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