Category: politics

interfaith iftar

interfaith iftar at the islamic center of rochester this evening. always lovely to see all our interfaith friends, of course, but how i love my muslim community. warmth, kindness, and wonderful generosity. such an honor to break our fast with everyone and then pray and eat together.

muna, shabnam, ayesha, halima, obaida, fatima, husain, samiha, navaira, wegdan, munye bhai and of course my daughter mimi ?

Lateefa Spiker’s art

Lateefa Spiker lives and works in London. Her reflective work is rooted in the spiritual traditions that underwrite traditional Islamic art and investigates the relationship between order and chaos, the contingent and the finite, and beauty and spirituality. Her particular approach to art was further enhanced by the time she spent in Cairo, Morocco and Spain.

Talking Forever (For Palestine & Dareen Tatour) by Naomi Shihab Nye

Say it again, resist times ten.

Those who were not politicians,

who were going to school or tending the rooms,

shops, libraries, kitchens, mint sprigs drooping in a can,

changing diapers, wiping spittle from chins,

chopping onions, snipping cucumbers from a scratchy vine,

we would have done anything for you, Palestine.

But all we knew to do was talk, talk, to everyone who already agreed.

Sign petitions, phone representatives, write checks,

wear keffiyehs tied around our necks, demonstrate,

feel hopeful that President Obama might (in his vast intelligence)

really stand up for you — what else could we do?

Talk to those who didn’t already agree? But who were we?

“If they knew our stories, they wouldn’t do these things to us,”

my Palestinian grandmother said, when she was 100 years old,

after being tear-gassed in her own room by Israelis.

She wasn’t angry – we were.

Dareen, trapped in her house for using the word “Resist” – she was there

and we were everywhere else. Easy to punish her, Israel had

no trouble trapping, oppressing, squelching, giving another name.

Pressed down for so long, those without influence over weapons or borders,

easy to ignore, refute, blame, always blame, changing the story,

inverting the facts…and they DID know the story, Sitti,

because everyone told it, Dareen told it,

Mahmoud, Fadwa, Edward, Suheir, Anton, Sharif, Nathalie, Lisa, Lena,

Khaled, Salma, Raja, Fady, Aziz, everyone told it, kept telling it,

talking forever, but the checkpoint lines got longer, pressed,

the sad orchards smaller, looming wall more riveted with cries,

the way a nightmare compounds, spinning out swirls of

hallways, blockades, locked doors, prison cells…

the powerful kept saying, Give the oppressors more money,

they are a democracy,

and the sleeping person shouted from the nightmare, Wake up!

Just let me wake up!

nakba rally

at the nakba vigil yesterday, where palestinians, jews, muslims, and christians came together to commemorate 71 years of the nakba or catastrophe whereby 700,000 palestinians were ethnically cleansed in 1948. i talked about palestinian poet dareen tatour who was harassed, house arrested and imprisoned over a period of three years for writing a poem titled, ‘resist, my people, resist them.’

nakba vigil in rochester

there will be a nakba vigil tomorrow at 5pm, at washington square park (near geva theatre) in rochester, ny. activists from jewish voice for peace JVP-Rochester, from the local muslim and palestinian communities, and from Christians Witnessing for Palestine will come together to commemorate the 71st anniversary of the “nakba” or “catastrophe,” when 700,000 palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their homes and villages. i will be speaking there. pls join us and learn more.

Write in Sareer Fazili

Pittsford friends, as we all know from the painful stories of racism we have heard recently, many things need to change in our schools. One of them is more diversity and POC representation on our school board.

My friend Sareer A. Fazili, a known leader in our community, is running for the Pittsford School Board as a write-in candidate.

A write-in candidate is a candidate in an election whose name does not appear on the ballot, but for whom voters may vote nonetheless by writing in the person’s name.

The election is May 21st. Please go to Barker Road Middle School between 7:00 AM and 9:00 PM and WRITE IN Sareer Fazili.

