An Entity Conceived In Hatred, Survives On Hatred Or How Abul Kalam Azad’s Fears Became Pakistan

Maulana Abul Kalam Muhiyuddin Ahmed (11 November 1888 – 22 February 1958) was a Muslim scholar and a senior political leader of the Indian independence movement. He was a vociferous advocate for the unity of India, opposing the partition of India on communal lines. Following India’s independence, he became the first Minister of Education in the Indian government.

A learned Islamic scholar, Maulana Azad opposed Pakistan’s founder Mohammad Ali Jinnah and his march to create a separate homeland for India’s Muslims. I came across a fascinating interview that he gave in 1946 to a Lahore magazine that reveals his clarity of thought and prescience of mind.

Confronted with the partition of India, something that he vehemently opposed, he warned with great prescience and foresight that:

We must remember that an entity conceived in hatred will last only as long as that hatred lasts. This hatred will overwhelm the relations between India and Pakistan. In this situation it will not be possible for India and Pakistan to become friends and live amicably unless some catastrophic event takes place. The politics of partition itself will act as a barrier between the two countries. It will not be possible for Pakistan to accommodate all the Muslims of India, a task beyond her territorial capability. On the other hand, it will not be possible for the Hindus to stay especially in West Pakistan. They will be thrown out or leave on their own.

The prominent Muslims who are supporters of Muslim League will leave for Pakistan. The wealthy Muslims will take over the industry and business and monopolise the economy of Pakistan. But more than 30 million Muslims will be left behind in India. What promise Pakistan holds for them? The situation that will arise after the expulsion of Hindus and Sikhs from Pakistan will be still more dangerous for them. Pakistan itself will be afflicted by many serious problems. The greatest danger will come from international powers who will seek to control the new country, and with the passage of time this control will become tight. India will have no problem with this outside interference as it will sense danger and hostility from Pakistan.

Could he have been proven more correct? These are the insights of a brilliant mind, one that refused to be cowed by the populist rhetoric of the age and instead choose to courageously speak to the dangers that lay in the future. He was constantly castigated by the more fundamentalist and extremist interpreters of Islamic philosophy and thought. He however remained aware of the actual history of Islam in India:

Muslim history is an important part of Indian history. Do you think the Muslim kings were serving the cause of Islam? They had a nominal relationship with Islam; they were not Islamic preachers. Muslims of India owe their gratitude to Sufis, and many of these divines were treated by the kings very cruelly. Most of the kings created a large band of Ulema who were an obstacle in the path of the propagation of Islamic ethos and values. Islam, in its pristine form, had a tremendous appeal and in the first century won the hearts and minds of a large number of people living in and around Hejaz. But the Islam that came to India was different, the carriers were non-Arabs and the real spirit was missing. Still, the imprint of the Muslim period is writ large on the culture, music, art, architecture and languages of India. What do the cultural centres of India, like Delhi and Lucknow, represent? The underlying Muslim spirit is all too obvious.

I highly recommend reading the entire interview, if for no other reason than to remember that there were dissenting voices to the journey to partition, and that the creation of a Muslim homeland was a project that required political and social planning. It was not a natural outcome of the reality of India and his society – the Hindus and Muslims do not belong to two separate world views or irreconcilable social spheres. In fact, India’s reality was quite the contrary.

Our future – that of Pakistan and India, is dependent on an honest and clear-sighted reading of the political, economic, social and even personal factors that led to the partition. Dreamy and misleading fantasies about irreconcilable religious worldviews will only continue to divide us and confuse it. It will make reconciliation and collaboration impossible.

Maulana Azad’s words remind us that it could all have been a different possibility. And that the different possibility always remains within our grasp. This is not some naive call for ‘reunification’ mind you. It is a reminder simply that our antagonisms, suspicions and fears are manufactured and maintained by powerful social, political and historical forces. They were made by man, and can be unmade by man. And they will require courage and honesty to dismantle. For dismantle they must be if we are to find normalcy – peace, trust, collaboration and calm across that infamous, blood stained border that divides India from Pakistan.

Pankaj Mishra & The Heritage Of Indian Pluralism

Pankaj Mishra, one of my favorite writers and intellectuals, has written a fascinating essay for The National newspaper title Beyond Boundaries that speaks about India’s long and resilient syncretic traditions.

I have featured his piece, thanks to his kind permission, on my The Idea of India project website. For those who may not know, this is a long-term project I am working on documenting India’s heritage of pluralism and syncretism.

Mishra’s essay could just as well have been the project description!

Mishra’s essay, as most of his essays, is precise in its historical details and vivid in its descriptions. He reminds us that despite nearly 70 years of assaults by fundamentalists Hindus and Muslims, India’s vernacular and popular traditions survive and thrive. As he points out:

Early in its millennia-long presence in the subcontinent, Islam lost its Arabian austerity, mingling with local religious traditions to become something that Wahhabis would abhor. Incredibly, much of the subcontinent’s “composite culture” has survived both the divide-and-rule strategies of British colonialism and the rivalry between the nation-states of India and Pakistan, which has produced three major wars since 1947. This enduring pluralism is rooted in the traditional diversity of religious practice across the subcontinent – marking a contrast to the more recent state-guaranteed multiculturalism of Europe and America. Here the pluralism preceded the establishment of the modern state, and it is often at odds with the state’s insistence on singular identities for its citizens.

A determined refusal to bow to the dogmatic and ideological dictates of the fundamentalist simpletons is a very basic motivation for my own work in India. And learning more about our popular traditions and their foundation of love, tolerance, acceptance and compromise is an important weapon in our struggle against the extremists.

This heritage, beautiful and strong, is also an important lesson for the citizens of Europe and America. We do not turn to South Asia to learn and understand, but we would do well to do so now. As a hideous and inhumane Islamophobia and Muslim-bashing consumes an insecure and paranoid Europe/America, they would do well to examine how India has managed to produce a complex and magnificent society whose very nature respect and celebrates diversity, complexity, difference and syncretism. As Pankaj Mishra himself points out:

It may be useful to contrast India’s lived experience of pluralism with contemporary Europe, especially as the latter tries to renovate its faded ideals of secular citizenship while longing for its old cultural uniformity. The secular liberalism of the nation-state has demanded conformity and obedience from Europe’s citizens. Upholding an abstract idea of the individual citizen divested of his religious and ethnic identity, this liberalism has not had an easy relationship with Europe’s ethnic and religious minorities, to put it mildly; the current obsession with Muslims, for instance, betrays a deep unease with expressions of cultural distinctiveness (previously exemplified in Western Europe by Jews). The rise of right-wing parties across Europe shows that masses as well as elites are embracing majoritarian nationalism, recoiling from what, by Indian standards, seems a very limited experience of immigration, social diversity and political extremism.

Indeed, it is useful. And it is needed.

Welcome To The Islamic Republic Of Switzerland – Do You Want Your Burqa In Black Or Blue?

The poster above has become the source of embarrassment and debate within Switzerland. Printed by the far-right Swiss People’s Party (SVP) it is part of their campaign to put a stop to the construction of mosques in the country, and raise their voices against the presence of ‘the other’. The poster depicts minarets in the shape of missiles, and of course, the ubiquitous burqa-clad woman who apparently represents Islam. As explained in a recent piece in Spiegel magazine called Why The Swiss Are Afraid Of Minarets the poster and campaign was the idea of …

…a German man who is behind the successful anti-minaret campaign. The 46-year-old from Hamburg moved to Switzerland after completing his university studies. He worked as a journalist for the conservative Schweizerzeit newspaper and later for the anti-Islam newspaper Bürger und Christ, or “Citizens and Christ,” in which he wrote tirades against a liberal society. “I’ve been able to be active with the SVP on referendum and election campaigns for years,”

Many cities in Switzerland have banned the poster.

But once again, I disagree with this decision. I think that all cities should allow this poster to be shown and distributed. It is the only way that we can reveal the hatred and racism that informs this campaign and confront it head on. But unless we bring these paranoia and delusions into the open, unless we create an environment where these hate-mongers and racists can be directly confronted and challenged, we will not eliminate this scourge from amongst us.

Banning it will only force it to where we cannot confront it, and remove it, and will empower the instigators of this campaign to continue to spread their hateful message but in more insidious and covert ways.

It is clearly obvious that the Swiss are intelligent enough to see the dangers of this campaign, and the racism that informs it. As the Spiegel piece points out:

The minaret initiative is so radical for a Western country that even some die-hard members of the far-right Swiss People’s Party (SVP) are uncomfortable about it. The former party president and current defense minister Ueli Maurer said he was “not totally happy” about it. It probably breaches the consitutional right to religious freedom and could do further damage to Switzerland’s international reputation which has already suffered in recent months from the UBS debacle in the US and accusations that Switzerland is a haven for tax evaders. The case could even provoke the same kind of violent reaction in Muslim countries as the publication of cartoons of the prophet Muhammad in Danish newspapers did four years ago.

There is in fact no point in a ‘violent’ reaction. This is a stupid campaign, by stupid men, and based on stupid assumptions and prejudices. They can be easily, and rather casually, challenged, undermined and eliminated.

There will always be extremists – the ones who are scared, and confused in the face of a changing world and a modernity that seems to be leaving them behind. Rewarding them with public censure only encourages their behavior because it offers them the victory of ‘victimhood’ and ‘martyrdom’. We should not do so.

Print the posters!

I suggest we all print them and hang them up in our homes if for no other reason than to remind us that our silence or our attempts to silence them will in fact be the reason for the ideas that inform this poster to become reality.

Print the posters.

SVP, please send me a copy!

You may also want to read Pankaj Mishra’s piece A Paranoid, Abhorrent Obsession and I quote the paragraph that obviously is an influence and an inspiration for my stand here:

It is a depressing spectacle – talented writers nibbling on cliches picked to the bone by tabloid hacks. But, as Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr pointed out, the “men of culture”, with their developed faculty of reasoning, tend to “give the hysterias of war and the imbecilities of national politics more plausible excuses than the average man is capable of inventing”. The “public conversation” about Islam…should not be avoided. Its terms have already been set low, and the bigger danger is that it will be dominated by an isolated and vain chattering class that, rattled by a changing world, seeks to reassure us by digging an unbridgeable trench around our minds and hearts.

Not In Our Name: Hamburg Artists Speak Out Against A Segregated City

A group of artists, intellectuals and concerned citizens have issued a ‘Not In Our Name’ statement to the city development authorities demanding that the ‘planned’ city and its extensive ‘gentrification’ be immediately stopped and that it not be used to create socially and class segregated ‘ghettos’ that privilege the few over the culture, social space and life of the city and it many diverse communities.

The original statement in Germany can be read here Not In Our Name, Marke Hamburg and an English translation is available here Not In Our Name.

Some key paragraphs that highlight the ideas of the manifesto:

• In Hamburg’s case, the competition now means that city politics are increasingly subordinated to an “Image City”. The idea is to send out a very specific image of the city into the world: the image of the “pulsating capital”, which offers a “stimulating atmosphere and the best opportunities for creatives of all stripes”. A local marketing company feeds this image to the media as “the brand Hamburg“. It is flooding the republic with brochures that turn Hamburg into a consistent, socially passified fantasyland with Elbe Philharmonic and table dancing, Blankenese and Schanzenviertel, agency life and art scenes, local Harley Days, gay parades in St. Georg, alternative art spectacles in the “HafenCity“, Reeperbahn festivals, fan miles and Cruise Days. Hardly a week goes by without some tourist mega-event carrying out its “brand-strengthening function.”
• Stop this shit. We won’t be taken for fools. Dear location politicians: we refuse to talk about this city in marketing categories. We don’t want to “position” local neighborhoods as “colorful, brash, eclectic” parts of town, nor will we think of Hamburg in terms of “water, cosmopolitanism, internationality,” or any other “success modules of the brand Hamburg” that you chose to concoct..We hereby state, that in the western city center it is almost impossible to rent a room in a shared flat for less than 450 Euro per month, or a flat for under 10 Euro per square meter. That the amount of social housing will be slashed by half within ten years. That the poor, elderly and immigrant inhabitants are being driven to the edge of town by Hartz IV (welfare money) and city housing-distribution policies. We think that your “growing city” is actually a segregated city of the 19th century: promenades for the wealthy, tenements for the rabble.
• We, the music DJs, art, film and theater people, the groovy-little-shop owners and anyone who represents a different quality of life, are supposed to function as a counterpoint to the “city of subterranean parking” (Süddeutsche Zeitung). We are meant to take care of the atmosphere, the aura and leisure quality, without which an urban location has little chance in the global competition. We are welcome. In a way. On the one hand. On the other, the blanket development of urban space means that we – the decoys – are moving out in droves, because it is getting increasingly impossible to afford space here.
• We say: A city is not a brand. A city is not a corporation. A city is a community. We ask the social question which, in cities today, is also about a battle for territory. This is about taking over and defending places that make life worth living in this city, which don’t belong to the target group of the “growing city”. We claim our right to the city – together with all the residents of Hamburg who refuse to be a location factor.

Suddenly, I like Hamburg.

The gentrification of the life of cities is taking place all across Europe. Stockholm is suffering this disease, rapidly creating little ‘middle class’ ghetto estates that lack any sense of human existence and reflect the complete degradation of human life to that of work and rest before returning to work. Cold glass and concrete buildings that look increasingly like fashionable prison cells are being sold on the market, with streets devoid of commerce, society or even a real natural settings to take pleasure in. And the public square, where people can gather, mingle, savor a cup of coffee, has been completely erased! Stockholm has no public squares! But it has a lot of the same second-rate shopping boutiques and very similar, cookie-cutter yuppie drones walking around wearing the same faux-designer clothing!

The conformity of modernity is suffocating and it is being manufactured by some lowly educated machine tool bureaucrat with no imagination of sense of the human, diligently working his way to the pensioned life s/he has been dreaming of since graduating from some technical college.

This is especially personal because I lived through the years when the life, society, diversity, uniqueness, quirkyness and sheer magnificent madness of New York was pillaged in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The rape of Times Square that transforemed this squalid but human, complex, diverse, challenging and provocative space into a anesthetized, lobotomized, corporatized, disneyfied infantile playpen was perhaps the symbolic act of those years.

So thank you Hamburg!

It is time to stop this shit!

‘Going Muslim’ At Fort Hood Or How Rabid Simplicities Masquerading As Insight Just Sell More Magazines

It did not take long for overtly racist explanations to be offered. Before facts come fantasy, and before truth comes tabloid opinions masquerading as insight. And it arrived not in some radical, fringe magazine but in the pages of the international magazine Forbes by one of their regular contributors. (I of course ignore the determined Islamophobia of outlets like Fox News.)

Tunku Varadarajan wrote a piece for Forbes magazine on 11th November 2009, title Going Muslim where he argued that:

“Going postal” is a piquant American phrase that describes the phenomenon of violent rage in which a worker–archetypically a postal worker–”snaps” and guns down his colleagues.

As the enormity of the actions of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan sinks in, we must ask whether we are confronting a new phenomenon of violent rage, one we might dub–disconcertingly–”Going Muslim.” This phrase would describe the turn of events where a seemingly integrated Muslim-American–a friendly donut vendor in New York, say, or an officer in the U.S. Army at Fort Hood–discards his apparent integration into American society and elects to vindicate his religion in an act of messianic violence against his fellow Americans. This would appear to be what happened in the case of Maj. Hasan.

Mr. Varadarajan is no clown – he is in fact a a professor at NYU’s Stern Business School and a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, and an executive editor for opinions at Forbes. Clearly a man of some learning and yet able to offer us this fine insight:

This is part of a larger–and too-hot-to-touch–American problem, which is the privileging of religion, and its frequent exemption from rules of normal discourse. Muslims may be more extreme because their religion is founded on bellicose conquest, a contempt for infidels and an obligation for piety that is more extensive than in other schemes.

Moving on to ask us a crucial question of whether:

But can the American swagger persist if many Americans come genuinely to view Muslims as Fifth Columnists? The integration compact depends on a broad trust that the immigrant’s desire to be American can happily co-exist with his other forms of racial/cultural/religious identity. Once that trust doesn’t exist, America faces a problem in need of urgent resolution.

∞

One doesn’t quite know where to begin to respond to what is without a doubt an overtly racist diatribe that takes the actions of an individual and paints it as that of a collectivity. That is after all the ideal description of racism: (noun) the belief that all members of a group posses characteristics or abilities (or pathologies) specific to that group. But then again, the learned professor is not alone in this and arrives as the inheritor of centuries of orientalist thought that can never quite reconcile itself to the individuality of the people it labels as Muslims. And he is not alone in America, or elsewhere.

But the learned professor raises specific points which I would like to examine perhaps a little more closely.

He says in this very article that ‘they’ [the Muslims] are more extreme because ‘their’ religion is …founded on bellicose conquest, a contempt for infidels and an obligation for piety that is more extensive than in other schemes.

Only sheer hubris combined with willful amnesia can allow this gentleman to offer us this explanation. Hubris as he sits as a citizen of a nation that is at this very moment in violent and repressive conquest of at least two once sovereign nations, and whose army has repeatedly insisted on a sheer contempt for the infidels it has found there and encouraged its soldiers to piety the likes of which can only make the foundations of our Republic weaker. The hundreds of thousands that have died since 2001 under the guns and arrogance of an overtly Christian/Evangelical administration that also led us to become instigators of war crimes, violators of international law and perpetrators of mass murder perhaps may not agree that it is Islam that is intrinsically programmed to encourage mass violence, conquest and/or piety.

(For those with short memories, see Micklethwait/Wooldridge’s The Right Nation, or Chris Hedges’ American Fascists or Michelle Goldberg’s Kingdom Coming or any number of others books on this issue)

I don’t think I have to elaborate on our occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, so I will move to the next point – Islam’s unique contempt for infidels and its piety. Really? Is it that unique? Lets see.

In a fabulous piece written by the relentless Jeff Sharlet for Harpers Magazine title “Jesus Killed Mohammed: The Crusade For A Christian Military”, he points out that:

When Barack Obama moved into the Oval Office in January, he inherited a military not just drained by a two-front war overseas but fighting a third battle on the home front, a subtle civil war over its own soul. On one side are the majority of military personnel, professionals who regardless of their faith or lack thereof simply want to get their jobs done; on the other is a small but powerful movement of Christian soldiers concentrated in the officer corps.

What men such as these have fomented is a quiet coup within the armed forces: not of generals encroaching on civilian rule but of religious authority displacing the military’s once staunchly secular code. Not a conspiracy but a cultural transformation, achieved gradually through promotions and prayer meetings, with personal faith replacing protocol according to the best intentions of commanders who conflate God with country. They see themselves not as subversives but as spiritual warriors—“ambassadors for Christ in uniform,” according to Officers’ Christian Fellowship; “government paid missionaries,” according to Campus Crusade’s Military Ministry.

This is perhaps one of the scariest pieces of journalism I have read, reminding us of the infiltration of Christian fundamentalist ideology infesting the armed forces and its consequences for our operations abroad. Perhaps the learned professor would do well to read his words, including:

Within the fundamentalist front in the officer corps, the best organized group is Officers’ Christian Fellowship, with 15,000 members active at 80 percent of military bases and an annual growth rate, in recent years, of 3 percent. Founded during World War II, OCF was for most of its history concerned mainly with the spiritual lives of those who sought it out, but since 9/11 it has moved in a more militant direction. According to the group’s current executive director, retired Air Force Lieutenant General Bruce L. Fister, the “global war on terror”—to which Obama has committed 17,000 new troops in Afghanistan—is “a spiritual battle of the highest magnitude.” As jihad has come to connote violence, so spiritual war has moved closer to actual conflict, “continually confronting an implacable, powerful foe who hates us and eagerly seeks to destroy us,” declares “The Source of Combat Readiness,” an OCF Scripture study prepared on the eve of the Iraq War.

As we look across to our Israeli allies, we ironically (or perhaps not) find in fact the same problem there! In a scathing piece written by Christopher Hitchens called An Army of Extremists for Slate Magazine, he pointed out that:

Recent reports of atrocities committed by Israeli soldiers in the course of the intervention in Gaza have described the incitement of conscripts and reservists by military rabbis who characterized the battle as a holy war for the expulsion of non-Jews from Jewish land. The secular Israeli academic Dany Zamir, who first brought the testimony of shocked Israeli soldiers to light, has been quoted as if the influence of such extremist clerical teachings was something new. This is not the case.

And should one have thought that this was simply a rare exception, he goes on to remind us that:

Possibly you remember Dr. Baruch Goldstein, the man who in February 1994 unslung his weapon and killed more than two dozen worshippers at the mosque in Hebron. He had been a physician in the Israeli army and had first attracted attention by saying that he would refuse to treat non-Jews on the Sabbath. …[I]n the March 22 New York Times about the preachments of the Israeli army’s latest chief rabbi, a West Bank settler named Avichai Rontzski who also holds the rank of brigadier general. He has “said that the main reason for a Jewish doctor to treat a non-Jew on the Sabbath … is to avoid exposing Diaspora Jews to hatred.” Those of us who follow these things recognize that statement as one of the leading indicators of a truly determined racist and fundamentalist. Yet it comes not this time in the garb of a homicidal lone-wolf nut bag but in the full uniform and accoutrement of a general and a high priest.

And we can even look outside of the ‘immediate’ military structure, and find piety and a religious zeal for conquest raising its ugly head. In an article written by Jeremy Scahill titled Blackwater Founder Implicated in Murder we learn that:

A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia.The two men claim that the company’s owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe,” and that Prince’s companies “encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life.”

In fact, the allegations read as follows:

To that end, Mr. Prince intentionally deployed to Iraq certain men who shared his vision of Christian supremacy, knowing and wanting these men to take every available opportunity to murder Iraqis. Many of these men used call signs based on the Knights of the Templar, the warriors who fought the Crusades.

Mr. Prince operated his companies in a manner that encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life. For example, Mr. Prince’s executives would openly speak about going over to Iraq to “lay Hajiis out on cardboard.” Going to Iraq to shoot and kill Iraqis was viewed as a sport or game. Mr. Prince’s employees openly and consistently used racist and derogatory terms for Iraqis and other Arabs, such as “ragheads” or “hajiis.”

Again, perhaps the learned professor would like to peruse this material if for no other reason than to understand that zealotry, piety, and a desire for conquest is never the exclusive purvey of any one spiritual delusion, but reflects the world views of practically all of them.

But in particular, at this moment in time and history, at this juncture of modernity, if there is a rapid, rapacious, powerful and in fact in execution spiritual movement of conquest and a drive for excessive piety, it is more so in the hands of some of the most powerful military nations in the world. And none of them can claim an Islamic collective mindset.

I will say something about the learned professor’s incredibly racist mistake in assuming that the shooter was an immigrant – as he says The integration compact depends on a broad trust that the immigrant’s desire to be American can happily co-exist with his other forms of racial/cultural/religious identity. But in fact Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan is as pure an American as they come; born, raised, educated and trained in the United States of America. He wasn’t an immigrant professor, he was an American.

And he was an American inside a deeply Christianized, racist military structure that has become comfortable speaking about and of the Arab world and Muslims in the most derogatory, demeaning and racist terms. It has become so because its wars are against a people it sees as a mass, a mob, a group, a collective – A-rabs, Muslims, ragheads, hajjis. The latter term is used openly and gleerfully in even such mainstream Hollywood films such as Stop-Loss. (I am sure there are more, but Hollywood is not something I watch with interest or regularity.)

The army has has become so because it is the war that it is fighting and it is here that we refuse to ask the hard question; how much of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s rage was against his fellow soldiers and the atmosphere at the base itself that allowed for a constant and unchecked language of hate and ridicule against an entire religion, people, culture and way of life? Were there, perhaps, white supremacists on the loose? Well, we will never know of course.

But I am sure that the learned professor doesn’t know either. What is dismaying is that he does not have the awareness to ask, but has instead chosen to give public vent to what can only be a deeply personal hatred against all Muslims claiming that it is only political correctness that is forcing America, and her Army, from taking the necessary, collective/racial profiling, actions that it should. He is angry that America suffers from a …privileging of religion, and its frequent exemption from rules of normal discourse.

Lets be clear, the learned professor is not complaining about America’s privileging of all religions, for after all it is not the insanity of the Christian Evangelicals that has bought him to this realization, but that the country is not collectively targeting Muslims! We have to remember that the same learned professor has been an outspoken advocate of racial profiling of Muslims in America,

But dear professor, viewing a crime as the act of an individual and not because of a pathology indigenous to an entire collectivity is less about being politically correct and more about being just and not being a racist. In fact, the determination to not reduce this to yet another all-too-easy Islam bashing exercise is a testament to America’s determination to return to the ways of the law and legality, and to move its society back to a point where it speaks not with generic hatred of an imaginary collectivity but with genuine desire to offer both justice and rights for individuals who commit crimes. It is one of the very set of values we always speak about and insist are what we are killing in places around the world for!

And it is a battle that we as American citizens have had to fight hard – to move past the infantile and retrograde desire to hate ‘all of them’ for the actions of a few, to lynch them for their color for example, and move towards the point where we can see individuals and individual responsibility and make them not only the recipients of retribution, but also the motivation for our respect for fundamental liberties and rights.

I do not know what led Maj. Hasan to do what he did. I can’t even begin to understand his motivations, and certainly not his actions. I remain dismayed to learn that he chose to justify his murders on the basis of his spiritual beliefs. Just as I have been dismayed to learn about Jewish extremists gloating about their murders on the basis of their beliefs, or Christian fanatics e.g. those in the US military I speak about earlier explaining their bloody rampages because of their ‘loving god’. Maybe he was just a mentally disturbed and ill person, as a recent NPR piece claims to have uncovered. Maybe he lost his way. I don’t know. I don’t claim to have an answer here.

My interest here is to question our learned professor. And wonder how we have arrived at a moment in time when such blatantly racist statements can make it to the pages of one of our most respected magazines, and then find hundreds who rush to defend his bigotry? Our continued insistence on seeing Muslims as a collective whole, tied at the psychological and moral level into one large blob, is quite flabbergasting and ultimately confusing.

Like a taint, a disease, a scar or a deformation, anyone, man, woman or child, even vaguely or deeply implicated by having been born, raised, educated, traveled to, interested in, curious about things Muslim has his entire identity and all its various other facets subsumed and erased by the label of being Muslim. And once that is established, the individual is safely dropped back into a mob, where only mob acts that are predictable and programmatic based on an formalized, systematized, idealized and perfectly synchronized response to instructions in text books or from the mouths of religious leaders can occur. LIke robots in a massive spiritual assembly line, anything that reeks of Islam can be expected to behave like a swarm, mindlessly following the dictates of their religious books, devoid of individuality, individual morality, judgment, discernment and comprehension.

I am diseased.

There have been calls to sanction the learned professor. I don’t support these calls. I think it would be better to debate him. He has a right to speak, and we would be right to dissuade him off his delusions rather than sanction him to where he would simply continue his nonsense.

Saying ‘Fuck Off’ In Muslim And Why I Say It So Often!

I was days away from penning a piece about how we should neither ask or give ‘collectivist’ explanations for acts of violence carried out by people 1) using Islam as a justification, 2) with Arabic/Islamic/Muslim names, and 3) veiling their illegal, violent and inhumane activities behind a language and rhetoric of Islam.

But Ali Eteraz beat me to it, and did it more articulately and with greater clarity. By the way, I have quoted from Eteraz’s works in the past. He has also recently published what looks like a fascinating memoir. The book is called Children of Dust and chronicles his journey from a village in Pakistan to the USA where he remained the rest of his life.

In a piece called Muslims Should Raise The Other Finger , written in the aftermath of the Fort Hood shootings and the massive outcry against ‘Muslims’ and ‘Islam’ that emerged overtly or surreptitiously (and obviously not for the first or the last time), Ali gets right down to it and says:

There is no need for one Muslim to condemn the crimes of another. Collective responsibility cannot, and should not, be accepted. Where one accepts collective responsibility one opens the door to collective punishment. Are Muslims individuals? Or are they one singular marionette that pirouettes each time its string is pulled?

Saving a particular, and well inspired, bile for a certain individual who recently wrote a very stupid piece in the Huffington Post

One of the most egregious acts of kowtowing to the “massa” occurred recently in the aftermath of the Fort Hood shootings. At Huffington Post, Muslim Public Affairs Council’s Salam al-Maryati wrote an article directed to Muslim-Americans, extolling them to “amplify our Muslim American identity.” No thanks. The only thing I’ll amplify is the length of my middle finger.

Time again there is an outcry against ‘Muslims’ that insists and demands that they [the Muslims] condemn acts of individuals or individual groups, as if this community – hundreds of millions of people, dozens of different cultures and ethnicities, hundreds of different histories and heritages, and dozens of political national groups were all somehow tied to each other and aware and responsible for the acts of all within it.

No other group is expected or asked to perform such demeaning and degrading ‘collective’ apologia. A Jewish settler slaughters a Prime Minister, but he is quickly seen as an ‘individual’, ‘an extremist’ and unrepresentative of his people. A Christian fanatic blows up a Government building in Oklahoma, but churches are not raided, nor charities closed. Christian soldiers in America’s armies are out there killing and murdering civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq, and yet few are exploring the pages of the New Testament to find its ‘genetic’ coding for violence. Or insisting that every Evangelical take responsibility for their actions and ‘do something about it’. A post office shooter kills off colleagues he finds boring, but we never investigate his religious feelings or delusions as a source of an explanation.

But god-forbid you have a 1) Arabic name, 2) come from a country with a predominantly Muslim heritage, or 3) traveled to or worked in or slept with a prostitute from a country with a predominantly Muslim heritage, and all bets are off and we are in the realm of the ‘mass condemnation’ and ‘mass apologia’. The ‘Muslim’ community is called to task by political leaders, and all sorts of self-appointed ‘leaders of the community’ emerge from their rats holes to speak for ‘us’.

Who are these people?

Islam has no clergy. And no illiterate, provincial or self-selected Mullah or Maulvi speaks for me or anyone in the community. It is not their role, it is not their responsibility, and it is not something anyone in any community has asked them to do. But from the morons at the Vatican to the morons at the White House, we repeatedly seen this pathetic theater of some lame-duck ‘Muslim’ leader – never heard of before or since standing alongside a bunch of self-righteous and pleased ‘Western’ leaders and playing the ‘moderate’ card. As if standing there with George Bush and mouthing stupidities about ‘the peaceful nature of Islam’ is what is needed and not what will only further encourage collectivist generalizations and racist simplicities.

So with Ali Iteraz I say – fuck you – not just to those who attempt to collect everyone of any random/vague or specific Muslim heritage into a mass, but also to those so-called ‘Islamic’ leaders who have the audacity to speak on my behalf. To turn and see acts of individuals and groups as acts of an entire, diverse and complex community is simply racist i.e. the belief that all members of a group posses characteristics and abilities (in this case, a propensity and preference for religious violence!) specific to that group!

So the next time someone asks you ‘Why is Islam so violent?’ or ‘What is your community doing about this?’ or ‘What is wrong with Islam?’, just indeed look them in the eye, smile, and say ‘Fuck you, you racist!’ There are extremists, morons, deranged individuals carrying out criminal acts all over the world. They come from all backgrounds, classes, ethnicities, religions and nations. To understand a crime we have to investigate it as a crime.

Crimes have personal, political, economic and social reasons and we are better off exploring these, than the pages of religious texts or the ‘psychology’ of ‘a belief’ to see if something in their DNA makes them uniquely susceptible to murdering, or creating illegal settlements, or faking weapons of mass destruction accusations, or building gas chambers to take out another ‘entire’ people.

Footnote: In 2005 I met a very well known American photographer in Jerusalem. I was on my way to Gaza and she was just returning from there. Upon learning that I was of a Muslim heritage, her immediate reaction was to ask me where in the Koran she could find an explanation for suicide bombings.

It took a few minutes for me to overcome my amusement and a growing disdain for this individual. I did however find a few moments of control to respond.

I turned to her and said only this – that I found it laughable that despite spending 3 weeks with the Palestinians of Gaza, and witnessing first hand their desperate conditions, their daily humiliations, their powerlessness to fend off the systemic violence inflicted on them and their children, their hunger, joblessness, and general hopelessness – conditions that have continued for decades and maintained because of an Israeli occupation, that she was searching the pages of a religious text to understand why the Palestinians engaged in retaliatory violence!

I believe that she kept looking in the pages of the Koran. She may still be looking after all these years!

Her pathetic cowardice and determined recism – one that erased the lived history and daily experiences of human beings, experience that she had seen with her own eyes, and chose instead to wallow in ‘religious’ fantasies and collective simplicities was just too appalling to behold. Suffice it to say, she has gone on to win many awards for her work. In a mainstream world where the mediocre is the magnificent, I would expect nothing less.

Getting The Pakistanis To Sing Our Songs But Sending Them Villains And Not Violins

A few weeks ago another typically obtuse and brain dead New York Times journalist lamented the said state of affairs of the country of Pakistan where apparently her pop singers were not entertaining him sufficiently with songs against the Taliban. Adam B. Ellick was confused and upset about this and pointed out, in a piece called Pakistan Rock Rails Against The West, Not The Taliban that there is..

…a surge of bubble-gum stars who have become increasingly politicized. Some are churning out ambiguous, cheery lyrics urging their young fans to act against the nation’s woes. Others simply vilify the United States.

But while Mr. Ellick is writing pointless and frankly infantile pieces about the country and her pop stars, we can be grateful that other American journalists are stepping out to in fact conduct actual journalism.

So here comes a shocking, if not altogether surprising, report by Jeremy Scahill for The Nation that reveals the extensive involvement of Blackwater Security in military and security operations inside the country. All of this with the full collaboration and support of the Pakistani Government and military of course.

Posted on The Nation website, the extensive and detailed investigation was published in a piece called Blackwater’s Secret War In Pakistan and it is explicit in the shenanigans taking place there, and the lives that are being lost there:

A former senior executive at Blackwater confirmed the military intelligence source’s claim that the company is working in Pakistan for the CIA and JSOC, the premier counterterrorism and covert operations force within the military. He said that Blackwater is also working for the Pakistani government on a subcontract with an Islamabad-based security firm that puts US Blackwater operatives on the ground with Pakistani forces in counter-terrorism operations, including house raids and border interdictions, in the North-West Frontier Province and elsewhere in Pakistan. This arrangement, the former executive said, allows the Pakistani government to utilize former US Special Operations forces who now work for Blackwater while denying an official US military presence in the country. He also confirmed that Blackwater has a facility in Karachi and has personnel deployed elsewhere in Pakistan. The former executive spoke on condition of anonymity.

Scahill makes clear the extent to which this private security and mercenary firm has made inroads into Pakistani’s government and security establishments, and the deep collaborations between the Pakistanis and Blackwater in carrying out a second series o drone attacks, independent of the predator campaigns being run by the US military. They are also involved in planning targeted assassinations, “snatch and grabs” and other sensitive actions inside and outside the country of Pakistan. Oh, and they may be posing as USAID workers!

There is an interview with Jeremy Scahill on Amy Goodman’s DemocracyNow station – America’s last bastion of independent, non-corporate, take-it-to-the-throat-of-power journalism. You can listen to Scahill here:

As the New York Times and Mr. Ellick sit inside their comfortable Islamabad villas and listen to the radio, getting upset that the stupid Pakistanis don’t seem to understand that the only way to actually ‘understand’ or ’see’ their own country is through the myopic and policy eyes of the United States, The Nation has revealed facts and goings ons that only confirm the fears and paranoia’s of the nation’s people.

It will only further convince them that it is not the Taliban that is a serious or even a real threat to Pakistan, but in fact the rapacious (hundreds are being killed each month in this drone campaign) and covert operations that will undermine and tear apart the fabric of the country just so we Americans, for just a little bit longer, do not have to confront the colossal failure of our policies and strategies in Afghanistan.

Sing away boy!!

Photographers I Like: Jason Eskenazi talks about His Work Wonderland

Jason Eskenazi is a photographer I greatly respect. Independent in mind, brilliant in eye and passionate in photography. I tried to meet him once – back in 2006 at Visa Pour L’image in Perpignan, France. But he was too busy to give me any time. I wish I had had a chance to sit over a coffee and pick his brain about the way he thinks about and structures projects. Oh well, just another disappointment to write about in my now-too-boring-for-words angst-ridden ruminations in my Moleskines!

Here is an interview with Jason, thanks to the Lutton/Brauer duo at dvafoto, who talks about his work in Russia – a portion of which was produced with the help of a Fulbright grant (Jason also received a Guggenheim!), and which was released as the book Wonderland: A Fairytale of The Soviet Monolith

more about “Jason Eskenazi talks about Wonderland…“, posted with vodpod

 

Remembering Faiz – As If We Could Ever Forget Him!

On the anniversary of the death of the man who in many ways changed my life…once I understood how to read, hear and comprehend his works. I wrote about his impact on my life in an earlier post titled Unraveling Bitter Threads & I refer to his works in a piece I wrote about the genocide in Bangladesh called The Dust From Blood Filled Eyes: On Bangladesh And The Acknowledgement Of Crimes.

