The Jenin Jenin Amendment: Israel from Ethnocracy to Fascism
May 13, 2013 § Leave a Comment
Last Monday, on the 6th of May, Israel’s Ministerial Committee for Legislation decided to approve the “Jenin Jenin Amendment” in a paramilitary hearing. The amendment [Hebrew] is an addition to the Israeli Defamation Law [Hebrew], stating that army personnel and the state can sue individuals, who expose army violence, for libel, without proving damages. The amendment comes as a reaction to Israel’s Supreme Court rejecting soldiers’ class action suit of defamation against actor/director Mohammad Bakri, for his documentary Jenin Jenin (watch it in full here), in which Palestinian testimonies describe their experiences of the 2002 massacre perpetrated by Israel’s army in the besieged refugee camp.
Israel 2012, The Question of a Nation: What Does Culture Have to Do with Politics?
December 12, 2012 § 5 Comments
For more information on how Israel is using this face to mask its evil, go to http://www.no2brandisrael.org/
The interesting thing about Israel is that its government and registered citizens have a wonky spatial perception, which feeds off itself: In Israel, you’re not in the state, the state is in you. Due to this cyclical perception, along with the “standard” “nation branding” (a marketing lie on to itself, and that sick capitalist perception of a state- a geographic territory with obligations and responsibilities towards its respective inhabitants- as a product which is on the market for sale), known as Brand Israel, much of Israel’s propaganda is based on the blurring of the lines between the individual and the state (and army).
As a BDS activist, whose main focus is cultural boycott, I’ve come up against a very common Israeli claim (individuals, small business, and government officials) that “culture has nothing to do with politics”. Most commonly it comes in the form of a puzzled “rhetorical” question: “What does culture have to do with politics?!” As if asking this question closes the discussion, because it’s so obvious that art, music, books, films, theater and dance are a pure form of entertainment that has no intellectual, political, anthropological value. As if cultural products aren’t bought and sold as commodities and status indicators.
Shuki Weiss Promotion and Production Ltd. in the Service of the State of Israel
Peter Linebaugh: The Magna Carta Manifesto
November 8, 2012 § 1 Comment
In the following interview, Peter Linebaugh speaks about his book, The Magna Carta Manifesto. Linebaugh explains how Magna Carta contained two charters: the Charter of Liberties and the Charter of the Forest. The most important aspect of Linebaugh’s book is that it brings new light to the largely forgotten Charter of the Forest. While the Charter of Liberties existed to protect people’s rights the Charter of the Forest existed to protect the commons, which guaranteed the subsistance of the people, against a tyrannical, privitising king.
A Scene from Pulp Fiction in Kashmir
May 2, 2012 § 3 Comments
"Pulp Fiction Bananas" by Banksy, once near Old Street Tube Station, London, now whitewashed.
PUMPKIN: Everybody be cool, this is an occupation!
YOLANDA: Any of you fucking pricks move, and I’ll execute every motherfucking last one of you!
JULES: So, tell me again about those killing-for-promotions there…
VINCENT: What do you want to know?
JULES: Killing is legal there, right?
VINCENT: Yeah, it is legal but it ain’t 100% legal. I mean you can’t walk into a house and start shooting right away. You’re only supposed to take those fucking pricks to certain designated places and blast off their fucking brains? You have to give them some name…
JUKES: Those are encounter sites?
VINCENT: Yeah, it breaks down like this: it’s legal to kill them, it’s legal to own it and, if you’re the occupier of the encounter site, it’s legal to bury them there. It’s legal to carry their bodies, but that doesn’t really matter ’cause — even if you got a truckload of them — if the cops stop you, it’s illegal for them to search you. Searching you is a right that the cops in Kashmir don’t have. « Read the rest of this entry »
America’s Lawless Empire: The Constitutional Crimes of Bush and Obama
February 15, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Ralph Nader ’58 and Bruce Fein ’72 visited Harvard Law School for a talk sponsored by the HLS Forum and the Harvard Law Record. At the event, “America’s Lawless Empire: The Constitutional Crimes of Bush and Obama,” both men discussed what they called lawless, violent practices by the White House and its agencies that have become institutionalized by both political parties.
“America’s Chickens Are Coming Home to Roost.”
