A Map of Home
August 31st, 2009 § Leave a Comment
This review was also published in the Electronic Intifada.
Randa Jarrar’s “A Map of Home” is a beautifully achieved coming of age novel which follows a clever girl through a war, a domestic battlefield, and repeated forced migrations. For our heroine, these events are aspects of the normal everyday stuff (because everything’s normal when it happens to you), like school, friends, family, and shopping. Despite the geographical and cultural particularities of the story, the themes – of awakening sexually, of learning how to love a parent yet firmly say no, and of struggling for independence and a place in the world – are universal, and the book will appeal to all but the most easily shocked readers.
At the novel’s centre is a family. The father, Waheed, is a Palestinian from Jenin exiled to a string of temporary residences. Resentful of his failure to develop a career as a poet, he projects his ambition onto his daughter, about whom Waheed is convincingly self-conflicted: he wants her to be a famous professor, but doesn’t want her to study away from home.
LIVE FROM HONDURAS: Congresswoman Silvia Ayala Multi-Tasks to Restore Democracy as Self-pitying Expat Blogger Attempts to Smear Her While Updating Amazon Wish List
August 31st, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Silvia Ayala
Congresswoman Silvia Ayala of the anti-coup Unificación Democrática (UD) Party had just returned from Mexico and was en route to the Dominican Republic, part of a trajectory aimed at strengthening international condemnation of the June 28 coup d’etat against President Mel Zelaya. She made time to speak with me at a cafeteria in the northwestern Honduran city of San Pedro Sula and arrived with her husband and two children, who alternately contributed anecdotes to the discussion, answered Ayala’s cell phone, and—in the case of her young son—drew pictures in a notebook.
A lawyer herself, Ayala announced that about 200 Honduran attorneys had actively joined the coup resistance despite the general alliance between Honduran law school faculties and the political right. The Spanish description of the alliance exploits the homophonic similarity between derecho—law—and derecha, right, with additional Spanish homophony made possible by the arrival that day of Judge Baltasar Garzón of Spain to investigate coup regime violations of derechos humanos, human rights.
The Saints Are Coming
August 30th, 2009 § 3 Comments
The great Desmond Tutu and Jimmy Carter visit the Occupied Palestinian Territories along with three former heads of state Mary Robinson (Ireland), Fernando Cardoso (Brazil) and Gro Harlem Brundtland (Norway). They are also joined by Indian activist Ela Bhatt. Our good friend Philip Weiss notes that advocacy on behalf of the Palestinians by The Elders, a group established by Nelson Mandela and underwritten by such maisntream business figures as Richard Branson (Virgin) and Jeff Skoll (eBay), is a gamechanger. Skoll, he notes, is Jewish, part of a growing disenchantment with Zionism. ‘Today we tell the Establishment Jews’, Phil writes, ‘that the weather has changed again, and Israel cannot continue destroying human rights in our name.’
The Elders hear first hand about life in Gaza, Bil’in and East Jerusalem
The Elders were unable to visit Gaza but spoke with young people and others via video link. They then went to the West Bank village of Bil’in where a local protest movement against the separation wall is gaining momentum. In the evening they visited a Palestinian family in East Jerusalem evicted from their homes by Israeli authorities.
Scenes of Resistance: Notes from Tegucigalpa
August 29th, 2009 § 2 Comments
By Joseph Shansky
I came to Honduras as part of a delegation of concerned activists who went to witness and accompany the daily protests, monitor human rights violations, and report back to the international community on conditions since the June 28th military coup. On that day, democratically-elected President Manuel Zelaya was forcibly removed from office by the Honduran military and expelled from the country. In the aftermath there has been an immediate popular uprising in his support, with many instances of severe police and military repression which continue today. The following is a reflection on time spent in and around Tegucigalpa during two critical weeks in August.
Last night as I was packing my bags to go to Honduras, I heard that the military repression was getting worse. One hundred and fifty arrested, many wounded. I sit in the airport waiting room and scan CNN. Not a mention on the world news.
Walled Horizons
August 29th, 2009 § 1 Comment
This documentary narrated by Roger Waters of Pink Floyd is produced by the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Occupied Palestinian Territory (OCHA-OPT).
Walled Horizons is narrated by and features Roger Waters (founding member of the rock band Pink Floyd), who visits the Wall in the Palestinian territories and comments on his observations as a musician and a songwriter who has written on walls. The film explores how Palestinians in urban and rural areas have been impacted by the Walls construction since the International Court of Justices Advisory Opinion in 2004, which declared the Walls route illegal. Several senior Israeli security officials are interviewed in the film, two of whom were directly responsible for planning the Wall route and who explain the Israeli position for constructing it. The film was made by the United Nations Jerusalem.
