Haiti and the Instruments of Death
January 17th, 2010 § 5 Comments
This is how the ‘International Community’ (read the West) is responding to the tragedy in Haiti: still no aid, yet plenty of guns. US has taken control of the Port-au-Prince airport and according to Al Jazeera it is turning back aircraft with much needed aid from other nations.
Don’t miss Patrick Cockburn’s brilliant piece. Here are some highlights:
The rhetoric from Washington has been very different during these two disasters, but the outcome may be much the same. In both cases very little aid arrived at the time it was most needed and, in the case of Port-au-Prince, when people trapped under collapsed buildings were still alive…In New Orleans and Port-au-Prince there is the same official terror of looting by local people, so the first outside help to arrive is in the shape of armed troops. The US currently has 3,500 soldiers, 2,200 marines and 300 medical personnel on their way to Haiti…
A sour Haitian joke says that when a Haitian minister skims 15 per cent of aid money it is called “corruption” and when an NGO or aid agency takes 50 per cent it is called “overheads”…
Inviting David Brooks to My Class
January 17th, 2010 § 11 Comments
M. Shahid Alam
On January 12, the New York Times carried an article by David Brooks on Jews and Israel. It so caught my eye, I decided to bring its conservative author to my class on the economic history of the Middle East. I sent my students the link to this article, asked them to read it carefully, and come to the next class prepared to discuss and dissect its contents.
My students recalled various parts of the NYT article but no one could explain its substance. They recalled David Brooks’ focus on the singular intellectual achievements of American Jews, the enviable record of Israeli Jews as innovators and entrepreneurs, the mobility of Israel’s innovators, etc. One student even spoke of what was not in the article or in the history of Jews – centuries of Jewish struggle to create a Jewish state in Palestine.
But they offered no comments about Brooks’ motivation. Why had he decided to brag about Jewish achievements, a temptation normally eschewed by urbane Jews. In my previous class, while discussing Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism, I had discussed how knowledge is suborned by power, how it is perverted by tribalism, and how Western writers had crafted their writings about the Middle East to serve the interests of colonial powers. Not surprisingly, this critique had not yet sunk in.
I coaxed my students, asking them directly to explore if David Brooks had an axe (or more than one) to grind. Was there an elephant in the room they had missed? What was the subtext of the op-ed?
An Interview with Joe Sacco
January 17th, 2010 § 1 Comment
From the excellent Ctrl.Alt.Shift Unmasks Corruption. An interview with Joe Sacco the acclaimed author, illustrator, journalist and historian. Sacco is the author of several award-winning works of graphic journalism, including Palestine, Safe Area Gorazde, War Junkie, and The Fixer.
To Shoot an Elephant
January 16th, 2010 § 2 Comments
During Israel’s deadly assault on Gaza in December 2008, Alberto Arce and Mohammad Rujailah were among only a few remaining foreigners who embedded with ambulances and Palestinian civilians as witnesses. “To Shoot an Elephant” (the title was inspired by a George Orwell essay) has since become an award-winning documentary that you can download for free from the official website. If you like the film, please also consider making a donation and/or purchasing DVDs to share with families and friends. Besides spreading this important message about the reality of what happened on the ground during Israel’s ‘Operation Cast Lead’, you will also be supporting the filmmakers and encouraging them and others like them to continue taking on more projects like this.
The trailer and a note from the director are found below.
Howard Zinn and the People Speak
January 16th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
In December 2009 the much anticipated documentary “The People Speak” (based on Howard Zinn’s excellent A People’s History of the United States and Voices of a People’s History) premiered on the History Channel. The DVD is expected to be released on January 26 and features narrations and performances by prominent and progressive American celebrities including Danny Glover, Sean Penn and Viggo Mortensen.
Be sure to also check out Voices of a People’s History of the United States, a nonprofit founded by Zinn that seeks to:
…bring to light little known voices from U.S. history, including those of women, African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants, and laborers.
The Agronomist
January 15th, 2010 § 2 Comments
This superb documentary by Oscar-winning director John Demme (Philadelphia, Beloved, Man from Plains, The Manchurian Candidate) uses the story of legendary Haitian journalist and broadcaster Jean Dominique as a focus to present the larger history of the country’s political struggles. The film features excellent archival footage and interviews, and a briliant soundtrack (although Wyclef Jean I have just learned is a poseur who actually echoed the Bush State Department line in laying the blame for the 2004 coup and kidnapping of Jean Bertrand Aristide on the president himself).
