Category: Linkees

My life has been fairly crazy. I flew up to Boston for the weekend so I could both meet Iraqi blog queen Faiza (who’s been at this training course in southern Vermont) and visit my son, who’s in Boston for the summer. I decided to take my youngest, Lorna, who’s 20. Old enough to help me drive up to Dulles airport from Charlottesville, not old enough to drive a rental car in New England. Oh well.
Our United flight from Dulles to Boston got brought down in Philly for a couple of hours due to “mechanical problems”. Oh well.
After we arrived I dropped the daughter with the son, then ways behind schedule made the drive over to Brattleboro. I found New England bathing in an unaccustomedly steamy sauna of heat.
Anyway, meeting Faiza was a breath of fresh air. She drove back to Boston/Cambridge with me and we talked all the way. We have a lot in common, stretching back a long time. Politically, and family-wise. We each have three young-adult kids. She’s just about the most animated veiled woman I’ve ever encountered.
(A lot of westerners– many of whom, I suspect, have never met a veiled woman– think that wearing a veil somehow “makes” a woman into a timid, submissive doormat. Far from it! For many Muslim Arab women whom I know, wearing a veil enables them to go out and participate in the public sphere. And many of them do so in a very self-confident, outspoken manner. Faiza is one of those.)
“Knowing” someone through her or his blog is a funny thing. Certainly, Faiza’s writing on her blog is very intimate, and gives you the feeling you really know her fairly well. And then you meet her… Wow!
I was interested mainly to learn more about her view of the situation in her country, and of what it is possible to do there, politically, in today’s horrible circumstances.
I was so happy to find that she hadn’t lost hope– at all. Though she didn’t underestimate at all, either, the ghastliness of the circumstances in most of Iraq.
Faiza talked a bit about her involvement with Adnan Pachachi’s list of candidates in the run-up to the January 30th election. Apparently, they asked her to run, and she was ready to do so. But then Pachachi dropped out at the last minute– after the US authorities started pressuring the heads of all the lists to commit to NOT pressing for any deadline for a US force withdrawal. Refusing to bow to that pressure was, she thought, quite the right thing to do.
She expressed at some point her disappointment (or worse) with the people in the Iraqi “government” that did emerge from the elections. She stressed that most of them were recently returned exiles, who’d come back to Iraq with the occupation, and who didn’t seem to know much or care much about the networks of people that had long existed inside the country. We talked a bit about Ibrahim Jaafari, comparing him with the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. Her view, in general, was that while both of them seemed at one level to be decent, worthy people, still “they were participating in politics in the wrong way, at the wrong time.” (This is, certainly, very much my own view re Mahmoud Abbas. I was interested to hear that she made this exact same analysis of Jaafari.)
Faiza seemed very confident that her disappointment (and worse) in the current Iraqi “government” has become very widely shared throughout Iraq. “My dear! Thibngs were horrible in Iraq in the months after the election. Just horrible! And all the politicans could do in those months was sit around and argue over who gets which ministry. No-one was thinking of helping the people, at all!”

Continue reading “With Faiza in Boston”

Imshin, the Israeli author of Not a Fish made a big deal two weeks or so on the blog about how she “had a secret that would be revealed soon.” For some reason, many people thought it was a pregnancy.
It wasn’t. It was a new design for her blog. (Also, a new URL.) I like it, Imshin, a lot… Very tasteful and calming, unlike the demented puppy and spots on the last design… I’ll try to get it updated in my sidebar here whenever I can.
Well, now Susan of Dancewater and another wellknown blogger and a few other people and I all have a secret…
And no, so far as I know none of us is pregnant. So y’all can just keep guessing.