Seeing Ben Shapiro flounder might be fun, but far-right celebrities are no joke

had never heard of ben shapiro until this now famous interview (am not on twitter much). man seems to be a complete hack. totally agree with nesrine malik on not engaging with bigots and racists.
…

Nesrine Malik: There are broadly three ways to react to the shifting of the Overton window – the range of ideas tolerated in public discourse. The first and most common is to move along with it, accepting new parameters and adapting to them. The second is to stay put but look through the window, acknowledging that things have changed while attempting to grapple with that. The third is to resist the movement altogether, to refuse to engage with any previously beyond-the pale-ideas, and reject any arguments to do so.
I tend to fall into the third camp…

[…] The belief that somehow giving more airtime to people will expose and vanquish them makes no sense. The whole “sunlight is the best disinfectant” argument no longer works. Sunlight simply provides exposure and nourishment. There is no middle ground with bigots, no matter how popular they are. With every attempt at “challenging” them, all we do is expand their stage that little bit more. More here.

The Attacks On Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib Don’t Surprise Young Muslim People

For Kifah Shah, who splits her time between Los Angeles and New York, many of the reactions towards the two women remind her of growing up as a Muslim girl in a majority non-Muslim community. It’s also emblematic of a larger scope of intolerance and ignorance towards Islam as a whole: “With mostly white people, [life] after 9/11 were a mixed bag of curiosity and coded (sometimes blatant) racism: from being asked whether or not I’ll have an arranged marriage to being told my uncle was [Osama Bin Laden] to having teachers dehumanize Muslim lives by saying an entire city in Iraq wasn’t worth the life of one U.S. soldier,” she remembers, adding that seeing trolls target both Omar and Tlaib by questioning their patriotism doesn’t surprise her.

“The right has asserted pernicious ideas about whether or not Muslims in the U.S. subscribe to the idea of ‘America,’ because if they don’t, or if they question any aspect of it, then they must subscribe to some other ‘state,’” Shah notes. “This conspiratorial, baseless, and harmful lens has for a long while attempted to push Muslims into dichotomies of good versus bad.”

[…] Yusuf agrees. “The typical profile of a congressperson has been an older, cisgender, heterosexual, white man with money for as long as our country has been around,” she begins. “For [two] Muslim women — one Palestinian and the other a Somali refugee — to enter a space that this country has excluded women, people of color, queer people, immigrants and anyone else from is extremely significant.” It is no surprise that the system is not set up for them to succeed in that space, she adds. “There can be no question why their identities are at the forefront of every discussion about their actions and words.” More here.

Race, Racism, and Relationship: Microaggressions and the Beloved Community

I will be co-teaching a workshop on ‘Race, Racism, and Relationship: Microaggressions and the Beloved Community’ tomorrow at 6pm at First Unitarian Church of Rochester. Will share some clips from The Injured Body: A Film about Racism in America, talk about Claudia Rankine’s work, discuss the inclusion of dance in the film, and the connection b/w oppression and breathing, and much more. Hope you can make it!

US Sanctions Have Devastated Venezuela & Killed Over 40,000 Since 2017

Economist Jeffrey Sachs: The U.S. government has been trying to strangle the Venezuelan economy.

It started with sanctions in 2017 that prevented the country from accessing international capital markets and the oil company from restructuring its loans. That put Venezuela into a hyperinflation. That was the utter collapse.

Oil earnings plummeted. The earnings that are used to buy food and medicine collapsed. That’s when the social, humanitarian crisis went spiraling out of control. And then, in this year, with this idea – very naive, very stupid, in my view – that there would be this self-proclaimed president, which was all choreographed with the United States, very closely, another round of even tighter sanctions, essentially confiscating the earnings and the assets of the Venezuelan government, took place.

Now Venezuela is in complete, utter catastrophe, a lot of it brought on by the United States deliberately, creating massive suffering. We know there’s hunger. We know there’s a incredible shortage of medical supplies. We can only imagine, because we won’t know really until the dust settles and careful studies are done, how much excess mortality there is, but, surely, in a context like this, this is a catastrophe largely created by the US, because this is an all-or-nothing strategy. What the US, what Trump, just doesn’t understand is the idea of negotiations.

This is an attempt at an overthrow. It’s very crude. It’s not working. And it’s very cruel, because it’s punishing 30 million people. More here.