Alexei Sayle to Leonard Cohen: Do NOT Play in Tel Aviv
June 22nd, 2009 § 2 Comments
The famous British Comedian, Alexei Sayle, is sending an urgent message to Leonard Cohen – Please DO NOT Play in Tel Aviv! Alexei supports the Cultural Boycott of Israel, designed to end the occupation and oppression of Palestine.
Iran Had a Democracy Before We Took It Away
June 22nd, 2009 § 2 Comments
Leaving aside the frivolous denunciations of Iran for such crimes as ‘creating Hizbullah’ to fight Israel, Chris Hedges makes some fair points about the hypocrisy of the US elite and intelligentsia whose historical amnesia prevents them from recognizing their own role in undermining Iranian democracy, and who have shown far less concern for the progressive erosion of democracy at home.
Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi speaks to supporters at a demonstration in Tehran (AP Photo / Ali Zare)
Iranians do not need or want us to teach them about liberty and representative government. They have long embodied this struggle. It is we who need to be taught. It was Washington that orchestrated the 1953 coup to topple Iran’s democratically elected government, the first in the Middle East, and install the compliant shah in power. It was Washington that forced Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, a man who cared as much for his country as he did for the rule of law and democracy, to spend the rest of his life under house arrest. We gave to the Iranian people the corrupt regime of the shah and his savage secret police and the primitive clerics that rose out of the swamp of the dictator’s Iran. Iranians know they once had a democracy until we took it away.
Where Is My Vote?
June 21st, 2009 § 2 Comments
The Editor: In these parlous times it becomes imperative to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate solidarity. The following is based on principle and respect for the Iranian people, and its demand for transparency and accountability is one we share even if our own reading of the elections is different.(Also see Khatami and Moussavi‘s statements on the elections which have been translated by our good friend Naj).
The aim of the following appeal is to declare our support for the Iranian movement in its call for a new election and our opposition to any violent intervention on the protesters. We do so as independent academics and not as representatives of our many respective governments. We do so in the hope that the historical appreciation and respect of higher learning in most of traditional Iran will make our voice of solidarity heard within Iran.
Iranians participate in the democratic process
June 21, 2009 — A week ago, Friday June 12, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner of the Iranian presidential election. Immediately after, all other candidates, Mir-Hossein Moussavi, Mehdi Karroubi, and even the conservative Mohsen Rezaei, disputed the official results. So did some people who started several demonstrations to express their anger. More news fueled the suspicion of fraud at an unprecedented scale. On Monday June 15, and to the amazement of the world, millions of people – of all ages, classes, and backgrounds – were in the streets of Tehran demanding another election in what was the biggest demonstration since the revolution in 1979. A week later, despite the threats and beatings issued and ordered by the government, millions of people are still demonstrating, and the movement is growing and spreading to other cities.
In praise of … John Berger
June 21st, 2009 § 2 Comments
Even the Guardian editors’ encomiums can’t escape the characteristic wishy-washiness. So they praise John Berger, in their usual weasly manner of course, and yet denigrate the politics which animates his fiction and gives it its distinctive edge.
John Berger
John Berger’s most tangible influences were that tiny band of intellectuals who combined fine-art criticism with a social conscience: John Ruskin; Oscar Wilde; Walter Benjamin. Great writers all, and 82-year-old Berger is their equal. Indeed, that was true as early as 1972, when he published Ways of Seeing, the classic work of art criticism that became a founding text of cultural studies and still has a huge influence on art teachers and their students. What is most gratifying about the report we publish today is that Berger still holds to the humane, generous values set down in that book, rather than make that long, cliched voyage to being a reactionary with a dessicated heart. The archive of one of the greatest thinkers in postwar Britain – a Booker-winning novelist, an artist, a critic – would have fetched a usefully-high price from any number of American universities, but Berger has given it for free to the British Library. All he wants is for the BL’s representative to help him with some farmwork. That is a typically bit of puckishness from a man who, when he claimed the Booker for his novel G, delivered a tirade of an acceptance speech against the event’s corporate sponsors and promptly handed over half his prize money to the Black Panthers. Gestures like that distracted (how could they not?) attention from his aphorisms such as “Nobody had ever sworn in paint before Picasso”. A sharp, bold statement – but it is also generous, helping the reader see the work under discussion. Those same qualities are true of its author.
Guevara asks you to join the vegetarian revolution
June 21st, 2009 § 21 Comments
A bit of levity — though many of us take our vegetarian cause very seriously — to balance out the grim crises in Iran and elsewhere we’ve covered here in PULSE. Pictured is Lydia Guevara, granddaughter of Ernesto “Che”, in a campaign for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). Yes, those bandoliers are of baby carrots. Launched first in Argentina, where Che Guevara was born, the campaign is PETA’s first for South America. And lest we forget, the biggest reason behind deforestation in the mighty Amazon is beef, a large chunk of it for export.
