Atrocities in Afghanistan: A Troubling Timetable
April 30th, 2010 § 1 Comment
by Kathy Kelly and Dan Pearson
Photo: Paula Bronstein/Getty Images
Peace activists can hasten an end to the U.S. war in Afghanistan by demanding a timetable for U.S. military withdrawal. [A bill in the U.S. Congress] introduced by Representatives McGovern and Jones, requires such a timetable. In the Senate, a similar bill has been introduced by Senator Feingold. Arguments in favor of a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan should include readiness to examine disturbing patterns of misinformation regarding U.S./NATO attacks against Afghan civilians.
It is worth noting that even General McChrystal acknowledges that U.S. forces have killed civilians who meant them no harm. During a biweekly videoconference with US soldiers in Afghanistan, he was quite candid. “We’ve shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force,” said General McChrystal. “To my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I’ve been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it.”
Those families and individuals that General McChrystal refers to should be our primary concern. We should try to imagine the sorrow and horror afflicting each individual whose tragic story is told in the “timetable” of atrocities committed against innocent people. How can we compensate people who have endured three decades of warfare, whose land has been so ravaged that, according to noted researcher Alfred McCoy, it would cost $34 billion dollars to restore their agricultural infrastructure. We should notify our elected representatives that the $33 billion dollar supplemental funding bill sought by the Obama administration to pay for U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq could be directed toward helping Afghanistan replant its orchards, replenish its flocks, and rebuild its irrigation systems. We should insist on an end to atrocities like those which follow.
Outing the Muslimness, Finally: Some Viewing (and Hearing) Pleasures (The King is Out: Part VI)
April 30th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
by Huma Dar
[Read Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V]
Rizwan Khan Offering His Namaz
[I]n one scene I wanted to have just a half open door and I wanted to be shown saying namaz once. We couldn’t take that shot. Then we put that bit where I say the prayer: Nasrun minal lahe wah fatahun kareeb (God give me strength to win) [sic] [Victory is Allah's, and the opening/victory is close] which is my own prayer too. I don’t think we should intellectualise entertainment. See the fun of it.
This is how Shahrukh Khan describes his experience working in the film Chak De! India (Dir: Shimit Amin, 2007). With apologies to King Khan for discarding his proposal to not “intellectualize” films, yet taking due “fun” in it, I argue that it is only in My Name is Khan (Dir: Karan Johar, 2010) that the King finally comes “out” as a Muslim. No “half open door” is needed. This coming out affords particular visceral pleasures to an audience (or at least a large section of it spread across the globe) long resigned to seeing SRK endlessly and persistently marked by the specifically filmic variety of Hinduness practiced in Bollywood: doing various pujas and aartis at different Hindu temples, or adorning his spouses’ hair-parting with sindhoor and smearing his own forehead with tilaks. This performative Hinduization of Shahrukh Khan in Urdu-Hindi cinema is unrelenting precisely due to the dogged presumption of SRK’s Muslimness that is not easily obscured. “In my films I have been going to temples and singing bhajans; no one has questioned that,” (my emphasis) SRK exclaims in the same interview. No one “questions” the diegetic (filmic) Hinduness of SRK; it is expected and mandatory. With the increasing and explicit polarization in India since 1990s, the anxiety around Muslimness is such that it requires perpetual masking: an iterative performance of Hinduness, secular or otherwise. When the mask slips off, the performance is momentarily paused – as when SRK plays a Muslim character in a film and critiqued the anti-Pakistani politics of Indian Premier League (IPL) – Hindutva activists target SRK’s suburban Bombay home, Mannat, with massive demonstrations (See the earlier Part II for more).[1]
Nathalie Handal on the Palestine Festival of Literature
April 30th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Two days ago PULSE published an exclusive interview with previous PalFest patron, Carmen Callil, as part of our in-depth coverage of this year’s festival. Now, just one day before official opening, we’re publishing a second interview with 2010 PalFest participant, Nathalie Handal.