Faiz Ahmed Faiz died on 20th November 1984.

The BBC Urdu service produced a small documentary about Faiz. It is in Urdu – I wish there was a version I could share with everyone. Its quite simple, but I suppose when you have lost something you love, anything will do.

Here is a performance by the incredible Iqbal Bano of one of Faiz’s poems

Here is Iqbal Bano singing that most amazing of Faiz’s work Dasht-e-Tanhai (Wasteland of solitude)

Who Was That Busker You Gave 50c To? The Same I Paid $100 To See The Night Before!

HE EMERGED FROM THE METRO AT THE L’ENFANT PLAZA STATION AND POSITIONED HIMSELF AGAINST A WALL BESIDE A TRASH BASKET. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.

That is how this wonderfully funny, and yet poignantly dismaying, story in The Washington Post begins describing how Joshua Bell, one of the world’s leading violinists, stood on a Washington subway platform and performed six Bach pieces on a violin worth $3.5 million. As the article explains:

Called the Gibson ex Huberman, it was handcrafted in 1713 by Antonio Stradivari during the Italian master’s “golden period,” toward the end of his career, when he had access to the finest spruce, maple and willow, and when his technique had been refined to perfection…Twice, it was stolen from its illustrious prior owner, the Polish virtuoso Bronislaw Huberman. The first time, in 1919, it disappeared from Huberman’s hotel room in Vienna but was quickly returned. The second time, nearly 20 years later, it was pinched from his dressing room in Carnegie Hall. He never got it back. It was not until 1985 that the thief — a minor New York violinist — made a deathbed confession to his wife, and produced the instrument. Bell bought it a few years ago. He had to sell his own Strad and borrow much of the rest. The price tag was reported to be about $3.5 million.

And how much did Bell make that day from busking on the Washington subway?

$32.00

You can hear his subway performance here. Its spectacular. But I can’t help but feel that I too would have just walked by, and not even dropped a coin in the bag!

Oh, how I lament my musical illiteracy!

Here is Joshua Bell playing Ave Maria:

The People Who Gave Us The One State Solution Or Can You Spell A-P-A-R-T-H-E-I-D?

Thanks to Max Blumenthal:

Voices Of Dissent In Times Of Consent: Anna Baltzar, Omar Barghouti And The Struggle For Justice

This is an American voice, and perhaps much needed. We are at a crucial turning point in the world opinion and understanding of the situation a.k.a. the occupation of West Bank and Gaza, and voices of people like Anna Baltzer are an essential complement to the decades of civic, intellectual, social and yes, occasionally, violent resistance and struggle by the Palestinians trapped inside Israel’s dreams and fantasies. Her’s and voices of intellectuals like Omar Barghouti are the humane, just and reasonable arguments against the murderous, cold-blooded calculations of those in power. To listen to Anna is to be filled with conviction that the pusillanimity of people like our Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and her global tours of pandering to the evil, ignominious and sickening, is merely background noise that represents those in positions of power but in fact in great places of weakness and inaction. Here is Anna, thanks to Essential Dissent and PULSE

more about “Essential Dissent: Anna Baltzer: Life…”, posted with vodpod

more about “Essential Dissent: Anna Baltzer: Life…”, posted with vodpod

more about “Essential Dissent: Anna Baltzer: Life…”, posted with vodpod

You can also listen to the articulate and brilliant Omar Barghouti who is traveling across the USA to argue for the Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions (BDS) movement against the state of Israel. I have been a vociferous opponent of this movement on the grounds that it reeks of collective punishment, and will not yield an engagement with the Israelis that is essential to a long term settlement and peace between the peoples there. However, I will admit that Omar’s arguments are compelling, and that many of my ideas and assumptions about the West Bank and Gaza, naive and irrelevant given that I do not live, suffer and struggle there. Humility demands that I listen to Palestinians voices who are in fact the force behind this movement, and it is the voice of an oppressed people asking the world to listen and to follow an act that they wish to undertake. Listen to Omar – his is an insightful and intelligent and cogent and universal voice.

 

Where The Head Spun: November 13th 2009

A wide range of issues came across recently and though I would love to wax lyrical about all of them I find my head space considerably limited to speak of each in some reasonable fashion. But I wanted to draw your attention to some interesting developments, a few of which are being carefully ignored in our press and oh-so-alert media

The Pakistanis are holding elections in Gilgit-Baltistan: Yes, as we continue to babble on about Kashmir and the conflict there, a monumental shift in Pakistan’s stance towards the regions of Gilgit-Baltistan. This is significant because these regions are part of what was once the Princely state of Jammu & Kashmir and were occupied by Pakistan in the 1948 invasion of the state. Dawn, one of Pakistan’s major English daily’s, reveals in a series of detailed reports what is happening there. We should not underestimate the significance of this decision, one that would have required considerable debate within the echelons of power and the military because, as we learn from Dawn

:

The problem though has to be seen in the international context because of the Kashmir issue. Historically, Gilgit-Baltistan was not merged into Pakistan proper because the fear was that it could undermine our claim on Kashmir and it was not merged into AJK because it could complicate a settlement on the area. If, for example, Gilgit-Baltistan is made a full-fledged province within the constitutional framework of Pakistan, India could perhaps argue that the state it has carved out of the disputed area, Indian-held Jammu and Kashmir, is also a legitimate entity and that it is a settled issue.

Of course it is premature to assume that this means anything significant, but we would be wrong to under estimate the meaning of this and the shift in the position of the Pakistani government when it comes to the areas once known as ‘The Northern Areas’. Could this be the beginning of a shift in the language and rhetoric towards the regions of Kashmir Valley? Could the situation there be transformed into a discussion about citizen rights, laws, accountability and representation? The Indians would do well to listen and pay attention. Others, who continue to write about Kashmir as if we are still back in the early 1990s, would do well to try to understand this issue at greater depth.

∞

In Sweden much to no one’s surprise, IKEA is revealed to be a mini-fascist state: Ok, I exaggerate, but there has a new tell-all, gossip book out by a former senior management member of the enterprise who reveals a lot of unmentionables about this otherwise ‘most Swedish’ of companies.  Tidbits include such exciting stuff such as:

On the executive floor, Stenebo claims, foreigners were repeatly denigrated as “niggers.” They apparently had no chance of promotion within the company — something Stenebo blames on Kamprad’s increasing paranoia. Ikea, in spite of being the world’s largest furniture company, is run exclusively by people from Älmhult in the Swedish region of Smaland — the small town where Kamprad himself grew up. “Born on the farm” is how the Swedish describe it. The importance of blood and place of birth within Ikea is no coincidence, Stenebo claims — blatant racism exists within the company.

Ah, yes, that never-ending flower of rampant nationalism continues to raise it skirts to reveal things incredibly hideous!

∞

On a different note, the incredibly obvious has been turned into a documentary, and many are ’shocked’. Philippe Diaz’s has a new documentary called “The End of Poverty?” which reveals, according to a review in Salon magazine, that:

What’s most profound, and also most controversial, in this analysis is the question of how much this pattern of exploitation continues today. Between 1503 and 1660, the precious metals looted from the Americas by the Spanish crown increased the European silver reserves fourfold, funding a massive expansion of imperialism. Today, the World Bank estimates that the developing world spends $13 in debt repayment for every $1 it receives in grants. Exactly how different are these scenarios? Is our affluent, consumer-democracy Western lifestyle only possible because we are, in effect, still stealing from the poorest people in the world?

Well, neither profound, nor controversial, but in fact a banal reality that most ignore willingly. This of course is not a criticism of the film which hopefully can educate many more about how things actually work. I was also reminded of Mike Davis’ book Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines & The Making Of The Third World the only work I know that actually asks the obvious question: How did the 3rd World become the 3rd World? - something that is rarely if ever discussed, and certainly never approached in our much celebrated higher education institutions.

∞

Speaking of the scourge of terrorism, yet another lame-duck reporter for the New York Times reminds us, or purports to remind us, that Pakistani pop musicians seems to be producing a lot of music criticizing America, while ignoring the threat of the Taliban.  Adam B. Ellick is indignant at the Pakistani musicians, particularly the new generation of pop stars at their clear ignorance and irresponsibility. Oddly, it never occurs to him that the reason could be that the Pakistanis do in fact consider America to be a more real, dangerous and immediate threat to the country than the marginal, and very small so-called Taliban threat!

It seems beyond his ability to accept that perhaps most Pakistani musicians, much like their countrymen, are focus on the core problem that has plagued the country since the late 1950s i.e. American intervention and meddling in the nation’s affairs, facilitated and supported by a cabal of shallow, venal elites bent on retaining control of legal and illegal revenue sources. That includes the military mind you. And that they understand that ridding Pakistan of America – and Afghanistan for that matter, will rid the country of the so-called Taliban too! In fact, I have quoted Eqbal Ahmed frequently to make this point. His analysis is from some decades ago when he said:

There is an increasingly perceptible gap between our need for social transformation and America’s insistence on stability, between our impatience for change and American’s obsession with order, our move towards revolution and America’s belief in the plausibility of achieving reforms under the robber barons of the ‘third world’, our longing for absolute national sovereignty and America’s preference for pliable allies, our desires to see our national soil free of foreign occupation and America’s alleged need for military bases.

And that was back in the 1970s! Mr. Ellick’s blinders make it impossible for him to see how his nation is seen from the perspective of a Pakistani’s economic and political emasculation, a trait shared by most every American reporter reporting from that country. Now lets see, where did I put my iPod play-list of American pop musicians sonorously protesting her illegal wars, torture centers, illegal detentions, thirst for the blood of Iraqi and Afghani ‘half-humans’? Oh, wait, there isn’t one!

∞

Speaking of thirst for blood, an American ultra-orthodox fanatic and frankly, lets admit it, deranged lunatic, Yaakov Teitel is on trial in a Jerusalem court room. He is the latest concoction of the fanatical and murderous settler groups infesting the West Bank (I apologize for using the ‘insect’ language here – infest – but it was too tempting not to since it is usually how such murderous religious terrorists are spoken about when it comes to some other religions!). Most of these, by the way, are not Israeli, but in fact, American zealots being trained there and being sent to the West Bank and once to Gaza. Yaakov Keitel made a home in a West Bank settlement of Shvut Rachel, that was also the home of yet another Jewish terrorist, Asher Weissgan, convicted of massacring five Palestinian laborers in a 2005 terror incident.

But, then again, this is not surprising given that deans of yeshiva can go about issuing statements justifying the killing of non-Jews in specific conditions – most by the way are written to justify Jewish killings and harassments of Palestinian on whose lands they are building settlements. The dean of the ultra-fundamentalist Od Yosef Hai yeshiva (orthodox religious school) in the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar recently made this enlightened fatwa (thanks to Didi Remez)

“In any situation in which a non-Jew’s presence endangers Jewish lives, the non-Jew may be killed even if he is a righteous Gentile and not at all guilty for the situation that has been created…When a non-Jew assists a murderer of Jews and causes the death of one, he may be killed, and in any case where a non-Jew’s presence causes danger to Jews, the non-Jew may be killed…The [Din Rodef] dispensation applies even when the pursuer is not threatening to kill directly, but only indirectly…Even a civilian who assists combat fighters is considered a pursuer and may be killed. Anyone who assists the army of the wicked in any way is strengthening murderers and is considered a pursuer. A civilian who encourages the war gives the king and his soldiers the strength to continue. Therefore, any citizen of the state that opposes us who encourages the combat soldiers or expresses satisfaction over their actions is considered a pursuer and may be killed…There is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us, and in such a situation they may be harmed deliberately, and not only during combat with adults.”…In a chapter entitled “Deliberate harm to innocents,” the book explains that war is directed mainly against the pursuers, but those who belong to the enemy nation are also considered the enemy because they are assisting murderers.”

The entire fatwa can be read on Didi Remez’s blog site. Thankfully some of this has been noticed by the media in the USA, and words spoken. Glenn Greenwald has written a piece about Teitel and others like him for Salon where he takes to tasks religious fanaticism and madness infesting not just the Jewish settler movement, but the US military and right-wing extremist groups in the USA. Oh, and by the way, Teitel walked around free in Israel for over 12 years before being taken into custody as Alex Fishman reveals in this piece called They Are Not Scared,

They shouldn’t be telling us that Yaakov Teitel’s arrest is a success story. They shouldn’t try to sell us, again, the weak excuse about the individual terrorist that cannot be traced. When a murderer like Yaakov Teitel walks around freely for 12 years, carries out attacks, trains, creates an explosives lab, and builds up a weapons depot with no interruption, this means there is no deterrence.

All in the name of religion and belief – and before members from other monotheism or any other faux-ism start to rant lyrical, just listen to Teitel’s justifications and realize that it is not just a fundamentalist Jew speaking, but that it could be any religiously delusional mind, narcissistic to the core, convinced, through no evidence whatsoever, of his unique mission for god here on earth to kill, murder, pillage and ruin:

“It was a pleasure and an honor to serve my God,” said Teitel at the Jerusalem courthouse. “I have no regret and no doubt that God is pleased.”

What kind of a god is pleased with murder? We should all ask that question.

∞

Speaking of taking the facts to the deluded, Shlomo Sands and Avi Shlaim gave a talk at the Frontline Club in London which you can see here (if you don’t see the video, click the reload button on the lower left side of the video itself):

Shlomo Sands is the author of a fascinating study of Jewish heritage and history called The Invention of The Jewish People (no, it is not an anti-simetic tract and morons who step up to use it as such should be condemned immediately and vociferously. I will do so here on this blog if i have to.) The book is a huge best seller in Israel, and has already been translated into a number of languages. As described on the book description itself:

A leading Israeli historian shatters the national myth of the Jewish exodus from the promised land. A historical tour de force that demolishes the myths and taboos that have surrounded Jewish and Israeli history, The Invention of the Jewish People offers a new account of both that demands to be read and reckoned with. Was there really a forced exile in the first century, at the hands of the Romans? Should we regard the Jewish people, throughout two millennia, as both a distinct ethnic group and a putative nation—returned at last to its Biblical homeland?

Shlomo Sand argues that most Jews actually descend from converts, whose native lands were scattered far across the Middle East and Eastern Europe. The formation of a Jewish people and then a Jewish nation out of these disparate groups could only take place under the sway of a new historiography, developing in response to the rise of nationalism throughout Europe. Beneath the biblical back fill of the nineteenth-century historians, and the twentieth-century intellectuals who replaced rabbis as the architects of Jewish identity, The Invention of the Jewish People uncovers a new narrative of Israel’s formation, and proposes a bold analysis of nationalism that accounts for the old myths.

Avi Shlaim is author of Israel & Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations and another fine Israeli historian whose works like The Iron Wall: Israel & The Arab World are must reads. The interview is worth a listen.

∞

Finally, the always provocative, Slavoj Zizik reminds us of the continued delusion conflation of capitalism with liberty and democracy could pose a great danger to our societies in a recent piece in The London Review of Books concluding with the thought that:

Today we observe the explosion of capitalism in China and ask when it will become a democracy. But what if it never does? What if its authoritarian capitalism isn’t merely a repetition of the process of capitalist accumulation which, in Europe, went on from the 16th to the 18th century, but a sign of what is to come? What if ‘the vicious combination of the Asian knout and the European stock market’ (Trotsky’s characterisation of tsarist Russia) proves economically more efficient than liberal capitalism? What if it shows that democracy, as we understand it, is no longer the condition and engine of economic development, but its obstacle?

What if indeed!

Arundhati Roy On The Meaning And Idea Of Resistance

It has become fashionable to simply accept, to acquiese to power, to be obsequieous, to kiss-ass, to bend over to be taken from behind, to be grateful that your mortage can still be paid, to look for hand outs, to simply repeat the rhetoric and language of the powerful…to simply exlain the status quo and consider it insight.

Arundhati Roy continues, quietly and incisely, to remind us that dissent, all dissent, is the fundamental platform of democracy and of liberty.

One of my favorite commentators, Mark Slouka, recently penned a piece called Democracy & Deference where he ask, first the Americans, but then the world in general:

Turn on the TV to almost any program with an office in it, and you’ll find a depressingly accurate representation of the “boss culture,” a culture based on an a priori notion of—a devout belief in—inequality. The boss will scowl or humiliate you…because he can, because he’s the boss. And you’ll keep your mouth shut and look contrite, even if you’ve done nothing wrong . . . because, well, because he’s the boss. Because he’s above you. Because he makes more money than you. Because—admit it—he’s more than you.

This is the paradigm—the relational model that shapes so much of our public life. Its primary components are intimidation and fear. It is essentially authoritarian. If not principally about the abuse of power, it rests, nonetheless, on a generally accepted notion of power’s privileges. Of its inherent rights. The Rights of Man? Please. The average man has the right to get rich so that he too can sit behind a desk wearing an absurd haircut, yelling, “You’re fired!” or refuse to take any more questions; so that he too—when the great day comes—can pour boiling oil on the plebes at the base of the castle wall, each and every one of whom accepts his right to do so, and aspires to the honor.

And then leads us to the crucial question on which our democracy may hinge:

What kind of culture defines “maturity” as the time when young men and women sacrifice principle to prudence, when they pledge allegiance to the boss in the name of self-promotion and “realism”? What kind of culture defines adulthood as the moment when the self goes underground? One answer might be a military one. The problem is that while unthinking loyalty to one’s commanding officer may be necessary in war, it is disastrous outside of it. Why? Because loyalty, by definition, qualifies individualism, discouraging the expression of individual opinion, recasting honesty as a type of betrayal. Because loyalty to power, rather than to what one believes to be true or right, is fatally undemocratic, and can lead to the most horrendous abuses.

Indeed, what kind of culture is that? We would do well to consider answers.

Whats Happening In Pakistan? Its Not What The New York Times Will Tell You

A couple of insightful pieces appeared recently. Both, in different ways, challenge the mainstream narrative being bandied about in Washington D.C. and being stenographed by individuals pretending to be reporters but in fact are really acting as government/official stenographers out of Pakistan and the USA.

The first piece is by Mohammad Ahmad Idress, founder of Pulse Media, and appeared in the recent issue of Le Monde Diplomatique. Title Pakistan Creates Its Own Enemies, if offers us some valuable background and some excellent insights. I will quote a few here, but I recommend that you read the entire piece to help cut past what can only be described as willful lies and obfuscations (these editors and journalists are not stupid, just cowards or ‘professionals’, which these days means the same thing really!) being sold to us by our press here in the USA.

Helping us understand how we got ourselves into this mess, Idress reminds us (and we do need to be reminded that):

This war began in 2002 under intense US pressure, with piecemeal military action in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), a semi-autonomous region of seven agencies along Pakistan’s north-western border. The Afghan Taliban were using the region to regroup after their earlier rout: veteran anti-Soviet commander Jalaluddin Haqqani headquartered his network in North Waziristan; Gulbuddin Hikmatyar’s Hizb-e-Islami had a presence in Bajaur. However, the military, reluctant to take on pro-Pakistan Afghans, whom the government sees as assets against growing Indian influence in Afghanistan, instead marched into South Waziristan to apprehend “foreigners” (mainly Uzbeks, Chechens and Arabs). Following the regional code of honour, the tribes refused to surrender the guests and were subjected to collective punishment that soon united them against the government.

This was a situation that I had been able to document during my work in Waziristan in 2004. See (Mother Jones Magazine: Frontier Justice, October 2004). I recommend that you read the entire piece.

Another piece that caught my eye was by Manan Ahmad called Start A War where he too reminds us of some ground realities:

The 3.5 million or more inhabitants of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, of which Waziristan is a component, only received the adult franchise in 1997 – 50 years after the creation of Pakistan. This area, with the highest poverty and lowest literacy rates in Pakistan, is still governed according to the brutal British colonial legal code: a family or even a village can be punished for the crime of a single individual, there is no protection from multiple sentences for the same offence, and most damnably, the state has no obligation to show cause for imprisonment. Most damaging is the utter lack of a judicial system that can adjudicate civil disputes – one reason for the persistent calls to impose Sharia within the region. The Pakistani state has yet to resolve these issues and, in the meantime, segments of the discontented population have resorted to armed aggression against the centre – which has taken both secular and religious forms. Decades of frustration allowed the Taliban a foothold in Swat, and the same conditions exist in Baluchistan.

and as if to shake us out of our intellectual stupor, he ends with this warning:

The true crisis facing Pakistan is not the Taliban: it is the rupture between the federal state and its constituent parts, and Islamabad’s refusal to accede to the legitimate needs and demands of its citizens in places like Swat and Baluchistan. It is a rupture, indeed, that is written into the very fabric of the state, and the reason why Bangladesh seceded from West Pakistan in 1971, after it was denied political legitimacy by the military regime and then brutalised by an oppressive army operation aimed at quashing any opposition.
But the Pakistan Army learnt exactly the wrong lesson from Bangladesh: since 1971 it has been determined to move as rapidly and violently as possible against any sub-nationalist movement elsewhere in Pakistan. The spectre of Taliban conquering Islamabad and the state’s American-backed resolve to press on in a series of wars against its own people have effectively ended any chance for political consideration of the Baluchistan issue. Instead Baluchistan will be, once again, merely an empty badland where Taliban are hiding, waiting, plotting. It awaits yet another military operation. And we await another declaration of success.

For those of you interested in Ahmed Rashid, Tariq Ali has recently penned a strong criticism of Mr. Rashid’s fear-mongering, in a piece called Ahmed Rashid’s War , pointing out that:

The main people who consult Rashid, apart from Robert Silvers at the New York Review of Books, are US policy-makers in favor of a continuous occupation of Afghanistan. Rashid provides them with many a spurious argument to send more troops and wipe out the Pashtuns opposing the occupation. Within Afghanistan, Rashid’s principal backer and friend is Hamid Karzai who has now managed to antagonize even the tamest US liberals such as Peter Galbraith, recently sacked as a UN honcho in Kabul because he suggested that Karzai had rigged the elections. Rashid the journalist has no time for people who suggest that Karzai is a corrupt rogue, whose family is now the richest in the country, or that he manipulates US public opinion with the aid of PR companies, friends in Washington and, of course, Ahmed Rashid himself.

As more and more Pakistani’s are killed to appease American domestic policy needs, and the insatiable greed of the venal individuals who have grabbed hold of Pakistan’s government, we would do well to at least understand how this situation has emerged. Perhaps we care not for some poor Pushtun and his pointless family being cut to pieces by tax-payer funded, but oh-so-sexy pilot-less drones, but maybe we can speak honestly about it and go to bed at night without fear or guilt. After all, international human rights laws, the Geneva Conventions, and even Pakistan’s own constitutional laws to protect the lives and rights of its citizens, were not really written for a bunch of baggy pant barbarians living in barren hills? Or were they, in fact, actually written for precisely such dehumanized, ignored, and invisibly erased people?

Photo Projects I Like: Joseph Rodriguez’s Reentry In Los Angeles

 

Don’t Say I Didn’t Tell You So

Talking To Each Other And Alongside Each Other: Anna Baltzer & Mustafa Barghouti On The Daily Show

Mustafa Barghouti is (Mustafa Kamil Mustafa Barghuthi) is a physician and a political activist; advocate for the development of Palestinian civil society and grassroots democracy; international spokesman for the Palestinian NGO sector, and organizer of international solidarity presence in the OPT.  Writes extensively for a local and international audience on civil society, democracy issues and the political situation in Palestine, and on health development policy for Palestinians living under occupation.

Anna Baltzer is a Jewish-American Columbia graduate,former- Fulbright scholar, the granddaughter of Holocaust refugees, and an award-winning lecturer, author, and activist for Palestinian rights. She is the author of Witness in Palestine: A Jewish American Woman in the Occupied Territories. In 2009, Baltzer received the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee’s prestigious Annual Rachel Corrie Peace &Justice Award, and is a contributor to three upcoming books on the subject. Baltzer serves on the Middle East committee of the Women’s InternationalLeague for Peace & Freedom and on the Board of Directors of TheResearch Journalism Institute, GrassrootsJerusalem, and The Council forthe National Interest. You can find more about Anna Baltzer on her website A Witness In Palestine and/or from her blog site Anna In Palestine.

The State As The Incarnation Of Collective Interests, Purposes And Goods: Tony Judt on Social Democracy, Its Meaning, Intent and Consequences

Tony Judt directs the Remarque Institute at NYU and is the author of Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. His latest book, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, was recently reissued in paperback. (September 2009).

He recently gave a lecture at New York University on the meaning and implications of democracy and in particular social democracy which is worth listening to. There are few, if any, in the USA who can make the arguments that he made, and this despite the desperate need to make them.

Click on the link here: Tony Judt’s 2009 Remarque Lecture

Tony Judt has never minced words. A searing critique of the American Left called Bush’s Useful Idiots in the London Review of Books lamented:

Why have American liberals acquiesced in President Bush’s catastrophic foreign policy? Why have they so little to say about Iraq, about Lebanon, or about reports of a planned attack on Iran? Why has the administration’s sustained attack on civil liberties and international law aroused so little opposition or anger from those who used to care most about these things? Why, in short, has the liberal intelligentsia of the United States in recent years kept its head safely below the parapet?

An essay that raised hackles across the spectrum, it nevertheless raised some crucial questions that few were prepared to confront in particular that the difference between a liberal left and a radical right were pretty much imaginary, if not altogether absent.

America’s liberal intellectuals are fast becoming a service class, their opinions determined by their allegiance and calibrated to justify a political end. In itself this is hardly a new departure: we are all familiar with intellectuals who speak only on behalf of their country, class, religion, race, gender or sexual orientation, and who shape their opinions according to what they take to be the interest of their affinity of birth or predilection. But the distinctive feature of the liberal intellectual in past times was precisely the striving for universality; not the unworldly or disingenuous denial of sectional interest but the sustained effort to transcend that interest.

It is thus depressing to read some of the better known and more avowedly ‘liberal’ intellectuals in the contemporary USA exploiting their professional credibility to advance a partisan case. Jean Bethke Elshtain and Michael Walzer, two senior figures in the country’s philosophical establishment (she at the University of Chicago Divinity School, he at the Princeton Institute), both wrote portentous essays purporting to demonstrate the justness of necessary wars – she in Just War against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World, a pre-emptive defence of the Iraq War; he only a few weeks ago in a shameless justification of Israel’s bombardments of Lebanese civilians (‘War Fair’, New Republic, 31 July). In today’s America, neo-conservatives generate brutish policies for which liberals provide the ethical fig-leaf. There really is no other difference between them.

He has also penned a number of pieces for the New York Review of Books, and one in particular that I remember was called Israel: The Alternative – an essay that cost Judt a number of friends and broad opprobrium. In it he asked and suggested the unthinkable:

The problem with Israel, in short, is not—as is sometimes suggested—that it is a European “enclave” in the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a “Jewish state”—a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded—is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.

And asking us to think what to date has been unthinkable, or at least unmentionable:

The time has come to think the unthinkable. The two-state solution—the core of the Oslo process and the present “road map”—is probably already doomed. With every passing year we are postponing an inevitable, harder choice that only the far right and far left have so far acknowledged, each for its own reasons. The true alternative facing the Middle East in coming years will be between an ethnically cleansed Greater Israel and a single, integrated, binational state of Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians. That is indeed how the hard-liners in Sharon’s cabinet see the choice; and that is why they anticipate the removal of the Arabs as the ineluctable condition for the survival of a Jewish state.

Israel itself is a multicultural society in all but name; yet it remains distinctive among democratic states in its resort to ethnoreligious criteria with which to denominate and rank its citizens. It is an oddity among modern nations not—as its more paranoid supporters assert—because it is a Jewish state and no one wants the Jews to have a state; but because it is a Jewish state in which one community—Jews—is set above others, in an age when that sort of state has no place.

There is an extensive interview with him, with extensive biographical information, in The Guardian: Uncomfortable Truths which is worth reading as well.

This Land Called Gaza – A Love and A Curse

“And what projects are you working on at the moment?”

“An exhibition…and…I’m working on the completion of a new book, something very close to my heart.”

“What’s it about?”

“The Palestinians.”

There was a rather long silence…my friend looked at me with a slightly sad smile, and said “Sure, why not! But don’t you think the subject’s a bit dated? Look, I’ve taken photographs of the Palestinians too, especially in the refugee camps…its really sad! But these days, who’s interested in people who eat off the ground with their hands? And then there’s all that terrorism…I’d have thought you’d be better off using your energy and capabilities on something more worthwhile!”

Swiss photographer Jean Mohr describes a conversation with a friend.(1)

Palestine is a thankless cause, one in which if you truly serve you get nothing back but opprobrium, abuse, and ostracism…Palestine is the cruelest, most difficult cause to uphold, not because it is unjust, but because it is just and yet dangerous to speak about as honestly and as concretely as [he] did.

Edward Said on intellectual/activist Eqbal Ahmed. (2)

Jabaliya, Gaza February 2009 Copyright Asim Rafiqui

Most independent photographers arriving in Palestine carry with them the awareness that much if not all of their work will go largely unpublished. This is not only because Gaza and the West Bank are amongst the world’s most thoroughly photographed human tragedies, but also because speaking of the Palestinian’s as a real people with real suffering remains near impossible. Their story has been effectively reduced to that of ‘terrorism’, ‘extremism’ and one of ‘instigators of violence’. Their rights and demands for justice drowned out by the shrill insistence on Israel’s infinite innocence and need for restitution for historical wrongs. And on presumptions of their mendacity and single-minded determination to destroy ‘the Zionist entity’. Even President Barack Obama, in a recent speech in Cairo, placed the principal responsibility of regional violence on their weak, unarmed and repeatedly defeated shoulders. Photographers and journalists who try to reveal a different reality or raise questions about the myth of Israeli innocence or question the assumption of Palestinian mendacity, find themselves ignored, marginalized and unpublished. Independent photographers who come to Palestine do so armed not with major assignments but with convictions that are personal and individual. And they usually come alone.

I arrived at Rafah, Egypt – the only crossing into Rafah, Gaza, during the last days of Israeli’s Operation Cast Lead. This time I was luckier than most for I had the support of a Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting grant and the encouragement of Ted Genoways, the creative and poetic editor of The Virginia Quarterly Review magazine. By the time I argued my way into Gaza, a way repeatedly blocked first by the Israelis and then by the Egyptians, I found myself in what had by then become only one of the most important prime time news events of the year.

The Israeli assault on Gaza began on the last day of Hanukkah on December 27th 2008 and eventually left nearly 1400 dead, thousands injured and tens of thousands displaced. It was covered by every major international TV news channel, daily newspaper and weekly magazine. Their cameramen, on-screen personalities, photographers, directors, fixers and coordinators stormed the walls of Gaza in a rush to film, edit, transmit and broadcast the events as they unfolded. On any given day, at any given hour, dozens of videographers and photojournalists could be seen in the hallways of Gaza’s famous Al-Diera Hotel speaking anxiously into their mobile phones, or sitting at tables in the restaurants, hunched over their laptops, cursing the slow internet connections and desperately transmitting their latest images. And when they were not scoffing down a quick meal, they were furtively discussing plans with their local minders, or rushing towards their waiting cars to get to a ‘hot’ location. Amidst this mob of media I, with my little film cameras and a small grant that gave me the freedom to work at my own pace, found myself apart, confused and more alone than ever before. How would what I came to say be heard over this noise?

My first time in Gaza was in the summer of 2003. I was a novice photographer who went because Edward Said wrote a small response to an email I sent him and encouraged me to go. I then returned and continued to document the situation in Gaza, particularly in southern Gaza city of Rafah where I worked for nearly 2 years. The settlers were still in Gaza then, and so were activists from the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), and the armored bulldozers and their accompanying tanks that were constructing the massive steel wall along the Rafah’s border with Egypt. The American activist Rachel Corrie, who was crushed to death by an Israeli armored bulldozer, was still there; alive, determined, passionate and beautiful. Home demolitions were frequent along the Rafah-Egypt border as bulldozers tore down Palestinian homes to make way for the steel wall. Tank patrols would terrorize residents living along the border, and there would be frequent firing into these neighborhoods resulting in deaths and maiming of residents. As a photographer I documented my fair share of funerals, Hamas marches and families salvaging their belongings from the ruins of their destroyed houses. Between 2003 and 2006 I made several trips to this surrounded territory, continuing to document the slowly shrinking social, political, economic and cultural space of its inhabitants.

And then I stopped coming. Dozens of courageous Palestinian photographers were doggedly documenting the bitter and crushing existence of the Gazans, and the incessant economic and military violence against them. The international photojournalists too kept coming to photograph the ‘militants’ and the ‘fanatics’, as if to provide the ‘facts’ that would maintain what Saree Makdisi has recently called a language that prevents us from recognizing what’s really going on in the Middle East.3 I felt that after three years of consistent work I had nothing new to add to this dialogue, nothing new to show. In retrospect I realize that it was an act of surrender by a young photographer frustrated by his inability to effectively capture in pictures the sufferings of those around him..

But now I was back again, and walking through the devastation left the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead I was struck by how familiar it all looked. The scale was larger than anything that I could remember, and its consequences very familiar; the bombed homes, the displaced families, the tank-track torn olive and citrus groves, the stunned relatives of the dead, the funeral dirges, the Hamas marches, the victory songs, the numbing buzz of the pilot-less drones overhead, the children scavenging amongst ruins, the sirens of the ambulances, the men on donkey carts carrying debris to nowhere, and that constant, distant human wail of a life torn apart or a hope torn asunder. Here I was again, but I had been here before and seen it before. The scenes I witnessed were remarkably similar to those I had seen during my time in Gaza between 2003 and 2006. As some of the world’s best photojournalists scrambled all around me to capture the devastation for the world’s audience, I found that I still had nothing new to say and by the second day I put away my cameras and stopped taking pictures.

And then I met Ismail Ibrahim Abu Eida.

He was walking alone near the rubble of his family home lost in thought. When he noticed me standing close by he merely nodded and said nothing. I stood there looking at him stumble and trip across the pile of rubble that had once been his home. A lone figure amongst thousands of lonely figures all over Gaza who were at that very moment quietly, resignedly stumbling and tripping across the rubble of their own lives. I wanted to talk to him about what was going through his mind, but he seemed reluctant, even a little embarrassed. “What will I tell you that others have not?”, he said quietly. And he was right.

Abu Eida’s pain – the loss of his life’s work, the displacement of his family, and the ruination of his livelihood, was an oft repeated occurrence in this land. Tens of thousands had already suffered it, and it was certain, given the entrenched ideas and ideals that perpetuate this conflict, that tens of thousands more are destined to do so in the future. In this land of pain, where everyone has experienced the gravest of loss, it has become difficult to express individual suffering or ask for compassion. In a life that must accept as normal the sudden and violent erasure of all that one holds dear, a life in which you console your neighbor knowing full well that someday they will be consoling you, you no longer speak about your own sorrows. You no longer share your burden because others are so crushed under their own. In a life of collective punishment your scars and sufferings are starkly your own to confront and tolerate.

Abu Eida was fortunate. No one had died. His family had been displaced to a UN refugee center, and he was sleeping on a mattress in a cargo container on the family property. With a voice that was severely controlled, he explained to me how tanks and bulldozers had forced him to flee and leveled everything he had built over the course of his life, including his family’s orange groves. Then he invited me for tea. He had only one cup. Ten minutes of digging in the rubble produced a second—broken but usable. He had no place for me to sit but a shout to a friend down the road produced a three-legged plastic chair. I protested this kindness, but he wouldn’t hear of it, reminding me that I was his guest. “It is our way, Mr. Rafiqui,” he insisted, as he made himself comfortable in the dirt, “to honor our guests— and to remind ourselves of the things within us which cannot be destroyed by tanks and missiles.”

As the day grew hotter, the mist that shrouded the citrus groves lifted, revealing what had once been the Jabaliya industrial zone. Ismail pointed toward Israel. I could see a wire fence and the silhouettes of soldiers walking along it. Israeli farmers had begun returning to their fields that morning as jeeps carrying soldiers raced back and forth along the border areas. Snipers kept an eye on the few Palestinians who dared to return to their lands. Despite the cease-fire, Gazan farmers were being shot and killed at random. “I used to work in Israel,” Ismail said. “But that was a different time, a different world.”

This world, the one whose remains surrounded us that morning, now lay in a shroud of dust raised by the hundreds of hands salvaging valuables from the remains of their homes, factories, stores, and farmlands. As I looked up from my cup of tea and out towards the scarred landscape I could see people sifting through rubble, searching for bodies, salvaging remains of machinery, consoling their children, or just sitting amongst the ruins of their homes. It struck me that indeed how fortunate were the dead who had at least, as Plato said, seen the end of war. The living however go on and suffer its horrors, carry it’s burdens, tolerate its indignities, appease its sorrows, and accept its cruelest gift – the death of loved ones.

Later that morning I finally made my first photograph – a family searching for the remains of a patriarch. The bulldozer roared and clawed mercilessly against the pile of ruins, churning up metal, concrete, electrical wiring, toys, clothing and whatever else its massive jaws caught in their broad sweeps. Around it sat many family members and friends, patiently watching the bulldozer work, prepared for the moment the body is discovered. “How do you know if someone is still trapped in there?” I asked. “You can smell it!”, came a slightly exasperated reply. There were no camera crews at the site, no photojournalists waiting to capture the moment. It was just one body, one individual, being searched for. The ‘hot’ news stories were elsewhere that morning and will be elsewhere the day after.

