Category: Human rights

“Rick Warren should be in jail”

“Rick Warren should be in jail.” So should Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Barth, Robert H. Schuller, and perhaps even…. Helena Cobban. :-}
I’m referring, if you haven’t guessed, to prison libraries and to the NYTimes report on new Federal Prison guidelines for libraries, specifically their sections on faith.
Kudos to Sojourners and “Sojo mail” for the catchy, if purposeful, headline about Mr. Warren. From their e-mail today:

Imagine walking into your local library, planning to read a theologian such as Reinhold Niebuhr or Karl Barth, or a popular inspirational work, such as Rick Warren’s Purpose-Driven Life or Harold Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People.
But instead of finding such important and popular titles, you discover that the religion section has been decimated – stripped of any book that did not appear on a government-approved list.
That’s exactly what’s happening right now to inmates in federal prisons under a Bush Administration policy. As The New York Times put it, “chaplains have been quietly carrying out a systematic purge of religious books and materials that were once available to prisoners in chapel libraries.”

Imagine, the Federal Prisons have labored to compile lists of approved books on faith; those not on the list get pulled or blocked. The specific criteria and the actual approved lists are not open for public review; this is, after all, the Bush-Cheney Administration.
Here’s a Sojo link for a suggested protest letter to the Prisons’ Director.
So how did the Bush Administration, reputed for faith-based approaches to social problems, come up with this bizarre policy? Maybe it comes from the “Feith-based” neoconservative view of the world — as in, “it’s all about national security.” According then to the “Stardardized Chapel Library Project,” we prevent prisoners from accessing anything that would “discriminate, disparage, advocate violence or radicalize.” As claimed by the Federal Prisons spokesperson quoted in the Times,

“We really wanted consistently available information for all religious groups to assure reliable teachings as determined by reliable subject experts.”

Just who, we wonder, determines what religious materials are “reliable teachings?” What’s meant by “radicalize,” or “discrimination?” Should we prohibit a book that says there’s only one way to be accepted by God? Wouldn’t that be “discriminating” against others who pointed to another “path?” One would think, this is absurd. Or as the Mark Early of Prison Fellowship puts it,

“It’s swatting a fly with a sledgehammer…. There’s no need to get rid of literally hundreds of thousands of books that are fine simply because you have a problem with an isolated book or piece of literature that presents extremism.”

Meanwhile, back to the front lines in Iraq – and their religious freedoms – consider this allegation that some US soldiers are being compelled to participate in Christian services. Perhaps there’s a “devil” or two in the details here, as I find it hard to believe that the Pentagon, much less Secretary Gates, would knowingly mandate the practice of any religion by soldiers.
Yet as we’ve noted here before, some “dispensationalist” Christian-zionist groups still view Iraq as a “crusade” for the spread of Christianity. It’s advance will bring on the rapture, Armageddon, the return & reign of Christ, etc. etc. See, for example, Max Blumenthal’s report on “Operation Straight Up” a group that operates with the Pentagon’s “blessing” and proselytizes among active-duty members of the US military, including with inflammatory apocalyptic video games.
In the judgment of Mikey Weinstein, a former Reagan Administration White House,

“The constitution has been assaulted and brutalized,… Thanks to the influence of extreme Christian fundamentalism, the wall separating church and state is nothing but smoke and debris. And OSU is the IED that exploded the wall separating church and state in the Pentagon and throughout our military.”

Meanwhile, the US State Department recently issued its annual, heavily politicized report on religious freedom around the world.
No doubt the rest of the world wonders:

“What, pray tell, gives you the standing to show us the way?

Cartoon: Iranians as Cockroaches!?

I learned today of a particularly disturbing political cartoon published on September 4th in the Columbus (Ohio) Post-Dispatch. Drawn by Michael Ramirez, the cartoon very much illustrates themes I’ve written about here several times before — that when all else in the Middle East fails, the change-the-subject Bush/Cheney Administration and friends can resort to the fail-safe “blame Iran game” as the root of all such troubles.
The cartoon in question displays a regional map with Iran and a sewer pipe at its center, the source of hordes of cockroaches infesting the region. You can see the Dispatch version here. I have since discovered that the cartoon was first published on June 25th, in full color, in the internationally circulated Investors’ Business Daily. (click here or here)
Before presenting additional details about the artist and the controversy, I am pleased to publish here an eloquent and courageous open letter to the Columbus Post-Dispatch, from Marsha B. Cohen, a scholarly colleague at Florida International University in Miami. (with my emphasis added)
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From: Marsha Cohen
To the Editor: Columbus Post Dispatch

