An Alternate Witness

2010-05-18T19:01:00.003+03:00

So much for my starry-eyed optimism:

The Obama administration announced Tuesday morning that it has struck a deal with other major powers, including Russia and China, to impose new sanctions on Iran, a sharp repudiation of the deal Tehran offered just a day before to ship its nuclear fuel out of the country.

"Major Powers Have a Deal on Sanctions for Iran, U.S. Says"

I guess I spoke too soon. It upsets me that Obama, the great mediator, who sent out such a conciliatory message to Iranians at Newroz over a year ago, is now resorting to the stick. While the stick may seem to have more immediate effect, in the long run it is always the carrot that is best!

A New Brazil-Turkey Axis?

2010-05-18T12:25:00.004+03:00

I haven't been so engaged in current events recently, but this recent development really excites me.

Living in Jordan, right along the flight path between Israel and Iran, I have been watching the developments between those two countries and the U.S. with a great deal of trepidation. While U.S. rhetoric has softened just enough during the Obama administration to keep me from real panic, I have still been worried about the future of this region.

That's why it's so exciting to me to see a third party, Turkey and Brazil, step in and take a mediating role. One a majority Muslim nation and traditional ally of Iran for centuries, the other a historical sympathizer to the Non-Aligned Movement of which Iran is a part, and both on the U.N. Security Council, these two countries are uniquely poised to appeal to Iran's political interests without making it look like Iran is bowing to the Great Satan.

As for Kinzer's claim that "Clinton, however, may not have been on the same political page as the White House," reflecting "Clinton's continuing isolation from the inner-circle of American foreign policymaking on crucial world issues," I don't see it that way at all. I think more than just Brazil and Turkey are playing "good cop, bad cop" as Kinzer suggests. That Sec. Clinton would come out publicly doubtful of Turkey and Brazil's chances of success, while Pres. Obama is encouraging Turkey behind the scenes, reflects a classic "good cop, bad cop" ploy on America's part, too, only in this case the U.S. is the bad cop, and Turkey and Brazil are the good cops. After all, the compromise that's been agreed to was first proposed by the U.S., but accepting the proposal from Muslim Turkey and Non-Aligned Brazil allows Iran to save just enough face to keep things relatively quiet on the domestic front. That can only be good for everyone.

Occupation 101 - a film

2009-11-20T13:35:00.003+02:00

There's good reason that this documentary has won so many awards. I wish I'd had this film to show to my students at nerd camp. I showed them "Iron Wall" and it was good, but this has a much larger scope, historically and geographically, and it's a powerful reminder of why we as Americans, perhaps more than anyone, can't ignore this issue:

No One's Revoking Palestinians' Passports

2009-07-25T12:41:00.007+03:00

At Least As Far As We Can Tell

I want to dispel a rumor circulating on the Web about Jordan and its Palestinians. Actually, I'm surprised that Nas at the Black Iris hasn't already commented on it.

Word on the Web is that Jordan has begun revoking the Jordanian passports of its Palestinian citizens. According to rumor, the Jordanian government is uneasy in the wake of President Obama's speech in Cairo about where the Middle East Peace Process will go next. There is concern that Jordan will be asked to take all the Palestinians, which Jordan and Palestinians have always made clear is not a viable option, and the rumor goes that Jordan is revoking the passports of Palestinians to pre-empt any talk of Jordan as the new Palestinian homeland.

Several of my friends in the States have heard the rumor and asked me about it, so I've been asking around. First of all, there is this article in the Jordan Times. As I understand it, Palestinians in Jordan hold one of three kinds of ID: green cards, yellow cards or UN IDs. From this article, it is my understanding that Palestinians can, under certain circumstances, exchange one kind of ID for another, and that a small number of Palestinians do this every year. I understand from the article that this number has not changed significantly from recent years.

I've also asked a number of friends who have their fingers on the pulse of Jordanian politics, whether by professional or personal interest, or through family connections. What I have learned boils down to this: no one knows anyone, or has heard of anyone, whose Jordanian passport was revoked. In fact, the Interior Minister was recently on Amin FM, a local radio station, inviting anyone whose passport had been unjustly revoked to call in to the program, and no one did. I know, in Jordan one must take this with a grain of salt, and suspect that anyone who did call in wouldn't be allowed on air anyway, but it shows that the government is aware of the rumor, and trying to dispel it.

This is what I think happened: In the wake of the Gaza War, the Obama speech, and other recent developments in the Israeli/Palestinian issue, reporters have gone into overtime to find information about Palestinian issues. One of them found some data about the yearly turnover of green and yellow cards, and misconstrued it, or sensationalized it, and then it "went viral" as the term now goes.

This is what I tried to teach my students in my Islam course at nerd camp. When you read something in the newspaper, see it on TV, or especially when you find it on the Internet, think carefully about who wrote it, where they got their information, and what their personal biases are. A reporter might, as happened in one of the articles my students read, come to Algiers, interview half a dozen people there, and write an article about the evils of Islam, a religion that encourages so-called "honor killings." Now, my students had studied Islam for almost three weeks of 7-hour days by this time, so they knew right away that she had her facts wrong: honor killings are a cultural phenomenon in many predominantly Muslim countries that directly contradict the edicts of the Qur'aan. But even if you didn't know anything about Islam, would you say that half a dozen interviews with Algerians makes the reporter any sort of authority on Islamic practices?

My sources may be suspect for any number of reasons, but I feel fairly confident in saying that there's sufficient evidence readily available that casts at least a shadow of a doubt on this latest rumor about the revocation of Palestinians' passports.

Believability In Numbers

2009-07-22T20:11:00.000+03:00

Thanks, Josh!

Books More Precious Than Dolls

2009-07-21T22:55:00.002+03:00

This article by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman really stands out for me as encapsulating a large part of the reason why I have come to the Middle East to teach. In this article, Friedman talks about the experience of opening a girls' school in Afghanistan with Greg Mortenson, author of the amazing Three Cups of Tea and builder of more than 200 schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Friedman gives us many wise words from Mortenson, including this passage:

“When a girl gets educated here and then becomes a mother, she will be much less likely to let her son become a militant or insurgent,” he added. “And she will have fewer children. When a girl learns how to read and write, one of the first things she does is teach her own mother. The girls will bring home meat and veggies, wrapped in newspapers, and the mother will ask the girl to read the newspaper to her and the mothers will learn about politics and about women who are exploited.”

I was just telling Keri last weekend that one of my goals as a Peace Corps Volunteer was to inspire great mothers, girls who would grow up appreciating the value of education, and, even if they weren't able to pursue it themselves, would push their own daughters to do well in school and go on to University. Someday maybe I'll make the kind of impact Mortenson is making.

Finally, this both surprised and encouraged me:

Mortenson said he was originally critical of the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan, but he’s changed his views: “The U.S. military has gone through a huge learning curve. They really get it. It’s all about building relationships from the ground up, listening more and serving the people of Afghanistan.”

Be Critical Cheerleaders for Obama!

2009-05-18T18:36:00.003+03:00

I won't say too much, except that this article says many of the things I've been saying all along about being a critical supporter of Obama, not putting great blind faith in him to fix everything, but believing that he will respond to the will and the best interests of the people more readily than his predecessor, if we tell him what that is! (Thanks, Ryan!)

Published on Saturday, May 16, 2009 by The Progressive
Changing Obama's Mindset
by Howard Zinn

We are citizens, and Obama is a politician. You might not like that word. But the fact is he's a politician. He's other things, too-he's a very sensitive and intelligent and thoughtful and promising person. But he's a politician.
If you're a citizen, you have to know the difference between them and you-the difference between what they have to do and what you have to do. And there are things they don't have to do, if you make it clear to them they don't have to do it.
From the beginning, I liked Obama. But the first time it suddenly struck me that he was a politician was early on, when Joe Lieberman was running for the Democratic nomination for his Senate seat in 2006.

Lieberman-who, as you know, was and is a war lover-was running for the Democratic nomination, and his opponent was a man named Ned Lamont, who was the peace candidate. And Obama went to Connecticut to support Lieberman against Lamont.
It took me aback. I say that to indicate that, yes, Obama was and is a politician. So we must not be swept away into an unthinking and unquestioning acceptance of what Obama does.

Our job is not to give him a blank check or simply be cheerleaders. It was good that we were cheerleaders while he was running for office, but it's not good to be cheerleaders now. Because we want the country to go beyond where it has been in the past. We want to make a clean break from what it has been in the past.
I had a teacher at Columbia University named Richard Hofstadter, who wrote a book called The American Political Tradition, and in it, he examined presidents from the Founding Fathers down through Franklin Roosevelt. There were liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats. And there were differences between them. But he found that the so-called liberals were not as liberal as people thought-and that the difference between the liberals and the conservatives, and between Republicans and Democrats, was not a polar difference. There was a common thread that ran through all American history, and all of the presidents-Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative-followed this thread.

The thread consisted of two elements: one, nationalism; and two, capitalism. And Obama is not yet free of that powerful double heritage.

We can see it in the policies that have been enunciated so far, even though he's been in office only a short time. Some people might say, "Well, what do you expect?"
And the answer is that we expect a lot. People say, "What, are you a dreamer?"
And the answer is, yes, we're dreamers. We want it all. We want a peaceful world. We want an egalitarian world. We don't want war. We don't want capitalism. We want a decent society. We better hold on to that dream-because if we don't, we'll sink closer and closer to this reality that we have, and that we don't want.

Be wary when you hear about the glories of the market system. The market system is what we've had. Let the market decide, they say. The government mustn't give people free health care; let the market decide.

Which is what the market has been doing-and that's why we have forty-eight million people without health care. The market has decided that. Leave things to the market, and there are two million people homeless. Leave things to the market, and there are millions and millions of people who can't pay their rent. Leave things to the market, and there are thirty-five million people who go hungry.

You can't leave it to the market. If you're facing an economic crisis like we're facing now, you can't do what was done in the past. You can't pour money into the upper levels of the country-and into the banks and corporations-and hope that it somehow trickles down.

What was one of the first things that happened when the Bush Administration saw that the economy was in trouble? A $700 billion bailout, and who did we give the $700 billion to? To the financial institutions that caused this crisis.

This was when the Presidential campaign was still going on, and it pained me to see Obama standing there, endorsing this huge bailout to the corporations.

What Obama should have been saying was: Hey, wait a while. The banks aren't poverty stricken. The CEOs aren't poverty stricken. But there are people who are out of work. There are people who can't pay their mortgages. Let's take $700 billion and give it directly to the people who need it. Let's take $1 trillion, let's take $2 trillion.

Let's take this money and give it directly to the people who need it. Give it to the people who have to pay their mortgages. Nobody should be evicted. Nobody should be left with their belongings out on the street.

Obama wants to spend perhaps a trillion more on the banks. Like Bush, he's not giving it directly to homeowners. Unlike the Republicans, Obama also wants to spend $800 billion for his economic stimulus plan. Which is good-the idea of a stimulus is good. But if you look closely at the plan, too much of it goes through the market, through corporations.

It gives tax breaks to businesses, hoping that they'll hire people. No-if people need jobs, you don't give money to the corporations, hoping that maybe jobs will be created. You give people work immediately.

A lot of people don't know the history of the New Deal of the 1930s. The New Deal didn't go far enough, but it had some very good ideas. And the reason the New Deal came to these good ideas was because there was huge agitation in this country, and Roosevelt had to react. So what did he do? He took billions of dollars and said the government was going to hire people. You're out of work? The government has a job for you.

As a result of this, lots of very wonderful work was done all over the country. Several million young people were put into the Civilian Conservation Corps. They went around the country, building bridges and roads and playgrounds, and doing remarkable things.

The government created a federal arts program. It wasn't going to wait for the markets to decide that. The government set up a program and hired thousands of unemployed artists: playwrights, actors, musicians, painters, sculptors, writers. What was the result? The result was the production of 200,000 pieces of art. Today, around the country, there are thousands of murals painted by people in the WPA program. Plays were put on all over the country at very cheap prices, so that people who had never seen a play in their lives were able to afford to go.

And that's just a glimmer of what could be done. The government has to represent the people's needs. The government can't give the job of representing the people's needs to corporations and the banks, because they don't care about the people's needs. They only care about profit.

In the course of his campaign, Obama said something that struck me as very wise-and when people say something very wise, you have to remember it, because they may not hold to it. You may have to remind them of that wise thing they said.

Obama was talking about the war in Iraq, and he said, "It's not just that we have to get out of Iraq." He said "get out of Iraq," and we mustn't forget it. We must keep reminding him: Out of Iraq, out of Iraq, out of Iraq-not next year, not two years from now, but out of Iraq now.

But listen to the second part, too. His whole sentence was: "It's not enough to get out of Iraq; we have to get out of the mindset that led us into Iraq." What is the mindset that got us into Iraq?

It's the mindset that says force will do the trick. Violence, war, bombers-that they will bring democracy and liberty to the people.

It's the mindset that says America has some God-given right to invade other countries for their own benefit. We will bring civilization to the Mexicans in 1846. We will bring freedom to the Cubans in 1898. We will bring democracy to the Filipinos in 1900. You know how successful we've been at bringing democracy all over the world.

Obama has not gotten out of this militaristic missionary mindset. He talks about sending tens of thousands of more troops to Afghanistan.

Obama is a very smart guy, and surely he must know some of the history. You don't have to know a lot to know the history of Afghanistan has been decades and decades and decades and decades of Western powers trying to impose their will on Afghanistan by force: the English, the Russians, and now the Americans. What has been the result? The result has been a ruined country.

This is the mindset that sends 21,000 more troops to Afghanistan, and that says, as Obama has, that we've got to have a bigger military. My heart sank when Obama said that. Why do we need a bigger military? We have an enormous military budget. Has Obama talked about cutting the military budget in half or some fraction? No.
We have military bases in more than a hundred countries. We have fourteen military bases on Okinawa alone. Who wants us there? The governments. They get benefits. But the people don't really want us there. There have been huge demonstrations in Italy against the establishment of a U.S. military base. There have been big demonstrations in South Korea and on Okinawa.

One of the first acts of the Obama Administration was to send Predator missiles to bomb Pakistan. People died. The claim is, "Oh, we're very precise with our weapons. We have the latest equipment. We can target anywhere and hit just what we want."
This is the mindset of technological infatuation. Yes, they can actually decide that they're going to bomb this one house. But there's one problem: They don't know who's in the house. They can hit one car with a rocket from a great distance. Do they know who's in the car? No.

And later-after the bodies have been taken out of the car, after the bodies have been taken out of the house-they tell you, "Well, there were three suspected terrorists in that house, and yes, there's seven other people killed, including two children, but we got the suspected terrorists." But notice that the word is "suspected." The truth is they don't know who the terrorists are.

So, yes, we have to get out of the mindset that got us into Iraq, but we've got to identify that mindset. And Obama has to be pulled by the people who elected him, by the people who are enthusiastic about him, to renounce that mindset. We're the ones who have to tell him, "No, you're on the wrong course with this militaristic idea of using force to accomplish things in the world. We won't accomplish anything that way, and we'll remain a hated country in the world."

Obama has talked about a vision for this country. You have to have a vision, and now I want to tell Obama what his vision should be.

The vision should be of a nation that becomes liked all over the world. I won't even say loved-it'll take a while to build up to that. A nation that is not feared, not disliked, not hated, as too often we are, but a nation that is looked upon as peaceful, because we've withdrawn our military bases from all these countries. We don't need to spend the hundreds of billions of dollars on the military budget. Take all the money allocated to military bases and the military budget, and-this is part of the emancipation-you can use that money to give everybody free health care, to guarantee jobs to everybody who doesn't have a job, guaranteed payment of rent to everybody who can't pay their rent, build child care centers.

Let's use the money to help other people around the world, not to send bombers over there. When disasters take place, they need helicopters to transport people out of the floods and out of devastated areas. They need helicopters to save people's lives, and the helicopters are over in the Middle East, bombing and strafing people.
What's required is a total turnaround. We want a country that uses its resources, its wealth, and its power to help people, not to hurt them. That's what we need. This is a vision we have to keep alive. We shouldn't be easily satisfied and say, "Oh well, give him a break. Obama deserves respect."

But you don't respect somebody when you give them a blank check. You respect somebody when you treat them as an equal to you, and as somebody you can talk to and somebody who will listen to you.

Not only is Obama a politician. Worse, he's surrounded by politicians. And some of them he picked himself. He picked Hillary Clinton, he picked Lawrence Summers, he picked people who show no sign of breaking from the past.

We are citizens. We must not put ourselves in the position of looking at the world from their eyes and say, "Well, we have to compromise, we have to do this for political reasons." No, we have to speak our minds.

This is the position that the abolitionists were in before the Civil War, and people said, "Well, you have to look at it from Lincoln's point of view." Lincoln didn't believe that his first priority was abolishing slavery. But the anti-slavery movement did, and the abolitionists said, "We're not going to put ourselves in Lincoln's position. We are going to express our own position, and we are going to express it so powerfully that Lincoln will have to listen to us."

And the anti-slavery movement grew large enough and powerful enough that Lincoln had to listen. That's how we got the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth and Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

That's been the story of this country. Where progress has been made, wherever any kind of injustice has been overturned, it's been because people acted as citizens, and not as politicians. They didn't just moan. They worked, they acted, they organized, they rioted if necessary to bring their situation to the attention of people in power. And that's what we have to do today.

Thanks to Alex Read and Matt Korn for transcribing Zinn’s talk on February 2 at the Busboys and Poets restaurant in Washington, D.C., from which this is adapted.

Cheney NewSpeak

2009-05-04T10:12:00.003+03:00

I want to thank Gabe for linking to this brilliant column of The Daily Dish that so brilliant utilizes George Orwell, one of my all-time favorite political commentators, to pillory Dick Cheney. It reminds me of the summer I spent house-sitting for my mother's Kiwi friend Pat, the summer I read 1984 in its entirety for the first time. I sat there at the dining room table, stroking the cats and the epileptic dog in turn, and wondering if George W. Bush's speechwriters were cutting and pasting straight from Orwell, and whether they could see the satire in it....

Queen Rania Online

2009-04-23T10:46:00.001+03:00

I was clued into this YouTube video on this article on NPR. As someone said at our house the other night, the women of the Arab world are so eloquent, and don't get nearly enough air time!

The Torturers' Manifesto

2009-04-19T21:30:00.002+03:00

The New York Times

April 19, 2009
Editorial
The Torturers’ Manifesto

To read the four newly released memos on prisoner interrogation written by George W. Bush’s Justice Department is to take a journey into depravity.

Their language is the precise bureaucratese favored by dungeon masters throughout history. They detail how to fashion a collar for slamming a prisoner against a wall, exactly how many days he can be kept without sleep (11), and what, specifically, he should be told before being locked in a box with an insect — all to stop just short of having a jury decide that these acts violate the laws against torture and abusive treatment of prisoners.

In one of the more nauseating passages, Jay Bybee, then an assistant attorney general and now a federal judge, wrote admiringly about a contraption for waterboarding that would lurch a prisoner upright if he stopped breathing while water was poured over his face. He praised the Central Intelligence Agency for having doctors ready to perform an emergency tracheotomy if necessary.

These memos are not an honest attempt to set the legal limits on interrogations, which was the authors’ statutory obligation. They were written to provide legal immunity for acts that are clearly illegal, immoral and a violation of this country’s most basic values.

It sounds like the plot of a mob film, except the lawyers asking how much their clients can get away with are from the C.I.A. and the lawyers coaching them on how to commit the abuses are from the Justice Department. And it all played out with the blessing of the defense secretary, the attorney general, the intelligence director and, most likely, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

The Americans Civil Liberties Union deserves credit for suing for the memos’ release. And President Obama deserves credit for overruling his own C.I.A. director and ordering that the memos be made public. It is hard to think of another case in which documents stamped “Top Secret” were released with hardly any deletions.

But this cannot be the end of the scrutiny for these and other decisions by the Bush administration.

Until Americans and their leaders fully understand the rules the Bush administration concocted to justify such abuses — and who set the rules and who approved them — there is no hope of fixing a profoundly broken system of justice and ensuring that that these acts are never repeated.

The abuses and the dangers do not end with the torture memos. Americans still know far too little about President Bush’s decision to illegally eavesdrop on Americans — a program that has since been given legal cover by the Congress.

Last week, The Times reported that the nation’s intelligence agencies have been collecting private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans on a scale that went beyond the broad limits established in legislation last year. The article quoted the Justice Department as saying there had been problems in the surveillance program that had been resolved. But Justice did not say what those problems were or what the resolution was.

That is the heart of the matter: nobody really knows what any of the rules were. Mr. Bush never offered the slightest explanation of what he found lacking in the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act when he decided to ignore the law after 9/11 and ordered the warrantless wiretapping of Americans’ overseas calls and e-mail. He said he was president and could do what he wanted.