But these searches, these sorrows, and the days without those who were once so close, so needed, will go on. As I stood on a small hill and watch the bulldozer tear away at the collapsed walls of the house I was struck with the realization that even when the world’s attention falls on them, the Gazans are most distant, misunderstood and isolated from us. The world comes to them asking them to be either the hate-filled militant out to destroy Israel or the innocent victims of Israel’s fanaticism. And in the process it denudes them of their ordinariness, frailty and flawed humanity. In its attentions the world ghettoizes them, refusing them their history, politics, memories and agendas. Gone are their love affairs, their family feuds, their fears and hopes for their children’s futures, their infidelities, their ambitions, their material desires, their days on the beach, their care for their elderly, their gentleness towards strangers, their love of food, their eye for the perfect coffee bean, their undying and near familial love of the olive tree and their sense of connectedness with the land.

This land called Gaza – a love and a curse.

Photographer’s Note: This essay was submitted to a Swedish magazine that eventually considered it too uninteresting for publication. It was also the essay I submitted recently to a grant committee to continue my work in Gaza. I did not receive the grant. I share it here despite its seemingly sorry record, as perhaps nothing more than a way to allow the thoughts I put down here to escape from the confinement of my hopes and disappointments.

1: Said, E & Mohr, J (1999) After The Last Sky Columbia University Press, New York, New York

2: Barsamian, D, (2000) Eqbal Ahmed: Confronting Empire South End Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts

3: Makdisi, S (19/6/2009) A Language That Absolves Israel, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles, USA.

Offering Silence To The Oppressed Or How Photography Can Become A Weapon Of Repression

An exhibition called ‘Beware The Cost Of War’ recently opened in London.

Reading about it in the New York Times ‘Lens’ blog left me deeply disappointed and concerned.

Let me explain.

(Aside: Yoav Galai, the curator, is someone I have called a friend for some time now and I hope that he will forgive me for this very critical review of what is something he clearly put a lot of work in to. It is not personal, but merely a reflection on this propensity in our world to fear speaking, to raise a voice, to add details and specifics where generalizations only confuse, perpetuate injustices and acquit the guilty. I am sorry Yoav. I must say my piece.)

∞

In their book Another Way of Telling photographer Jean Mohr and writer/intellectual John Berger present an experiment where a series of Mohr’s photographs, each with their captions removed, are shown to a number of ordinary strangers and each is asked to explain what they see in the photograph. As Jean Mohr himself explains:

Was it a game, a test, an experiment? All three, and something else too; a photographer’s quest, the desire to know how the images he makes are seen, read, interpreted, perhaps rejected by others. In fact in face of any photo the spectator projects something of her or himself. The image is like a springboard. (page 42)

The result was that each individual described the photograph differently, thereby rending each photograph meaningless, and completely erasing it of history, context, intent and meaning and replacing them with what were little more than randomly created ideas based on fantasies, prejudices, and ignorances. The photos gave nothing to the viewer, the viewer merely imposed their ‘knowledge’ – factual and otherwise, onto the image. The images became springboards indeed, but they also became empty vessels into which the viewer could put anything and make them what s/he wanted. The images offered nothing, taught nothing, revealed nothing and as a result added nothing.

∞

Jean Mohr also collaborated with the writer/intellectual Edward Said to produce what I consider to be one of the finest, most important, book of photojournalism ever – After The Last Sky. This book, about which I have written elsewhere, is a masterful collaboration between a photographer and a writer. It is one of those rare photography books that has managed to lift itself from the fashionable but frivolous shelves of photography books and into the more relevant Middle East History section of a bookstore.

The book grew out of an unusual context; in 1983 Edward Said was a consultant to the United Nations International Conference on the Question of Palestine (ICQP) and he suggested that some of Jean Mohr’s photographs of Palestinians be hung in the entrance hall to the main conference site in Geneva, Switzerland. The official response to this suggestion, as Said himself describes it in the book, was unusual; they would allow the photographs to be hung, but no words could accompany them, and no explanations.

It was then that Said and Mohr came up with the idea of writing about the Palestinians – about adding the words to the photographs. As Said explains:

Let us use photographs and text, we said to each other, to say something that hasn’t been said about Palestinians. (page 4)

But they were aware that the problems they faced was not a lack of text on this matter, but perhaps too much of it. But it was also clear that:

…for all the writing about them, Palestinians remain virtually unknown. Especially in the West, particularly in the United States, Palestinians are not so much a people as a pretext for a call to arms. (page 5)

Confronting this challenge about how to convey the Palestinian experience to a reluctant audience was not going to be easy, and yet it was crucial and clear that text was going to be a fundamental act of resistance, and that its place for a people oppressed was fundamentally important because:

Stateless, dispossessed, de-centered, we [Palestinians] are frequently unable either to speak the ‘truth’ of our experience or to make it heard. We do not usually control the images that represent us; we have been confined to spaces designed to reduce or stunt us; and we have often been distorted by pressures and powers that have been too much for us. (page 6)

∞

“Beware The Cost Of War” is an exhibition of Israeli and Palestinian photographs now being shown in London. In a review written on the New York Times blog ‘Lens’, a review titled Stirring Images, No Names the writers explain that:

“Beware the Cost of War,” a show opening Friday at the Blackall Studios in London, will be conspicuous for many reasons — one of them being what it lacks: captions and credits next to the images, which were taken both by Israeli and Palestinian photographers.

The notion is that, without words, the pictures will be freer to speak for themselves.

In a slide show of some of the images we are shown scenes of grieving Palestinian and Lebanese families and of Israeli families. The curator, Yoav Galai, we are told:

…hoped viewers would discard customary ideological and political preconceptions as they looked at the images, many of which are deeply disturbing…

He is later quoted as saying:

“I realized it’s hard to show what’s really happening,” Mr. Galai said. “Once a photograph is out there, people ascribe whatever they want to it. So I thought, why not take all the pictures and tear them away from their narrative?”

∞

Yoav Galai is a young photographer. An Israeli who has documented the destruction of the Palestinian social, cultural and physical space in occupied East Jerusalem, he and I have frequently communicated via email and I respect his individual voice and determination.

But sadly I find myself in deep conflict and disagreement with this entire exhibition, and the silencing of the experience, history, and narrative of the Palestinian people already suffering from decades of silencing, marginalization, and erasure. The entire impression of ‘balance’ here is specious, and frankly misrepresents the situation which is simply one of a powerful military occupier systematically repressing and controlling an otherwise unarmed and desperate Palestinian population.

Tearing away the narrative, the history, the context of a photograph is the best way to further enable people to ascribe whatever meaning people want to images, and hence, only confirm and not question their prejudices, hates, ignorances and fears.

That Israeli historians, intellectuals, writers and journalists can clearly speak of this, admitting to the injustices their government has been executing against the Palestinians, only reminds us of the vast gap in intellectual and physical courage that imbues our societies when it comes to the question of the rights of an Arab people.

This exhibition in its current format ends up committing a number of sins against the history of the situation it claims to speak about, and even about the lives of the people involved.

• The exhibition removes context, so that we never know who is the occupier, and who the occupied. It pretends to suggest that everyone is a victim, when in fact that is not true. Israel is an occupying force, its citizens repeatedly voting into power civilians leaders, most all with deep military track records and connections, based on their ability to ‘handle the Palestinians’. The Palestinians are an unarmed people now trapped in quite possibly the most extensive, professionally administered, rationally planned, efficiently executed occupation regime in history.

• The exhibition removes chronology, so that we never know whether the act occurred this year e.g. the brutal and unnecessary massacre of nearly 2000 Palestinians of Gaza in early 2009 prompted by Israeli domestic political needs and condemned in the recent UN Goldstone Report vs. the aftermath of a suicide bomb that occurred many years ago and the likes of which have not been repeated in years.

• The exhibition removes history, so that we never know what it is that violence represents i.e. acts of legitimate violence in order to resist and overthrow and illegal occupation vs. acts of repressive violence meant to occupy, steal, and control.

• The exhibition removes the ugliest of constant and material facts; the dehumanizing and degrading check points, the summary arrests, the illegal (and yes, please, they are illegal) settlements, the military patrols that enable them, the hideous barbarism of the fundamentalist, fanatical and humanly deviant Jewish settlers, the summary executions, the entire infrastructure – administrative, military, political, under-cover of the occupation regime, the displacements, the senseless closures, and the constant threat of violence that hangs in the air and frequently manifests itself into reality.

The exhibition in fact become a tool of oppression, creating ‘balance’ where there is none, offering the easy consumption of ‘violence’ while ensuring that nothing provokes us to realize the truths that create the violence, the injustices that continue to be perpetrated, and the powers that have to held accountable for what is a clear and simple crime against humanity and massive violation of international law.

As writer Peter Lagerquist comments after hearing and reading about this exhibit:

It’s not only offensive but brutalizing, because it perpetrates another violence on those pictures, and their subjects. They are robbed of meaning, the viewer is robbed of their ability to think critically about violence, rather than merely wringing their hands over it…All that we are left with here is diffuse pathos, the knowledge that violence is bad.  And this simply is not enough; we need to understand something else.

We don’t have to love the Palestinians, but why must we insist on shutting them up? Why must we be so dismissive of values and laws that we with such fanfare created and offered at Nuremburg and enshrined in so many UN charters and Geneva Conventions? Why, when it comes to the ‘lesser’ people, do our voices suddenly find no air, our minds no thoughts, our courage no will and our photographs no captions?

∞

An oppressor wants to erase the voice of the oppressed. ‘Balance’ serves the interests of those exercising disproportionate violence and control over a weaker people and society. A people displaced, dispossessed, ignored, dehumanized, and incarcerated, in flagrant violation of our most valued principles of international law, justice and rights, do not need us to ‘remove’ their context, history and experiences of their suffering. On the contrary, it is precisely words, text, and voice that need to be used to unveil their experience. It is crucial to our responsibilities as reporters, journalists and photojournalists, to speak with courage and clarity and add our voice to those of the weak to counter, and challenge the easily heard and broader disseminated voice of the powerful.

Michael Massing took on the issue of specious ‘balance’ that today’s media organizations strive for and identified it as one of the major problems with journalism today. In a piece called The Press; The Enemy Within he quoted the writer Ken Silverstein (I am a big fan of Ken’s work!) who was then working on a piece about voting fraud in St. Louis and who found clear evidence of Republic Party manipulation of votes but was not allowed to say it as such and encouraged to ‘balance’ it with comments about similar actions, though far less systematic, by the Democrats:

I am completely exasperated by this approach to the news. The idea seems to be that we go out to report but when it comes time to write we turn our brains off and repeat the spin from both sides. God forbid we should…attempt to fairly assess what we see with our own eyes. “Balanced” is not fair, it’s just an easy way of avoiding real reporting and shirking our responsibility to inform readers.

Any easy was to shirk our responsibility to inform readers, and I would add, help them understand the perspectives and principles that are in fact consistently and necessarily defensible. And we are being cowards to not admit that there are principles of law, justice and national behavior and they are enshrined in documents that we love to quote e.g. Sudan, Kosovo, or Kuwait when it suits our needs.

I quote Edward Said from his work Representations of the Intellectual when he points out that:

Universality means taking risks in order to go beyond the easy certainties provided to us by our background, language, nationality, which so often shield us from the reality of others. It also means looking for and trying to uphold a single standard for human behavior when it comes to such matters as foreign and social policy. (page xiv)

My point would be that for the contemporary intellectual [or individual] living at a time that is already confused by the disappearance of what seem to have been objective moral norms and sensible authority, is it unacceptable simply either blindly to support the behavior of one’s own country and overlook its crimes or to say rather supinely “I believe they all do it, and that’s the way of the world?”

To speak consistently is upholding standards of international behavior and the support of human rights is not to look inwards for a guiding light supplied to one by inspiration or prophetic intuition. Most…countries in the world are signatories to a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted and proclaimed in 1948, reaffirmed by every new member state of the UN. There are equally solemn conventions on the rules of war, on treatment of prisoners, on the rights of workers, women, children, immigrants and refugees. None of these documents says anything about ‘disqualified’ or less equal races or peoples. All are entitled to the same freedoms. (page 97)

This exhibition, sadly participated in by Palestinians photographers themselves, further oppresses the Palestinian experience, because it reduces everything to merely violence and sensationalism. This is the legacy of wire photography, and of mainstream photojournalism that chases blood, celebrates murder, and titillates through the tragic.

At a time when more than ever we need to speak with courage and clarity at the systematic dispossession of what little has been left to this blighted people, we have photojournalists and curators participating in a project of silence and obfuscation.

∞

“Beware The Cost Of War’ unfortunately attempts to balance what is so terribly imbalanced. And in that process it misleads. There is nothing to be gained by wringing our hands at the hideousness of blood and flesh torn by bombs. There is nothing to be understood by images of mothers crying. There is no value in the sight of another babies still body. To produce something that can really only provoke pity – a debilitating and cowardly emotion, is to produce nothing at all. (I am reminded of Nietzsche’s argument that… the thirst for pity is a thirst for self-enjoyment, and at the expense of one’s fellow men. It reveals man in the complete inconsideration of his most intimate dear self, but not precisely in his ’stupidity’.)

As photographers we must demand that the text be returned to us who made the works. Our eye and our text is our intent, our ideas, our values and our risks. We must insist that our images not be exploited or left open to the random violence and fantasies of an indifferent and/or confused viewer. Context matters, history matters, and memory matters. We must insist that our words are not dismissed, that the intents with which we produced our images is not marginalized, and that our images do not become merely ‘illustrations’ but are clear statements of our work and our beliefs.

Our words anchor the image, and give it something that itself does not contain; meaning and intent. The caption is crucial because it is also the photographer’s insistence on controlling the use the image is put to, and to what extent it can be manipulated. In a world overrun with meaningless illustrations, the caption takes on even greater value. Context becomes a powerful weapon against propaganda and obfuscation. And a means towards clarity and understanding. We should not surrender or relinquish this right easily. In a conflict mired in millions of words of propaganda, from both sides of course but certainly largely from the mouths of the powerful who have an unbalanced access to mainstream print, internet, and tv media, the words of those who have witnessed first hand are paramount.

Epilogue: A few days ago a Swedish magazine invited me to publish my portraiture from Gaza in its pages. A highly respected publication, it offered me the choice to submit as many images as I liked, with just one condition – they would not use the words that accompanied the work. They only wanted the pictures. You can see this work, images with words, as it appeared in a recent issue of The Virginia Quarterly Review. I refused to let them publish the work, arguing that erasing the words reduced them to meaningless aesthetics, and silenced the voices of the individuals who sacrificed their time and patience in the most horrifying of conditions so that I may carry to the world their sufferings. As photographers we either forget, or prevented from being complete individuals; thinking, creative individuals with opinions, ideas and realizations. We must defend this completeness, and the sanctity of our individual experiences, understandings and conclusions.

Update: The No Captions Needed site, authored by two professors, one from Indiana University and the other from Northwestern University and described by them as ‘…a book and a blog, each dedicated to discussion of the role that photojournalism and other visual practices play in a vital democratic society.” also discussed the ‘no caption’ approach at this exhibit which you can read here: Visual Ironies

Personal Note: This post was edited to ensure that it is understood that it does not claim that the curator(s) intended to oppress the voices or remove context, but simply that the current format inadvertently ends up doing that. This is a criticism of the format, not of the individuals involved, all of whom I am more than sure have the most determined and committed intentions to raise awareness of the situation in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Pakistan In A Nutshell Or Examples in Failures Of The Imagination

Pakistan Receives First of 18 Lockheed F-18C Fighter/Bombers for which it paid nearly $2,000,000,000.00

October 13, 2009 Air Chief Marshal Rao Qamar Suleman of the Pakistan Air Force shows off the country's new toy

Woman & her 3 daughters commit suicide – cause: unbearable poverty

The article points out that “According to sources, Muhammad Sharif was a poor man and leading hand to mouth life with his spouse Zahida Bibi and three minor daughters while the couple would scuffle on an on due to poverty. Yesterday, Zahida Bibi together with her three minor girls committed suicide over being emotional by dint of poor living conditions, sources said.”

∞

The relevance of a nation, the legitimacy of its government, the professionalism of its military and the allegiances of its elite are judged by the welfare of its weakest citizens. As this mother dies, her children with her, I question the relevance of the government, these deadly toys, the professionalism of the military and the allegiances of the elite.

Most post-colonial nations (and I mean most, not all) have chosen a path of purchased modernity - a propensity to believe that simply buying new toys, clothes, college degrees and properties in foreign lands would bestow upon us a European modernity. We are desperate to display it, mimic it, consume it and be equated as being modern. The mimicry of the material is balanced by a determined erasure of the human and the just. I believe that Europe herself has failed her own intellectual and philosophical legacy – as Frantz Fanon argued in his masterpiece The Wretched of the Earth:

Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe.

… but nevertheless, it is this legacy that is completely ignored by us. We want the toys, not the thoughts. I accept that we don’t know our own legacies of humanism, tolerance, justice, equality and service. After all, our education systems, particularly those provided to the elite, are principally Euro-centric, teaching us mostly European literature, arts, history, and else.

To be modern, as understood by our leaders, elites and the military, is to be materially rich in the products, behaviors, and tasts that mirror the European/West. Even our politics simply mirrors their priorities.

We are nations of small ambitions. As our citizens die death not worthy of dogs, as we ‘best’ and most educated, gloat about the opening of a new BMW dealership in Karachi, but remain silent in the face of real scandals that are occasionally printed on the back pages of local newspapers.

∞

I wish for a day when a Pakistani government would collapse not because it was less willing to fleece its people or pander to imperialist interests, but because a mother and her 3 children were forced to kill themselves because of the negligence and indifference of a government that was supposed to protect them and their welfare.

The Wars On Our Frontiers Or Haven’t We Been Here Before?

From Mother Jones magazine, October 2004, written by Malcolm Garcia

Kalooshah, South Waziristan, April 2004: Mir Abbas Khan sits outside the remains of his family home, destroyed by pakistan army bulldozers. The army has destroyed dozens of homes in this area of people it claims were harboring Al Qaeda fighters and collaborators. Many innocent civilians have been displaced and others have lost their homes, belongings and means of livelihood as a consequence. 2004 Copyright Asim Rafiqui Do Not Reproduce

Mir Abbas Khan stares into the camera. Behind him the ruins of his home lay strewn across the dry, hard ground. Since March, when Secretary of State Colin Powell visited Pakistan and promised President General Pervez Musharraf billions of dollars in aid, the Pakistani army has been scouring the semiautonomous tribal regions of South Waziristan for Al Qaeda fighters—bombing, burning, and bulldozing the homes and belongings of those deemed collaborators, or merely uncooperative.

Over the centuries, no one has exercised much authority over South Waziristan, a stark, mountainous area of southwestern Pakistan that borders Afghanistan. But in the wake of two assassination attempts, and in pursuit of continued U.S. largesse, Musharraf seems determined to try. At the start of the campaign, he announced that a senior Al Qaeda leader was surrounded, and hinted it might be Osama bin Laden. Days later, after the army met surprisingly stiff resistance, the top Al Qaeda operative was down-graded to a Chechen commander, and then to a local criminal. Eventually, senior government officials admitted they never had proof that a key terrorist was in the area. Though it boasts of killing hundreds of militants—claims that cannot be substantiated—the government is tight-lipped about casualties among innocent villagers.

Journalists and human rights workers are effectively barred from entering the region. But in April, photographer Asim Rafiqui managed to sneak in by posing as a local businessman. With no base of support in the area, the Pakistani army (mostly ethnically distinct from the Pashtuns of Waziristan) has been attempting to enlist the support of local tribes and battling those who don’t cooperate. Tribal jirgas, or councils, that comply with the army are rewarded with development aid and spared from bombardment. Other tribal leaders see the conflict as a means to turn the wrath of the army on rival tribes. In any case, lashkars—tribal posses—have ransacked scores of villages, vowing to capture or kill those suspected of cooperating with Al Qaeda. Tradition, however, forbids a host to turn over a guest to an enemy without a fight. And Waziris are even being asked to betray blood relations, although family ties extend far deeper than national loyalty.

In pitting his army against his people, Musharraf risks losing his tenuous hold on power by energizing the very Islamic fundamentalists he seeks to crush. Muslims consider soldiers killed in combat to be martyrs. But many of the tribesmen battling the army are former mujahideen, who, in the 1980s, were actively recruited by Pakistan and the United States to resist the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and support the Taliban. They came from all over Central Asia and settled in the tribal regions. They married, had children, and became woven into the local culture. To many Pakistanis, who don’t understand the about-face of the Musharraf government, it is not the soldiers who are martyrs, but the Waziris fighting them. “America is a wolf at our door,” said retired Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul, a fundamentalist Muslim. “Pakistan throws it crumbs so it does not attack our house. South Waziristan is a crumb. But the people know defenders of the tribal areas are defending their country. Are they terrorists, and the attackers good boys? No. The people don’t believe this.”

Pakistanis are all too cognizant that it is at America’s bidding that Musharraf, his army, and the lashkars of Waziristan carry out this campaign. Any resentment it causes will inevitably flow back up that chain. Consider again Mir Abbas Khan, in the photo on the opposite page. Look at his eyes, his ruined home, and back to his eyes—full of fear and hurt, but mostly rage.

Accuser, Judge and Jury. We now are seeing the beginnings of such scenes

And there will be more, and far worse. Our parrots in the military and the political administration are not only repeating the language and obfuscations of the Americans, but the equally stupid and ‘blow-back-ready’ tactics as well. By the way, you would never know it, that there has been a sustained military occupation/presence and war against the people of the region of FATA since 2002. Our drone attacks in 2009 alone are interesting to observe, rising to levels of indiscriminate slaughter based on the statements of ‘officials’, all of whom seem to have direct telephone lines to the international media hungry for easy quotes and thought-closing statements.

The Pakistanis look on and wonder why bombs are going off in their cities. They rarely if ever wondered why bombs were falling indiscriminately on our citizens in FATA, how many were dying, who was being killed, and why. Our silences as they screamed are now being answered by our screams. These days of dishonor, these moments of dark horror, will yield only more pain, only more confusion, and only more suffering. And if they are not convinced, maybe what Asif Ali Zardari said in an interview with The Daily Telegraph:

“My position is that I have always asked for possession of the drone; I want the Pakistani flag on it.”

How much cash was needed to agree to slaughter civilians and Pakistani citizens for that bravado? I suppose there is no point in reminding him that they are citizens with rights, and that he is the representative of his citizens. Oh well, such niceties sound so naive.

The paymaster celebrate our ‘actions‘, the military leader grins and gloats as he receives American toys for the holiday season days before this latest ‘war’, and the nation’s sovereignty is offered up for a pocket full of change most of which will of course end up in the hands of the crooks now apparently sitting as ‘democrats’.

It has been our strategy to always replace a mess with an even larger one. President Obama, choosing only the finest and most intelligent people in his administration, is proceeding to repeat the same mistake. In a wonderfully amusing, but insightful, piece called Wall Street Smarts in the New York Times the poet Calvin Trillin argued that:

“The financial system nearly collapsed,” he said, “because smart guys had started working on Wall Street.”

In Errol Morris’ fear-inducing film The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara he reminds us that the men who orchestrated, managed, administered and planned the Vietnam fiasco where the ’smartest guys in the room’.  Robert S. McNamara “… graduated in 1937 from the University of California, Berkeley, with a Bachelor of Arts in economics with minors in mathematics and philosophy. He was a member of Phi Gamma Delta fraternity,^[10] was elected to Phi Beta Kappa his sophomore year and earned a varsity letter in crew. He was also a member of the UC Berkeley Golden Bear Battalion, Army ROTC. He then earned a master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration in 1939. After earning his MBA McNamara worked a year for the accounting firm Price Waterhouse in San Francisco. In August 1940 he returned to Harvard to teach in the Business School and became the highest paid and youngest Assistant Professor at that time.” (from Wikipedia)

In an earlier argument, Chris Hedges pointed out in an essay called The Best And The Brightest Led American Off The Cliff that:

The multiple failures that beset the country, from our mismanaged economy to our shredded constitutional rights to our lack of universal health care to our imperial debacles in the Middle East, can be laid at the feet of our elite universities. Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford, along with most other elite schools, do a poor job educating students to think. They focus instead, through the filter of standardized tests, enrichment activities, advanced placement classes, high-priced tutors, swanky private schools and blind deference to all authority, on creating hordes of competent systems managers. The collapse of the country runs in a direct line from the manicured quadrangles and halls in places like Cambridge, Princeton and New Haven to the financial and political centers of power.

And President Obama now sits, like a god-king, asking his ‘best and the brightest’ to oversee an unfolding fiasco that is going to be Afghanistan and Pakistan. Enough with the intelligent, lets try the moronic. Could they do worse? I doubt it.

Paris Photo 2009:Be There For If You Are Not There…Er…You Are Not There!

Rio, Sans titre, 2008 © Mohamed Bourouissa, Courtesy Galerie Les filles du calvaire Paris/Bruxelles

Paris Photo, possibly one of the more important photography art fairs of the year, begins in Paris at the Carrousel du Louvre on November 18th 2009. This year’s focus is on what they claim to be ‘Arab‘ and ‘Iranian‘ photography. As always, I place such classifications in brackets because they, in our modern world of forced and chosen exiles, say little or nothing about the artists and their work.

Lens Culture magazine has an extensive slide show of some of the works featured.

America’s First Black President Wasn’t Barack Hussein Obama

On Magic, Miracles And Photography Or Uncertainty And Creativity, Another Look

A small post some weeks ago provoked a series of diatribes and a healthy round of insults directed at me across the internet. Titled Why I Shoot Film And Why You Should Give A Damn it reflected the results of a very personal examination of my preference for shooting with film cameras, though I admitted that as a professional I must and do frequently use digital cameras for client work.

Paolo Roversi is a fashion photographer. His images lovingly tactile and in some cases surprisingly human.

I found him echoing some similar sentiments about the connection between uncertainty and creativity to what I had spoken about in my post, though he is far more eloquent and more stylish in his presence and delivery.

You can listen to it here, thanks to A Photo Editor

Guantanamo Detainee Fouad Mahmoud Al Rabiah’s Petition for Habeus Corpus Is Granted!

In a remarkable, courageous and honest ruling, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, found that the government could not credibly support its allegation that Fouad Mahmoud Al Rabiah was part of the Taliban or al-Qaida, and that the evidence against him wasn’t sufficient to justify his continued detention. She ordered the government to release Al Rabiah “forthwith [1].” The actual statement read as follows:

Because the Government has not met its burden by a preponderance of evidence, the Court shall GRANT Al Rabiah’s petition for habeas corpus. The Court shall issue an Order requiring the Government to take all necessary and appropriate steps to facilitate Al Rabiah’s release forthwith. Dated: September 17, 2009

That there are institutions, procedures and individuals that still respect the rule of law, and the necessity of upholding our most cherished legal, judicial and moral precepts particularly in moments of crisis and fear should give us hope for our increasingly decimated republic.

But whereas we can argue for the rights of illegal detainees held in the USA few if any for that matter have raised a voice in outrage at the wholesale slaughter of imagined ‘terrorists’, ‘Taliban’ and ‘Al Qaeda’ operatives in the tribal areas of Pakistan. I say imagined because they are labeled ‘Taliban’ and/or ‘Al Qaeda’ to ensure that we never ask for evidence or proof and that we can kill them at will.

There the Pushtuns, a people dehumanized so completely that we do not even register their deaths, are being killed and maimed with impunity, thanks to the venal machinations of the Pakistani elite and toy-hungry military in bed with an American imperialist juggernaut that knows nothing other than the inspirations of its own greed and power.

The people of Pakistan’s tribal areas deserve their day in court if they are being accused of specific crimes and misdemeanors. Though I do not know what these would be other than that dastardly crime of not bending to the will of specious power and elite greed. I have argued in an earlier piece called Fear The Pushtun Bogeyman Or Scaring Children As An Imperialist Habit for the necessity of protecting the lives, and access to procedures of law and justice for all citizens of Pakistan particularly the criminalized Pushtun tribes of the frontier.

The Pakistan Army, and its establishment civilian leaders, have carried out an unjust, illegal, immoral and inhumane war against its own people. The bombs that capture our attention are a consequence of a belief that disproportionate force can erase memory and sorrow. The United States of America has provided the funds and the armaments and the quiet pat on the back. The war on the frontier serves political interests both in the USA and in Pakistan, ensuring that fear of this bogeyman never leaves us, that we believe that our manicured front lawns are in fact under direct threat of crazed, wide-eyed, bearded men in loose pants with designs to subjugate all that we love and cherish (Wall Mart? 24-cable TV? Unlimited internet porn?) and control the world.

Illegal detainees are being given a chance to argue their case, to defend themselves, and a Government that illegally tortured and incarcerated them is being taken to task. Here in the USA. But in Pakistan, where our surrogates are happy to dance to any tune we play, the deaths continue, the horror unfolds. There are few voices in opposition. So I suppose they will only come in the form of bomb blasts and more ‘terror’ attacks. Sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind.

Where The Head Spun: Tuesday, October 13th 2009

Ali Eteraz has been featured on this blog site before. His insightful piece Pakistan Is Already An Islamic State about Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s cynical and politically motivated ‘Islamization’ of Pakistan’s constitution and its long term consequences that are today manifesting themselves in the pathologies in Swat and the rest of the country. His new books is called Children of the Dust – a personal memoir of growing up Muslim and American. I have not read the book as yet and will write a short review/impression of it once I do.

But here is Ali speaking about the work and the motivations that went in to it:

∞

Outlook India posted some fascinating videos of Delhi in the 1930s. The narration alone is worth listening too as it captures well the arrogance and ignorance of a colonial voice. But it shows some amazing scenes of the city and particularly its Mughal monuments.

There is more on the BFI National Archives, like this rare footage of life in Hunza Valley, now in Pakistan

You can see more videos on the BFI National Archive Search Page.

∞

I came across a rather hilarious piece by Chris Lehmann at The Awl blog on the suffering’s of Harvard University’s spoilt student body. Inspired by an insipid piece in The New York Times by their reporter Abby Goodnough called Leaner Times At Harvard: No Cookies about the hardships hitting this over-branded, over-rated and pompous institution (we must have our Oxfords & Cambridges you could hear some one say, complete with the inbred idiocy that marks them!) and how its student have to ‘learn to live with less’. But as Lehmann points out:

One shudders to think of how these euphoria-deprived pashas of the nation’s bogus meritocracy will forge onward in their post-Harvard professional lives. Will they bypass leather banquette tables at Le Cirque for furtive shame-filled footlong binges at Subway? Will they shun the siren calls of Marc Jacobs or Barney’s for the fall savings spectaculars at Loehmann’s or—shudder—Filene’s Basement? Will their would-be summer Hamptons rentals molder in favor of low-budget rustic resort accommodations in the Catskills or on the Jersey Shore?

But more seriously, Lehmann points out how the article fails to examine how Harvard University got itself into the financial mess that it does find itself, and that is forcing it to cut back on the caviar with egg breakfasts. I quote him:

But the curious thing about Harvard’s investment plight is that it antedates the onset of international financial sclerosis last fall. Harvard Management Co., the school’s investment arm, had long carved out a profile as a high-flying trader in hedge fund portfolios, derivatives—i.e., second-order market bets on stock performance that rarely involve any underlying assets—and other exotic financial instruments that greased its toboggan skids toward the market trough. On June 30, 2008, Forbes reports, Harvard Co. fund managers “had, thanks to… fancy derivatives, a 105 % long position in risky assets. The effect is akin to putting every last dollar of your portfolio to work and then borrowing another 5% to buy stocks.”

So as ever, the New York Times in-bed-with-power-and-celebrity pieces fail to examine the root causes, fail to ask the hard questions, and fail to reflect a journalistic approach that is not enamored by the wealth, glamor, power and influence of the institutions and individuals they are expected to cover. Yawn!

∞

Finally, the brave, clear minded, provocative and ever insightful Arundhati Roy gave an interview at DNA magazine that once again confronts us to ask ourselves whether we have the courage to see through the lies and deceptions that mark our modernity and are eviscerating out societies. A short quote from this interview:

Today, the idea of progress has come to mean just the western idea of progress and development, and a totally industrialised society. Of course, now with climate change, we have no choice but to imagine a different kind of progress, where perhaps everybody has less but your footprint on the earth is lighter. We have to go back to a totally different way of looking at consumption. Right now, the situation is that, unless you consume, the economy will collapse; but if you consume, the ecology will collapse — if you consume at the current rate. So in a way this is a good time for radical thought, but one doesn’t know if human beings are capable of it as a race, because we have historically seen societies collapse doing things that they know will cause them to collapse.

Speaking of modernity meaning only that which can be associated with the abstraction called ‘the West’, I recommend Dipesh Chakravarty’s wonderful book Provincializing Europe: Post Colonial Thought & Historical Difference that examines what ‘modernity’ has come to mean, how it has enhanced and limited our ability to confront social and cultural realities, the dangers of ‘historicism’ – hey, anyone remember the great Karl Popper!

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Richard Silvetstein, author of the wonderful blog site Tikun Olam, wrote an interesting piece about his struggles to encourage a dialogue and exchange between his synagogue and local mosques. Title When Muslim-Jewish Dialogue Fails, and Other Tales of Jewish Alienation.

Anyone know of a similar voice, a critical but humane voice, emerging from the American-Muslim community? If so please let me know. Richard offers a very intelligent and humanist criticism of Israel, America and other imperialist adverturers while remaining true to his heritage, a proud one at that, as a Jew. I continue to seek such informed, engaged, humanist voices from some of the other self-defined ‘defenders of the true faith’.

Photo Projects I Like: Jörg Brüggemann’s “Same Same But Different”

Backpackers are mildly delusional. I mean that in the most serious way. They travel to some of the most travelled regions of the globe, along paths so well worn that they have been eroded to their skeleton of touts and shysters, but carry within them the idea that they are somehow traveling ‘off the beaten path’ or engaged in some sort of unique journey of self-discovery. They arrive with fantasies of exotic lands, and the belief that their journey will be unique, experiential and enlightening. They insist on remaining oblivious to every sign around them that reminds them that they are in fact indulging in what is no more than another ‘packaged tour’. Facilitated by the Lonely Planet guide, the ‘individual travelers’ bible, and quite possibly the most significant inducer of the delusion that the world is just waiting for the individual travel to explore it and explore him/herself, they simply follow the instructions on the pages, right down the sequence of the experience.

That these travelers, with their illusions of discovery and self-exploration, arrive and live amongst tens of thousands of others doing the same thing, does not deter them from their fantasy. Neither do the many touts, hospitality businesses, tour guides, and others constantly waiting outside their doors to whisk them off to some ‘exotic’ locale or sell them some faux-exotic trinket. Perhaps the best sign of their self-sustained fantasy is their annoyance and aloofness towards other such travelers – they avoid looking at each other. Another backpacker reminds them that in fact they are not indulging in anything unique, but in merely the easy and conveniently packaged. It reminds them that they are not in fact unique, nor on an adventure, not exploring anything, and not ‘off the beaten path’.

Jörg Brüggemann has been working on a wonderful photo project that captures much of this ‘alternative’ but mass tourism travel industry. I wanted to post it here because I loved how these images really reflect the world of the backpacker and how they capture the contradictions that define their experience. The images are intelligent and express his intent and ideas well.

Copy Right Jorge Bruggemann

So what do these travelers tell each other, and their friends once these travels are over? What world have they really seen and experienced? As the entire ‘backpacker’ experience remains largely packaged and delivered with convenience and ease, it remains travel with little or no experiences. The entire path as laid out in books like the Lonely Planet guide or any number of other ones found in bookstores everywhere, is lined by ‘professional’ locals – people who are there to sell and nothing more. Ironically, a backpacker can no longer expect to meet any real experience, individual or situation since all of it is fronted by professional ‘locals’, ready to deliver a ready-made experience, sell ready-made souvenirs and provide ready-made stories for the ‘intrepid’ to take back home and attempt to impress their friends with. This is of course a generalization, but like most such generalizations, also largely true.

Can we ever travel again without the travel guide? I wonder.

The Hindus Live In Small And Dark Homes Or Educating Our Child Soldiers

The minds of children are usually shut inside prison houses, so that they become incapable of understanding people who have different languages and customs. This causes us to grope after each other in darkness, to hurt each other in ignorance, to suffer from the worst form of blindness. Religious missionaries themselves have contributed to this evil; in the name of brotherhood and in the arrogance of sectarian pride they have created misunderstanding. They make this permanent in their textbooks, and poison the minds of children.