For over four decades, Fidel Castro has been considered one of the most odious leaders in the Western hemisphere. After he took power, hundreds of thousands of Cubans fled their island home for Miami (where I live and work), and where they have prospered. Many of them have been among the most vocal opponents of any moves by the US government to normalize relations with Cuba. Even now that Castro is old and sick, and at death’s door, he remains a hated symbol of a revolution gone wrong, that rapidly morphed into a detested enemy of the interests and values of the US.
Nevertheless, no Florida newspaper would ever dare to depict Cuba as a sewer, with cockroaches from it spreading out across North and South America. The outrage expressed, even by the regime’s most vociferous opponents, to the insult to their Cuban identity and beloved homeland, would put the police on crisis alert, and make headlines throughout the entire country.
Yet in an editorial cartoon, published on Sept 4. the Columbus Dispatch had no compunctions about portraying Iran as a sewer, and Iranians as cockroaches. Its decision to do so–regardless of the political motives of the editorial board, of the artist, or the message they were trying to convey–is unfortunate, and reflects more shamefully on the values and integrity of your newspaper than on the Iranian people, both in Iran and and those who have made their home in this country and other parts of the world, that this cartoon (whether intentionally or unintentionally) maligned and demeaned.
I hope that every organization that considers itself a champion of civil and human rights will express its outrage at the publication of this cartoon. Had the “cockroaches” been designated Jews, Blacks or Hispanics, the cartoon never would have made it into print in a respectable newspaper. And if it did, the objections and the fury generated throughout the community would have been loud, swift and resonant.
Anyone who would not want to see themselves and their ethnic group depicted in this way by a cartoonist is morally obligated to vociferously object to its publication. While the rights of a free press may extend to the promotion of racism, hatred and dehumanization, this does not mean you, as a newspaper, are obligated to exercise that right, or that decent people everywhere should not denounce your decision to do so when you do. Your disgusting representation of Iranians–irrespective of their regime–deserves nothing less than nationwide condemnation.
Sincerely,
Marsha B. Cohen
Miami, Florida

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Well said and thanks Marsha Cohen.
A few additional tidbits on the cartoonist and the controversy:

Continue reading “Cartoon: Iranians as Cockroaches!?”

Mia Farrow: “virtual hostage”

Irony alert
Those familiar with Farzaneh Milani’s path-breaking literary analysis will recognize the phrase “hostage narrative,” a term she has been devloping over many years to apply to that best-selling genre of politically tinged “true stories.” In these “hostage narratives,” women writers who are now “liberated” or “un-veiled” tell the world of their past “cultural captivity” in their native, usually Muslim lands.
In this genre, as Professor Milani documents, the line between “fact” and “fiction” gets lost, as those sympathetic to the “message” focus only on the cause served. It’s a great way to sell books and a shrewd way to “heat up” the political culture to support bombings and invasions to “liberate” the presumed hostages. Thus the sequel:
“Reading Lolita while bombing Tehran.”
(And oh by the way, are women now better off in today’s de facto Islamic Republic(s) of Iraq than they were under Saddam? Where’s columnist Ellen Goodman been on that?)
Veteran actress Mia Farrow now takes the “hostage narrative” to a new, virtual realm, with her over-the-top offer to exchange herself for the “freedom” of a Sudanese “dissident” rebel leader and Darfur advocate, Suleiman Jamous. Depending on the source you read, Jamous is a “virtual prisoner” who cannot leave a UN hospital and/or cannot leave the country for medical treatment.
To Sudan’s President, Ms. Farrow writes,

Mr. Jamous is in need of a medical procedure that cannot be carried out in Kadugli… Mr. Jamous played a crucial role in bringing the SLA to the negotiating table and in seeking reconciliation between its divided rival factions.
I am… offering to take Mr. Jamous’s place, to exchange my freedom for his in the knowledge of his importance to the civilians of Darfur and in the conviction that he will apply his energies toward creating the just and lasting peace that the Sudanese people deserve and hope for.

How curious. Ms. Farrow’s “courageous offer” to become a female hostage in a Muslim land is a recognizable stroke of p.r. brilliance. It’s getting widespread softball media treatment in the US, as anything supporting the long-suffering Sudanese Darfuris is “hip” in the US and must be “a good thing.” And besides, she’s a UNICEF goodwill ambassador, and what’s the harm — particularly if it helps focus the international microscope back on unresolved Sudanese nightmares? (US international broadcasting has been prominently featuring Ms. Farrow’s offer too….)
Ms. Farrow of course knows there isn’t a chance the Sudanese government will take her up on her offer to become a “hostage.” What a p.r. disaster for them that would be!
In her best acting yet, Ms. Farrow professes to the media the sincerity of her wish to be a real hostage. Indeed.
We’ll likely have to settle for Ms. Farrow keeping a journal for enthralled admirers of her “ordeal” as a surreal hostage-in-waiting – a “virtual hostage” on behalf of a “virtual prisoner.”
Oh the drama. I feel another best-seller in the works, no doubt for a worthy cause. (Aren’t they all? Though perhaps in Mia Farrow’s case, the title, “Not Without My Daughter” might be a bit inappropriate…..)
So what’s next? Hundreds, if not thousands, of Darfur activists on college campuses signing up to join Mia as “virtual hostages?” eh? Me & Mia? No doubt that’s too harsh.
I hear Ms. Farrow’s next movie will be a comedy.

