Category: Linkees

She’s back!
Riverbend, that is.
Read her latest post about the “insurmountable combination of heat and family issues ” that’s kept her from blogging recently. Including, the death of “an older aunt”:

She had a stroke shortly after the war and has been deteriorating ever since. [snip] The first problems we faced occurred in the graveyard. Upon visiting the graveyard, my uncles discovered that the family plot which had been purchased years ago had very recently been occupied by some strangers who could find very little room elsewhere in the overcrowded cemetery. The grounds keeper apologized profusely but said that they were bringing in an average of almost 100 bodies a month this year to his graveyard alone- where was he supposed to bury the bodies?
After some negotiations, the uncles were directed to some empty spaces on the outer borders of the cemetery and the aunt was resignedly buried there. Immediately after began the 7-day mourning ritual in the deceased aunt’s house. For seven days- from morning until evening- friends, family and neighbors all come to give the family their condolences and mourn the dead. This is called a ‘fatiha’ or a wake. Another wake is simultaneously held at a local mosque and this one is attended by the men- it lasts for only three days. Scheduling the mosque wake was also an issue because so many of the mosques are booked for wakes lately.
Lately, the condolences from neighbors and friends come in the form of, “She was much too young for such a death, but you should thank God- it’s a better death than most these days… ” And while death in general is still regarded as unfortunate, it is preferable to die of a stroke or natural causes than to die, say, of a car bomb, gun shot, beheading or under torture…

You get the drift. Not a happy one. But we, at least, are blessed by having Riverbend there to write about it for us.
Thanks, River. And welcome back!

Riverbend has a great new post up on her blog. She says she hasn’t felt much like blogging recently. The new post is a great little reflection on cleaning the family’s roof ready for summer-time sleepouts there.
She notes that sleeping out on the roof used to be just a tradition that her parents told her about… from the “olden days”:

They used to tell us endless stories about how, as children, they used to put out mats and low beds on the roof to sleep. There were no air-conditioners back then… sometimes not even ceiling fans. People had to be content with the hot Baghdad air and the energetic Baghdad mosquitos. Now my parents get to relive their childhood memories like never before because we’ve gone back a good fifty years. It’s impossible to sleep inside of the house while the electricity is off.

She promised that “tomorrow” (i.e., today?) she’d write more about the new government.
Great, River! Thanks so much for coming back up. I am really eager to hear what-all you think of what’s been going on.

There is so much bad news from the US Congress– the long history of rolling over to the administration on the whole war-mobilization effort; trade barriers that hurt low-income nations; blanket support for the Israeli government; etc etc– that it’s great to be able to highlight a few really good things that seem to be happening there.
One is the new climate in which the Democrats and even some leading Republicans in the Senate are seeking to hold the administration accountable for the Abu Ghraib tortures and many other misdeeds in Iraq. Even our own senior Senator from here in Virginia, the generally hawkish and very powerful John Warner, seems to be acting sensibly on some of these issues.
Thanks, Senator! Keep it up!
But there’s more good news from Capitol Hill, too…

Continue reading “U.S. Congress getting ‘SMART’?”

Riverbend (from Baghdad) hasn’t been posting a lot recently on her blog. But when she writes, it is always so well and so movingly done that it’s worth waiting for.
Here’s what she was writing yesterday evening about the first anniversary of the “liberation”:

where are we now? Well, our governmental facilities have been burned to the ground by a combination of ‘liberators’ and ‘Free Iraqi Fighters’; 50% of the working population is jobless and hungry; summer is looming close and our electrical situation is a joke; the streets are dirty and overflowing with sewage; our jails are fuller than ever with thousands of innocent people; we’ve seen more explosions, tanks, fighter planes and troops in the last year than almost a decade of war with Iran brought; our homes are being raided and our cars are stopped in the streets for inspections– journalists are being killed ‘accidentally’ and the seeds of a civil war are being sown by those who find it most useful; the hospitals overflow with patients but are short on just about everything else- medical supplies, medicine and doctors; and all the while, the oil is flowing.
But we’ve learned a lot. We’ve learned that terrorism isn’t actually the act of creating terror. It isn’t the act of killing innocent people and frightening others– no, you see, that’s called a ‘liberation’. It doesn’t matter what you burn or who you kill- if you wear khaki, ride a tank or Apache or fighter plane and drop missiles and bombs, then you’re not a terrorist- you’re a liberator.
The war on terror is a joke– Madrid was proof of that last week– Iraq is proof of that everyday.
I hope someone feels safer, because we certainly don’t.

And while we’re on the subject of looting, I want to add in a note about my own frustration with all these reports of “so many hundreds, or thousands, of schools having been rebuilt by the US and coalition forces”.
Before the US assault on the country, just about all those schools were functioning. (Iraq is not Afghanistan, after all. Males and females have both been well educated for a couple of generations there.) A small number of the schools got damaged during the fighting of March-April last year– but the much larger number were ransacked and damaged during the looting that followed the US “victory”. Preventing any such looting was wholly the responsibility of the occupying forces: one they notably failed to exercise.
So for the US spokespeople to crow about how many schools etc they have renovated, and to make it seem like some kind of an achievement, is getting things backways on. That damage should never have been allowed in the first place. Rumsfeld should have planned properly for the post-combat phase. But he failed to. It is quite dishonest of him and his minions to claim any “credit” for having renovated a proportion of those ransacked classrooms in the months since then.
It’s like trying to claim “credit” for having (partially) stopped beating one’s wife…

Iraq’s Queen of all Bloggers Riverbend has two great new posts on her blog today. Go there immediately!