The Bush administration also never explained how it interpreted laws that were later passed to expand the government’s powers to eavesdrop. And the Obama administration argued in a recent court filing that everything associated with electronic eavesdropping, including what is allowed and what is not, is a state secret.

We do not think Mr. Obama will violate Americans’ rights as Mr. Bush did. But if Americans do not know the rules, they cannot judge whether this government or any one that follows is abiding by the rules.

In the case of detainee abuse, Mr. Obama assured C.I.A. operatives that they would not be prosecuted for actions that their superiors told them were legal. We have never been comfortable with the “only following orders” excuse, especially because Americans still do not know what was actually done or who was giving the orders.

After all, as far as Mr. Bush’s lawyers were concerned, it was not really torture unless it involved breaking bones, burning flesh or pulling teeth. That, Mr. Bybee kept noting, was what the Libyan secret police did to one prisoner. The standard for American behavior should be a lot higher than that of the Libyan secret police.

At least Mr. Obama is not following Mr. Bush’s example of showy trials for the small fry — like Lynndie England of Abu Ghraib notoriety. But he has an obligation to pursue what is clear evidence of a government policy sanctioning the torture and abuse of prisoners — in violation of international law and the Constitution.

That investigation should start with the lawyers who wrote these sickening memos, including John Yoo, who now teaches law in California; Steven Bradbury, who was job-hunting when we last heard; and Mr. Bybee, who holds the lifetime seat on the federal appeals court that Mr. Bush rewarded him with.

These memos make it clear that Mr. Bybee is unfit for a job that requires legal judgment and a respect for the Constitution. Congress should impeach him. And if the administration will not conduct a thorough investigation of these issues, then Congress has a constitutional duty to hold the executive branch accountable. If that means putting Donald Rumsfeld and Alberto Gonzales on the stand, even Dick Cheney, we are sure Americans can handle it.

After eight years without transparency or accountability, Mr. Obama promised the American people both. His decision to release these memos was another sign of his commitment to transparency. We are waiting to see an equal commitment to accountability.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

'Nuff said!

NPR On The Ball

2009-04-09T15:02:00.007+03:00

I want to applaud National Public Radio (www.npr.org) for airing a series this week called Israel's Barrier. It reassures me once again that this is a news outlet truly interested in balanced coverage of both sides of the stories they cover. I remember a commentary in the Jordan Times back in 2006 criticizing NPR's coverage of the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war as being biased in favor of Israelis. This was when I realized that most of NPR's anchors are Jews, proud to say so on air, but it's also when I recognized that many of their leading producers have Muslim names. About the same time, I also heard that NPR was the only American news agency not cutting their reporting staff in Iraq. I have since listened to NPR with a very critical ear, but I have to say, I think they come down pretty hard on Israel, while being quite critical of Hamas and the PLO as well. All in all, for Arab issues as well as other topics, I think NPR is doing a pretty good job of bringing balanced coverage of the Middle East to American listeners (tho, admittedly, to the kind of listeners who are already less likely to be afraid of "them A-raaabs!").

Ayatollah Fadallah on Women

2009-03-30T09:39:00.003+03:00

For those who would say that Islam is restrictive to women, and especially those who say that Shi'ism is the worst of these, I recommend this interview from my friend Chris's blog.

Not Funny

2009-03-24T08:55:00.004+02:00

Israel's military condemned soldiers for wearing T-shirts of a pregnant woman in a rifle's cross-hairs with the slogan "1 Shot 2 Kills," and another of a gun-toting child with the words, "The smaller they are, the harder it is."
--Matti Friedman, Associated Press

I can't say that I'm surprised, and there are many reasons for my reaction. As I said over and over again in defense of American soldiers after the Abu Ghraib incident, in a war zone, a soldier has to learn how to de-humanize his enemy, or else he can't do what a soldier has to do in war. I have to think that this would be even more the case for a young Israeli soldier, who has to serve in the military regardless of his opinions on the IDF, unless he's willing to face a year of solitary confinement in jail. I'd like to say that I would, in that position, have the moral fortitude to be a refusenik, but the fact is that I'm not in that position, and I'll never know how I would respond. I do know that, despite my moral fortitude, I can be taken in and brainwashed as easily as the next guy, even if Rotary Youth Exchange brainwashing (not better, not worse, just different! peace one friendship at a time!) is pretty benign in comparison! What both Israelis and Palestinians have endured over the last 60 years is frankly beyond my comprehension, and I just know that it must make it that much easier for each side to demonize the other!

Nor am I saying that the bad taste in cartoons is one-sided, either! My pro-Israel friends will surely point out that

Hamas-controlled media consistently glorify attacks on Israelis, and cartoons in Palestinian newspapers frequently use anti-Semitic images of Jews as hook-nosed, black-hatted characters.

Hamas also mocked Israeli suffering, staging a play about its capture of an Israeli soldier in which it makes fun of the serviceman crying for his mother and father.

But in light of recent reporting by the United Nations, I find this kind of talk on Israel's part to be, at best, disingenuous, and at worse, pure hypocrisy:

On Monday, the military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, defended his troops.

"I tell you that this is a moral and ideological army. I have no doubt that exceptional events will be dealt with," Ashkenazi told new recruits. Gaza "is a complex atmosphere that includes civilians, and we took every measure possible to reduce harm to the innocent."

Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups fire rockets from heavily populated areas, and Israel says Hamas is to blame for the civilian deaths because it leaves the military no choice but to attack them there.

U.N. human rights experts said Monday that Israeli soldiers used an 11-year-old Palestinian as a human shield during the Gaza offensive. The military ordered the boy on Jan. 15 to walk in front of soldiers being fired on in a Gaza neighborhood and enter buildings before them, said Radhika Coomaraswamy, the U.N. secretary-general's envoy for protecting children in armed conflict.

Israeli army spokesman Capt. Elie Isaacson denied the military used human shields, saying "morals and high ethical standards are paramount" in the army. [all emphasis mine]

Reuters has provided more examples of UN claims as to how Israel violated human rights and international law in their Hannukah offensive last year:

In one [incident], [the Sri Lankan human rights lawyer] said, Israeli soldiers shot a father after ordering him out of his house and then opened fire into the room where the rest of the family was sheltering, wounding the mother and three brothers and killing a fourth.

My hat goes off, as well, to UN special rapporteur Richard Falk, who was banned from entering Gaza previous to the Hannukah offensive because of what Israel perceived as an anti-Semitic bias, but who continues to call for

an independent experts group to probe possible war crimes by Israel and Hamas. [He] also suggested that the U.N. Security Council set up an ad hoc criminal tribunal.

DIY Stimulus

2009-03-23T23:05:00.001+02:00

There's all kinds of ranting and raving going on around the United States and among Americans abroad about the new stimulus package Pres. Barack Obama is trying to put through Congress, about how it's too little too late, how it's just the same as the Bush stimulus that didn't work. People are complaining that the government isn't coming down more harshly on AIG for using government bailout award bonuses to their executives (contractually obligated bonuses which, incidentally, amount to only 0.03% of the government's total AIG bailout). My roommate's new complaint is that Pres. Obama is now reversing his campaign slogan of "the fundamentals of the economy are wrong" to echo the old Bush comment that "the fundamentals of the ecnomy are strong."

All of this is justified criticism, and since the early Bush years, I've applauded any critique of governmental policy, because genuine critical thinking about the government became a scarce commodity under George W. Without a doubt, Pres. Obama ran on a platform that included fixing what's wrong with the economy, and he should be expected to follow through on that promise. And I believe that he will, not merely because it will help get him re-elected in 2012, but also because I think he genuinely believes in the American promise.

However, we cannot and should not rely on the goverment alone to fix the problem. For a start, the government can't do it alone. Indeed, for the government alone to make any sort of dent in the economic crisis would mean mortgaging our grandchildren and great-grandchildren's futures with an even greater ballooning of the national debt than George W. Bush foisted upon them. Even if the government had the money to make a difference, though, would they really be able to implement quick and effective policies? National government is by definition cumbersome and slow, and it is exactly that quality of our goverment that helps protect us from too much dictatorship and oppression. Primarily, however, the goverment is too large and impersonal to see what individual communities need and what solutions individual problems warrant.

That's why I've been so excited to see a trend of Do-It-Yourself Stimulus peppering the news.

Sit-In Leads To Green Revolution
The first inkling I got of this was when my roommate started talking about a factory in Chicago where 240 workers were staging a sit-in after their factory was foreclosed with just 3 days notice. The complaints included the fact that Bank of America had been awarded funds in the stimulus package precisely to keep it from foreclosing on businesses and pushing up unemployment. This commentary by UC Santa Barbara's Prof. Nelson Lichtenstein explains why factory sit-ins are both rare and significant. The conclusion of this event is even more exciting than the effectiveness of this kind of civil disobedience. Just a month ago, the factory was bought by a California company making energy-efficient windows, making this a green revolution, too!

Several other cases have come to my attention more recently of mid-sized businesses and even individuals stepping up to the plate and sacrificing to help those even worse off in this economic crisis.

Hospital Cutbacks
From the Boston Globe came the story of the President and CEO of Beth Israel Hospital who, faced with the need to slim the budget, took a hard look at "the people who polish the corridors, who strip the sheets, who empty the trash cans, and he realized that a lot of them are immigrants, many of them had second jobs, most of them were just scraping by." He also recognized that the interactions of food servers and people who pushed wheelchairs with patients were a vital part of the practice of medicine at his hospital. So instead of announcing job cuts as he had originally thought, he asked his employees to

"...do what we can to protect the lower-wage earners - the transporters, the housekeepers, the food service people. A lot of these people work really hard, and I don't want to put an additional burden on them.

"Now, if we protect these workers, it means the rest of us will have to make a bigger sacrifice," he continued. "It means that others will have to give up more of their salary or benefits."

He had barely gotten the words out of his mouth when Sherman Auditorium erupted in applause. Thunderous, heartfelt, sustained applause.

And, having been asked, his workers were more than happy to give up cost-of-living increases, bonuses, a few vacation days and a little sick leave if it meant that everyone would keep their jobs.

Public Defenders
I remember reading a year or two ago that the Public Defenders office somewhere in the Upper Midwest was unable to keep lawyers on their payrolls. With mounting costs of law school and little to no chance of scholarships and other financial aid, new lawyers had so much debt piled on their shoulders that they couldn't afford to work for the public good, no matter how desperately they might have wanted to. The goverment was considering options to forgive those loans just to keep enough lawyers in the Public Defenders office to do what the Constitution demands. According to this article, the economic crisis may be helping public services, and at a time when lawyers are desperately needed to deal with the flood of foreclosures and bankrupcies rocking the country.

Philanthropy Rising
Even individuals are ponying up and doing what they can to help those worst effected by the economic crisis. This article explains how Salvation Army Kettles have raised record donations this past Christmas season, funds desperately needed in such times. I've also read that donations to church social action funds are also on the rise.

So while the economic situation in America may be bleak, I think that for many people, this crisis is bringing out the very best parts of the American spirit, that can-do attitude that got our nation to the top of the global pigpile to begin with. It renews my faith in the power of human compassion. I just watched Will Smith's "Independence Day" yesterday, and I still believe that what that movie says is true:
When the going gets tough, Americans get going!

Israeli Awakening?

2009-03-16T22:57:00.006+02:00

Waltz with Bashir is an animated Israeli docu-drama, nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2009 and winner of many other awards. On the surface, it is a film about a former IDF soldier's attemts to reconstruct his memories of the Sabra and Shatila Massacre in Beirut in 1982. Much to my surprise, however, it was actually the post-Modern pastiche of time that appealed to me most about this film. Generally speaking, I hate post-Modernism (even though it makes my Goucher Girls flinch when I say so), but this film used the techniques of post-Modernism to great effect. In particular, the juxtaposition of times and genres mimicked the way the mind recalls repressed memories in response to unexpected stimuli like an old song, the casual comment of a friend, or an image seen on the news.

As much as this is a film about the 1982 Lebanon-Israel War, I had a feeling very early on in the film that this was also about the 2006 Lebanon-Israel War. It may be wishful thinking on my part, but I feel like the 2006 War awakened in Israel some old wounds dating back to the 80s, and that it also energized the peace movement generally. I would like to think that this movie, Waltz With Bashir, reflects a shift in Israeli culture that is becoming increasingly aware of the toll that the endless conflict with its neighbors is having on the Israeli psyche.

But it's probably just wishful thinking from the eternal optimist!

Day Against Cyber Censorship

2009-03-16T14:52:00.001+02:00

Nas is a very brave man, and everyone interested in free speech in the Middle East should be reading his blog!

What Makes a Muslim?

2009-03-02T12:40:00.005+02:00

...since Election Day, I have been part of more and more conversations with Muslims in which it was either offhandedly agreed that Obama is Muslim or enthusiastically blurted out. In commenting on our new president, "I have to support my fellow Muslim brother," would slip out of my mouth before I had a chance to think twice.

"Well, I know he's not really Muslim," I would quickly add. But if the person I was talking to was Muslim, they would say, "yes he is." They would cite his open nature and habit of reaching out to critics, reminiscent of the Prophet Muhammad's own approach....

Asma Gull Hasan's article in Forbes Magazine, My Muslim President Obama, reflects many of the reasons I've also heard here in Jordan about why people here are so excited to see Pres. Barack Obama in the White House.

...Most of the Muslims I know (me included) can't seem to accept that Obama is not Muslim.

Of the few Muslims I polled who said that Obama is not Muslim, even they conceded that he had ties to Islam. These realists said that, although not an avowed and practicing Muslim, Obama's exposure to Islam at a young age (both through his father and his stint in Indonesia) has given him a Muslim sensibility. In my book, that makes you a Muslim--maybe not a card-carrying one, but part of the flock for sure. One realist Muslim ventured that Obama worships at a Unitarian Church because it represents the middle ground between Christianity and Islam, incorporating the religious beliefs of the two faiths Obama feels connected to. Unitarianism could be Obama's way of still being a Muslim.

I've heard this from many imams and sheikhs in the United States, when I say that I am Unitarian Universalist. "Oh, Unitarian? Well, that's practically Muslim!" Initially, it always strikes me that this is merely because the translation of Unitarian into Arabic, tawHeed, means "unity of God" (as opposed to trinitarianism: Father, Son and Holy Ghost), which is a central tenet of all Islam, or "oneness with God" which is the ultimate goal of Sufi Islam. But on further reflection, it becomes apparent that Unitarians and Muslims have a very simliar agenda of social justice, too, and see the world in a very similar way. There is an aya (verse) in the Qur'aan that says, "I have made you into tribes and peoples so that you might know each other better," and this is very much like the Unitarian view of the world: that all the varied cultures and religions of the world help us to understand ourselves, our communities, and our common humanity better.

The rationalistic, Western side of me knows that Obama has denied being Muslim, that his father was non-practicing, that he doesn't attend a mosque. Many Muslims simply say back, "my father's not a strict Muslim either, and I haven't been to a mosque in years."

This reminded me of all the times in the village that my students' mothers would say, "Do you see how Maryah dresses? Are you paying attention to how Maryah treats others? Have you noticed that she put her sweater back on because she thought your father was coming through the door? She's a much better Muslim than you are! Why can't you be as good a Muslim as Maryah?" They all knew I wasn't Muslim. One mother even suspected that I wasn't a believer of any sort, but it didn't stop her from telling her daughters that I understood Islam and lived the tenets of Islam better than they did!

Sometimes even the girls would say it to each other. Some of the neighborhood girls liked to come and cook lunch at my house once or twice a week. (It was a great deal for me, because they cooked, washed up, and scrubbed my floors to thank me for having them!) One day we had a particularly large group of the cousins over, and they kept saying they wanted to make more food, and I kept saying, "It'll be enough, it'll be enough!" And when we had all eaten our fill, there was no food left on the mat on the floor. The oldest of the cousins said, "Maryah, you cook by the sunna!" Sunna are the traditions of the Prophet Mohammad and his Companions. "Why is that?" I asked. Safa' replied, "The Prophet Mohammad said that one should never make more food than one can consume in one sitting." Of course, this made perfect sense in the Eighth Century Arabian Peninsula, without refrigerators to keep the food from spoiling. "You, Maryah, never make more food than you can eat in one sitting. We never do that. Our mothers always make enough for several meals."

Asma Gull Hasan's article, however, gets right to the heart of one of the things I love most about Islam. The most important thing in Islam is intention, and when it comes to Judgement Day, one's actions and one's intentions count equally towards one's eternal reward or punishment. Even if one was not a practicing Muslim, but had all the right attitudes towards his brothers and God, one can still achieve Paradise. I think this is what Ms. Hasan means when she says Pres. Barack Obama is a Muslim. He is a generous, well-intentioned man who tries to help others and create a more just local and global community as much as he is able, and this is the very heart of Islam.

Affirm Life

2009-02-19T13:18:00.005+02:00

It started with Taylor Mali. I wanted to go back and hear "Like Lilly Like Wilson Like," to relive that moment where he says,

And the eighth-grade mind is a beautiful thing;
Like a new-born baby's face, you can often see it
change before your very eyes.

I can't believe I'm saying this, Mr. Mali,
but I think I'd like to switch sides.

And I want to tell her to do more than just believe it,
but to enjoy it!
That changing your mind is one of the best ways
of finding out whether or not you still have one.
Or even that minds are like parachutes,
that it doesn't matter what you pack
them with so long as they open
at the right time.
O God, Lilly, I want to say
you make me feel like a teacher,
and who could ask to feel more than that?

Before I knew it, I was on YouTube, watching Taylor Mali pontificate on "Miracle Workers":

YouTube is addicting, it's no secret, and I got sucked in, watching Taylor Mali work his magic on the first episode of Def Poetry Jam with one of my favorite spoken word pieces, "What Teachers Make":

What can I say? I'm a teacher at heart! But once I was listening to Def Poetry, I was reminded of some of the more weighty poets that I love who have appeared on Def Poetry. I actually saw Amir Sulaiman for the first time at Indiana University - Bloomington at an event hosted as part of Muslim History Month by the Muslim Students Association, where he put 9/11 in perspective with "Danger":

But when it comes to putting 9/11 in perspective, no one has more lyrically expressed a perspective quite like hers better than Suheir Hammad in "First Writing Since":

Please, lose yourself in Def Poetry and other such spoken word on the Internet. I can spend hours listening to this kind of thing!

The Onus For Peace Is On Whom?

2009-01-29T15:49:00.005+02:00

The Continuity of Obama's Change by Mouin Rabbani and Chris Toensing is a more pragmatic analysis than anything I've seen on the BBC or CNN of the prospects of Israeli-Palestinian peace in the Obama Administration. (Thanks, Chris, for pointing it out to me.) I want to believe in Obama and Mitchell, and I want to believe that the world is reaching a tipping-point at which we will no longer tolerate the continued maltreatment of Palstinians. However, Rabbani and Toensing make compelling arguments as to why my optimism is a little over-zealous. I found this argument most compelling:

The Mitchell report shared the structural flaw of all US interventions on the Israeli-Palestinian front subsequent to the collapse of talks at Camp David in July 2000. Whether through a stoppage of Palestinian resistance, constitutional and security reform, or institution building, it placed the onus for progress toward peace and Palestinian statehood upon the occupied people, and deferred the duties of the occupying power until later. And it spoke not at all of the foremost of those obligations, the duty to end the occupation.

This is precisely the problem with, for example, the resolution the U.S. Senate passed on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. If Hamas is going to be blamed for firing rockets into Israeli after the end of the ceasefire with Israel, then Israel must also be blamed for failing to fulfill their obligations under the ceasefire agreement, namely, to open the borders and allow food, medicines, water, currency, electricity and other basic necessities to enter the Gaza Strip on a regular basis, in sufficient quantities to maintain a decent standard of living for Palestinians trapped inside the Gaza Strip.

Audacity of Hope Isn't New

2009-01-24T14:16:00.004+02:00

In these days of bloodshed, blockade and brutality, and in this time of happiness, honored promises and hope, I offer the words of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his 1964 Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

I am mindful that only yesterday in Birmingham, Alabama, our children, crying out for brotherhood, were answered with fire hoses, snarling dogs and even death. I am mindful that only yesterday in Philadelphia, Mississippi, young people seeing to secure the right to vote were brutalized and murdered. And only yesterday more than 40 houses of worship in the State of Mississippi alone were bombed or burned because they offered a sunctuary to those who would not accept segregation....

I believe that even amid today's motor bursts and whining bullets, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow. I believe that wounded justice, lying prostrate on the blood-flowing streets of our nations, can be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of men.

I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down, men other-centered can build up. I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive goodwill will proclaim the rule of the land.

"And the lion and the lamb shall lie down together and every man shall sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid."