Rabindranath Tagore “To Teachers”,

from Chakravarty, A (ed) The Tagore Reader (Page 216)

Jamaat-e-Daawa/Lashkar-e-Taiba Graffitti Near The Town of Gujranwala, Pakistan Reads "THE LIBERATION OF KASHMIR WILL NOT BE ACHIEVED THROUGH NEGOTIATIONS BUT THROUGH THE DEATH & DESTRUCTION OF THE HINDU"

Our wars, our massacres, our suspicions and fears, our prejudices and hatred, begin in the pages our of children’s textbooks.

No where is this more apparent than on the pages of Pakistan’s Social Studies and Pakistan Studies textbooks, most of which were being taught in her schools up till at least 2002 if not later. In a study commissioned by the Sustainable Development Policy Institute in Islamabad, titled The Subtle Subversion:The State of Curricula and Textbooks in Pakistan, the authors identified a long list of what can only be called hate material taught to high school children in Pakistan.

It makes for sobering reading that I share with you here.

• Hindus worship in temples which are very narrow and dark places, where they worship idols. Only one person can enter the temple at a time. In our mosques, on the other hand, all Muslims can say their prayers together. - Muasherati Ulum for Class V, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, 1996, p 109

• This division of men [among Aryans] into different castes is the worst example of tyranny in the history of the world. In course of time the Aryans began to be called the Hindus. - Social Studies Class VI, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002: p 59

• The Hindus lived in small and dark houses. Child marriage was common in those days. Women were assigned a low position in society. In case the husband of a woman died, she was burnt alive with his dead body. This was called ‘sati’. … The killing of shudras was not punished, but the murder of a Brahman was a serious crime. … However, the people of low caste were not allowed to learn this language. The caste system had made their life miserable.” - Social Studies Class VI, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002: p 67

• Muslim children of India wear shalwar kameez or shirt and pajama and Hindu children wear Dhoti also. - Social Studies Class VI, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, p 79

• Hindus thought that there was no country other than India, nor any people other than the Indians, nor did anyone else possess any knowledge. - Social Studies Class VIII, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002, p 82.

• …but Hindus very cunningly succeeded in making the British believe that the Muslims were solely responsible for the [1857] rebellion. - Social Studies Class VIII, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002, p 90

• Nehru report exposed the Hindu mentality. - Social Studies, Class VIII – Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore. March 2002, p 102

• The Quaid saw through the machinations of the Hindus. - Social Studies Class-VII, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, ?, p 51

• The religion of the Hindus did not teach them good things — Hindus did not respect women. - Muasherati Ulum for Class IV, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, 1995, p 81

• The Hindus always desired to crush the Muslims as a nation. Several attempts were made by the Hindus to erase the Muslim culture and civilisation. Hindi-Urdu controversy, shudhi and sanghtan movements are the most glaring examples of the ignoble Hindu mentality. - M. Ikram Rabbani and Monawar Ali Sayyid, An Introduction to Pakistan studies, The Caravan Book House, Lahore, 1995, p 12

• Hindu pundits were jealous of Al Beruni. Since they could not compete against Al Beruni in knowledge, they started calling him a magician. - Social Studies Class VIII, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002, p 82

• The Sultans of Delhi were tolerant in religious matters. They never forced the non-Muslims to convert to Islam. The Hindus embraced Islam due to the kind treatment of the Muslims. The caste system of the Hindus had made the life of the common people miserable. They were treated like animals. Nobody could claim equality with Brahmins. - Social Studies Class VI, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002: p 109

• The Hindus who have always been opportunists cooperated with the English. - Social Studies Class VI, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002: p 141

• The Hindus praised the British rule and its blessings in their speeches. The Hindus had the upper hand in the Congress and they established good relations with the British. This party tried its best to safeguard the interests of the Hindus. Gradually it became purely a Hindu organization. Most of the Hindu leaders of the Congress were not prepared to tolerate the presence of the Muslims in the sub-continent. They demanded that the Muslims should either embrace Hinduism or leave the country. The party was so close to the Government that it would not let the Government do any work as would be of benefit to the Muslims. The partition of Bengal can be quoted as an example. - Social Studies Class VI, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002: p 143

• …but Hindus very cunningly succeeded in making the British believe that the Muslims were solely responsible for the [1857] rebellion. – Social Studies Class VIII, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002, p 90

• The British confiscated all lands [from the Muslims] and gave them to Hindus. - Social Studies Class VIII, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002, p 91 [This is stated despite the fact that all the large feudal lords in the part that later formed Pakistan were Muslims]

• Therefore in order to appease the Hindus and the Congress, the British announced political reforms. Muslims were not eligible to vote. Hindus voter never voted for a Muslim, therefore, … - Social Studies Class VIII, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002, p 94-95

• Hindus declared the Congress rule as the Hindu rule, and started to unleash terror on Muslims – Social Studies, Class VIII – Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore. March 2002, p 104

• At the behest of the government [during the Congress rule], Hindu “goondas” started killing Muslims and burning their property. – Social Studies, Class VIII – Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore. March 2002, p 104-105

• The British, with the assistance of the Hindus, adopted a cruel policy of mass exodus against the Muslims to erase them as a nation. The British adopted a policy of large scale massacre (mass extermination) against the Muslims The Muslim population of the Muslim minority provinces faced atrocities of the Hindu majority. [The Muslims] were not allowed to profess their religion freely. Hindu nationalism was being imposed upon Muslims and their culture. All India Congress turned into a pure Hindu organisation. The Congress was striving very hard to project the image of united India, which was actually aimed at the extermination of the Muslims from the Indian society. The two Hindu organisations [Congress and Mahasabha] were determined to destroy the national character of the Muslims to dominate and subjugate them perpetually. - National Curriculum English (Compulsory) for Class XI-XII, March 2002, pp 6, 13, 31, 45, 7, 25, 8, 46, 48, 50

• While the Muslims provided all type of help to those wishing to leave Pakistan, the people of India committed cruelties against the Muslims (refugees). They would attack the buses, trucks, and trains carrying the Muslim refugees and they were murdered and looted. – National Early Childhood Education Curriculum (NECEC), Ministry of Education, Government of Pakistan, March 2002, p 85

• The Hindus in Pakistan were treated very nicely when they were migrating as opposed to the inhuman treatment meted out to the Muslim migrants from India. - Social Studies Class- IV, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, p. 85

• After 1965 war India conspired with the Hindus of Bengal and succeeded in spreading hate among the Bengalis about West Pakistan and finally attacked on East Pakistan in December 71, thus causing the breakup of East and West Pakistan. - Social Studies (in Urdu) Class- V, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, p 112

• Hindu has always been an enemy of Islam - Urdu Class V, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, March 2002, p 108

The dismaying simplicities and inanities are too many to list here. Suffice it to say that since the 1970s the children of Pakistan have been subjected to a systemic and comprehensive ‘poisoning’ of their minds when it comes to matters Indian, Hindu and the country’s Islamic heritage. The same report outlines in great detail the encouragement of religious violence, the denigration of women, the foisting of an Islamic ideology of Pakistan and other ahistorical perspectives with which the country’s children have been scared.

Professor Pervaiz Hoodbhoy has been documenting the deterioration in the educational culture of the country, in particular, the celebration of religious violence and the projection of a homogenous Islamic heritage of Pakistan, the latter at times going to levels of stupidity that defy commonsense. For example, history textbooks in Pakistan actually attempt to directly associate the ‘idea of Pakistan’ and the ‘creation of Pakistan’ to the earliest presence and arrival of Arab forces on the shores of Sindh! This inane association, in fact violent castration of the history of the region, to all that is perceived to by only ‘Islamic‘ is perhaps the underlying pathology that has scared education in the country for decades. (Please email me directly if you wish to see a copy of this report.)

The quest for peace and reconciliation often begins in the gilded corridors of diplomacy, or the cynical bed chambers of the politicians. It would seem that we would do well to instead begin in the moldy, dank, dark classrooms of the nation’s ignored and underfunded education institutions where the foundations of suspicion, fear, loathing and anger are laid.

In her book The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence and India’s Future the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum argued that:

The ability to accept difference – difference of religion, of ethnicity, of race, of sexuality – requires, first, the ability to accept something about oneself; that one is not lord of the world, that one is both adult and child, that no all-embracing collectivity will keep one safe from the vicissitudes of life., that others outside oneself have a reality. This ability requires, in turn, the cultivation of a moral imagination that sees reality in other human beings, that does not see other human beings as mere instruments of one’s own power or threats to that power.

Martha Nussbaum, The Clash Within, (Page 336)

Pakistani society, from its citizens to its military, is imbued with a suspicion and fear of ‘the other’ defined as ‘the Hindu‘, the nation of whom is India. It is cultivated in their minds at an age when they are hardly able to think, and more susceptible to the perspectives and dogmatism of their adults.

It is a dogmatism, bigotry and hate that is of course mirrored across the border in India, particularly during the hideous eight years the Indian democracy was under the guidance of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In a series of terse and critical essays, India’s Outlook magazine featured a series of articles by writers taking to task the BJP government’s attempts to re-write Indian history with a distinctly communal/sectarian bent.See for example the piece Communalisation of Education by Mridula Mukherjee and Aditya Mukherjee, or a piece by the eminent historian Irfan Habib called The Rewriting of History…

I found this last essay particularly interesting because of its focus on the treatment of the heritage and presence of Islam and Muslims in India in the National Curriculum Framework of School Education (NCERT) text books. NCERT is a technically a private body, but has close links to the Ministry of Education (MoE), with NCERT’s head being chosen by the MoE. The Supreme Court has in fact defined the NCERT back into the government and given broad authority.

I quote Habib himself:

Given its view of Muslims as utter barbarians, the Sangh Parivar is naturally uncomfortable with Muslim scientific thinkers. Alberuni, whose description of Indian sciences in the earlier part of the eleventh century was described by K.M. Panikkar as “a moment in history”, attracts the ire of the Sangh propagandists who hasten to picture him as anti-Indian, because of his remarks about Bahmagupta’s mythological explanation of the eclipses and about the Indian tendency not to accept external discoveries. As for Akbar the Mughal emperor, who occupies a particularly high place in Indian history, for his policy of tolerance, humanism and patronage of the arts, he is totally unacceptable not only as a “foreigner,” but also as the grandson of Babur, made notorious owing to the Babari Masjid. When the Indian Council of Historical Research, during its pre-RSS past, decided to observe the 450th birth anniversary of Akbar in 1992, the BJP MPs raised the matter in Parliament, one of them even describing Akbar as a “Pakistani” having been born in Umarkot (Sind).(They naturally forgot the birthplaces of L.K. Advani and the like).

Martha Nussbaum provides a detailed examination of the assault on India’s textbooks that took place under the ‘wise’ guidance of the BJP’s historians. A large number of Indian organizations and individuals challenged the distortions, bigotry and outright lies that tainted the new textbooks being made available to Indian students once the BJP had come to power. The attempts to ’saffronize’ education in India i.e. to infuse it with the ideology of Hindutva, became a fundamental goal, with education minister Murli Manoha Joshi, a BJP politician with known links to the RSS and VHP, given the leadership of this effort.

And with an indictment that could not cut more deeply, Irfan Habib warns the Indians that:

If the BJP is to have its way, we would soon be competing with Pakistan in framing the utmost possible parochial view of the past.

And indeed, given the state of books in Pakistan today, a situation that many in its civil society are fighting to reform, there could be no worse insult or fear. Pakistan and India eye each other with fear, loathing and suspicion. The idea of the other as the singular enemy, distorted in its hatred of ‘us’ and determined to do anything in its power to destroy ‘us’ is ingrained into our minds from an early age. At ages when children are still grasping to understand the fundamentals of Newtonian physics, they are subjected to historical, sectarian, and political indoctrination that they can neither comprehend nor question. In fact, they are encouraged not to question at all. And perhaps that is why this indoctrination must take place at so early an age – an age where critical thought could develop but instead unquestioning obedience and obeisance is encouraged.

Our child soldiers are being prepared as we speak. They, with their distortions and prejudices, will eventually man the corridors of diplomacy, politics, military and the citizenry. They will, except for a handful few able to break the pattern, carry within them the lessons of their youth, the unexamined prejudices and hatred of their adolescence. To imagine that their distorted world views, developed under the authority of a state and its adult voices, will not color their engagement with ‘the other’ is to be naive at best, irresponsible at worse. It is a world view apparent in the language of our military and our politicians today – bent as they are on working with caricatures and generalizations that convince them that only barbarians and killers live on the other side of the borders.

Its time to read new books.

The New India? Or How It Became Just Like Everyone Else!

I came across this piece in the recent issue of Granta and it made for depressing reading.

Capital Gains by Rana Dasgupta

I was not quite sure what about it really cut to the quick. I am still not sure.

Perhaps it is some sort of romanticism about a world in the past that cared for something more than just material wealth, brand awareness, consumer choice and flash. But I have read Robert Musil’s A Man Without Qualities and know well that such a world never existed. There is a surprising continuity in man’s perpetual search for the banal, the bombastic and the brilliantine!

Perhaps it was that it reminded me so much of the Karachi that i grew up in – vapid, empty, all show and no go, where men were hot air and women simply decorative pieces to be shown and then discarded to their domestic nothingness. Pakistan succumbed to the seductions of the ‘free market’ i.e. open to foreign products and killing all its own, far earlier than India did. And all throughout my early years I would envy India’s independence, her ability to stand on her own feet, achieve engineering and national achievements through her own efforts. While Pakistan was for sale to the highest bidder. Probably another romantic delusion, but certainly with some truth to it. Pakistan became a ‘client’ state back in the 1960s, whereas India was always the independent, confident, self sufficient and not cowed by power structures from without.

But Dasgupta’s piece bought back memories of that earlier Karachi I disliked and feared so much. Today it is a hollow city, its inhabitants without culture, their eyes turned towards ‘the West’, desperate to make their children the equivalent of modern day Janissaries, as the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid once called my generation. A generation raised in Pakistan to be sold to the highest bidders (academic, corporate) in the Western world. If you don’t know, the Janissaries were a force made from abducted sons from conquered countries, and then sent back to those countries to act as soldiers and administrators.

Is India becoming a Pakistan i.e creating an entire class of people who have effectively seceded, as Arundhati Roy once argued from the rest of the nation?

Tarun, the editor of the amazing Tehelka magazine is quoted in this piece as saying:

‘No one cares,’ he says. ‘There are no ideas except the idea of more wealth. The elite don’t read. They know how to work the till, and that’s it. There’s nothing: we are living in the shallowest decade you can imagine. Rural India, that’s 800 million people, has simply fallen out of the master narrative of this country. There should have been an enormous political left in India, but people worship the rich and there’s no criticism of what they do. They face no consequences; they live in an atmosphere of endless possibility.’

The conflicts in Pakistan are not seen as class wars, but they are. I recently wrote a post called Wrapping Photographers Into The Packaging of War about how foreign journalists/reporters are confused when it comes to reporting about Pakistan. Few realize that the rise of insurgencies and voices of sectarian political allegiances are veils that hide large scale class conflicts that have not be resolved in the country.  India’s conflicts in the West (Assam, Manipur, Nagaland, Chattisgarh etc.) are class conflicts as well, as reporter Jason Motlagh has recently written in Conflicts Within.

In Pakistan the deprived (and they are not necessarily the poor, simply the cheated, fooled and ignored) are asking for their share, and using religion (in Swat for example) and nationalism (in Baluchistan for example) to fight for their share of the pie that is otherwise in the hands of a minority, venal, wealthy class that just does not care!

I will say that while reading this piece I was irritated by the suggestion that this mindless affinity for wealth and its display, the indifference towards the environment or broader societal welfare needs (education, health care etc.) is some sort of Hindu problem. Such suggestions are simply racist – there is just no other term for it. They are reductive, simplistic, and label hundreds of millions of people from varied class, culture, ethnicity etc. with a broad brush. Many object to such language when it comes to Africans, or Muslims, or Arabs. I can’t accept it here and we should not either.

The greed of man, the banality of man, does not need a religion or a universal spiritual outlook. I mean, has anyone been to Dubai recently? Money and consumerism have reduced that nation to a catatonic bonhomie that I believe would easily diagnosed by a professional as ‘diseased’! It continues to surprise me  the ease with which we speak to the general but rarely ever acknowledge the shared; human greed and frivolity is universal and has nothing to do with religious outlooks or philosophies. If anything, the religions are easily (too easily!) woven into our human preferences and values most of the time anyways – its called cultural adaptation and adjustments!

What is happening in Delhi is real of course. But its not just Delhi – it will happen in every city of India if its not already that way. I would argue that anyone who knows the history of India, particularly the show and pomp of its most recent collection of rulers; the British, The Mughals, the Hyderabadi dynasty etc. will know what pomp and bombast are. Are we truly in a moment of unique crassness and indifference? I am not so sure. And Its not unique to India either. Its China. Its Islamabad. Its Doha. Its Milan. Pankaj Mishra wore eloquently about this India in a piece in The Guardian some months ago.  I remember this paragraph:

In India…the pursuit of economic growth at all costs has created a gaudy elite but also widened already alarming social and economic disparities. Facilities for health care and primary education have deteriorated. Economic growth, confined to urban centres, is largely jobless. Up to a third of Indians live with extreme poverty and deprivation. And militant communist movements have erupted in the poorest, most populous states.

When we arrive in India in a few weeks (aside: this essay was originally written for workshop students accompanying me to India in August 2009) we have to remember that we are entering a dynamic and modern India, but that the stories we will cover are the ones that are being lost in the hysteria of celebration and consumerism. There are many who are richer, but some argue, many more who have been left in the wake of this pursuit of wealth.

As journalists it is our responsibility to add the weight of our voices to that of the weak, to help balance the equation, and facilitate their access to rights, justice, and basic human needs. I think that Pankaj Mishra said it best, in a tribute he wrote for the late Babara Epstein (editor The New York Review of Books), when he said that:

…literary and political journalism requires much more than the creation of harmonious and intellectually robust sentences; … it is linked inseparably to the cultivation of a moral and emotional intelligence; … it demands a reasonable and civil tone, a suspicion of abstractions untested by experience, a personal indifference to power, and, most importantly, a quiet but firm solidarity with the powerless.

I don’t believe that any nation that ignores the welfare of all its citizens can succeed in the long run. I know this from my experiences in Pakistan – a very wealthy nation with levels of deprivation and poverty that leaves one reeling. Certainly in Sweden, where I have now lived for nearly 9 years, I can see possibilities I had previously not imagined; the achievements of a state that invests in the broad welfare of all its citizens is quite a sight to behold.

You can’t build a sky scrapper over weak foundations.

Staying Faithful To The Totality Of Experience Or New Frontiers In Photography

It is something that those of you reading my posts will by now recognize I hold very dear; the absolute and crucial need for a new generation of story tellers to reach past the conventions, cliches and crass generalizations about ‘the other’ that have so informed and influenced a whole generation of photographers, photojournalists, writers and editors.

Some of these are so familiar, so obvious, that they have become truths in and of themselves and no longer require questioning or examination; The hijab as oppression, the refugee as victim, the Muslim maulvi as fundamentalist, the Jewish settler as fanatic, the drug addict as lost, the African as violent and so on and so forth. Our challenge remains to cut past the obvious and to allow ourselves to explore spaces, lives and circumstances with humility and a genuine recognition of the humanity, history and individual agency of our subjects.

I am reminded of a wonderful essay by the Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainain that appeared some years ago in the British literary magazine Granta. Title How To Write About Africa., it was an acerbic, at times tongue-in-cheek, poke at the conventions that shackled ‘Western’* writing about Africa. I quote a small piece:

“In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.”

I highly recommend reading the entire piece. As an exercise, try doing it without laughing.

James Gibbons, in a recent review of books from Africa and about Africa, points out that:

Wainaina’s essay is more than an acerbic takedown of lazy and half-informed Western perceptions. Embedded within it is a manifesto of sorts. If we turn inside out the sardonic rules and prohibitions, a vision of African literature emerges that departs from the dark-continent fantasies still entertained even by sophisticates in Europe and North America…In one sense, this is a call to normalize African writing, to make its human scale comparable to that of literature set elsewhere…The dilemma for imaginative writers lies in staying faithful to the totality of their experiences while shunning images that simply confirm … biases. The sporadic media coverage of Africa runs a familiar gamut, broadcasting a continent in perpetual—and, it is implied, essential—peril. The challenge of African writing is to provide some new news.

I love that phrase staying faithful to the totality of their experience and what it implies for the new possibilities opened up to a new generation of photographers and journalists. It was very much what Edward Said challenged us to do with it came to things Islamic and Muslim in his work Covering Islam: How The Media and the Experts Determine How We See The Rest Of The World. And for that matter, even Amartya Sen in a work already on our recommended reading list The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity where he takes typical ‘Western’ assumptions and generalizations about India, her heritage and her people to task.

At the 2008 World Press Photo awards Stephen Mayes, managing editor at the VII photo agency and a WPP judge, pointed out that too many photographers were chasing the same too few stories. That too much of the world’s experiences were being ignored as photographers attempted to find formulas for success and recognition that increasingly seemed to hinge around shooting the same stuff as that which may have already been published or recognized.

This seems even more egregious if not outright irresponsible when the formulas for producing new and interesting stories has already been offered to us. We just need to consider it, absorb it and act on it.

* ‘Western’ here does not refer to a physical land, area or people, but more a metaphor of a certain world view and presumptions about the conditions of man, the relationships between nations, and the role of the ‘haves’ towards the ‘have nots’ etc.

I Am Not A Journalist But I Play One At The New York Times

In an earlier post called The Most Dangerous Nation I had criticized The New York Times for its reliance of ‘official’ sources to report complex stories in a exasperatingly one-sided way. The Times reporter David Sanger had penned a rather shoddy piece of reporting, titled Obama’s Worst Pakistan Nightmare, on Pakistan that made it to the front pages of the magazine section. My specific complaints centered on ….

The American journalist’s love of rubbing up to power, to be known as someone with access to the ‘inner’ corridors of power, is perhaps its greatest failing at the moment.  Mr. Sanger is spending all his time in the offices of ‘officials’ and eating too much of the fine cuisine available at fine restaurants that I am sure he is dined at.  In Pakistan he is traveling through the living and dining rooms of the small elite – unable to speak the country’s language, ignorant of her history and her cultural diversity, uninterested in confronting it as a complex entity, Mr. Sanger has produced the classical American piece on Pakistan; sensationalist, fear mongering, officially sanctioned, and fed.

This propensity to rely, lazily, on ‘official’ sources continues, despite the scandals (remember Judith Miller on Iraq anyone?) as we proceed to build a decade long case for war against Iran. The old troupes are being trotted out and of course, New York Times journalists, complete with their fine degrees and corporate-sponsored Pulitzer prizes are there to provide the dynamite.

Michael Massing analyzed a recent piece written by Helene Cooper and Mark Mazzetti called Cryptic Note Ignited An Iran Nuclear Strategy Debate where he points out the following sources used to complete the piece:

1. a senior administration official
2. a second senior administration official
3. administration officials
4. senior intelligence officials
5. the officials
6. the official
7. White House officials
8. American officials
9. a senior administration official
10. the officials
11. a senior official
12. American officials
13. the officials
14. a senior administration official
15. the administration official
16. a senior administration official
17. administration officials
18. one administration official
19. senior administration official

You can see his piece here, called Eyes Wide Shut On Iran

We are back in time, back to the routine, back to same mindless, and frankly irresponsible ‘professional’ journalism that seems to be carried out by trained technocrats as desperate to climb their journalism career ladders as they are to rub shoulders with ‘power’. The fiasco of American journalism that was the build up and execution of the illegal, immoral, unnecessary and frankly hideous war against Iraq seems to have faded into distant memory, and the newspapers back at their old games. Yesterday it was Judith Miller,  clawing her way to fame and celebrity, today it could be Helene Cooper or any number of dozens of New York Times, The Washington Post and other ‘career professionals’ unable to see past their own skull sized kingdoms (to borrow a phrase) and letting all integrity, rigor, ethics and even journalist practice go to hell!

Arundhati Roy has penned perhaps one of the harshest and most vivid autopsies about pathologies of modern democracy that I have ever read. Titled Democray’s Failing Light it exposes the underlying dysfunctions, deceptions and deceits that mark the theater of ‘modern democracies’. In America, newspapers and journalists at the New York Times are clowns in the show that is America’s version of the game called ‘democracy’.

2000 Women Whipped, Babies Dropped From Towers, Red Cows For The Messiah’s Holocaust Or Other Wisdoms Our Elders Taught Us

Click Image To Go To Video

And least some Islamic triumphalist become too content, perhaps s/he would like to examine this ritual being performed under the banner of the faith

But then again, there is no limit to the idiocies that can be sanctioned under the banner of ‘absolute faith’, a form of collective delusion fueled by a deadly combination righteousness, arrogance, i,nsecurity, infantilism and obstinate blindness – oh, by the way, the red heifer is desperately bred, probably genetically modified and not a natural or ‘miracle’ birth which I suspect was the intention of the prophesies, but of course, they edit that detail out in the video. Why wait for ‘god’ to do it when we can do it ourselves and claim victory!

In a piece in the National Review, we are informed that:

In 1996, thanks in part to a cattle-breeding program set up in Israel with the help of Texas ranchers who are fundamentalist Christians, a red heifer was born. There was immense excitement among messianists of the Israeli religious Right, and their American Christian counterparts… (but)…As it turned out, during the three years of waiting for the heifer to reach the ritually mandated age of sacrifice, white hairs popped out on the tip of her tail. This bovine was, alas, not divine. But now there’s a successor, and rabbis who have examined her have declared her ritually acceptable (though she will not be ready for sacrifice for three years).

As humanity, as society, we have to ask ourselves this simple question; what is our definition of a mental illness and if a condition known as ‘faith’ or ‘belief’, something obvious based on nothing but a will to believe, creates situations of human suffering and in other cases large scale oppression and bloodshed, should not that condition be labeled an illness and treated?

I believe this question can simply be answered by determining the human cost – in terms of war, bloodshed, suffering, cruelty, inhumanity, injustice that a belief creates. If murder is an evil, then why not the minds and manufactured beliefs that justify it?

There are many who wish the ‘humanist’ project dead – the idea that we have a capacity for recognising moral values, we perceive our own self and its relation to other selves, and we should try to work toward a notion of goodness that can be accepted by all, and that protects all from cruelty, inhumanity, suffering, torture and injustice. I still believe in this model and remain convinced that despite the cynicism (read: intellectual and moral cowardice) of our age, there are universal principle of justice and humanity that are worthy of defending and fought for. Traditions have their place, but not unquestioningly. For many, ‘faith’ is simply a tradition handed down and then mindlessly followed and transformed by an act of will into ‘truth’. We fear questioning this ‘truth’ – and the consequences of the belief in those ‘truths’. Even if it kills us!

For a quick update on the humanist project, I do recommend Todorov’s The Imperfect Garden – yes, its Euro-centric offering only examples of European philosophers and thinkers, but it is brilliant and necessary. For those trying to read beyond and perhaps explore these ideas in another part of the world, Ifran Habib’s Akbar & His India makes for interesting reading. Or even Sen’s The Argumentative Indian, or something by R. Tagore like Sadhana or The Religion of Man or Edward Said’s Humanism & Democratic Criticism or Representations of the Intellectual.

“Beware the man of one book.”

- St. Thomas Aquinas (the irony is killing!)

Read, something, other than just that one ‘book’!

So, What Do You Think About Our Washington Press Corp? Oh, Sorry I Asked!

Nadia Bilbassy, White House correspondent for MBC, a satellite TV network in Dubai, what do you really think about the American Washington Press Corp? No, really..and in case you missed it, here is a transcript of her comments

more about “Arab media White House correspondent …“, posted with vodpod

Our Songs Carry Our Soul: Khwaja Ghulam Farid’s Husn e Haqiqi

more about “Our Songs Carry Our Soul: Husn e Haqi…“, posted with vodpod

Khawaja Ghulam Farid was a Sufi poet, and this is the Pakistani singer Areib Azhar singing one of his poems Husn-e-Haqiqi (The Beauty of Truth). This performance is nothing short of stunning, one of the more beautiful renditions of this poem I have ever heard. And Azhar’s voice is simply magnificent – controlled and guided to provoke the heart and emotions in a way that only South Asia’s Sufi folk music can.

Below is a translation, by Areib Azhar himself, of this beautiful poem:

O’ Beauty of Truth, the Eternal Light!

Do I call you necessity and possibility,

Do I call you the ancient divinity,

The One, creation and the world,

Do I call you free and pure Being,

Or the apparent lord of all,

Do I call you the souls, the egos and the intellects,

The imbued manifest, and the imbued hidden,

The actual reality, the substance,

The word, the attribute and dignity,

Do I call you the variety, and the circumstance,

The demeanor, and the measure,

Do I call you the throne and the firmament,

And the demurring delights of Paradise,

Do I call you mineral and vegetable,

Animal and human,

Do I call you the mosque, the temple, the monastery,

The scriptures, the Quran,

The rosary, the girdle,

Godlessness, and faith,

Do I call you the clouds, the flash, the thunder,

Lightning and the downpour,

Water and earth,

The gust and the inferno,

Do I call you Lakshmi, and Ram and lovely Sita,

Baldev, Shiv, Nand, and Krishna,

Brahma, Vishnu and Ganesh,

Mahadev and Bhagvaan,

Do I call you the Gita, the Granth, and the Ved,

Knowledge and the unknowable,

Do I call you Abraham, Eve and Seth,

Noah and the deluge,

Abraham the friend, and Moses son of Amran,

And Ahmad the glorious, darling of every heart,

Do I call you the witness, the Lord, or Hejaz,

The awakener, existence, or the point,

Do I call you admiration or prognosis,

Nymph, fairy, and the young lad,

The tip and the nip,

And the redness of betel leaves,

The Tabla and Tanpura,

The drum, the notes and the improvisation,

Do I call you beauty and the fragrant flower,

Coyness and that amorous glance,

Do I call you Love and knowledge,

Superstition, belief, and conjecture,

The beauty of power, and conception,

Aptitude and ecstasy,

Do I call you intoxication and the drunk,

Amazement and the amazed,

Submission and the connection,

Compliance and Gnosticism,

Do I call you the Hyacinth, the Lilly, and the Cypress,

And the rebellious Narcissus,

The bereaved Tulip, the Rose garden, and the orchard,

Do I call you the dagger, the lance, and the rifle,

The hail, the bullet, the spear,

The arrows made of white poplar, and the bow,

The arrow-notch, and the arrowhead,

Do I call you colorless, and unparalleled,

Formless in every instant,

Glory and holiness,

Most glorious and most compassionate,

Repent now Farid forever!

For whatever I may say is less,

Do I call you the pure and the humane,

The Truth without trace or name.

(Translation by Areib Azhar)

You may also want to check out some of the other performances on the Coke Studio website.  This performance by the masterful Saeen Zahoor of Bulleh Shah’s, another Sufi folk poet, is truly stunning.

The entire Coke Studio sessions can be seen and heard here: Coke Studio. It is a remarkable collection of music and talent, a truly beautiful reflection of Pakistan and her deep connections to her Indian heritage. This is not just Pakistani music – this is the voice of South Asia, tracing its heritage and traditions to hundreds of years of development and evolution. These songs, these poems, their voices and their passion transcend boundaries, and reflect the continuities of traditions and cultures that Edward Said was so determined to remind us of.

Student Work: Brittany Sloan / The Aftermath/EXPOSURE Workshop, Ajmer India 2009

The story was just not coming together. It had sounded very strong when we had been researching it – an examination of the economic and social communities that emerged around an important Sufi shrine, and what this meant for the creation of a tolerant and pluralistic culture. But the pictures that Brittany was bringing back in the first week were too literal, too obvious and lacked a connecting theme. They were a literal documentation of the economic and spiritual world that existed around the dargah of Gharib Nawaz Moinuddin Chisti. And we knew that we were looking for, hoping for, something more than the literal. But it has to be admitted that both Sara and I were initially unable to articulate what this ’something more’ would be. I at least had hoped that Brittany would just discover it once she was out working. But for at least the first week it did not seem to offer itself and the frustration and concern on Brittany’s face only grew.

She kept going out to make pictures, and kept cornering us to look at what she had found. Brittany was perhaps the most determined to find this ’something more’ we had been talking about. She spent hours pouring over her day’s take, discussing and arguing and challenging. We would look at each individual image and try to understand what was working and what was not. We talked for hours. And it was in one of these determined sessions that she would initiate that we had our breakthrough.

Brittany had become interested in the flower vendors that surrounded the dargah and realized that they would be an important element of her story. She made friends with local vendors and spent a lot of time around their warehouses and storefronts. She was determined that they were the relevant ‘economic’ element of her story. It was while discussing this with Sara Terry that they hit on the idea that the flower was in fact the story! It was that binding element that tied the whole story together, and that offered a unique way to speak about Ajmer, the culture of tolerance and pluralism around the shrine, and the economic realities that helped tie it all together! They both turned to me and said what I thought. I think I said “Hallelujah!”

Here are a few samples from Brittany’s Aftermath/EXPOSURE workshop story called The Rose of Ajmer:

Copyright Brittany Sloan

Copyright Brittany Sloan

Copyright Brittany Sloan

Copyright Brittany Sloan

Copyright Brittany Sloan

For Edward Said: Remembering 25th September 2003

Edward Said passed away on 25th September 2003. I am re-reading his Representations of the Intellectual, a book that has had a major influence on my own way of negotiating the world, in his memory this week. Though I never met him when I was at Columbia he was a powerful intellectual force at the campus, and even us on the far edges of his universe could not help but be pulled towards his ideas and views. And we continue to be, with his works Reflections on Exile, After The Last Sky, Humanism & Democratic Criticism, The Politics of Dispossession, On Late Style, Musical Elaborations and Culture & Imperialism repeatedly being taken down from the bookshelf as references or as reminders of ways of thinking

His death was widely mourned, and widely spoken about. Here are links to some obituaries that you may have missed:

• The Guardian: Edward Said
• Asad Raza remembers Edward Said
• Akeel Bilgrami remembers Edward Said
• Al-Ahram: Mourid Barghouti on Edward Said
• Salon: Christopher Hitchens on Edward Said
• London Review of Books: Michael Wood on Edward Said
• New Left Review: Tariq Ali on Edward Said
• The Nation: Tony Judt on Edward Said
• Time Magazine: Daniel Barenboim on Edward Said
• The Village Voice: Moustafa Bayoumi on Edward Said
• The Independent: Gabriel Piterberg on Edward Said

In a small tribute to the man, Democracy Now! has an archive page of Edward Said’s appearances which you can see here

• Democracy Now!: Edward Said

Spreading Democracy Around The World…By Seducing One Brutal, Egomaniacal Dictator At A Time

Speaking of a history of ugliness, that lovely man shaking the hands of our Secretary of State is Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, the President of the nation of Turkmenistan. This photo was taken on September 21, 2009. At the Waldorf Astoria in New York City. Quite the address.

This gentleman, all decked in what appears to be the uniform of the civilized, modern, accommodating, liberal, peace loving dictators we so love, heads a country that has one of the most heinous record when it comes to human rights and justice. Just a search on the Amnesty International website or the Human Rights Watch website yields just too many reports to actually read! But even a cursory search on the HRW website report reveals the following:

Turkmenistan remains one of the most repressive and authoritarian countries in the world because the government has not altered the institutions of repression that characterized Niazov’s rule. Hundreds of people, perhaps more, languish in Turkmen prisons following unfair trials on what would appear to be politically motivated charges. Draconian restrictions on freedom of expression, association, movement, and religion remain in place. Teaching of the Ruhnama, Niazov’s “book of the soul,” has been cut back, but is still part of the state education curriculum.

Oddly, our Assistant Secretary of State Robert O’ Blake was quick to point out that

…human rights is not as big an issue in Turkmenistan as it is in some of the other Central Asian countries.

Really?

I wonder if it had something to do with this earlier comment he made in the same meeting:

U.S. [oil] companies are already doing a lot of business in Turkmenistan, particularly offshore, and are interested, I think, in doing more work to develop some of the onshore hydrocarbon resources there. And so the Secretary conveyed that interest. The Turkmen president said that he’s going to be meeting – in fact, next – tomorrow – with a lot of the U.S. oil companies to, again, explore what more they can do in Turkmenistan. So that’s certainly a welcome development.

So remind me again, what was it that we had hoped would change with this new administration?

I really can’t remember!

On The History of Ugliness

more about “On The History of Ugliness“, posted with vodpod

Student Work: Jessica Bidgood / The Aftermath/EXPOSURE Workshop, Ajmer India 2009

Her’s was a very personal walk. Each day Jessica would take a rickshaw to Ajmer’s Delhi gate, negotiate her way through the narrow alleys around the Gharib Nawaz dargah – clogged each day with tens of thousands of pilgrims anxious to enter what is quite possibly the most important pilgrimage center in South Asia for people of all faiths, and begin the slow near two kilometer trudge uphill to the shanties on the hills where the community of illegal Bangladeshis lived.