Torture in Tehran
August 28th, 2009 § 5 Comments
It has been almost 3 months since the June 2009 Iranian election and allegations of detainee abuse have been added to the upsetting news of protesters who were beaten in the streets and others who were needlessly killed during the demonstrations. Reform candidate Mehdi Karroubi has been applauded for publishing the testimony of a young man who claims that he was also sexually assaulted while in detention on his party’s website and has warned that he will come forward with more allegations if investigations are not conducted.
It is not difficult to find many more allegations, by other Iranian men and women, who claim they were raped, beaten, subjected to prolonged solitary confinement and other forms of torture while held in detention. Some protesters have also died while imprisoned. Of course, these allegations are not evident of a new trend, but rather a continuation of Mohammad Rezā Shāh Pahlavi’s policies by the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI).
Writes Columbia university scholar and writer Hamid Dabashi:
These charges are no longer brought by expatriate, and at times discredited, opposition. It is the founding fathers of the Islamic Republic, with impeccable revolutionary credentials, who are bringing these charges, as others are coming out and corroborating them in excruciating detail.
The British amateur terror trackers: A case study in dubious politics
August 28th, 2009 § 1 Comment
A Spinwatch investigation: Tom Mills and David Miller on the British amateur terror trackers.
Dominic Whiteman as he appeared on BBC Newsnight
Investigations by Spinwatch reveal that a group of freelance terror trackers who promote stories about the threat from violent Islamists have been involved in exaggerating and even fabricating such stories, which they then comment on in the national press and on network television and radio. The group – which has now fallen apart – was centred on freelance spy Glen Jenvey and Conservative Party member Dominic Wightman, who uses the pseudonym ‘Whiteman’.
The barrage of stories from official sources and from terror ‘experts’ suggesting that Britain is under serious and extensive threat from Islamists and that Islam as a religion is particularly prone to extremism has been boosted by some stories that have little basis in fact. These have included:
- An alleged attempt to plant a story about terrorist grannies planning to blow themselves up in British supermarkets
- An attempt to suggest – quite falsely – that campaigners against the Israeli attack on Gaza were actually planning to target British Jews
- The creation of a fake allegedly Islamist website in a bid to entrap suspects.
- Spying on Tamil activists in the UK.
- A fraudulent fundraising effort in the 1980s which was claimed to be to aid the African National Congress
The Kennedys vs Israel’s Lobby
August 28th, 2009 § 24 Comments
Editor’s note: PULSE is delighted to welcome Grant F. Smith, director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRMEP) and author of many books, including America’s Defense Line, as our new feature contributor. In his first post Grant reveals the emerging details of the secret battles between the Kennedys and the Israel lobby.
AIPAC Founder Isaiah L. Kenen and Ted Kennedy
The lobby’s accolades for the late Ted Kennedy and his support of Israel mask the generally unknown conflicts fought by the senator’s older brothers. It is likely that lessons from the fiercest of all battles, fought behind the scenes by President John F. Kennedy alongside his brother and Attorney General Robert—guided the younger sibling’s political choices. Details of the JFK-RFK duo’s effort to register the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) parent organization, the American Zionist Council (AZC) as an Israeli foreign agent were shrouded in mystery until declassified in mid-2008.
Between 1962 and 1963 Senator J.W. Fulbright uncovered a massive network of financial “conduits” moving funds directed by the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem to Israel lobby startup groups across the United States. Even as JFK attempted to place Israel’s Dimona nuclear weapons program under US inspection, RFK ordered the AZC to openly register and disclose all of its foreign funded lobbying activity in the United States.
Pity the Nation
August 28th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the Beat Generation legend and founder of City Lights Books, reads one of his recent poems.
The Crisis of Islamic Civilisation
August 27th, 2009 § 2 Comments
This was published in Prospect Magazine.
The contemporary religious revival is a complex business. In the same period that Muslim societies, in their weakness, seem to have re-embraced Islam, America, in its strength, has re-embraced Christianity. Western Europe remains avowedly secular. Despite the contradictions within the West, mainstream Orientalism holds that all cultures are developing towards the universal (or, more specifically, globalised) model of secular modernity and the market. The Muslim world experiences backwardness to the extent that it resists secularisation.
“The Crisis of Islamic Civilisation”, a subtle and erudite book by former Iraqi minister Ali A Allawi, challenges this thesis. Surveying the Muslims’ social, economic and moral failures, and the terror espoused by certain Islamist groups, Allawi suggests the problem might not be too much Islam, but too little.