December 24, 2011 § Leave a Comment
An end of the year lament.
by William A. Cook
“Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred. And terrorism begets terrorism. A white ambassador said that y’all, not a black militant (Ambassador to Iraq, Edward Peck). Not a reverend who preaches about racism. An ambassador whose eyes are wide open and who is trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice upon which we are now poised…” – Jeremiah Wright, September 16, 2001.
Prophets fare poorly in their own country, yet countries would do well to hearken to their prophets. Scorn, ridicule, and innuendo attend their pronouncements as the righteous defend their actions as logical, existential and necessary. Jeremiah Wright suffered such scorn and mockery because he understood the consequences of revenge on the innocent and the defenceless, justified by whatever inane discourse. Wright spoke truth to power that Sunday after 9/11 and the righteous cried to heaven condemning him to perdition for defaming America, for even suggesting that revenge for the sake of revenge is the motivation of the arch fiend against the Almighty, the foulest, most ignorant, most amoral rational for action.
Prophets anticipate truth; they review a nation’s past history and can predict its future. Witness America’s past as the Reverend Wright did that Sunday morning, and what America is doing now repeats its ugliness. Wright said this about America’s past:
« Read the rest of this entry »
Kashmir, of dreams and nightmares
December 18, 2011 § 26 Comments
by Burhan Qureshi
Blurred Memories. photo credit: Huma Dar, 2006
My mother comes from a sleepy village in north Kashmir. It is, indeed, picturesque. At times when she sits me down and tells me the stories of her childhood, she takes me into a dreamland. Her house there is on a hillock, a gushing clear stream runs at its foothills. There are vast fields on either side of the road. She tells me of the orchard where the finest apples grow, of the walnut trees in her garden that she used to climb (in fact, she taught me how to eat the raw, green colored walnuts, which if you know the trick, taste even better). And when she tells me that she used to swim in that stream, my heart skips a beat. I fall in love with her all over again.
Of Niqabs, Monsters, and Decolonial Feminisms
April 15, 2011 § 14 Comments
By Huma Dar
A woman in niqab being arrested in Paris, April 12, 2011, copyright EPA
Of Civilities and Dignities
On 22 June 2009, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, asserted that burqas (or the burqa-clad?) are “not welcome” in France, adding that “[i]n our country, we cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity” and that “the veils reduced dignity.” France’s Muslim minority is Western Europe’s largest Muslim minority, estimated at six-million-strong. And this is just an approximation, as the French Republic implicitly claims to be post-race and post-religion via a prohibition on any census that would take into account the race or religion of its citizens. (This anxiety mirrors the brouhaha in Indian media àpropos the much-contested enumeration of OBCs or Other Backward Castes in the Indian census surveys of 2011, or the urgency to declare some spaces post-caste, post-feminist, and post-racist while casteism, patriarchy and racism continue unabated.)
A Call from Home
April 8, 2011 § Leave a Comment
By Majid Maqbool
“Card chukha seath thavaan?”
(Do you carry the ID card with you?)
Mother worries over frequent phone calls
Away from home, home enters questions
‘Identity’ printed on a piece of paper
cuts through her voice; a discomforting lullaby:
“Card gase hamashe seath thavun”
(always carry the ID card with you)
Home leaves a permanent imprint…
On scattered notes, stamped on memories
At home, mother would tiptoe after me
At the door, before endless blessings, she always asked -
That question mothers have for their sons -
Protesting Kashmiri Women al (Yawar Nazir, IMOW)
“Card tultha seath?”
From Delhi now, your question settles on my unrest
Identity – detached from the card – hangs heavy
This is not Kashmir, mother
“Toete gase card seath thavun…”
(Still you must carry the card with you…)
The line dropped on this insistence
I kept redialing, to rest her concerns,
her unfinished questions, unanswered
Hello..helloo… mother
Can you hear me?
I left the card at home, mother
In the back pocket of my worn-out jeans
Interrogating Identity in Kashmir
Find: a fading photograph, scrutinized edges
And no trace of those unrecognized questions
forever inked on my memory
For troops to question my absence
The proof I left behind is not enough
That frisked ID card remains
like a festering wound, pocketed pain
I carry everywhere
Majid Maqbool is a young journalist/writer from Kashmir. Some of his writings can be found on his blog maqboolvoice.blogspot.com.