Each day she would enter a neighborhood that, though initially welcoming, had become increasingly concerned about her presence there. Harassed by the police, pursued by exploitative journalists and wary of ‘welfare’ workers out to make a quick buck, the community of Bangladeshis had learned to live with suspicion and doubt. A foreign woman photographer arriving at their doorsteps each day was a source of unwanted attention. They wanted her to complete her work quickly and leave. Like all the other photographers from the local newspapers did. But Jessica was there to tell a different story, and to produce a different work. So she kept coming back, kept negotiating her way in.

Her research had revealed that the issue of illegal immigrants was a hot political topic, but few had really bothered to investigate the actual lived lives of the people and the struggles and aspirations that kept them together as a community and their dignity as human beings. So Jessica kept going back to the shanties, and kept exploring. And each day she kept coming back with some remarkably personal and gentle images of a people long denigrated and dehumanized in India’s charged political climate. What amazed me was that her process was genuinely exploratory; a look at her digital files revealed a photographer relentlessly working a situation, missing her marks, but staying the course and then capturing a wonderfully evocative and intelligent frame. A real photographer’s process.

Here are a few samples from Jessica’s Aftermath/EXPOSURE workshop story:

Copyright Jessica Bidgood

Copyright Jessica Bidgood

Copyright Jessica Bidgood

Copyright Jessica Bidgood

Copyright Jessica Bidgood

Why I Shoot Film And Why You Should Give A Damn!

“Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.” – Erich Fromm

Do you prefer to shoot digital or film? – Many have tried to answer this question, and yet I find that I remain unconvinced by most all the answers. Repeatedly, a number of well known photographers shooting on film seem to struggle to offer a simple, clear answer to this question. Most just give up.

A couple of years ago it was a ‘you are with us, or you are with the terrorists’ type of question – the answer could be one or the other, and intelligence, consideration, insight and commonsense had no place in the dialogue. Today, with digital more mature and brilliant as ever, it actually becomes a harder question to answer. Again and again I see studies and research articles reminding me that digital resolution, detail, etc. are far superior to anything film can offer. Having lost all the technological arguments, many resort to rather weak arguments that revolve around rather inane and desperate statements like ‘I like holding film’, or ‘I like to have something tangible in front of me’ or other such nonsense. A losing battle really with none really being able to defend this ‘dying’ space.

I am predominantly a film shooter. The entire project on India, The Idea of India, is being shot on Kodak Portra 160NC and 400NC color negative film. Prior to this I have shot magazine assignments on film. I turn to digital only in specific situations where the client’s turnaround time does not allow time for processing, scanning and fixing of film images. But whenever and wherever given the choice I always return to film. I have shot both slide and color negatives, and of course, a lot of b&w. I don’t have the definitive answer, but I do have an answer. I am dismayed that it has not, as far as I know, been articulated before. If I am wrong please do email me a link. I would be happy to have any further backers of my thoughts, trust me!

I prefer to shoot film because it is a more human process, complete with all the frailties, mistakes, fears, worries, concerns, and doubts that define me as a human being. Yes, of course, digital has all the utilitarian advantages (cheaper, faster, quick turn around sharper etc.), but film retains all the creative advantages.

Gandakosa Village, Northern Iraq, The Funeal of Isaac Sheba Slewa. A result of a timing mistake, this image is the only one of the nearly 72 exposures I have ever used. Looking at the contact sheets nearly 2 months after the image was made, my 'correct' exposures failed to impress and this image, made after relentlessly working the situation because I was just never sure if I got what I wanted, became the favorite. Copyright Asim Rafiqui 2005

Film photography remains a slower process, requiring greater concentration and awareness since mistakes cannot be corrected by the time the results are seen. It is also a process filled with doubt, fear and uncertainty. It requires us to confront fear and work to make it something that drives us. The results are unknown, our memory of what has been captured uncertain, and we keep coming back, keep looking, keep exploring and shooting. The doubts drive, define, and push. The fear maintains the issues and subjects on our mind. We lose sleep thinking about the subject, convinced that we shot the roll on the wrong ASA, or other such amateurish mistake. There is no consolation, as Raymond Depardon argued, for the photographer. Nor should there be.

Creativity is a flawed and uncertain process. It requires mistakes, corrections, adjustments. It is driven by the pursuit of an ideal that you don’t even know exists or even matters. But something drives you, as a blind man searching for his sight but not knowing when and where he will find it. Writers, poets and fine artists embrace these uncertainties, channels these fears, thrive on the mistakes and persevere past the failures. I have always wondered why photographers are so afraid of precisely these human instincts and failings, constantly looking for the predictable, the certain, and the promised. Why are we so afraid of what we are?

I shoot film because it gives me more of a chance to be a who I am, complete with all my flaws and doubts. I shoot film because I today embrace my weaknesses and propensities rather than attempt to overcome them with toys. I shoot film because I must reach further into myself, my soul, psyche and sensibility and aspire to that place where someday I too may find something to say and show – something unique, something beautifully flawed and hence in its unique way, something beautifully human.

UPDATE: By coincidence Umberto Eco has penned  a mild lament at the death of hand writing. In his piece The Lost Art of Hand Writing he suggests that “..writing by hand obliges us to compose the phrase mentally before writing it down. Thanks to the resistance of pen and paper, it does make one slow down and think. Many writers, though accustomed to writing on the computer, would sometimes prefer even to impress letters on a clay tablet, just so they could think with greater calm.”

I agree with his point that it may force us to think before committing words to paper but I am not sure I accept the entire argument. Tempting as it may be to find a parallel with my justification for the love of shooting film, I will resist. Writing is less a craft defined by the tools that enable it as photography is. I do agree that we may write different on a computer than on paper, but there are many social, cultural, economic and political reasons for why we may be writing differently today than say 50 years ago. Not the least of which would be the electronic text editor. Photography however is a mechanical craft, and the choice of the tool is not irrelevant to the work the photographer wishes to do, or is limited to do. That is, photography requires us to make a choice of equipment depending on either our goals, vision and/or preferences, or it forces us to limit ourselves to the method most suitable to the device we work with. A photographer and her camera are a relationship, at times economic, at times creative and at times habitual and each influences, limits and defines the kind of work that is produce.

Make Mine Bigger Or Maps And What They May Say About History And Us

A friend recently pointed to a poster on her wall and explained that it a Peter’s Map. An area accurate projection of the world, its first publication in 1974 provoked a minor firestorm. Perhaps because it revealed how the world’s powers were in fact geographically tiny nations – as if size and land mass may have had something to do with cultural, intellectual, military and social superiority. China was finally seen to be nearly 4 times the size of Greenland. Africa was 14 times the size of Greenland. Its just not cricket!

I recently came across a fabulously interesting and informative website called Strange Maps. Containing gems like Heineken’ (founder of the beer company) idea of a United States of Europe:

Source: http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/

Or a map of the Mahatma Gandhi as India

Source: http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/

Or a mapping of what aliens monitoring our TV signals will see (American TV only – we presume that is all an alien life form would want to watch, particularly given its plethora of incomprehensible and socially eviscerating reality tv shows!)

Source: http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/

Student Work: Saloni Bhojwani / The Aftermath/EXPOSURE Workshop, Ajmer India 2009

Hers was perhaps the subtlest way of working, one that allowed her to quietly, unobtrusively blend into a space and be forgotten. Rarely have I seen a first time shooter with such a knack for becoming inconspicuous so easily and so precisely. While working on a story about the social and cultural divisions created through sectarian education programs that divide societies through its children, Saloni would keep coming back with images that surprised me with their intimacy. And they revealed a real photographer’s sensitivity and eye. And this from a student who had never shot before attending the workshop! Her first contact with an SLR was on the 3rd day of the workshop itself!

She was also perhaps one of the quietest students attending the workshop, rarely saying anything, but always observing. You could see that in the way she scanned a room when she walked in – a quality and skill that obviously served her well on what was a very difficult story to put together. With social tensions running high in the region, and her subjects sensitive to the intrusions of an outsider with a camera, Saloni had to negotiate a careful line while working with the religious schools and the community caught in the middle.

Here are a few samples from Saloni’s Aftermath/EXPOSURE workshop story:

Copyright Saloni Bhojwani

Copyright Saloni Bhojwani

Copyright Saloni Bhojwani

Copyright Saloni Bhojwani

Copyright Saloni Bhojwani

Copyright Saloni Bhojwani

Sabra & Shatlia Or Histories That Do Not Make It To Prime Time

September 16th.

September 17th.

September 18th.

1982.

Least we forget.

Never.

Fazel Muhamad, 48, holding pictures of family members who were killed in the attack. Photograph: Ghaith Abdul-Ahad

“I couldn’t find my son, so I took a piece of flesh with me home and I called it my son. I told my wife we had him, but I didn’t let his children or anyone see. We buried the flesh as it if was my son.” Jan Mohamad.

This and more.

They sowed the wind and reap the whirlwind;They plowed evil and reap injustice.

(Hosea 8:7; 10:13)

Our feigned innocence is leaking blood. Vividly our future is being written today as it was once in the past. But then too, as today, we will look and ask ourselves, in numbed confusion inspired by discardable memory, whence our enemies came from. Can you hear it – the answer to our question?

Student Work: Elizabeth Herman / The Aftermath/EXPOSURE Workshop, Ajmer India 2009

It took only a few hours after her arrival in Ajmer for Elizabeth to realize that the story she had hoped to do did not exist. At least not within a reasonable distance from the city itself. Nearly 3 days of telephone calls to local journalists and discussions with other contacts in the city failed to provide a solution. I was concerned. Sara was concerned. I remember even some of the other students were concerned. Interestingly, Elizabeth was unfazed, and I found that rather troubling. She seemed very calm and composed through it all, and was in fact pursuing a quiet strategy – that of accompanying some of the other students to their meetings with local NGO and other institutions and keeping her eyes and ears open to something new. It was on the third day that I ran into an excited Elizabeth who approached me and said I have a story. My doubts were probably written all over my face, but Elizabeth was persistent and described what in fact was an intelligent, complex and fascinating story.

A small village on the outskirts of the city of Ajmer had had a new railway track constructed right through the middle of it. This had not only divided the village from its agricultural lands, but had also created fissures in its social and cultural fabric. The railroad meant that India’s modernity, with its conveniences and deprivations, had arrived right at its doorstep, imposing new values and new dreams amongst a younger generation of villagers more interested in careers, conveniences and the city life. As the elderly looked on, they traditional agricultural way of life now irrelevant, they could see that their village had become a smaller version of the broader changes taking place in today’s India.

Elizabeth had indeed found her story.

Here are a few samples from Elizabeth’s Aftermath/EXPOSURE workshop story:

Copyright Elizabeth Herman

Copyright Elizabeth Herman

Copyright Elizabeth Herman

Copyright Elizabeth Herman

Copyright Elizabeth Herman

Student Work: Radhika Saraf / The Aftermath/EXPOSURE Workshop, Ajmer India 2009

Her nervousness was palpable; sitting in the corridor late at night I watched her and her fear. For the last three days she had been exploring the lives of the Cheeta-Mewati community in the Beawar region of Rajasthan. A unique community that practiced a syncretic version of Hindu/Islamic spirituality, her project required her to examine the pressures the community had come under from the orthodox – both Hindu and Muslim, organizations that were fighting for their ’spiritual’ souls and attempting to seduce them towards a more purified spiritual place. Radhika Saraf is a first time photographer – a few days earlier I had been teaching her how to handle autofocus, and precisely why the camera meter behaves as it does.

Now, hours away from her first foray into this community, she was scared and I completely understood why. It was a fear that I had felt many times, and still do; the moment when the research, the planning, the imagination, and the ideas, are all set aside and the first step taken to actually enter a space and begin to explore a story. As Radhika, on that night, stood on that threshold of this moment and looked out across a world complex and unpredictable, she began to understand the difficulties of this craft that today is so easily dismissed as ‘dead’, and the tremendous creative and personal courage and clarity needed to begin, and create something out of what initially appears to be merely chaos and randomness.

A few samples from the Aftermath/EXPOSURE workshop follow:

The Cheeta-Mewati, Beawar Rajasthan: Copyright Radhika Saraf

The Cheeta-Mewati, Beawar Rajasthan: Copyright Radhika Saraf

The Cheeta-Mewati, Beawar Rajasthan: Copyright Radhika Saraf

The Cheeta-Mewati, Beawar Rajasthan: Copyright Radhika Saraf

The Cheeta-Mewati, Beawar Rajasthan: Copyright Radhika Saraf

Speaking Of The Obvious Or Profiling Photographers And The Selling Of War

A fascinating little piece of reporting from The Stars & Stripes that simply reminds us what this entire US military embedd fiasco is all about. In a piece called Files prove Pentagon is profiling reporters we learn that the US military and the Pentagon profile reporters before allowing them to embed with the military forces. Basically, if you are in, then you have been taken. There are some still running around pretending that their embedded reporting was done with a wide degree of ‘liberty’ and ‘latitude’ and without any specific constraints imposed on them.

Even a recent World Press Photo competition winner has been repeatedly espousing in public forums, rather vehemently and defensively I would argue, the nonsense that he was ‘never told what to shoot’, revealing once and for all the delusions such photographers impose on themselves when they refuse to acknowledge the walls of the prison, while celebrating their ability to move about freely within it.

I have repeatedly spoken out against the US military embed program, much to the dislike of many, some of whom of course have happily participated in this journalistic charade and even gone on to decorate their chests with trinkets received in competitions and such. I wrote about the embed programs recently in a piece called Wrapping Photographers Into The Packaging of War, and in another piece called How We Refused To Embed With Brittany Spears, and in a more acerbic piece called Creating Tempests In A Teapot Or What Else Is A Photoeditor To Do.

I am sure I have written more about it, particularly in my lengthy tirade against modern day photojournalism also available on this blog site. I will spare you the link.

UPDATE: The same newspaper, Stars & Stripes, recently reported that the military has cancelled its contract with the private contracter who was responsible for creating these media profiling and analysis report. In a piece called Military Terminates Rendon Contract writer Kevin Baron quotes a military spokesman Col. Wayne Sharks as saying “The Bagram Regional Contracting Center intends to execute a termination of the Media Analyst contract.”. Later a Rear Adm. Gregory J. Smith is quoted as stating that ““The decision to terminate the Rendon contract was mine and mine alone. As the senior U.S. communicator in Afghanistan, it was clear that the issue of Rendon’s support to US forces in Afghanistan had become a distraction from our main mission.”

Oddly, the quotes only claim to cancel the contracts as they relate to Afghanistan. There is no claim in fact that the US military has canceled its engagement of this firm, Rendon, to carry out its controversial media analysis work. In fact, the article goes on to reveal that Rendon will continue to produce these profiles, and in fact that these reports have been regularly used by the Defense Department and the CIA to provide “…a range of media analysis services beyond just the profiles and was just the latest contract for services it had provided the military for years.  The company has a long history of contracting with the Defense Department and the CIA on controversial media projects.”

So what appears to be a ‘change in policy’ is eventually revealed to in fact not really be that. Or certainly nothing more than a juggling around of ‘responsibility’. The article was confusing and obfuscating and does not attempt to separate between the US Defense Department, various departments of the military forces, the ground operations in Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere. It does not make clear what this ‘cancellation’ means, the scope of its impact, the implications for future policy on the handling of embedded journalists. In fact, it just ends by pointing out that this contractor has been working for the Defense Department and will continue to do so!

Did I miss something?

A Quick Update For The Restless Or What The Hell Has He Been Up To?

Once again I find it near impossible to blog while traveling.  Despite my best efforts I have been unable to update this blog with anything substantial.

Much time was taken conducting the Aftermath/EXPOSURE workshop in Ajmer that Sara Terry and I were teaching. I will be posting all of the student work on this site in a few weeks time, so please be patient. Suffice it to say, they produce some remarkable stories and took fabulous photographs.

So much so that at least two of them have been invited to contribute to the ‘The Idea of India’ project website. Britt Sloan and Radhika Saraf, both new photographers, produced some beautiful work that captured India’s remarkable syncretic and pluralist culture in Ajmer.  and I have invited them to submit their images and essays for inclusion on the project website.

They then formally open up the ‘The Idea of India’ project stie to other photographers – I will annouce this more formally when I return to Stockholm in a couple of weeks. The scope of the work now demands that others start to send their stories for inclusion, and help evolve the project site from being just about my journeys in India, to a broader, more comprehensive site for stories and resources about India’s magnificent pluralist and heterodox heritage.

Britt Sloan and Radhika Saraf are students at Tufts, young photographers and sharp, intelligent and passionate individuals. I am very excited about their participation.

I also expect to invite a couple of the other students to the project site as well, but will start with these two.

I am back in Stockholm on the 14th of September.  New posts will once again start to emerge after I land.

Thank you all – all handful of you, for your patience, support and encouragement.

How Hindus Are Destroying New Delhi Or An Exercise In Absolute Foolishness Masquerading As A Stupid Opinion

Writer Rana Dasgupta, famous for his book Tokyo Cancelled, has penned a piece on the city of New Delhi and its rampaging obsession with things material, brand-obsessed, consumerist, shallow, callow and crass. Called Capital Gains it appeared in the recent issue of Granta magazine.

Fair enough – one can write similar pieces about pretty much any city in any ‘capitalist revolutionary’ city anywhere in the world. Take your pick, this story though well written and at times funny, could just as well be about Karachi, Rio De Jeneiro , Bangkok, Dubai, Shanghai, Beijing or even the now-under-China’s shadow, Hong Kong.

I enjoyed reading the piece, but the reason why I am writing this post is less the piece itself, since it was rather banal and unsurprising, but that in the midst of it I came across this rather amusing (and I mean that not in an amusing way) exchange that the write has with an editor at Tehelka magazine:

‘No one cares,’ he says. ‘There are no ideas except the idea of more wealth. The elite don’t read. They know how to work the till, and that’s it. There’s nothing: we are living in the shallowest decade you can imagine. Rural India, that’s 800 million people, has simply fallen out of the master narrative of this country. There should have been an enormous political left in India, but people worship the rich and there’s no criticism of what they do. They face no consequences; they live in an atmosphere of endless possibility.’

‘Do you think anything will come of all this money they’re making?’ I ask. ‘Do you think they’ll try to leave behind a legacy?’

‘They don’t care about their legacy! This is a Hindu society: I’m back for a million more lives – how much fuss am I going to make about this one? Indian businesspeople might run a school or feed a few orphans, but they’re not interested in reform because they are bent on making the system work for them. Hinduism is very pliable. It rationalizes inequality: if that guy is poor it’s because he deserves it from his previous lives, and it’s not for me to sort out his accounts. Hinduism allows these guys to think that what they get is due to them, and they have absolutely no guilt about it.’

Frankly, and I realize that this is merely the opinion of an individual at a magazine that I otherwise respect, I was shocked that such reductive, essentialist nonsense made it past the editing sessions. This statement is so wrong that it isn’t even wrong, its just plain callous, and frankly lunatic.

A city of tens of millions of people, with a history and a heritage that goes back over a thousand of years and that contains within it an incredibly diverse, varied, complex community of people of all walks of life, beliefs, class, ethnicities, cultures, values, ideas, fears, doubts and dreams can never be called ‘a Hindu society’ alone. This is such a vast idiocy that it can’t even be laughed it. Delhi is one of the world’s great cities and what makes it so is that it is a cradle of the world’s heritage and civilizations and that billions have passed through her, lived there, defined it and more will.

It is a world city. Complete with the full complexity and vastness of what that term means.

The so-called Hindu businessmen with their indifference to reform are pretty much like tens of millions of other businessmen and capitalists around the world. Their being Hindu explains nothing about their exclusivity, pursuit of wealth and bombast, their greed or their general indifference. They are just businessmen, much like all the others (Muslims, Sikh, non-believers, gay, straight, black, white and other) that live and work and play and show-off in Delhi. Business is about profits regardless of who conducts it. There are strands of Hinduism (I use this term broadly) that call for asceticism and abstinence from desire. So by what definition is the tern Hinduism being used here by this editor? And what does anyone being Hindu really tell us about their indifference and/or greed? Nothing I say!

An elite, a capitalist elite, weaned on the belief that success is to the strong and clever is indifferent to the under privileged and exploited in all societies across the globe. I am sure that Dasgupta has been to the USA, or China or even to Pakistan. It has nothing to do with Hinduism. The Delhi elite are in fact too much like those in other nations and cannot be understood through the prism of religion. To attempt to explain what are secular acts – power, wealth, snobbery, indifference by deferring to something as ill-defined as Hinduism is irresponsible to say the least, and dangerous at the worst. I say dangerous because it encourages people to essentialize others, to reduce them to a mass and loose sight of them as individuals. It is the same issue I have by the repeated insistence of journalists, pundits, intellectuals and others to explain socio-political issues in Muslim and Arab nations through the prism of Islam. This is a distorting and randomizing prism that allows us to say anything about any situation based purely on imagined ideas of how people transform philosophies (which is what religions are) into worldly actions. It is near impossible to imagine that everyone does it the same way!

Full disclosure: I remain a big admirer of the Tehelka editor who actually made this inane comment and encourage people to read Tehelka magainze – a real example of courage in journalism.

I repeat a comment made by Robert Musil in his masterwork A Man Without Qualities that I am reading now as I wrote in an earlier blog piece called In Bed With Robert Musil Part I

…it is always wrong to explain what happens in a country by the character of its inhabitants. For the inhabitant of a country has at least nine characters; a professional, a national, a civic, a class, a geographic, a sexual, a conscious, an unconscious, and possibly even a private character to boot. (page 30)

The point being not that there are nine or three or ten or twenty characters, but that individuals are more than just one things and that a religion is simply one piece that can be at times a major and other times a minor influence of their decisions, priorities, values and behaviors. To attempt to blame this on religion, and worse on a religion as varied, complex, and near-impossible-to-define, as Hinduisum is even more egregious.

What is happening in Delhi though disappointing is in fact taking place in cities all across the globe and is not unique to India, or to Hindus. It cannot be understood, explained or blamed on something called Hinduism or the Hindu.

In Bed With Robert Musil: Part I

I am traveling with Robert Musil’s A Man Without Qualities.

I have a bad habit of writing in books I read. I will usually do it on the inside flap of the cover and never on the pages of the book itself. Readings will provoke thought, but more often, I will simply note down a page where I found a sentence or an idea particularly interesting.

What I love about Vintage International’s edition of Musil’s book is that it comes with a number of blank pages towards the end. This is not the only excellent thing about the version; the bindings are superb and allow the reader to bend and fold the book comfortably into his hands without cracking the spine. And its porportions are an excellent example of the size a book should actually be – easy to hold, carry, bend, store and pack.

Any by the way, one copy of A Man Without Qualities read with focus and reflection far outweighs the value of a thousand random and insipid books on a Kindle (who came up with that retarded name?) or any other electronic book readers. Do you really want to carry yet another recharger? Call me backward, old fashioned or just 43-years of age, but I can’t see how a reading medium that reduces your gazpacho soup recipe to the same form and flow as your The Adventures of Amir Hamza can really work for anything other than simple, easy, low-concentration fare.

Call me sceptical, but never thickheaded, I remain open to the idea that it may be more convenient to carry your entire library with you wherever you go, but is it really what reading is all about? And why is it that I can read 100 pages from the printed edition of A Man Without Qualities without tiring, while I can barely make it through a digital, multi-page online article on Salon or The New York Times Magazine?

I ponder.

So, back to Musil. I am traveling in India with him by my side, and I am taking you along for the ride. Over the course of the next few weeks, some snippets of insights that perhaps will also encourage others to read this wonderful European novel.

Patriotism remains a disease despite all attempts at modernity and greater moral civility. This passage could just as well have been written about Pakistan, India and a number of other nations determined to ‘celebrate’ their purity and superiority through banal and insipid and definitely artificial symbols and rituals:

Patriotism in Austria was quite a special subject. German children simply learned to despire the wars sacred to Austrian children, and were taught to believe that French children, whore forebears were all decadent lechers, would turn tail by the thousands at the approach of a German soldier with a big beard. Exactly the same ideas, with roles reversed and other desireable adjustments, were taught to French, English, and Russian children, who also had often been on the winning side…But in Austria, the situation was slightly more complicated. For although the Austrians had of course also won all the wars in their history, after most of them they had had to give something up.  (page 13)

The following passage should be read by most in America’s conservative and lunatic fringe right wing, including the making-too-many-apperences-on-TV and clearly determined to outline his warmongering credentials, the hideous John Bolton, former Permanent US Representative to the UN during the repugnant George W. Bush Administration:

Uninitiated observers have mistaken this for charm, or even, for a weakness of what they thought to be the Austrian character. But they were wrong; it is always wrong to explain what happens in a country by the character of its inhabitants. For the inhabitant of a country has at least nine characters; a professional, a national, a civic, a class, a geographic, a sexual, a conscious, an unconscious, and possibly even a private character to boot. (page 30)

And a wonderfully funny moment when Ulrich considers the consequences of his choice of a career in the field of mathmatics:

We have gained reality and lost dream. No more lounging under a tree and peering at the sky between one’s big and second toe; there’s work to be done. To be efficient, one cannot be hungry and dreamy but must eat steak and keep moving. It is exactly as though the old, inefficient breed of humanity had fallen asleep on an anthill and found, when the new breed awoke, that the ants had crept into its bloodstream, making it more frantically ever since, unable to share off that rotten feeling of antlike industry…The inner drought, the dreadful blend of acuity in matters of detail and indifference towards the whole, man’s monstrous abandonment in a desert of details, his restlessness, malice, unsurpassed callousness, money-grubbing, coldness, and violence, all so characteristic of our times, are by these accounts solely the consequence of damage done to the soul by keen logical thinking! (page 36)

I loved this statement that had me thinking since I read it:

Then Clarisse and Ulrich took a walk through the slanting arrows of the evening sun, without Walter; he remained behind at the piano. Clarisse said:

“The ability to fend off harm is the test of vitality. The spent is drawn to its own destruction. What do you think? Nietzsche maintains it’s a sign of weakness for an artist to be overly concerned about the morality of his art.” She had sat down on a little hummock. Ulrich shrugged.

More in the coming days on this wonderful work, but I highly recommend it!

India Diary: August 6th 2009 The Aftermath/Tufts University Photography Workshop Sessions

I am back in India to teach a workshop and to continue my work on The Idea of India project.

I, along with The Aftermath Project founder and photographer Sara Terry, am teaching a two week workshop in Ajmer, India to students from Tuft University’s Institute for Global Leadership.

Thanks to a wonderfully imaginative collaboration between the grant program and the school, we will be spending an intense two weeks with nine students exploring stories that speak to issues of cultural and religious pluralism, and social and civil conflict aftermath.

Though the actual workshop will run from August 1oth till August 22nd, the students have already been working on their stories for at least a month now. They started to develop story ideas about four weeks ago and both Sara and I have been working with them to review, revise and approve the ideas. Some of the students have made contacts on the ground and carried out extensive background research on the subjects they are covering and the institutions and individuals they will be working with. Suffice it to say, it has been an intense learning process and we are not even starting until next Monday!

These workshops concentrate on the challenges of researching, structuring, executing and producing narrative documentary stories. They are less about the aesthetics of photography or the mechanics of producing it. Though of course some relevant details will be address. The focus does reflect the priority that both Sara and I place on the need to explore social, economic and political issues from the perspective of individuals and the worlds they occupy. Sara and I have had the privilege of helping students identity stories that relate to issues of cultural and religious pluralism, and stories about those dealing with the aftermath of economic, political, sectarian and other conflicts. We are pushing students to engage with the complex, to shy away from cliche’s about India and about her culture, and to prepare to explore and discover the autonomy and determination of even the most dispossessed and marginalized of her citizens. We are pushing them to see and document real people, in a real country, without prejudice and preconceived simplicities. It will not be an easy two weeks for the students, and for the teachers, that is for sure.

If possible I will try to blog about the progress of the workshop. Perhaps some of you are interested in following the work and sessions and to stay engaged with what we are struggling with and discussing. A lot depends on my internet access and of course time, but I will do my best to update the India Diary in a consistently.

The Palestinian Wedding Or More Studies In Farce & Fanaticism

A Wedding At Masara, West Bank Photo By: Oren Ziv/ Activestills.org

This post today celebrates a Palestinian wedding thanks to the photography of Israeli activists at Activestills and Haggai Matar who was in fact beaten by Israeli soldiers while participating in this event, as he explains here in this piece called Assault-A Personal Story

And a different union of sorts, where yet another Palestinian family, living in Israeli-occuppied East Jerusalem is united with the long, painful and tragic history of the rest of the Palestinian people.

Update: By the way, this is not some random event; the transformation, or ‘Judaization’ of East Jerusalem is a project financed by many in the USA, including Irving Moskowitz about whose direct involvement in the hideous, and yes, racist, project is well explained in a recent Guardian piece called Irving Moskowitz’s Bingo Madness by the wonderfully clear headed Richard Silverstein who also rights a fabulous blog about all things Israeli and its associated illigal occupation driven pathologies, obfuscations, lies, and brutalities called Tikun Olam – which means  ‘healing the world’ in Hebrew.

There is an odd silence amongst the world’s finest photojournalists when it comes to the West Bank and Gaza. Few if any of the self-proclaimed best-in-the-business are anywhere near the determination, courage, dignity and civility of the Palestinian struggle to overcome the Israeli occupation juggernaut. Quick to rush to cover ’spotlight’ events – those making it to the front pages of the daily press and the prime-time TV news broadcast, their cameras are silent about situations that actually require the strength of their voices and the power of their images. Citizen documentation of the situation in the West Bank and Gaza in fact towers over anything that is being produced, or has been produced, by the professionals.

There is a growing and extensive archive of photographic and video documentation of the brutality, inhumanity, and infantile banality of the Israeli occupation and the horrors and humiliations inflicted on an unarmed and defenseless civilian population of the West Bank and Gaza. And its all being shot by amateurs! And when you compare it to the simplistic works being produced by the professionals, you get a sense that the professionals are simply afraid to confront the realities – with all its humiliations and brutalities, of the occupation itself!

But I digress.

Lets celebrate today, a Palestinian wedding!

Fear The Pushtun Bogeyman Or Scaring Children As An Imperialist Habit

Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan.

He is the author of Engaging the Muslim World. He has a regular column at Salon.com. and writes the Informed Comment blog.

He has now written what I think is the first piece that connects modern day American imperialist paranoia in Afghanistan to 19th century British imperialist paranoia in Afghanistan. In a piece called Armageddon On Top Of The World: Not! he reminds us that:

What most observers don’t realize is that the doomsday rhetoric about this region at the top of the world is hardly new. It’s at least 100 years old. During their campaigns in the northwest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, British officers, journalists and editorialists sounded much like American strategists, analysts, and pundits of the present moment. They construed the Pashtun tribesmen who inhabited Waziristan as the new Normans, a dire menace to London that threatened to overturn the British Empire.

He goes on to remind us that:

In fact, few intelligence predictions could have less chance of coming true. In the 2008 parliamentary election, the Pakistani public voted in centrist parties, some of them secular, virtually ignoring the Muslim fundamentalist parties. Today in Pakistan, there are about 24 million Pashtuns, a linguistic ethnic group that speaks Pashto. Another 13 million live across the British-drawn “Durand Line,” the border — mostly unacknowledged by Pashtuns — between Pakistan and southern Afghanistan. Most Taliban derive from this group, but the vast majority of Pashtuns are not Taliban and do not much care for the Muslim radicals.

Lets repeat that statement once again: Most Pushtuns are not ‘Taliban’ nor ‘Islamic Radicals’. That there are fringe lunatics with guns and an overbloated rhetoric of armegeddon that is given undue and unjustified attention by scabarous and weak minded journalists and photographers is a crucial issue we prefer not to discuss.

It would be the equivalent of an Al Jazeera reporter insisting on covering the USA only from the eyes and from the hot-air rhetoric of militia groups in montana and nebraska, or the lunatic-fringe christian evangelical congregations in Florida!

The fact remains that bandying about the bogeyman makes for easy journalism, easy photography and easy sales. Fear sells. We know this well. The unfortunately an entire people, the Pushtuns, have been demonized, humiliatated, murdered, displaced and criminalized.

Mir Abbas Khan returns to his home destroyed by Pakistani Army bulldozers and helicopter gunfire. Near Kalooshah, South Waziristan

In 2004 I was in Waziristan, and spent a month there with the tribes that were being lassoed into Pakistan’s desperate attempts to appease the American war-gods. The story eventually appeared in print in Mother Jones magazine. Titled Frontier Justice its most prescient part was the conclusion that writer Malcolm Garcia wrote – based on an interview I had done inside Waziristan:

Consider … Mir Abbas Khan, in the photo on the opposite page. Look at his eyes, his ruined home, and back to his eyes—full of fear and hurt, but mostly rage.

Indeed, consider Mir Abbas Khan’s face and his eyes….and his rage. An innocent Waziri, Ahmedzai tribesman whose entire life was torn to shreds because he happened to be in the path of American and Pakistan military power games. This is in 2004 and Malcom and I argued back then – an argument that got me in trouble with Homeland Security the one time they picked me up at Miami Airport for a 3 hour intense questioning, that it is inhuman, immoral, illegal and a clear violation of their human rights and rights to justice to kill them with impunity and from thousands of feet in the air.

The Pushtuns are not ‘a tribe’, or ‘a mass’, they are individuals and these individuals, their lives, their families are what we are crushing and killing in the blood-laden fields of South Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan. We have made animals out of them, reducing them to mere objects that we kills, see in the distance and attempt to blow away. Our embedded photographers continue this trend, showing the Pushtuns as alien to us, distant from our humanity, their passions, emotions, sufferings, and humiliations unknown and unfelt by us.

“Asim”, his eyes looked at me pleading, ‘”is it not possible for you to imagine that we too can act only because we are human?”, I was with Waziri madrassa students in Peshawar in 2008, as they were trying to explain to me how life for them and their families had become a living hell since 2003 as the Afghan conflict began to spill over.”Sometimes we too, knowing that it is against our laws, our beliefs and our Koran, act because we are just human beings!”. His face tightened as if about to implode “I want to kill because I may have seen my brothers body parts torn all over a room – I want to kill not because I am a fanatic, but becuase I am a brother” He looked at ‘Is that no possible for us?” I had no answer for him. We sat there in the silence, a dark madrassa dorm room, about 20 other students sitting around me, and just thought about what we had just heard.

We are precipitating a genocidal campaign against an entire people because we can’t be bothered to see them as human beings.

This war, which perhaps we once tolerated and remained quiet about, has lost its mooring, and we have lost our moral compass.  It, like Iraq, is a dishonorable war, that is being fought dishonorably and will bring nothing but dishonor to those who plan it and fight it.

Open See – Another Jim Goldberg Scream

Open See: Jim Goldberg

I love Jim Goldberg’s work. His new book is fabulous and best of all, complicated. Jim continues to employ his seemingly random photographic methods using all sorts of different formats, borrowed images and even scratching and writing on the photographs themselves.

Open See:Jim Goldberg

I have noticed a lot more photographers doing this – I even remember one well known photographer working on his prints on the terrace of the Hotel Pams during Visa Pour L’image, painting away on the prints with blood mixed in water. There, on the terrace, in full view of a curious public, it appeared an artifice. But I digress.

Jim’s work is informed by a far stronger, determined and clear vision. He is again a photographer whose technique and method I may not want to emulate, but I respect and admire them for what they produce. He remains one of those rare photographers where the whole is far more than the sum of the parts. You can see samples of the book’s images on the Magnum website, but it is obvious that it is the book that you want to possess and not merely glance at the images.

Many may not, some may not remember, but one of the pioneers of the ‘touched’ photograph was a the American photographer by the name of Peter Beard. Beard did a lot of commercial work, even a cheesy calender shoot for Pirelli tyres, but he always did it in his own way. Less his commercial efforts, I found his more personal works far more compelling and exciting, particularly because of the incredibly complex, free wheeling and intriguing scribbles and sketches that covered the images.

Peter Beard: Hippo And The Hand 1955/2006

I believe I read an interview with him where he argued that the image is incomplete until and unless the photographer has worked on it. This comment reflects an old fashioned idea of the need for the human touch and frailty on what is otherwise a purely mechanical product. Perhaps Beard did not value this instinctive, creative side enough and felt the need to push the works even further. Or that the spectrum of his creativity extended itself beyond the framing of the image and to the final image which appeared in his mind as he captured the negatives. It is however a process that produces unique objects, much like Jim Goldberg’s work which appears to continue this very practice of the ‘worked on’ image.

Yes, Your Taste In Music Sucks Or What MTV Erases!

That can either be me talking about you, or your judgment of what I listen to these days. So enjoy it regardless!

The Carolina Chocolate Drops are an old style, talented, string band carrying on the tradition of some of the greatest string musicians from North and South Carolina. Tell me that Rhiannon Giddens voice isn’t simply hair raising!

The next videos is from the brilliant documenta/film called Searching For The Wrong-Eyed Jesus – A tour of the American south through its music and its people.

I loved this film so much that I have been listening to the likes of Jim White, Wovenhand, Johnny Dowd, Mellisa Swingle, and The Handsome Family ever since!

