Juan Cole’s “Engaging the Muslim World”
October 19th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Muhammad Idrees Ahmad, The Electronic Intifada, 19 October 2009
Stereotypes, ignorance and misrepresentation have long pervaded US media coverage of Islam. In his 1981 book Covering Islam, the late Edward Said analyzed these distortions in the light of the relationship between knowledge and power and found that hostile representations are often informed by the particular circumstances of the engagement between the US and the Muslim world and the asymmetry of power between them. Little has improved in the years since, even as the focus on the region has intensified. Many of the misrepresentations that Said observed still abound, but the increased attention since the end of the Cold War, and especially since 11 September 2001, has inflamed suspicions and reinforced resentments making it easier for demagogic politicians to exploit. In his timely and insightful new book, Engaging the Muslim World, University of Michigan professor Juan Cole debunks prevailing myths and presents a set of compelling policy prescriptions that aim to encourage dialogue and defuse hostilities. However, while he convincingly addresses the questions of knowledge, unlike Said, he leaves issues of power largely unexamined.
Challenging the Dahiyeh Doctrine: the Samouni Family and the Goldstone Report
October 19th, 2009 § 1 Comment
The Samouni family of Palestine lost 29 members of its extended family in Israel’s December massacre against the defenceless population in Gaza. Brenda Heard, founder of Friends of Lebanon, reveals how the goodwill of the Samouni family and assumption of continued cordiality with Israelis was repaid: in their family’s blood. The Samouni’s naive neighbourliness in the service of self-preservation was repaid with most of their extended family mercilessly wiped out by the occupying apartheid regime. This was not collaboration but a misguided attempt to co-exist under conditions of occupation and siege. The genocidal contempt towards genuine peace and all Palestinians is on display in a microcosm here as the UNHRC passes the Goldstone Report.
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Just Say No – Refusing the Drug of Propaganda at an Early Age
October 19th, 2009 § 2 Comments
Israeli media is finally starting to feel the pressure. These past two weeks, the news has been full of the issues that activists have been working hard for and paying with their freedom for. Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions is slowly making headlines, the Goldstone report has been on the Israeli mind all week and the issue I’d like to highlight today, has been gaining momentum: The Shministim.
Meet the Shministim
In Hebrew “Shministim” means “seniors”. Every high school senior, in Israel, gets their drafting order in the mail. On rare occasions, these seniors refuse on ethical grounds, becoming conscientious objectors. In Israel, conscientious objectors are jailed by the army. They serve up to 28 days (those refusing to wear an army uniform, during their jailing, are sent to solitary confinement), are released and jailed again, until the army agrees to discharge them.
LIVE FROM HONDURAS: Claudia Rosett fails to detect Obama conspiracy to keep Nobel Peace Prize out of Micheletti’s hands
October 18th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Asked in a recent meeting in the press room at the presidential palace in Tegucigalpa about the accuracy of the New York Times claim that the coup government has spent at least $400,000 USD thus far on a “high-profile lobbying campaign” in the US, coup president Roberto Micheletti is reported in La Tribuna as responding that “the calculations have already been made and we know perfectly well how much is being charged,” before confirming that the estimated sum sounds fairly accurate. Not explained is whether Micheletti believes that the fact that he knows how much he is paying justifies the undertaking, or why there has been incessant golpista complaining about Honduran President Mel Zelaya’s past allocation of funds for domestic projects.
According to Micheletti, the hiring of Washington firms like the Cormac Group and Chlopak, Leonard, Schechter & Associates is completely consistent with “what the law says we can do” and is not so much a campaign as a presentation of information his government thinks the US should know. As for domestic projects currently being pursued in Honduras, these include a promise made by Micheletti to improve press room conditions at the presidential palace and a Forbes.com article by Claudia Rosett reproduced on page 10 of the October 10 edition of La Tribuna along with the specification “Paid political advertisement” in the top right corner.
Khalil Bendib interviews Shlomo Sand
October 17th, 2009 § 2 Comments
(Download Mp3)
Following an interview earlier this year, Khalil Bendib once again speaks with Tel Aviv University historian Dr. Shlomo Sand about his brand-new book, The Invention of the Jewish People. The book has become a best seller both in Israel and in France: Did the world’s Jewry truly originate in Palestine, and if not, why does that myth persist to this day?
Sand is currently touring the US: see also an interesting review of Shlomo Sand’s recent NYU lecture by Philip Weiss here.
Smashing the Silence: Community Defiance in Honduras
October 16th, 2009 § 3 Comments
Demonstration in front of Clarion Hotel, Tegucigalpa. (Photo: Joseph Shansky)
By Joseph Shansky
Since the few days of renewed excitement around the “secret” return to Honduras of democratically-elected President Manuel “Mel” Zelaya, there has been a disturbing omission of the Honduran political crisis in the international news. It would be reasonable to think that with each passing day an exiled president was camped in a foreign embassy (as Zelaya has been in the Brazilian embassy since September 21st), tensions would rise and all eyes of the world would be on that lone building. Instead the opposite has occurred and it appears as though the international press had lost interest without action to follow. The subsequent collapse and renewal (and collapse again, etc.) of ongoing “negotiations” with Roberto Micheletti’s coup government did little to breathe life into this story.
