Is Palestine Next?
July 14th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Adam Shatz has an excellent essay in the London Review of Books, a survey of the Palestinian situation in the occupied territories, inside Israel, and in exile. This essay is available free of charge at the LRB website. I strongly recommend subscribing to the LRB, Britain’s best publication by far. Subscription gives you a print edition fortnightly and access to the enormous online archive.
“The Arab world may be impatient for the Palestinians to rebel,” Shatz writes, “but they are not. When they are ready to mobilise, they will; meanwhile they will continue to prepare, and to wait until the time is right, as they have for the last 63 years. This waiting should not be mistaken for passivity; it is a deeply political act.”
No one in the Arab world was watching the news more closely than the Palestinians during the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. The first emotion they experienced was disbelief; the second – particularly when they saw Palestinian flags being raised in Tahrir Square – was relief that they were no longer alone. Arab lethargy has been a virtual article of faith among Palestinians, who felt that their neighbours had betrayed them in 1948 and had done nothing to help them since. The Palestinian national movement, which rose to prominence under Yasir Arafat’s leadership in the late 1960s, was defined in large part by its belief that Palestinians had to rely on themselves. Mahmoud Darwish was not the only one to note that during the siege of Beirut in 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon in an attempt to crush the PLO, tens of thousands of Israelis protested in Tel Aviv but the Arabs were too busy watching the World Cup Final to take to the streets.
Gunboats and gurkhas in the American Imperium
July 14th, 2011 § 2 Comments
My new piece on the complicity of the Pakistani elite in the US drone war is up on Al Jazeera‘s website.
Pakistanis are enraged by ongoing US drone strikes in their country
Meet Resham Khan. The 52-year-old shepherd was brought on a stretcher to a psychiatric hospital in Islamabad in January, traumatized and unable to speak. The father of six witnessed 15 members of his extended family perish last June when a US drone attacked a funeral procession in his native North Waziristan. The atrocity has left him mute and emotionally paralyzed, his vacant eyes staring into the distance. He gave up on food and drink in the months following the attack; shortly afterward, the pious Muslim gave up on prayer too. His condition also prevented him from looking after his ailing mother who died soon thereafter. And his surviving children have suffered. When the Reuters journalist finally got him to talk, one of the few things he said was ‘Stop the drone attacks.’
Kareem Khan, too, has suffered. On December 31, 2009, his son Zaenullah Khan and his brother Asif Iqbal were among the three people killed in a US drone attack which destroyed their home in Mir Ali, North Waziristan. Kareem’s absence spared him the sight of his mutilated family; and unlike the helpless shepherd, he had the wherewithal to demand justice. In November 2010, his lawyer, Barrister Shahzad Akbar served legal notices to the CIA station chief Jonathan Banks, former Defence Secretary Robert Gates, and former Director of Central Intelligence Leon Panetta for $500 million in damages. Banks, who was in Pakistan on a business visa, took fright and soon fled the scene, and the US government was so terrified of the legal challenge that last month it denied a visa to Barrister Akbar to travel to the US. More survivors have since come forward demanding justice.
All Things Considered
July 12th, 2011 § 3 Comments
I was a guest on BBC Wales’s All Things Considered, a religious programme, talking about Christians in the Arab world in the light of the Arab revolutions. Also talking are the Right Reverend Bill Musk, based in Tunisia, Bishop Angelos, who serves the Coptic community in London, and the Reverend Christopher Gillam, who admires the Syrian regime and overemphasises Syrian Christian opposition to the uprising. Apologies for my voice, which was heavy with cold.
Playing with Political Fire
July 12th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
by Brenda Heard
The timing of political manoeuvring often reveals the stark business of domination. Sometimes the timing is flagrant, like the recent commotion in Greece. In the very hours of forbidding the passage of the aid flotilla to Gaza, the financially strapped Greek government welcomed the approval of an €8.7 billion aid payment from the European Union. With Israel’s position as an EU-groupie, even the Associated Press couldn’t resist smirking at Greece’s underlying ‘incentive to cozy up to its rich Mediterranean neighbor’.
Political manoeuvring also thrives on more subtle timing, as for example in the case of the notorious indictments of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon. Widely announced as imminent in December 2010, they somehow found themselves on the backburner when the Arab uprisings claimed every corner of Middle East news coverage. Some six months later, on the heels of the formation of a Lebanese government non-hostile to the targeted Hezbollah—in the very hours between finalising the government’s policy statement and its being subject to a parliamentary vote of confidence—only then were the indictments set into motion. Bored of battling the credibility of Arab protests, international media eagerly shifted to the new sensational headlines.
Particularly when it comes to the Zionist project, the Western Israeli Alliance has often banked on timing—on distraction and exploitation. Five years ago, for instance, Israeli forces repeated the pretext-invasions of 1978 and 1982. Five years ago, Israeli forces renewed their aggressive campaigns of 1978 and 1982. With the full backing of their Western allies, five years ago Israeli forces again attacked Lebanon.
Indigenous resistance is the new ‘terrorism’
July 10th, 2011 § 1 Comment
(EPA)
Manuela Picq has the following to say on “terrorism” in Ecuador at Al Jazeera:
If you thought there was anything romantic about environmental activism or indigenous rights, think twice. Socialist ideas about nature – such as keeping water a pubic good – can get you facing charges of sabotage by a leftist government. In the land of the Incas, if you protect the pachamama ["Mother World"], you might just be a “terrorist”.
It’s becoming tricky to identify “terrorists”, at least in Ecuador. They are not members of criminal organisations, they don’t spread fear or target civilians, nor have a politically motivated agenda. According to President Correa, “terrorists” are those opposing Ecuador’s development. So today’s “terrorism” might just look like indigenous peoples peacefully taking over the streets, with their ancestral knowledge and values, to demand environmental and social rights.
