“Do Palestinians teach their children to hate?”
November 16th, 2011 § 1 Comment
The amazingly talented Canadian-Palestinian spoken word poet, Rafeef Ziadah, answers.
Fadwa Sulaiman
November 15th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Samar Yazbeck, Ibrahim Qashoush, Khaled Khalifa, Rasha Omran, Ali Farzat, Mai Skaf, Samih Shqair – there’s an impressive list of Syrian writers, musicians, songwriters, and artists who have bravely and unambiguously supported the people’s aspirations for dignity. And now the actress Fadwa Sulaiman. Here she is in besieged Homs leading chants of ‘no Salafis, no Brotherhood, the Syrians want freedom’ and ‘One, One, the Syrian People are One.’ Here she is on Jazeera (Arabic) interviewed via skype. And, below, here she is announcing her hunger strike until the prisoners are released and the siege of the besieged cities is lifted. Translation of her words follows after the page break.
Unsettled, with Amira Hass
November 15th, 2011 § 1 Comment
An excerpt from my interview with Israeli journalist, Amira Hass for Guernica Magazine:
When it comes to her coverage of Palestinians, Israeli journalist Amira Hass is one of a kind. Yet she blends right in at the Canadian bus station where I pick her up. Vancouver is the second stop on the nationwide speaking tour organized for her by the advocacy group Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East. She greets me with a warm smile and lifts her small but heavy bags into the trunk of the car. Hass is used to taking care of herself while traveling, doing it weekly as she navigates through Israeli military checkpoints while tracking a story or simply trying to visit a friend. Before I can help her with her bag, in fact, she helps me with mine. When she sees me struggling with my bag outside her lecture venue, she takes it from my shoulder, laughing, “I know. I do it too.”
Hass has worked for the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz since 1989. She left her academic roots during the First Intifada and started her media career there as a copyeditor. A few months later, she convinced the paper to send her to Europe to cover the Romanian revolution. In Romania she proved her skills as a writer, and in 1993 her editors assigned her to Gaza. She had become familiar with the area while volunteering with a group that had her visiting Gazans to deliver money they were owed from Israeli employers who’d withheld their pay. It was during this time that her “romance” with Gaza began.
No one encouraged Hass to live in Gaza; in fact, she was specifically told not to. But determined to learn about the occupation from the inside, she moved there in 1993 and made a permanent home in the West Bank in 1997. This initiative made her the only Israeli journalist to live and work among Palestinians full-time.
‘Revolutionary Pacifism’: Noam Chomsky’s 2011 Sydney Peace Prize Address
November 15th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Noam Chomsky riffs off A. J. Muste’s concept of ‘revolutionary pacifism’ to deliver the 2011 Sydney Peace Prize Lecture at Sydney Town Hall on Wednesday 2nd November. The transcript follows the audio.
Revolutionary Pacifism: Choices and Prospects
As we all know, the United Nations was founded “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” The words can only elicit deep regret when we consider how we have acted to fulfill that aspiration, though there have been a few significant successes, notably in Europe.
For centuries, Europe had been the most violent place on earth, with murderous and destructive internal conflicts and the forging of a culture of war that enabled Europe to conquer most of the world, shocking the victims, who were hardly pacifists, but were “appalled by the all-destructive fury of European warfare,” in the words of British military historian Geoffrey Parker. And enabled Europe to impose on its conquests what Adam Smith called “the savage injustice of the Europeans,” England in the lead, as he did not fail to emphasize. The global conquest took a particularly horrifying form in what is sometimes called “the Anglosphere,” England and its offshoots, settler-colonial societies in which the indigenous societies were devastated and their people dispersed or exterminated. But since 1945 Europe has become internally the most peaceful and in many ways most humane region of the earth – which is the source of some its current travail, an important topic that I will have to put aside.
WBAI/Beyond the Pale interview: The Imperial Messenger
November 14th, 2011 § 1 Comment
Yesterday I was interviewed about my book The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work for the Sunday WBAI/New York program “Beyond the Pale“. WBAI is part of the Pacifica Radio Network; the interview was conducted by Marissa Brostoff, former staff writer at The Forward newspaper and Tablet Magazine and author of a recent article for Salon.com on the Occupy Wall Street movement.
The hour-long program can be listened to here:
My part starts at minute 21 and ends at minute 38. Before me is Anthea Butler, professor of Religious Studies and Graduate Chair of Religion at the University of Pennsylvania, discussing the Herman Cain phenomenon with Kiera Feldman, author of an exposé for the Nation about Birthright Israel.
After me is a commemorative segment on recently deceased Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali.
The Imperial Messenger: promotional video
November 12th, 2011 § 9 Comments
The following is a short promotional video for my book The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work. (gracias Amelia)
Obama’s drone war claims another victim
November 12th, 2011 § 1 Comment
by Clive Stafford Smith
Tariq Aziz sits in the centre of the second row in this picture from the 28 October 2011 Jirga with tribal elders and lawyers from Reprieve.
LAST Friday, I took part in an unusual meeting in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad.
The meeting had been organized so that Pashtun tribal elders who lived along the Pakistani-Afghan frontier could meet with Westerners for the first time to offer their perspectives on the shadowy drone war being waged by the Central Intelligence Agency in their region. Twenty men came to air their views; some brought their young sons along to experience this rare interaction with Americans. In all, 60 villagers made the journey.
The meeting was organized as a traditional jirga. In Pashtun culture, a jirga acts as both a parliament and a courtroom: it is the time-honored way in which Pashtuns have tried to establish rules and settle differences amicably with those who they feel have wronged them.
On the night before the meeting, we had a dinner, to break the ice. During the meal, I met a boy named Tariq Aziz. He was 16. As we ate, the stern, bearded faces all around me slowly melted into smiles. Tariq smiled much sooner; he was too young to boast much facial hair, and too young to have learned to hate.
Blue Nights: a conversation with Joan Didion
November 12th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Christopher Lydon of the excellent Radio Open Source speaks to Joan Didion, one of the greatest non-fiction writers and prose stylists of the past half century, about her latest book Blue Nights. The book is a follow-up to her acclaimed The Year of Magical Thinking; both are meditations on death inspired by the death of her husband, the author John Gregory Dunne, closely followed by the death of her adopted daughter Quintana.
Joan Didion is reading from her second smashing meditation on death, Blue Nights. And I’m her interlocutor and foil again onstage in Cambridge. With a woman of the considered written word, not the spontaneous spoken word, it’s a tricky job. And it didn’t solve for me the puzzle of Didion’s power. But how could I not share it, or you not respond?
Joan Didion’s a writers’ writer gone suddenly, in her seventies, rock star and phenomenon, meeting a hungry market for introspections on death both sudden, as in the case of her husband John Gregory Dunne and Didion’s 2005 best-seller, The Year of Magical Thinking; or slow and almost unfathomable death, which came to Didion’s adopted daughter Quintana Roo, at 39, and prompted Blue Nights. Six hundred readers bought books and tickets to hear Didion and pack the First Church in Harvard Square last night.
Letters from Iran
November 12th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Iran’s civil rights movement, re-energized by the Greens in 2009, is not going away.
Is ESPN’s Documentary about Bahrain Iranian Propaganda too?
November 11th, 2011 § 1 Comment
We are interested in seeing how the PR agents of Bahrain’s ruling Al Khalifa family will try to spin this documentary produced by the U.S. sports channel, ESPN, as Iranian propaganda.
If you haven’t already seen Al Jazeera’s report on the brutally repressed and resilient democracy movement in Bahrain, you can watch it here.
