Updates

Liberated Kafranbel, abandoned to Assad's bombs, pays tribute to James Foley
Liberated Kafranbel, abandoned to Assad’s bombs, pays tribute to James Foley

Everything’s burning from Libya to Iran. I’m working on fiction, so not responding except in Facebook bursts. Here are a few status updates, starting with today’s:

A year ago Assad’s fascist regime sprayed sarin gas over the Damascus suburbs, killing over 1400 men, women and children in five hours. Hundreds more died from the effects in the following weeks. Obama had given Assad effective permission to use tanks, artillery, missiles and war planes against the Syrian people (and had ensured that the people remained unarmed), but made large-scale chemical attacks a ‘red line’. We soon saw that the red line meant nothing. An alliance of the British Labour Party, Tory back benchers, UKIP, the BNP, the US Congress and the Tea Party helped Obama step away, and to hand the Syria file to Putin’s Russia – the same power arming the criminal. So the genocide continued, and continues, to the mood-music accompaniment (in the liberal-left press) of absurd conspiracy theories, racist slanders, and willed deafness to the voices of those suffering.

(On absurd conspiracy theories, read this. And here is one of the best accounts of the Syrian revolution and counter-revolutions I’ve read.) It would be great if the US were really ‘withdrawing’ from the region, as some claim Obama is doing, leaving the people there to solve their problems independently. But Washington is not withdrawing – it continues to back the murderous coup junta in Egypt, and the Israelis as they pummel the refugees in the Gaza ghetto yet again for no more than psycho-symbolic reasons. Washington actively prevented states which wanted to aid the Syrian resistance from providing serious weapons. The result is the Islamic State (or ISIS) phenomenon – also provoked by Malki’s Iran-backed sectarianism in Iraq, and the US occupation and sanctions beforehand, and Saddam Hussain before that – and now American bombing runs in northern Iraq. Obama’s ‘withdrawal’ is as illusory as the Stop the War Coalition’s Putinesque ‘pacifism’.

This was from yesterday:

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Why I’m Voting Yes

I’ll be voting for Scottish independence in next month’s referendum, and obviously not for ethnic-nationalist reasons – I have no Scottish blood as far as I’m aware (although the Scots may have some Syrian), and my mixed-up accent is far more English than not. Furthermore, I reject the simplistic ‘Braveheart’ narratives of uninterrupted Scottish victimhood. There’s an ex-mining town not far from here named Patna – after the Indian city – and in Sri Lanka the tea plantations bear Scottish names. Scots played an essential role in the British empire, and over the centuries Scottish as well as English landlords and industrialists have exploited the poorer Scottish classes (at some points driving them off their land en masse).

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Western Activists: We Don’t Want Your Pity

First published at The Sleuth Journal, this piece is by Syrian rapper and activist Mohammad Abu Hajar. Abu Hajar’s rapping can be seen and heard here.

As new arrivals to Europe from the Middle East, we come from countries where death in war has become an almost mundane, non-urgent event; I am now in an environment where war is understood not as brutal current events but as historic ones. For us in the Middle East, by contrast, war is just another unpleasant reality we live with, like many others: occupation, poverty, dictatorship, corrupt governments, marginalization, etc…

For me, being in Europe after participating as an activist in Syria in an epic revolution showing unbelievable steadfastness by ordinary people, is important for many different reasons. Firstly, I feel like I carry a duty to tell the stories of my countrymen who I left behind, the stories of daily life full of wishes, pain and stolen moments of joy, moments stolen from between the jaws of death. Secondly, Europe means to me a platform where politics are taken to another, more advanced level, with freedom of expression and human rights – at least the basic human rights – well maintained. To me, being in Europe means acquiring new techniques and methods of analyzing political events; all this is in addition to doing my Master’s degree in Economics at a European university.

The new knowledge and culture that I’ve encountered here in Europe are extremely important to me, yet it’s still important to relate the other untold side of the experience. What I’m trying to write about here is an entirely different subject to the usual topics. While the political and social dimensions of the relationship between the locals and the new arrivals are both well covered by academic research and papers, the psychological and the personal aspects of this relationship have been largely overlooked.

The reason behind writing those words is a cumulative explosion of a feeling that many in these societies are not yet able to consider us as fully equal human beings. I don’t wish to generalize here; I’m not talking in this instance about the hostility of the far-right motivated by ultra-nationalism, but am thinking specifically about a variety of the more liberal, left wing-affiliated mind-sets or the so-called humanists.

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A Letter To The Arabs

According to TV sources, the child was killed shortly after the video was uploaded.

A Letter To The Arabs

We are doing fine in Gaza,
Tell us how are YOU doing?
We are doing fine in Gaza,
What about you?
Our martyrs under the rubble
Our children in tents
Asking about you
Where are you?
We are doing fine in Gaza
Tell us how are YOU doing?
The sea is behind us
But we are fighting.
Our enemy is before us
We are still fighting.
We have enough arms
Food, and peace initiatives
We thank you for your support
Our souls, our wounds, our homes,
our faces, our blood, our eyes, our coffins
protect us
from your promises
from your talk.
We are doing fine in Gaza
Tell us how are YOU doing?

Ten Things to Remember about Syria

I edited the Critical Muslim’s Syria issue, which includes excellent essays by Amal Hanano, Rasha Omran, Itab Azzam, Maysaloon, Malu Halasa, poetry by Golan Hajji, prose from Zakkariya Tamer, and much more. I contributed an essay on Syrian culture revolutionised, and I wrote the following list:

yerba mateIn the old days Syrians were ready to list their ten favourite picnic spots, their ten favourite restaurants, or even ten of the sects participating in the imaginary happy mosaic. Today lists of traumatisation leap to the mind: the ten largest refugee camps, or ten major massacres, or perhaps ten of the numerous new militias.