This scene from the film, an interview with Lee Sexton, should be a photograph! I remember watching it the first time and thinking that I would love to have been there to shoot the moment – that perfect artificial light, the beautiful window beam, that perfect and magnificent presence of age and experience embodied in this man. The scene only gets better in the second session when a younger man joins him in the interview – this is a beautiful photographic moment! This is an American light!

David Eugene Edwards – the lead singer of what was once 16 Horsepower and now, more recently Wovenhand was also introduced to me by this film. This is Christian music but seriously spiritual music. Not the cheesy, mass produced, muzak you find in religious bookstores. This is the sound of the belief of the South and in it one begins to see and understand a certain side of America that we often ignore what with our obsession with things New York, LA or Chicago!

Then there was the beautiful Melissa Swingle who appeared in a short clip on the film and stole my heart! Well, my musical heart with the striking, jagged, interupted voice that had so much vulnerability in it that one could not help but be smitten. She lead for the band Trailer Bride, which has disbanded and now she is with a band called The Moaners – hard,, southern rock that I am not such a big fan of. But Melissa remains a wonderful talent – see her song on the film itself!

Moving on: Adem – brilliant, individual singer, you have to listen to. His new album ‘Takes’ is a must:

or

There will be more in the near future!

And What Did You Hear, My Blue Eyed Son

No words. Just music. Thanks to DuckRabbit for reminding me as well of one of my favorite Dylan songs.

Where did this music go? Where did these words go? Where did this voice go? Doesn’t our generation deserve this as well?

I wonder.

Joseph Rodriguez & The Documentary Eye

Joseph Rodriguez may be one of the last great classical documentary photographers working in America today. I can think of only a few others who represent a similar passion and commitment to telling the human stories. Brenda Ann Kenneally and Eugene Richards come to mind. I was fortunate enough to have Joseph as a mentor in my early years. I could still use him, but I know he has neither the time or the energy to mentor a photographer living thousands of miles away!

Joseph was featured in a rather interesting little book called Witness In Our Time: Working Lives of Documentary Photographers, that also included personal and in-depth interview with the likes of Mary Ellen Mark, Sebastiao Salgado, Eugene Richards, Susan Meiseles, Graciela Iturbide, Dayanita Singh, Fazal Sheikh, and Antonin Kratochvil – a who’s who of great documentary photographers.

Here is a new piece that he has been working on. It is part of a series of stories Joseph is producing on the American prison system.

Notice that Joseph shoots human beings, not art objects or light or geometry or such. Human beings. His eye is drawn to gestures, movements, expressions and emotions. Its classic and its personal.

Asim

India As Fiction

I don’t have an exhaustive list – Indian literature is just too extensive and too diverse. I also have not read her writers in anything other than English and Urdu. That may still not represent a significant portion of India’s literary output. But India loves her books – anyone going to Kerala or walking into cafes in Calcutta will know what I mean. In fact, there was a Le Monde Diplomatique essay about the Kerala publishing industry and the love of books there called Kerala: Mad About Books.

Sixth on the list of seven objectives of Kerala’s communist-led state government’s literacy mission is “provision of facilities for library and reading rooms for creating an environment conducive for literacy efforts and a learning society”.

The grassroots level activism that brought about the literacy movement continues in the form of publishers like KSSP (Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad), which was formed in 1962 to publish scientific literature in Malayalam. Today KSSP continues its practice of door-to-door sales and Kala Jathas (literacy rallies). According to KK Krishna Kumar, its former president, KSSP publishes around 60-100 titles and sells books worth Rs 10-15m ($200,000-$300,000) every year.

Anyways, there have been rather ‘famous’ names winning awards recently some of whom are actually worth reading. Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss comes to mind. Adiga’s White Tiger does not!

Of course, the late, great Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Shame, and the very popular (though less read) Satanic Verses. I believe that Rushdie has died as a writer since his move to the USA (no necessary connection), but the three works mentioned here remain masterpieces. Certainly Midnight’s Children can be accused of overwhelming the modern Indian novel with its innovation and audacity. Regardless, it remains a pivotal pieces of work.

Amit Chaudari is a beautiful, intelligent and sensitive writer. His Freedom Song and the more recent The Immortals are worth the effort.

Amitav Ghosh, whose In An Antique Land, is one of the most beautiful books I have read in a long, long time. It has (we are all adults here), truly one of the most evocative and sensual descriptions of a dance  – I had ever read! Ghosh’s prose is precise, concise and visual, an eye that concentrates on the essentials of the action, something that all photographers can learn from. Here is how he describes the scene, on a hot evening, in the remoteness of a village in remote Egypt:

It was long past sunset now, and the faces around the bridal couple were glowing in the light of a single kerosene lamp. The drum-beat on the wash-basin was a measured, gentle one and when I pushed my way into the center of the crowd I saw that the dancer was a young girl, dressed in a simple, printed cotton dress, with a long scarf tied around the waist. Both her hands were on her hips, and she was dancing with her eyes fixed on the ground in front of her, moving her hips with a slow, languid grace, backwards and forwards while the rest of her body stayed still, almost immobile, except for the quick, circular motion of her feet. Then gradually, almost imperceptibly, the tempo of the beat quickened, and somebody called out the first line of a chant, khadnaha min wasat al-dar, ‘we took her from her father’s house’, and the crowd shouted back, wa abuha ga’id za’alan, ‘while her father sat there bereft’. Then the single voice again, khadnaha bi al-saif al-madi,‘we took her with a sharpened sword’, followed by a massed refrain, wa abuha makansh radi, ‘because her father wouldn’t consent.’

The crowd pressed closer with the quickening of the beat, and as the voices and the clapping grew louder, the girl, in response, raised and arm and flexed it above her head in a graceful arc. Her body was turning now, rotating slowly in the same place, her hips moving faster while the crowd around her clapped and stamped, roaring their approval at the tops of their voices. Gradually, the beat grew quicker, blurring into a tattoo of drumbeats, and in response her torso froze into a stillness, while her hips and waist moved even faster, in exact counterpoint, in a pattern of movement that became a perfect abstraction of eroticism, a figurative geometry of lovemaking, pounding back and forth at a dizzying speed until at last the final beat rang out and she escaped into the crowd, laughing.

Amitav Ghosh, from In An Antique Land

Qurratullain Haider penned in Urdu quite possibly the great Indian novel, River of Fire, and later did her own translation of it into English. A classic, and a must read indeed. It is vast in its scope and truly amongst the regions great books.

Upamanyu Chatterjee wrote what I think is also a great Indian novel, English, August – about a young Indian man forced by circumstance to take up a job in a middle-of-nowhere town with the Indian Civil Service, and longing to do nothing more than smoke pot and sleep! It is perhaps one of the finest studies of the divide between those who are called to serve as civil servants, and the communities they are expected to administer. And it is laugh-out-loud hilarious to boot!

Mulk Raj Anand has written a wonderful book called Untouchable.

Or Mukel Kesevan’s interesting attempt at a partition era book called Looking Through Glass.

I think someone mentioned Rohinten Mistry earlier (recently famous for being stopped repeatedly at airports by our fine, intelligent  Homeland Security officers while he was on a USA book tour. He cancelled it and returned home!) and his A Fine Balance is a heartbreaking but beautiful read.

Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things has to be mentioned if only because I am a huge fan.

Pankaj Mishra’s brilliant and poignant The Romantics is perhaps one of the most insightful books about how an Indian student living int he city of Vatanasi (Benares), an albeit intelligent, educated and liberal Indian, views the tens of thousands of foreigners who mill about India ‘discovering’ themselves or exploring ’spirituality’.

And the list of some other fascinating writers would include: Gita Mehta, R.K.Narayan, Ardashir Vakil, Bapsi Sidhwa, Ved Mehta – just getting started!

By the way, William Dalrymple’s recent works on India, though largely non-fiction (The White Mughals, The Last Mughal) are in fact fascinating historical studies written with the flair of a fiction writer. His earlier works on India including City of Djins are also fabulously fun to read. But certainly, The White Mughals remains one of my favorites because it explores the deeply heterodox social, political and cultural life of the Indians and the British before the rapid turn around of affairs with the arrival of the Evangelical Christian orientated, and far more racist (a connection between the two propensities I am not so sure about!) colonial administration post-1857.

Basically, Indian writers are ‘hot’ and in fact, so are Pakistani writers. South Asian fiction, that being written in English, is very popular with new talent emerging every month it seems. Tyrewala, Gasgupta, Mohamad Hanif, Mohsin Hamid, Daniel Moinuddin and many others.

Phew lots to read!!

Asim

Disasters – The Journal of Disaster Studies, Policy And Management

I was sent a link to a fascinating magazine that concentrates on aftermath and reconstruction issues in the wake of conflict, disasters and other such events. I thought I would share it with you:

Disasters – The Journal of Disaster Studies, Policy And Management

there are some interesting articles, each of course, providing rich material for ‘aftermath’ works for documentarians and photographers. i don’t know the magazine too well and am looking through it now. but it addresses a lot of critical issues that would be fascinating to examine. there is a large number of essays on post-tsunami issues, many of them touch on what would make excellent documentary work. ironically, most of these issues are missing from media coverage. but of course!

asim

Anthony Suau: Quiet, Serious, Profilic, Focused

I don’t Anthony, but I do remember him for a little book he produced as we were preparing to wage war on Iraq. I don’t think a lot of people bothered with it, what with the hysteria and patriotic jingoism of the period. But Anthony went ahead and produced this little book called Fear This. I recommend you look it up. I don’t know how well it sold, but I suspect that given the atmosphere of the period, probably not a whole lot (I hope I am wrong). But what it did represent was an individual photographer’s response to the times. Here was a major, mainstream magazine photographer who held on to his individual sense of right and wrong, and very cleverly, in a quiet, civilized way, choose to say something about it.

Anthony Suau also won a World Press Photo award this year. Here is a short video of him. I also post this to show you what working with as little equipment as possible can be a powerful way to allow your individuality and voice to come forward. You are forced to rely on your skills, mental and physical, to compensate and adjust to overcome what first appear to be limitations.

I will post a few other videos in the coming hours/days. They will repeat the same mantra; simple equipment, sophisticated eyes, and a mind that is seriously seeing.

Asim

What To Bring…Some Thoughts

I had wanted to put together a well thought out, rigorously professional list of things to bring to India. I have been trying to do just that for a couple of days now. But each time I do the list just seems completely artificial and pointless. We are all different, and have different preferences. We all know what we have to have with us to make our photographs, and to be comfortable while working and resting. Clothes, toiletries, something fun to read, a couple of notebooks and a pen (preferably a fountain pen – more on that later!), a good pair of slippers. What else does a photographer need? Josef Koudelka famously said that 2 shirts and 2 pants are more than necessary and then its just a matter of going. Perhaps a bit ascetic, but he sets the bar for the minimum required.

I in fact do usually travel with just 2 pants and perhaps 3 shirts! I don’t know why, but I have a serious aversion to baggage. Even for a 6 week India trip I will not have enough to require checking my bags at the airport counter. Perhaps it is some need to feel that I can just pick up and leave a place any time I want, to roam without concern about my belongings and to be able to walk without exhaustion to any destination once I have disembarked from a bus or train. It is also the reason why I rarely carry heavy camera equipment, or even a laptop! A couple of camera bodies, a couple of lens, perhaps 40 rolls of film and i am off!

August is a beautiful month in Ajmer – it rains. This is no ordinary rain. This is India’s summer rain, considered a gift of the heavens. It cleanses the city, energizes the people, compels children to laugh all day and play carelessly in pools of waters. I remember this rain from my childhood. Karachi would seath in June and July, and August would bring relief in the form of downpours that millions anxiously waited for. The city would be bought to a standstill – water would collect everywhere, roads would back up, electricity would fail sometimes for hours, offices would be closed, schools too (yes!), and every one would be left to do nothing but….play! It was the greatest time of the year and the only one I remember when my mother would become a girl and rush out into the rains to run and laugh!

Fear not; its not monsoon that destroys our ability to be out and make pictures.

August is rain in Ajmer. Just remember that. It is a unique time for the city which is otherwise hot, dry and near impossible to work in because the heat just cuts through your skin and squeezes your lungs!

Ajmer is also where you can find anything you will need as far as daily needs are concerned; clothes – the light kurta is a near perfect piece of clothing for hot weather and very cheap. it is light and simple and found everywhere. It is also appropriate in that it will automatically erase any concerns about appropriate attire and so on. If you are passing through Delhi you can find fabulous ones at Fab India and other such places. I pick a few up each time I arrive and then just wear them out during my travels. Basically what I am saying is that you need not drag a lot of heavy stuff for fear of not being able to find things in India. Yes, of course, that silk full length, off-shoulder/Armani tuxedo may need to be packed if you feel you must!

Some people bring a lot of exercise equipment. This is tricky as jogging on the streets of India is not recommended – the pollution alone can kill you, if the traffic will not! I do yoga in my room – its easier, requires no extra equipment and ensures that I do not have to fear an unknown neighborhood. I am sure that there are gyms somewhere in the vicinity, but I seriously doubt if you will have time for, or that we will allow you time for, body toning and aerobics. Just so you know. Photographers are also very proud of their beer bellies and lack of stamina. Marks of honor!

I would also suggest that you keep your camera equipment to the bare essential. If you must know I only work with 2 lens – both fixed focal length. A 50mm and a 35mm. That is it. I find that people carrying a lot of different lenses are attempting to hedge against ‘unexpected’ circumstances and hoping that some lens combination will be available to capture every situation. The fact of the matter is that you can never get all the pictures you want. You will never be able to capture it all in all its infinite variety and variations. The best strategy is to select the equipment that best allows you to get most of your images. And since we will be working on close documentary work, you are best off bringing your simplest lenses, and putting aside long zooms and so on. But of course I am simply suggesting this because different people have different ‘equipment comfort’ levels. Certainly less is more in my book Besides, lugging around large camera bags to your subjects and sites is a bit of a pain. Not only does it draw a lot of unnecessary attention, but it can be an impediment to your ability to get others to relax around you.

The European AC Plug

Electricity can be tricky and particularly in the rainy season it can be fickle. Do bring a small torch to find your way to and from the toilet. I have a silly little one in my mobile phone and it works just fine. We are not out in the tundra here – just something that can help you navigate without breaking any bones.

Wall plugs are mostly European compatible, so all your Americans will need adaptors please. Best that you come with these, though I am sure they can also be found in Delhi or Ajmer. India uses a 2-pin plug though I have seen some very strange variations on this as well. My European plugs work fine though I know that the Indian plug is just a slight variation on this model.  The India variety has 3 round pins – the lower 2 actually fit the European plug. There are plenty of light weight adaptors available – Belkin has a nice and easy one that I have found to always work in India though I am not sure the one I have is still being produced. Note, most all digital cameras and laptops have dual-voltage capability so you needn’t worry about this. Power surges can be an issue, but I recommend that we by a surge protection power strip once we are in India for those of you worried about such matters.

Extra batteries for your camera are always a good idea. You may be working away from the hotel and it would be better that you have a backup.

Bring a toothbrush please. Thank you.

Bring light, cool, cotton clothing. I know people love those fancy nylon hiking pants with more zips than a space suit. Ok, I guess you can bring these if you want. Light shoes. Scarves may not be too fashionable. The girls should bring something to cover their heads – yes, a scarf because it is decent and respectable to do so when entering mosques, shrines, and temples. And perhaps even when meeting elders – it is a sign of humility and courtesy to cover your head. Not a must, just a thought.

Lip balm. Mosquito repellent. Imodium (yes, come on, be prepared!). Deodarant. All are necessary. All can be bought in India.

No fanny packs please! Ok, that is just a pet peeve that has no real logical reason. Lets just say its a question of taste!

For a more serious, well thought through, point by point list talk to Sam. I saw that he has one hell of a packing list on his blog from Uganda I am sure he will remind me of the 20 most important things I completely forgot!

I will update this one as other thoughts come up. But the general rule is; keep it simple and don’t over do the whole thing. If you forget something you can always find it in Ajmer.

Oh, yes, fountain pens. Do you realize that ball point pens place incredible pressure on your wrists and arms? It is one of the reasons why people do not write with them for any length of time. A fountain pen however flies over paper, and is a joy to write with. You can buy these very cool, cheap, disposable (if you must!) fountain pens in India. I love writing with them and find that I actually write a lot just to feel the pleasure of the pen moving over paper. I hope to get a quality one this time around. So chuck that Bic and pick up a fountain pen, take your notes in your fashionably cool Moleskins (yes, we do need some style) and feel the joy of writing again!

(Coming up in the next post; why the LP will reconquer audio playback again, crushing this fad called the CD!)

Asim

Proven: The Apollo 11 Moon Walk Was A Hoax!

If there was ever any doubt, this video erases them!

To be uploaded soon; video of my lunch date with Sasqautch which was rudely interrupted by an alien abduction attempt!

Wrapping Photographers Into The Packaging of War

They took the New York Times on a war tour. The Battle For Pakistan it was called when the magazine finally published the photographs their boys had so carefully constructed and bought back. They had all the elements that would suggest valor, fear, desperate battles, the struggle of ‘a state’ against an unseen but clearly fearsome enemy. Though to my eye it appeared to be a lot of pictures of Pakistani soldiers ‘posing’ – the kinds of pictures I know these soldiers often pose for whenever I have had to photograph them. They know the routine – it is a veritable war zone cat walk, Pakistan’s Next Top Soldier! There are ‘buckets’ of IEDs, emptied villages, men behind bars wearing their self incriminating, evidence acceptable in our modern courts of war, skull caps and beards. The Battle For Pakistan, a nation of 170 million, with a cultural and ethnic diversity that baffles most, was apparently being fought against a few hundred men with outdated guns and plastic buckets IEDs!

They also took CNN on one, all expenses paid, luxury jaunt around the Swat ‘war zone’. Their reporter, breathless and in awe of his actually being inside this valley. Pakistan military confronts Taliban in key Swat city is a breathless regurgitation of the voice of the Army, the reporter not even attempting to ask any hard questions. Dressed in the requisite ‘toy soldier’ garb of multi-pocket pants and manly watch, it appears that he is attempting more to celebrate his presence in a ‘hard’ zone than actually doing any reporting. The soldiers languish in the background, looking bored and at ease. Some questioned are raised – but none that would break the ’spell’ of this great war. Kills are celebrated by some army spokesperson who i am sure off camera is caring father, husband, lover or son.Everything that the dead lying around the valley of Swat are not. A collection of random weapons – most look like they were from the early 20th century are laid out on tables, and some men – less than 5 are paraded in front of the journalists. Who are these men? What is their story? What are their crimes? What are their rights? We do not ask – they are ‘Taliban’ says someone and that is enough. The war looks like it is going well.

What should have been no more than a police action 2 years ago, is now being sold as Pakistan’s great war to protect America! A see-how-we-love you performance piece funded by American dollars and fueled by Pakistani greed.

What has happened in Swat remains largely unknown. The media has been blocked from entering. Refugees streaming out of the region – expelled in fact because they were ordered to leave or feared random slaughter from the Army, speak about there being no war in the valley, and the killing of innocents who are then paraded as ‘Taliban’ fighters.

We will also not know what has happened in Swat because few if any of the foreign journalists working on covering the region have any idea or interest in the social, economic, and political history of the area. These people have no stories. Pakistan is largely covered by journalists who are ill equipped to report on it. They do not speak any of its languages, they have little or no knowledge of its history, they do not understand its ethnic groups, their histories, or even the fundamental political history of the nation since its creation, and definitely not prior to its separation from India. They know little or nothing, other than what they need to know looking down through the telescope of the ‘war against terror’.

Slugging around a few cliches’ mostly picked up in elite living rooms in Islamabad, they venture out in righteous conviction that this is a war against the ‘Taliban’ – a word that today incorporates pretty much any entity we wish to place inside it and hence has no meaning at all! And yet, we are at war against this abstraction, quite like our war against ‘terror’ and that other one against ‘drugs’. In theaters soon – the war against ‘angst’!

The people of Swat, much like the people of Waziristan, or Mohmand, or Bajaur, or Mardan or any other ‘conflict’have no history, no political-economy, no agency, no connections to the wider nation, no memory, no emotions, no love or longings, and no human capacity for creating culture, life, society and values. They are just dead bodies, ‘Taliban’, refugees, that scuttle around as we need them.

I suppose some of them are being ‘professional’ i.e. ‘do your job and shut up!’. It means never asking the editors any questions, returning to challenge assumptions, attempting to offer insights based on their experience, working to alter the ‘angles’ being created in towers in Manhattan. You give them the pictures they want, and the best of them are extremely good at it.

I have to believe however that these photographers are smarter than their works suggest. They have to be. I have to believe that they are just subsuming their intelligence to deliver to the demands of what today are clearly even more exalted jobs; paid positions or contract positions with major magazines whose budgets can only hold a few.

I am reminded of something that Paolo Pellegrin admitted to after his coverage of the evacuation of the settlers from Gaza. His statement revealed a large gap between the theatricality and emotions that were created in the images – a necessity to support the master narrative of that ‘pull out’. That is, the wrenching decision that Israel had to make and the incredible concessions she was prepared to offer, and the suffering she was prepared to inflict on her own citizens, for the sake of ‘peace’ with the Palestinians. The photographs repeatedly show determined, pious, righteous, resisting settlers as Israeli police ‘fight’ to evict them from their homes. The world watch with a mixture of pity and awe and the photographers delivered the images that captured these scenes. Many went on to win major photo awards that also showed the ‘innocent’ settlers even single handedly resisting the determination of the Israeli forces. A heroic strugle, a heroic people, a grand national sacrifice, a nation torn, a people wounded, families destroyed, lives interuppted, all for peace.

And yet, while narrating his work, Paolo offered this incredible insight on his Magnum In Motion piece about the Gaza evacuations called The Evacuation – you can hear his words by clicking on Image #18 that shows Israeli police dragging a settler onto a waiting bus:

This obviously actually happened, and these [the images] are documents of real moments. But you felt that it was also a theater. The event was at some level orchestrated and in some cases the arrangement that was made was that the settlers in a particular community or settlement decided that they could not walk away from the settlement on their own feet because that was not the way that they wanted to leave. So they decided [that] they were going to be dragged away. That it was a decision. And that was an element in this story, the fact that obviously this was happening, but at the same time it was also the result of two parts (parties?) coming together and each with their own agenda.

There is a gap, between the intelligence and awareness of the photographer, and the photographs he returns with to fulfil the story he has been asked to deliver. Even the Magnum In Motion piece maintains the emotional and pathos atmosphere of the piece, at no time allowing any suggestion that this entire event or certainly major portions of it was also political theater. The piece ends with the heroic and lament ridden music of the Israeli national anthem the Hatikva - a shockingly poor choice given that the settlers were being pulled out from occupied territories! The designers of the piece remain true to the story that is being packaged, the emotions that are being sold, the angle that is accepted, agreed to and acceptable to the world. And certainly not be coincidence, the angle that the Israeli government, its think tanks, lobbyists and pundits defined for us.

Photojournalism and photography too easily depoliticizes what it documents, elevating the visible act that is otherwise mired in various forces outside of the photograph, to being seen as ‘complete’ and ‘true’ in and of itself.

The photographer’s mind and body can sense that he is part of something more than just ‘real’ events, that he has become part of a performance, and within that performance, complete with its pathos and sorrow, he has to continue to work and shoot the ‘right’ angles, the right emotions, the right ‘feel’ so as to not ruin the whole thing for the rest of the audience – the editors, the readers in the papers the following morning. Besides Paolo, who obviously realized that he was playing a part in a script that someone else had written for him, there were hundreds of other photographers. The same hundreds by the way that are repeatedly prevented from access to Gaza, or Jenin or any number of other sites in the occupied territories.

When They take us somewhere, we should ask ourselves why!

Which is precisely what the embedded journalists now touring the ‘war’ zone with the Pakistani army ought to be doing. Why are they being taken? Where are they being taken? Why now and not before or after? A modicum of skepticism would be useful even when producing what are clearly ‘filler’ mutli-media pieces to feed the ravenous hunger of the 24-7, multi-channel needs of our the business of modern news.

Kamran Asdar Ali,  acting director of the South Asia Institute and associate professor of anthropology at the University of Texas-Austin, has written a valuable piece called Pakistan’s Troubled “Paradise on Earth” in the Middle East Research & Information Project (MERIP). He points out again that:

The Taliban have plainly appealed to smoldering anti-feudal resentments in the Swat valley in recruiting their cadre. A handful of families own the fruit orchards and cow pastures that are the main sources of livelihood in the valley, and their agreements with tenant farmers are often honored in the breach. Wages for rural labor are low. The large landlords (khans) are also likely to hold the concessions for the timber forests and the contracts to operate the gemstone mines that also employ the working class of Swat. “Paradise on earth” or not, the Swat valley has seen a large percentage of its able-bodied men out-migrate since the 1950s.

Until 1969, Swat was run as a princely state under an autocratic wali, in a continuation of the administrative structure set up under the British. Though he is remembered as benevolent and forward-looking in his social policies, the wali held a complete monopoly over taxation and the exploitation of natural and mineral resources. Revenue collection rights were given to elites and every household was taxed at a high rate to fill the state’s coffers. The princely state had its own laws and also the privilege of raising an army; indeed, the wali had a personal guard, a cavalry unit and heavy artillery. The Taliban’s desire for autonomy has a precedent.

When I met with Maulana Fazalullah in early 2008 he was considered a ‘dangerous’ man. While the army patrolled the highways and mountain tops attempting to control the so-called Taliban, I was able to walk in to Maulana Fazalullah’s compound at the Imam Dehri center and sit down with him for tea. We spent a couple of hours during which he insistently talked about the corruption and brutalization of the people of the valley of Swat. The men sitting around him echoed his stories with those of their own; the corruption and venality of the police, the exploitation of their forests and water ways, the destruction of their way of life and values at the hands of property speculators and hotel owners, the continued struggle to find a decent life under the boots of the feudasl who decided everything on a whim. Fazalullah never spoke about the Americans, Afghanistan, the ‘war against terror’ or such. He just spoke about Swat, about the areas near and around his village. As we sat there nearly 400 volunteers from villages all over the valley had come down to help construct his new madrassa. They had bought their own food and supplies and were working 24 hours a day to construct the center. And money as well. The army sat on the mountaintops and watched. I am sure they could see that dozens of armed men milling about the compound as well. But it was the highways that they wanted to patrol, the local people they wanted to harass, and the foreign photographers they wanted to take to their ‘posts’ and ‘command centers’.

It does not take a lot of intelligence to see that you are part of a game whose rules are being defined beyond the headlines and journalist pieces.

Ali Eteraz wrote a fascinating piece about the Islamization of Pakistan’s constitution under the direction of Zulfiwar Ali Bhutto. He describes in a piece called Pakistan Is Already An Islamic State, that foreign media’s penchant to see everything in Pakistan exclusively through the distorting prism of ‘the war against terror’:

…these views, rooted in the “war on terror” frame of thinking, diagnose Pakistan’s relationship with Islam incorrectly. The real issue in Pakistan is not that from time to time a group of militants, while demanding the implementation of sharia, begins attacking civilians. This, while deplorable and painful, is a consequence of Pakistan’s constitution. The essential problem in Pakistan is its flawed constitutional framework, which forces every citizen to refer to their idiosyncratic and personal views on life through the lens of “Islam.” Such a state of affairs has the effect of concealing every political, material and economic demand behind theological verbiage, and that situation ultimately favors religious hard-liners and militants who are willing to use violence.

Further pointing out that:

Most people in the world, including some Pakistanis, live under the illusion that the country is secular and just happens to have been overrun by extremists. This is false. Pakistan became an Islamic state in 1973 when the new constitution made Islam the state religion. Under the earlier 1956 constitution Islam had been merely the “official” religion. Nineteen-seventy-three, in other words, represents Pakistan’s “Iran moment“—when the government made itself beholden to religious law. Most western observers missed the radical change because the leader of Pakistan at the time was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a whiskey-drinking, pseudo-socialist from a Westernized family. Those that did notice the transformation ignored it because the country was reeling from a massive military defeat in 1971, which led to half the nation becoming Bangladesh.

And that this had devastating consequences for how the people of the country had to use Islamic idioms to demand even the most essential and basics of needs from a government now drowning under the Islamization programs of the self-styled prophet General Zia-Ul-Haq. Even Nawaz Sharif, now desperately attempting to pull on democratic underpants, once attempted to draw up legislation that would have him titled Amir-Ul-Momineen – The Great Leader Of The Believers. Pakistanis do have a wonderful penchant for shallow grandiosity and empty bombast!

And finally, Tariq Ali has recently written a Diary for London Review of Books piece that reminds us of the venality and corruption that is Asif Ali Zardari, and the pathetic state of a nation that is increasingly convinced that in fact it was he who simply murdered his wife, the highly popular, democratic myth known as Benazir Bhutto!

Of course these nuances, particularly those raised by Ali Eteraz and Asdar Ali are difficult to catch in our morning internet read. Pakistan does not really exist, other than as a pawn in a chess game being played in Washington D.C. The people dying on the frontiers of Afghanistan are not real people. President Obama was shedding tears for the killed Iranian activist Neda the same day that his drones slaughtered 60 people in the tribal areas. The cynical exploitation of ‘human concern’ in one instant, and the callous, calculated, inhuman, purely barbaric and cannibalistic indifference to the erasure of another speaks poorly of the popular belief that modernity and morality go hand in hand. The Pakistani government (it should be called the Pakistani Cabal), now in the hands of a rank criminal, is a pawn that can only move in two or three preordained directions. And our reporters arrive in it and report on it with those ‘rules of engagement’ subliminally and explicitly defined.

Let the wars begin!

Photographing Poverty: A Dialogue

I came across this a few days ago and thought that it would prove a provocative read for all of us:

Child Labor: The Sequel

19th Century Public Art in 21st Century Photography

Photographing Poverty: Realism Or Sentimentality

Asim

You Must Remember This, A Kiss Is Still A Kiss, A Lie Is Still A Lie

Losing My Religion To Tomorrow’s Headlines

Via Sepia Mutiny:

This is RizMC

Realities, Myths, Fantasies & Paranoias: The Muslims – Get To Know Them Series

Professor Yoginder Sikand recently posted an extensive review of Abdelwahab El-Affendi’s Who Needs An Islamic State. The book is a fascinating challenge to political Islamists everywhere and confronts them on their simplistic, utopian and definitely mythical ideas about an earlier pure, ideal, perfect Islamic past. As Professor Sikand writes:

El-Affendi is particularly critical of modern Islamist ideologues, such as the Egyptian Syed Qutb and the Pakistani Abul Ala Maududi, who conceived of an ideal Islamic state as being totalitarian, anti-democratic, authoritarian and coercive. He is bitter about what he calls the Islamists’ ‘self-righteous pretensions’, which translates into ‘a readiness to resort to violence at the slightest pretext’. He likens them to the Khawarij or Kharijites, an early splinter group from among the Muslims, who saw themselves alone as true Muslims, and the rest of the world, including other Muslims, as deviant, aberrant, even anti-Islamic, thus ruling out any room for compromise.

While still upholding the notion of a Muslim state molded or guided by religio-moral concerns and principles, el-Affendi points to the serious gaps in modern Islamist political thought, indicating the way forward for the emergence of a genuinely democratic, pluralist and contextually-relevant Muslim political discourse.

∞

I also found Salman Hameed’s blog Irtiqa. As he describes it, it:

…tracks and comments on news relevant to the interplay of science & religion – including scientific debates taking place in the Muslim world. Irtiqa literally means evolution in Urdu. But it does not imply only biological evolution. Instead, it is an all encompassing word used for evolution of the universe, biological evolution, and also for biological/human development. While it has created confusion in debates over biological evolution in South Asia, it provides a nice integrative name for a blog that addresses issues of science & religion.

Salmam Hameed is an Assistant Professor of Integrated Science & Humanities at Hampshire College, Massachusetts and working “…on understanding the rise of creationism in contemporary Islamic world and how Muslims view the relationship between science & religion.”.

Check it out – There was an amusing discussion about a mythical Halal Browser – a poke at the recently announced Koogle a Kosher browser – no, I kid you not! The Halal browser drew some comments from Karachi blogger Tazeen Javed about its seductive features for the obscurantists.

∞

I also found, thanks to Salman Hameed something that I had been looking for for months – a survey of educational institutions in Pakistan and in particular the spread of madrassas as far as the country’s education structure goes. Here is a fascinating piece by Asim Khwaja called The Madrassa Myth that examines how pervasive a presence these religious institutions have in the country. The conclusion: not much! Though as one commentator points out, unregistered madrassas may not be in the data. Worth a read.

∞

And then from my own bookshelves I found, while dusting them of course, copies of Fazlur Rahman’s Islam and Islam & Modernity.  Fazlur Rahman studied Arabic at Punjab University,  went to Oxford University where he wrote a thesis on Ibn Sina. He then taught at at Durham University and then at McGill University where he taught Islamic studies until 1961. A noted Islamic scholar, he was also the Harold H. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of Islamic Thought at the University of Chicago. And perhaps most obviously, he was reviled and hounded out of Pakistan where he had been invited to head the Central Institute of Islamic Research. As explained by Hangingodes:

Anyone examining the newspapers of second half of 68′ would know with ease that the whole episode was one of the earliest and most unfortunate sagas of political hijacking of Islam. It is immaterial whether Fazlur Rahman was labeled a kaafir, an apostate or a religious hypocrite and how the political environment at that time overshadowed an otherwise academic issue; what is important however, that Fazlur Rahman proved to be a victim of misdirected traditionalist emotionalism and paid the heavy price of abandoning his cherished goal of transforming intellectual heritage of Muslims and deploying a modern religious education policy in Pakistan.

A brilliant man, a superb scholar, his works are the earliest influence on my own ideas about the study of religions and in particular the rigorous and modern examination and investigation of the religion of Islam. I recommend both Islam and Islam & Modernity as places to start, the latter is in fact a fabulously enlightening work!

India Blogs That Inform, Amuse, Confuse And Enlighten

If you are curious, here are some blog sites by and/or about Indian literature, politics, culture, history, arts etc. that I find fun and inspiring;

• Sepia Mutiny
• Amardeep Singh’s Blog
• Professor Yoginder Sikand’s Blog
• The DesiPundit

Not that you guys have any time to be blog-surfing!

Asim

What I Learnt From My Students & How It Was Not What I Had Planned On Teaching Them!

Earlier this year I taught a 1-week photography workshop in Dubai. I am not fond that city, and deliberately avoid going there for as long as I can remember. It has something to do with an early childhood memory of seeing poor Pakistani laborers being beaten with sticks by security police at the Dubai International Airport. I have since associated feelings of anger and sorrow with that town. But the workshop was being organized by a good friend and I could not say no.

The workshop was meant to be for new photographers – proficient with the technical wizardry of their cameras, but only starting to learn how to create documentary work. On the first day of the workshop I found myself standing in front of 11 students from various backgrounds, and staring at some of the most sophisticated and expensive camera equipment one can buy.

Some of the students were writers and editors from local newspapers and magazines. Others were starting out in photography and hoping to pursue careers as freelance commercial and feature photographers. There were a couple of amateurs who were there just to learn a little more. And a teacher of photographer from Kuwait who wanted to get away from that country and just be amongst others like him i.e. lovers of the craft of picture making.

The workshop outline was quite simple, and I am sharing it here with you because we will talk about some of the issues listed here during out time in Ajmer:

• Dominating Your Camera: S&M (Simple & Manual) Techniques For Controlling the Picture Making Process
  • Understanding light temperature and its impact on the picture
  • Watching light movement and mapping light
  • Measuring light and shooting only when it is right
  • Awareness of geometry and constructing images backwards
  • Out dated techniques for fast focus and proper exposure that can save you millions

• Lost In Space: Story Frameworks And Other Crutches For The Crippled
  • Introducing the story
  • Key story line requirements
  • Developing a checklist
  • What are the themes that will define the story
  • The theory of comic book photo essays and how to graduate to book.

• The Necessary Evil: Dealing with the Subject, Gaining Access and Developing Trust
  • List of subjects
  • Who is the subject or what
  • How do you convince them to let you shoot them
  • Arranging access to locations and individuals
  • Entering, working within and exiting situations/locations

The first day of the workshop went of fine. By the second day we had identified a series of stories the students wanted to shoot, each story contributing to an overarching theme around the issue of the economic crisis and its consequences (both good and bad) for the city. A fairly straight forward and obvious assignment with rich possibilities in this city.

But on the 3rd day things started to go awry.

I noticed that some of the students were avoiding stories that involved negotiating access and working with people! In fact, the act of packing your cameras, heading to a location, and working to negotiate entry and the right to photograph people and their lives proved to be the one thing the students struggled with most!

I had assumed that once the stories were selected, the outlines and frameworks defined, the subjects identified, it would be a relatively easy matter to simply head out, contact the right person, introduce yourself and begin loitering around their lives to find the right pictures. It proved to be the hardest thing to do.

Three students dropped out of the class rather than face their subjects as I kept insisting they had to. Four never actually overcame the process and continued to shoot from the side lines and tangentially. Only four – and its no coincidence that these were the writers and editors, actually managed to get inside the lives of their stories and come back with some surprisingly personal and human pictures.