Jefferson & the Reign of Witches

Kudos to the Baltimore Sun for its July 4th editorial. Contrary to the keen imagination of another former “Jefferson Fellow” now at Oxford, I (Scott), as far as I know, had nothing to do with the Sun editorial. :-}
The Baltimore editorial begins with the reference to Thomas Jefferson’s First Inaugural. (Yes, this is the same Jefferson address I invoked here at jwn last November 2nd, in challenging Senator George Allen’s claim to being a “Jeffersonian”). In the Sun’s version,

In his first presidential inaugural address in 1801, he (Jefferson) ticked off a long list of essential principles of government, featuring highlights of the Bill of Rights, and called preservation of the government “in its whole constitutional vigor” the “anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad.” These principles “should be the creed of our political faith,” he said. “Should we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty and safety.”

The editorial credits Jefferson for having been “prophetic” about how the US government has (yet again) committed “a long train of abuses” (as Jefferson once wrote about another George III) against our constitutional liberties, in “moments… of alarm.”
If I had written the editorial, I’d have pointedly noted how for Jefferson, “freedom of the press, and freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus, and trial by juries impartially selected” were among the principles that:

“form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation. The wisdom of our sages and blood of our heroes have been devoted to their attainment. They should be the creed of our political faith.”

Through his long public life, Jefferson had extensive first hand experiences with the challenges of protecting such principles in perceived times of national emergency, including the treatment of prisoners of war. As I noted last November, Jefferson would have been particularly horrified by our present cavalier disregard of habeas corpus protections, given that he:

affirmed that habeas corpus applied to both citizen and alien alike, and.. argued against suspending it even in times of war or rebellion. In a 1788 letter to James Madison, Jefferson warned that the want of habeas corpus “will do evil…” and that suspensions thereof can become “habitual” and the “minds of the nation almost prepared to live under its constant suspension.”

In similar vein, the Sun editorial closes with an all too appropriate warning:

“Public outrage at the discovery of such clandestine abuses has typically resulted in the sort of corrective action Jefferson recommended. Such a process may be under way soon again as Congress and the courts begin to apply some restraints on an administration that as much as or more than any other has considered itself above the law. There’s little time to waste before Americans become so accustomed to their lost liberty that the loss becomes acceptable.“

Harpers Magazine on July 4th featured a related, and also all-too-relevant Jefferson quotation about our present “Reign of Witches.” As Scott Horton notes, Jefferson was writing in 1798 to a friend on his hope that the Federalists had “overplayed their hand” with the Alien & Sedition Acts (an early version of today’s Patriot Act). Yet Jefferson nonetheless was concerned that he could be arrested if his letter was publicized, given how paranoid the country had become then (as now).

“A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt… And if we feel their power just sufficiently to hoop us together, it will be the happiest situation in which we can exist. If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake.”

Helena here has repeatedly expressed her optimism that the tide in Washington has turned…; may the reign of the neocon warlocks soon pass over.

Just what did “The Declaration” Declare?

Here in the United States, it’s July 4th, a day we commemorate with fireworks, cook-outs, concerts, and speeches. So what exactly is it that we celebrate?
Nominally, today marks the 231st anniversary of revolutionary America formally declaring its separation from Great Britain. The primary author of the famous document was, of course, Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson’s Monticello home, here in Charlottesville, has become a living educational memorial to Jefferson. I recently was honored to be a “Jefferson Fellow” at the adjoining Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, (ICJS) where scholars, in part, explore the ongoing legacy of Jefferson for our world today.
Despite the ready association of Jefferson with today’s date, do we understand what the core purpose of Jefferson’s Declaration was?
Easy, right? If so, and at the risk of turning this into NPR’s “wait, wait,… don’t tell me” quiz show, then let’s try this question: how did America’s famous Declaration begin? Was it:

a. “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,…”
b. “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness…”
c. ” When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station….”
d. “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.”
e. “All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness…”

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If you the reader are like the vast majority of Americans, you will be inclined to answer “b,” but sorry, that is the Declaration’s second paragraph, not the first.

Answer “e” is also incorrect; that’s the opening to the 1945 Vietnamese Declaration (among dozens of Declarations in world history that emulated America’s in one form or another.)
Answer “d” also is incorrect, as this is Article 1 from the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man.
With answer “a” of course being the preamble to the 1789 US Constitution, then you surely knew the answer to be “c.”