This list tends towards the positive (only number 10 is a bad thing – it’s something that can’t be ignored). It focusses on those aspects of Syrian reality that can’t be destroyed by war, those things which will survive (with the exception, we hope, of number 10).

1. Maté

Along with Turkish Coffee, Argentinian Yerba Maté is Syria’s quintessential drink. Drink it strong and sugary in a gourd or a glass, through a silver straw from the Qalamoun region; keep the water hot for continual fill-ups; and you’ll be telling Homsi and muhashish jokes all night. Maté connotes conviviality, and sometimes more specifically the Druze, Christian and Alawi mountain communities. When the martyred Free Army commander Abu Furat appealed to the Alawi community, he did so in terms every Syrian would understand: “I know the Alawis well. I’ve visited them in their houses. We’ve drunk maté together. We lived together before and we’ll live together again, despite you, Bashaar.”

How did a South American drink become a Syrian (and Lebanese) staple? The answer is in the late 19th/ early 20th Century mass migration of Syrian-Lebanese to South and North America, the Caribbean, and west Africa. A couple of hundred drowned with the Titanic. The ‘Street of the Turks’ in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Macondo is so-called because the people were Ottomans when they arrived in Colombia, but they were Syrian Ottomans, Arabs. Today 20 million people describe themselves as Syrian-Brazilians. Guyana’s richest family is the Maqdeesis. Carlos Menem, former Argentinian president, is of Syrian origin too.

Abdul-Qadir al-Jaza'iri

2. Migrants

Abdul-Qadir al-Jaza’iri led a long and heroic resistance against the French occupation of Algeria. Eventually captured and brought to Paris, he was given the choice of exile elsewhere in the Arab world. Abdul-Qadir chose Damascus, where he wrote Sufi poetry in the shrine of the mystic Ibn ‘Arabi, who was an earlier migrant, from Andalucia. In 1860, when the Christian quarter of the Old City was burnt in sectarian rioting, Abdul-Qadir protected hundreds of Christians in his house and garden.

The tomb of Ibn ‘Arabi stands between two inner-city neighbourhoods climbing the slope of Mount Qassiyoun: ‘Muhajireen’, or Migrants, is so-named because it once housed Muslim refugees from the Balkans; and ‘Akrad’ means Kurds – still a Kurdish area, it was first built for the Kurds who came with Salahudeen al-Ayyubi (Saladin’s) armies.

Who else? Armenians, descendants of those who survived the forced march from Anatolia. Half a million registered Palestinian refugees and many more Palestinian-Syrians (Yarmouk camp in Damascus, Syria’s largest Palestinian population, is nearly empty now – its population refugees for a second time, mostly in Lebanon). Over a million and a half Iraqi refugees until Damascus and Aleppo became even less secure than Baghdad and Basra. And in 2006, a million refugees from the Lebanese South (fleeing Israeli bombs), who were welcomed in mosques, schools and private homes. Syrians angrily compare the way they welcomed refugees with the way they are now (not) welcomed, in their hour of need.

Continue reading “Ten Things to Remember about Syria”

Ngugi Wa Thiong’o on HARDtalk

HARDtalk speaks to one of Africa’s greatest living writers, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o. Tipped to win the Nobel prize for literature, he decided years ago not to write novels in English but in Gikuyu, his mother tongue. His work includes extraordinary memoirs of colonial times and the Mau Mau uprising in his native Kenya. How far have today’s young Africans forgotten the sacrifices that brought about independence? And has that independence itself been a disappointment?

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The children of Gaza

Jon Snow is a legend and he is back. He may be the greatest journalist currently on TV. Please listen to this heartfelt account of what he witnessed in Gaza and share widely.

Jon Snow recounts the scene in Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital, where doctors struggle to treat adults and children wounded by Israeli attacks.

Gaza: Is this a war on children?

More from Channel 4 News

Jon Snow has been speaking to youngsters in Gaza City about their lives and how they’re coping with living in a warzone. And he also talks to Dr Mads Gilbert – a Norwegian doctor working at al Shifa hospital – who is treating some of the children.

Let’s Talk About Genocide: The Case of Palestine

For other articles in this series 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

… declaration made by the General Assembly of the United Nations in its resolution 96 (I) dated 11 December 1946 that genocide is a crime under international law…

Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.  

Though still contentious in some circles even within the Palestine solidarity movement, I’d like to join Ali Abunimah, Ilan Pape and others [1,2] and put forth that Israel, typical of a colonialist entity, isn’t only guilty of war crimes, discrimination, and employing an apartheid system on the Palestinian people, but is actually committing genocide. Before the reader rules me out as another “extremist” and clicks on, I’d like to remind you that all these terms are legal terms. And though I’m by no means a legal expert, I intend to argue the legal points in this article, in hopes of not only proving that Israel is in fact committing the crime of genocide, but that legal professionals would refine these arguments and take them where they belong- International Criminal Court.

Continue reading “Let’s Talk About Genocide: The Case of Palestine”

Rula Jebreal gives her employer NBC a scolding for its pro-Israel coverage

More on it here. UPDATE: RJ continues to kick ass in this followup with Chris Hayes.

“Because of AIPAC, and because of the money behind it, and because of Sheldon Adelson, and because of all of us in the media. We are ridiculous. We are disgustingly biased when it comes to this issue,” Jebreal said.

“Look at how many airtime Netanyahu and his folks have on air on a daily basis. Andrea Mitchell and others,” she continued, referring to the MSNBC stalwart whose show airs right before Farrow’s afternoon program. “I never see one Palestinian being interviewed on theses same issues.”