Category: Culture

Thanks to Juan Cole for the link to this 5-minute video, which is a hard-hitting anti-Bush satire energetically sung (and performed) by the Kuwaiti singer Shams. She sings a well-known Egyptian popular song of romantic repudiation. “Hi! How are you… You think you’re so great? I never want to see you again!” while hamming it up with a dizzying array of props representing aspects of Bush’s policy in the Middle East. And yes, that includes Washington’s “information” policies, too, with repeated visual references to newspaper stories and to round-table type TV talk-shows…
I’ve remarked before on the complex relationship between pornography and war. In this video– which was apparently shot in Cairo and used remarkably high production values– Shams does her own mocking (and I would say, extremely feminist) riff on that relationship… She sashays provocatively up to a cardboard image of Bush at the “presidential” podium before she takes over the podium herself… She stands dancing and primping in a sand desert in front of huge letters spelling out “DEMOCRACY” before hitting into the sand various heavily armed US soldiers undertaking operations all around her… She wanders with a “lovelorn” look around a sound-studio full of (male) talking heads hung from puppets’ strings around a table, and being manipulated by members of the Bush administration before, with a wicked smile, she snips the string of one of the puppets. (The string/rope left swinging there at the end is an eery visual reminder — same lighting and all– of the videos of the Saddam execution.)
You have to see how she blows the blond toupee off the head of an ageing Arab male journo, provocatively fans herself with the card holding her “detainee number” as she stands in a police line-up, or disports herself langorously along the top of the large letters “GUANTANAMO” laid out in front of (an image of) the White House…
In the fast-paced denouement of the video a cowboy-hatted Bush propositions her on top of a castle built in the sand in the form of an economist’s graph showing, I think, oil-price rises. She swats Bush off the castle (more Saddam hanging imagery here), then throws down on top of him a stone block that turns out to be an “E” that is rapidly joined by all the other letters of the word “LIBERTY”… which is then itself immediately placed behind iron bars… Finally, from a fortune-teller Shams learns that her future is to walk happily off into the sunset with… Naji al-Ali’s iconic, Kuwaiti-born child, Handala. (And if you don’t know who Handala is, or what he represents, then you probably need to find out. Hint: “old-fashioned” pan-Arab nationalism… )
As we all saw with the Saddam execution videos, rapidly distributed video imagery can have a massive effect on public attitudes. This one has been very cleverly crafted to satirize many, many aspects of the Bush administration’s policy in the Middle East from a broadly Arab-nationalistic perspective.
Another Kuwaiti woman, English-language columnist Muna al-Fuzai, presumably recognized this power in the video when she sputtered:

I watched the video recording of this song on TV yesterday and it made me sick to the gut. What I watched was not art but mockery. This video clip is an insult to all Americans and all the good that they stand for and even die for! Why is it so easy for Arab artistes to attack the Western leaders while they won’t dare say a word against their own rulers? Why can’t they get it? What on earth do they know about the art of criticism? Since the past couple of weeks, some dailies somewhat managed to cover bits and pieces of this song until they finally aired it on television. What a sick decision.
The essence of art is to appreciate as well as learn from it, but what I watched was pure adulterated [I think she means “unadulterated”?] insult and humiliation…

As a US citizen, I’d like to say that I don’t consider the video “an insult to all Americans and all the good that they stand for and even die for.” I think it’s an astute, well-crafted criticism of not just the content of George Bush’s misbegotten and ill-fated war against Iraq but also the hypocrisy of the wide-reaching propaganda effort that has surrounded his pursuit of the war. And if it’s produced in a way that makes its Arabic-language viewers laugh or even crack a small smile, that is fine by me. A bit of humor can really help a person to survive some tough and otherwise dispiriting times!
I do not see the video as unfairly mocking “all that Americans stand for”: I read the references there to “liberty”, “democracy”, etc., as introduced precisely to pinpoint the disconnect between the Bushists’ very public espousal of those values and their actual practices in places like “Guantanamo.”
For his part, Juan Cole called the video “the oddest thing, but certainly a ‘resistance’ video of a sort.” I don’t know why he sees it as odd. It is political satire presented in the populist genre of an Arabic-language music video. Not “odd”, but rather inventive, I’d say.
Anyway, if you have a fast internet connection, check out the video and tell us what you think.

