Author: mara.ahmed

Nearly 600 Israelis have signed up for a campaign of civil disobedience, vowing to risk jail to smuggle Palestinian women and children into Israel for a brief taste of life outside the occupied West Bank. The Israelis say they have been inspired by the example of Ilana Hammerman, a writer who is threatened with prosecution after publishing an article in which she admitted breaking the law to bring three Palestinian teenagers into Israel for a day out. Ms Hammerman said she wanted to give the young women, who had never left the West Bank, “some fun” and a chance to see the Mediterranean for the first time. Her story has shocked many Israelis and led to a police investigation after right-wing groups called for her to be tried for security offences. It is illegal to transport Palestinians through checkpoints into Israel without a permit, which few can obtain. If tried and found guilty, Ms Hammerman could be fined and face up to two years in jail. Full article.

The talks are surely a farce, but this is an amazing moment that we must celebrate: independent Palestinian voices are at last being heard in major American newspapers as a counter to the endless pro-Israel arguments. And they are speaking plainly to Americans about an American idea: equal rights. The other day the New York Times ran Ali Abunimah on the centrality of Hamas to any discussion of the Palestinian future. Today the LATimes features an Op-Ed piece by Ahmad Tibi, a Palestinian member of the Knesset, more prominently than Yossi Klein Halevi’s counterweight hasbara. And Tibi tells Americans of the right of return to stolen farms and houses. Full article.

I stand with the ACLU and people all across America in defense of religious liberty. I also affirm my support for leaders like Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City who boldly oppose religious discrimination rooted in cultural stereotyping and resist those who seek to trade away our most precious values for political advantage. Our laws protect the right to build a mosque, church, synagogue or any other house of worship. And preventing Muslims or any other group from practicing their faith is unconstitutional and un-American. Sign petition.

Beyond the arts world, an increasing number of trade unions, student unions and churches are signing up to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Even an Israel-based group, Boycott from Within, backs the campaign, stating that its government’s “political agenda will change only when the price of continuing the status quo becomes too high . . . because the current levels of apathy in our society render this move necessary”. Full article.

his does not make any sense!

The bomb appeared to target a rally being held for Al-Quds day, an international annual event held by the Shia community opposing Israel’s control of Jerusalem and showing solidarity with Palestinian Muslims. The death toll has now reached 43 while the number of people injured is over 100. Full article.

When will those brave critics of Islam decry this mob hate?
As anti-Muslim hysteria in the US reaches a peak, its intellectual accomplices should start to reconsider their actions

In the New York Times last week, writing about the eruption of hatred for Muslims in the US, Frank Rich asked what seems an increasingly pertinent question: “How do you win Muslim hearts and minds in Kandahar when you are calling Muslims every filthy name in the book in New York?” Americans who are shocked by what the columnist Maureen Dowd calls a “weird mass nervous breakdown” accuse the usual suspects – rightwingers whose “fear and disinformation” is “amplified by the poisonous echo chamber that is the modern media environment”. But anti-Muslim toxins were injected into the mainstream well before August 2010, and not by rightwingers alone.

Bestselling authors like Ayaan Hirsi Ali may be the “new heroes”, as the writer Peter Beinart puts it, of the Republican party’s crusade against Muslims. But “professional” former Muslims have long provided respectable cover for the bigotry and, more often, plain ignorance of mainstream western commentators on Islam. This Monday Germany’s Hirsi Ali, the Turkish writer Necla Kelek, stood shoulder to shoulder with the German central banker and Social Democratic party (SPD) member Thilo Sarrazin as he asserted that Muslims are out-breeding white, presumably “Aryan”, Germans and that “all Jews share the same gene”.

Most of these ex-Muslim “dissidents” lucratively raging against Islam in the west wouldn’t be able to flourish without the imprimatur of influential institutions and individuals in the US and Europe. Hirsi Ali, who wishes to be the Voltaire of Islam, commands rapturous endorsements from not only rightwing crazies like Pamela Geller and Glenn Beck but also Tina Brown.

Certainly, the story of Hirsi Ali’s life attests powerfully to the degradations suffered by many women in patriarchal cultures. There is no question that she should feel free to say that Muslims are programmed to kill infidels and mutilate female bodies, however much these opinions may offend some people. There is little reason, however, for most of her opinions to claim serious intellectual attention.