Lest we get too confident in our history IQ, how many of us can readily recall just what the 1776 American Declaration… well… “declared?”
Even if you had a solid American history education, don’t feel too bad if you’re a bit confused by the question. Assuming you went to an American school that still taught “civics” in some form, your lessons on “The Declaration” likely included much contemplation of the meaning, the “codes,” of Jefferson’s second paragraph. Just what fundamental “truths” did the new American nation “hold” to be “self-evident?” And what about all that seeming hypocrisy regarding all persons (“men”) being created equal, even as so many of them were then in tolerated bondage?
Until quite recently, very little in the vast scholarship on Jefferson and the Declaration addresses the “simple” question of just what was the Declaration’s purpose? The curious state of such learned discourse is neatly illustrated in a short 1999 text, edited by Joseph Ellis and entitled, “What Did the Declaration Declare?” This book provides splendid examples of the great scholarly debates over the last half of the 20th Century about how the Declaration was written, about the merits or exaggerations in the list of grievances against George III, and just which intellectual current influenced Thomas Jefferson’s writing of the Declaration’s second paragraph. Was it John Locke? Or was it the Scottish Enlightenment? Or was it some Saxon mythology that only Jefferson could fathom?
Whatever Jefferson’s intellectual parentage, Abraham Lincoln’s 1859 tribute to Jefferson’s “second paragraph” still nicely sidesteps such inquiry:

“All honor to Jefferson… who had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”

Yet from Lincoln to the present, few scholars or pundits have provided much substantive comment about the Declaration’s first sentence, which in full reads:

“When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

Parenthetically, my own work focuses on just what Jefferson and his colleagues meant by a “decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” (I have much to publish on this rarely-considered clause, and yes, it has a rather compelling contemporary ring…. Imagine — American leaders once caring about world opinion.)
I am pleased though to acknowledge that the two-century-old intellectual logjam blocking inquiry into the Declaration’s first sentence has been nicely broken by Harvard’s David Armitage, an historian and “English School” international relations scholar.
In a brilliant 2002 William & Mary Quarterly article and in a slender new book, entitled “The Declaration of Independence: A Global History,” Armitage contends directly that the fundamental purpose of the American Declaration was to…
(drum roll…. turn the page…. whoosh, poof, boom, zing, crackle,sizzle…, bang!….)

Continue reading “Just what did “The Declaration” Declare?”

Failed States Index & “Failing the Faithful”

The July-August issue of Foreign Policy magazine features the 3rd installment of the annual “Failed States Index,” (FSI) a tool intended to identify the world’s “weakest links.” A project of “The Fund for Peace” and Foreign Policy (via its parent, the Carnegie Council for International “Peace”), this year’s top five “winners” are:

Sudan, Iraq, Somalia, Chad, and Zimbabwe.

This year’s FSI report covers 177 states, considerably more than the first two studies. Africa is well “represented” among “top” failed states, as are those in the Middle East and West Asia. Among the latter:

Afghanisan #8,
Pakistan #12,
Uzbekistan #22,
Yemen #24,
Lebanon #28,
Egypt #36,
Turkmenistan # 43

Iran, compared to its neighbors, comes in “relatively” well, with an FSI rank at #57. Israel comes in at 67, though no explanatory notes are provided to explain if “Israel” includes the occupied territories or not. “Palestine” is not covered. Conveniently, the study only provides country notes for the first 60 states.
With considerable hesitation, I concede that such reports may be useful in trimming away ideological biases while equipping citizens and policymakers alike to discern what areas of the world may be suffering from, or sliding toward, critical instability. Not just dangers to themselves, states on the verge of implosion “threaten the progress and stability of countries half a world away.” (Or so we say. But do we really believe it? That’s another subject.)
Yet this study’s utility, at least to me, slips when it starts with an “elastic” multi-functional definition of a “failed state.”

“A state that is failing has several attributes. One of the most common is the loss of physical control of its territory or a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Other attributes of state failure include the erosion of legitimate authority to make collective decisions, an inability to provide reasonable public services, and the inability to interact with other states as a full member of the international community. The 12 indicators cover a wide range of elements of the risk of state failure, such as extensive corruption and criminal behavior, inability to collect taxes or otherwise draw on citizen support, large-scale involuntary dislocation of the population, sharp economic decline, group-based inequality, institutionalized persecution or discrimination, severe demographic pressures, brain drain, and environmental decay. States can fail at varying rates through explosion, implosion, erosion, or invasion over different time periods.”

To clarify a bit more, the “Failed States Index” is derived from an aggregation of 12 indicators of state performance:

1. Demographic pressures (e.g. too many people, compared to resources);
2. Refugees (desperate people on the move);
3. Group grievances (people hating each other);
4. Human Flight (brain drain);
5. Uneven development (too many poor);
6. Sudden economic collapse;
7. Deligitimization of the State;
8. Public Services Deterioration;
9. Rule of Law (lack thereof) and Human Rights Violations;
10. Security Confusion (states w/n states?);
11 Factionalism of elites;
12 External Penetration (foreign meddling)

One could get an honest “headache” deconstructing the definitions of each of these FSI indicators and numerous internal contradictions therein. I’ll spare readers, save for the worst.