I still believe that we shall overcome.

Let us recall that it was his hope that drove Rev. King, his hope and that of those who believed him that ultimately triumphed over centuries of oppression, even genocide, of the black man, and his hope that allowed Barack Obama to be where he is today. Since the beginning of Senator Obama's campaign for president, the slogan "Audacity of Hope" was derided as an empty phrase meant to obscure a lack of focus, a dearth of policy. But we believed in him; he made us hopeful after 8 long years of secrecy and deception. If Dr. King could speak of hope in the face of all the violence that still faced the people whose champion he was, then we should be able to retain that audacity of hope that has inspired us thus far. President Obama is only in his first week of office; let's not judge him yet!

Obama's First Executive Orders

2009-01-23T21:32:00.002+02:00

From the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee:

Yesterday, at around 11:30 a.m. (EST), President Obama signed an executive order to close Guantanamo Bay detention center. In addition, the order formally:

* Bans torture and inhumane and degrading treatment of detainees by requiring that the Army field manual be used as the guide for terror interrogations.
* Closes the CIA’s secret prisons and ends the Bush administration's CIA program of enhanced interrogation methods that have included abhorrent procedures like water-boarding.
* Provides the International Committee of the Red Cross access to all U.S.-held detainees.
* Establishes an interagency task force to lead a systematic review of detention policies and procedures and a review of all individual cases.

We applaud our new president for taking this important step on his second day in office. UUSC believes that any government-sponsored acts of torture, under any circumstances, are profoundly immoral, unjustified, and illegal. These practices can and must be ended now.

President Obama expressed the values and beliefs of all Americans of conscience in his inaugural speech when he stated, “We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our founding fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake.”

Show President Obama that he has the support of the American people to act on his beliefs. Take action — let him know that you support his executive order!

Visit our website to read UUSC’s recommendations to Congress to end torture and illegal detention.

Thank you for supporting UUSC's efforts to restore civil liberties.

Sincerely,

Myrna Greenfield
Director of Outreach & Mobilization

The Unitarian Universalist Service Committee is (technically, but only loosely) an organization with religious affiliations, but the Unitarian Universalist Association is happy to cooperate with anyone with the same humanitarian intentions. Please support us.

We Must Hope AND Work For Change

2009-01-22T19:11:00.004+02:00

There's such a Catch-22 in all this conversation here in the Middle East about President Obama's character, intentions and potential actions. People are asking each other if President Obama really wants change in the Middle East, whether he really is the idealistic humanist democrat that his words portray him as, and how much the people who voted for him really care about his Middle East policy. I am also hearing and reading a lot of debate as to whether President Obama will rise above domestic concerns (read: the economy) and American self-interest (read: AIPAC) to engage his administration in the politics of the Middle East, if so, will the Congress support or impede him in such an endeavor, and can the United States even accomplish the peace, freedoms and prosperity that Arabs hope Obama will bring to their region. Many people here are optimistic, like the newest Jordanian blogger I'm following, The Arab Observer. Others are less trusting of rhetoric, including my friend Kinzi and many who responded to the Observer's opinion.

There's certainly plenty of debate as to how much power the American government has over the issue of Israel/Palestine, or of democratic and human rights reform anywhere in the region. Certainly the United States pumps plenty of money into controversial regimes in the region, starting with Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, but definitely not ending there! If America cut off the tap, would that weaken oppressive regimes enough to be overthrown by the will of the people? If so, would the United States extend the same humanitarian aid to a regime that had overthrown America's former allies?

There's no doubt that foreign aid is needed in Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt and other parts of the Middle East. If the US Agency for International Development (USAID) were to suddenly stop all its programs in part or all of the region, humanitarian crisis would surely follow. Saudi Arabia and Iran may have the oil resources to provide some sort of substitute for USAID, but would they extend that aid? If so, what strings would be attached, and how would people in the Middle East or beyond react? Judging by the reaction to Iran's support of Hamas and Hezbollah, which do provide extensive and vital social services in the Palestinian Territories and Lebanon, I think the reaction of the Western powers would be far from desirable.

On the American side, there are plenty who question why we should help people in the Middle East who don't seem to want to help themselves. Of course, Black Iris made an eloquent argument in the post "Somewhere Near the Israeli Embassy In Amman...." for why it is so difficult for people in this region to press for change and reform from within. On the other hand, change and reform will never be successful if they are imposed entirely from without.

The whole debate reminds me of an amazing experience I had as an undergraduate at tiny Goucher College in Baltimore. Professor Emeritus Froehlicher, who had a dramatic life that included working for the resistance to the Nazis, and then coordinating the translators and interpreters at the Nuremberg Trials, convened a group of professors, most from the Modern Languages Dept, and me and my former roommmate. We each read the opinion pages of newspapers in different languages, and convened to share what we had found. One French professor invited the Johns Hopkins University professor who was teaching her Arabic to bring us the Arab perspective, and he showed us magazine after magazine calling for America to bring an end to Egypt's and the region's woes. America, he said, was the only country with the political, economic, military and cultural power to effect real change in the Middle East, and if Americans really believed in their founding principles, how could they not save the Middle East? He had to leave early, but it's the rest of the conversation that has really stuck with me.

Prof. Froehlicher had grown up under the Nazis. Most of the other teachers in the room had grown up behind the Iron Curtain in East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Russia. They started describing how they had felt the same way about America. If America really wanted to cover the world in democracy and freedom, why weren't they doing anything? Why wasn't the United States using its superpowers to tear down that wall, to fix their problems in the Soviet states and satellites?

But what really brought down the Berlin Wall, and ultimately the Iron Curtain? It wasn't American democracy and power. It wasn't American President John F Kennedy saying, "Ich bin ein Berliner," or Pres. Ronald Reagan saying, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" Perhaps America and its presidents served as an inspiration, or as that vital ray of hope, but in the end, it was the people behind the Wall, behind the Curtain who brought it down. It was the grassroots resistance movements of the Polish Spring, the Velvet Revolution, and the Catholic Church. It was the ordinary East German citizens who chose to believe a bureaucratic error and converged peacefully on the wall. It was the lowly East German borderguards who made the humanitarian choice to disobey their standing orders to shoot anyone trying to cross that border. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, America may well have facilitated the collapse of the Soviet Union, but nothing America did directly caused it.

I hope that people in the Middle East take inspiration from Barack Obama, as Americans are doing, and do find the audacity to hope. But it is incumbent upon us all to remember that hope alone will never be enough. It is our responsibility, as Mahatma Ghandi said, to be the change we want to see in the world. It's not enough to believe in change; you have to work for it.

Praise song for the day

2009-01-21T00:24:00.002+02:00

by Elizabeth Alexander

Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others' eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer consider the changing sky; A teacher says, "Take out your pencils. Begin."

We encounter each other in words, Words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; Words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, "I need to see what's on the other side; I know there's something better down the road."

We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.

Some live by "Love thy neighbor as thy self."

Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.

What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.

In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light.

As read at the Inauguration of America's 44th President Barack Obama

The Holidays In Gaza

2009-01-17T19:18:00.004+02:00

Feast of the Sacrifice and no sacrifice
No money nor goats
Yet each one a sacrifice
Hurting
Hurting from hunger and thirst
Hurting from fear and belittlement
And sacrificing soul and property

Feast of the Sacrifice and each one
Is Ishmael
Beneath the hand of the Greater
The sacrifice smaller and weaker
Watching the weapons
And hurting
Hurting from lack of power
And lack of voice
And lack of help
Not self-help
Nor the help of friends

Feast of the Sacrifice and each one
Ishmael without Gabriel
Where is Gabriel?
Where is the messenger?
Where is the voice of the Just
Telling the sacrificer:
Stop!
The intention suffices.
The symbol of your intention suffices.

Christmas without Nativity
Without gifts or blessing
But with destruction
Christmas, and the gifts
They are destruction
And destruction of houses and wealth
That is temporary destruction
Yet the destruction of families and childhood
And feelings of safety and hope
That is eternal destruction
And it's destroying the future
The future of individuals
As well as the nation's.

Christmas is birthing
Fear and despair
And anger and hatred
In the hearts of the children
The children of Palestine
And the children of Israel

Hannukah without light
Neither light nor oil
Nor the light of hope
No light in the temple
Nor light in the church
Nor light in the mosque
Not the hope of safety
Nor of justice
Nor of peace
Nor of aid
Not on the holy days
Nor on normal days

Of course, like all translations, it sounds far better in the Arabic in which I originally wrote it; more internal cohesion and repetition, more obvious religious allusions. But someone was bound to ask for a translation, so here it is.

أيام الأعياد في الغزة

2009-01-17T18:53:00.003+02:00

عيد الأضحى بدون أضحى

بدون فلوس وبدون أغنام
بل كل فرد ضحية

يألم

يألم من الجوع ومن العطش

ومن الخوف ومن الاستصغار
ويضحي بالنفس والنفيس

عيد الأضحى وكل فرد

هو إسماعيل

تحت يد الأكبر
الضحية أصغر وأضعف

ويشاهد الأسلحة
ويألم

يألم بعدم القوة

بعدم الصوت

بعدم المساعدة
لا مساعدة نفسية

ولا مساعدة الأصدقاء

عيد الأضحى وكل فرد

إسماعيل بدون جبريل
وأين جبريل؟

أين الرسول؟

أين الصوت من العدل

يقول للذابح

قف

يكفي الإرادة

يكفي رمز أرادتك

عيد الميلاد بدون توليد

بدون هدايا ولا بركة
بل بتدمير
عيد الميلاد والهدايا

هي التدمير

وتدمير البيوت والثروة

هو تدمير مقتصر
بل تدمير العائلة والطفولة

وشعر الأمن والأمل

هو تدمير مؤبّد
وهو تدمير المستقبل

مستقبل الشخص

كما الوطن

عيد الميلاد يولد

الخوف والحزن

والغضب والكراهة
في قلوب الأطفال

أطفال فلسطين

وأطفال اسرائيل

عيد الأنوار بدون ضوء
لا ضوء ولا زيت

ولا ضوء الأمل
لا ضوء في الكنيس

ولا في الكنيسة

ولا في المسجد
لا أمل بالأمن

ولا بالحق

ولا بالسلام

ولا بالمساعدة
لا في أيام الأعياد

ولا في أيام العادية

Marginalized Critics

2009-01-15T10:31:00.002+02:00

You should read the full article on SabbahBlog, but here's your teaser, from Chris Hedges:

This attack is the final Israeli push to extinguish a Palestinian state and crush or expel the Palestinian people. The images of dead Palestinian children, lined up as if asleep on the floor of the main hospital in Gaza, are a metaphor for the future. Israel will, from now on, speak to the Palestinians in the language of death. And the language of death is all the Palestinians will be able to speak back. The slaughter-let's stop pretending this is a war-is empowering an array of radical Islamists inside and outside of Gaza. It is ominously demolishing the shaky foundations of the corrupt secular Arab regimes on Israel's borders, from Egypt to Jordan to Syria to Lebanon. It is about creating a new Middle East, one ruled by enraged Islamic radicals.

....

I called [Yuri] Avnery at his home in Israel. He is Israel's conscience. Avnery was born in Germany. He moved to Palestine as a young boy with his parents. He left school at the age of 14 and a year later joined the underground paramilitary group known as the Irgun. Four years afterward, disgusted with its use of violence, he walked away from the clandestine organization, which carried out armed attacks on British occupation authorities and Arabs. "You can't talk to me about terrorism, I was a terrorist," he says when confronted with his persistent calls for peace with the Palestinians. Avnery was a fighter in the Samson's Foxes commando unit during the 1948 war. He wrote the elite unit's anthem. He became, after the war, a force for left-wing politics in Israel and one of the country's most prominent journalists, running the alternative HaOlam HaZeh magazine. He served in the Israeli Knesset. During the 1982 siege of Beirut he met, in open defiance of Israeli law, with PLO leader Yasser Arafat. He has joined Arab protesters in Israel the past few days and denounces what he calls Israel's "instinct of using force" with the Palestinians and the "moral insanity" of the attack on Gaza. Avnery, now 85, was seriously wounded in an assassination attempt in 1975 by an Israeli opponent, and in 2006 the right-wing activist Baruch Marzel called on the Israeli military to carry out a targeted assassination of Avnery.

"The state of Israel, like any other state," Avnery said, "cannot tolerate having its citizens shelled, bombed or rocketed, but there has been no thought as to how to solve the problem through political means or to analyze where this phenomenon has come from, what has caused it. Israelis, as a whole, cannot put themselves in the shoes of others. We are too self-centered. We cannot stand in the shoes of Palestinians or Arabs to ask how we would react in the same situation. Sometimes, very rarely, it happens. Years ago when Ehud Barak was asked how he would behave if were a Palestinian, he said, ‘I would join a terrorist organization.' If you do not understand Hamas, if you do not understand why Hamas does what it does, if you don't understand Palestinians, you take recourse in brute force."

The public debate about the Gaza attack engages in the absurd pretense that it is Israel, not the Palestinians, whose security and dignity are being threatened. This blind defense of Israeli brutality toward the Palestinians betrays the memory of those killed in other genocides, from the Holocaust to Cambodia to Rwanda to Bosnia. The lesson of the Holocaust is not that Jews are special. It is not that Jews are unique. It is not that Jews are eternal victims. The lesson of the Holocaust is that when you have the capacity to halt genocide, and you do not-no matter who carries out that genocide or who it is directed against-you are culpable. And we are very culpable. The F-16 jet fighters, the Apache attack helicopters, the 250-pound "smart" GBU-39 bombs are all part of the annual $2.4 billion in military aid the U.S. gives to Israel. Palestinians are being slaughtered with American-made weapons. They are being slaughtered by an Israeli military we lavishly bankroll. But perhaps our callous indifference to human suffering is to be expected. We, after all, kill women and children on an even vaster scale in Iraq and Afghanistan. The bloody hands of Israel mirror our own.

....

"Hamas will win the war, no matter what happens," Avnery said. "They will be considered by hundreds of millions of Arabs heroes who have recovered the dignity and pride of Arab nations. If at the end of the war they are still standing in Gaza this will be a huge victory for them, to hold out against this huge Israeli army and firepower will be an incredible achievement. They will gain even more than Hezbollah did during the last war."

Chris Hedges, who writes a weekly column for Truthdig that is published every Monday, is currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and a Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University, and spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Hedges, who has reported from more than 50 countries, worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, where he spent fifteen years. He is the author of the best selling “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,” which draws on his experiences in various conflicts to describe the patterns and behavior of nations and individuals in wartime. The book, a finalist for The National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, was described by Abraham Verghese, who reviewed the book for The New York Times, as “...a brilliant, thoughtful, timely and unsettling book whose greatest merit is that it will rattle jingoists, pacifists, moralists, nihilists, politicians and professional soldiers equally.” Hedges ... speaks Arabic and spent seven years in the Middle East, most of them as the Middle East Bureau Chief for The New York Times.

A Touch of Levity

2009-01-14T10:23:00.002+02:00

It's only amusing because it's true....

[translated from original Spanish source] - via fpp.co.uk January 11, 2008

NOTE the twelve golden and infallible truths that the media are obligated to adopt:

1. In the Middle East, the Arabs always attack first and Israel always defends itself. This defense is called 'retaliation'.

2. Neither Arabs, Palestinians nor Lebanese have the right to kill civilians. This is 'terrorism'.

3. Israel has the right to kill civilians. This is called 'legitimate defense'.

4. When Israel massively kills civilians, the Western Powers ask to her do it with courtesy or politeness. This is called 'reaction of the international community'.

5. Neither Palestinians nor Lebanese have the right to capture Israeli soldiers inside military installations with sentry and combat positions. This has to be called 'kidnapping of defenceless civilians'.

6. Israel has the right to kidnap as many Palestinians or Lebanese as they wish and at any time or place. Their present figures are about 10,000 imprisoned, 300 of whom are children and one thousand women. They do not need any evidence about their culpability. Israel has the right to detain such kidnapped prisoners indefinitely, even if they are people democratically elected by Palestinians. This is called 'imprisonment of terrorists'.

7. Whenever the word 'Hizbollah' is mentioned, it is compulsory to add in the same phrase 'supported and financed by Syria and Iran'.

8. When 'Israel' is mentioned it is absolutely forbidden to add 'supported and financed by the United States'. This could give the impression that the conflict is uneven and that Israel's existence of is not after all at risk.

9. In any statement about Israel, any mention of the following phrases is to be avoided: 'occupied territories', 'UN resolutions', 'Human Rights violations' or 'Geneva Convention'.

10. Palestinians, as well as Lebanese, always are 'cowards' hiding behind a civil population that dislike them. If they sleep in military accommodation with their families, this has a name: 'cowardice'. Israel is entitled to annihilate with bombs and missiles such barracks where they sleep. This is to be called a 'surgical, high-precision action'.

11. Israelis speak English, French, Spanish or Portuguese better than the Arabs. That is why they deserve to be interviewed more frequently and have better opportunities to explain to the audience at large the above rules, from 1 to 10. This is called 'media neutrality'.

12. Any person in disagreement with the above rules is to be branded a 'highly dangerous anti-Semitic terrorist'.

2009-01-13T14:01:00.003+02:00

Last Thursday, The Economist offered a historical analysis of the current conflict in Gaza that strikes me as not only cool and collected, but also as relatively even-handed. "The Hundred Years' War in Palestine" criticizes the common complaint by Israelis that Palestinians are unwilling to compromise:

The fact that the Arabs rejected the UN’s partition plan of 60 years ago has long given ideological comfort to Israel and its supporters. Abba Eban, an Israeli foreign minister, quipped that the Palestinians “never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity”. Israel’s story is that the Arabs have muffed at least four chances to have a Palestinian state. They could have said yes to partition in 1947. They could have made peace after the war of 1947-48. They had another chance after Israel routed its neighbours in 1967 (“We are just waiting for a telephone call,” said Moshe Dayan, Israel’s hero of that war). They had yet another in 2000 when Ehud Barak, now Israel’s defence minister and then its prime minister, offered the Palestinians a state at Bill Clinton’s fateful summit at Camp David.

This story of Israeli acceptance and Arab rejection is not just a yarn convenient to Israel’s supporters. It is worth remembering that it was not until 1988, a full 40 years after Israel’s birth, that Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) renounced its goal of liberating the whole of Palestine from the river to the sea. All the same, the truth is much more shaded than the Israeli account allows. There have been missed opportunities, and long periods of rejection, on Israel’s part, too.

Instead, The Economist argues that both sides have missed opportunities, and gives fair descriptions why these were well-considered and supportable positions on both sides in their historical contexts.

The Economist then goes on to explain how things have changed in recent years.

One far-seeing Zionist, Vladimir Jabotinsky, predicted in the 1930s not only that the Arabs would oppose the swamping of Palestine with Jewish immigrants but also that “if we were Arabs, we would not accept it either”. In order to survive, the Jews would have to build an “iron wall” of military power until the Arabs accepted their state’s permanence. And this came to pass. Only after several costly wars did Egypt and later the PLO conclude that, since Israel could not be vanquished, they had better cut a deal. In Beirut in 2002 all the Arab states followed suit, offering Israel normal relations in return for its withdrawal from all the occupied territories, an opening which Israel was foolish to neglect.

The depressing thing about the rise of Hamas and the decline of the Fatah wing of the PLO is that it reverses this decades-long trend. Hamas’s victory in the Palestinian elections of 2006 had many causes, including a reputation for honesty. Its victory did not prove that Palestinians had been bewitched by Islamist militancy or come to believe again in liberating all of Palestine by force. But if you take seriously what Hamas says in its charter, Hamas itself does believe this. So does Hizbullah, Lebanon’s “Party of God”; and so does a rising and soon perhaps nuclear-armed Iran. Some analysts take heart from Hamas’s offer of a 30-year truce if Israel returns to its 1967 borders. But it has never offered permanent recognition.

The article also sets the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into its global context, noting that they two sides are not acting independently, and never have been:

For too long the conflict in Palestine was a hostage to the cold war. America was once neutral: it was Eisenhower who forced Israel out of Gaza (and Britain out of Egypt) after Suez. But America later recruited Israel as an ally, and this suited the Israelis just fine. It gave them the support of a superpower whilst relieving them of a duty to resolve the quarrel with the Palestinians, even though their own long-term well-being must surely depend on solving that conflict.

It may be no coincidence that some of the most promising peacemaking between Israel and the Palestinians took place soon after the cold war ended. But now a new sort of geopolitical confrontation stalks the region, one that sets America against Iran, and the Islamist movements Iran supports against the Arab regimes in America’s camp. With Hamas inside Iran’s tent and Fatah in America’s, the Palestinians are now facing a paralysing schism.

