Category: Writing and publishing

You could test it out by reading this column of mine, that appeared in al-Hayat today.

I just put up two more months’ worth of Golden Oldies onto the sidebar here.
Last November was quite a momentous month for Iraq!
October was a momentous month for our family. My elder daughter got married (and I was pretty busy helping out.)
BUT…. today, further bad news from Najaf. Reuters’ Michael Georgy at 21:38 EST has this:

U.S. aircraft launched a fresh assault on Shi’ite rebels in the embattled Iraqi city of Najaf early on Sunday after talks on transferring control of the mosque at the centre of a two-week siege ran into trouble.
A U.S. military AC-130 gunship unleashed rapid cannon and howitzer fire on positions held by rebels loyal to radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, a Reuters witness said.
The attack lit the area with white flashes and was followed by a blast. Smoke drifted over the old city near rebel positions, and flashes were seen on the outskirts of the city. Tracer fire and orange flashes went skyward in reply.

Well, I was planning to go to Quaker meeting tomorrow anyway. I always go if I can. It restores a little space of calm, sanity, peacefulness, and loving-kindness in a world which, God knows, needs every ounce it can get of those qualities.
Now, even more reason to go.

I’m wiped. I finished writing the section of my book on Rwanda today. And I don’t even have energy for blogging. What’s happening here??
Don’t worry. I’ll be back tomorrow with another rush of trenchant comments on the ways and woes of the world.
Tonight, I’ll curl up with a Carol Shields book I got from the library. Tomorrow, I’ll run, maybe dig a bit of garden… Then I’ll be back!

Finally! After long labors, the book-length report that 14 of us–nearly all Quakers–have written on the Israel/Palestine situation is out. (Quaker process takes a famously long time, but we did it.)
It is called, When the Rain returns: Toward Justice and Reconciliation in Palestine and Israel, and it is being published by the American Friends Service Committee, Philadelphia. AFSC still doesn’t have a downloadable order form on their website. Tsk, tsk. Pending the moment that they get one up, I did some scanning of the hard-copy brochure they sent me. So now you can download and print the following items:

Continue reading “Our Quaker book on Israel/Palestine–finally!”

She writes civilized yet passionate journal entries, focused on international affairs. The look of the page is cool–as are the colors. Her background and experience make her deeply credible…
This, from a new survey today on the website of Charlottesville community-builder and community activist George Loper. Just scroll down a bit from that anchor to read those really nice words that George’s writer Dave Sagarin penned about me, as well as a few musings I’d sent to him on why I write JWN.
Dave’s whole lengthy page (posting?) there, which is titled “Is the Blogosphere the New Agora?” contains some interesting general information about, and reflections on, the world of the weblog.

I’ve been in New York since I flew in here from Toronto on Sunday evening. Monday, I suddenly remembered I needed to write not one but two columns for The Christian Science Monitor, about China. I got them both with my editors in Boston by 11 a.m. Tuesday. The first, China hums with change, is in Thursday’s paper. The second will be in the June 17 edition.
It was really exciting reconnecting with some of the experiences I had in China last month, as I wrote about them.
On the other hand, trying to focus on that aspect of my work, after just coming away from the conference in Canada on the Rwandan genocide and other atrocities, and while continuing to be consumed with Iraq, the US torture issue, Palestine, etc etc., all left me feeling a little drained.
I’ve had some good meetings here this week.

Continue reading “New York, CSM column on China, etc”

I’ve been trying to discuss reproduction rights issues with my editors at Al-Hayat for some time now. (No, that does not mean abortion issues. It means reproduction of the columns I send them.)
Hayat btw is probably the world’s leading Arabic-language daily. It’s published out of London and distributes worldwide. I’ve been contributing regular columns to them since 1993. “Dar” is Arabic for “house”, as in publishing house.
The rights discussions with the editors haven’t really gotten anywhere. But since they have a bunch of my columns up on their English-language website I figured why not link to some of them there?
I have to say their English-language site is (ahem) “not optimally organized”. But by finding the section of their Search capability that actually seemed to work, and by careful selection of the Search terms, I came out with the following list:

America and the Iraqi Intifada
2004/05/05
Helena Cobban – Late March of 2004 will go down in history as the time the Americans made three key mistakes that sparked the Iraqi Intifada. They decided to escalate their challenge to Moqtada Al…
Dark Horizons
2004/03/17
Helena Cobban – How tough is the situation in the occupied Palestinian territories? I was there for a rapid but intense visit in mid-February, and the situation seems to me to be marked by the fol…
China, The United Nations And Palestine
2004/01/05
Helena Cobban – China is the home of one in every five of the people alive in the world today. What role will this massive, rapidly industrializing country play in the conduct of world affairs in …

Continue reading “From Dar al-Hayat’s English-language website”

The column I had in yesterday’s Christian Science Monitor was on Iraq. It’s titled “A pattern of culpability in Iraq”.
Regular readers of JWN may find quite a few familiar themes in there… Actually, one of the many things I use the blog for is as a way of working out ideas.
At my editors’ urgings, I pulled a few punches in the text. “Many human rights experts consider…” etc etc. As always, we were working right up against deadline. Not sure how I feel about all that caveating. (Or, more to the point, not sure how I feel about being urged to engage in it.)

Continue reading “CSM column on Iraq”

Finally! The Boston Review article I wrote about Gaza has been put up on their website. You can read it here.
I wrote it in late February and revised it in late March. Tell me what you think. (Some of it may not be totally “new” to attentive JWN readers… )
I’m in Ohio. Yesterday I spoke at Miami University here about Rwanda and S. Africa. Tuesday, we’re going to China for a couple weeks. Life is pretty crazy. I wish I could follow the news from Iraq more attentively– or even better, be there!– but still, I’ll be writing what I can about that and everything else during the upcoming travels.
I just saw that Israelis tried to kill Rantissi. What follies, follies, follies!! How can anyone imagine that actions like that, or the gross collective punishment imposed on Fallujah, or the gratuitous provocations against Moqtada Sadr will bring peace??

I’ve been struggling quite a bit with (re-)shaping and (re-)writing the section on Mozambique for my current book-writing project, “Violence and its legacies”. Actually, the conference I went to on Sunday/Monday on transitional justice etc has really helped me to solve a problem in the writing.
At one point during the conference, I remarked out loud on the fact that there we all were, some 45 people, nearly all from “western” or “northern” cultural backgrounds, all earnestly discussing a bunch of problems/issues that disproportinately affect people who come from very backgrounds very different from ours.
“We need to get more people from Africa, from the ‘south’ generally into the room and the discussion here!” I said.
A little later, Maurice Eisenbruch, who’s a professor of Multicultural Health and indeed the Director of the Centre for Culture and Health at the University of New South Wales, in Australia, took my suggestion a little further… He conjectured what a Cambodian or East Timorean traditional healer might conclude if he had been a fly on the wall during our meeting thus far…
(I hadn’t met Maurice before. He was one of a number of really interesting people I met there.)
So okay, the problem I’d been confronting in my writing was mainly this: How to “shape” all the many really significant and interesting things I heard people say in Mozambique last year as I gently elicited their views on the efficacy of the peace process their country went through in 1992-94, as well os whether they might have liked to see war-crimes courts or truth commissions brought to bear on the situation then. (The answer to both those latter questions was almost always a resounding “No!”)
So I had to figue out how to shape (i.e. edit) all the interesting things I’d heard from them, for two main reasons. (1) To get the material to fit into the end of an already overcrowded chapter. And (2), so that my own analytical frame would control the narrative.
After what happened at the conference, I thought…

Continue reading “Voices from Mozambique”