Nathalie Handal
Nathalie Handal is an award-winning poet, playwright and writer. She has lived in Europe, the United States, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Arab world. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, and she has been featured on PBS The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, NPR, as well as The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Reuters, Mail & Guardian, The Jordan Times and Il Piccolo. Her most recent books include: Love and Strange Horses (2010), and the landmark anthology, Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond (2008). Handal has been involved either as a writer, director or producer in over twelve theatrical and/or film productions worldwide. She was an honoured finalist for the 2009 International Rescue Committee Freedom Award.
Jasmin Ramsey (JR): Why did you decide to participate in the Palestine Festival of Literature again this year?
The Future of Palestine: Righteous Jews vs. the New Afrikaners
April 30th, 2010 § 6 Comments
John J. Mearsheimer
This is the transcript of the Hisham B. Sharabi Memorial Lecture delivered by John J. Mearsheimer at the The Palestine Center today.
It is a great honor to be here at the Palestine Center to give the Sharabi Memorial Lecture. I would like to thank Yousef Munnayer, the executive director of the Jerusalem Fund, for inviting me, and all of you for coming out to hear me speak this afternoon.
My topic is the future of Palestine, and by that I mean the future of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, or what was long ago called Mandatory Palestine. As you all know, that land is now broken into two parts: Israel proper or what is sometime called “Green Line” Israel and the Occupied Territories, which include the West Bank and Gaza. In essence, my talk is about the future relationship between Israel and the Occupied Territories.
Of course, I am not just talking about the fate of those lands; I am also talking about the future of the people who live there. I am talking about the future of the Jews and the Palestinians who are Israeli citizens, as well as the Palestinians who live in the Occupied Territories.
Suriname may have fewer missiles than Hezbollah
April 29th, 2010 § 1 Comment
Yesterday afternoon at the house of the family that is currently hosting me near downtown Beirut, Samar—a 46 year old mother of three—predicted an imminent repeat of July and August 2006, when dozens of relatives from the Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs had descended upon her home in order to avoid being the targets of Israeli surgical precision.
The cause of Samar’s prediction, it turned out, was U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ announcement during a Tuesday press conference in Washington, D.C. with Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak that, thanks to Syria and Iran, Hezbollah has “more missiles than most governments in the world.” Leaving aside the issue of how most governments in the world do not face regular attacks by the primary recipient of U.S. military aid, it is still unclear why Gates did not devise a similarly precise formula during his recent visit to Colombia, where instead of recognizing that the administration of Alvaro Uribe has “a worse human rights record than most governments in the world” he simply proclaimed Colombia a model for regional security. As for why it is that Hezbollah is more capable than the Lebanese state when it comes to repelling Israel from Lebanese territory, this may have something to do with the fact that U.S. military aid to Lebanon tends to center around less sophisticated weaponry such as night-vision goggles.
Who will be most crippled by the new Iran sanctions?
April 29th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
On Wednesday The Nation’s Robert Dreyfuss provided an interesting summary of a recent conference committee meeting where members of the house and senate gathered to “outbid” each other on just how “crippling” their proposed sanctions for “Iran” could get.
Dreyfuss describes the speakers as “rabid, right-wing Republicans or militantly pro-AIPAC Democrats” and argues that recently proposed “draconian” bills that will impose sanctions on anyone that sells gasoline or petroleum products to Iran will not only be bad for business, they are also highly unlikely (as Juan Cole and others have argued) to weaken the Iranian government into submission in the first place.
Significantly, Dreyfuss notes the Obama Administration has so far resisted the house and senate bills in question, but key US congress members (pressured by Israel lobbyists devoted to blocking the prospect of diplomatic relations between the US and Iran) are determined to “force” the Obama administration into complying after they present a finalized Iran sanctions bill to the White House.
Most of the conferees lambasted the White House – and previous administrations, too – for refusing to implement Iran-bashing legislation that they’d helpfully enacted in the past. That’s because diplomats and others with cooler heads, including key players in the administration of George W. Bush, too, realize that sanctioning allies and imposing harsh penalties on European, Russian, Chinese, and Indian companies doesn’t win friends and influence people. (The Clinton administration realized the same thing, and President Clinton refused to impose draconian measures in the 1990s that Congress wanted.) But in 2010, Congress is so mad at Iran, and so unhappy with resistance from the White House and the State Department, that this time they’re going to write a bill that forces President Obama’s hand.
