Placating the gods of Citizenship: the Ritual Sacrifice (The King is Out: Part III)
April 22nd, 2010 § Leave a Comment
by Huma Dar
King Khan and his divinity
The obligatory declaration of cinematic patriotism for Indian Muslims (discussed in Parts I and II earlier) necessitates a continuous performance of “loyal citizenship” invariably through offering the sacrifice of a “disloyal” one. This leaves little space for critical engagement with the nation, the state, and the unending wars. An example of this ritual performance is the sequence in My Name is Khan where Rizwan Khan, played by Shahrukh Khan (SRK), reports the “doctor” in the Los Angeles Masjid to the FBI. How do we know the “bad” doctor is an al-Qaeda member or a terrorist? Dr. Faisal Rahman does indeed talk about his “blood boiling” at the oppression of the Muslim Ummah in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir et al and even exhorts the handful of audience in a completely open space inside the Masjid to “join him and do something.” The details of that “something” are never revealed.
Shahrukh Khan and the Pound of Flesh: the Cost of Stardom (The King is Out: Part II)
April 22nd, 2010 § 6 Comments
by Huma Dar
[read Part I]
Shahrukh Khan (SRK) has a long history of playing the fraught field (of the Indian context) with flawless diplomacy, perhaps even overplaying the field. In early 2002, precisely during the days of the state-sponsored anti-Muslim pogroms in Indian Gujarat, the then Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, from BJP (a Hindu Nationalist party), released an MTV-esque album,Samvedna [Sensitivity]. Widely broadcast on Doordarshan, the State-owned television channel, as well as on Indian-American programs (at least in the San Francisco Bay Area), the video features Vajpayee reciting his Hindi poetry while Jagjit Singh, the ghazal singer, sings in tune. The album is prefaced by the rhapsodizing words of Javed Akhtar — another famous Muslim from Bollywood, narrated by Amitabh Bachhan.
America’s post-racial society produces ‘Birther Bill’
April 22nd, 2010 § 7 Comments
According to a recent poll run by the New York Times and CBS News, only 58% of Americans believe President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Some speculate that the shocking results have been perpetuated by ongoing right-wing propaganda campaigns designed to cast doubt on the Obama Administration as a whole. A “birther bill” was also recently approved in ex-presidential candidate John McCain’s home state of Arizona. If passed it would require Obama to present his birth certificate before appearing on the Arizona ballot in the event of a re-election campaign. Similar bills have also been proposed in other US States including Florida and Missouri.
Curiously enough, while Obama was born in Hawaii, McCain was born in the former Panama Canal Zone — an area that is no longer considered US territory.
NATO apologizes to win ‘hearts and minds’
April 21st, 2010 § 2 Comments
According to The New York Times, NATO has ‘apologized’ for murdering 4 unarmed Afghan civilians (including one 12-year-old boy and a police officer) earlier this week in Khost Province.
Four more Afghan civilians were also shot dead and 18 others injured earlier this month when NATO forces opened fire on a civilian bus in the Zhari district of the southern province of Kandahar.
When US General Stanley McChrystal became the commander of US and NATO troops in Afghanistan, he announced plans to revise their strategy in Afghanistan by implementing policies designed to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the Afghan people. While a UN report indicates that civilian deaths were on the rise in 2009 and that NATO was not responsible for the majority of Afghan civilians deaths during that year, it adds that NATO “airstrikes remain responsible for the largest percentage of civilian deaths attributed to PGF during the first six months of 2009.”
Will WikiLeaks video have lasting consequences?
April 21st, 2010 § 1 Comment
Al Jazeera English takes an in-depth look at a WikiLeaks video showing US soldiers killing a group of innocent Iraqi civilians and 2 Reuters employees from an Apache helicopter in 2007. WikiLeaks Editor Julian Assange and US Defence Analyst Ivan Eland provide analytical commentary on the clip. Coverage of this event was but a blip in mainstream US news media and according to US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates, the leaking of the video will not have any “lasting consequences.”
I have sincere respect for the anonymous whistleblower (likely a member of the US military) that provided this video to WikiLeaks in the first place.
Dates Announced for PalFest 2010
April 21st, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Check PULSE regularly for exclusive interviews with PalFest participants which will be published over the coming days.
Robin Yassin-Kassab and Jeremy Harding with Birzeit University students
The 2010 Palestine Festival of Literature (PalFest), a traveling cultural roadshow that tours Palestine annually, will be taking place May 1-6. A variety of international artists will be participating including Suheir Hammad, Pankaj Mishra and new patrons Philip Pullman and Emma Thompson.