This is the conclusion of the writers at The Economist, and I find it a very compelling one:

Taking Hamas down a peg is one thing. But even in the event of Israel “winning” in Gaza, a hundred years of war suggest that the Palestinians cannot be silenced by brute force. Hamas will survive, and with it that strain in Arab thinking which says that a Jewish state does not belong in the Middle East. To counter that view, Israel must show not only that it is too strong to be swept away but also that it is willing to give up the land—the West Bank, not just Gaza—where the promised Palestinian state must stand. Unless it starts doing that convincingly, at a minimum by freezing new settlement, it is Palestine’s zealots who will flourish and its peacemakers who will fall back into silence. All of Israel’s friends, including Barack Obama, should be telling it this.

Please, Barack Obama, Speak Out!

2009-01-12T12:31:00.002+02:00

From the Facebook Group One Million Strong Calling Obama To Support an Immediate Ceasefire In Gaza:

“I’m asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington…I’m asking you to believe in yours.”
- Barack Obama (www.barackobama.com)

This is a broad-based, diverse group composed of individuals of different races, creeds, religions, sexual orientations, and walks of life. We have come together to affirm our commitment to fundamental human rights and we call on President-Elect Barack Obama to make good on his campaign promise of ushering in an era of “change we can believe in.”

President-Elect Obama inspired America by reminding us that the ideals of life, liberty, equality and the pursuit of happiness can only be realized by one if enjoyed by all – not just in the United States, but across the world. The Gaza Strip is facing a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions which has been clearly documented by reputed international observers such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Save the Children, Oxfam, and Amnesty International. Therefore, it is incumbent upon us to call on President-Elect Obama to lend his inspiring support to worldwide calls for an immediate ceasefire, and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip. In doing so, President-Elect Obama will stand alongside human rights advocates and organizations the world over, including leading Israeli human rights organizations, B’Tselem and Jewish Voices for Peace.

There can be no clearer way for President-Elect Obama to demonstrate his commitment to making real his promise of a new and better era for the world. And there can be no better way for us to make true the promise of democracy than to join together and press President-Elect Obama to act on his beliefs.

Please note: This group is devoted solely to ending the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Therefore, moderators reserve the right to remove any posts that detract from the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and/or are discriminatory or abusive.
Also, in an effort to maintain the security of the group, we will under no circumstances be adding any additional administrators.

The success of this group hinges on you and your efforts. So, please forward widely, invite others to join, and encourage them to do the same!

Voice your opinion, and press President-Elect Obama to take action:
http://change.gov/page/s/yourvision

For background and further information:
1.
International Committee of the Red Cross Press Release
“Gaza: plight of civilians traumatic in 'full-blown humanitarian crisis'”

2.
CNN news report
“Patients lying everywhere”

3.
Amnesty International USA statement on the crisis

4.
Amnesty International Urges U.N. Security Council Not to Fail Civilians Caught in Gaza

5.
BBC reporting from a hospital in Gaza. Interview with European doctor at hospital.

6.
United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Report on Gaza

7.
Save the Children Launches Major Appeal to Assist Children in Gaza

8.
B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, acts primarily to change Israeli policy in the Occupied Territories and ensure that its government, which rules the Occupied Territories, protects the human rights of residents there and complies with its obligations under international law.

9.
“Jewish Voice for Peace joins millions around the world, including the 1,000 Israelis who protested in the streets of Tel Aviv this weekend, in condemning ongoing Israeli attacks on Gaza. We call for an immediate end to attacks on all civilians, whether Palestinian or Israeli.”

10.
Israeli offensive puts families’ and aid workers’ lives at risk, Oxfam warns.

What the Arabs Think of America--Andrew Hammond

2009-01-11T19:18:00.003+02:00

Yesterday I tried to wax eloquent on what I believe Americans know, don't know and want to know about the Arab world. Today, let me show you this book review of What the Arabs Think of America by long-time Middle East correspondent Andrew Hammond. I'm not impressed with the quality of the reviewer's writing, but I think Hammond's book must be an interesting read, and one that supports my own observations that, whatever Arabs may think of American policy, they do like Americans.

A year after the publication of the entertaining and well researched “Popular Culture in the Arab World,” Andrew Hammond has come up with another engaging title: “What the Arabs Think of America”. The author strongly dispels the notion that after Sept. 11 the Arab world — and especially Muslims — hates America. This book tries to show there is hardly any connection between the way Arabs feel toward American policies and American culture.

Anyone traveling through the Middle East is bound to notice signs of American consumerism, a lifestyle embraced by a large majority of Arab youth. According to the UN Arab Human Development Reports, about 38% of the population of Arab League member states are minors. Nowhere is this more visible than on Arab TV screens where western entertainment appeals to youth. Free-to-air satellite channels offer around the clock US sitcoms, reality TV, chat shows and movies.

Other reviewers have been more eloquent in their description and review of the book.

Review

“This is a well-documented and timely volume since there are currently few other works dealing with the same subject. The book is based on the author's....thorough knowledge of Middle Eastern countries, their history, and politics before and after 9/11/2001; interviews with Arabs of various political persuasions and social strata; his own witnessing of events; and writings of political analysts and novelists.”–MultiCultural Review

“[a] timely and informative study.”–Arab News

Product Description

For hundreds of years, pilgrims to Mecca have paused in the narrow mountain pass known as Mina to cast stones at the three pillars of the Jamaraat in a symbolic casting out of the Devil. Recently, someone added graffiti to the central pillar, four Latin letters of the English script - Bush. These days, Americans and America provoke strong opinions from Arabs of all sorts, from politicians and journalists to the ordinary men and women of 'Arab Street'. Their voices aren't always heard in the West, but for over a decade British journalist Andrew Hammond, based in the Middle East, has been listening to what they have to say, and in this book they are heard loud and clear. Many of the issues are political. What do the Arabs think of American support for Israel or its close relationship with Saudi Arabia? How have they reacted to the American occupation of Iraq? But American influence in the Arab world isn't limited to politics. What is the Arab view of American film, television or the latest hip-hop or rap music? And what, for that matter, do Arabs think of Americans themselves, their life-style, attitudes and character? Incorporating interviews with individuals of all sorts from all over the Arab world, What the Arabs Think of America gives voice to the unheard partner in a relationship in crisis. After an introductory chapter describing the historical background, six chapters are devoted to issues of crucial importance to Arabs: 1) 'Domestic America' (exploring Arab enthusiasm for American pop culture, admiration for the US as a land of freedom, and ambivalence about religion in America); 2) 'The Palestinians' (showing how US policy towards Israel and Palestine has come to dominate Arab views of the US in recent years); 3) 'The Iraq Project' (articulating Arab theories about American motives for the invasion and reactions to the occupation, including the Abu Ghraib scandal); 4) 'Peace with Egypt' (highlighting the general Arab view that America's brokerage of the 1979 Camp David agreement deliberately split the Arab world in its opposition to Israel); 5) 'The House of Saud' (reviewing Arab distrust of the close relationship between the ruling Saudi royal family and the US since the monarchy allowed US companies to drill for oil in the 1930s); and 6) 'The Sudanese Card' (exploring Arab dismay at American support of south Sudanese Christian separatists at war with the Islamic north). A short chapter speculating on likely future developments in the Arab-America relationship concludes the book. A Chronology, Glossary (of Arab institutions, political parties, historical events, etc.), Biographies (of key Arab figures) and Bibliography help orientate the reader.

So for those of my friends in America who are interested in learning more about what the Arabs think of us, and for those of you who are worried about my safety in this time of protests, I think this book would both be accurate and reassure you.

What Do Americans Know?

2009-01-10T16:57:00.007+02:00

While I know that Rashid Khalidi is a controversial figure in the West, and his friendship with Barack Obama was portrayed by many of Israel's supporters as highly undesirable, I think he makes some very valid points in this New York Times Op Ed, and I can't help but find his conclusion compelling:

This war on the people of Gaza isn’t really about rockets. Nor is it about “restoring Israel’s deterrence,” as the Israeli press might have you believe. Far more revealing are the words of Moshe Yaalon, then the Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff, in 2002: “The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.”

Rashid Khalidi, a professor of Arab studies at Columbia, is the author of the forthcoming “Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East."

However, I find his title, "What You Don't Know About Gaza," to be presumptive. It's a common thread for academics and those of us expats who are living in the Middle East to assume that Americans are largely ignorant of the truth of things here. Perhaps the most famous example is the Website If Americans Knew. Certainly the conversation we had over Skype the other night with my roommate's friends back in Michigan suggests that Americans are largely ignorant of the reality on the ground here.

On the other hand, the very incidence of that conversation indicated that Americans are searching for answers. This was what impressed me most about Americans when I returned from Jordan the first time in 2005. In the case of my roommate's friends, perhaps these questions were not surprising, coming from students of political science asking about governance and peacemaking issues in the Palestinian Territories. In 2005, I expected my father and my college friends to ask me hard questions about the Arab World, and they have never disappointed that expectation. What shocked me was that everyone had questions about the Arab World, Islam, and the Middle East. I was fielding questions from gas station clerks, from housewives, from friends and family friends who had hardly ever been more than 100 miles from home and had definitely never left the US of A. Not only did they have hundreds of questions, but they really listened to my answers, and didn't assume that they knew what was really going on in the Middle East.

There was then and, I believe, continues to now be a strong sense in the United States that we need to learn more about the Middle East and Islam, that it is an increasingly important influence on our lives. Yes, progress is slow, and yes, the current economic woes in the US will probably slow it further. There are many issues in the world, both domestic and international, and while the Middle East is high on my agenda, I recognize that for many people, there are other priorities. But I think it may be disingenuous to suggest that Americans are ignorant of what Gaza is really like.

Then again, I have my own set of blinders. I'm reminded of the night in November 2000 when my family sat around the dinner table in bewilderment. "I don't know anyone who voted for Bush. Do you known anyone who voted for Bush?"
"No. I don't know anyone who voted for Bush. Do you know anyone who supported Bush?"
And so it went, around the dinner table. We didn't know anyone who wanted a Bush regime. Until finally someone said, "Maybe we just don't know the right people!"

Word Still Leaks Out

2009-01-08T18:14:00.006+02:00

The Israelis aren't letting foreign journalists into the Gaza Strip to cover the incursion, despite widespread agreement that having journalists on the ground in times of war is good for international opinion and justice:

"The barring of outside news organizations from Gaza hampers the flow of unbiased information of vital interest to the entire world. Authorities on all sides should work to allow access by journalists in keeping with the aims of press freedom," said John Daniszewski, the AP's managing editor for international news.

The Israeli government has long banned Israeli journalists from entering Gaza because of fears for their safety, but foreign reporters previously were permitted in, even during times of heavy fighting.

Human Rights Watch urged Israel to open Gaza to journalists and human rights monitors to report on the actions of both sides. "Their presence can discourage abuse by warring parties and help save lives," the New York-based organization said.

There are plenty of theories floating about the blogosphere about why: They don't want the rest of the world to observe their war crimes. They don't want anyone to know that they're mostly guessing at where the militants might be. They're worried about the effects of collateral damage on Israel's image and security. They can't guarantee the safety of the press. They don't believe that foreign media reports objectively on Israel.

It doesn't matter, though. Word still leaks out. The networks are interviewing doctors in Gaza's hospital by phone, or monitoring statistics from the UN. Bloggers around the world are posting images of bloody children. Last night, right here in Jebal Amman's al-Balad Theater, the names of the victims were read by a chorus of actors, in solidarity with the families they've left behind. And, of course, Gaza has its own native journalistic forces, who are getting out pieces like this beautiful elegy of a city by Ibrahim Barzak of the Associated Press.

There are other pictures that haunt me. The Israeli army issued a video of the bombing of the Hamas-run government compound, which it posted on YouTube. In it, I also can see my home being destroyed, and I watch it obsessively.

Even when Israel tries to use the digital age to it advantage, it still works against them.

The Hadi grocery where we once shopped is closed. Food is scarce all over town.

....

Samir, who is 9, told me his family has no water at home and he wanted to bring enough for a bath because he and his brother smell.

That's a problem for most people in Gaza right now.

In my father-in-law's building, residents throw out bags of spoiled food. With no power, refrigerators don't run and fresh food quickly rots.

And if you think that's bad, things are going to get worse, according to the UN.

But then, of course, it's never that easy, as Marty Kaplan so eloquently points out. He highlights exactly my dilemma in this whole issue. Both sides have legitimate arguments, and how can you come down entirely on one side?

Native Voices of Discontent

2009-01-07T14:55:00.007+02:00

What does it say when Bashar al-Assad, President of Syria, which is sometimes included in the Axis of Evil, is calling for compromise on American Network TV?

"They are ready [to make a deal]," Al-Assad told CNN's Cal Perry in an exclusive interview. "They were ready, they are ready. Today, the factors have changed so the requirement will change at the same time.

"We cannot talk about the same condition, like what happened a few years ago. Otherwise, we'll keep moving from a cease-fire to another conflict to another breaking of this cease-fire and so on. The more blood you have, the more difficult to talk about peace will be."

Al-Assad met with Sarkozy earlier Tuesday. Sarkozy appealed to Al-Assad for help in bringing about a halt to the conflict in the Middle East -- an Israeli incursion into Gaza after eight days of Israeli airstrikes.
--CNN

Bashar isn't as violent and partisan as his father, Hafiz al-Assad, but he's hardly a pacifist in favor of compromise with Israel. Consider the Golan.

Here's a highly educated, well-travelled Middle Eastern blogger, Cent Uygur, who frequently lambasts both sides. Most recently, he had this to say:

The government of Israel keeps saying their actions in Gaza are justifiable because they are doing it in retaliation for what Hamas has done. Hamas says the same exact thing -- that they are firing the rockets in retaliation for what Israel did in imposing a blockade and bombing their tunnels and leaders. I find both points completely unpersuasive -- yes, including Israel's.

Every day now, I hear someone saying, "What was Israel supposed to do? Hamas keeps firing rockets into their country."

And then Mr. Uygur proceeds to answer that very question with the following well-justified points:

1. Not break the cease-fire in the first place.
2. You are stronger. Don't strike back.
3. Make a peace deal already.

He ends with this:

Finally, let me ask you this personal question to give you a sense of what people mean when they say Israel is acting disproportionately. Let's say you're walking down the street in your local town and you hear gun fire. You have a vague suspicion that someone is firing at you from a nearby school, would you firebomb the school just in case?

You know what the answer to that question is, if you're a decent human being. No way. You might be scared out of your mind. You might be afraid for your life. But you are not going to throw a bomb into a school full of children just in case (especially when you're not even sure that's where the shots are coming from). You would be called a psychopath if you did. But today, we hear excuses like, "Hey, that's what happens in wars." Maybe, that's why it is incumbent upon us to try a little harder to avoid them. So that we don't all act like psychopaths when they start.

It's not just Arabs and Turks who are speaking out about Israel's actions in Gaza. The statements of Israeli academic Avi Shlaim have been classified thusly by The Guardian:

How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe
Oxford professor of international relations Avi Shlaim served in the Israeli army and has never questioned the state's legitimacy. But its merciless assault on Gaza has led him to devastating conclusions

In his own words, he said:

On 2 June 1948, Sir John Troutbeck wrote to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, that the Americans were responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed by "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". I used to think that this judgment was too harsh but Israel's vicious assault on the people of Gaza, and the Bush administration's complicity in this assault, have reopened the question.

I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I utterly reject is the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the June 1967 war had very little to do with security and everything to do with territorial expansionism. The aim was to establish Greater Israel through permanent political, economic and military control over the Palestinian territories. And the result has been one of the most prolonged and brutal military occupations of modern times.

Four decades of Israeli control did incalculable damage to the economy of the Gaza Strip. With a large population of 1948 refugees crammed into a tiny strip of land, with no infrastructure or natural resources, Gaza's prospects were never bright. Gaza, however, is not simply a case of economic under-development but a uniquely cruel case of deliberate de-development. To use the Biblical phrase, Israel turned the people of Gaza into the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, into a source of cheap labour and a captive market for Israeli goods. The development of local industry was actively impeded so as to make it impossible for the Palestinians to end their subordination to Israel and to establish the economic underpinnings essential for real political independence.

Gaza is a classic case of colonial exploitation in the post-colonial era. Jewish settlements in occupied territories are immoral, illegal and an insurmountable obstacle to peace. They are at once the instrument of exploitation and the symbol of the hated occupation. In Gaza, the Jewish settlers numbered only 8,000 in 2005 compared with 1.4 million local residents. Yet the settlers controlled 25% of the territory, 40% of the arable land and the lion's share of the scarce water resources. Cheek by jowl with these foreign intruders, the majority of the local population lived in abject poverty and unimaginable misery. Eighty per cent of them still subsist on less than $2 a day. The living conditions in the strip remain an affront to civilised values, a powerful precipitant to resistance and a fertile breeding ground for political extremism.

That's from a self-identified Israeli loyalist. It only illustrates what I have heard from Jordanians and expats alike at least half a dozen times a day: "What does Israel think they're accomplishing? This isn't just bad for Gaza and the Palestinians. This is bad for Israel!"

I put all these out there because these men say precisely what I want to say, but with far more clarity. Many thanks to the friends who pointed these articles out to me by posting them to Facebook.

And I leave you with this level-headed, eloquent interview with my hero, Queen Noor:

Suffer the Children....

2009-01-06T19:07:00.008+02:00

I'm so glad that Megan posted this article to Facebook:

SDEROT, Israel -- Mohammed Abu Hassanin may be a young boy, but he's old enough to know he's scared of the attacks being launched by Israel in Gaza.

"When the Jews bomb us when we are asleep, [Hassanin] says 'We get scared,' " a translator says. Hassanin is one boy from Gaza speaking frankly to an anchor on Hamas TV about the attacks, which have gone on for 10 days.

Children like him have accounted for one-third of the casualties at Gaza's main hospital, foreign doctors say. And now Hamas and their media are making them the face of the attacks.

The children have seen terrible images of tragedy: their friends injured or killed and bloodied bodies in the streets.

They are images Hassanin says he will never forget. He'll keep them stored away until he's old enough to do something about it.

"When we will grow up, we will bomb them back," a CNN translator quoted the boy saying on Hamas TV.

It's a sentiment psychiatrists in Gaza say could be responsible for a frightening future--that the violence children are witnessing will sow the seeds for future violence.
Watch how Arab media is covering the crisis »

Story Highlights:

Boy on Hamas TV: "When we will grow up, we will bomb them back"
Tearful girl: "Maybe my sister could die some day, I don't know. I am afraid"
Psychiatrists say seeing destruction firsthand can create violence in the future
One psychiatrist said earlier children witnessing violence grew into extremists

I'm glad of this story, because it's about time I saw a story about the kids on a major Western network like CNN. This is my bugbear in all conflicts. Children of conflict are haunted by what happens to them in the fray. Some are able to take those experiences and use them to inspire lives of greatness, of service, of positive leadership. But they won't all be able to channel their experiences constructively.

Children can be very resilient, it's true. I've seen it. But they're also still forming their worldviews, their psyches, and their futures. What kind of future are these children forming?:

Israel Defense Forces tank fire killed at least 30 Palestinians at a United Nations school in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, UN officials and medical sources and at two hospitals said.

Two tank shells exploded outside the Gaza school, spraying shrapnel on people inside and outside the building, where hundreds of Palestinians had sought refuge from fighting between Israeli soldiers and Hamas militants. In addition to the dead, several dozen people were wounded, the officials said.

Medical officials said all the dead were either people sheltering in the school or local residents.

An Israeli sources said that militants barricaded in the school had opened fire on IDF soldiers.

This is neither a pro-Israeli or a pro-Palestinian post. I'm appalled that Israelis would fire on a school, but I'm also appalled that the Palestinian militants would take refuge in a school and expect either that the Israelis wouldn't attack, or that the deaths and injuries of those children would make anyone more sympathetic to their cause!

No, this is like every divorce my parents walked their friends through. They were constantly accused of taking the wrong divorcing parent's side in the mess, and my parents always had the same answer: "We're not on your side, we're on the side of the kids!" That's where I stand. So I'll say it again:

I'm on the side of the kids. All the kids. Everywhere. No child should have to suffer bombings, trauma, hunger, poverty, treatable illness or death when it could possibly be avoided, regardless of where that child happened to be born.

Punishing Gazans Yet Again?

2008-12-30T19:02:00.000+02:00

Stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
--Albert Einstein

We are witnessing right now what BBC World is calling the worst attack on Gaza in the history of the conflict in terms of casualties, not even a week after the end of a 6 month truce.

UN Special Rapporteur Richard Falk has this to say:

Against this background, it is especially painful for me, as an American Jew, to feel compelled to portray the ongoing and intensifying abuse of the Palestinian people by Israel through a reliance on such an inflammatory metaphor as 'holocaust'...