Here in Tegucigalpa, life continues under subtle siege for ordinary citizens. The city gets dark faster at night now and the people seem more frightened in general. The curfew remains. Small groups huddle together and glance around anxiously, couples hug closer, young girls grasp hands tighter and walk faster. Militia is everywhere of course, made up of young, mostly uneducated kids who twirl their guns with abandon, dig their batons into the dirt and wait for a notice for action. It can come at a whistle’s call here, and sometimes it feels as though the entire country is poised, frozen in battle.
Treasury’s Cohen Cracks Down!….well, not on everyone.
October 16th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Where are Lev Leviev and Irving Moskowitz in the big scheme of things?
The Treasury Department’s assistant secretary David Cohen addressed the American Bankers Association on Monday. Cohen implored the assembled executives to understand that money laundering sometimes involves “good money being put to bad use,” a standard the G7 Financial Action Task Force adopted way back in 1989. Cohen outlined Treasury’s efforts to “detect, deter and deny” money launderers access to the financial system by naming and shaming “facilitators” from the Gulf petroleum producers to Mexico. He also warned that there would be “reputational and legal consequences” for banks that didn’t pull at the yoke of expanded Treasury powers assumed under Executive order 13224 (PDF).
Audience members were visibly uneasy during camera pans. There was little interest in questioning the Treasury’s new employee. Perhaps with good reason. James G. Carr, the chief federal judge in northern Ohio, recently ruled that Treasury was acting unconstitutionally when it froze a US charity under suspicion of terrorist ties. US courts are only beginning to weigh in on the vast new powers assumed by Treasury. Until now there has been little visibility into its overseas activities. Treasury maintains that the Bank Secrecy Act, a money laundering law, empowers it to deny FOIA requests.
Is a Binational State Possible?
October 15th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Palestinian-American journalist and Electronic Intifada co-founder Ali Abunimah discusses the notion of a binational state in Palestine/Israel with Palestinian politician Ghassan Khatib on the Riz Khan Show. Abunimah reiterates an important point early on which advocates of the two-state solution continue to ignore: if the two-state solution has failed to cement the so-called “peace process” after nearly two decades of failed “negotiations,” then isn’t it time to consider a more realistic, practical possibility? Or is the “peace process” just a show, rather than an actual quest for a viable solution to this conflict?
For PULSE contributing editor Robin Yassin-Kassab’s comments on Abunimah’s brilliant book, One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse, click here.
Peshawar: A Journey Home
October 14th, 2009 § 2 Comments
Beyond Hayatabad, the sun sets over the Khyber hills which separate Peshawar from the tribal areas.
Le Monde Diplomatique, 14 October 2009; Counterpunch.org, 15 October 2009
I leave Kamra (*) in Punjab at 7pm in a rickety old bus without air-conditioning. A pleasant wind rushes through the open windows: the late summer evening has mercifully sucked the humidity out of it. People who can’t afford air-conditioned transportation usually escape the infernal elements by travelling at night. And the passengers are mostly a destitute lot. When a man in the seat in front gets up I notice that his sādr — a cotton shawl used by Pakhtun men variously as a turban, windbreaker or bedspread — covers the long rip running down the back of his kameez. Next to that rip is an older tear that has been crudely stitched together.
In two hours we are in Peshawar. For a third of each day the city has no electricity, and it’s lights out as we arrive. I get off a stop early and decide to walk even though I have been advised against walking in western clothes outside the city centre. A pharmaceutical company salesman was killed a short while back for arriving at a hospital wearing pants, shirt and tie. But I feel safe despite my hiking outfit, backpack and sandals: I haven’t been in Peshawar long enough to think of it as anything but the city I grew up in. We always took our safety for granted.
Goldstone and the Kids
October 14th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Illustration by Carlos Latuff
Anything that happens in my world, now, seems just that little bit more ironic, since Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Not that I credit the institution with too much merit, considering its list of peace-fakers, but the propaganda of this ill-executed award bothers me, nevertheless. While it’s easy to discredit Obama as an initiator of peace just for the sheer amassing of dead Afghans, this year I’d like to take it to my own little corner of the world.
Politics of Human Rights
Another action against peace, which the Obama administration has taken, is the pressure it applied in the UN to bury the Goldstone report:
Unsurprisingly, an early ally in the Israeli campaign for impunity was the Obama Administration, whose UN ambassador, Susan Rice, expressed “very serious concerns” about the report and trashed Goldstone’s mandate as “unbalanced, one-sided and basically unacceptable.” (Rice was acting true to her word; in April she told the newspaper Politico that one of the main reasons the Obama Administration decided to join the UN Human Rights Council was to fight what she called “the anti-Israel crap.”) [Electronic Intifada]
