Year: 2010

An Open Letter to Margaret Atwood from Gaza: Don’t Stand on the Wrong Side of History

Dear Ms. Atwood,

Gaza's largest institute of higher learning after the Israeli bombing

We are students from Gaza representing more than 10 academic institutions therein. Our grandparents are refugees who were expelled from their homes in the 1948 Nakba. They still have their keys locked up in their closets and will pass them on to their children, our parents. Many of us have lost our fathers, some of us have lost our mothers, and some of us lost both in the last Israeli aggression against civilians in Gaza. Others still lost a body part from the flesh-burning white phosphorous that Israel used, and are now permanently physically challenged. Most of us lost our homes, and are now living in tents, as Israel refuses to allow basic construction materials into Gaza. And most of all, we are all still living in what has come to be a festering sore on humanity’s conscience—the brutal, hermetic, medieval siege that Israel is perpetrating against us, the 1.5 million Palestinians of the Gaza Strip.

Many of us have encountered your writing during our university studies. Although your books are not available in Gaza—because Israel does not allow books, paper, and other stationary in—we are familiar with your leftist, feminist, overtly political writing. And most of all, we are aware of your strong stance against apartheid. You admirably supported sanctions against apartheid South Africa and called for resistance against all forms of oppression.

Continue reading “An Open Letter to Margaret Atwood from Gaza: Don’t Stand on the Wrong Side of History”

Wikileaks releases evidence of US warcrime in Iraq

Namir Noor-Eldeen, the photographer killed in the Baghdad air strike (Khalid Mohammed/AP)

The wonderful folks at WikiLeaks.org have released a video that captures a US Apache gunship murdering two Reuters journalists — 22-year-old Reuters photographer, Namir Noor-Eldeen, and his driver, Saeed Chmagh, 40 — and 18 Iraqis while wounding two children. Let me warn readers that the footage is disturbing, but not nearly as disturbing as the Nazi-like gloating of the killers. But the worse comes later when a clearly unarmed man, mortally wounded, is being assisted by some brave individuals in a minivan, with children inside, and very deliberately shot at by the murderers in the Apache gunship.

The Guardian reports that  WikiLeaks.org, will be shortly releasing a video of another atrocity, this time in Afghanistan. Wikileaks obtained the video after the Pentagon blocked a freedom of information request by Reuters. According to Wikileaks director Julian Assange, they had to break through encryption by the military to view the video.

Here is Julian Assange, the editor of WikiLeaks, speaking to Al Jazeera about why the story is only coming out now and how it was concealed earlier.

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From the Front Line: Insurgent Pakistan

This article appeared in the Political Studies Association‘s excellent new publication Political Insight.

by Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

No nation has ever made a frank avowal of its real imperial motives. It always claims to be primarily concerned with the peace and prosperity of the people whom it subjugates. — Reinhold Niebuhr

The ironies of US President Barack Obama’s Nobel acceptance speech in Oslo were widely noted. Not since Theodore Roosevelt had a Nobel laureate used the acceptance ceremony to make a case for war. Both men appealed to St Augustine’s authority to support the justness of their cause. However, when Roosevelt spoke he had already concluded the peace for which he was honoured; Obama’s lies distant in the purgatory of  ‘hope’. In the present he remains at war — as Henry Kissinger was, when he picked up his prize — having recently ordered the second major escalation of his brief presidency. Kissinger’s war simmered on for two more years; Obama’s will likely last longer.

Afghanistan may well become Obama’s Vietnam, but his diversion is not Cambodia, or Laos, it is nuclear-armed Pakistan. History sometimes repeats itself both as tragedy and farce.

Weeks before Obama described al-Qaeda as a threat on a par with Nazi Germany, national security adviser, General James Jones, told CNN that the organisation had fewer than a hundred men in Afghanistan. Driven by institutional inertia and vulnerable to the charge of weakness, Obama appears unable to disengage. Instead he has borrowed Bush’s rhetoric of good and evil and joined the fear factory. He has subsumed al-Qaeda and the Taliban into a singular threat of global proportions whose defeat he pronounced ‘fundamental to the defense of our people’. Afghanistan, he argued,will not be pacified until the Taliban’s allies in Pakistan are vanquished. Precipitate withdrawal will restore the Taliban to power, and create a safe haven for al-Qaeda to plan more terrorist attacks on the west.

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On the abuse of language

Tony Judt on linguistic subterfuges practised in Europe and America.

Tony Judt

In America the misuse of language is usually cultural rather than political. People will accuse Obama of being a socialist. Italians would say magari – if only. However, no one takes this very seriously. What we have instead in the US is cultural communities policing what can and can’t be said, and that shapes how we define difference. The idea is that you can’t have an elite, since elitism is undemocratic and unegalitarian. Therefore, you always make the point that people are in some important way the same. If they are badly disabled like me, they are ‘differently abled’, which I find very amusing. It is not a ‘different’ ability: it is no ability. But since it’s politically uncomfortable to distinguish between people who can do things and people who can’t, the latter are described as separate but equal. There are numerous things wrong with this: first, it is lousy language; second, it creates the illusion of sameness or achievement in its absence; third, it conceals the effects of real power and capacity, real wealth and influence. You describe everyone as having the same chances when actually some people have more chances than others. And with this cheating language of equality deep inequality is allowed to happen much more easily.