4 out of 11!

It is one of the hardest things to do in the first few days at the start of any documentary and photographer project – to break through that invisible but concrete wall that first separates you from the stranger you are about to work with. And it can take creativity, compassion, determination and perseverance to scale it and it will test your self confidence and your conviction.

There will be moments at the start of a story, a project, when it will all appear hopeless, when  you will think that there are no images and that there is no story and that the subject will never give, accept or allow you to come close and be part of their lives for even a moment. It will all appear distant, confusing, chaotic and even self destructive as your mind works against itself and its better instincts and tells you to flee! You will feel tired, scared and lost.

The fact is that there is nothing you can do other than to keep going back, to stay longer, to resist the temptation to leave and remain, to put aside the camera and be human.

I did not expect that the last few days of the workshop would be spent encouraging the students to simply hang around, to simply wait and not rush to find the images or the story they had gone there to find. That to find deeper reserves of patience during those first 48-72 hours can be the difference between mediocrity and clarity. And that all photographers, good or bad, unknown or famous, go through this. The best work through it consistently though not necessarily with greater confidence.

We are discussing and thinking a lot about our stories and the readings and the crucial intellectual issues that inform them. But come August 10th you will be asked to start to think as a human being walking in to the lives of other human beings who are from a different class, ethnicity, culture, society, religion and come with vastly different life experiences, outlook and concerns. Suddenly all that we have read and thought about will fall to the wayside and we will be confronted with our own fears, insecurities, uncertainties and doubts.

Suddenly we will sense our frailties and our human doubts. And it will all happen in front of people who will be taking you as a serious professional and expecting you to know exactly what it is that you are looking for and need.

We need to be prepared to be tested. And to realize that it is not just a matter of scaling the wall, but of doing so such that the other welcomes you across. This is in the end a documentarian’s greatest asset; the ability to overcome the divide and get to a place where the subject offers you their hospitality, reveals to you their intimate concerns, shares with you their joys and troubles and believes that you are there to speak about and for them with integrity, honesty and humanity.

Scaling this wall is about going from being a stranger to becoming a trusted partner. And it will take perseverance and belief. That is why we have focused so much on selecting the stories and hopefully each of you has selected one your believe in and are seriously engaged with.

Those of you with more experience should be ready to help and support the others. I and Sara will of course be there, though I can confirm that I face these moments of severe doubt practically every time I go out to shoot. So you will not be alone – I will be cowering in the corners with you!

The stuff in the workshop outline above is the easy part. We will get through that without concern. And we have a fabulous 2-weeks to work through the rest. As Sara has repeatedly pointed out – this will be a unique experience and I am still impressed that the school is encouraging this level of on-the-ground work from its students. Some, not all, will jump over that wall without a thought. Others will take some more time. Regardless, it will be seen and felt by all, I promise you that. The question we will have to ask ourselves is how do we negotiate it so that it reveals what is on the other side and not damage it.

Asim

Panic Not! Ira Glass To The Rescue

After reading some of the recent posts focusing on the divergent and/or contradictory demands of academic and photographic project objectives, I thought that it would be useful for you all to step back and reconsider things.

Ira Glass. This American Life. A brilliant story teller. An amazing journalist. An inspiration to many. My friend Zoriah reminded me that perhaps the students should hear him talk about creative story telling and how the best of them actually work. He himself has written a post about Ira Glass on his blog.

So I am posting a bunch of his videos for you here so that you are inspired and excited and liberated!

And another where he talks about finding stories

And then of course the discussion wanders over to why failure is inevitable but holds us together is our aesthetic values (this is my favorite video in the sequence.)

And finally, the 2 major mistakes beginners make; to abandon your life and to abandon yourself in your work!

Ajmer is an incredible and rare opportunity to explore and unleash a creative side to you that liberates you from the strict, often well defined requirements of academic work. That is, you have to appreciate that the stories inAjmer allow you to tickle that human, creative, and imaginative side of you that you may typically hold back in your academic writings. That is, be quirky, be unconventional, be daring and be simply inspired. Not to say that all that can’t be applied to academic research and writings, but I think you all understand what I mean.

This is about story telling. It is about creating something that excites, informs and inspires. It is actually more difficult than a written paper because you do not have the luxury of endless references, tangential discussions on background, footnotes and such. It is just a pure, simple, straight forward story.

And it is a fabulous complement to what you are typically used to delivering; the photography reveals the human consequences and responses to the broader, underlying, academic issues you are exploring. Think of it as the hook that compels someone to read your more detailed research. For example, if we are examining Special Economic Zones (SEZ) than the research speak to their origins, goals and reasoning for creation, and also to the resistance of the local communities and why. The photo project then can reveal the human side of this story through one individual and concentrate on their agency, their response and their views. So the two work together!

We are 3 weeks away from entering a new world of people we typically do not meet and definitely do not know. This can be scary, but it is also one of the most exciting things you will do in your life. I promise you that.

Do not approach the photography like an assignment because you will struggle, panic and worse, fail at it. Approach photography as a human being first, who is meeting and trying to understand the lives, experiences and perspectives of other human beings. Hear their stories, and most importantly, hear your own responses to their stories. And it is in these personal responses that you photos and your narrative will begin to offer itself.

I quote Huxley: Experience is not what happens to you, it is what you do with what happens to you.

And what you do with your experiences with these amazing people you will meet will be based on you as an individual, a human being and then as a photographer using photographs and text to express it.

Where The Head Spun: Sunday, 12th July 2009

This week has been busy with some writings on The Idea of India photo project, but I did manage to come across some fascinating stuff:

Ikea Is As Bad A Wal-Mart; A piece in Salon magazine that reviews Ellen Ruppel Shell’s book Cheap.

Yes, it is our consumer habits that are driving these climate changes – the degradation of the soil, the cutting of forests, the polluting of the oceans, the exploitation of human labor in china and mexico, to name just two places, is all for the sake of our cheap consumer goods.  We may prefer to avoid this fact by trying to simply shop ‘green’, but shopping, and repeateded, frequent cycles of shopping are in fact why the problems are emerging.

Shell’s argument is simple; buy cheap and you have to buy often and hence continue to fuel the hunger of the machinery that in the end churns away at human lives (cheap labor) and the earth (trees, oil, water, cultivatable land, fresh water etc.). So avoid IKEA!

∞

Dr. R.K.Pachauri has a blog! I did not realize this. Dr. Pachauri is the Director General of The Energy & Resource Institute (TERI) and Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and winner of a Nobel Prize for his team’s work on the environment.  Some interesting quotes:

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) brought out a report in 2006 which estimates emissions of GHGs from agriculture as a whole, of which 80 percent are accounted for by livestock production. These constitute 18 percent of all GHG emissions from human activities. An interesting comparison between a vegetarian meal and a beef steak, for instance, was provided by The New York Times in its issue of 27 January 2008 which is revealing. A meal consisting of 1 cup of broccoli, 1 cup of eggplant, 4 ounces cauliflower and 8 ounces of rice results in 0.4 pounds of emissions of CO2 equivalent. On the other hand a 6 ounce beef steak results in 10 pounds of CO2 equivalent emissions, which amount to 25 times that of the vegetarian meal with which the comparison was made.

Apparently the retarded Mayor of London was miffed and said that he would now eat twice the beef he normally did! I guess he has friends in the beef industry!

∞

Arundhati Roy seems to have lost her faith in the direction of modern ‘democracy’ particularly because, as she argues in her piece Democracy’s Failing Light, it has become a brand usurped by the most venal and calculated of opportunists, and used to veil injustices and terrible violence. Interestingly Pankaj Mishra had expressed similar dismay in an earlier piece called The Banality of Democracy where he argued that ‘democracy’ has become a theater that hides extremes of violence, and where the language of ‘elections’, ‘votes’, ‘citizen rights’, ‘liberty’ etc. is used to silence genuine freedom and justice.

∞

Today’s While You Wait Lobotomy Special! come from  this interview with director Claude Lanzmann, speaking about his new film called Tsahal.

I was laughing so hard that in fact I could not even post a link to this frankly retarded conversation when I first read it a week ago.  What adds spice to it is the subtlety of the interview who is clearly repulsed by Lanzmann’s racist and, lets be honest, stupid answers.

When asked a question (and it is clear that Lanzmann’s intellectual myopia does not allow him to recognize that the interviewer is setting him up), about why Israeli life is worth more than that of others, he says:

The answer goes back to the Shoah, the murder of the Jews in the Second World War. There are very few families in Israel who did not lose one or several members in the Shoah. The number of Jewish victims killed in wars and attacks must at all costs – and I mean that absolutely literally– be kept as low as possible. That is the maxim.

And the inanities continue, when further into the interview, and now clearly loosing hold on his sanity, Lanzmann reveals a toy soldier’s love of weapons of slaughter:

Weapons play a central role in my film. But I don’t know whether I would say they “fascinate” me. That’s not a fair word. Because the film is never about fascination. And yet I can certainly say that tanks are the most extraordinary machines. And the most extraordinary tank of all is the Israeli Merkava, because it was built in absolutely impossible conditions. The tank commanders love their Merkavas. The tank units spend at least three years of their lives in them. The Merkava was developed by the Israeli General Tal. He features prominently in my film. He says that Israel is an ideal country in which to develop tanks further and wage wars with them.

All this would just be interesting amusement, like reading the diary of a ’slow’ friend at school, if it were not for the fact that the interview is packed solid with false histories carried over from the 1950s! Mythological references to the ‘Jews sense of defensiveness’ are trotted out to argue and defend Israel’s current aggressions and love of violence. As if there isn’t a people, nation, class or ethnicity who couldn’t construct a narrative of past sufferings and argue for their need to perpetuate new ones! The Israeli canard of the ‘uniqueness’ of the Jew’s suffering is bandied about with abandon, and I guess leaving many an Armenian, Bangladeshi, Mapuche and yes Palestinian salivating at their ‘right’ to then perpetuate their own mass slaughters in the future!

Reductive ideas of about Arabs and Palestinians are displayed to create another old canard; Israel is perpetuatlly under threat and so it must kill – they make us kill them! Viva Meir!

Its is amusing and funny, and I wish the interviewer was even more acerbic and explicit in his disdain which he clearly has but holds in check.

And finally, the great toy soldier moment does arrive, this strange boy’s love for the butcher’s tools. The interviewer subtly tricks Lanzmann into revealing an infantile worship of weapons, like a boy who buys a sports car to compensate for his cowardice and overwhelming sense of inadequecy. I qoute Lanzmann’s hilarious reply:

Of course I rode in a tank during the filming of “Tsahal”. I have also shotgrenades from a Merkava. It was really easy to hit a stationary target, but I found it extremely difficult to hit a moving one. I have also flown on reconnaissance missions. During the work on my film I also saw the first prototypes for unmanned flights, drones, which were invented and developed in Israel. They are very unusual machines, but they do not feature in my film.

Oh dear. He rode a tank – Yeeeee Haaaaa! Lets get me one of them A-rabs!!

∞

Over at Dissent the writer/intellectual Ali Iteraz in a piece called Pakistan Is Already An Islamic State reminds us, particularly those from Pakistan, that the country’s slide towards becoming a religiously drunk state is  nothing new and does not begin just because of America’s recent wars in Afghanistan. He takes us back to the years of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto – the man who is now a myth so sacrosanct that we forget that he began his career kissing up to Pakistan’s earliest dictators, precipitated 2 wars, and was directly responsible for the break-away of Bangladesh, not to say anything about the genocide that he helped encourage there. Some quotes:

Most people in the world, including some Pakistanis, live under the illusion that the country is secular and just happens to have been overrun by extremists. This is false. Pakistan became an Islamic state in 1973 when the new constitution made Islam the state religion. Under the earlier 1956 constitution Islam had been merely the “official” religion. Nineteen-seventy-three, in other words, represents Pakistan’s “Iran moment“—when the government made itself beholden to religious law. Most western observers missed the radical change because the leader of Pakistan at the time was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a whiskey-drinking, pseudo-socialist from a Westernized family. Those that did notice the transformation ignored it because the country was reeling from a massive military defeat in 1971, which led to half the nation becoming Bangladesh.

And as the government and its working increasingly articulated their objectives and plans through a language religious, the people too learned that couching their demands in religious terms was perhaps the only way to find action from the government. As Iteraz says:

Over the 1970s and 1980s, Pakistan’s marginalized people also learned how to put Islam to political use.

In 1994, the poor locals of the quasi-autonomous Swat region, languishing in a broken colonial-era legal scheme, agitated for a more efficient system called “Sharia Nizam e Adl.” This system, being local and cultural in origin and mostly the construction of a man named Sufi Mohammad, had very little in common with the sharia that exists in the classical books of Islamic Law. But the Swatis figured that appealing to Islam would work, because, after all, everyone else did the same when they wanted their material concerns addressed. They turned out to be right. Benazir Bhutto’s government quickly consented.

His conclusion is, and it relates to the situation in Swat and other regions, that people are arguing through the prism of Islam because for decades that has been the only means to reach decision makers, and to effect any sort of legislative and political action on matters of justice, rights, and needs. I quote Iteraz again:

What is happening with the widespread religious militancy in Pakistan today is that the political and feudal elite like Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who initially were beneficiaries of manipulating the Islamic character of Pakistan, have lost control of “Islam” to a much broader class of people. These out-of-power groups, after decades of alienation, want to have control in the political system and are attempting to acquire it by defining Islam, which is an amorphous idea, in a way they deem most suitable. Every day the abstract cry of sharia becomes a means of political agitation. Every day people organize into new movements around the declaration.

I recommend the entire piece, particularly to those who insist on solving abstractions with yet another delusional one that goes something like ‘If we implement true Islam we will solve all this’ or ‘Islam does not advocate violence’ and other such inanities. These are political and social issues – of man, for man and by man. Man uses whatever references, languages and forms he needs to argue for his food, his shelter and his security. It can be ‘democracy’, it can be ‘Islam’, it can be any number of abstract slogans, but underneath they are fueled by fundamental needs.

The Shock Of Gaza Or Salvaging Something From What Was Nearly Nothing

A few days after arriving in Gaza last January, I posted the following piece on the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting’s Untold Stories blog site dedicated to the Gaza project that writer Elliott Woods and I were working on. I think it fairly captures what was going on in my head during that time.

On the Getty Images archive you can type in ‘Gaza Destroyed’ and retrieve over 5,500 images to select from.  If you run the query ‘Gaza Funerals’ you will get back over 7,000 images.  I was unable to check the Corbis archives because at the time of writing this entry their site was undergoing maintenance.  But I am confident that I would find a similarly large number of images for both the queries above.

The challenge for a photographer arriving in Gaza is that s/he is walking into a place that has been consistently and extensively photographed for decades, and that there are many fine, talented and professional Palestinian photographers who carry out this task for their various agencies.  In addition, some of the best and most talented international photojournalists have also made Gaza the focus of their work.

I have arrived in Gaza in the aftermath of Israel’s most recent military operation against the region, Operation Cast Lead.  And I find that though the scale of this latest venture is larger than anything I can remember from my previous travels to Gaza, its impact and consequences are very familiar.

The official numbers state that over 1,300 people have been killed, of which it is believed that nearly 400 were children, about 50,000 made homeless, and over 5000 left seriously injured.

I arrived in Gaza just as the cease fire had been declared and I had been immediately struck by how familiar it all seemed.

The day before as I stood on the Egyptian border with Rafah and watched Israeli jets dropping their payload on buildings and tunnel construction sites I was unsure of my decision to proceed.  Cowardice has been my best friend and protected me from many dangers.

Why would I not listen to it now?

My first trip to Gaza was in 2003.  I then returned and continued to document the situation here, particularly in Rafah, Gaza, in 2004 and 2005.  The settlers were still in Gaza then, and so were activists from the International Solidarity Movement, and the armored bulldozers and their accompanying tanks that were constructing the massive steel wall along Rafah’s border with Egypt.

Home demolitions were frequent along the Rafah border as bulldozers tore down Palestinian homes to make way for this steel wall.  Tank patrols would terrorize residents living along the border, and there would be frequent firing into these neighborhoods resulting in deaths and maiming of residents.

As a photographer I documented my fair share of funerals, Hamas marches and families salvaging their belongings from the ruins of their destroyed houses.

And now, as I walk through the devastation in Gaza from the most recent Israeli operation, I am struck by how familiar and how similar it all looks.  My photographs from this morning look little different from those I took back in 2003, 2004 and 2005!  In fact, a simple re-edit of the captions of my previous work and I could convince you that the photograph was taken just yesterday!

The scale is different.  Absolutely.  But the visible consequences are the same as: dead bodies and lost lives; destroyed homes and displaced families; angry funerals and political exploitation; protest marches and armed men promising revenge; physical destruction and families trying to rebuild.

We have been here before.  We are here again.

As I walk through Gaza with my little camera in hand, and around me scramble some of the world’s finest photojournalists capturing yet more of what we have already known and seen, I am desperately trying to find my own voice to this story.  And it is not helping that I know that in the not too distant future there will be yet more confrontations, and more military operations, and more funerals, and marches, and destroyed homes and displaced lives.

The cycle repeats itself.

Is there a way to stop the images from doing the same?

Asim Rafiqui, Untold Stories, January 22nd 2009

The work that emerged, first the documentation of the things and people left behind, and the portraits were a result of an adjustment that had to be made when I was confronted with the reality I saw and also the reality I felt. Gaza was there and dozens took it, but there was also a very personal reaction to coming back, a reaction I had not anticipated even as I had stood on the Rafah, Egypt border watching Israeli jets bombing tunnels a mere 100 meters away! It was only once I was in, and after a few days spent walking around and talking to people, that things started to fall apart.

This has happened before. It happened on a project about Polish immigrants in Slough, UK. The entire project work plan fells apart as I arrived in this incredibly non-descript, non-Polish town with nary a physical, cultural, or architectural clue to the presence of Poles – it just looked like any other lame, UK industrial city!

It happened in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti where the story refused to offer itself until and unless some personal risks that I had previously considered unnecessary had to be taken. Writer Malcolm Garcia and I discussed our situation for a couple of days at least before a decision was made to change our approach and go into the story in a new way.

And that uncertainty is in fact exciting, and a source of creativity if you can work through it. There have been instances when I have failed to work through – I never show those projects! I will share some of those situations with you when we meet in Ajmer.

How We Refused To Embed With Britney Spears!

I woke up this morning and read the following piece of news:

“Sweden’s four national newspapers, Aftonbladet, Expressen, Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet boycotting Britney Spears concert at the Globe July 13. The organizer needs to press photographers must sign a contract that gives her the copyright to the images, and the right to decide which images may be published. ‘If they do not tear the contract we will not shoot,’ says DN’s image manager Roger Turesson.”

And I soon wafted into a day-dream that took me back to the world in late 2002 as the final touches were being put on the US military journalist embed program, and this announcement hit the front pages of a oh-so-imaginary-but-courageous New York Times:

“America’s four national newspapers, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribue are boycotting George Bush’s  Gulf War to be held in 2003. The organizers of this event demand that press photographers sign a contract that gives them [the organizers] the right to decide which images may be published and what, if anything, they will be allowed to document. ‘If they do not tear the contract we will not shoot,’ says New York Times photo editor Jane ‘battlefield” Schmoe.”

I have been accused of naivete, and stupidity by those in positions of ‘power’ at magazines and newspapers for constantly harping on this.

Today, with memories that do not go beyond the 24 hour news cycle, editors justify their decisions to continue to ‘embed’ their reporters with the arguments like ‘there is no other way to do it – its too dangerous otherwise’. They fail to realize that this is precisely what the embed program hoped to achieve beyond its simple control of the ‘image’ of the war.

We live in the very house we built!

(UPDATE: 25th July 2009: NBC’s new prime-time titilation is called The Wanted that unites ’special operations’ operatives with self-declared ‘journalists’ to hunt down what they describe – without evidence, right to defense, process of law, right to counsel, a fair trial and a full hearing of course, are the world’s most dangerous ‘terrorists’. Where they get this list is easily guessed at. But, my point is underlined by such lunatic programming – our ‘journalists’, our ‘military’, our ‘intelligence’ and our ‘government’ continue to conflate. and continue to loose credibility. we are not even pretending any more!)

By getting in to bed with one of the belligerents we asked our journalists and photojournalists to participate in acts of war. The Iraqi and Afghani has been dehumanized but can we for a moment imagine what it must look like from the hell they are standing and looking from?

Dressed as toy soldiers in camouflage our reporters/photographers are seen strutting around in US military camps, sitting inside US army Humvees during patrols, chatting it up with US army personnel as civilian bodies lay shredded all around, sharing meals with those who break through doors and threaten families, walking away with soldiers as they humiliate and drag men to prisons, sharing sleeping quarters with those who torture them, and speaking fluently the language of the pillager and occupier.

That is, as pure and simple collaborators with what are illegal, and brutal wars of occupation and pillage.

Is it any wonder then that it is ‘too dangerous’ to cover it from outside the embed?

I will add that real reporters have covered the war in Iraq from outside the ‘voice over’ of the US military. Urban Hamid and Dahr Jamal come to mind, and also the group of young photographers who took considerable risks to produce independent stories from the country and the war and horror that was bestowed on her by our leaders.

I will also add that there are those who did embed, and came back with stories and images that spoke beyond what they were intended to do. Chris Hondros comes to mind, Zoriah and also Ashley Gilbertson to name a few. But these are exceptions that reveal ways that individuals have attempted to get something more out of a bad situation. They are all unique characters, not easily usurped by others and their work beyond Iraq continues to confirm this. I am sure that there are others, but again, these are people working ‘against’ the strictures of the embed program and allowing themselves to think beyond what is being shown.

And perhaps in a great irony, I remember an Iraq photojournalist telling me that it was the ordinary soldiers that were most keen on helping him see the things the Army did not want us to see – they helped him and encouraged him to photograph the insanity of war perhaps in the hope that the images could stop their involvement in this madness!

It can be done, it has been done by more and it is the only and the right way to report these wars. But it takes commitment and a willingness to understand why we are ‘reporters’ and ‘photojournalists’ in the first place.

It can still be done.

The newspapers can still come together and finally refuse to participate in the embed program and possibly even pool their financial resources to allay costs. Imagine if tomorrow all reporters simply refused, announced that they were going to arrive independent of military cover and start to work to establish an independent presence inside Iraq and Afghanistan and make the investments to rebuild trust and credibility with them, and with us here in the USA.

We need to rebuild our commitment to journalism and in particular in the eyes and minds of the people who are dying for ‘our protection’ and our supposedly sacrosanct ‘way of life’!

Newspapers and news agencies around the world have in fact organized boycotts on a number of occasions.  A little research shows however that they mostly tend to be aimed at pop stars, and sporting organizers. There was a slightly annoying incident with the National Football League some years ago, another with the Indian IPL cricket leage and then another with the football World Cup, and another with the Australian Cricket Board. I believe that the band ColdPlay was also the target of a threat of an organized boycott.

If we can confront the power of Britney, why not then the US military?

UPDATES: Some pieces that I came across that highlight the situation in Afghanistan a little better include Escalation Scam by Norman Soloman and a review by Ann Jones of the HBO film Fixer called Everything That Happens in Afghanistan Is Based on Lies or Illusions. I also found the hilarious but vividly revealing blog site for freelance reporter P.J.Tobia who is reporting the daily realities of Kabul and other places he visits.

NOTE: I realize that this boycott, like any against a pop star or a sports league, is less about ethics and standards and more about money. Rights to images determines of who gets the financial benefits of the images. However, the same argument can also be made for why American newspapers so eagerly jumped into bed with the US military; there was just more money to be made. It is easier to give people what they want than to adhere to the ethical obligations of your profession. Journalism is not just a business but, much like health care, also a public good. It is why profiteering by medical insurance companies or health care companies, so repulses us. Remember the Hippocratic Oath? We believe in the sanctity of the profession and its ethics reflect the ethics of our society; we care for all and it is just. It is what defines a civilized and developed society. Journalism is similarly – a public good and has priorities and responsibilities that go beyond money making. It has to balance profits with professional responsibility to serve the public. So yes, of course, embedding was easy and profitable and every one was doing it and it was going to be a huge seller since the nation was drunk of mindless patriotism that demanded blood and soon. We wanted pictures of heroes and liberators, not questions about the immorality and illegality of the wars, the fake intelligence reports, the lies at the UN or about ‘yellow’ cake and so on and so forth. I know all this. I still remain naive, and stupid, and idealistic and believe that regardless of the market share value improvement, it was the wrong decision and one that continues to hurt the newspapers and us as a society and a now-struggling democracy.)

Great Moments In Film History: The Bat Mitzvah Singer, Starsky & Hutch

The singer is Dan Finnerty, and the scene is from the otherwise lame movie re-make of the tv series Starsky & Hutch starring Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughan and Ben Stiller.

Finnerty is also the wedding singer in this classic scene from the film Old School – watch Will Ferrell’s reaction!

There are things that only Hollywood can pull off!.

Fighting Ghosts And Selling The Good War Or Why Are The Toy Soldiers On The Front Lines!

Alex Webb Magnum Photos: The Invasion of Haiti 1994

The silence is deafening. As American troops are dropped in on Afghanistan to fight their fantasy war, there is no sound from our defenders of truth and checkers of power i.e. the media, about the operation, its objectives, our continued presence in the country, our blood thirsty allies, our ‘pretend’ Afghani democracy, our support of drug lords and genocidiares, our consistent killing of innocents and our blind faith in our own righteousness and unquestioned right to trample on another people and bend them to ‘our ways.

The glory of war is being sold on the front pages of our newspapers, none of which have the courage to ask what they know is in fact a fake war, aimed at a poor and defenseless people, fueled by the ‘intelligence’ and advice of a group of venal, corrupt, blood thirsty and power hungry clique of Afghani warlords, drug barons and oil huckster!

Here is The Washington Post’s idea of war. How purposeful!

Here is The Sacramento Bee looking at this war. How glorious!

Here is The Denver Post blinding themselves. Oh, Our Lord Calls!

Did someone in a marketing department at the pentagon think to arrange all this to coincide with hysteria and myopia that typically captures the nation on every 4th of July? I have to think so. Could they have found a better moment to sell ‘the good soldier’, and the righteous nation, by launching what is increasingly looking like yet another ‘ghost’ operation meant more for ‘domestic’ consumption and sales rather than any serious attempt to go after any real enemy. That something called ‘The Taliban’ are a manufactured foe is something I have written about in an earlier piece called To The Last Man: Fighting The Wrong War in Afghanistan. At most a band of village elders and fanatics with AK-47s scrambling about the remotest and barren regions of the globe have been re-cast as an existential threat to the world’s most powerful military and imperial power, and we all have fallen for it like children for the tooth fairy. Our think tanks, media ‘intellectuals’ and pundits, newspaper columnists and our politicians have become the finest marketing arms of the brand called ‘Al Qaeda’ and ‘The Taliban’, a brand that is perpetually maintained in front of our eyes and sold complete with music, video, and live performances such as this latest operation in Afghanistan.

I am reminded of the ‘great’ American military fantasy in the little country of Haiti – and Alex Webb was there to cut past the lies that these ‘toy soldier’ photojournalists love to sell once their work is done. He was abused for his ‘irresponsible’ pictures. I on the other hand remember hearing a rare honest voice.

Soon these ‘war’ pictures will be sent to competition around the globe, and winners will give interviews about how they wanted to ’shed light on the truth’ and other such gibberish that is used to obscure the fact they mostly want to glorify themselves. This band of clowns who confuse bravado with bravery  will then be awarded trinkets at annual photo competitions by behind-the-desk warriors in offices at major magazine headquarters in metropolises around the globe. No questions will be asked about the veracity of the work, the independence of the sources, the commitment of the individual.

Chris Hedges said it best in a piece called On War:

The vanquished know war. They see through the empty jingoism of those who use the abstract words of glory, honor, and patriotism to mask the cries of the wounded, the senseless killing, war profiteering, and chest-pounding grief. They know the lies the victors often do not acknowledge, the lies covered up in stately war memorials and mythic war narratives, filled with stories of courage and comradeship. They know the lies that permeate the thick, self-important memoirs by amoral statesmen who make wars but do not know war. The vanquished know the essence of war—death. They grasp that war is necrophilia. They see that war is a state of almost pure sin with its goals of hatred and destruction. They know how war fosters alienation, leads inevitably to nihilism, and is a turning away from the sanctity and preservation of life. All other narratives about war too easily fall prey to the allure and seductiveness of violence, as well as the attraction of the godlike power that comes with the license to kill with impunity.

Professor Marc Herold has been working to reveal the media’s role in selling us war. In a piece called War As An Edsel: The Marketing & Consumption Of Modern American Wars he points out that

By the first Gulf War, reporters were confined to pools and the Pentagon distributed video-game like footage to TV channels extolling the precision of U.S. weaponry. In September/October 2001, the Bush Administration hired the public relations firm, Rendon Group1, and also Ms. Charlotte Beers, former “queen of Madison Avenue” and chairperson of both advertising giants J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy & Mather (she had successfully promoted Head & Shoulders shampoo and Uncle Ben’s Rice), to “explain” the new Bush wars to Muslims abroad (and the American consumer), creating the new post for her of the State Department’s Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy with a half billion dollar budget.2 According to Colin Powell, Beers was fluent with branding and she was:

“from the advertising business. I wanted one of the world’s greatest advertising experts, because what are we doing? We’re selling. We’re selling a product. That product we are selling is democracy.”

Democracy sold abroad, war sold at home. But while the battle for minds abroad led by Beers and Rendon fared badly in Muslim lands, the battle on the home front to persuade the American public led by MIMIC succeeded eminently. The Bush Administration worked hard to encourage and benefit from a compliant mainstream domestic corporate media – led by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, Time Warner’s CNN, the Clear Channel radio network, radio talk shows, and major dailies like the New York Times, the Los Angles Times, and the Washington Post and journals like Rupert Murdoch’s Weekly Standard – which served as giant megaphones of State Department and Pentagon positions on the Bush wars… Clear Channel, the largest owner of radio stations in the country, has scrapped even any pretense of objectivity with its sponsorship of pro-war rallies in major cities throughout the U.S. The mainstream media bosses recognized – led by CNN’s coverage of Iraq in 1991 – that media flag-waving, fabricated personal story heroics, action-movie like storytelling, techno reporting could boost TV ratings and profits.

And so here we go again – the blatant entanglement of our media barons with the purveyors of power are known and obvious and the war in Afghanistan is being ‘produced’ for us much as the previous wars. The tired cliches are being published by machine-tool journalists who cannot even bother to confront the obfuscating language they have become so used to using. Rory Stewart recently wrote about the use of language to curtail thought and achieve results in a piece called The Irresistible Illusion :

When we are not presented with a dystopian vision, we are encouraged to be implausibly optimistic. ‘There can be only one winner: democracy and a strong Afghan state,’ Gordon Brown predicted in his most recent speech on the subject. Obama and Brown rely on a hypnotising policy language which can – and perhaps will – be applied as easily to Somalia or Yemen as Afghanistan. It misleads us in several respects simultaneously: minimising differences between cultures, exaggerating our fears, aggrandising our ambitions, inflating a sense of moral obligations and power, and confusing our goals. All these attitudes are aspects of a single worldview and create an almost irresistible illusion.

It conjures nightmares of ‘failed states’ and ‘global extremism’, offers the remedies of ‘state-building’ and ‘counter-insurgency’, and promises a final dream of ‘legitimate, accountable governance’.,,It papers over the weakness of the international community: our lack of knowledge, power and legitimacy. It conceals the conflicts between our interests: between giving aid to Afghans and killing terrorists…It is a language that exploits tautologies and negations to suggest inexorable solutions. It makes our policy seem a moral obligation, makes failure unacceptable, and alternatives inconceivable. It does this so well that a more moderate, minimalist approach becomes almost impossible to articulate.

Our ‘brave’ photojournalists continue to cloister their minds and thump their chests as they rush into ‘combat’ protected of course by entire battalions of some of the best trained military men and women in the world. No need to think how they got there, or why they are there on the front lines.

The toy soldier lives.

The Afghani dies.

I still wonder how we got here and why the slide to this mediocrity has proven so easy!

Digital Image Management…Again

Some of you have been asking questions about which tools and what versions and such, so I thought it best to write another discussion about software and specifically about image manipulation tools.

First, there is no need to invest a lot of money in tools like Photoshop CS 3 or CS 4 if you have not already done so. Photoshop is expensive. This is a narrative photography workshop and our focus is on our stories, and the way in which we construct them and present them. This is not a photography tools and image enhancement workshop so we need to worry about whether we have the ‘best’ or the ‘latest’. We just need the workable.

There are some excellent image manipulation tools that pretty much do all if not more than Photoshop CS 3/4 offer. Remember that Photoshop was not specifically designed for photographers, and there are products now available that were in fact specifically designed for photographers.

Tools like GIMP and GIMPShop are free, created under the Open Source software development structure. They are reliable and excellent and do most all that Photoshop can. And there are simpler, more basic products also available on the internet but the nice thing about the GIMP structure is that it can handle most all RAW formats including the .DNG format.

Also, there are the more simpler photographic tools like Lightroom and Aperture, but one that few people know about and is in fact very good is LightZone. It quite cheap, less than $100, and more importantly, it is fast, completely non-destructive in its image tools and of a size that will not grab a lot of your hard disk space.

I already discussed alternatives to iView Media Pro in a previous post.

Ok, enough about toys!

Our Unbreakable Bond With…Er…Some Israelis

In response to an earlier post I received some comments that claimed, in an ironic mimicry of an idiotic argument often used by the Israeli government, that ‘there was no one to talk to’ in Israel, I am putting up this post to help us find ‘people to talk to’ in Israel.

So here are some suggestions for organizations we would do well to join, support, participate with, talk to and stand alongside.

• B’Tselem
• Gisha
• Yesh G’vul
• Combatants for Peace
• Breaking the Silence
• Rabbis for Human Rights
• Hadash
• Peace Now
• The Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions
• Courage to Refuse
• Parent’s Circle
• Anarchists Against the Wall
• Gush Shalom
• The International Solidarity Movement

I am little tired of the simplistic and dismissive ideas about Israel that seem to pervade conversations many young people from backgrounds Muslim. We have allowed our anger at the wrongs committed against the Palestinians to reduce us to ignorance and mindless invective.  I have said it before and I will say it again; we do not know Israel and the decades of ignorance of  its society, politics, history, culture, conflicts, strains and possibilities weakens our goals and our cause for the search for justice for the Palestinians.

Another place to begin would be to read those who know her, and write about her from within. Journalists like Jonathan Cook have been covering Israel’s politics and society for years. His books (Disappearing Palestine, Israel & The Clash of Civilizations and Blood & Religion) and articles reveal the complex political and societal workings of the country and help us understand her policies towards the Palestinians and the various agendas at work. His work helps us understand where to focus our resistance.

Ignorance, stupidity, and sheer thick headedness will not change anything, nor will it weaken the resolve of those we wish to confront and stop. There are individuals in Israel, yes, Jews, who are opposed to her policies and her terrorism against the Palestinians. These Jews, these Israelis, share with us our understanding of human life, morality and justice. So why not join them, stand alongside them, add our voices to theirs just as they will add their voices to ours?

If You Are In Chicago…

…then this may be worth stopping by for a listen:

Projects Related To Women's Issues

For those of you looking at issues related to women in India, or matters of social justice in general, here are a couple of organizations based in New Delhi that could offer an invaluable place to start are:

JAGORI

SHAKTI SHALINI

You can also read more about women’s organizations, NGOs and such at InfoChange India. They also have a links to many institution and other resources that could be useful.

I would recommend stopping by there when you guys are in New Delhi, though of course I expect that where relevant you would be contacting them now.

Asim

Give Me A Homeopathic Lager Baby!

more about “Give Me A Homeopathic Lager Baby!“, posted with vodpod

Homeopathic medicine has been under even more intense scrutiny lately.

The death of Thomas and Manju Sam’s 9 year old daughter made this a major news story. As Phil Plait, of Discovery Magazine’s Bad Astronomy Blog, wrote:

The infant girl, Gloria Thomas, died of complications due to eczema. Eczema. This is an easily-treatable skin condition (the treatments don’t cure eczema but do manage it), but that treatment was withheld from the baby girl by her parents, who rejected the advice of doctors and instead used homeopathic treatments. The baby’s condition got worse, with her skin covered in rashes and open cracks. These cracks let in germs which her tiny body had difficulty fighting off. She became undernourished as she used all her nutrients to fight infections instead of for growth and the other normal body functions of an infant. She was constantly sick and in pain, but her parents stuck with homeopathy. When the baby girl developed an eye infection, her parents finally took her to a hospital, but it was far too late: little Gloria Thomas succumbed to septicemia from the infection.

Gloria’s parents were convicted of manslaughter in an Australian court. Gloria suffered horribly in her last weeks. Doctors have testified to that fact. I can’t help but feel for the Sams. They must carry their pain with them, for they loved their daughter and wanted only what was best and right. Personally I feel that they should have been forgiven by the court, because the loss they have suffered, a loss they will carry for life, is punishment enough.

