Month: November 2012

Dr Stephen Sheehi on Islamophobia and the Arab Spring, at Nazareth College

The War on Terror and much global conflict are rooted in Islamophobia. Dr Stephen Sheehi has written an excellent book on the subject. We are lucky that he will be in town this week and will be speaking at Nazareth College. Pls don’t miss this!
…

“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
dr stephen sheehi

stop killing shiite muslims!

murderous attacks against shias all over pakistan during the month of muharram – more than 300 shias have been killed this year in sectarian violence inside pakistan, according to human rights groups. all the analysis i’ve read so far talks about the “schism between sunnis and shias [which] developed after the prophet muhammad died in 632”. ok, but what about what’s going on in pakistan right now? no mention of how wahhabi groups were armed and funded by the military dictator general zia ul haq in the 1980s, of how the ISI was tasked with monitoring shia organizations, of how the pakistani state/military became complicit in the massacre of shias and how things have only gotten worse over time? military dictators like zia ul haq and pervez musharraf have done more harm to pakistan than we will ever be able to compute. the war against the soviets, the war against al qaeda, and now the war against the taliban have changed (and will continue to change) pakistan’s internal dynamics, its v makeup.

Secrecy and Sexual Assault in the Military – Richard Wolinsky interviews Helen Benedict

Richard Wolinsky: This is all set against the background of things that happened and people you interviewed, so I’d like to go into some of the details that simply stunned me. Rape plays a major part in this book [Sand Queen], and I understand that you wrote a play about a class action suit against the Pentagon by women in the army because the army refused to deal with rape.

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.

Poem with Several Unforgivable Keatsian References, Poem Burning Up in the Fire I Lit to Warm My Son by Chris Dombrowski

I’ll keep my soul this morning, a consolation
prize, fledgling my mother once nourished
with a pot of stove-warmed water carried
to a tepid bath, hence my first thought
while looking out the early window:
the moon as a pot of stove-warmed water
your mother carried to your tepid bath, hence
my conclusion that perhaps good John Keats
was wrong, that the world isn’t the vale
of soul-making so much as it is the river
running through the vale in which souls
can drown. I knew I was flailing when
yesterday a sparrow landed next to me
in the grocery store parking lot and I
had nothing to say to it, whereas when
my son ate boot-slush off the doormat
I yelled at him, sent him without a bath
to bed though he shook from the gouts of ice
that slid melting down his gullet. Since when
had I become a wiggler unworthy of a bait-hook
squirming on the shanty floor, I wondered, my negative
capability increasing through the night until the boy
woke crying, the woodstove fire dead.

More here.

On Gaza: Interviews with Sherine Tadros and Mouin Rabbani, and A Reading by Sinan Antoon

In a special edition of Voices of the Middle East and North Africa, three guests deepen our understanding of the recent onslaught beyond the reality of Israel’s brutal aggression. First, whose narrative does this media convey and why? Malihe Razazan poses this question to Sherine Tadros of Al Jazeera, who was one of a handful of journalists covering the attack from Gaza in the winter of 2008/2009. The other question is: Why did Israel really attack Gaza? Khalil Bendib speaks with long-time analyst and Jadaliyya Co-Editor Mouin Rabbani about the new context in which this latest Israeli onslaught is taking place in Gaza, and Israel’s effort to reaffirm and reassert its regional supremacy post-Arab Spring. The show concludes with poet and novelist Professor Sinan Antoon as he reads Silence for Gaza, a poem by Mahmoud Darwish that he himself has translated from the original Arabic. More here.

The National Language – Granta Magazine

Uzma Aslam Khan: It’s Urdu poetry that I love best, more than Urdu prose. (And more than poetry in English, which, with a few exceptions, lacks the immediacy with which I feel poetry in Urdu.) If I had to single out one poet, it would have to be Faiz Ahmad Faiz. There’s no other artist who’s captured the range of human emotion more beautifully and heart-wrenchingly than Faiz. I still remember my first experience of not only listening to his poetry but actually understanding it, and this was while hearing his two oft-quoted poems ‘Hum dekhainge’ (‘We will see‘) and ‘Dashte tanhai me’ (‘In the Desert of Loneliness’) sung by the amazing Iqbal Bano. The songs were playing in our home in the 1980s, during General Zia’s military rule, and many of those present who were singing with Iqbal Bano were also crying. Later, my father asked if I understood the poems, the first of which was a fiery and optimistic call to change, the second of which was a lament of loss and separation. I felt I did understand them, but I let him explain that celebration and mourning, love and despair, in Pakistan, are two things that are never separated. If that was true in the eighties, it’s no less true today, possibly, it’s even truer, which is why Faiz continues to matter, continues to be remembered, and continues to make us sing and cry.
…

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.