...and has even gone so far as to use the word "genocide."
In fact, I can't begin to put this in words as well as he, Sabbahblog and others are doing, but I do want to contribute my two gersh/cents.

I don't dispute Israel's right to defend its citizens. This was part of my dilemma over the 2006 Lebanon War, because there was an immediate threat to innocent Israeli lives, and it was legitimately hard to distinguish purely military targets. The population density in the Gaza Strip makes it even harder to distinguish military targets, which is precisely why, after the publicity beating Israel got after the 2006 Lebanon War, I should think they would want to be more careful about civilian casualties. One Israeli was killed, so the only appropriate response was to kill 350 Gazans and injure over 1000 more? Come on, Ms. Livni!

If "the people of Gaza do not deserve to suffer" for what Hamas does, as PM Olmert said in today's press conference, where is the proof of that? It's not suffering to be under a strangling blockade of even basic food and medical supplies since June 2007? It's not suffering to never know when Israeli planes, tanks or troops will attack?

Ehud Barak said the IDF only "... attacked only targets that are part of the Hamas organizations [and will] make an effort in order to avoid any unnecessary inconveniences to the people of Gaza." Is that why they bombed a university? It's not an "unnecessary inconvenience" to allow no food, water or electricity over the border for weeks at a time?

And what, exactly, is all of this supposed to accomplish? Does Israel really think that cutting off aid and basic necessities and raining down bombs on the Gaza Strip will make Palestinians more sympathetic to Israel? Do they really think that by killing hundreds of Gazans, this will make them stop retaliating on Israeli citizens? This is the very epitomy of what Albert Einstein was talking about when he defined stupidity!

Though I have to give Israel kudos for their timing. What with the Christmas season, the global economic woes, and the US administration in transition, hardly anyone is paying serious attention to what's going on over here. This much, at least, shows definite cunning!

I try, in this blog, to be eloquent, to say things that are well considered and meaningful, but I just feel so frustrated and impotent today. I did take some food donations to Books@Cafe today to be sent to Gaza. Apparently, only Jordanians are being allowed into the Gaza Strip to deliver aid. I guess Israel is worried about what the UN and Red Crescent might have to say about the conditions of people there. Certainly Israel displayed their unhappiness with the comments of Richard Falk which I mentioned above when they denied him entry to the Gaza Strip.

There was some talk on BBC today about the lessons UIsrael has learned from the 2006 Lebanon War, and I can think of a couple they failed to mention. Apparently Israel learned that there's nothing the international community is ready or able to do to actually stop Israel's actions. I feel, too, like they've taken a page from George W. Bush, who legitimized the Pre-Emptive Strike Doctrine that, for lack of a better word, completely fucked up Iraq, and now seems to be allowing Israel to do the same to the Gaza Strip.

I'm no Juan Cole or Richard Falk; I know that the words I put here won't reach many people or make much difference, especially as disjointed and incoherent as this rant is, but I feel compelled to publish something, anything to express my outrage and frustration.

Planes, Trains and Innovation Lacking

2008-12-24T20:35:00.003+02:00

It was the description of the difference between American airports and public transportation, and that of the rest of the world, that first drew me into this article by recent Nobel Prize winner Thomas Friedman. My father likes to compare the Swiss train stations, which apologized profusely when a train was just 2 minutes behind schedule, with the traffic reports we listened to after we got back from Switzerland that habitually indicated 45 minute delays on the commuter trains into the US capital! Just this week I was fuming to someone about how luggage carts are free(or at most require a 25 cent refundable deposit) in every airport I've ever been to EXCEPT in the States, where they cost $3 and, in my experience, are often broken. (I had one in Philadelphia towards the end of my 24 hour trip home from Peace Corps that would only turn left, but there was no way I was paying another $3 for another cart!)

However, it should come as no surprise that the winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics had very cogent things to say about the future of the American economy.

Because of the financial crisis, Barack Obama has the bipartisan support to spend $1 trillion in stimulus. But we must make certain that every bailout dollar, which we’re borrowing from our kids’ future, is spent wisely.

It has to go into training teachers, educating scientists and engineers, paying for research and building the most productivity-enhancing infrastructure — without building white elephants. Generally, I’d like to see fewer government dollars shoveled out and more creative tax incentives to stimulate the private sector to catalyze new industries and new markets. If we allow this money to be spent on pork, it will be the end of us.

America still has the right stuff to thrive. We still have the most creative, diverse, innovative culture and open society — in a world where the ability to imagine and generate new ideas with speed and to implement them through global collaboration is the most important competitive advantage. China may have great airports, but last week it went back to censoring The New York Times and other Western news sites. Censorship restricts your people’s imaginations. That’s really, really dumb. And that’s why for all our missteps, the 21st century is still up for grabs.

John Kennedy led us on a journey to discover the moon. Obama needs to lead us on a journey to rediscover, rebuild and reinvent our own backyard.

Merry Christmas

2008-12-24T19:57:00.005+02:00

Earthrise is the name given to this photograph of the earth taken by astronaut William Anders on Christmas Eve 1968 during the Apollo 8 mission. Wilderness photographer Galen Rowell called it "the most influential environmental photograph ever taken." Now an editor for the journal Nature reenvisions this photograph as an enviornmental call to action for another generation in this article.

But it is solar energy, indirectly or directly, that will dominate the picture, simply because of its abundance. The Sun delivers more energy to the Earth in an hour than humanity uses in a year.

Not All Holidays Created Equal

2008-12-24T09:48:00.004+02:00

THE LIGHTS are out in Gaza again and few are paying attention. The 1.5 million Palestinians living in the densely populated strip are being collectively punished once more, while Israel attempts to strangle the Hamas government. The UN agency that feeds hundreds of thousands of people is unable to get supplies in because the border is closed, and a plea from UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon has been ignored.
Ignoring the Plight in Gaza
by Yousef Munayyer in the Boston Globe

This article was posted to Facebook by my friend Jennifer, whom I met when she was teaching me Arabic in the Peace Corps, whose wedding to a fellow Peace Corps Volunteer I attended in Amman, in his village of Rajaf near Petra, and in Kansas City, Missouri (the only one other than his family to attend all three). She worked on the Obama campaign (though she was instructed to tell voters she was Spanish or Italian, not Arab), changed her Facebook name to Jennifer "Hussein" Walsh in protest of the anti-Muslim slurs hurled at Obama, and said of this article, "Somebody is writing about this." Too often, for those of us who are concerned about the situation in Gaza, it seems that no one does write about this.

Like Mr. Munayyer, I wonder why Israel believes that continuing the blockade of Gaza will change anything within Gaza or any of the Palestinian Territories.

After Hamas was democratically elected, sanctions followed and the grip began to tighten on the Gaza Strip. Fuel supplies ran short, malnutrition rose, and Gaza's only power plant could not be relied on to provide electricity. Store shelves were often empty of food, and many who were already impoverished were now struggling even more.

And what, if anything, has been gained by all this? If the objective was to diminish public support for the Hamas government, it is hardly working.

Some public-opinion polling of Palestinians has consistently showed that Hamas remains as popular today as it was before it was elected. Some polls also indicate that Hamas garners its highest approval ratings when the collective measures against the Gaza Strip have been most punitive.

But aside from the fact that the Israeli policy of collective punishment, and world complacency to it, is counterproductive, there is a greater problem with this policy: It is morally reprehensible.

In 1949, when Soviets had surrounded Berlin and were ready to choke a war-torn population into submission, the Western world refused to stand silent. In the boldest move in the history of the Cold War, the United States spearheaded an airlift of food and supplies to Berlin, flying in the face of Soviet oppression, confident the Soviets would not fire upon humanitarian aid.

Where, one has to wonder, is that moral courage now?

I am not asking President Bush or President-elect Obama to declare "Ana Ghazawi," the Palestinian equivalent of "Ich bin ein Berliner." Rather, the United States should strongly state to Israel that this failed policy is only hurting innocent civilians and is making Israel and the United States look terrible in the process. While Hamas must moderate its positions if it is to be considered a legitimate political player, this policy has failed to change Hamas.

The collective punishment in Gaza has left a deep and troubling scar on America's image in the world and has hindered our ability to maneuver politically in the region. If we are truly living in a new era, and change has come, let us hope it will come for the innocent civilians in Gaza too.

Yousef Munayyer is a policy analyst for the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

Reading this article reminded me of the truly terrible situation I saw on the BBC and meant to write about during the week of Eid. The second week in December was the most important holiday on the Islamic calendar, the Feast of the Sacrifice (Eid al-Adha), commemorating Ibrahim's (Abraham's) willingness to submit to the will of God and sacrifice his first-born son Ishmael (Isaac in Judeo-Christian tradition). It is traditionally a time for family, feasting and sacrificing one's own sheep to God, in imitation of the ram which the angel told Ibrahim at the last minute would be an acceptable substitute for Ishmael.

Merely finding the food to feed one's family in Gaza has been a challenge for many years, as the border is frequently closed, and so deliveries are sporadic and uncertain. From time to time, the UN, Red Cross and other international bodies step in to demand that Israel allow food and basic necessities into Gaza, but it is not consistent. There are also, reportedly, networks of tunnels allowing the smuggling of food and necessities into Gaza. In the days leading up to Eid al-Adha, in fact, live sheep were being smuggled through those tunnels for the holiday festivities.

However, this year there was a new challenge for Gazans. Israel blocked banks from transporting bills and coins into the Gaza Strip in the days leading up to Eid. On the last Thursday before Eid, banks and ATMs were forced to close, because they didn't have the bills to pay the paychecks that were to be issued that day. Banks were then closed for the whole next week for the holiday. This meant that people not only didn't have the money to buy sheep for sacrifice, but that they didn't even have the means to purchase even basic food items for 10 days.

The Gaza Strip is in serious danger of a complete economic collapse into a barter economy, but one in which there isn't even anything to barter for!

Yes, Hamas has supported and probably still supports so-called terrorist ideology and actions, but why is that? When a people under military blockade have no vote, no voice, no hope, no food, no money, and not even anything to barter with, what other choice do they have?

Maybe President-elect Obama will never say it, but I will: "Ana Ghazawiya!"

I Would Throw My Shoes, Too!

2008-12-20T23:10:00.003+02:00

Emily put me on to the fabulous commentary excerpted here, by Najlaa A. Al-Nashi, with Noah Baker Merrill, of Direct Aid Iraq:

You may have heard the news that an Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at the American president, but as an Iraqi I’d like to share with you a few details about the journalist, and why he did that.

Muntather’s actions have, for these days, united Sunnis, Shiites, and Christians. It united Iraqis as Iraqis. And it only took a few seconds. Sunni and Shiite tribal leaders have publicly asked that Muntather not be referred to using his tribal affiliation (Muntather al-Zaidi), because they believe his tribal affiliation now encompasses all the tribes of Iraq: They’ve asked for him to be referred to as “Muntather Al-Iraqi” (Muntather the Iraqi). At the same time, the tribal leaders have said that they hope it is now clear that they have only one enemy — the occupation of Iraq.

The Iraqi response shows clearly that Muntather’s actions have triggered a deep release in Iraqi society. It gives an indication to the outside world how much so many Iraqis oppose the occupation and the ongoing presence of foreign troops in their country, but have been without a voice that cut through the walls of silence and the filtered mainstream media.

It is important to be clear that this action by a single man does not arise from his role as a journalist, or from some specific incident or time in his life. It comes from an Iraqi man who, like all of his people, has suffered greatly from occupation, from the actions of mercenaries like those employed by Blackwater Worldwide, from the torture of Iraqis by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere, and from the sectarian violence that the occupation has cultivated, fueled, and allowed to thrive. Muntather himself was kidnapped a few months ago, though thankfully he was released alive.

Unfortunately, Direct Aid Iraq is reporting that he was tortured in the care of Iraqi police, a practice common under the Saddam Regime, and unfortunately not much discouraged by the Americans, Jordanians, Saudis and others who trained those police. It reminds me of what my roommate said when he heard about the incident: "I wonder if they'll kill his whole family for this." I'm happy to see that the shoe-throwing has not fueled the sectarian violence, and that the Americans didn't cart poor Muntather off to Guantanamo for the insult. Nonetheless, it is a vivid example of how ludicrous it is to think that the United States would be able to bring democracy and freedom of speech and expression to Iraq by the means which the Bush Administration has chosen.

Small Victory

2008-12-03T13:39:00.003+02:00

I wanted him to be President. I hoped someone would see his potential as a Vice President, criss-crossing the world solving problems as he did for the Clinton Administration, but with more weight. When that didn't happen, I held out hope for Secretary of State, even though I figured the position was probably promised to Senator Clinton in the still-secret meeting with Senator Obama that marked the end of her campaign.

He's been US Ambassador to the UN. The man negotiated hostage releases from North Korea, Cuba, Sudan and Saddam Hussein himself. He brokered a ceasefire in Sudan that, while short-lived, was the most successful such deal to date. Three times, he's been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. On the other hand,

In 2006, Forbes credited Richardson's reforms in naming Albuquerque, New Mexico the best city in the U.S. for business and careers. The Cato Institute, meanwhile, has consistently rated Richardson as one of the most fiscally responsible Democratic governors in the nation.
--Wikipedia

Perhaps Secretary of Commerce is not a position unsuited to his talents. I only wish he'd been able to returned to the world stage, because I see in Governor Bill Richardson the statesmanship and global vision that I admired in President Bill Clinton. I thought that a Vice President or Secretary of State Richardson could help restore what is left of the American image after 8 years of the neo-cons.

Still, who knows what the future holds for Secretary of Commerce Richardson?

Blogging in the Kingdoms

2008-12-03T10:31:00.003+02:00

Here are a couple interesting blog entries by friends about blogging in the Arab world: from kinziblogs with some interesting comments by the very Jordanians effected, and about a Saudi blogger whose neighbors can't see what he writes.

I feel somewhat protected by being an American in Jordan, which depends heavily on American funds to run its government and its economy, and is therefore loathe to offend the American public. However, rest assured, it has crossed my mind more than once that blogging in this part of the world is not without risk.

I filter my writing carefully anyway. I know that friends, family and potential employers all have access to my blogs, as well as the friends, family and current or potential employers of those whom I mention in my blog. I definitely don't want to offend those people, who are important to me, nor jeapordize their personal or business relationships. I also have a definite agenda to help Westerners see this region in a more sympathetic, positive light.

All of this, however, is about my own personal concerns. As a US American, as a humanist, and as a writer, I find government control of information appalling.

Schools for Cubicle Jockeys

2008-12-03T09:10:00.005+02:00

The following anonymous comment (that sounds an awful lot like it came from my sister!) was left on my blog entry "New Teachers Needed":

As a student (victim, survivor?) of the American school system and a current cubicle jockey, I must ask, what world are the children not prepared for? I am numbered and accounted for at every turn. Recently I was sent to the principal’s office (DMV) for not having my hall pass (work order for my car) signed. Never mind that I fixed the problem promptly. I have a job where I write- and I am expected to be empathetic and caring, within the proscribed limits. I must hold the position for a year before I am allowed to move up, no matter how fast my learning curve is. I am also struggling- as I did in elementary, middle, and high school, to simplify my responses to customer queries in order to cater to the least common denominator. I have been placed on a “Career Path” by my supervisor, who is currently working to get me more exposure to the same department on another site so that my year-end evaluation (grades) will be higher and stack up better against my peers. There are two main cliques that lunch together, and a few of us floaters that wander between groups. How is this different than school?

Yes, you're right, public schools definitely prepare us for the scenario you describe. But the "Shift Happens" video I posted before, or the TED speeches by Sir Ken Robinson and Ray Kurzweil all suggest that, while this model still works at T. Rowe Price, Merril Lynch and Ford, they won't sustain us too far into the future.

But wait a minute! It's not working for Merril Lynch and Ford, is it? And I don't think it's the way things are working in the most successful segments of Google, Zappos and other new companies that are taking the Twenty-First century by storm. Some of the newest success stories are a matter of wikinomics or built on the open-source model of Linux and OpenOffice.org.

I think, in fact, that you've gotten the point exactly. Public education, as it emerged out of the Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century, has been designed to train and prepare students for the kind of corporate culture that has produced the cubicle jockey. In fact, however, this model is becoming obsolete, and while it may work for our generation, I believe Sir Ken Robinson when he says that it will not be relevant for today's first graders.

Courage

2008-12-01T21:56:00.002+02:00

So how about a Thanksgiving toast: Let’s give thanks for the courage of these magnificent women, and to those readers who had the faith to send checks to an illiterate rape victim in a remote Pakistani village.

People are always telling me how brave I am to do what I do, traipsing about the world, volunteering here, there and everywhere....

But THIS is courage!

Kids Love Pirates

2008-12-01T09:07:00.005+02:00

It was a cold, dark, wet and miserable Sunday afternoon. I was in my car, driving my 12-year-old daughter and her friend back from a birthday party. I was tired and fed up from being in the car.
"Mummy, mummy," trilled a voice from the back. "I want to phone the pirates."
My daughter had heard me repeatedly trying to get through to the Somali pirates on board the Sirius Star.
They usually picked up the phone but put it down again when I said I was from the BBC. My obsession with getting through to them had reached the point that I had even saved their number on my mobile phone.
"Mummy, mummy, please can I phone the pirates for you?"
"No."
"Pleeeeez."
By this time, with rain battering my windscreen and cars jamming the road, I was at the end of my tether.
"OK", I said, tossing the phone into the back of the car.
"They are under P for pirates."
"Hello. Please can I talk to the pirates," said my daughter in her obviously childish voice.
I could hear someone replying and a bizarre conversation ensued which eventually ended when my daughter collapsed in giggles.
This was a breakthrough. Dialogue had been established.

I guess it's hard to establish contact when you represent the Power Couple of the US and Britain that intervenes half-heartedly in Africa only when intervention sends the right message.
Don't get me wrong. I applaud this reporter for her tenacity, for her determination to get the point of view of the pirates themselves. This is reporting at its most responsible, the kind of reporting I was calling for recently. But it's exactly what she was able to report in doing so that makes my point:

A pirate, who called himself Daybad, spoke in Somali, calmly and confidently. He said Somalis were left with no choice but to take to the high seas.

"We've had no government for 18 years. We have no life. Our last resource is the sea, and foreign trawlers are plundering our fish."

Once upon a time, the United States of America and Great Britain declared that they were not going to stand idly by and watch Somalia fall into ruin. And they continue to warn that the situation in Somalia is fostering anger and radical Islamism and that it is a serious threat in the "War On Terror." Yadda yadda yadda. It sounds great on the airwaves and on the campaign trail. When it comes down to it, though, the US and the UK are completely unwilling to put their resources where their mouths are.

I understand that resources are limited, and now more limited than ever with their Iraqi follies and the repurcussions of Americans' and Britains' unwillingness to live within their means. I also know all too well that, even when we are willing to put our resources where our mouths are, we are not always effective. (Just ask me about a bus station in the southern Madaba governorate of Jordan.) It's just frustrating, when you're on this side of the pond or the Channel, to listen to the talk and know that, not only is nothing going to be done, but that the world's most powerful forces are going to continue doing the selfish, damaging, infuriating things that they have always done, the things that have contributed to the problems that they claim to want to fix.

New Teachers Needed

2008-11-21T22:45:00.004+02:00

Is today's education teaching our children to live in their world?

Leaving my job as a second grade teacher at the Modern American School here in Amman, Jordan, has made me rethink a conversation we frequently had in Peace Corps with Jackie and Lynn, who were retired elementary school teachers, and had been students in the American system fifty years ago. They would frequently say that Jordan's education system is about where America's was 50 years ago, and it would take time to catch up. I would say that the Modern American School may be where the American system was 40 years ago, but I keep thinking back to a video I saw on YouTube some time ago:

We can't afford to be stuck in an educational philosophy that is 40 years old. We can't even afford to be stuck in today's educational philosophy.

I don't know what the answer is. That's the whole point. None of us knows what the answer is, what our new teaching model needs to look like. But I know that it shouldn't look like this:

My math class was the hardest to teach, not only because I don't do math the way most people do math, but also because it was a class of extremes. I had one student who needed me to do every problem with her, because she couldn't remember how to do them from one question to the next. I also had about five students who finished their workbook pages in five minutes, finished four or five additional double-sided worksheets, and still had twenty minutes left in the class period, day after day. My mother suggested what seemed to me like a brilliant solution, which I proposed to my supervisor: Elementary school math books are designed to be more or less self-explanatory to students who are competent readers. Couldn't I just put my best students together at one table and allow them to teach themselves at their own pace? It was essentially what those students had been asking to be allowed to do for weeks.

Now, I know that my supervisor was thinking of the third grade teachers when she answered my question. The third grade teachers who would have those students next year, and have to fit them back into the officially sanctioned little boxes. I am sympathetic to my supervisor's answer, but I am shocked nonetheless by it. She said:

"Absolutely not! We can't have students thinking that they can learn by themselves!"