Continue reading “Failed States Index & “Failing the Faithful””

Human rights, democracy, the US, and Syria

I spent a few days in Damascus at the end of February, and was able to get a ground-reality view of the effects of the Bush administration’s (former) campaign for the forced ‘democratization’ of Middle Eastern societies on the work of Syrian citizens with long experience struggling for human rights and democracy in their country.
Bottom line: “Very bad indeed.”
That was the verdict rendered on the Bushites’ ‘democratization’ campaign by Danial Saoud, the President of the venerable Committee for the Defence of Human Rights and Democratic Freedoms in Syria (CDF).
Saoud was himself a political prisoner from 1987 through 1999, and has been President of the CDF since August 2006. He was adamant that what Syria’s rights activists need most of all right now is a resolution of their country’s state of war with Israel.
Speaking of Condoleezza Rice he said,

    Her pressure on the regime had a very bad effect for us. Now, for 18-24 months the Americans and Europeans have put a lot of pressure on the regime– but the regime then just pushes harder on us.

Mazen Darwish, who is Saoud’s colleague in the CDF’s three-person Presidential Council, told me,

    Before the US invasion of Iraq, people here in Syria liked us, the human rights activists, and we had significant popular sympathy. But since what happened in Iraq, people here say ‘Look at the results of that!’

Saoud stressed that for Syrians, the question of Israel’s continued occupation of Syria’s Golan region itself constitutes a significant denial of the rights of all the Syrian citizens affected– both those who remain in Golan, living under Israeli military occupation rule there, and those who had fled when Israel occupied Golan in 1967 and have had to live displaced from their homes and farms for the 40 years since then. “Golan is Syrian land, and we have all the rights to get it back,” he said.
In addition, he and the other rights activists I talked with pointed to the fact that the continuing state of war between Syria and Israel has allowed the Syrian regime to keep in place the State of Emergency that was first imposed in the country in 1963. “All these regimes in this area say they are postponing the issue of democracy until after they have solved the issues of Golan and Palestine,” he said.

    So let’s get them solved! Everything should start from this. The people in both Syria and Israel need peace. We need to build a culture of peace in the whole area.
    … The CDF is working hard to build this culture.

Both men pointed out the numerous contradictions and ambiguities in the policy the US has pursued regarding democratization in Syria. Darwish noted that, “When the US had a good relationship with Syria, in 1991, Danial was in prison– and the US didn’t say anything about that.” These two men, and other rights activists I talked with also noted that more recently, even during the Bushites’ big push for ‘democratization’ in Syria in 2004-2005, the Bushites were still happy to benefit from Syria’s torture chambers by sending some suspected Al-Qaeda people there to be tortured. (Canadian-Syrian dual citizen Maher Arar was only the most famous of these victims. In September 2005, Amnesty International published this additional list.)
Over the past year, two processes have been underway in Syria that seem to confirm these activists’ argument that US pressure on the Damascus regime has been detrimental to their cause. Firstly, the rapid deterioration in the US’s power in the region has considerably diminished Washington’s ability to pressure the Syria regime on any issues, and Damascus has become notably stronger and self-confident than it was a year ago. For some evidence of this, see my latest interview with Foreign Minister Walid Mouallem, serialized here, here, and here.
Secondly, over the same period, the situation of human rights activists within the country seems to have improved some.
Saoud told me that the number of (secular) political prisoners in the country is now less than 20. Indeed, the day we talked, about 16 Kurdish and student activists who had been held for less than a month had just been released. He said “No-one knows how many Islamist activists are in detention… We don’t hear about them until they come to court.” He said, “They don’t torture people like Anwar al-Bunni or Michel Kilo, or the others who were detained last year for having signed the Beirut-Damascus Declaration.” He indicated, however, that it was very likely that many of the Islamist detainees had been tortured. (Human Rights Watch’s recently released report for 2006 states that in Syria, “Thousands of political prisoners, many of them members of the banned Muslim Brotherhood and the Communist Party, remain in detention.)
… Meanwhile, the main factor dominating political developments in Syria as in the rest of the Middle East, is the continued and extremely painful collapse of conditions inside Iraq. Syrians have watched that collapse in horror. Their country has received and given a temporary refuge to more than a million Iraqis (a considerable burden on their nation, equivalent to the US taking in some 17 million refugees within just a couple of years.) And since Iraq’s collapse has occurred under a Washington-advertised rubric of “democratization”, the whole tragedy in Iraq has tended to give the concept a very bad name, and has caused Arabs and Muslims throughout the Middle East to value political stability much, much more than hitherto.
Under those circumstances, it is very moving to still hear people living in Arab countries talking about the need for democracy. But when they do so, they are very eager to distance themselves from the coerciveness inherent in Washington’s recent ‘democratization’ project. And they all– regime supporters and oppositionists, alike–stress the need for moves toward democratization to grow out the local people’s needs and priorities, rather than the geostrategies pursued by distant Washington.