Death
June 21st, 2009 § 5 Comments
*Warning – disturbing footage.*
Neda Soltani was killed by the Basij. This is cowardly and despicable. I hope the perpetrators are brought to justice and dealt with severely. It was reported the other day that some of the Basijis were being arrested. I hope that is true.
Death — by Harold Pinter
Where was the dead body found?
Who found the dead body?
Was the dead body dead when found?
How was the dead body found?Who was the dead body?
Who was the father or daughter or brother
Or uncle or sister or mother or son
Of the dead and abandoned body?Was the body dead when abandoned?
Was the body abandoned?
By whom had it been abandoned?Was the dead body naked or dressed for a journey?
What made you declare the dead body dead?
Did you declare the dead body dead?
How well did you know the dead body?
How did you know the dead body was dead?Did you wash the dead body
Did you close both its eyes
Did you bury the body
Did you leave it abandoned
Did you kiss the dead body
Sentimental moments at the ballot box: Thomas Friedman warms his heart in Brummana, Lebanon
June 20th, 2009 § 3 Comments
Not Brummana, Lebanon. (Photo by Amelia Opalinska.)
In a June 16 Op-Ed column in the New York Times entitled “The Virtual Mosque,” Thomas Friedman declares that events in Iran have raised “three intriguing questions” for him:
Is Facebook to Iran’s Moderate Revolution what the mosque was to Iran’s Islamic Revolution? Is Twitter to Iranian moderates what muezzins were to Iranian mullahs? And, finally, is any of this good for the Jews — particularly Israel’s prime minister, Bibi Netanyahu?”
Friedman goes on to explain that, over the past 8 years in certain parts of the Middle East, “spaces were opened for more democratic elections,” but that “[u]nfortunately, the groups that had the most grass-roots support and mobilization capabilities — and the most energized supporters — to take advantage of this new space were the Islamists.” Leaving aside the issue of why Friedman thinks it is up to him to decide which manifestations of democracy are fortunate and which are not, we are informed that the reason the Islamists have been able to exploit the opening of democratic spaces is that they have mosques, places where they “were able to covertly organize and mobilize… outside the total control of the state.” Over the next few paragraphs Friedman appears to arrive at the conclusion that people who attend mosques are less entitled to rights as citizens than, for example, the more than 50,000 fans that Mir Hossein Mousavi is reported to have on Facebook. Friedman points out that 50,000 exceeds the capacity of a mosque, although he does not speculate as to whether all of the Mahmoud Ahmadinejads listed on Facebook are real.
The language that absolves Israel
June 20th, 2009 § 2 Comments
Looking over the Apartheid wall
‘A special political vocabulary prevents us from being able to recognize what’s going on in the Middle East,’ writes Saree Makdisi.
On Sunday night, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a speech that — by categorically ruling out the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state — ought to have been seen as a mortal blow to the quest for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
On Monday morning, however, newspaper headlines across the United States announced that Netanyahu had endorsed the creation of a Palestinian state, and the White House welcomed the speech as “an important step forward.”
Reality can be so easily stood on its head when it comes to Israel because the misreading of Israeli declarations is a long-established practice among commentators and journalists in the United States.
Philip Weiss on US Middle East Policy
June 20th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Scott Horton of Antiwar Radio interviews our good friend Philip Weiss.
Philip Weiss
Investigative journalist Philip Weiss discusses Netanyahu’s right-wing biblical rhetoric in response to Obama’s groundbreaking Cairo speech, the U.S. media’s long-awaited questioning of Israeli settlements, Israel’s accelerating departure from Western values and the sub-human living conditions forced on Gaza residents.
MP3 here. (31:26)
Philip Weiss is an investigative journalist who has written for The Nation, New York Times Magazine, The American Conservative, Jewish World Review and other publications. He is the author of American Taboo : A Murder in the Peace Corps and writes the blog “Mondoweiss“.
In Tehran, fantasy and reality make uneasy bedfellows
June 20th, 2009 § 7 Comments
It appears Robert Fisk — who I have often referred to as the greatest living journalist — is trying to redeem himself for the overly credulous reporting in his last article (for which he was chided here yesterday). “It’s said that the cruel ‘Iranian’ cops aren’t Iranian at all. They’re Hizbollah militia”. These and other equally silly rumors Fisk lays to rest in this return to his usual uncompromising journalism.
Protesters attacked by the Basij
At around 4.35 last Monday morning, my Beirut mobile phone rang in my Tehran hotel room. “Mr Fisk, I am a computer science student in Lebanon. I have just heard that students are being massacred in their dorms at Tehran University. Do you know about this?” The Fisk notebook is lifted wearily from the bedside table. “And can you tell me why,” he continued, “the BBC and other media are not reporting that the Iranian authorities have closed down SMS calls and local mobile phones and have shut down the internet in Tehran? I am learning what is happening only from Twitters and Facebook.”