The parents of my students are being told and believe that they are getting the best possible education for their children. What their children are learning, however, is to work within a social system that will be completely irrelevant by the time they finish college. I'm not sure how to teach for that. I think it probably looks something more like the way I taught for nerd camp. What I know is that it's not the way I was being asked to teach the second grade.

Academia v. the Media

2008-11-20T13:48:00.005+02:00

I don't know much about the campaign that is being waged against Rashid Khalidi. I don't remember much of what I read by Rashid Khalidi in graduate school. Unfortunately, I worked so many hours to pay my bills that I had to choose between learning Arabic or reading carefully for my so-called "content classes," and chose the former (but that's another rant for another day). What I do know is that my friend Chris brought this video to my attention while I'm unemployed and have the time to watch it, and I think every student and politician should be listening to what Rashid Khalidi (and presumably the other presenters at this conference) have to say about the state of the Fifth Column.

We had this discussion all the time at Indiana University. With some valuable exceptions, academics have become so turned inward that they don't know how to engage with the public, how to make use of the new media revolution to get out their valuable, informed opinions. Academia and a free press are supposed to be working together to illuminate what government forgets or attempts to cover up. Western liberal democracies tout academic freedom and press freedom as hallmarks of what makes Western liberal democracy great and worth exporting to the developing world. If we can't guarantee those freedoms at home, what business do we have imposing our particular variety of liberal democracy on Iraq, Afghanistan, DR Congo, North Korea, Iran, or anywhere else? If we can't keep the press honest, if we can't keep the debate clean, if we resort to Swiftboat-style personal vendettas, and if we can't give academics the freedom and objectivity that they deserve, how can we claim to be a bastion of liberal democracy?

Because I can tell you with absolute certainty that the rest of the world is watching. I can say this with such certainty because I'm now out in the rest of the world. I'm interacting not only with Jordanians, but with Germans, Filipinas, Mexicans, Canadians ... people from all over the world. I can tell you that they know more about American politics than the majority of Americans know about the politics of any other country in the world, even more than most Americans know about their own politics. Furthermore, I tell you that this is no new phenomenon. I've been out in this world for a decade listening to Europeans, Arabs, Aussies, Kiwis, South and East Asians, Africans and South Americans give detailed, accurate arguments about American foreign AND domestic policy.

They're listening, they're watching, and they are most certainly judging us. If you ask me, they're doing a very good job of it. People here know that while the administration and the media are touting full-voice their support of the occupation of Iraq, the majority of Americans are against it. People out in the world see that American policy is addressing the exact same nuclear issues by making nice with North Korea, but not with Iran or Syria. People here know that the European Union's economic stimulus package announced yesterday is a serious attempt to fix the problem, and the stimulus package McCain made such a big deal of abandoning his campaigning for was just that much flag waving, and won't actually help anyone who really needs it. (They also know that's why Obama won the election.)

People out here are very insightful critics of American policy, politics, media and society, and let me tell you, it does not look good from out here in the rest of the world!

Language or Dialect?

2008-11-19T13:44:00.001+02:00

I've been having an interesting series of conversations about language with my top-level adult English students. We've been doing a chapter on language registers: business vs. casual English, written vs. spoken language, the English of different age and cultural groups. There was a question in the book asking whether students believed most people spoke their own language correctly.

Now, you have to understand that asking this question in the Arab world is like asking it in Switzerland or Bavaria. The difference between the dialects of those regions and High German are so great that northern German swear they can't understand a word. Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is like High German, the language of writing, TV news and official speeches, except that there is no population which speaks Standard Arabic as their native language. All Arabs first learn a dialect of some sort. Many say that the Levantine dialect of Jordan, Palestine, Syria and Lebanon is the closest to Modern Standard, but it is still significantly different.

So I asked my students what they considered to be their native language. Was it dialect, or MSA? About half the class said of course dialect was their native language! They never spoke a word of MSA till some time in elementary school. MSA, which they simply call "Arabic," was a foreign language to them. The rest of the class said that Levantine was not a language, that it was just a corruption of real Arabic. (As a hobby linguist who believes languages are organic, evolving systems, this answer always irks me, but I held my tongue.)

So then we asked the book's question, Do most people speak their native language correctly? Their answers fell predictably along the same lines. Those who considered Levantine their first language said yes, of course we speak our first language correctly. Those who considered MSA their only language claimed that it took years of study to speak even one's native language properly.

The whole conversation reminded me of a conversation I had with my adult class last session. I showed them my resume, which says I speak Standard, Levantine and some Iraqi Arabic. My students considered it completely illogical that Iraqi, Levantine and Egyptian dialects should be considered worth mentioning separately. For an Arab, they're all Arabic. They grow up watching Egyptian films, news from al-Jazeera in the Persian Gulf, and call-in shows with dialects from Morocco to Oman. But for me, the differences are huge. Egyptian is unintelligible to me. I was listening to Yemenis on al-Jazeera talk about the recent flood in Hadramawt, and barely understood one word in three. Just listening to the newscasters on al-Jazeera with their fully-inflected MSA is a frustration to me. But put on the Syrian mini-series Baab al-Haara or any other miniseries in Levantine dialect, and I feel very much at home.

This is, of course, opposite to most non-native speakers of Arabic. Unless you learned your Arabic by marrying an Arab, chances are that you learned MSA first and best, and the dialects are just so much grammarless jibberish to you. This is why, when I gave directions home from Club Nai for my American and German friends the other night, the cab driver said, "Are you Jordanian? No? But your Arabic...!"

My standard reponse has become, "I learned my Arabic by living near Gafgafa for two years." Everyone laughs, because everyone knows Gafgafa as the site of one of Jordan's most infamous prisons.

Obama-mania, Arab style!

2008-11-08T13:46:00.000+02:00

First, let me say that my faith in American democracy has been restored. Regardless of who won this election, I was hoping that we wouldn't have the same quagmire we had in the last two elections, with no one quite sure who really deserved to win, even four and eight years later. I'm glad that McCain and the xenophobic, bellicose GOP right and especially Sarah Palin didn't win, but I'm mostly glad that the election was an unambiguous one.

Those Jordanians who had a preference in the recent election are also mostly pleased by the result. I can't tell you how many people, upon seeing me for the first time after the election, have said "Mabrouk! [Congratulations!]" So tonight in my adult English class at AMIDEAST, I decided to ask my students for their thoughts on the election. Most Jordanians I've spoken to tend to agree that as far as the Middle East is concerned, the two candidates are basically the same. On Palestine, the same. On Afghanistan, the same. On Iran, Obama is calling for more dialogue, but is not significantly less belligerent.

Wait a minute, I said. All of that I can agree with. But what about Iraq? Don't you see a difference there?

No, said Ghassan. Whether it's a few hundred troops, or thousands, both candidates want to leave a troop presence in Iraq. They came for the oil, he said, and that hasn't changed.

However, everyone here seems to recognize that, while there isn't a difference where Arabs are concerned, for Americans there is a huge difference between McCain and Obama on domestic issues. All the Jordanians I've spoken to here know that Obama is calling for national health care, and they will all tell you that he has the better plan to help ordinary Americans in their current financial crisis. On domestic issues, all the Jordanians I've met would say that Obama is clearly the best choice.

And, of course, all the Muslims I know here are delighted that America has elected the son of a Muslim. I haven't actually asked anyone why yet. I can think of two likely reasons, though. First, under Islamic law and tradition, any son or daughter of a Muslim is and always will be a Muslim, so although he's been a practicing Christian for years, many Muslims may be telling themselves that America has a Muslim president. The other, probably more likely reason that comes to mind is that, whether Obama is Muslim or Christian, Muslims in America have come under an awful lot of not-so-flattering scrutiny in America in the last seven years, and at the very least, Obama knows something about Muslims. I think that Muslims may well be hoping, as I am hoping, that an Obama administration will be sympathetic to the troubles of both Muslims and Muslim Americans, or at the very least, will be more rational.

Which Woman We Want in the White House

2008-09-09T19:24:00.003+03:00

I recently received one of those Republican propoganda emails full of vitriol and innuendo trying to discredit the Obamas as un-American. It came from the same person who sent me the infamous and very damaging email speciously claiming that Barack Obama is secretly a dangerous anti-American Muslim terrorist, because his father is a non-American and a Muslim, and because Barack went to early elementary school in the Philippines. This email, however, was not even about the candidate himself. The subject was "This is NOT First Lady material!" and it was about the Senior thesis of one Michelle Obama, nee Michelle LaVaughn Robinson, written 23 years (half her lifetime!) ago.

In stark contrast to the authors of this suspiciously anonymous forwarded email, I don't see anything abut Michelle Obama's thesis that's controversial. Let me give you a few examples.

What is Michelle Obama planning to do with her future resources if she's first lady that will elevate black over white in America ? The following passage appears to be a call to arms for affirmative action policies that could be the hallmark of an Obama administration.
'Predominately white universities like Princeton are socially and academically designed to cater to the needs of the white students comprising the bulk of their enrollments.'

Universities like Princeton DO cater to the needs of WASPs over all other ethnicities, because WASPs (and a few Catholics) established and still run these universities. It's a fact that has been proven over and over in academic studies, just as it's a fact that the SATs are culturally biased towards white middle and upper class high schoolers, which hinders minorities from getting into universities like Princeton (or Goucher, or even Indiana University) in the first place.

Here is another passage that is uncomfortable and ominous in meaning:
'There was no doubt in my mind that as a member of the black community, I am obligated to this community and will utilize all of my present and future resources to benefit the black community first and foremost.' (emphasis not mine!)

Ominous? Michelle Obama is hardly unusual in wanting to channel her abilities and resources towards the improvement of her own community, just as white evangelicals give preference to the white evangelical community, Latinos give preference to their community, Jewish America protects its own interests, and Republicans prefer to give to Republican causes. This doesn't make her a racist. It merely means that she has a strong sense of community and social responsibility, and as First Lady her community would expand to include all of America. I believe that a First Lady with a strong sense of social responsibility can only be good for American society. I would call this quite the opposite of ominous; I would call it hopeful.

Obama writes that the path she chose by attending Princeton would likely lead to her 'further integration and/or assimilation into a white cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society; never becoming a full participant.'
Michele Obama clearly has a chip on her shoulder.

I think she has less of a chip on her shoulder than she has a right to. She's absolutely right that most white Americans see her as black first and American second, just as they see Barack Obama as black first and American second. If that wasn't the case, no one would care about her college thesis or her "ethnic allegiances," because they would recognize that Michelle and Barack are Americans. Just as American as any Mayflower descendent or DAR member, and just as dedicated, if not more, to making sure that all Americans succeed.

If you want to talk about what we DON'T want in the White House, take a look at Sarah Palin, who tried to !ban books in her local library in Alaska, who didn't tell her children that her baby would have Downs Syndrome because she wasn't sure she would keep him, and who thinks that dealing with the Yukon Territories of Canada is significant international policy experience. *I* have more foreign policy experience than Sarah Palin, as do these nearly 54,000 people. Oh, yes, and she's under investigation for corruption in her home state ... but I wouldn't worry too much about that: Innocent until proven guilty (or Muslim).

There were other even more specious and out-of-context quotes in this email I received, but I'll just leave you with one more:

P.S. We paid for her scholarship.

Damn right we did! That's what America's supposed to be all about:

...Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome.... "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore...."
--Emma Lazarus, 1883, on the Statue of Liberty

Iraq as Tapestry

2008-07-29T11:14:00.002+03:00

This interview and the associated book offer a view of Iraqi history and culture not often heard these days:

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/07/20/a_talk_with_orit_bashkin/?page=full

It's a controversial viewpoint, to be sure, one that I call the "Istrabadi version" of Iraqi history, because it's the one that I heard most often from my professors at Indiana University, Dr. Zainab Istrabadi and her brother Amb. Faisal Istrabadi. But there is some truth to this viewpoint. For a very long time, especially during the Abbasid Dynasty that built Baghdad, Iraq and especially Baghdad were the center of the known world. Scholars came to Baghdad, Basra and Kufa from as far away as al-Andalus in Spain or the Philippines to study with the some of the greatest scholars of their ages in Baghdad.

The Talmud, the greatest compendium of Jewish law, was written in Babylon (a suburb of present-day Baghdad), where the Jews had been banished by King Nebuchadnezzar II in 588 BC. Even after the Persian ruler Cyrus the Great allowed Jews to return to Palestine half a century later, many stayed on in Baghdad, and for 25 centuries there was a substantial Jewish population in Baghdad. In addition to Jewish contributions, The Thousand and One Nights as we in the West know it today was adapted from Hindi in Abassid Baghdad. The seat of the Nestorian Church, considered heretical and heavily persecuted by the Byzantine Holy Roman Empire, has always been in Baghdad, with Nestorians living peacefully alongside Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Armenian Catholics, Armenian Orthodox, Jews, Sabeans, Zoroastrians, Muslims (Sunnis, Shi'is and Sufis), Yazidis and others.

As Zainab and Amb. Istrabadi's father used to say, Iraq is a country of 38 nationalities (i.e. ethnic and religious groups). The Istrabadi family tree itself includes Sunni Arabs, Shi'i Arabs, Kurds, Armenians, Turkmens, and many others, and the Istrabadis are hardly unique in this respect.

I see two futures for Baghdad and the rest of Iraq. The tapestry of Iraqi identity may well survive and be repaired after the occupation ends, with all Iraqis finding a way to coexist. We may find, however, that America and the so-called Coalition of the Willing has shredded the Iraqi cultural tapestry so badly that Iraq will be shattered for generations.

What Is Faith?

2008-07-22T19:08:00.003+03:00

"I had spent years discussing religious matters with smart American students in excellent schools before I was sent to the Middle East. I had found those conversations enjoyable, often challenging and usually sincere. But something was often missing, something I found hard to pin down. An Egyptian Muslim friend I met in Qatar helped me understand what that something was. Talking with Americans about faith and religion, he told me, is like having coffee with Forrest Gump: pleasant enough, but not of much substance. "They just don't have much to say because they just don't get it," he said....

"The majority of Georgetown students I know are fairly knowledgeable about religion. They can talk intelligently about Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism. The glitch is that they talk from the perspective of anthropologists and sociologists and historians. These are valuable perspectives. But they are not enough. Of course we need to raise young people who can be smart, savvy, sophisticated participants in international affairs. What we also need are young people who can be all of those things while at the same time knowing and understanding what it is to live one's life with a commitment rooted in faith."

---Father Ryan J. Maher, Asst. Dean, Georgetown University

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/18/AR2008071802558.html?referrer=myspace

I couldn't say anything more precise and eloquent than Father Maher says here. Suffice it to say, he's absolutely right when he says that most Americans in the international sphere don't understand what faith means in many other parts of the world. I count myself among them. And I wish there were a thousand more students like this one:

"Recently, I had a conversation with a young woman who is about to begin her sophomore year at Georgetown. She has a passion for art history and American democracy and is serious about her Jewish faith. She hopes to work in international affairs one day. We were discussing the courses she might take this fall.

"She reported that people had been telling her she really should take more economics. "What if instead of that," she said, "I took only four courses this semester and used the extra time to go with my Christian and Muslim friends to their churches and mosques? I just think that if I had a better sense of how they prayed and what they mean when they use the word 'God,' I'd be able to have much better conversations with them about the situation in the Middle East."

"What do you say to that, except "Amen"? And, "Have you thought of taking the foreign service exam after you graduate?" "

What did you think I was doing here, then?

2008-04-08T17:23:00.001+03:00

There are those really amazing days in teaching when you can see a student finally get it, make that breakthrough that just makes your day....
And then there are days like this....

Bulqiis was one of my brightest first graders. She had learned every word in her vocabulary, she had learned at home to identify all the words and letters in the English alphabet, and she never gave me any trouble in a class that was often quite unruly. Like the Queen of Sheba whose name she shared, Bulqiis was already well on her way to being a very capable, admirable woman.

One day, as I was starting class, Bulqiis raised her hand. "Miss Maryah," she asked, "do you speak Arabic?"

"Of course. We're speaking Arabic right now. You hear me use it a lot in class." Too much, perhaps, though I needed the least amount of Arabic to get the lessons across to my first graders, who had not yet formed the habit of learning English through Arabic. But maybe, I was thinking, I didn't use as much Arabic as I thought, if Bulqiis wasn't sure I spoke the language at all.

Then she asked the question that burst my bubble. "Then why do you always speak to us in English?"

Jordanian Kids Say the Darndest Things!

2008-03-31T23:50:00.002+03:00

In my second year of Peace Corps, I taught English to the first, second and third grade classes. Perhaps the freshest of my first graders was Sarah, the daughter of an Arabic teacher who lived right next to the school. Sarah's sister Selsabeel was the star of my third grade and the darling of the teachers' room, and Sarah was determined to be different from her sister. I'm sympathetic to this; my sister was in a very similar situation, and eventually she transferred to another school to avoid being compared to me!

Sarah was clearly one of the fastest learners in my class, but determined not to let anyone know it. Sometimes I would walk around the room and ask the girls to point, say, to the number 3 in their books. With a big smirk, Sarah would point to the 4, the fox, the pencil, the 2, the ball.... Sometimes I'd wait for her to point to everything else on the page, and then ask her again to point to the 3, and she would start over, pointing to the fox, to the 1, to the pencil, to the 4.... Anything but the 3, which made it obvious that she knew exactly where the 3 was, but was determined not to let me know it. In addition to trying to act dumb, Sarah did her best to be disruptive. I would turn around to write on the board, and hear some little girl's voice, usually Bulqiis or another of my best students, say, "Miss Maryah, Sarah's sitting under her desk again!"

Every morning, when I entered the first grade classroom, Sarah would ask, "Miss Maryah, do you love God?"

"Of course I love God," was always my automatic response, and I would start class. Though an agnostic with polytheist inclinations at home in my Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Maryland, in Jordan I described myself as a Christian, at Peace Corps' suggestion, and because UUism is hard enough to explain in English!

One morning, however, Sarah tried a different tactic of distraction as I entered the classroom. It was midmorning, with early morning flurries and no heat in the school, and it was cold! As usual that winter, I was wearing pants over second-hand Eighties stirrup pants, two wool sweaters, a wool cloak and my mother's gift from my trip home to Maine the summer before: a big fleece hat . "Miss Maryah," said Sarah in her chipper little voice, "you shouldn't be wearing that hat! You should be wearing a headscarf!"

Without really thinking about the fact that these were only first graders, most of whom had seldom left the village and probably never met another real, flesh-and-blood non-Muslim, I said, "I'm a Christian. I don't have to wear a headscarf." With older children, this was often (but not always!) sufficient explanation.

Immediately, though, another little girl asked, "What's a Christian?"

"Christians are of a religion like Islam," I said. "They worship the same God, but they have different customs. For instance, they don't wear headscarves." I thought this ought to do it: a fairly simple, non-judgemental statement that no parent could take offense to as prosthelytism, with carefully chosen pronouns to not dig myself too deeply into my habitual white lie of being a Christian.

Not so. "Miss Maryah?" asked someone else. "Are you a heretic?"

This hit a little closer to home, and perhaps made my response a little more vehement than necessary. "No, no!" I said. "Christians are People of the Book; they worship the same God as the Muslims. Christians aren't heretics."

"Miss Maryah?" asked yet another first grader. "Are you a pagan?"

Cringing inwardly, I said, "No, no!" Things were starting to get out of hand.

"Miss Maryah?" someone else inquired. "Do you love Satan?"

With a quick "no," I started class with our usual full-body review of the four verbs they knew in English. "Alright, ladies. Stand up. Sit down. Stand up. Jump! Sit down. Stand up. Sit down. Stand up. Turn around."

Crossing Over: Learning To Give Thanks

2008-03-04T23:30:00.002+02:00

As a Peace Corps Volunteer in a small Bedouin village in northern Jordan, it bothered me to no end that no one every said "shukran," the word we had been taught in training to mean "Thank you." In fact, my neighbors and students would laugh when I said "shukran," and ask me why I used that word so often. Even more bewildering to my new community was the way I would say, "No, thank you." They would protest, "But I didn't do anything! I just asked a question!" It was a long time before I began to appreciate the nuances of thankfulness in Jordanian culture, and to recognize that I was being thanked, but in ways that were so culturally strange to me that I did not initially recognize my neighbors' gratitude.

Months into my service, I began to complain to my closest colleague and friend, a Muslim American raised mostly in Pakistan, about the lack of gratitude for the work I was doing. It was she who explained to me the Evil Eye and related customs, which were also prevalent in Pakistan. It was, she said, considered very bad form to give compliments or thanks, because this might foster a sin of pride and bring down the Evil Eye upon the recipient. I found the idea of the Evil Eye strange and, I must admit, backward. Nevertheless, I used the mantra I had learned as a Rotary Youth Exchange Scholar, "Not better, not worse, just different!" and tried to accept that I would not be receiving thanks for my work.