(Don’t miss Democracy Now!‘s excellent, in-depth coverage of the tragedy in Haiti)
Thomas Friedman charges Arabs and Muslims with building “something decent and self-sustaining in Afghanistan and Pakistan”, takes personal credit for outcome of U.S. Civil War
January 15th, 2010 § 3 Comments
(Photo by Rensselaer/Kris Qua)
In another demonstration of his knack for captivating editorial ledes, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman begins his recent dispatch “www.jihad.com” as follows:
Let’s not fool ourselves. Whatever threat the real Afghanistan poses to U.S. national security, the ‘Virtual Afghanistan’ now poses just as big a threat. The Virtual Afghanistan is the network of hundreds of jihadist Web sites that inspire, train, educate and recruit young Muslims to engage in jihad against America and the West.”
It thus appears that Friedman has in the course of a mere 6 months curtailed his exuberance over the lucrative opportunities offered to Islam by the internet, which he outlined in a June 16, 2009 column entitled “The Virtual Mosque.” Writing in the aftermath of the Iranian presidential elections, Friedman gushed:
What is fascinating to me is the degree to which in Iran today — and in Lebanon — the more secular forces of moderation have used technologies like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, blogging and text-messaging as their virtual mosque, as the place they can now gather, mobilize, plan, inform and energize their supporters, outside the grip of the state.
For the first time, the moderates, who were always stranded between authoritarian regimes that had all the powers of the state and Islamists who had all the powers of the mosque, now have their own place to come together and project power: the network. The Times reported that [Iranian opposition presidential candidate Mir-Hossein] Moussavi’s fan group on Facebook alone has grown to more than 50,000 members. That’s surely more than any mosque could hold — which is why the government is now trying to block these sites.”
Brzezinski on the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan
January 15th, 2010 § 2 Comments
Zbigniew Brzezinski has always ranked high in leftist demonology for allegedly luring the Soviets into Afghanistan and ‘creating’ the Mujahideen thereby destroying a government which was bringing womens’ rights and education to the benighted, medieval people. Typically, this analysis accords no agency to the Afghans themselves: the natives can only be manipulated, they have no will of their own. It is always the outsider that knows what’s best for the native: for the neoconservatives it is Uncle Sam, for leftists it as Kremlin. As Brzezinski correctly notes here, however, the Soviets were already deeply engaged in Afghanistan long before the invasion. The arms supplies only started after the invasion, and escalated around 1982. The war was a popular liberation struggle. The US support only hastened the Soviet exit, it wasn’t indispensable to it. The Afghans would have fought anyway.
Leaving aside his dubious views in other areas, on Afghanistan Brzezinski is right. And the interviewer’s attempt to impose a teleological narrative on developments in Afghanistan is rather frivolous. There was no inevitability to all that has happened in Afghanistan. Much like the neoconservatives, leftists seem predisposed to accept the Enlightnement belief in the linear progress of history. They fail to appreciate the contingency of it all.
(The first part of this interview is here)
Chomsky, BDS, and the Elephant in the Room
January 15th, 2010 § 18 Comments
As readers of this blog would know by now I have fundamental differences with Prof. Chomsky when it comes to analysis of the Middle East. In the following interview Ali Abunimah and Jeffrey Blankfort do an excellent job of challenging some of Chomsky’s more questionable claims. (Here is the article Blankfort mentions; here is his previous interview on the Lobby. Here is former Senator James Abourezk on Chomsky; and here is M. Shahid Alam.)
Why does Noam Chomsky oppose boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel, and why does he think Palestinians should not talk about justice and redress for their ethnic cleansing from their homeland in 1948? Why does Chomsky dismiss any talk about the influence of the Israel lobby?
On 13 January 2010, Ali Abunimah and Jeffrey Blankfort were invited to respond directly to an interview Chomsky gave earlier on these topics, on KPFA’s show Voices from the Middle East and North Africa hosted by Khalil Bendib. Chomsky was invited to take part in a direct debate but declined. Listen!
Neoliberalism and the City
January 14th, 2010 § 1 Comment
David Harvey
From the excellent Against the Grain. Here is a talk by acclaimed Marxist geographer David Harvey, author of the indispensable A Brief History of Neoliberalism. While I generally agree with Harvey on most things, like most leftists, he got Iraq wrong. Although his analysis is more sophisticated – he, for example, understands the symbiotic relationship between neoliberalism and neoconservatism and separates the logic of territory from the logic of capital — it nevertheless remains reductive in its materialism. (This perhaps has to do with his over-reliance on Michael Klare for his geopolitical analysis).
What role does urbanization play within the surplus-generating dynamics of capitalism? And what part do cities play in fueling or abating economic crises? Pioneering Marxist geographer David Harvey talks about 19th century Paris and New York City in the 1970s and how neoliberalism has shaped the city.