I’ve been having Iran on my mind. Thinking of “survivors” of the terrible earth-quake in Bam who have lost so much– sometimes ALL the other members of their families as well as their homes, their community… Let’s hope not their faith in whatever it is that at times like this can make a person’s life worth hanging onto.
(I have always been very moved by the parts in Victor Frankl’s book Mankind’s Search for Meaning where he writes about his time in the Nazi death camps; and how it was the people there who, despite everything, were able to keep or create some structure of meaning in their lives who were the ones with the most resilience to survive… It’s a great book.)
Anyway: Iran. I’ve just learned about, and visited, a great new blog being written in English, Arabic, and Farsi by Iranian Vice-President Mohammad Ali Abtahi.
The blog’s called “Webnevesht”. It has a really engaging tone. (MAA used to be a journalist: maybe that has something to do with it?)
In the blog, he writes mainly about politics, culture, and religion. The best page to start at is this one, which is like a “Main Index” page for the blog. (Would he do better to get hold of a Movable Type system, I wonder?)
The two posts he has about Bam are really moving. In this one, he writes a poem. It could use a bit of polishing on the translation– but even the way it is it’s achingly bittersweet and poignant.
This post is also really poignant. (I’m a sucker for the narratives of war veterans.)

Continue reading “Iranian VP’s interesting new blog”

Imshin, the Israeli author of “Not a Fish”, has been in reflective mode on the one-year anniversary of the death of her mother.
My condolences, Imshin. Losing a mother is hard.
But on Wednesday, in that same post, you also wrote more broadly about what you described simply as “The Situation”, in the following terms

I want it to finish already. I want the Palestinians to have a state, and for them to be able to live in freedom and in affluence; I want the settlements dismantled; I want the Palestinians and all Arabs (and the rest of the world, for that matter) to accept our presence here; I want the terrorists in prison or dead or reformed; I want to know my children and grandchildren have a future; I want to know I will be able to grow old in peace in my home that I love.
I want us all to live happily ever after…

But Imshin, you as an Israeli citizen and voter have a huge amount of power to help make some of these things happen. You can get active in the peace movement, active in the anti-settlements movement. You can reach out a hand of friendship to Palestinians in their time of despair and terrible repression.
Just as we in the US whose government has been running a policy of military aggression, occupation, domination, and control, have to do what we can to change that.
So I’d love to hear about it when you actually do some of these things, Imshin, rather than sitting around saying you’re “tired of thinking about The Situation”…

She’s back! If you’ve missed Marine’s Girl and her wonderful, fresh writing; and if you followed her harrowing story of how some random and mean-spirited old cyber-harrasser guy intimidated her into slamming the door shut on most of her great earlier content– then you should hurry on over to Across the River, the new group blog that she’s started up with a couple of friends.
MG’s old blog now looks definitively down. (It may take me a day or two to change the link to it that I still have on my Main Page sidebar. Be patient: I’ll do it.) But she has been reposting some of her oldies but goodies onto the new blog: like here, and here. Plus she’s doing some good fresh posts. Plus, there’s at least one other new voice there. Plus, she has Comments!!
Yay for MG!

Much attention has been focused on the decisions that international humanitarian-aid workers in Iraq have been facing in recent weeks. But friends, we also need to give thoughts and prayers to their colleagues elsewhere. And particularly right now, to the aid workers and skill-sharers in Somaliland.
(Don’t know where or what Somaliland is? Go to the site I link to on the right sidebar here called “A Taste of Africa”, where you can learn lots about it.)
Back on October 5, Italian aid worker Annalena Tonelli, who had been in Somaliland for many decades, was shot dead there by unknown assailants. Yvette Lopez, the author of Taste of Africa, has written a lot of posts about Annalena’s life and death. Check out this one, or go to the special section on Annalena down on her left sidebar.
Then, about ten days ago, a British couple called the Eyeingtons who were house-parents at the SOS Children’s Village there were also gunned down.
You can imagine how terrifying this is for the other brave souls–pitifully few in number–who have gone from distant countries to share skills and do aid work in Somaliland.
Yvette herself is one of them. She’s a Filipina social activist/organizer and has been doing some really amazing work in Somaliland under the auspices of an international, Catholic-run (I believe) skill-sharing organization.
You can see the courageous way Yvette has been trying to deal with the latest set of security challenges, while also continuing to make good on her deep commitment to the projects she’s been working with in Somaliland, if you read her posts from most of October.
I’m headed over to Taste of Africa right now, and I’m going to post some good wishes there for Yvette so she knows I care about her. Why don’t you join me and do the same?

Yesterday evening I discovered a great new blog called Today in Iraq. It’s written by a guy calling himself “yankeedoodle” who used to be a warrant officer in either the Marines or the Army (I forget which).
He just trawls the news sources for fabulous nuggets of news, info, and commentary on Iraq and presents them in a really clear way along with just the right amount of his own piquantly anti-Bushite commentary.
I just put a link to it onto the bar at the right.
Elsewhere in the blogosphere there’s been a big campaign to stop some cranky elderly Bushophile called Troy who’s been pretending to be Riverbend. He put an ‘S’ into the middle of her URL , made a template that looked just like hers, and then created this entire fake blog about how wonderful it is to be an Iraqi after the arrival of the US forces etc etc.
I did see his fake blog before Blogspot took it down (presumably, for violating their Terms of Service). He’s been trying to get another one up, at www.riverbendsblog.blogspot.com, but evidently it’s taking him some time to get it looking anywhere near authentic.
River herself has some nice commentary on it. But if you really want to max out out on the details of the counter-troy campaign, there’s a whole other blog devoted solely to that.