In fact, as I eventually recalled, they had told us in training that we would probably not be thanked for our work. They had told us that the things we would do in the community would not fall outside the realm of the community's expectations of us, and thus would not merit thanks. Also, they pointed out, we would be invited for tea and meals, to engagement parties and weddings, and this would be because the community appreciated our efforts there. However, our trainers were primarily Jordanian themselves, few had even traveled outside the Arab world, and few had lived in the villages, where life is very different from the capital city, Amman. Over time, I began to unpack the cultural norms that they could not recognize behind their own descriptions of how Jordanians show appreciation.

Jordanian life, especially among families in the smaller villages that tend to be of nomadic Bedouin origin, operates on a basis of collectivism. In the desert, the individual perishes without the support of the community. Even in the villages of the semi-arid regions, Jordan is one of many cultures where it truly does take a village to support an individual. Under such conditions, everyone always helps everyone else.

Sometimes the girls next door would come over for English help while I was cleaning, doing laundry or cooking, and I would say that I did not have time just then, and they should come back later. Often their mothers would then come knocking, and the mothers would say, "If you are going to live among the Arabs, as an Arab, you may not say no when you are asked for help." They would explain that even when someone called the house, asking for the mother of the house, and she was a mile down the road visiting a friend, whoever answered the phone would say, "She's right here! Just a minute," and run down the road to fetch her. Once it had been pointed out to me, I saw that exactly this was the case.

I started thinking about "Thank you," and what it implies. To say "shukran" in Jordan is to imply that someone did something for me that was not needed or expected. Giving me a cup of tea is not occasion for "shukran;" guests expect to be offered tea. Receiving a plate of whatever my neighbor had made for lunch is not an occasion for "shukran;" she was also sending plates to her inlaws, and she considered me her spinster sister. "Shukran" is for an unexpected gift, or something above and beyond the daily exchange.

In time, I noticed that, while I was not being thanked, thanks was constantly being given. A daughter of the house would serve tea, and the guest would say, "God bless your hands." A child would bring home a high grade on an exam, and the parents would say, "God's will is done!" A neighbor would give us a ride home from school and we would say, "God have mercy upon you." We had been taught all these phrases in training, and been told that they were an important part of village life and courtesy. At first I avoided such phraseology; as a secularist who has not declared faith in any God, it felt fraudulent for me to use such God-speak. Eventually I came to understand what our trainers had known intuitively, that all these phrases meant "thank you," but by thanking God, there is no danger of attracting the Evil Eye. It was not until I had studied Islamic law and tradition more closely in graduate school that I realized an even deeper significance of the practice. If they thanked God for the things I had done, I would remain sufficiently humble, and I would understand that my place was to work for the good of the community, promoting the good and forbidding the evil, which is the essential core of Islam.

Living with the Bedouin in Jordan and learning their language and idiom helped me to see the world in a new way. As I embark on an academic career leading to a career as an Arabic interpreter, I find myself wondering about the interdependence of interpreters and the peace process. If I am the linguistic liaison between Arab and American parties, and at the end of negotiations, the Arab says, "God's will is done!", it may be unwise to translate this literally, because the American party is likely to understand this as a statement of religious conservativism, whereas perhaps the Arab's meaning is closer to "Thank you." Likewise, in English, perhaps it is worth considering how sincere my own "thank you"s are, and what cultural baggage they carry.

Build WHAT?

2007-04-24T05:31:00.000+03:00

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9783129

I can't believe it. The Americans and their Iraqi lackeys are building a wall around the Shi'a community of Adamiya in northern Baghdad. Despite spokesman for the US military command in Iraq, Major Gen. William Caldwell's comment that it is not usually America policy to build walls, I am reminded of the wall under construction between the United States and Mexico. Not only that, but who do you think is really paying for the so-called "Security Barrier" (i.e. Big Concrete Wall) that Israel has almost finished building around the West Bank? At the very least, the United States' government is perfectly transparent about its support for the Anti-Palestinian Wall. That's surely the wall Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was referring to when he said he was "afraid that the wall may remind us of other walls we reject."

But let's be realistic here. Do walls really work? No wall is going to keep destitute Mexicans out of the underbelly of the United States' economy, nor keep outraged, desperate Palestinians from attacking their Israeli opressors. How successful was the Berlin Wall at keeping capitalism out of the Soviet Bloc?

I can only think of only one wall that was truly effective at confining a targetted population: the wall around the Warsaw ghetto. Do we really want to follow Hitler and Himmler's example, though?

There must be a better way. What ever happened to negotiation, democratic processes inclusionary of militant Iraqi nationalists, humanitarian aid, and "winning hearts and minds"?

Stereotyping

2007-04-20T03:19:00.001+03:00

This morning I and other residents received an email from the campus Apartment Housing Office with "Virginia Tech" in the subject line, and a message to the effect that this is a multicultural community and we should be careful not to make generalizations about large groups of students based on the actions of a few. I was amazed that anyone would have generalized from one clearly deranged student's actions to the entire Korean and Korean-American community.

I hoped that I would see a frequent client at the writing center, a South Korean chaplain studying counseling, but when I found myself coming to an early finish with an East Asian international student writing about Korea, I took the opportunity to ask him if he knew of any incidents against East Asian students on campus. While he concluded that he believed the university's Korean community was overly anxious, he mentioned a few accidents that left me feeling uneasy. He said he had heard that all the Korean students have left Blacksburg, VA, that two of our city's four Korean churches have canceled outdoor services scheduled for this coming Sunday, and that his pastor had told him about incidents of high school students ganging up to beat on Korean classmates. He also said he had heard that the South Korean diplomatic mission to Washington, DC, had wanted to attend and perhaps say a few words of sympathy at the convocation at Virginia Tech in which Pres. Bush spoke, but that the US State Department told them that, as the shooter was a Permanent Resident, i.e. an immigrant to the US, South Korea had no reason to get involved.

I'm disappointed in my fellow Americans. After September 11th, in which al-Qaeda overtly claimed to be attacking American society, I expected some backlash against Arabs and Muslims, though I still thought it would be small-minded to blame an entire ethnic or religious group for the acts of the extremist few. But it didn't even cross my mind that anyone would blame Koreans and Korean Americans generally for the acts of this single student, who was clearly disturbed and acting from personal motives.

But then this student I was tutoring said that Koreans, both here and in South Korea, were expressing feelings of guilt that one of their own could do such a terrible thing. This, he thought, was unnecessary, but I was reminded that I was in Switzerland eight years ago this week when the Columbine shooting happened, and I felt the same impulse to apologize and explain that this was not the American way.

Even still, the biggest tragedy of Virginia Tech, the airplane crash that killed a Yankees ball player last fall, and countless other such incidents, is the way we as a nation respond. It is sad to me to see that our first reaction in a tragedy has become this: "Police say that they are not yet ruling out terrorism." As if that were the primary motive for violence in this world.

Both Fear and Hope are Universal

2007-04-19T03:52:00.000+03:00

I was a college Senior in Political Science 101 on the first anniversary of September 11th. The professor wanted to spend that day's class remembering the tragedy of a year before; knowing that almost half the students in the class had been high school Seniors in New York City a year earlier, I was dreading the class. I was wrong to do so. I was surprised at how clear-headed and eloquent my classmates were. In particular, I remember the words of a girl from Oregon. Her mother woke her that morning with the news, and she said her first thought was that she didn't have time to mourn, because someone was going to have to make sure that our civil liberties would not be stolen away as the nation reacted.

When I heard what had happened at Virginia Tech, I thought of the girl from Oregon, and I thought, I can't mourn because someone has to remember the dead, beseiged and violated elsewhere.

Don't get me wrong, this is a tragedy, as unprecedented a tragedy in its own way as September 11th. My junior high was the site of a school shooting, and my sympathy goes out to the students of Virginia Tech and the people of Centerville, VA, home town of the shooter and several of his victims (and some friends of mine).

But let us not neglect to notice that today--two days later--was an extraordinarily bloody day in Iraq. More than a hundred were killed and over twice that many injured. It is absolutely right for Pres. Bush to pray at Virginia Tech, and for universities and schools all across the country to re-examine their emergency procedures and the measures they take to monitor the mental health of their students. However, we must be careful that such actions are not taken at the expense of the attention Iraq, Darfur, Nigeria, Russia and other troublespots also deserve, even require.

Taxing Disappointment

2007-04-14T18:05:00.000+03:00

Taxes are supposed to support government programs to support and protect the people served by that government. If that were truly the case, I wouldn't mind paying taxes at all. As the Finns and Swedes say, we gladly pay 50% in taxes, because the government takes good care of us. Or as Elton John has said, he has no interest in moving to the U.S. where the taxes are lower, because his taxes support the poor in South London who buy his records and make him rich.

Half a century ago, the CEO of General Motors made fifty times what his average worker made, and paid well over half that money back to the government. Now the CEOs of major companies pay easily 500 times what their average workers make, and pay far less than 50% of that money back in taxes. Yes, there are philanthropists like Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey and the Ford Foundation who are privately distributing their wealth all over this country and the world; they are major contributors to the fact that Americans, per capita, make more private donations to people and programs in impoverished nations than the citizens of any other nation in the world.

But if we taxed Bill Gates for half his yearly net income, he'd still have millions of dollars to put into philanthropy, and I suspect that his taxes could almost single-handedly provide universal health care in the United States. Instead, take a look at this report of UNICEF's Innocenti Research Centre, "Child Poverty In Perspective: An Overview of Child Well-Being In Rich Countries" (http://www.unicef-icdc.org/publications/pdf/rc7_eng.pdf). Of the 21 countries surveyed, the United States ranks in the bottom third in 4 of the 5 categories for which US ranking was provided, including 20th in Family and Peer Relationships, and Behaviours and Risks, and 21st--that's last of the richest nations!--in Health and Safety! That's worse than even the significantly poorer former Soviet Bloc nations of Poland and the Czech Republic. According to this report, 22% of American children under 18 live in homes taking in less than 50% of the median national income; that's dead last of the nations polled. One in eight American 15-year-olds polled has less than 10 books in his or her household. The United States has among the highest rates of infant mortality and accidental child deaths of these rich nations. At 75%, the United States has the 5th lowest rate of 15-19-year-olds in school. American children are judged to have the second worst relationships with parents and peers of the 21 nations surveyed. American children have the worst health behaviours of the nations surveyed, the highest child obesity rate, and the highest teen pregnancy rate. One in 5 American children rate their own health as 'fair or poor.'

Could we not be using our tax money to improve these numbers? Why are we not?

Instead of making the richest nation in the world the best place in the world to be a child, we are engaged in a quagmire in Iraq. We were told that fighting the "terrorists" there would keep us safer here. This is unlikely to be the case. Our arrogance in Iraq has cost us more friends than it has made us; this conflict has undermined our soft power and image in the world, and made us look like the big bully on the block. And we are suffering at home for this war every day.

The money we have spent in Iraq could have provided health insurance to nearly 250 million American children, or have built over 3.7 million units of public housing for the millions of hurricane displaced or otherwise impoverished and homeless persons, including children, in the United States. Or the money we spent in Iraq could have paid for a year's Head Start expenses for 55 million children, or hired over 7 million new teachers, or provided over 20 million 4-year scholarships for Americans to attend college. You can see a running tally of these figures at http://costofwar.com/index.html. Or we could use the money we're spending in Iraq to reduce world hunger by half in 10 years, immunize children around the world for that time, stem the tide of AIDS in the world, and still have money left over (http://costofwar.com/numbers.html)! Any one of those things would improve our image and thereby increase our national security far more than any war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran or elsewhere.

As you pay your taxes, I challenge you to consider where that money is going, and whether you are comfortable supporting the actions your money supports. Because if you're not, it's time to take ownership of that money and of your government--for the people, by the people--and demand change!

Remember Your Outrage!

2007-02-05T03:03:00.000+02:00

It's a terrible thing, as the minister said Sunday morning, to hear on the morning news that over 130 Iraqis were killed and an entire market obliterated by a truck bomb in Baghdad. It is a still worse thing to find that you have become numb to the horror. I heard that news on NPR this morning, winced, and immediately pulled out the expresso machine and started making coffee. I fear and dread the day when I don't even wince.

There came a point, when I was studying the Holocaust as an undergraduate, at which I became numb to the horror, able to watch footage of emaciated, gassed inmates bulldozed into a hole and not even blink. It was a relief to reach that point, because I wanted to be able to make witness to these terrible occurences, to understand them intellectually so that I could join the fight to keep such horror from happening again. Of course, in my idealism, I didn't fully realize that it was happening all the time: Rwanda, Kosovo, Darfur, East Turkistan, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Chechnya....

I started this blog full of outrage and anger at Bush, Blair, Olmert, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and all the others who abetted and even instigated wars, apartheid, death and destruction in Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq. I had lived in the Middle East, I had talked to Baghdadi mothers and children about their lives there, I listened to Sid Ismahan and others as they thrust the pictures from Abu Ghraib prison into my face and said, "Look at these well! These are our brothers!" I bawled my eyes out in front of two dozen Jordanian teachers because I thought (mistakenly, I hasten to add) that I had heard one of them say, "How can she be upset about a stolen pen when people are dying in Iraq?"

I must remember....

I'm still angry about the ghetto-ization of the West Bank and the boycotting of Hamas.
I'm still anguished about those rendered homeless and plagued with PTSD in Lebanon.
I'm still apalled that a bunch of political appointees locked up in the Green Zone could think they know what's best for Iraq without ever meeting an Iraqi.
I'm still frustrated with Bush's total disregard for the opinions of both his constituents and the experts.
I'm still horrified at the neglect of physically and psychologically mained Iraq and Afghanistan War Veterans.

I want to find that fire again, and let it devour the despair and helplessness I feel here, as I sit in class and talk the problem to death, as I languish before my computer and listen to the body count rise on NPR, listen to the Bush and Cheney build their case to add Iran to the two fronts--Iraq and Afghanistan--where we are already losing the so-called "War on Terror."

Because if we lose the tiny sliver of flame we have, I shudder to think where that might lead us.

Generous, Generous

2006-12-02T02:50:00.000+02:00

His feet cracked as the earth
Robes tattered as roadside thistle
Caked-in dirt beneath the nails
Greasy scraggles of thin, grey hair
And rheumy eyes, fogged with years
Yet shoulders straight and strong

Chapped and cracked, his thin lips mutter
Over and over, one reminder
‘kareem, kareem—kareem, kareem’
Muttering as the beads fall
Slipping through dark fingers

The oldest elder of the village
Calls to him to sip of her tea
On wool-stuffed ticks in the sun
Staring quietly at the street
Traveler muttering, ‘kareem, kareem’
A granddaughter pouring tea

Sun creeps slowly down the sky
Flocks return from the hills
Children play soccer in the dust
Women bring their laundry in
Hens scratch and donkeys bray
And two old people sip their tea
Beads slip through crooked fingers

The sun descends, muezzins call
Fathers plod up to the mosques
Women dice and toss the salad
A slender granddaughter carries plates
To the oldest elder and her guest
Who bend and eat with a ‘bism’ullah’
Sipping sweetened tea on mint

Darkness falls, lights flicker on
Chickens roost and nannies bleat
Men with their wives, babes in arms
Toddlers clinging to their gowns
Stroll across the rocky ground
To the oldest elder’s house.

Women pull out the extra ticks
Men all press the elder’s hand
To lips and brow, and then again
‘Yumma, Mama, how are you?’
Their wives settle to one side
‘Amma, Auntie, how’s your health?’

‘Pilgrim, Uncle, welcome here
Peace and welcome in our homes
Mercy and blessings on your hands
From what direction do you come?
What news have you from beyond?’
Yet the traveler—‘kareem, kareem’—
And the elder silently sip

Prayer beads slide, eight sets
Sons, wives, elder, pilgrim
Each a gentle mantra reads
‘bism’ullah, mercy, compassion
Thank the divine, lord of all
There is none but the one’
Under it all, ‘kareem, kareem’

Babies nurse and fall asleep
Once again, muezzins cry
‘There is none but the one’
The shouts of playing children fade
The breeze has died, all is still
Except the traveler, ‘kareem, kareem’

Hoisting toddlers, babes in arms
Two by two, young parents depart
‘Go with peace, wake well
You do us honor, pilgrim’
As he nods, ‘kareem, kareem’
Beads clacking rhythmically

The last young wife, before she goes
Spreads blankets, comforters
For the elder and the traveler
Sleeping in the cool night air
Still the mystic muttering
‘kareem, kareem—kareem, kareem’
The name of God is ‘generous’

Prayer in Airports

2006-11-23T00:11:00.000+02:00

I am appalled to hear that four imams were removed from their flight out of Minneapolis Airport Monday for saying their prayers. Prayer alone, even Muslim prayer, is not an indication of terrorist intent. This culture of fear undermines the very foundation of the United States. Exactly this sort of hypocrisy makes our motives suspect in many parts of the world.

Puritans, Quakers, Catholics, Lutherans, Mennonites, Amish, Jews, Armenians, Maronites, Palestinians, Tibetans, Uyghers, Lebanese Shi'ites, members of resistances against Nazism, communism, military juntas and theocracies, psychoanalysts, artists, scientists, philosophers.... Throughout the nation's history, people have immigrated to these United States for the freedom to practice and profess their beliefs. Religious freedom is protected in the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States and has been repeatedly upheld by the US Supreme Court as a founding principle of this nation.

Prayer has often been used in the history of this country and others as a form of peaceful resistance and civil disobedience, but prayer has never threatened our nation's security. Do we ban Orthodox rabbis, evangelical Christian ministers or Buddhist monks from flying because we fear their religious convictions? Not at all! To the contrary, we offer kosher and vegetarian options for in-flight meals, even though Jewish, Christian and Buddhist adherents have all committed terrorist acts in the name of their religion. If we encourage the religious convictions of Jews and Christians in our airports, who are we to forbid Muslims, who worship the same God of Abraham, from fulfilling their own religious obligations?

It is not the only recent episode of prejudice by the airlines. There have been many, many examples. One that is getting attention is a woman who was kicked off her flight for breastfeeding, and Tuesday NPR reported on “nurse-ins” across the country in protest. We ought to be able to raise the same sense of outrage for such blatant religious discrimination, as well.

Alf Mubarak!

2006-11-21T16:51:00.000+02:00

Either I'm prophetic, or I spoke too soon.

Today, Baghdad announced the normalization of relations with Syria after 26 years, the mutual establishment of embassies, and cooperation towards the establishment of greater security in the region. Syria, of course, has an interest in keeping Iraq together, because a fracturing of Iraq would fuel Kurdish nationalism within Syria. Diplomatic cooperation between Iraq and Syria is a seed of hope that the Syrian border might be tightened and the smuggling of arms and insurgents into Iraq.

Sadly, however, just a little farther west in Lebanon, news is just coming through about the apparent assasination of Industry Minister Pierre Jamail, whittling down a Lebanese governing council already weakened by the ostentatious defection of Shi'ite ministers protesting Lebanon's support of a UN study finding Syria complicit in the assasination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri.

Syria, of course, is a common thread in all of this. They are, of course, accused of aiding violence both in Iraq and in Lebanon, but I cannot help but wonder if a little recognition on the world stage, such as the normalization of relations with its neighbor Iraq, might give Syria the recognition it craves, in which case they might scale down their controversial smuggling operations.

Additionally, Iraq's President and a Syrian representative will be attending a weekend summit in Iran to discuss regional concerns. Better yet, the United States has not yet made any statements condemning such cooperation. Might this indicate the possibility of improved security in the Middle East?

A thousand blessings on their endeavors.

Hell Outta Dodge!

2006-11-19T21:20:00.000+02:00

A local activist asked me this morning what I thought about the situation in Iraq. I was quite flattered by his interest in my opinion, since he has managed to essentially managed to make a living of activism, whereas I only dabble. In any case, this is essentially what I said, without hesitation:

We have to get out as soon as possible. A year ago, I would have told you that we made this mess, and we ought to stick it out till it's fixed. But the evidence now seems very much to the contrary. At a local showing of the documentary "The Ground Truth," one of the Iraq War veterans interviewed in the film took questions from the audience, and I was struck by one answer, in which he said that, upon analysis of where insurgent attacks are occuring, most happen in communities where American troops operate, and when the Americans move on, the attacks stop. This agrees with the comments of Newsweek Baghdad editor Michael Ware who told Frontline, for the documentary "The Insurgency," that the Iraqis cum insurgents whom Ware has been interviewing since before the invasion have told him that they only attack "the occupier," i.e. American troops and contractors and those who collaborate with them.