MESA and blogging in Boston

I’m at the MESA conference here in Boston this weekend. Sunday evening, we went to Juan Cole’s presidential address on “Islamophobia and neo-orientalism”. He talked mostly about the former, and generally informatively so.
Tomorrow (or actually, later today, Monday) he and I– along with As’ad Abu-Khalil, Josh Landis, and Abu Aardvaark are all taking part in a panel discussion on blogging the Middle East. I note I’m the only female on the panel (though the chair and organizer, Leila Hudson, is also female.) Ways back when leila approacjhed me about doing the panel I said we needed to talk about gender issues in the blogosphere, and I suppose I feel some responsibility for raising that question, along with a few others.
Is the blogosphere just one more public arena in which the boys always have their hands up first and dominate the conversation? I don’t think it needs to be like that; and I have certainly wlecomed the opportunity to have my own space here, as well as to hear the un-‘media’-ted voices of other women in the blogosphere like Riverbend, Faiza, Laila el-Haddad, Imshin, Yvette (in her day), etc. But I suppose I should think this issue through a bit more before talking about it tomorrow. I also intend to challenge the guys on the panel as to how they try to address (and redress) gender concerns in their blogging.

The HRW report on Palestinian women, contd.

Amira Hass has a column marked by her usual perspicacity and deeply humanistic vision in HaAretz today, in which she notes that,

    There could not have been a worse time to release the Human Rights Watch report on violence against women within Palestinian families and society: yesterday, November 7, at the same time the Israeli army withdrew from Beit Hanun after a six-day assault that claimed 53 lives. At least 27 of those killed were unarmed civilians, including 10 children and two Red Crescent volunteers. Of the 200 or so people injured in the operation, there were at least 50 children and 46 women…

She adds, “In the competition over the Palestinian slot in the Israeli media, it is obvious that a report critical of Palestinian society and its institutions will trump the option of completing a report on this assault.” The same might certainly be said of much of the US media, too.
By way of quantification, Hass reports– and I would tend to trust her on this, given her good relations with Palestinian women’s groups and human rights organizations– that, “Twelve Palestinian women – eight from Gaza and four from the West Bank – have been murdered since the start of 2006 by relatives on the pretext of ‘family honor.'” Of course, this is tragic and outrageous; and in a sense it is only the tip of a huge iceberg of harm that Palestinian females suffer at the hands of a very patriarchal, traditionalist society.
However, several scores of Palestinian females have been killed by the Israeli occupation forces in this same period. And this, too, is just the tip of a huge icreberg of harm that Palestinian females have suffered at the hands of Israel’s all-encompassing, stifling military occupation rule over Gaza and the West Bank.
In the post I put up here yesterday I noted that the latest HRW report on domestic violence in Palestine had made no mention in its own name either of the very harmful direct effects that the Israeli occupation rule has had on the lives (anbd deaths) of Palestinian women, or of the clear link– evident to anyone who spends any time in the West Bank or Gaza, as I do fairly frequently– between these stifling conditions of life and the likelihood of intra-familial violence among many of those thus stifled. The report did have, as I noted in an addendum, one short, third-person reference to the fact that “Some Palestinian women’s organizations” had established such a causal link– but this was, as I noted, buried deep within one of the report’s many footnotes. It was also extremely non-committal
I wish HRW had articulated much more explicitly and clearly this quite evident political and social context within which the phenomenon of domestic abuse– and, any efforts to end it– must surely be considered.
I agree it is true, as Hass argues today, that many members of what she calls the “traditional-masculine lobby in Palestinian society” will, as always, seek use the fact of Israel’s continuing occupation in order to “deter… the voices demanding social change.” I was not, however, arguing that no-one should even mention the facts of intra-familial violence amongst Palestinians these days, or that no-one should think of doing anything about it. I was trying to argue instead that in order to do anything effective about this issue, people do need to understand the whole range of factors affecting the lives of Palestinian women and their menfolk as they work together (I hope!) to build strong supportive relationships and strong, nurturing families. And in that context, the effects of Israel’s occupation rule on the lives of these men and women– both its direct effects, and the knock-on effects it has on the ability of people to sustain strong, respectful relationships inside the home– simply cannot be ignored.
No Palestinian woman who works in a woman’s group or elsewhere with whom I have ever spoken believes that Israel’s role in this can be ignored. Both factors together– the behavior of many Palestinian men and the behavior of the occupation– have to be considered and challenged, or modified. But for HRW to relegate any reference to that principled position to deep inside footnote #103, and to distance themselves from it by simply saying that this is merely what “some Palestinian women’s groups” believe, seems to me extremely disempowering and dis-voicing of those women’s rights activists. It seems to tell them: “Human Rights Watch in New York knows best; and we are determined for our own reasons not to mention the behavior of the Israeli occupation as a relevant factor in this regard.”
I beg to disagree.