Ultra Zionists Take Manhattan, and Demand the Holy Land
April 28th, 2010 § 1 Comment
Indepedent journalist Max Blumenthal has just released his latest video. This one deals Jewish extremists at a New York city rally that closely resemble members of the American Tea Party movement.
Blumenthal writes the following.
On April 25, over 1000 New York-area Jewish extremists gathered in midtown Manhattan to rally against the Barack Obama administration’s call for a freeze on construction in occupied East Jerusalem and to demand unlimited rights to colonize the West Bank. With Obama and top White House officials engaged in a charm offensive to repair their relationship with mainstream American Jewish organizations, speakers at the rally lashed out at the Jewish groups and Democratic politicians, warning that cozying up to Obama would endanger Israel and imperil their cherished settlement enterprise.
I’ll let Blumenthal’s video tell the rest.
Last year, Blumenthal, along with Joseph Dana, produced the famous “Feeling the Love in Jerusalem” video that was banned on YouTube and Huffington Post. He also produced “Bomb a Ghetto, Raise a Cheer,” a video documenting pro-Israeli teabaggers rallying in support of Operation Cast Lead. For more of Blumenthal’s works click here.
Ghosts: Documenting Unseen Stories
April 28th, 2010 § 1 Comment
Canadian documentarian Morvary Samare’s brave new film, Ghosts, premiered last month at the Human Rights Film Festival in Montreal. The film reveals the stories of three Canadian-Arab men who were detained and tortured in Syria and Egypt for months and years only to later be released without charges. The film raises a number of important questions concerning the use of torture and the role of the Canadian government in these cases. As Samare notes, while the case of another Canadian citizen detained and tortured in Syria, Maher Arar, received enormous attention in the media, the cases of the three men featured in Ghost – Abdullah Almalki, Muayyed Nureddin and Ahmad Abou El-Maati – received none at all. Recent reports have revealed that although the Canadian government was aware that these men were detained and possibly being tortured, officials did little or nothing to question the validity of their detention. Instead, the government maintained that all of information pertaining to their cases concerned national security and as such, were state secrets.
Here’s a link to a recent CTV interview with Morvary Samare, the producer and director of the film (as well as one of the founders of RamzMedia):
Carmen Callil on the Palestine Festival of Literature
April 28th, 2010 § 2 Comments
Over the past two months PULSE has been providing in-depth coverage of the Palestine Festival of Literature which will be opening on May 1st. As promised, here’s an exclusive PULSE interview with 2009 PalFest participant, Carmen Callil.
Carmen Callil
Carmen Callil founded Virago Press in 1972 and ten years later became managing director of the publishers Chatto & Windus & The Hogarth Press. She is the author (with Colm Tóibín) of The Modern Library: The 200 Best Novels in English Since 1950. In 2006, she published Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland, a biography of Vichy figure Louis Darquier, whose daughter was Callil’s therapist. Callil was born in Melbourne, Australia. She moved to the United Kingdom in 1960.
Jasmin Ramsey (JR): Why did you decide to participate in the Palestine Festival of Literature in 2009?
Carmen Callil (CC): Because I wanted to see for myself what I had read about Palestine and the injustices under which it was said to labour. I had written a book about the persecution of the Jews of France during the Second World War, and their despatch from France to the Nazi death camps. As I researched and wrote this book, over many years, I became increasingly disturbed by what the State of Israel (I do not consider this state to be synonymous with Jewish people) was said to be doing to occupied Palestine. There were historical similarities which disturbed me. I wanted to see the situation for myself.
Leverett and Milani on the Riz Khan Show
April 27th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Last week New America Foundation/Iran Initiative Director Flynt Leverett appeared on the Riz Khan Show along with Stanford University Director of Iran Studies Abbas Milani to discuss US foreign policy on Iran.
According to Ben Katcher from The Race for Iran (all emphasis is mine):
One aspect of the discussion between Leverett and Milani deserves special attention.
Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.
