Jeremy Scahill does CNN
November 5th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Earlier this week award-winning investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill appeared on CNN’s Lou Dobb’s Tonight where he debated NYU’s Patricia DeGennaro and the neoconservative Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations about Afghanistan.
Scahill has written and continues to write extensively about Iraq (he is the author of the brilliant Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army) and argues here that the US should withdraw from Afghanistan. His reporting is always immaculate and full of facts unlike much of corporate media’s censored fluff. Seeing a voice like his get airtime on a mainstream media outlet like CNN is one reason to remain hopeful. Don’t forget to support him and others like him in every way you can.
Watching “The Hurt Locker” Hurts
November 5th, 2009 § 4 Comments
"The Hurt Locker" was a Box Office favorite and may become an Academy Award contender.
Alternet, November 4.
As the year winds down and Hollywood gets busy creating Oscar buzz, one unlikely contender is “The Hurt Locker,” the widely praised Iraq movie that premiered at the Venice Film Festival last year and was released in the U.S. in June 2009.
Just when I thought I’d seen enough of Iraq war movies, along comes (Hurt Locker),” an Access Hollywood film critic told USA Today in September. “If any movie about Iraq is going to break through to the academy, this is it.
Indeed, the “megabuzz-spawning film” (to quote the Modesto Bee) was nominated for its first official honor last month, by the prestigious (if relatively obscure) New York-based Independent Filmmaker Project, which tapped it for Best Feature. According to the Los Angeles Times, which has started tracking Oscar favorites, “The Hurt Locker” has been tapped by no fewer than 16 leading film pundits as a serious Academy Award contender.
Even if it skipped your radar, you’ve probably heard some beaming reviews about “The Hurt Locker” by now.
The almost unanimous acclaim it attracted from mainstream reviewers focused mainly on director Kathryn Bigelow’s suspenseful action scenes, which make up the majority of the film’s run time, and prominent reviewers agree that it’s a masterfully crafted American combat epic about three deceptively simple-looking and courageous American men making sacrifices for their country while in unfamiliar, hostile territory.
How Eurocentric Is Your Day?
November 4th, 2009 § 9 Comments
M. Shahid Alam
At the outset of the classes I teach, I always address the question of bias in the social sciences. In one course – on the history of the global economy – this is the central theme. It critiques Eurocentric biases in several leading Western accounts of the rise of the global economy.
This fall, I began my first lecture on Eurocentrism by asking my students, How Eurocentric is your day? I explained what I wanted to hear from them. Can they get through a typical day without running into ideas, institutions, values, technologies and products that originated outside the West – in China, India, the Islamicate or Africa?
The question befuddled my students. I proceeded to pepper them with questions about the things they do during a typical day, from the time they wake up.
Unbeknownst, my students discover that they wake up in ‘pajamas,’ trousers of Indian origin with an Urdu-Persian name. Out of bed, they shower with soap and shampoo, whose origins go back to the Middle East and India. Their tooth brush with bristles was invented in China in the fifteenth century. At some point after waking up, my students use toilet paper and tissue, also Chinese inventions of great antiquity.
Gilad Schalit in Captivity – Israel’s Most Valuable Asset of Occupation
November 3rd, 2009 § Leave a Comment
The youth in Israel are raised to willingly and even proudly enlist in the army. I personally remember being promised by my high school teachers that if something happened to me, Israel wouldn’t forsake its “sons and daughters”. It’s been a while since I was in school, but nothing has changed:
[IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi] also told the troops that Israeli soldiers “must always remember that if anything happens to them, we will make sure they are returned to their families.”
I often ask myself how this can be said, when raising crops of gun-wielding robots is the main focus of the Israeli educational system. When you encourage me to enlist, do you not encourage me to die? When you encourage my parents to turn me over to the state’s care, for the sole purpose of enlisting, do you not encourage them to make the ultimate Abraham’s sacrifice? How do people get so crazy as to willingly sacrifice themselves for a “greater good” that they are constantly told is unattainable, because the other side is no partner?
CSIS Director Richard Fadden Patronizes Canadians
November 3rd, 2009 § 2 Comments
Richard Fadden, the newly appointed director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), recently stated that the Canadian media portrays terror suspects as “quasi-folk heroes” and that some Canadians wrongly believe that the Canadian government is “overreacting” when subjecting people to terror charges and policies. In his first public speech as the director, Fadden accused Canadians of being sympathetic to terror suspects while being too hard on their own government:
Almost any attempt to fight terrorism by the government is portrayed as an overreaction or an assault on liberty. It is a peculiar position, given that terrorism is the ultimate attack on liberties. If terrorists believe in anything, it is nihilism and death, and they are equal opportunity oppressors.
This is a curious claim to make, especially considering Fadden’s law degrees, without providing any supporting evidence. In response one could also argue that the Canadian government has done an outstanding job of attacking civil liberties on its own (see the case of Maher Arar who was tortured in Syria for more than 1 year after Canadian authorities erroneously informed US authorities that he was a terror suspect) while using Canadian tax dollars to pay for its mistakes when they could have been used to build better hospitals and more schools (Arar was given 10 million dollars in a settlement). Perhaps the Harper government’s decision to also spend more than 1.3 million Canadian tax dollars in “legal fees” to fight Judge James O’Reilly’s ruling that Canadian citizen Omar Khadr should be returned to his country of birth (Canada) and tried here is another reason why some Canadians don’t see eye to eye with their government.