Protecting Palestinian females: HRW misses the mark

I truly do not understand some of the decisions that my colleagues and friends at Human Rights Watch have been making. This week, to much fanfare, they rolled out a very well-funded study about domestic violence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, in which their main order of business is to blame the Palestinian Authority for having, “failed to establish an effective framework to respond to violence against women and girls.”
Look, as a woman, as someone who survived some long-ago domestic violence, as the mother of two daughters, and as quite simply a member of the human race I am deeply concerned about the question of domestic violence. But this study seems wrongly conceived and wrongly focused for a number of reasons:
(1) The study makes no mention whatsoever that I can see of the huge amount of physical and systemic violence inflicted on Palestinian females by the Israeli occupation forces. Why not? It does make a few namby-pamby references along the way to the impediments that the Israeli occupation’s roadblocks, lockdowns etc place in the way of participants in the Palestinian justice system who might want to help remedy the plight of Palestinian females suffering domestic violence. But why no mention at all of Israel’s own use of lethal violence against Palestinian females?
Just in the past few days, the Israelis have killed at least three adult women and one girl in Gaza, maybe more. (See two of those reported here.) Back in July, the Israelis killed 20 women in Gaza in one month alone. And so it goes on and on and on– lives of women snuffed out or blighted forever through wounding or bereavement– at the hands of Israel, the occupier. But no mention at all in this HRW report.
(2) The report states that, “the PA holds ultimate responsibility for protecting victims and holding perpetrators accountable.” In my judgment this is quite incorrect. Israel has never relinquished its responsibilities (or rights) under international law to act as the occupying power in the West Bank and Gaza. It is therefore, pending a final peace settlement that addresses the sovereignty issues in those areas, the power that bears the “ultimate responsibility” for the protection of life and public security in those areas. The PA is just acting, as it were, as an intermittent sub-contractor to the occupying power. Certainly, Israel retains the right to arrogate back to itself at any time that it chooses, any of the powers that the PA may exercise– and it has done so very frequently and very freely, in both territories. (For example, when it sent tanks back into Ramallah in 2002 or since, or into Gaza last month, this did not constitute an “international incident” or an “act of war” against a neighboring state. It was simply Israel exercising the rights as occupier in those areas that it has never relinquished… Which is not to say, of course, that the way in which it has exercised those rights has always been legal. It has not. But it does show that Israel claims the right to re-enter at any point, at any time– and that the Security Council and the rest of the international “community” agrees with this assessment.)
So for HRW to haul the PA onto the mat of blame now as bearing the “ultimate responsibility” for harms that befall Palestinian females, while criticising Israel only very tangentially for hampering the PA from doing its job is, I believe, seriously to miss the mark.
It is, I repeat, Israel, as occupying power, that has established all the conditions of life (and death) for the Palestinians of the occupied territories and that must be held primarily reponsible for them.
One of the main conditions of life that Israel has established has been its own frequent use of lethal force against all Palestinians, including women, as noted above. Another has been its imposition of tight constraints on the ability of Palestinians in both territories to carry out anything like a normal human existence– through the imposition of stifling movement control regimes, economic boycott, etc etc.
Is it any wonder that under those demeaning and sometimes life-threatening conditions of life, many Palestinian families have found themselves stressed out to the point where stronger family members increase their use of “domestic” violence against weaker family members? This is a classic example of what Israeli saint Amira Hass calls “The Experiment.”
It would be good if every single person at Human Rights Watch responsible for producing this latest little report could go back and re-read the whole of Hass’s great mid-October article on that topic. Here’s some of what she wrote:

    The experiment was a success: The Palestinians are killing each other. They are behaving as expected at the end of the extended experiment called “what happens when you imprison 1.3 million human beings [in Gaza, alone] in an enclosed space like battery hens.”
    These are the steps in the experiment: Imprison (since 1991); remove the prisoners’ usual means of livelihood; seal off all outlets to the outside world, nearly hermetically; destroy existing means of livelihood by preventing the entry of raw materials and the marketing of goods and produce; prevent the regular entry of medicines and hospital supplies; do not bring in fresh food for weeks on end; prevent, for years, the entry of relatives, professionals, friends and others, and allow thousands of people – the sick, heads of families, professionals, children – to be stuck for weeks at the locked gates of the Gaza Strip’s only entry/exit…
    It is the good old Israeli experiment called “put them into a pressure cooker and see what happens,” and this is one of the reasons why this [Palestinian factional violence] is not an internal Palestinian matter.

Hass’s article, by the way, refers more generally to the incidence of political violence among members of the different armed factions in the OPTs. But it is also completely applicable to the issue of intra-family violence there.
But from HRW, all we get is just a few very veiled references to the “difficult conditions of life” being experienced by the Palestinians… Certainly, no recognition whatsoever that it is the Israeli occupation administration that must– under international law– be held fully responsible for those conditions of life.
(3) The level of “research” carried out by HRW for this study is laughably inadequate, and certainly nowhere near sufficient to have propelled the study into so many of the august tribunes of the western MSM. The study makes no attempt whatsoever to quantify the incidence of domestic violence in the OPTs or even to provide any form of rough comparison between the level there and the level in other countries. All we are told is that, “A significant number of women and girls in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) are victims of violence perpetrated by family members and intimate partners”, and

    Various studies and statistics gathered by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) and Palestinian women’s groups record high levels of violence perpetrated by family members and intimate partners, aggravated during times of political violence. Information obtained from social workers, academics, and police officials on the prevalence of domestic violence, incest, and actual or threatened “honor” crimes, also indicate that reported rates do not reflect the full extent of such violence…