Update, later Monday:

The Egyptian popular culture site Yallabina tells us:

After signing a two-million-dollar contract with Surprise, an American producing company, singer Shams video-clipped Ahlan Ezayak. The song is Egyptian, and it’s written by Ekram Assi, composed by Mohamed Rohayem and musically arranged by Dr. Ashraf Abdo.
The video-clip was directed by French director “Costas Mroudis”. A whole cast, of technicians and artists, was brought from France and other European countries to take part in the video-clip, which was shot in only 3 days.

There is quite enough sexism, demeaning of women, and exclusion of women from the public sphere already without Joshua Landis further contributing to and propagating childish sexist attitudes on what is supposed to be a blog about serious public-policy issues.
What’s more, Landis’s blog is supposed to be about Syria. But so eager was he to jump on the ogling-women bandwagon that he even went leeringly off-topic there to put up that special post about the bodily attributes of female participants in various protests in Lebanon.
Landis lists himself on the blog as “Co-director of the Center for Peace Studies at the University of Oklahoma.” I truly don’t understand what anyone who propagates such crass, good-old-boys-ish material about women is doing anywhere near a “Center for Peace Studies.” Does he propagate this same demeaning, objectifying view of women there, too, I wonder? “Peacemaking through the demeaning and social exclusion of half of humanity”– hey, it could be a major new contribution to the field….
Put away the dirty raincoat, Josh, and try growing up.
(If people are seriously interested in the emerging role of women within Islamist movements like Hizbullah or Hamas, they can go to the kinds of sources cited in this recent JWN post.)

Every so often it’s good to pause and count my blessings.  This past
week I’ve had a number of really interesting, powerful experiences, and I
thought I’d tell you about some of them.

Last Sunday, I took the train to New York City.  Now our passenger train
system here in the US is antediluvian and, in general, quite unworthy of
any polity that tries to present itself as part of (let alone the leader
of) the “civilized world.”  But still, there is one train per day that
crawls up the eastern side of the country from New Orleans to Boston, and
another that makes the return trip.  This train goes through Charlottesville,
and so does the three-time-a-week “Cardinal” train that loops down from New
York through Virginia, West Virginia, and Cincinnati and ends up in Chicago.
 I love trains!  I rode the Thalys from Paris to Den Haag back
in July.  And last Sunday, I rode the Crescent from C’ville to New York.
 Okay, engineering-wise and amenities-wise there is no question but
that the Thalys is hugely superior.  But still, it’s great to step onto
the train in Charlottesville at 7 a.m. and step off it six and a half hours
later in Penn Station, New York…

People in Gaza, or Bethlehem, or Nablus could only dream of being able to
enjoy such freedom of movement.

I stayed with my daughter Leila and her spouse Greg Curley in their place
in Brooklyn.  Monday and Wednesday I got to run  the 3.43 mile
circuit round Prospect Park
, which is a most amazing, publicly owned resource for the people of Brooklyn.
 When I ran, the weather was crisp and sunny; and actually, given that
I also run from their house to the park, it must come in at around 4 miles
for me.  Somehow, when I’m there that doesn’t feel burdensome, though
at home I generally only run 3 miles each time.

Tuesday, I went to a day-long conference the American Bar Association’s Section
of International Law had organized at New York University.  It was titled
something like “Legacies of Nuremberg for Africa”, and someone from SIL from
the west coast had persuaded me to speak there about the lessons from my
book
Amnesty After Atrocity?
 I was on a morning panel with Ruti Teitel, an ultra-brainy
law professor of Argentinian origin who a while ago published an iconic
book titled Transitional Justice.  It was an interesting experience,
since I was one of very few non-lawyers there.  Perhaps the only one?
 Indeed, the main argument of my book is that judicial remedies are
really not terribly useful for societies reeling from recent and perhaps
still ongoing atrocities.  So I made the best case I could, based on
my research, and sticking more or less within the prescribed time-limit of
15 minutes.  Afterwards, there were some tinteresting questions, and
a few very interesting people came up and chatted.  So I think it went
pretty well.