Innocent Maher Arar is still on the US Terror Watchlist
November 3rd, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Even though a Canadian commission has cleared Maher Arar's name and admitted wrongdoing in the handling of his case, the US will keep his and his family's name on its notorious Terror Watchlist. Photo Credit: REUTERS/Chris Wattie
Syrian born Canadian citizen Maher Arar was flying through New York in 2002 on his way home to Canada after a family vacation when he was stopped by U.S. immigration. The US authorities had been misinformed by erring Canadian authorities that Arar was a terror suspect. After prolonged periods of interrogation, a brief meeting with a lawyer and denying the accusations that were made against him, Arar was deported to Syria where he was repeatedly tortured and held in a “grave” of solitary confinement for more than 10 months. Prior to his deportation Arar had stated that he feared being tortured in Syria. In response Arar claims that US officials showed him a document explaining that the Immigration and Naturalization Service (which was part of the United States Department of Justice but ceased to exist as of 2003) “was not the body that deals with Geneva Convention regarding torture.” His pleas and statements were ignored. Arar was released and returned back to Canada after almost one year in a Syrian prison. It later became evident that the Canadian authorities had “mistaken” Arar for someone else and a Canadian Commission publicly cleared Arar of any links to terrorism and offered him a $10 million settlement.
Despite Canada’s admission of wrongdoing and news of the settlement (granted in light of the overwhelming evidence that Arar could have used against the Canadian government had the case gone to court), the US government refused to clear Arar’s name and maintains both him and his family on its notorious Terror Watch List which now includes 400,000 names. In response U.S. lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) pursued a legal case (Arar v. Ashcroft) on Arar’s behalf, alleging that the actions of the U.S. government were illegal and violated his constitutional, civil, and international human rights.
Somalia: When is a pirate not a pirate?
November 3rd, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Pirates or Coast Guard?
From our friend Agustín Velloso Santisteban in Madrid.
Oh, the pirates! What a nice word. It brings us sweet memories from our childhood. Unscrupulous, merciless, astute characters, and today armed with automatic guns. We are longing to see before the High Court in Madrid, Spain, the two Somali pirates captured by our brave Atalanta operatives in the Indian Ocean on 4 October.[1]
We have had enough of the corrupt CEOs who sail towards offshore banks. We do not want to hear anymore about the prime ministers who attack and invade faraway countries. What we really want is to see real pirates. While those corsair and freebooter businessmen and politicians are well-known and still at large, you can confidently expect that the two detainees will spend a long time behind Spanish bars. Everyone knows that they are poor, black, Muslim and dared to attack a Spanish fishing boat.
Islam in the Writing Process
November 2nd, 2009 § 8 Comments
photo by Rehan Jamil
If all goes well I will be at Notre Dame University in the US later this month for a conference on the role of Islam in contemporary European literature. I wrote the piece below for the conference.
Salman Rushdie once commented that ‘Islam’, in contrast to ‘the West’, is not a narrative civilisation. This, in my opinion, is obvious nonsense. Beyond the fact that human beings are narrative animals, whatever civilisation they live in, and that Islamic civilisation cannot be isolated from, for instance, Christian, Hindu or Arab civilisations, the Muslim world has a history of influential narratives which is second to none. These include Sufi tales, chivalric adventures, fantastical travelogues, romances and spiritual biographies written in several major languages.
Although the Arabic novel is generally considered to have developed in the early twentieth century from the experience of industrial urbanisation and the penetration of European genres and philosophies, Ibn Tufail’s 12th Century “Hayy ibn Yaqzan”, an inspiration for Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe”, can reasonably stake a claim to being the world’s first novel. The Arabian Nights (via Don Quixote) is surely another source of the European novel tradition. And Islam the religion – as opposed to the even more nebulous ‘civilisation’ – is a text-based faith. The Qur’an is the religion’s only official miracle; the first word revealed to the Prophet was ‘iqra’ – ‘read’. Those who attempt to draw a distinction between literalist scripture and free and playful literature should pay attention to verse 26 of the Qur’an’s second chapter which, immediately after the first description of heaven and hell, proclaims: “Behold, God does not disdain to propound a parable of a gnat, or of something even less than that.” In other words, the Qur’an is a text unashamed to use metaphor, symbol and a whole range of literary devices in order to point to ineffable realities.
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Chomsky: Palestine and the region in the Obama era
November 1st, 2009 § 2 Comments
Tariq Ali and Noam Chomsky speak in London on the Israel-Palestine question. I think Tariq’s suggestions are eminently sensible, whereas once again Chomsky’s analysis leaves me underwhelmed. I don’t think he has anything of value to contribute to this debate any more. Worse, he is telling Palestinians that UNGAR 194 is no longer useful and that they should forgo the right of return. Curiously, he still continues to insist that Israel is merely a pawn in the belligerent US designs against Iran. I also found it disingenuous that while he has remained consistent in his opposition to BDS, his argument hasn’t. While in the past he would insist that everything Israel does was at the behest of the US, hence its the imperial patron that needs to be boycotted, now he says public opinion is not ready for it.