Continue reading “On the abuse of language”

Unequal Before the Law

Two weeks before Israel planned to withdraw from Gaza, 19-year-old Eden Natan-Zada boarded a bus en route to Shafr’ Amr and opened fire on Arab passengers, killing four and injuring a dozen before  he was attacked and killed as news of the shootings spread, creating an angry mob.  Currently, 12 Arab men are being prosecuted by the Israeli state for the murder of Natan-Zada. This case has become a point of entry into a larger debate concerning what many feel is an existing double standard  in the application of the law between Jews and Arabs in Israel.

Film-maker Tony Stark’s One Law for All, examines how Israel’s Arab citizens have been and are currently being subjected to an institutional form of racism through the unequal application of the law. The Israeli state’s reticence in recognizing the attack by Natan-Zada as an act of terrorism is just one of the many ways in which Stark reveals this legal imbalance.  Segments from Stark’s documentary, which references multiple cases in which the Israeli state has neglected incidents in which Palestinians have been killed by Jewish Israelis, were aired on Al Jazeera’s People & Power earlier this week: 

The Only Democracy in the Middle East: 2.04.2010

The war continues at Nebi Salah:

More footage from Nebi Salah, this week:
'An Nabi Salih' Demonstration, 02.04.2010 - 05

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Guantanamo: So much for Change

According to a recent poll by CNN, public support for closing down GTMO has dropped 12 points over the past 14 months. Shortly before Obama’s inauguration, 51 percent of Americans said they thought the facility in Cuba should be closed. Now this number is down to 39 percent, and six in ten believe the United States should continue to operate Guantanamo.

This drop in numbers might indicate the public’s aversion to the idea of having alleged ‘terrorists’ on U.S. soil or may be due to a general fear of the return of legal rights that it is assumed would accompany such a shift. To this end, the public appears to overestimate the government’s intentions, for even if Guantanamo detainees were transferred to the United States, this shift cannot be assumed as indicative of a change in detention policies. The upcoming trial of Syed Fahad Hashmi, who has been detained in the United States since 2007, indicates that  this administration does not consider it unlawful to hold U.S. citizens with ‘alleged’ links to Al Qaeda under unconstitutional conditions. Bill Quigley, the legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, has recently written the following concerning the treatment, legal conditions, and upcoming trial of Hashmi in the Huffington Post: Continue reading “Guantanamo: So much for Change”

Argentina renews Falklands claim

Lucia Newman of Al Jazeera reports from Buenos Aires.

It has been 28 years since Britain and Argentina went to war over the disputed Falkland islands – known as the Malvinas by Argentines – in the South Atlantic.

Britain emerged victorious from the conflict and the islands have since grown prosperous from tourism and fishing among other things.

Now with oil companies exploring the waters surrounding the islands, tensions between the two countries are rising again.

As Argentina pays tribute to the soldiers who fell in the conflict, many people, including the president, are raising their voices against the continued British rule over the islands.

AIPAC confronts its worst fear: Daylight

by Philip Weiss

Col (ret.) Ann Wright and Code Pinkers bring long overdue attention to the AIPAC annual conference, that great annual firesale of American politics.

In that radical handbook on the workings of American society, the Wizard of Oz never recovered once Dorothy pulled back the curtain of her own innocence. One would like to believe that AIPAC will never recover from a brutal spring that has exposed its real interests to the American public. Even supporters of the Jewish state have criticized the American Israel Public Affairs Committee for fully taking Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s side in his battle with Barack Obama over settlements, and during its recent annual conference, the lobby looked wobbly and defensive.

Yes, there was the usual procession of weak-kneed politicians professing love for Israel, not to mention AIPAC board members explaining how they cultivate “relationships” with the powerful. Yes, Sen. Chuck Schumer gave a bloodcurdling yowl, Am Yisroel Chai—the Jewish people live!—as he pledged to be Israel’s guardian. But a large shift in American policy and opinion has left the lead institution of the lobby exposed, and worse, mocked.

AIPAC was taking on water before its VIP-studded conference began in late March. Important supporters of Israel in the media, including Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic and David Remnick of The New Yorker, questioned whether reflexive support for Israel’s right-wing policies served the American interest, echoing the view of Gen. David Petraeus that the Palestinian problem is our problem in the battle for hearts and minds in the Middle East.

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The Madman of Freedom Square

“I see no need to swear an oath in order for you to believe in the strangeness of this world.”

How can imagination respond to a situation like Iraq’s, in which truth is so blatantly stranger and more horrifying than the darkest fiction? Perhaps by simply recording real stories, then sometimes allowing reality to slip a little further in the direction it’s already chosen.

Hassan Blasim, film maker, refugee, and author of the astounding short-story collection “The Madman of Freedom Square,” has a more precise formulation:

“The important thing is to observe at length, like someone contemplating committing suicide from a balcony. The other important thing is to have an imagination which is not melodramatic but malicious and extremely serious, and to have an ascetic spirit that is close to death.”

Except this isn’t a formulation but a voice within a story. In another story there is a man who throws himself from a balcony – a man who clears blood and debris in the aftermath of explosions, then migrates to Holland, renames himself Carlos Fuentes, becomes a Hirsi Ali figure, more Dutch than the Dutch, and suffers nightmares. There’s a man who dreams a number which foretells not a lottery ticket but .. something else. I give away too much.

Continue reading “The Madman of Freedom Square”