‘Mowing the Grass’ in Gaza

Michael Ratner: They refer to what they’re doing in Gaza sometimes as “mowing the grass.” In other words, they think that every three or four years, or whatever number of years, that the people in Gaza, who are on occupied territory, who are occupied, get a little bit too big for their britches, and they have to be—mow the grass, kill off the people who are leading any kind of revolt in Gaza. And that’s what they appear to be doing now, although again they appear to be doing with a high cost to civilians. […] I don’t like to put human rights on an equal footing when it comes to talking about the oppressed versus the oppressor. Yes, we can say they’re both violations of the law. But the question is: how do you end it? And the way you end that, of course, is end the occupation, return the land, certainly, that was conquered in 1967, which includes, of course, the occupied territories and the West Bank, as well as Gaza. You have on one of two theories, you either have a two-state solution or you have a one-state solution. But what you don’t have is a situation where Israel continues the occupation, continues to gobble up Palestinian land, and then occasionally, when the Palestinians begin a process of fighting back, then essentially rain on them an incredible amount of death with bombings, drones, etc. More here.

on thxgiving…

One day those who claim to be allies of the Indigenous will stop speaking about their past and future as if they were all extinct.

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

I Remember I Was a Point, I Was a Circle by Houda Al-Namani

I remember
I was
a point, I was a circle,
I walked
The swords are porous green. I fell, to the edge of a whitened
eyelash, I laughed, to the edge of death I laughed.
I remember I was a glass that breaks the water, stretched out across
a cloud,
I remember I was a butterfly,
despair began to spread like darkness, bullets began
to make shadows, pointed shadows.

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

When the Smoke Clears in Gaza

this was published in the new yorker!
…

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.

Life Under Lockdown

What is striking about the Gaza Strip is the lack of a visible military presence. In the West Bank at checkpoints and crossings, Israeli Defense Force soldiers in green fatigues strut about with their automatic rifles at the ready. They are young, some of them in their teens, and they sling their weapons over their shoulders like guitars as they demand papers and issue orders. At the Kalandia Crossing between Jerusalem and Ramallah in 2008, I was caught in the labyrinth of bars and turnstiles, trying to get through the metal detectors and x-ray machines. As I shuffled forward, voices yelled in Hebrew over loudspeakers. What they were yelling and to whom was unclear. I watched a middle-aged man, clearly in pain, being turned back; his wife and young daughter, who were trying to get him to a hospital for treatment, were weeping. In Hebron, the army patrols the streets in full combat gear, weighed down by helmets, body armour and radio sets, while kids on bicycles circle round them in the manner of children everywhere.

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.

When the Smoke Clears in Gaza

published in the new yorker:

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.

Mowing the Lawn in Gaza

So even though Israel itself had broken the truce a few weeks before and then assassinated its own subcontractor (according to Haaretz) it all boils down to Hamas’s desire to “inflame the entire region.” There is no mention of the political gains Israeli politicians usually harvest alongside and after these invasions or of the genealogy of the current moment.

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.

Chris Hedges: Elites Will Make Gazans of Us All

Gaza is a window on our coming dystopia. The growing divide between the world’s elite and its miserable masses of humanity is maintained through spiraling violence. Many impoverished regions of the world, which have fallen off the economic cliff, are beginning to resemble Gaza, where 1.6 million Palestinians live in the planet’s largest internment camp. These sacrifice zones, filled with seas of pitifully poor people trapped in squalid slums or mud-walled villages, are increasingly hemmed in by electronic fences, monitored by surveillance cameras and drones and surrounded by border guards or military units that shoot to kill. These nightmarish dystopias extend from sub-Saharan Africa to Pakistan to China. They are places where targeted assassinations are carried out, where brutal military assaults are pressed against peoples left defenseless, without an army, navy or air force. All attempts at resistance, however ineffective, are met with the indiscriminate slaughter that characterizes modern industrial warfare.

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.