Declaring that the civilised west has no choice but to stamp out barbaric Islam in the clash of civilisations, Hirsi Ali seems useful only to her bellicose neoconservative employers in the US and their ideological kin in the caves of Afghanistan and Pakistan. And her recent exhortations to Muslims to convert to Christianity make her sound more like Billy Graham than Voltaire.

Yet the mildest criticism of Hirsi Ali’s naivety triggers a tsunami of vitriol from her army of prominent supporters. In recent months Clive James as well as Melanie Phillips have rebuked Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash for not joining the chorus of praise for Hirsi Ali, a defender of the western Enlightenment, and for being “soft” on apparently closeted jihadists like the Muslim academic Tariq Ramadan.

Those who tirelessly cheerlead Hirsi Ali’s war on totalitarian Islam today did not have much, if anything at all, to say about the original despoiling, by western-backed Muslim fanatics, of Pakistan and Afghanistan during the anti-Soviet jihad in the 80s. The long-gathering backlash that finally arrived in the west on 9/11 sent them scampering to bone up about “Islam” – about as gainful a mode of knowing your enemy as Afghans sitting down to read Kant’s essay What is Enlightenment? after a US drone has destroyed their village.

Many of these Islam watchers championed the misbegotten wars that have already killed hundreds of thousands of Muslims and ruined innumerable more lives. But they still present themselves as virtuous and lonely warriors, indefatigably rooting out the internal enemies of western civilisation, who tend to be either Muslims sinisterly reluctant to embrace the true American patriot’s worldview, or politically correct liberal-lefties too scared to hear, let alone speak, the real truth about Islam.

Thus the writer Paul Berman, a self-described “laptop general” who first stalked Ramadan and hounded Buruma and Garton Ash in the New Republic – once the principal periodical of liberal America – and then expanded his 28,000-word indictment into a much-reviewed book, could recently lament in the Wall Street Journal, the Murdoch-owned US newspaper, that we are living in the “age of the zipped lip”.

Oddly, this persecution complex afflicts people with the easiest access to mass media and the greatest influence on public opinion. Defending Martin Amis, who had fantasised in the Times about subjecting Muslims to multiple humiliations, Ian McEwan protested that leftwingers were closing down “debate” on Islam.

As it turns out, millions of angry Americans have opened up an equally unedifying “debate” on Islam. “You look them [Muslims] in the eye and flex your muscles,” Hirsi Ali exhorted the west recently, “there comes a moment when you crush your enemy.” Well, that much-awaited moment is here. Populist sentiment, which Democrats as well as Republicans clamour to represent, fully endorses the scapegoating of a religious minority for America’s recent military and economic failures.

It remains to be seen how the previously besieged critics of Islam respond to the mob of Koran-immolators. Certainly their critiques of Islam, always redolent of tabloid wisdom, can no longer be passed off as acts of moral courage. And it may be too optimistic to expect them to go to Muslim countries, or befriend a few Muslims, and then discover, as EM Forster did, that: “Islam is more than a religion … it is an attitude towards life which has produced durable and exquisite civilisations.”

Even a conservative figure like Henry James, while recoiling from Jewish immigrants in Manhattan, manifested a curiosity about America’s new population that transcended the bigotries of his time. In comparison, the liberal assumptions of superiority today have seemed experience-proof. The mass anti-Muslim hysteria has now thrown them into crisis – finally, long after it has become clear that Hirsi Ali-style denunciations, vigorously amplified by mainstream intellectuals and politicians, have potentially terrible consequences for the millions of Muslims in the west.

Writing about another “foul, ignoble” episode in America’s recent history – Joe McCarthy’s witch-hunts against America’s internal enemies – James Baldwin marvelled at the “ignorance and arrogance” of intellectuals who went on discussing the threat to the “free” world while “every hour brought more distress and confusion – and dishonour – to the country they claimed to love”.

The stigmatisation of racial and religious bigotry counts as one of the very few instances of moral progress in the previous half-century. It’s not, alas, an irreversible advance, and the witch-hunters of today can still occasionally have a field day. But it is their intellectual accomplices who will invite the severest contempt of posterity.