In an effort to promote the “the power of culture over the culture of power,” PalFest counters the travel restrictions imposed upon victims of Israel’s military occupation of Palestine by connecting international artists with Palestinian audiences.
According to PalFest Chair and Founder, Ahdaf Soueif:
There’s tremendous energy to PalFest, and huge amounts of goodwill pushing it forward… This is a literary festival that makes a difference, both to the hosts and to the visitors.
To Vote Or Not
April 20th, 2010 § 3 Comments
Steve Bell's Nick Clegg - who deserves a reward
Democracy is supposed to mean ‘government by the people’. In the ancient Greek city states all the free men (but not women or slaves) would cram the theatre for lively, informed debate on a relevant issue, and then would decide it by a show of hands. Not so today. Putting a mark on a piece of paper every five years and imagining that you run things seems like a sad parody of such activity, a demotic populism masking power rather than a popular democracy negotiating it.
In our society the most important decisions are often made by unelected movers of capital and unelected civil servants and generals. Elected officials are very often at least as loyal to the lobbies easing their way as to the voters they supposedly represent.
Heading in the ‘Right’ Direction?
April 20th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
With speculation growing over who President Obama will nominate to replace the retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, three top contenders have emerged: Solicitor General Elena Kagan, US Appeals Court Judge Merrick Garland and US Appeals Court Judge Diane Wood. In an interview with Democracy Now! legal analyst and contributor for Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald discusses the nominees, focusing in particular on why the nomination of Elena Kagan threatens to shift an already conservative judiciary further to the right.
Particularly alarming about Kagan’s track record is that when Bush-Cheney were abusing inherent executive power, Kagan was a robust defendant of the admnistration’s claim that the entire world was a battlefield and that executive had the right to indefinitely detain….well…anyone!
“Coffee with Hezbollah” review by Mary Rizzo
April 20th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Following is a review of my book Coffee with Hezbollah, written by Mary Rizzo for Palestine Think Tank.
Before reading the wonderful book by Belén Fernández “Coffee with Hezbollah”, I never would have imagined it possible to read about the post-destruction aftermath of Lebanon and smile at the same time. The pretext alone, a hitchhiking trip from Turkey to southern Lebanon simply “feels” dramatic, especially when the memory of Brides on Tour, was still fresh. Would two young, attractive, independent women meet a better fate than the raped and assassinated Pippa Bacca, travelling in the same way, with each new step being not only a test of their own wits and good fortune, but also a constant surrender to trust in a world wracked by its encounter with the ultimate violence?
Belén and her friend and travelling partner Amelia Opalinska were on the road in much the same way as Che Guevara and Alberto Granado, and it’s not incidental that they recount moments from their adventures in Latin America and Cuba in “Coffee with Hezbollah”. In a similar way to the historically relevant on the road experiences of the revolutionary, conversations described and rapid changes in plan (or even in mood) allowed the reader to feel a sincere interest in the persons they encountered as well as a way to describe the larger paradigm of Lebanon. The people who populate this book, with their idiosyncrasies, their habits, beliefs and expressions, are part of the story, an exchange that appears to these eyes only slightly hampered by needing to resort to “pidgin English” (however, the fact that many of these people spoke some English at all is testament to their desire to reach out to the world). Nevertheless, each conversation and encounter left up to fate brought a new insight, a new interpretation of a fragmented reality.
“Veil in the Time of War” or “Veilin’ the Time of War”
April 20th, 2010 § 2 Comments
Segert's Anti-Minaret Poster
by Huma Dar
In the context of the current multiple arenas of war and occupation in Muslim-majority regions, the issues of gender and sexuality are vitally linked to the casus belli, both within and without academia. Such linkages, with a long and complicated genealogy thoroughly imbricated in the politics of colonization, decolonization, and neo-colonization, theorized by Inderpal Grewal, Gayatri Spivak, Lata Mani, Leila Ahmed, Sherene Razack, Saba Mahmood, Sunera Thobani amongst others, also indicate an obsessive desire to re-enact the “discovery narrative” or the “rescue narrative.” Examining current contestations in popular media – including recent articles written by Maureen Dowd, Naomi Wolf and Phyllis Chesler et al and the poster designed by Alexander Segert, which was integral to the success of the anti-minaret Swiss referendum – I investigate whether, how, and where the neoconservative, neoliberal, and the mainstream feminist discourses converge, diverge, and intersect. I undertake to deconstruct the ongoing debates that obsessively revolve around the veil or the sexuality that is variously professed to be suppressed, annihilated, or even “discovered” beneath the veil by some liberal explorers.