Representing the East, Viewing the West
July 9th, 2011 § 5 Comments
Renowned anthropologist Laura Nader (sister of Ralph Nader) discusses how Arab/Muslim women perceived the west during their encounters in the past centuries.
Downloadprogram audio (mp3, 47.8 Mbytes)
Laura Nader
Edward Said spent much of his distinguished career combatting Western stereotypes of the Arab world. Laura Nader explains what Said meant by “Orientalism,” and describes what Arabs who visited the West in past centuries came to think of Western practices. Also, Adel Iskandar talks about the volume in which Laura Nader’s article about Said appears.
Adel Iskandar & Hakem Rustom, eds., Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation UC Press, 2010.
Why Bradley Manning Deserves a Medal, Not a Prison Cell
July 8th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
First published by TomDispatch.
We still don’t know if he did it or not, but if Bradley Manning, the 24-year-old Army private from Oklahoma, actually supplied WikiLeaks with its choicest material — the Iraq War logs, theAfghan War logs, and the State Department cables– which startled and riveted the world, then he deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom instead of a jail cell at Fort Leavenworth.
President Obama recently gave one of those medals to retiring Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who managed the two bloody, disastrous wars about which the WikiLeaks-released documents revealed so much. Is he really more deserving than the young private who, after almost ten years of mayhem and catastrophe, gave Americans — and the world — a far fuller sense of what our government is actually doing abroad?
Bradley Manning, awaiting a court martial in December, faces the prospect of long years in prison. He is charged with violating the Espionage Act of 1917. He has put his sanity and his freedom on the line so that Americans might know what our government has done — and is still doing — globally. He has blown the whistle on criminalviolations of American military law. He has exposed our secretive government’s pathological over-classification of important public documents.
Here are four compelling reasons why, if he did what the government accuses him of doing, he deserves that medal, not jail time.
Honduras’ very own war on terror
July 7th, 2011 § 1 Comment
John Negroponte was the US ambassador to Honduras, a country that was known as the 'USS Honduras' [GALLO/GETTY
A few months after the 2009 coup d’etat against Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, I was approached on the street in Tegucigalpa by a man who threatened to kill me unless I produced an economic incentive sufficient to halt my demise. I suggested that we walk to an ATM and postponed the issue of my lack of an ATM card to an indefinite future point.
Fortunately, by the time we reached the nearest gas station, my companion had finished a bottle of aguardiente and our conversation had taken an unexpected course. Thanking me for the stroll, he requested that I adopt his 18-month-old son in order to spare the child his girlfriend’s crack cocaine habit.
The brief but tragic death of Popeye’s
From the gas station I procured a ride back in the direction of my pension with a female university student in an SUV and designer sunglasses, whose analysis of what had just transpired was that 80 percent of Hondurans were thugs. By coincidence, her calculations also revealed that 80 percent of Hondurans were poor and that this was why the recently-expatriated Zelaya was so popular, which did not alter her view that Honduran democracy had in fact been upheld by his forcible expulsion from the country.
The expulsion was orchestrated once Zelaya had shown himself to be incompatible with everything from the regional neoliberal project to the elite Opus Dei sect’s obsession with banning the morning-after pill. The president’s transgressions had included raising the minimum wage in certain sectors and paying slightly more attention than previous leaders to the complaints of poor communities tired of the effects of international mining endeavors on their skin and reproductive abilities. The last straw was Zelaya’s attempt to poll the citizenry as to whether the national constitution - which hails from the era in which the country was affectionately referred to as the “USS Honduras” and is skewed in the interest of approximately ten families who dominate the economy – should be revised.
American Holocaust: The Destruction of America’s Native Peoples
July 6th, 2011 § 3 Comments
The American Holocaust is the topic of the following lecture by David Stannard, professor and chair of the American Studies Department at the University of Hawaii. Specifically, he examines the manufactured controversy in discussing the history of Native Americans with the terms genocide and holocaust.
During the course of his argument, Stannard criticises modern day apologists for the genocide of Native Americans including Christopher Hitchens and Benny Morris. Morris, in particular, for his justification of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians using the example of the American Indians: quoting Morris, “[t]here are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing,” he adds “[e]ven the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history.” Or as he also, rather disturbingly, put it, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. You have to dirty your hands.” Therefore the terms and significance given to the crimes against the Native Americans also take on international importance as the example of America is used to justify current and, perhaps, future crimes against humanity.
The Mozlems Are Coming
July 6th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
by M. Shahid Alam
Fear grips the country from coast to coast.
Politicos, anchors and talk-show hosts
chatter all day, The Mozlems are coming;
they’ve dropped their drivel about fighting
them there. While our troops fought in Iraq
holding the ‘terrorists’ at the gates, back
home, greater troubles were brewing.
Radical Mozlems were actively scheming
to impose an Islamo-fascist theocracy
on the United States. Our great democracy
confronts an existential threat from within.
Let us act fast – good Republicans raise a din –
Moslems inside the US are working openly
to force sharia-law upon us. Act quickly,
harangue the pundits – or lose this great country
to heathens. Now’s not the time for an energy
plan, overhaul Medicare, fix the infrastructure,
or trim the deficit. We face greater dangers
from the enemy within: The Mozlems are coming.
It’s women in burqa, no gambling, no drinking,
nor driving for women. Americans get cracking
‘cause your country is calling. The Mozlems are coming.
- M. Shahid Alam is professor of economics at Northeastern University. He is author of Israeli Exceptionalism (Palgrave, 2009) and Poverty from the Wealth of Nations (Macmillan, 2000). Write to him at alqalam02760@neu.edu.
