenced to almost six years in 2004 for connecting his New York customers to Hezbollah’s satellite channel.

In many of these cases, government prosecutors speculated that the speech of the Muslim defendants was not protected because it could have led to violence even though no evidence was ever presented to support such a theory. Contrast that with the proven record of hate speech spewed by numerous American Islamophobes, many of whom were quoted extensively by anti-Muslim extremist Anders Breivik, who deliberately killed in cold blood 77 people in Norway in July 2011. In his 1500-page manifesto, Breivik cited many American anti-Muslim haters such as Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes, Pamela Geller, Martin Kramer, and others. They apparently inspired him to commit the atrocious killings, though none were ever held, even morally, accountable, or subsequently condemned for their hateful inciting anti-Muslim speech. (Esam Al-Amin)

More here.

The fatal impact of plastic pollutants on the marine environment has been widely observed, as birds and fish regularly consume waste products, which can be easily mistaken for jellyfish or other prey but cannot be degraded in the stomach. Plastics also slowly release toxins and other chemical substances that work their way up the marine food chain. “It’s too late to do much about what’s already out there at this stage, as this stuff is going to hang around for thousands of years,” said Bowler. However, he says the best way to mitigate future pollution is to advocate the use of biodegradable technologies while emphasising a shift in consumer practices. More here.

One Family in Gaza from Jen Marlowe on Vimeo.