Continue reading “New York, Cairo kids, the universe”

I know that the poverty and hunger statistics for Gaza are currently appalling. But it’s great to be reminded that the Strip has a fine and ancient culture, of which its food-prep culture is only a small part.
The inimitable Laila El-Haddad has a great piece about Gaza’s cuisine in the June edition of This week in Palestine. In it, she confronts head-on some of the stereotypes non-Gaza Palestinians hold about the Strip’s people. (“They are ‘brute’ and ‘unsophisticated,’ and what they lack in culture they make up for in strong-headedness.”) But she argues convincingly that, “Gaza boasts a unique cuisine rivalled in its variety only by its versatility of ingredients, with a flavour to satisfy every palate…”
She notes that the Gazan kitchen has been enriched by cultural interaction amongst the indigenous Gazans and that 80% of the Strip’s population who are 1948 refugees from surrounding towns and villages– and also, colored by the population’s experience of poverty:

As far as Palestinian food goes, Gaza’s is characterized by its generous use of spices and, of course, chillies. Other major flavours and ingredients include dill, chard, garlic, cumin, lentils, chickpeas, pomegranates, sour plums and tamarind. Many of the traditional dishes rely on clay-pot cooking, which preserves the flavour and texture of the vegetables and results in fork-tender meat.
Traditionally, most of the dishes, such as rummaniya, are seasonal and rely on ingredients indigenous to the area and its surrounding villages, pre-1948. Poverty has also played an important role in determining many of the area’s simple meatless dishes and stews, such as saliq wa adas (chard and lentils) and bisara (skinless fava beans mashed with dried mulukhiya leaves, chilli, dill seed and garlic). One cannot discount the influence of the 1948 Nakba, which resulted in an influx of refugees from all over Palestine’s coast, tripling Gaza’s population overnight. Many of them were fellahin (peasants) who would rely on eating seasonally, based on what they grew, and who brought with them a variety of flavours and ingredients, especially those that were easy to carry and cook in the harsh conditions of the exile they were forced to live in, as many first-generation refugees testify.
Due to the Strip’s geographic isolation from the rest of Palestine as a result of decades of occupation and Israeli-imposed closures, many of its dishes have not been heard of outside of Gaza…

I can tell you, from the couple of times I was lucky enough to be included in an El-Haddad family meal when I was in Gaza, that these dishes are really tasy– and far, far spicier than most Palestinian cuisine. In fact, I think Laila’s mom, Um Tarek (who’s a retired pediatrician) should maybe plan a new career as a cookbook writer.
Anyway, go read Laila’s whole article. It will make your mouth water.

In addition to discussion of the role of the pro-Israel lobby, another major Israel-related taboo within the US mainstream media has to do with the topic of Israel’s nuclear weapons.
Thus, today, we have the amazing spectacle of Dennis Ross, the former longtime Arab-Israeli “peace process coordinator” for the Bush I and Clinton administrations, writing an oped in today’s WaPo about the Iranian nuclear issue without even mentioning the word “Israel” once…
Well, I imagine there are many contexts in which one could do that. But not in the context in which Dennis is writing his piece, since he is looking specifically at the Middle East regional implications of any move Iran might make toward developing nuclear weapons…
And in the course of doing that he comes up with zingers like this:

If Iran succeeds, in all likelihood we will face a nuclear Middle East.

Hullo?? Earth to Dennis!! Um, Dennis, the Middle East already has nuclear weapons in it– thanks to Israel.
And then he goes on to examine likely responses from other Middle Eastern countries to any Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons, arguing with a degree of dogmatic certainty that then Saudi Arabia “will seek” their own nuclear weapons capability, etc etc…
But still no word– anywhere in this whole piece about Middle East nuclear matters!– about Israel.
This, I note, just one day after the WaPo itself had published a very informative article by Avner Cohen and William Burr that described how US officials behaved back in the late 1960s as they became increasingly convinced that Israel had already developed its first nuclear weapons:

Apparently prompted by those high-level concerns, Kissinger issued NSSM 40 [that’s short for National Security Study Memorandum, no. 40]– titled Israeli Nuclear Weapons Program — on April 11, 1969. In it he asked the national security bureaucracy for a review of policy options toward Israel’s nuclear program. In the weeks that followed, the issue was taken up by a senior review group (SRG), chaired by Kissinger, that included [CIA Director Richard] Helms, Undersecretary of State Elliot Richardson, Deputy Defense Secretary David Packard and Joint Chiefs Chairman Earle Wheeler.
The one available report of an SRG meeting on NSSM 40 suggests that the bureaucracy was interested in pressuring Israel to halt its nuclear program. How much pressure to exert remained open. Kissinger wanted to “avoid direct confrontation,” while Richardson was willing to apply pressure if an investigation to determine Israel’s intentions showed that some key assurances would not be forthcoming. In such circumstances, the United States could tell the Israelis that scheduled deliveries of F-4 Phantom jets to Israel would have to be reconsidered.
By mid-July 1969, Nixon had let it be known that he was leery of using the Phantoms as leverage, so when Richardson and Packard summoned Rabin on July 29 to discuss the nuclear issue, the idea of a probe that involved pressure had been torpedoed. Although Richardson and Packard emphasized the seriousness with which they viewed the nuclear problem, they had no threat to back up their rhetoric…

Cohen and Burr based much of their article on a collection of newly declassified US documents on the topic that is now available on the website of the DC-based “National Security Archive.”
That’s a valuable-looking collection of documents there. (Just scroll down on that page for the links to them.) There are still, though, many other relevant docs that have not yet been declassified.
The main outline of this story was already pretty well-known back when, for example, I wrote an article titled Israel’s Nuclear Game: The US Stake, and published it in the Summer 1988 edition of World Policy Journal. (Shortly after I published that, Helms, whom I had come to know a bit, wrote me telling me I had got the basic facts and the analysis there quite right.)
I guess I should work to get the text of that article– and the follow-on piece I published in Foreign Affairs in Summer 1989, along with former US arms-control czar Gerard C. Smith– up onto the internet. It shouldn’t be too hard…
But what I want to note here is the kind of amazing self-censorship at work over at the WaPo: that the editors could publish that entire piece by Dennis Ross today without insisting that he at least make some reference in it to the big elephant in the room in any discussion of Middle East nuclear issues– namely, Israel’s longtime possession of a significant nuclear arsenal.
That’s about equivalent to writing about terrorism in the world without writing about Al-Qaeda. (And of course, it makes Dennis’s entire analysis correspondingly nonsensical.)
My 2005-2006 issue of the IISS’s “Military Balance” describes Israel as possessing “up to 200” nuclear wraheads– the same number, I think, that it has attributed to Israel for a number of years now.
I imagine, though, that Israel’s nuclear arsenal has, if anything, grown over recent years, rather than shrunk or stayed the same size?
Certainly, Israel’s ability to deliver these warheads has grown significantly over the years. Even back in a 1993 essay, the Israeli strategic analyst Gerald Steinberg was writing that Israel’s Jericho-2 missile,

is credited with a range of 2000 to 2800 kilometers, and, according to Fetter … “can probably deliver at least 2 tonnes on any Arab country”.

My 2005-2006 Mil Bal says Israel has “about 100” Jericho-1 and Jericho-2 missiles.
But Dennis Ross– and his editors there at the WaPo– think that with a straight face they can publish an article about Middle East nuclear-weapons developments without even mentioning Israel?
Now that’s self-censorship.

In response to my earlier query on this, Reidar Visser sent me this handy link, which is to a site that automatically does either Gregorian-to-Hijri (Islamic) or Hijri-to-Gregorian calendar conversion.
A linked page there contains this listing of the various, lunar-based, Hijri months:

(1) MuHarram
(2) Safar
(3) Raby` al-awal
(4) Raby` al-THaany
(5) Jumaada al-awal
(6) Jumaada al-THaany
(7) Rajab
(8) SHa`baan
(9) RamaDHaan
(10) SHawwal
(11) Thw al-Qi`dah
(12) Thw al-Hijjah
The most important dates in the Islamic (Hijri) year are: 1 MuHarram (Islamic new year); 27 Rajab (Isra & Miraj); 1 RamaDHaan (first day of fasting); 17 RamaDHan (Nuzul Al-Qur’an); Last 10 days of RamaDHaan which include Laylatu al-Qadar; 1 SHawwal (`iyd al-FiTr); 8-10 Thw al-Hijjah (the Hajj to Makkah); and 10 Thw al-Hijjah (`iyd al-‘aDHHae).