Then from there the report leaps almost immediately to concluding that “it is already well established that violence against women and girls inside the family is a serious problem in the OPT.” And that’s the best that the attempt at quantification can produce.
My own estimation? I believe it is entirely possible that the incidence of domestic violence in Palestine may be lower than that in the US, where the physical and social isolation of many small family units leaves the women in those families particularly vulnerable… But I recognize that we simply do not know enough about the level, in either place.
Yes, I know there are always under-reporting problems in this domain. But what, actually, do the reports that do exist from Palestine exist tell us about the situation there? And can they demonstrate this stated link between domestic violence and the incidence of political violence? That, at least, would be interesting and significant to know. But the HRW report presents no serious attempts at any form of quantification or even of estimation. We are all just invited to take on trust the general trope that “there’s a lot of it about, out there in Palestine.” I note that just exactly this same same kind of lazy trope– claiming concern for women’s rights and women’s interests– was used to justify all kinds of colonial depradations of various parts of the world by the colonial powers of centuries past. A case of plus ça change plus c’est la même chose here perhaps?

    Addendum, Wed. morning: I just re-read the report and found some attempt at quantification in a section titled, somewhat misleadingly, “Social and Legal Obstacles to Reporting Violence and Seeking Redress.”. This section cites a number of studies, including “a Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) survey of 4,212 households in the OPT conducted in December 2005 and January 2006” that found that, “Twenty-three percent of the women surveyed had experienced physical violence, 61.7 percent psychological violence, and 10.5 percent sexual violence at the hands of their husbands”; and “A survey on violence against women in Gaza conducted by the Women’s Affairs Center in 2001 [that] revealed that 46.7 percent of the 670 women interviewed reported that their husbands used ‘force and brutality’ during sexual intercourse; 17.4 percent reported that their husbands beat them to have sex; and 35.9 percent said that their husbands threatened and intimidated them into submission.”
    That section also has, buried deep within footnote #103, this fairly noncommital little piece of writing: “Commentators have linked a variety of factors to these increases in violence. Some Palestinian women’s groups point to recent increases in poverty and unemployment that have stripped men of their traditional breadwinning role; the humiliation and frustration that Palestinian men experience at the hands of the Israeli army at checkpoints and during arrest and detention; and the fact that this frustration and anger is often taken out on family members, especially as unemployed men spend more time at home and families have been stranded together in the home for days and weeks during Israeli imposed curfews.”
    Yes, HRW, you tell us in this footnote that “Some Palestinian women’s groups” make these arguments. But what is your judgment on this score? We are not told.

The report’s summary tells us, regarding methodology, that

    This report is based on more than one hundred interviews conducted in Jerusalem, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Nablus, Hebron, Tulkarem, Jericho, and Gaza in November and December 2005; follow up communications with many of the same individuals by telephone and email as well as a handful of new interviews in June and July 2006; and examination of relevant laws, academic literature, policy analyses, surveys, and other published materials…

Of the one hundred interviews, as far as I can tell, roughly half were with social workers, government officials, and other professionals, and roughly half with women who were themselves actual survivors of domestic violence.
This scale of interviewing, and the preparation and publication of a lengthy, 101-page report like this, use up considerable resources. (And this, from an organization that is always begging me and others to give it more money.) I think that from their elegant perch in the Empire State Building, the HRW leaders could have chosen some campaigns that would have been far, far more effective in bringing increased protection to the lives and wellbeing of Palestinian females. They could have started by insisting that Israel

    * end its promiscuous recourse to the use of lethal force,
    * lift the illegal blocade it maintains on Gaza and on the institutions of the PA in general, and
    * dismantle both the system of checkpoints and barricades it has erected deep inside the Palestinian West Bank and the network of (completely illegal, and very damaging) Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

Then they could continue by urging our own legislative and executive powers here in the US to cut off all the financial and political support that has allowed Israel to persist in these anti-humane (including anti-female) policies for many years.
Moves like those would make a huge improvement in the conditions of life for Palestinian women and their family members… And until Israel enacts such changes, we can expect only that Palestinian women and their menfolk will remain, sadly, trapped in the belly of “the Experiment.”
But HRW did not mention wide-reaching, humane, and effective steps like those. No, instead they just chose to beat up on the quite powerless and always vulnerable “Palestinian Authority.” No marks for bravery, friends.

    Addendum #2, Wed. morning: I also re-read the long list of “Recommendations” in the report. By far the vast majority of these are aimed at the PA and its institutions. Many of them look very sane, sensible, and humane. But then you start to think, gosh, if the PA is going to do all these things, it has to have some resources with which to do them? … So I rushed down to the small list of recommendations at the bottom of the page there, that are addressed to “the internatinal donor community”, expecting to see “Restore the P.A.’s funding” as number 1 there– so the PA could have even a chance of doing some of the things HRW was asking it to do…
    What do you think I found? No mention of that at all.