With everything that’s going on in the world these days, I miss the always compassionate, always passionately anti-war voice of Marine’s Girl.
Her great blog “Acoss the River” got hacked by hostile elements back in early March. Not the first time it had happend. This time, though, she was in the midst of bad, bad treatments for her cancer, her guy had just managed to spring some kind of exit from Iraq to come look after her in Michigan, and she didn’t seem to have the energy or desire to do all the work of fighting back to regain control of her blogspace.
I was thinking about writing something about you, MG, just this past week. I miss you! And I hope-hope-hope the treatments have been going well.
Send us a shout, if you can, and tell us how things are! (And hey, if you have the energy to send a blog post or two into a securely non-hackable–as far as I know– blogspace, just send something in to JWN!)
Also, an admirer of yours called Danya was looking for you, and sent me the following message to post someplace you could see it:

I’m glad to hear you are OK MG, but your blog is missed. I find myself wondering about your health and your homelife now that your marine is home. I know that is what you need to be concentrating on right now but it’s sad to lose such a strong, smart voice for the side of reason.
Signed, Danya

You have lots of admirers out there, MG! Big hugs from all of us to you!

I see that today Juan Cole did refer to my work warning about the dangers of delay in forming the Transitional Government in Iraq.
Nice that someone gives public attribution and acknowledgement to my work here, eh? But then, I’ve always thought Juan was a very decent person, even when I have disagreed with him.
(Incidentally, we worked together back in the mid-1980s when he was co-editor of a book on Shiites and Social Protest to which I was contributor.)
Juan’s blog post there was reporting that some sources– apparently Kurdish– are saying that Iraq may get its Transitional Government formed by Sunday…
Let’s wait and see… Both whether they can do that, and also what powers the occupying army will allow the “government” to have…
Anyway, it’s still ways early to take down our “Democracy Denied in Iraq” counters…

I was pretty upset a couple of weeks ago when I tried to go to Marine’s Girl’s lovely blog and found it had been hijacked…
Maybe by the same nasty anti-peacenik gremlins who hijacked Riverbend’s blog ways back when? Those blogjackers also put some anodyne, fake “Buddhist”-style pablum onto what had previously been a great, vividly antiwar site.
I emailed MG asking her if she knew what had happened. She replied, “I don’t know what happened. It’s not mine anymore, that’s obvious. Perhaps this is for the best as [her guy] is home now and I wasn’t updating very often anyway.”
Oh, MG, I miss your voice!
But I understand you have a lot to do in your real life these days… Like getting better, looking after Danny, looking after your guy… I hope you two will get married and make a wonderful life together.
I hope to heck they don’t send him to Iraq or any other war zone again.
I also hope you kept good backup archives of all the great posts you put onto “Across the river” throughout those 18 months or so that you ran it? Those are really important and poignant documents. Maybe once you have more energy you could import them back into another blog, on a safer server, and resume blogging? (It strikes me that Blogspot seems terribly vulnerable to the blogjackers, btw.)
Anyway, dear Michigander friend– I hope your health improves as much and as fast as possible. Comfort, strength, and joy to you and your family!

My friend Judy alerted me yesterday to the fact that Marine’s Girl’s blog seemed to be down. Today, there is something there at her customary URL, acrossriver.blogspot.com, but it ain’t her. It certainly looks as though someone has hijacked her URL.
MG had a huge problem back in November 2003, reported here, when some officious Marines gunnery sergeant threatened her and her guy with all kinds of problems if she continued publishing. On that occasion, she got some good support from wellplaced people in the Marines’ officer’s corps that persuaded her it was safe for to resume blogging just along the same lines she had been…
Some of the most poignant, intimate, and revealing posts on her blog have been the records of IM sessions she’s had over the months with her guy, in Iraq. He’s back looking after her in Michigan now. (She has a bad cancer-plus-chemo problem.)
I found a recent version of her blog’s front page by hitting “Cache” on the Google listing for it. But on that cached version, none of her archives were accessible. Seems like someone has really done a job on her URL.
I’m assuming that this time she’s been keeping copies of her own archives (please, MG!), so I hope she and VK (her guy– Valiant Knight) can get it back up in some form, soon. Except that, of course, there’s lots else going on in their lives right now.
How mean does a person have to be to launch an attack like this on a brave, truthful woman with a severe cancer problem and her guy who’s spent maybe 18 months in Iraq already but who has come back to tend to her?
Please, JWN people, let us all know if you get hold of any news about her and/or her blog. (I emailed her an enquiry, but who knows when she’ll be able to reply?)
And send her all the spiritual support you can. She, her guy, and her 10-year-old son Danny need our prayers.

