Author: mara.ahmed

we support egypt’s oppressive regime to the tune of 2 billion dollars every year. how dare we talk about democracy and freedom.

just lovely.

The church, which was founded in 1986, has long been controversial in Gainesville. The Koran-burning protest is just the latest in a string of high-profile “protests on other issues, such as homosexuality, same-sex marriage, and abortion,” Religion News Service reports. But it seems clear that taking on Muslims is the one of the church’s central goals. The church’s leader, Dr Terry Jones – who before heading up the Dove World Outreach Center ran a sister church in Cologne, Germany – has published a book entitled “Islam is of the Devil” and posted a large sign outside his church that offers passing commuters the same message. Last year, members sent their kids to public schools wearing “Islam Is Of The Devil” t-shirts (the students were sent home, creating more headlines.) Full article.

Published in Guernica, July 2010 (thx Majid)

No one has described the victims’ experience more astutely or intransigently than Jean Améry—writer, résistant, Jew—who was captured by the Gestapo in 1943 and survived (or, as he insisted, did not really survive) Auschwitz and other camps. Améry’s relative anonymity is a shame, for he wrote some of the most original, incisive, and discomfiting essays on torture and genocide ever penned—essays that are, sad to say, still strikingly relevant, and that challenge current ideas about what reconstruction after genocide might look like. Despite the restrained irony of Améry’s voice, his writings accumulate into an accusatory howl.

As he hung from a hook in a Gestapo prison, Améry learned some quick lessons. “The first blow brings home to the prisoner that he is helpless, and thus it already contains in the bud everything that is to come,” he would later write. This helplessness is social more than physical, and bespeaks isolation and abandonment more than pain. The prisoner knows that the world has forsaken him—rescue, aid, solace are impossible—and that he is, therefore, no longer part of the world, even if he is not yet dead. Améry learned, too, that all those aspects of his character that he had considered central and unique would quickly vanish, leaving only one irrefutable reality: the body in pain. “The tortured person never ceases to be amazed that all those things one may… call his soul, or his mind, or his consciousness, or his identity, are destroyed when there is that cracking and splintering in the shoulder joints… Only through torture did he learn that a living person can be transformed so thoroughly into flesh.” The destruction of the autonomous self—a destruction that, if he survives, will continue to haunt the victim—makes torture “the most horrible event a human being can retain within himself.”

The tortured person loses what Améry called “trust in the world”: a belief in the social contract, a belief that the boundaries of the body will be respected, a belief that the world wants to share itself with you. Trust in the world means that you, too, are entitled to a minimal safety and a minimal life: though the world might not shower you with happiness, it will at least defend your right to exist. The loss of that trust, Améry argued, is a kind of mutilation. That is why “whoever was tortured, stays tortured… It was over for a while. It still is not over. Twenty-two years later I am still dangling.”

In a startling piece called “Resentments,” written in the mid-1960s and addressed to a German audience, Améry wrote of the exultation he felt after the war, when the corroding loneliness of the torture-and-concentration-camp victim was eased. Améry was returned not only to life but to the family of man: he was in sync, intellectually and morally, with the world around him. This was, for him, “a totally unprecedented social and moral status, and it elated me,” he recalled. “There was mutual understanding between me and the rest of the world. Those who had tortured me and turned me into a bug… were themselves an abomination… Not only National Socialism, Germany was the object of a general feeling that before our eyes crystallized from hate into contempt.

Full article here.

The [following] clip by Sebastian Walker is the best feature report produced by Al Jazeera on Haiti so far and needs to be watched by everyone, no matter how much they think they already know. Of particular interest is Walker’s highlighting of the NGO industry which seems to be flourishing while Haitians continue to live in misery.

the pakistani army has suffered historically high casualties in the service of the “war on terror”, u.s. drone attacks killed 900 pakistani civilians last year, some 5 million pakistanis have been displaced on account of army actions against the taliban at the behest of the u.s. govt, millions r still stuck in horrific refugee camps, militant groups that were ditched by the pakistani army have been wreaking havoc inside of pakistan, but hey, now that we’ve sifted through 90,000 documents at super human speed and the NYT has declared that there r alleged rumors which suggest that pakistan might be playing a double game, now we can finally come out with it and have a troop surge in pakistan.

Israel is poised to become the largest defence supplier to India, a position currently held by Russia. Israel also trains Indian special forces, which are then deployed in the troubled region of Kashmir and in India’s north-east areas. Full article.

Right now, in the context of the war on terror, we are facing a barrage of claims about the supremacy of Western values. This is leading to a resurgence of white supremacy, and the banner of the superiority of Western values is often being carried by Western feminists – as we have seen in debates about veiling, sharia, and “saving” Afghan women. I see feminist organizing changing for the worse with this new self-assertive and self-confident white feminism, which supports the structures of white supremacy internationally. Full article.

western feminism – its ties to imperialism and the racialization and demonization of islam. brilliant.