So, using the converter, I can now tell you that the next of those liturgical-calendar dates that is coming up is the 27th of Rajab 1427 which is…. 22 August 2006 CE (with a small probability of a one-day error, depending on moon-sightings.)
Handy, huh?

There’s an excellent piece over at The Nation about the Mearsheimer-Walt article. It’s by Philip Weiss.
Weiss gives some significant background to the writing of the piece, which was originally commissioned– from Mearsheimer alone– by The Atlantic Monthly back in 2002. Mearsheimer brought in Walt, well understanding the kind of reaction he could expect to any objective treatment of the topic:

“No way I would have done it alone,” Mearsheimer says. “You needed two people of significant stature to withstand the firestorm that would invariably come with the publication of the piece.”
… “We understood there would be a significant price to pay,” Mearsheimer says. “We both went into this understanding full well that our chances of ever being appointed to a high-level administrative position at a university or policy-making position in Washington would be greatly damaged.” They turned their piece in to The Atlantic two years ago. The magazine sought revisions, and they submitted a new draft in early 2005, which was rejected. “[We] decided not to publish the article they wrote,” managing editor Cullen Murphy wrote to me, adding that The Atlantic’s policy is not to discuss editorial decisions with people other than the authors.
“I believe they got cold feet,” Mearsheimer says. “They said they thought the piece was a terrible–they thought the piece was terribly written. That was their explanation. Beyond that I know nothing. I would be curious to know what really happened.” The writing as such can’t have been the issue for the magazine; editors are paid to rewrite pieces. The understanding I got from a source close to the magazine is that The Atlantic had wanted a piece of an analytical character. It got the analysis, topped off with a strong argument.

Weiss writes that, “in Israel the article has had a respectful reading, with a writer in Ha’aretz saying it was a ‘wake-up call’ to Americans about the relationship.” (I guess that would be this piece by Daniel Levy.)
In the US, by contrast, as Weiss notes…

Many liberals and leftists have signaled their discomfort with the paper. Daniel Fleshler, a longtime board member of Americans for Peace Now, says the issue of Jewish influence is “so incendiary and so complicated that I don’t know how anyone can talk about this in the public sphere. I know that’s a problem. But there’s not enough space in any article you write to do this in a way that doesn’t cause more rancor. And so much of this paper was glib and poorly researched.”

(Of course, Fleshler doesn’t actually give any instances of this… )
Weiss writes,

The liberal intelligentsia have failed in their responsibility on specifically this question. Because they maintain a nostalgic view of the Establishment as a Christian stronghold in which pro-Israel Jews have limited power, or because they like to make George Bush and the Christian end-timers and the oilmen the only bad guys in a debacle, or because they are afraid of pogroms resulting from talking about Jewish power, they have peeled away from addressing the neocons’ Israel-centered view of foreign relations. “It seems that the American left is also claimed by the Israel lobby,” Mary-Kay Wilmers, LRB‘s (Jewish) editor [who was of course the person who did decide to publish a shortened version of the piece], says with dismay. Certainly the old antiwar base of the Democratic Party has been fractured, with concerns about Israel’s security driving the wedge. In the 2004 primaries, Howard Dean was forced to correct himself after–horrors–calling for a more evenhanded policy in the Middle East. The New Yorker’s courageous opposition to the Vietnam War was replaced this time around by muted support for the Iraq War. Tom Friedman spoke for many liberals when he said on Slate that bombs in Israeli pizza parlors made him support aggression in Iraq. Meantime, out of fear of Dershowitz, or respect for him, the liberal/mainstream media have declined to look into the lobby’s powers, leaving it to two brave professors. The extensive quibbling on the left over the Mearsheimer-Walt paper has often seemed defensive, mistrustful of Americans’ ability to listen to these ideas lest they cast Israel aside.
Mearsheimer and Walt at times were simplistic and shrill. But it may have required such rhetoric to break through the cinder block and get attention for their ideas. Democracy depends on free exchange, and free exchange means not always having to be careful. [New America Foundation scholar and writer Anatol] Lieven says we have seen in another system the phenomenon of intellectuals strenuously denouncing an article that could not even be published in their own country: the Soviet Union. “If somebody like me, an absolute down-the-line centrist on this issue–my position on Israel/Palestine is identical to that of the Blair government–has so much difficulty publishing, it’s a sign of how extremely limited and ethically rotten the media debate is in this country.”