Marine’s Girl has a new post up. Read it. In case you haven’t been reading her before now, just know that she’s one heck of a feisty woman who lives with her son, Danny, in Michigan, while her fabulous boyfriend, who’s a Marine, is in Iraq. She’s having a tough battle with cancer, and indeed hasn’t posted much in recent weeks because of the effects of the disease and her medications. She’s been trying to get a discharge for her guy, so he can come back and help look after her.
So the latest post is the text of a long “ICQ” exchange they had….

Faiza, of “A Family in Baghdad” is participating in an interesting exchange
on the “Open democracy” site.

In addition, her blog now carries the English-language version of a long
post
she wrote in Arabic on october 3. Here are some interesting excerpts:

Continue reading “Faiza on US-style democracy”

I am not resistant to HIV infection, are you?
That is the haunting question with which Yvette Lopez of A Taste of Africa ends this amazing post, that tells how –since one of the many incredible campaigns she’s been working on in Somaliland is a campaign to promote HIV/AIDS testing– she thought she ought to go and get tested herself.
Even Yvette, who is, I assume, a very clean-living person, was fearful about the encounter; and she writes very clearly and intimately about some of those fears. I’m sure that people have lots of different kinds of fears around the idea of getting tested for HIV. But I think it’s really important that these fears shouldn’t stand in the way of people getting tested. So it’s good that she wrote about her fears, so that other people can see that they’re not alone in entertaining them.
The program she went to, btw, seems to have been extremely well conducted. It was called “Voluntary Counseling and Testing”. So I guess there was due stress on the counseling part of it, and that seems to have been extremely well done by the Somaliland doctor she went to, Dr. Abdirashid.
Here’s how she ended her post:

Continue reading “Fear and HIV/AIDS”

Continuing on the theme of the role of women in reform efforts in Muslim countries, Yvette Lopez, the talented, inspirational author of the Taste of Africa blog, has a great post there today on the subject.
Somaliland, in case you didn’t know much about it, is an almost self-governing portion of war-plagued Somalia. (You can read much more about it on Yvette’s blog.) But what she writes in today’s post–as in many previous posts– gives a lot of good info about the vital role of women in rebuilding shattered communities after wars–whether in Muslim countries or elsewhere.
In today’s post, she writes of:

Daraweyne village where an impending inter-clan conflict was halted by women, they stood in the middle of two warring clans as if saying “kill us first before you kill each other!” This act prevented the clash of male villagers and paved the way for a dialogue facilitated by women.
After the war, women took odd jobs to provide for their families while the men were left unemployed. The male unemployed force come from demobilized liberation fighters and nomads affected by the livestock ban, an industry dominated by men.
“Our men are proud, they don’t want to be seen doing work they consider demeaning” [Zamzam Abdi, the manager of the most successful micro-finance institution that provides loan for women traders] added. More and more women set up small businesses, they sew clothes, manage teashops, clean houses, cook for other people among others. Today, women head more and more households, the sad impact of khat chewing sends their husbands away from their families leaving women to carry the burden of productive and reproductive roles.
The total absence of women in the traditional clan structure is slowly being changed in the arena of the newly formed Somaliland government and civil society movement. “We have gone a long way, now we have 2 women cabinet Ministers, 3 out of 332 local officials are women, stable and strong organizations are well managed and sustained by women, we are now part of the National Electoral Commission (NEC) of political parties and civil society groups that publicly voice out women’s interest,” Sacadia of Pastoral Environmental Network of the Horn of Africa (PENHA) said.

Check the rest of the post out, too!