There are other insurgent groups that have come into Iraq from elsewhere to wage sectarian violence, but Shi'ites and Sunni lived very closely and comfortably together for many years. Some would give credit for this to the iron fist of Saddam Hussein and his Baathists on the Shi'ite majority, but Saddam did not force the hundreds of Sunni-Shi'ite intermarriages that are now being torn apart, or the mixed Sunni-Shi'ite-Christian neighborhoods that used to be a feature of communities all across Iraq. The truth is that Iraq has more reason to stay together than fall apart, and a 2005 study by Mansoor Moaddel, sociology professor at Eastern Michigan University, and two of his political science colleagues at the University of Michigan, showed that the majority of Iraqis, in all ethnic and religious categories, would prefer a unified Iraq. A division of Iraq would leave Sunnis without any oil wealth, leave the Shi'ites vulnerable to attack from Sunni Gulf States and Saudi Arabia, and Turkey has vowed that it would go to war with a free Kurdistan in Northern Iraq, and Syria and Iran would join. All three nations have struggled with Kurdish nationalist movements that are already strengthened by the increased autonomy of Iraqi Kurdistan under the No Fly Zones before the fall of Saddam.

The United States has, since the 1991 Gulf War, openly supported the creation of an independent Kurdistan in Northern Iraq. This has not been without benefit to the current situation. The Northern No Fly Zone essentially protected the Kurds from Saddam Hussein and his army, allowing them to establish the institutions of free democratic government: free press, political parties, elections, social services and defense forces. It can be no coincidence that both President Jalal Talabani is ethnically and culturally Kurdish. With widespread distrust of former Baathists, whether they joined the party by choice or compulsion, the Kurds are the ones with respected experience in democratic self-government. The Bush administration does not, however, help the future of Iraq by supporting an independent Kurdistan. American supports national separatist movements because that is what America is, a state that seceded from the British Empire, but Americans also fought to prevent the secession of the Confederacy. Why? High school history books tend to tell us it was about high American ideals of independence and emancipation, but it is perhaps closer to the truth to say that the economies of the North and South were inextricably intertwined. The same is true of Iraq. But we cannot consider Iraq as an isolated entity.

Shibley Telhami is the holder of the Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and he spoke on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday today. He said unequivocably that the breaking Iraq apart into independent Sunni, Shia and Kurdish states would be wrong, not because of it looks like a loss for the Americans, but because of its effect on other nations of the region and world. I am very glad to know he is advising the Iraq Study Group. If America backs a fracturing of Iraq, it sets a precedent for other multi-cultural nations around the world. I do not mean to say that regions do not always deserve independence from their parent nations. The former Yugoslavia seems to have settled into a set of successful, self-satisfied nations. However, I fear that if America divvies up Iraq the way the British divvied up India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, or Israel, Palestine and Jordan, then not only is the Mesopotamian Valley in for a much longer period of violence, but I fear it sends a message to nations like Chad, Sudan or the Philipines that negotiation and compromise are passe and giving up is perfectly acceptable.

Not only is American support of an independent Kurdistan a problem, but the United States has deliberately and decisively shut down Iraqi President Nouri al-Maliki's attempts at Sunni-Shi'ite reconciliation. The supposed experts are determined to use a European Cold War model to explain Iraq, but de-Baathification clearly is not working, it is only putting people out of the only work they know how to do and the only way they know to support their families. Many of these displaced former Baathists, like the Nazis to which de-Baathification proponents compare them, were forced into party membership to continue in their lines of work, but clearly what worked in Germany is not working here. I think President al-Maliki is absolutely right: What is needed in Iraq is more of a South African-style Truth and Reconciliation. If that means that the Iraqi administration does not prosecute resistance fighters who have killed Americans, then that is the price of war to which we, as the unprovoked aggressor and occupier, must also be reconciled.

Not only must there be internal reconciliation for Iraq, but they must reach similar understandings with their neighbors, especially with Iran. I say again, we must include Iraq's neighbors in talks concerning the cessation of violence there. If America will not speak directly with Iran and Syria, we should at least not impede President al-Maliki from developing a relationship with his neighbors. Perhaps we can afford to snub Syria and heckle Iran from our position of clear superiority half a world away, but President al-Maliki lives right next door to these nations, and is in no position to defend himself, should they be insulted to the point of belligerence. We would find ourselves with another Lebanon on our national conscience.

We are not helping Iraq. In point of fact, the United States is far too often working in direct opposition to Iraq's best interest, and to our own, in creating this quagmire of anti-American insurgency. It is time we get out, and the sooner the better!

Partners in Creation

2006-10-31T05:56:00.000+02:00

As I listen to all the very legitimate concern over North Korea, overshadowing continued humanitarian crises in Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq, as I listen to American officials insist that they will not meet with North Korean officials outside the context of Six Party Talks, I am struck by a fundamental irony. On the opposite side of the world from North Korea, the U.S. is taking the opposite stance vis a vis Iraq, Iran and Palestine. There, the United States is not working with regional partners—Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Jordan, Syria and Turkey—who will bear the effects of any outcome, good or bad, in any of the embattled nations and territories of the Middle East. Instead, the Bush administration is determined to exert America’s time-honored tradition of DIY.

Ehud Barak put it quite eloquently when he spoke at Indiana University this evening. Advances in technology and communication, and increased economic interdependence of nations and peoples have created a world that is inescapably interconnected. In this new reality, nations and national leaders cannot afford to operate unilaterally or even bilaterally. There is no more “go it alone.” Nations must, perforce, work in cooperation with the each other, the United Nations, European Union, NATO and other multilateral organizations to make any lasting progress. Everything is interconnected. North Korea and Iran may not be geographically, economically, or politically connected, but surely they are watching each others’ interactions with world powers and learning from what they observe.

I am reminded of what a local rabbi said at an interfaith panel a few weeks ago. Jewish tradition, she said, holds that God made the world a little incomplete. He gave Adam and Eve wheat but not bread, flax but not cloth. Jews, she said, see themselves as partners in Creation. The Children of Adam are entreated to make the world more holy, closer to God, and to sanctify humanity. It is the foundation for the extensive dedication of Jews around the world to issues of social justice and the betterment of all peoples.

Ehud Barak tonight called for a long view of history, for politicians, nations and individuals to work towards more than the next year or political term, but for the long term. The fate of our children, he said, rests largely with those children of more than half of the world’s population, who suffer from poverty, disease, illiteracy, ignorance, oppression and neglect. Simultaneous to working for our immediate defense against our neighbors and a nebulous imminent terrorist threat, we must also work to alleviate poverty and disease, provide universal education, and oppose oppressive, brutal and neglectful governments around the world. It is not enough to kill the mosquitoes that bring disease, he said. We must make the extended effort to drain the swamp that spawns them. To drain the swamp, we must expend our resources, which might mean giving up some luxury we desire. Only through compromise can we find sustainable solutions.

I was very glad to hear Barak say these things today. It goes back to what I told that Israeli math professor in the laundry room when he wanted to know how Israel could have avoided war with Lebanon. I told him I wished that Israel would even occasionally speak out against American heavy-handedness in the Middle East, would call for moderation and compassion regarding Iraq or Iran, and multilateral dialogue between Arab states and the West. I wish more of Israel’s prominent statesmen would say many of the things Ehud Barak said tonight. Such statements could only benefit Israel’s image in the Middle East and, consequently, improve its security.

Regarding Israel’s supposed nuclear capacity, I must note for my friend the liberal Israeli professor that Barak did say, unequivocally, that no Israeli Prime Minister has ever confirmed or denied a nuclear capacity in Israel. And I sympathize with Barak’s statement that it is the first duty of the Israeli government to protect its citizens; that is the first principal of the Hobbesian idea of a social contract between a government and the governed. However, I caution moderation, and I say again that it does not matter whether Israel has 200 nuclear weapons as my Kurdish friend says, or none at all. So long as Israel’s neighbors believe the rumors of Israel’s nuclear capability, or even the nuclear capability of Israel’s allies like the United States, they will continue to develop weapons of their own to defend themselves against Israel.

In the Cold War, lines were clearly drawn. Some countries were communist or aligned with the Soviet Union, others were democratic, aligned with the Allies. The developing world was divided between nations where Peace Corps Volunteers and Western Europeans worked towards democratic equality, and where Soviets assisted in bringing about communist egalitarianism. Today the lines are far fuzzier, but the alliances of rich, free nations with poor, hopeful nations are no less important than they were. Our parents did not want us to grow up to be filthy communists or dirty capitalists. We do not want our children to grow up to be terrorists, or terrified. Avoiding that effort entails a global effort, and global compromise. In a tug-o-war, both sides can win if both sides give a little slack.

The U.S. giveth, the U.S. taketh away

2006-10-05T03:04:00.000+03:00

How ironic to hear Condoleeza Rice say that she is "very concerned" about the deteriorating living conditions in the Palestinian Territories, since her administration was the primary mover in causing the blockade of those territories!

It's sure noble of her to say that the US will "redouble efforts to improve living conditions" of the Palestinian people. Perhaps she should just let the democratically elected government of the Palestinian Territories, Hamas, do exactly what they promised to do in their election campaign, which was as successful as it was precisely because municipal Hamas governments have an astonishing history of making good on identical promises on a local level. Those municipalities which, in 2004, elected Hamas administrations showed a significant rise in standard of living between those elections and the national elections earlier this year. Had the United States not led the Western world in cutting off Palestine so completely and relentlessly, it is probable that Hamas would have continued to improve standards of living in the Palestinian Territories.

All I can say is, Rice had better do something, because if the United States eases sanctions in respect for Palestinians' human dignity, the world will follow, and if the United States recognizes the legitimate right of Palestinians to democratically elect their own leadership, then they will finally have a Palestinian partner with whom to negotiate peace who truly represents the Palestinian people as Yassar Arafat and Fatah never did.

Teach Peace

2006-10-03T04:17:00.000+03:00

I'm deeply disturbed by the shootings in schools this week, most especially the execution-style killing of three Amish schoolgirls and wounding of many others which occured not an hour's drive from where I grew up. This is the third incident of school violence in the area of my school in recent years, and I'm losing count of how often it happens around the country.

I'm reminded, too, of the siege in Beslan, children left without schools in New Orleans and Lebanon, the attacks on female teachers and students in Afghanistan, and other such occurences.
But I can't help but think, in world dominated by a man and a superpower who feel justified in an "attack first, worry about clean-up later" attitude towards international disputes, what's to make kids think that violence isn't the answer?

Be the change you want to see in the world. Teach children about communication and compassion.

Mother of the Uyghurs

2006-09-26T16:54:00.000+03:00

Rabiye Kadeer, a nominee for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, was imprisoned for more than 5 years in China on charges of providing state secrets to foreigners. Following her release she went into exile, where she worksto further human rights for the Uyghurs who live largely in the Xinjiang region (formerly known as East Turkistan) of the PRC. She is also one of the most prominent advocates for women's rights in China. Using her own resources, Rabiye Kadeer founded and then directed a large trading company in Northwestern China that provided training and employment for Uyghurs. She also founded the "Thousand Mothers' Movement" as a vehicle for the empowerment of Uyghur women in Xinjiang. Prior to her arrest in1999, while en route to a meeting with a visiting U.S. congressman, Rabiye Kadeer was a member of the top advisory body to China's parliament. She is the winner of the 2004 Rafto Prize, and the current director of both the Uyghur American Association and the Uyghur HumanRights Project.

I heard her speak at the University last night. My linguistic fascination with the Uyghur language and its relationship to Kurdish and Arabic aside, I found the talk very moving. She was poignant, funny, and passionate. I nearly cried as she talked about her children, now imprisoned by the Chinese, and her suspicion that they are being held in solitary confinement as she was for two years. And I was amazed by her strength in resuming her political efforts at such an international level after such trauma for trying to act in the past.

The whole experience made me want to learn Uyghur and move to East Turkistan and DO something about the human rights abuses there.

Last week on the bus, after I'd been speaking to a Korean student about why I am learning Arabic and that I hope to contribute to greater world peace and stability, and she asked me, Why didn't you learn Korean? And I had to say, Well, I had to choose a language. I can't learn them all.

It's so frustrating to be one little person in the face of all that is sour and wrong in the world. So frustrating to think that I can't fix everything, and that even when I try to fix some portion of it, by interpreting Arabic in the Middle East, chances are that I won't ever see the result of what I've done, for better or worse.

Have a look

2006-09-21T20:39:00.000+03:00

Today the Jordan Times published a commentary that eviscerated NPR's bias towards Israel in reporting on the Palestinian Territories. I have to say, I'm disappointed, but not surprised. I trust NPR more than, say, Fox or CBS, but nonetheless I am all too aware that they, too, have a degree of bias.

More than a year ago, while I was in Jordan, I received an email from my father about a piece NPR did on the opinion of Jordanians vis-a-vis America and the war in Iraq. My father wanted to know if it sounded accurate to me. When I read the transcript, I was apalled. The NPR reporter, whose name I don't recall (unfortunately, I no longer have the transcript), had interviewed Iraqi long-range truckers stuck in Amman due to closed borders, and Palestinian taxi drivers, and from these extracted an extremely negative view of Americans. I have seen many such reports from many news and polling sources, but can't think of any that I've seen which reflected the opinions of the Jordanians I knew.

Over and over I heard, yes, the American government went out of their way to stir things up in Iraq where they had no business. Such comments were almost always qualified, however, with the sentiment, but Americans have been very good to us: e.g. granting visas to study in the US, building health clinics, offering free surgeries through Medicin sans Frontiers and Operation Smile, etc., putting computers in the schools, training teachers, providing wheelchairs and hearing aids and other tools for the handicapped, and on and on.

I don't know if you noticed the very fine distinction in that paragraph, but I never failed to hear it when listening to Jordanian opinions on America. That distinction is between "the American government" and "Americans." This is one of the things I love most about Jordanians, that not even most Europeans I know seem to note. Jordanians very easily, from a young age, differentiate between governments and their people. They recognize very quickly that the decisions and statements made by governments, even those elected by their people in a free democratic system, do not always represent all or even a majority of their constituents. Perhaps this is because Jordan is a police state, a dictatorship, however well-intentioned its kings may be. I, however, like to think that it's because so many Americans come to Jordan, or give their money or time to organizations that aid Jordanians.

Though studies show that the United States' government gives less in charitable aid to less fortunate nations, I have also read studies showing that Americans, per capita, give a higher percentage of their personal funds to charitable and humanitarian organizations than the people of any other nation. Of course, Americans have, per capita, more to give than most other nations, but having the money doesn't make one any more likely to give it away.

the Writer

2006-09-11T03:05:00.000+03:00

The role of the writer is not to defend his country, his role is to defend what is right.

--Elias Khoury,

Lebanese writer,

on National Public Radio

a causal conundrum

2006-09-10T06:28:00.000+03:00

I had a fascinating encounter today, while folding laundry, with a visiting Israeli math professor who is living temporarily in my building. When, in casual conversation, I mentioned living in Jordan for a couple years, he was immediately fascinated, and told me he had been in Haifa, Israel, during the summer's war, and wanted to hear my opinion on the whole thing.

I was reluctant. Having lived in the Middle East, in a predominantly Palestinian country, I know that these things are emotional issues. He must have heard this in my voice, because he hastened to say that he was center-left, in favor of peaceful coexistence but, as became increasingly apparent through our conversation, truly baffled at where Israel had gone wrong and what they should have done differently.

I had to concede, as angry as the conflict made me, sooner or later Israel had to respond to the direct threat of thousands of rockets in the hands of a group, Hezbollah, which had publicly announced its intention to wipe Israel off the map. What, then, he kept insisting, should Israel have done differently? They have their own internal struggles over the Palestinian Territories, and the corresponding international rhetoric and politics. Israel is a small country with limited resources, and now they and the Palestinians are suffering because Hezbollah has diverted their attention and resources. What should they do? What should they have done?

For one thing, I said, perhaps Israel should, from time to time, speak up and contradict their allies in the West. Perhaps they should speak up and say, for example, Don't go to Iraq, you'll just make things worse, or, Leave Iran alone, they're more bluster than threat. I subscribe, in large part, to the theory that what happened in Lebanon was a proxy war between Iran and the United States, more political than ideological.

But what I kept coming back to was education. I admit, as a teacher, I'm biased. But I truly believe that the root of the problem in the Middle East is in education. Totalitarian governments like the Baathists and the Saudi Wahabis want a generally ignorant population. They're easier to control, easier to marginalize. But democracies demand educated citizens, to a fairly high level.

Perhaps one of the most frustrating things about teaching in Jordan was that my students didn't understand the basic concepts of critical thinking that American students take for granted. It is so ingrained in the American and European systems that teachers do it automatically, urge their students to be skeptical, to look for corroborating evidence, to identify a writer or speaker's point of view, his prejudices. The majority of Jordanian students I met, and even many of the older teachers, weren't familiar with the basic concepts of critical thinking. I can't tell you how many times I heard, 'But I read it on the Internet! It must be true!' From adults as well as children.

King Abdullah's Minister of Education works very closely with the American and European embassies, and with Western educators, to integrate critical thinking into the national curricula in all subjects, and to teach Jordanian educators about such basics as Bloom's Taxonomy of educational objectives, teaching to aural, visual and kinesthetic learners, personality theories like Meyers-Briggs and their application in the classroom, and essay writing. I helped lead a workshop in my governorate on critical thinking, and helped my colleagues apply these skills in the classroom. The public goal of these reforms is to hone Jordan's human resources--it's ONLY natural resources!--to take advantage of opportunities for leadership in Information Technologies in the Middle East. Privately, I have on impeccable authority that King Abdullah has said he doesn't wish to be king forever, he would rather see Jordan function as a true democracy.

If Israel, the United States, Britain, or anyone wants to see real progress in the Middle East, they must support education, they must support the teaching of critical thinking, a cornerstone of democratic literacy. If a nation like Israel doesn't have the resources for this, they could at least speak up and call on those who do--the US, UK, EU, UN, Japan, anyone!--to put their money where their fear is.

The drawback to this method is time. It is likely to take 30 years to show real progress, because the older generation doesn't know how to support their children in this new kind of education. Parents asked me all the time, especially the mothers about their daughters, 'I want her to succeed in school, I want to help her, but how can I do that? I'm not even literate in Arabic, I don't understand these things she's studying.' It will be the next generation of students who truly benefit from the reforms of this generation.

But the advantage is longevity. A democracy achieved gradually, from the bottom up, from the first grade up, is more likely to be successful over the long term than one imposed from without. Don't take my word for it. Take Ghandi's:

"The spirit of democracy cannot be imposed from without. It has to come from within."

for Miss Ismahan, I bear witness

2006-09-09T04:39:00.000+03:00

We've all done it—skimmed the headlines numbly, eyes sliding right over another roadside bomb, another rocket attack, another hostage, another refugee. I hear Don Gonyea read through the news and I just want to turn it off. Please, not again! But then I often see my Jordanian colleague Miss Ismahan holding up the newspaper—a 2 page spread of photos from Abu Ghraib prison—and I'm transported back to the village in Jordan where I taught English until recently.

Miss Ismahan was one of two Islam teachers on the faculty, and I expect she was consciously predisposed to dislike the Peace Corps Volunteer pushing in on a community she loved. As far as she was concerned, people there were perfectly able to help themselves. But when I held off other teachers' attempts to convert me to Islam with respectful understanding of the gravity of such a choice, Miss Ismahan softened enough to make me feel welcome.

But I still remember our first real interaction. I had been at my assignment less than two weeks when the Abu Ghraib story broke. They passed the pictures around and I was not passed over. “You must see these,” Miss Ismahan said, holding them up to my face. I knew very little Arabic then and didn't understand her individual words, but I understood what she meant.

“I've seen them on the Internet,” I said. I had winced over them a week before, and hashed out the implications with my Peace Corps colleagues.

“You must look again,” she insisted. “You must bear witness. These are our brothers,” she explained of the victims. She did not say that the soldier perpetrators were my brothers. She didn't have to.

I find myself with the sometimes dubious pleasure of having friends on all sides—American, European, Jordanian; liberal and conservative.... I have known soldiers who assaulted Baghdad, children who were there and live there still, Palestinians and Arab dissidents in exile around the world, and Westerners who have worked in Jerusalem hospitals and elsewhere in the Arab and Muslim worlds. I am acutely aware that, however discouraged I am by the headlines, it is nothing to the despair there would be if no one listened or tried to help at all. There is so little I can do, and even less that Miss Ismahan can do, but if we all bear witness, then, when the opportunity comes to act—to vote, to give money, time or assistance—we'll understand the stakes a little bit better.

That's what I hope to do here, in this blog: to bear witness, to suggest an alternative angle, to show a point of view that you might not have considered about what you hear in the news.