The Guardian, September 1, 2010

[Obama] said that the US has paid a high price, a huge price. Not as huge as the Iraqis have paid. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed. Tens of thousands of Iraqis who were rendered in American detention, their lives ruined for years, children who didn’t know where their fathers were. A couple of million displaced internally and abroad. Iraq is a shattered country. He said we persevered because we share a vision with the Iraqi people. Most of the Iraqi people, their vision has been, for the last seven years, that the Americans would withdraw. Full article.

Kashmir has changed since 1947, even since 1989. In the 90’s it was militant and the Indians used that to build up their own military here. They’re still using it. But things have changed here – a turning point came in 2008 – in August 2008, we had a couple of million people turning out for a single march.The boys now don’t want to join the militants. Education has helped. Kashmiri boys on the street are reading Foucault, Martin Luther, about the Palestinian intifada, about Northern Ireland. They’re trying to equip themselves with knowledge whereas in 1989 they wanted to equip themselves with guns. The mood on the street here is changing but India has not changed its attitude towards Kashmiris – India refuses to see that the earlier militancy has died down and been replaced by a peaceful movement. Full article.

US-brokered talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority begin today in Washington. Both sides agreed to sit down last month after the US successfully pressured Palestinian leaders to drop their precondition of an Israeli settlement freeze. On the eve of the summit, Palestinian militants killed four Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank. We speak with Ali Abunimah, co-founder of The Electronic Intifada. Full article.

As Pakistan struggles to rescue families from flood waters and fend off disease and starvation before winter sets in, it is scrambling to pay out a shocking 30% of its annual budget revenues to foreign creditors on debt incurred by previous dictatorships. If Pakistan is obliged to make these debt payments, rescue efforts for tens of millions of people whose lives have been devastated could be crippled. Earlier this year, we persuaded creditor governments to drop Haiti’s debt after it was devastated by an earthquake — and now we could do the same for Pakistan. Pls sign petition here.

Pakistan’s staggering $55 billion debt burden comes from decades of reckless spending by its autocratic ruling elites, matched by irresponsible lending on the part of Western creditors and banks.

But 60% of Pakistanis still live below the poverty line. It is a tragic irony that these tens of millions of Pakistanis whose lives have been destroyed in these floods and who have received little or no benefit from these massive loans, are the ones now footing the bill of such unjust debt.

In the aftermath of Haiti’s earthquake, Hurricane Mitch in Central America, and the Asian tsunami, the world responded by suspending and cancelling debt payments from affected countries. Pakistan’s debt is too vast to cancel in one swoop, but a two year moratorium with accountability mechanisms to ensure that the released funds are spent on relief is a first step and now is the moment to push for it.

If we win this debt campaign, we can make billions available for relief and reconstruction. Let’s make sure the international community does the right thing. Sign the urgent petition above and share this message with all your friends and family.

This video from the American Civil Liberties Union condemns the U.S. government practice of issuing death sentences without due process as part of its targeted killing policy. “Targeted Killing” is being released to coincide with the filing today of an unprecedented lawsuit by the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) challenging the government’s asserted authority to use lethal force against U.S. citizens located far from any battlefield without judicial process, and without disclosing the standards it uses to target individuals for death.

[drone attacks on “other” people r well accepted for the most part. i found it interesting that even in this video, the aclu is supporting targeted killing as long as it’s in a war zone. well, if u wanna get really legal about it, both iraq and afghanistan r illegal wars and we r not at war with pakistan. so drone attacks on iraqis, afghans and pakistanis r as reprehensible, illegal and immoral as on u.s. citizens. the whole idea of murder w/o judicial process (much like the dubai assassination of a hamas man by mossad) is unacceptable. what people don’t understand is that as we lower the legal stds of justice (and human decency), at some point it will affect all of us.]

Firas Maraghy, a Jerusalem native and current Berlin resident, has been on hunger strike in front of the Israeli Embassy in Berlin since 26 July, demanding Jerusalem residency rights for his baby daughter and the right to keep his own residency: “My father was born before the establishment of the State of Israel. My grandfather was born before the Balfour Declaration. And I am going to lose my right to be in Jerusalem just because I have stayed in Germany for a few years?” The German section of the Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East has sponsored a petition on Firas Maraghy’s behalf. Sign petition here.