Anyway, as someone whose work and personal integrity have both been viciously attacked, and whose career and earning power have been harshly damaged over many years by various strands of the pro-Israel lobby, I can tell you that’s a good piece of writing– including both good reporting and solid argumentation– from Weiss there. Go on over and enjoy it. (And of course you can come back and discuss it here.)

Wishing a blessed Pesach to all of JWN’s Jewish readers. And special greetings to the wonderful group of young Jewish men and women in Boston who held this seder outside the AIPAC office there today, under the banner, “Passover Means Liberation For All”.
One participant reported,

We repeated our Freedom Seder four times, and chanted in between. The most exciting thing that happened was the man who ran past us screaming “Race traitors!” and another man who said “Praise Jesus” The police came at the very end after we faced the building and chanted for a few minutes. Most of the people in the building escaped out the side door, but we did have the opportunity to confront a few key insiders who exited the building right in front of us.
The slanted sunlight blessed our green Justice for Palestine sign, our bitter herbs, and our salt water. It felt joyous and sacred. Look for us in the Jewish Advocate- big Boston paper!

One of the best ways to mark the third anniversary of this war: go read this, by Riverbend.
Another good way to do so, given the many organic links between the Iraq war and the Palestinian-Israeli situation: go read Laila’s description of the noose of Israel’s punitive economic siege tightening around Gaza.
Thank G-d for the blogosphere, which brings us these fresh, un-mediated voices of people– including talented observers and writers who are women— who are living in zones of conflict and stress.
The other thing I’m going to do today to mark the war anniversary, is take part in our local pro-peace march here in C’ville.

I saw the NYT linked to this statement today, jointly issued by around three dozen eminent Muslim thinkers and religious leaders from around the world. It explained the Muslim position on the sense of violation many or most observant Muslims felt in reaction to the cartoons:

The events in Denmark concerning the Messenger of God represent an entirely unacceptable crime of aggression that has violated the highest sanctities of the Muslim people.

It also called on,

the Danish government and the Danish people to yield to the large number of objective and sincere voices emanating from within their society, by apologizing, and condemning and bringing
an end to this attack.

However, it also issued a crucial call for restraint:

We appeal to all Muslims to exercise self-restraint in accordance with the teachings of Islam and we reject countering an act of aggression by acts not sanctioned in Islam, such as breaking treaties and breaching timehonoured agreements by attacking foreign embassies or innocent people and other targets. Such violent reactions can lead to a distortion of the just and balanced nature of our request or even to our isolation from the global dialogue. The support that we give to our Prophet will not be given by flouting his teachings.

The signatories include Sunnis and Shiites, and people from Indonesia, India, Morocco, the US, as well as the Muslim heartland. They include the present Mufti of Jerusalem, the Grand Mufti of Lebanon, and Ayatollah Muhammad Husain Fadlallah, the spiritual mentor of Hizbullah, in Lebanon. I see no signatories from Iran. There are at least two from Syria.
Regarding people’s arguments that some of the anti-cartoon violence has been stirred up by “authoritarian” regimes, I would say that there has been as much anti-cartoon activism by pro-US as by anti-US regimes, and that in nearly all these cases the popular response was far stronger than any of the regimes had expected. The cartoons issue has touched a point of very deep grievance and hurt inside many Muslim societies. Of course it has been “used” by many different kinds of political forces for their own reasons. But their agitation on the issue would not have been met with such a strong popular response if the deep hurt weren’t there in the first place.
The response that has sickened me the most so far has been when Muslim mobs in Nigeria torched churches and killed a reported 25 members of the Christian community in the north of the country. And now, most recently, there have been anti-Muslim reprisals in the south of the country.
What do Nigerian Christians have to do with one self-important Danish journalist’s decision to knowingly break a Muslim taboo on publishing pictures of the Prophet? Nothing whatever.
Let’s hope as many Muslims as possible heed the religious leaders’ call for self-restraint. Personally, I wish it had been more strongly worded and called explicitly for a ban on all forms of violence and hate-mongering in response to the cartoons. But still, it’s a good start.