There are many who defend such practices – those claiming ‘holistic’ thinking, or ’spiritual’ beliefs, or espousing convictions in ‘chakras‘ and the ‘life forces’ around man.

So be it.

But they would do well to remember that belief is not fact and that conviction is not truth. Homeopathic doctors, chiropractors, and other ‘higher spiritualists’ are exploiting gullible individuals who may otherwise mean well in their search for greater truths. Yet the same people, many from well-to-do middle-class, educated backgrounds, will scoff with scorn at ritual exorcisms of demons, voodoo fire rituals, and other ‘backward’ or ‘tribal’ customs. They fail to see the similarities.

Modern medicine has its own issues, not the least of which today is the dangerous and probably fatal nexus of corporate interests, profiteering and the excessive influence pharmaceutical firms have on our doctors and hospitals. But the facts are that modern medicine works, and that it has to remain the principal resort of the sick and seriously ill.

Drink real beer. Take real medicine.

UPDATE: My friend Nicole Slavin pointed me to a couple of sites that continue their struggle to bring sense and sensibility to the self-indulgent and deluded. Check out The Skeptics Guide To The Universe and Sense About Science. The Discovery Magazine blog mentioned above is called Bad Astronomy Blog

Broken Promise: Israel Known & Unknown

HAMID SAMONI Father of Zakaria Hamid Samoni, 8 years of age, who was killed by a rocket fired from an Israeli helicopter

The Summer 2009 issue of The Virginia Quarterly Review magazine dedicated to matters Middle East has been published just as Amnesty International releases its report on Israel’s 22 day assault that began on December 27th 2008 on the territory of Gaza.

The report (download a copy at this link) provides a broad human rights and war crimes background to the work that writer Elliott Woods and I recently completed in Gaza thanks to the generous support of the Virginia Quarterly Review and The Pulitzer Center On Crisis Reporting.

Elliott Woods essay Hope’s Coffin focuses on Gaza’s young generation and its view of the future. My essay Portraits of Survival steps away from the conventional Gaza conflict photography and concentrates on portraits of people left to deal with the scars of this recent conflict. You can also read our field reports that we compiled for The Pulitzer Center while we were on the ground in Gaza.

Peter Lagerquist has also contributed with an amazing piece called Tracing Concrete that examines the who examines the legacy of British methods of detention and barricading in Palestine, a legacy that now live on in Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

The issue emerges a few weeks after some other news. Noted Israeli writer, journalist and intellectual Amos Elon passed away on the 25th of May 2009. His voice, his views and his courage in speaking honestly about the situation in Israel/Palestine will be greatly missed. As Tony Judt says in his obituary:

Amos Elon’s commitment to Israel, the country where he lived and worked for most of his life, was never in question. But for just this reason his awkward stance, relentlessly engaging with the country’s failings, set him apart. His courageous refusal to endorse the clichés with which Israel’s defenders parry every criticism contrasts not only with the defensiveness of contemporary left-wing Israeli commentators but also and especially with the pusillanimous apologetics of Israel’s American claque.

His pieces in The New York Review of Books – Olmert & Israel, and Israelis & Palestinians are just samples that offer us insights into his clarity of thought and courage of conviction. And it his breath of vision that also offered us insights into the failings of the Palestinian leadership that is also responsible for the mess their people are in today. Again, from Tony Judt’s obituary:

His sympathy for the “stateless, dispossessed, and dispersed Palestinians” did not blind him to the ineptness of their leaders. He had met enough Arab and Palestinian politicians to know just how inadequate they were to the tragedy of their peoples and the tasks facing them.

His pieces provide us an important and complex backdrop to the crisis in the region and the forces that work against what most would call a just and civilized solution.

In addition, the Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk also passed away recently. He wrote frequently in Le Monde Diplomatique and was a incisive thinker about the state of Israel and her politics. His pieces for the Le Monde Diplomatique like Limits to Tolerance , Israel’s Failed Invasion, and Israel: An Army In Power remind us once again of the powerful voices within Israeli society, politics, media and culture that are not cowed by her leader’s trenchant and shrill assault on things human, moral and just.

We do not know Israel. I am always struck by the fact that so few photojournalists have paid attention to the complexities and conflicts within Israel. As a photographer I remain dismayed at how little photo-journalistic work has been done on the country itself rather than its occupations next door. I believe that today we can learn more about the nature and reasons for the occupations and wars by looking inside Israel. To understand why life in Gaza is as it is one has to look at the Israeli communities around Gaza.

Writer Peter Lagerquist has argued this frequently and even created a powerful proposal for a magazine piece on this. As yet my attempts to take his ideas to photo editors have only been met with blank stares. It seems that we are either not ready to ’see’ Israel, or not ready to engage in the complex.

In the Arab world the country is seen as a monolithic pathology, a state consisting of homogeneously fanatic ‘yehudis’ with a thirst for Arab blood. To say nothing about the many ‘James Bond/007′-inspired conspiracies that simply exaggerate her powers and influences around the globe, to say nothing about bestowing its incompetent and mediocre leaders and secret agencies like Mossad with intelligence and a genius they hardly deserve!

Its complexities are lost to most, and with them the chance to engage and join the voices that are from within Israel speaking out against her injustices. We know well the righteousness and religiously sanctioned occupations of the West Bank and Gaza, the continued discrimination and harassment of its Arab citizens, its amnesia about the violence and inhumanity that underlined her founding, its celebration of violence as emancipation, its militarization of its culture, politics and society, its complete ignorance of the very continent and culture it actually sits in, and its aggressive and destructive influences in the politics and societies of its neighbors. We know it and we condemn it.

But we should also know that Israel needs to be engaged and entangled with. In particular, we need to connect with those within her who are confronting its structures of power and repression. As academics, intellectuals, politicians, students, writers, photographers, artists, activists and critics we have to add our voices to the minority within that is also risking its safety, welfare and security confronting what Kapeliouk called an army with a state!

Kapeliouk was one of the founders of the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, which recently won an award for their ‘citizen journalism’ campaign where they handed out video cameras to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to document human rights violations. B’Tselem then uses the footage to advance human rights and law enforcement in the region. And how many know that some fine work about the reshaping of East Jerusalem has come from a young Israeli photographer. Yoav Galai has spent many months documenting the destruction and reshaping of the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem. Its a story and situation that deserves even more attention. He continues to write about the area in his personal blog site as well.

Elon and Kapeliouk offer us examples of courage that we would do well to emulate. Not just when it comes to Israel, but to our own societies. Their voices may now be silent. But their ideals, courage and vision must be carried forward.

What's On My Computer Or Thoughts On Digital Image Management & Manipulation

I do not subscribe to the idea of more being better. I have a very limited interested in acquiring new software packages, or hardware devices. To that end I try to keep my digital image manipulation and management tools to a very basic set. Furthermore, I am a photojournalist and do not typically produce the high volume of images that sports, fashion and product photographers produce each day. Keeping this in mind, here is what I loaded on my white core 2 duo macbook.

iView MediaPro: this is an image management software application that I use for importing, annotating, naming, organizing, archiving, resizing, searching and distributing my digital images. To use this product effectively you must also have a very basic file organization strategy so that you know the follow:

1. What folder should your RAW take of the day be downloaded to & how to name it to differentiate the folder from the previous day’s shoot and future downloads
2. What are the naming conventions that you will consistently use for your RAW image files?
3. Whether you wish to use the industry standard .DNG RAW format or leave your files in their .NEF (Nikon), CRW (Canon) or other vendor exclusive RAW file format.

For example, I will have a main folder called AJMER PROJECT. Under that folder I would have one called RAW IMAGES. Under that I would have folders for each individual day’s shoot and named appropriately using dates in the names e.g. AJMER SHOOT 10-07-2009, AJMER SHOOT 11-07-2009, AJMER SHOOT 12-07-2009 and so on. This way you now know where your RAW files are, and they are organized by the day the images were taken. Remeber that your RAW filles also need to be renamed once they have been imported and I again suggest names that reflect the day of the shoot e.g. ajmer_110709_001, ajmer_110709_002, ajmer_110709_003, ajmer_110709_004, ajmer_110709_005 etc. for all images shot on august 11th, 2009  for example.

iView Media Pro can then be used to create multiple ‘views’ into your RAW folders – 1 st selects, 2 selects, etc. so that the original files remain where they are, but you use the visual editor and its thumbnail links to move around and organize the files the way you wish to see them. All IPTC metadata updates to the images – captions, location details, copyright information etc. can be managed from within iView Media – make sure that you hit the ’sync’ buttons once you have inputted the data otherwise the IPTC metadata details will not be updated to the original files!

Note, those of you shooting video and audio should also think about how to create a folder structure such that audio, video and image files that are related can be maintained and kept together. Naming conventions can be very critical when it comes to such matters.

The same concept applies as you work on your images and create your JPEG versions fter photoshop adjustments. Note, you can open your images from within iView Media Pro and import the image straight in to Photoshop or Gimp.. You can create a folder under the main project folder for your selected, JPEG images, leaving the names as they were so that you can retrieve the original RAW file should you need it, but of course change the .DNG/.NEF to .JPG.

You can of course read all about Digital Asset Management (DAM) from any one of a number of interesting books published on the subject. It can be a complex process and depends on your type of work and the different media types you are managing and creating.

NOTE: It appears that iView was bought by Microsoft (thank you Sara Terry for pointing this out to me!) and this product is now available as something called Microsoft Expressions. I have no idea how much of the original iView Media has been retained, however, you can probably find downloads for the original product on the internet. Send me a private email to ask how. Alternatively, if you are freaked out by Microsoft as I am, try Photo Mechanic, another product popular with professionals. Has pretty much all the same capabilities as iView and then some. Also, there is always iPhoto for those of you on Apple machines.  And then of course there is blueMarine, a free open source photo workflow product. I am in fact experimenting with it as we speak as it does offer some very nice capabilities.

Photoshop CS4 Or GIMP; I don’t know how many of you know but GIMP is the Gnu Image Manipulation Program – a free image manipulation software that does most everything Photoshop does. Those of you looking to save cash and work with an excellent and reliable product can look in to this. I do use GNU, but I am a heavy Photoshop CS3 users because of my reliance on layers to carry out my image work. GNU handles them differently and I am still more comfortable with the Photoshop approach.

And that it it! I do all backups to extenal hard drives manually. And there may be some who would argue for a different approach, so be it. The key is that you are organized, that you can retrieve images from your archive efficiently. Feel free to create folder structures, naming conventions etc. that best suit your work and style. Just be consistent and do indeed keep it simple.

Aside: I do not use Lightroom or Aperture because I do not produce on any given day the volume of work that would justify the use of any one of these products. I am familiar with both and have so far preferred Lightroom because it seems to be a smaller, faster program. But again, I do not use these for my work. At least not yet.

Asim

Getting Past The Obvious: Photojournalism & Lesser Explored Frontiers

Dayanita Singh is an Indian photographer. She used to be an internationally famous photojournalist until the day she realized that the India editors kept asking her to shoot was not what she herself was experiencing. There was a gap between the cliches being asked of her and the complexities, human and social, that she knew lay unexamined behind so many of the stories she was being asked to do. Whether the stories were about poverty, prostitution, child labor or any number of the conventional cliches we seem to love to produce from India, Dayanita Singh was unable to turn off her mind. She was amongst the first to produce a series of images of India’s emerging middle class. She had seen this phenomenon at a time when others would not take it seriously.

Dayanita Singh’s work is beautiful, brilliant and difficult. And one project that I have always loved is a story she did on a Muslim eunuch and her daughter title ”Myself Mona Ahmed’, a beautiful, human portrayal of a subject that has been drowned in cliches and populism – we love to gawk at these creatures and stories about ‘transvestites’, ‘eunuchs’, ‘lady boys’ etc. are on the rosters of many photojournalists. And yet Dayanita’s work is brilliantly different because it is so modest and so honest.

You can read an interview with Dayanita Singh about this story and how she produced it.

You can also find pictures from the work on the NB Pictures website. Just go to the main menu and select ‘*nb photographers’ and choose dayanita’s name.

I encourage you to see and understand this work. It will help you see one very important hallmark of an aftermath photographer; the humility and courage to respect the subject agency of action.

Too often the subject is reduced to a mere victim, the better to allow ourselves or our audience to ‘insert’ itself into the story as ’saviours’ or ‘interventionists’. This has been the traditional approach for a lot of ‘NGO’ driven work, or even ‘news’ journalism that has been arguing for ‘intervention’. Where there is such a need this is essential. But quite often photojournalists and journalists will create this ‘need’ and erase and/or deny the actual lives and actions of the people they are working with.

‘Myself Mona Ahmed’ reveals a story of a strong, independent individual confronting her society, its prejudices, proud to be a mother, dreaming large dreams and never waiting for anyone.  Its an ordinary story about an ordinary person who happens to have a persona and character that is to many of us rather extraordinary.

Such respect for the possibilities, abilities, convictions, determinations, courage and agency of the others is what enables a photographer to find those more complex, multi-faceted stories that typically reflect an aftermath sensibility.

Asim

India Research Resources

There are some fine online news and analysis resources that may prove very useful for you as you research your stories and India in general. Please do check them out – and use their web based search facilities to look for articles and stories that may help give you ideas and insights:

• Tehelka Probably one of the best independent investigative journalism magazines/websites anywhere in South Asia if not the rest of the world. Staffed by some amazing writers and investigative journalists, Tehelka is famous for taking on the powerful and the wealthy with little or no concern for its consequences.

• Countercurrents This is an Indian alternative news and analysis site that invites writers from around the globe to discuss issues of national and international important. You will in particular find their sections on ‘Communalism’, ‘Dalit’, and ‘Human Rights’ particularly interesting.
• Outlook India An English weekly news magazine worth reading – fairly populist, it does however cover the width and breath of issues Indian.
• Frontline India Another excellent Indian news magazine, but with a more analytical, rigorous approach to its subjects.

Browse them at your convenience. Research your stories on them as well. I think you will find a lot of articles and discussions related to the subjects you will be exploring in Ajmer.

Asim

John Steinbeck's 10 Minute Lesson In Photography

At the start of my photography workshops, I offer the students 2 options.

The first is a sheet of paper in an envelope that they are invited to take home at that very moment, with a full refund of their workshop fee, and trust that what I have written on the enclosed sheet of paper is the only photography lesson they will ever need.

The second of course is that they remain the entire lenght of the 7 days workshop, their fees in my pocket, and walk out of here with the foundations of knowledge and inspirations that can help them continue their path towards becoming real photographers.

No one has ever taken the envelop!

∞

So whats in this envelop? Well, for you, and only for you, I will reveal what is on that sheet of paper. And also tell you that I fundamentally believe that the students should have just taken the envelope and spent the next few weeks simply practicing what they had read!.

The envelope contains a passage from John Steibeck’s The Grapes of Wrath which reads:

The film of evening light made the red earth lucent, so that its dimensions were deepened, so that a stone, a post, a building had greater depth and more solidity than in the daytime light and these objects were curiously more individual – a post was more essentially a post, set off from the earth it stood in and the field of corn it stood out against. And plants were individuals, not the mass of crop; and the ragged willow tree was itself, standing free of all other willow trees. The earth contributed a light to the evening. The front of the gray, paintless house, facing the west, was luminous as the moon is. The gray dusty truck, in the yard before the door, stood out magically in this light, in the overdrawn perspective of a stereopticon.

From John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, Page 115, Penguin Books, 2000 Edition

You must go back and read this passage many times, but each time keep the following things in mind.

• What time of day are we talking about?
• What is the color and quality of the light that is falling on the house?
• What is the direction of the light?
• What is the angle of the light
• What do the shadows look like, and how may they be moving as time passes?
• Where am I, the reader, being made to stand to see and experience this scene?
• How would this very same scene look say 4 hours earlier, and why would I not shoot it then?

You are now ready to be seeing photographers.

Steinbeck captured the fundamental idea of a photographer; an individual uniquely and obsessively sensitive to light and its textures, movements, and shadow creations across objects and landscapes. It is how the greatest of artists saw. It is how Caravaggio saw. And the brilliant de Chirico saw.

Phew, that was an exhausting teaching session. I must now rest!

Your Brain Of Mud Or President Obama’s Magic Show In Cairo

“It is well”, I said carelessly “…beware! Play us no tricks, make us no snares, for before your brains of mud have thought of them, we shall know them and avenge them. The light from the transparent eye of him with the bare legs and half haired face [the white man with his magnifying glass] shall destroy you and go through your land: his vanishing teeth shall fix themselves fast on to you and eat you up, you and your wives and children; the magic tubes shall talk with you loudly, and make you as sieves. Beware!”

Qautermain confronts the African Kukuana tribe, from the book King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard

Ruth Mayer, in her work Artificial Africas, points us to Mary Pratt’s book  Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing & Transculturation, in which Ms Pratt:

…differentiates two main stances in colonial self-stylizations, an imperial ‘rhetoric of conquest’ suffusing the absolutist era and an ensuing rhetoric of ‘anti-conquest’ demarcating the split consciousness of Western travelers in the 18th and 19th centuries, their paradoxical desire ‘to secure their innocence’ in the same moment as they assert European hegemony

she further points out that:

To contain an imperialist system within a rhetoric of anti-conquest calls for confusion … and indeed a highly contradictory symbolic system resulted from the efforts to reconcile the irreconcilable. What I call ‘trick translation’ is perhaps one of the most persistent troupes for casting colonial contact in terms of mutual understanding without abandoning the idea of a clear-cut hierarchy of communication and an European [today American] monopoly of meaning production.

It was an act of ‘trick translation’ that Barack Obama had actually come to perform on June 4th 2009 in Cairo, Egypt.  To offer a language of ‘anti-conquest’, and should we add ‘anti-involvement’, in a region with the most deeply entrenched American political, economic, and military involvement since WW II.

On June 4th 2009, President Barack Obama (a man I voted for!) took the stage on the soil of one of the region’s most despotic and repressive regimes. But more than that, he was standing in the center of the geography of American imperial projections that has been the Middle East since the British, Germans, French and other smaller European nations were forced to leave it in the 1940s.

The Middle East is home to some of America’s most important client states – Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, The United Arab Emirates and of course, the unbreakable, Israel. It is also the site of some of her largest military bases and home to tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of American military and undercover operations personnel. It is the site of her most extensive energy resources and investments. It is the site where she has repeatedly engaged in covert and overt political and military operations to ensure access and control to these energy resources. It is the region where her operatives, military, covert and political, keep a close hand on political and economic developments and work to ensure that the nations of the region remain in the realm of American influence.

But, we are here to weave a rhetoric of ‘anti-conquest’, and I focus on those specific areas of his speech that I felt were particularly obfuscatory and Huxlian (Aldous Huxley being one of the original genius’ to describe a modernity where language becomes the most powerful weapon of war and conquest).

∞

Like a great white hunter confronting a group of cannibals about the eat his friend alive, President Obama arrived with a few rhetorical tricks up his sleeves meant to appease the torridly infantile minds of his audience and hosts by offering them trinkets and hoping to dazzle them with his erudition and ‘respect’ for their histories.

We meet at a time of great tension between the United States and Muslims around the world — tension rooted in historical forces that go beyond any current policy debate

The determination to see something called ‘the Muslim world’ as one large homogeneous entity is the hallmark of a classic Orientalist mind who fails or refuses to recognize that the polity of ‘Islam’ covers a remarkable diversity of people, cultures, ethnicity’s, and most importantly histories and heritages. To say nothing about the horribly embarrassing fact that the largest number of Muslims in fact live outside of the Middle East (Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan and India contain the largest number of officially defined Muslims), and where many practice regional varieties of Islam that many in the Middle East consider blasphemous!

More importantly, it is an act of the most egregious arrogance and even ignorance to suggest that if there are ‘tensions’ between a people who may be Muslim, and a nation that is in fact imperialistic and colonizing in the lands inhabited by Muslims than it is because of ‘historical forces’ and not because of  immediate military, political and economic realities.

Perhaps I am being naive in believing that it is less the crusades that concern the Palestinians, or their slaughter by Richard the Lionheart, and more the ongoing and brutal military occupation of their lands being carried out by one of America’s favorite client states, Israel!

The hubris of a statement the attempts to erase the entire post-WWII history and engagement of the United States of America in the region of the Middle East, and replaces it with imagined ‘historical forces’ that point to events and imagined acts from hundreds if not thousands of years in the past is staggering! Perhaps President Obama, this self-claimed student of history, needs to return to his college library and pick up a few books on the American entanglements in the region. He could not do badly by starting with Robert Fisk’s  The Great War For Civilization, or Michael B Oren’s Power, Faith & Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 – Present . I could suggest many others.

And to say nothing about the fact that the issues that cripple the Middle East are the least likely to be understood if seen as emerging from the region’s ‘Islamic’ character. They would in fact be better acknowledged if seen, as we see most every other region of the globe, with a careful and rigorous examination of the local and regional political, economic, social and strategic issues that infect the region. The crisis in Lebanon and the crisis in Kuwait have separate, if only tangentially related if that, issues and require a local focus.

It is this refusal to engage the region in its specificity that allows a number of American intellectual, commentators, politicians, journalists and other opinion makers to repeatedly conflate entities like Hamas with others like Hezbollah, the Islamic Brotherhood with Al -Qaeda. In a tribute to the most obscurantist and simplistic ideas perpetuated by classical Orientalists, the American administration and her providers of thought (think tanks, hired intellectuals, lobby and media organizations) continue to aggregate largely diverse and political complex matters that should in fact be examined within their local and regional social, political and regional contexts.

∞

Moreover, the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam.

Perhaps the only thing more embarrassing than this statement – a classic Orientalist construction that cleverly claims modernity for ‘the white man’ while falsely praising the natives for their ‘traditions’  (read: backward, anti-modern, unchanging, out-dated, medieval), was that probably none of the luminaries in the audience, representing the worst and most illiterate of their nations, understood what had just been said to them!

And ironically, it was a statement that would have appealed to the most obscurantist and fundamentalists of reactionaries in the audience; the people who in fact work day and night through state control of media, culture, society and speech to ensure that their people remain in the shackles of ‘traditions’ and avoid such modern day comforts such as full and enforceable rights as citizens of a functioning democracy with the rule of law and equality for all. In that room full of hereditary leaders or despots, there could not have been a mind not nodding in quiet agreement at the American presidents endorsement of Islam’s ‘traditional’ values and the threat it faces from the ‘foreigner’s’ modernity, for after all, these same people use this very argument, with the help of their obscurantist mullahs and TV celebrity preachers, to demand that their citizens not ask for such modern innovations such as equal justice under the law, juridical accountability for elected representatives, legal and social ad human rights,  and a representative polity.

But the presence of this orientalist canard was certainly a surprise. Recent works by the historian Jack Good (The Theft of History) and Marcel Detienne (The Greeks And Us)  have challenged Europe’s belief in her modernity and certainly her assumptions that she was uniquely equipped to facilitate it. As John B Hobson states in his work Eastern Origins of Western Civilization:

“Eurocentrism errs by asking wrong questions at the outset. All Eurocentric scholars (either explicitly or implicitly) begin by asking two interrelated questions: ‘What was it about the West that enabled its breakthrough to capitalist modernity?’ and ‘What was it about the East that prevented it from making the breakthrough?’” But these questions assume that western dominance was inevitable, and lead historians to scour the past for the factors that explain it. “The rise of the West is understood through a logic of immanence: that it can only be accounted for by factors that are strictly endogenous to Europe.”

∞

His words were frequently met with applause. President Obama threw them some crumbs, and they gobbled them up like hungry natives. Condescension were accepted as genuine respect and appreciation by people so devoid of dignity and honor that they will accept false pearls to disguise their being real swine. (I hope people get the colonial reference here!)

They applauded when he spoke to them in the only Arabic phrase he could be bothered to remember; the greeting of Assalaamu alaykum. How touching. Taking a note right out of an off-the-shelf travel guide to sites remote and exotic, Mr Obama did not forget that even ‘attempting’ the local lingo will result in smiles and graciousness!

They applauded when he appeared to respect something called ‘Islam’s’ contributions to European civilization.

Perhaps most had failed to realize that he was referring to contributions that were some 500 years or more old while retaining, subtly of course, the right to all other innovations since then for the more civilized and ‘modern’ Europe. Or the fact that, once again, it was not ‘Islam’ that made these contributions but individuals of questionable Muslim, Jewish, and other uncertain origins who were given deeply to issues of intellectual inquiry and study and open to influences all the way from China and India, who just happened to be living under a Muslim dynasty made these contributions.

Algebra is not a religious achievement – it is a human achievement, produced by men for man and with the effort of man. Religion has had no influence on the creation of this, or the arch or the compass or the other items Mr. Obama seemed to think ‘Islam’ contributed to. To attribute the discover of vaccine to a spiritual, religious, and some would argue, mythical philosphy is ignorant and anti-intellectual. It would be the equivalent of suggesting that Penicillin was a Christian discover, or the splitting of the atom a Jewish one! But apparently such inanities go down well in the Middle East!

(Rather than applaud, they should have hung their heads in shame; there is not a library of note, nor a university of even mediocre repute in all the lands across all the sands in all of the oil drenched nations in this region! That Arabs (and Obama was speaking to Arabs, not Muslims or even a nebulous ‘Islam’) continue to contribute to modernity, science, culture, arts, literature and the future, but must often flee their homelands and do so elsewhere!)

They applauded again when he spoke about Islam’s traditions of tolerance and racial equality. It was bizarre to say the least to offer this conventional sop to a room filled with representatives of intolerant and at times rascist regimes, applauding a philosophical concept alien to the very societies they have created and rule. They applauded when told that Thomas Jefferson kept a copy of the Koran in his personal library – did they imagine that he consulted it for his political and personal affairs, or was influenced by it?

They applauded when Mr. Obama claimed that the 7 million American Muslims enjoy incomes and educational levels that are higher than the American average. What that says about the deprivations of the average American, particularly the African-American community I am not so sure about. Who are these extremely successful and wealthy Muslims we do not quite know. But to make a claim to suggest that in fact in America the Muslims even do better than the Americans is sheer nonsense!

Their success or failure, as that of any immigrant in the USA is independent of their status as ‘Muslims. The Asian American, the West Indian and most recently the South Asian Indian community are highly successful immigrant communities and there is no way to claim that their religious choices are a determinant or a measure of their success. Furthermore, given that America allows only the ‘best and the brightest’  or the very wealthy from ‘other’ nations to come to the country, particularly when they are from Asia and/or the Middle East, it should not surprise us that these immigrant communities in fact do rather well.

But this obfuscation was essential to hide America’s ridiculous and immoral detainment, harassment, incarceration, deportation, and torture of hundreds of ‘Muslims’ either living in America or abroad. It was necessary to say to hide the rendition programs targeting of Muslims, the ‘black’ sites and their exclusively Muslim inhabitants, and the air and environment of overtly racist anti-Muslim sentiment that pervades American print, radio and television, particularly if you are of the conservative kind. And I will not even mention what the Evangelical fanatics and retards have been saying and encouraging amongst their congregations! By the way, I doubt that the Pakistanis and Bangladeshis festering in hovels in Jamaica Plains, scrambling from apartment to apartment to avoid the prying and ‘black’ eyes of the Homeland Security Department, quite fit into this fabulous President Obama statistic.

They applauded when Mr. Obama claimed that the United States government has gone to court to protect the right of women and girls to wear the hijab and to punish those who would deny it. Which left me perplexed because I was sure that I was told that we had invaded Afghanistan to liberate that nation’s women from ‘oppression’ symbolized by the burqa! And yet as devastation and horror now marks that country, with the arguments for the liberation of their women center stage, I wonder if it is not time to bring the daisy-cutters and pilot-less drones back to the USA where apparently women are being given constitution protection for a practice that elsewhere is considered by the Americans to be a sign of their backwardness and oppression!

And is this the same government that did not go to court to protect the rights of men and women being held at Guantanamo? As men continue to die in American ‘black’ site custody, I find it shocking that legal and judicial resources are available for women’s right to cover themselves where as they have been argued away for men we are torturing, murdering and discarding at unknown locations around the world!

And the inanities continued.

∞

President Obama called the war in Iraq – this most brutal, hideous, illegal and greed based invasion of a nation in recent memory, as a war of choice that provoked strong differences in my country and around the world. Quite the soft way to describe an event that was and is in fact nothing less than an illegal, unprovoked, premeditated invasion of a sovereign nation (to say nothing about the genocidal 12 year sanctions regime instituted against the civilian population of a de-armed state!)  led to the displacement of hundreds of thousands, the deaths of nearly a million, the torturing of thousands (pictures of which President Obama recently decided to censor to protect our delicate sensibilities – we are so civilized) and frankly remains a hell hole for those outside the centrally air-conditioned ‘green zone’ and should in fact be a crime prosecutable in the International Court of Justice.

Oh but wait, as President quickly added,  he believes that the Iraqi people are ultimately better off without the tyranny of Saddam Hussein.

Ah, then its ok. For now at least we have a ‘democracy’ that requires private/corporate armed militia to protect politicians, businessmen, journalists and anyone not sanctioned by the many crooks and criminal organizations that now actually control the country while  masquerading behind banners of religions and sects. And for added measure the under cover assassination teams/death squads, massive torture centers, prisons, 24×7 hour private security, walls/dividers, daily 24×7 military patrols, towns like Falujah that remain under marshal law, kidnappings, criminality, a dysfunctional social and civil service, and the entire government under the guidance of our American generals and politicians necessary just to keep this duct-tape kleptocracy together for a little while longer.

Nine-eleven was an enormous trauma to our country. The fear and anger that it provoked was understandable, but in some cases, it led us to act contrary to our traditions and our ideals.

What then are the consequences, Mr. Obama, of the fear and trauma of the Iraqis and the Afghanis who are in fact at this very moment confronted as they are by American tanks and pilot-less drones trying to understand how they will act contrary to their traditions and ideals? Or perhaps we will just blame their actions on ‘Islam’.

∞

Speaking of America’s intolerance of extremism and violence, Mr Obama went out of his way to celebrate Israel. Walking in the footsteps of his predecessor, he proclaimed with great stress America’s ‘unbreakable’ relationship with the country. He even manufactured completely fictitious ‘cultural and historical’ ties. I can’t imagine what ties a group of European religious fanatics determined to create an ethnically exclusive state by intentionally and violently colonizing and driving out its original inhabitants would have with the United States of America? Oh yes, I forgot, it would be the penchant for violent European colonization of native lands, institutionalized and military cleansing of them from these lands, and the celebration of the now completed fact as liberty, modernity, progress and civility, with a neat set of ‘reservations’ for the unfortunately who survived. How silly of me!

It is also undeniable that the Palestinian people — Muslims and Christians — have suffered in pursuit of a homeland.

No Mr President, they have not suffered in the pursuit of a homeland. They have suffered in the dispossession of it.

They are waiting not for gifts from America, but for their rights, rights for which we have gone to war for other nations (Bosnia, Kuwait and now would love to for Chad) but remain silent on their behalf.

And in what can only be described as the most contorted reading of history, Mr Obama laid claim to the entire process of decolonization as one of a long heritage of non-violent resistance

Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and it does not succeed…from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It’s a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end. It is a sign neither of courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That’s not how moral authority is claimed; that’s how it is surrendered.

I wonder if Mr Obama is reading the same books of history.. I also wonder as President Obama escalates the now senselessly immoral and unjust conflict in Afghanistan if he listening to himself!

The history of colonial Africa, Middle East, South and South East Asia is marked by repeated and consistent armed insurrections and resistance to the colonial enterprise. The colonialists often painted this resistance as ‘minor’ or ‘marginal’ but none of the occupied people, even the Africans who were so savagely raped and enslaved, did not ‘go quietly into the night’. To say nothing about the intellectual, artistic, cultural and political resistance to occupying and colonizing regimes across the globe. Edward Said’s Culture And Imperialism would be a decent place for him to begin to start to understand regimes of resistance to colonial oppression that existed from the very moment the colonialists arrived on the shores of Africa, Asia and elsewhere. Or if Said is too politically sensitive for him, then perhaps he would like to read a fellow African; C.L.R. James’ masterful The Black Jacobins will remind our President of the power of violent resistance in breaking the back of a rapacious and brutal colonizer and usurper.

And if these nations and peoples of the far South and Africa are too complex for him to understand, then perhaps he would do well to remember if nothing else then the American Revolution and the great American war of independence, celebrated every year with great fanfare on July 4th. I believe that General George Washington would take umbrage to the suggestion that violence is a dead end. Or perhaps he would remember the American Civil War, a war that liberated the ancestors of his black citizens and moved America towards the path of modernity. Perhaps if they had followed a non-violent approach…… But then again, the oppressors and users of violence always love to lecture the oppressed about their ‘barbaric’ violent resistance and their need to demonstrate ‘civility’ by adopting a softer and more nuanced tone to the occupiers continued and increasingly military and violent responses!

Notice how the occupier is never told to adopt a non-violent occupation!

And the sheer arrogance to lecture to an unarmed and hopelessly repressed and dehumanized people, while their lands are under brutal military occupation from the only nation in the region that has in fact repeatedly attacked, occupied, summarily killed and displaced lands and peoples across the entire region is sheer mind boggling. The Palestinians are being asked to renounce violence, while the Israelis are being funded with more arms, more jets, more tanks, more training, more excuses for their illegal nuclear weapons program, and more aid packages – all of which continue to go towards and fund the creation of more settlements and more dispossessions and more brutality and more killings and more strangulations.

Continuing what has now become an almost too-boring-to-repeat cliche’s, President Obama placed all the blame for the violence, the intransigence of the conflict in Palestine on the Palestinians. There, in the world he was weaving on that stage in Cairo, where there is no Iraq and no Afghanistan, and no oil and interests, and business connections and shady deals and under handed greed, there was also no nuclear-armed, American funded, religiously fundamentalist, military controlled, ethnically discriminatory pseudo-democracy only for Jews with its American funded M16s and jackboots across the throats of a helpless and desperate people.

Yes, we are told that it is not the military bases, the settlements, the Wall, the check points, the gates, the farm lands, the murdering settlers, the curfews, the summary arrests, the targeted assassinations, the random detentions, the expropriations, the home demolitions, the expulsions, the incarcerations, the discrimination, the humiliations, the bombings, the phosphorous, the slow and daily grinding away at human dignity that are all part and parcel of a highly sophisticated military, architectural, social, political and economic settlement regime. Its the Palestinians with their handful of AK-47s and their donkey carts!

Calling the democratically elected Hamas Government as having ’some support’ amongst the Palestinians, while calling upon the corrupt and discredited Palestinian Authority to develop a capacity to govern President Obama continued the insistent, anti-democratic approach of supporting the very people the citizenry rejected, while rejecting the very people the citizenry selected.

The only democratically elected official government in the very Middle East Mr. Obama claims to be talking to, and it is just not the one that we want.

Israel is in illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. It has permanently constructed roads, settlements, military camps and emplacements, check points and gates, a massive Wall, security fences and cameras, farms and industrial estates all across the West Bank and done so with the absolute and complete support of the United States of America who funds these activities through a myriad and complex set of private, corporate and governmental institutions.

It is not there because the Palestinians are ‘violent’ or have ‘rockets’. It has been there because it wants these lands. It has done everything in its power to destroy the prospects of an independent Palestinian state, and only the beltway in Washington D.C. are a handful of people who think otherwise.

Israel’s obligations are not just what President Obama claimed: to ensure that Palestinians can live and work and develop their society but in fact to withdraw completely from the West Bank and Gaza to the 1967 green lines, to compensate financially the victims of the 1948 displacements, and to offer restitution both verbal, financial, legal and other to the millions who now suffer thanks to its intransigence, occupations, wars and religiously sanctioned hysteria and radicalism. The settlements don’t just need to be stopped, they need to be destroyed, dismantled, reversed, erased, and along with it the entire occupation machinery of men, tanks, gates, check points, walls, soldiers, settlers, goons, fanatics, businessmen and of course Palestinian collaborators.

∞

And far from distancing himself from the pathologies of religious mysticism and mumbo-jumbo, President Obama sadly chose to pander to it further. Continuing yet another grand orientalist tradition of speaking to ‘the natives’ through the use of what the orientalist imagines is their particular world formulations – they are too stupid to understand our modernity, so we must use our ‘trick translation’ and speak to them about reality in their barbaric tongue – Mr. Obama like a modern day Quatermain decided to end his speech in a ‘one for the road’ chorus of quotations from the 3 religious texts and this shocking and rather insulting statement:

The people of the world can live together in peace. We know that is God’s vision. Now that must be our work here on Earth.

President Obama may have pulled off the greatest Evangelical mind tricks in history when he may have convinced a room full of ‘Muslim’ despots and criminal national leaders to join him in the support of a vision fantastically and naively created on the basis of a religious text that has been variously used to different degrees to also justified the inquisition, the crusades, the holocaust and possibly even the recent slaughter of the people of Iraq by an Evangelical, fanatic and religiously drunk American administration.

America engages the Middle East through conquest, investments, manipulations, espionage, education, extraction of resources, training of the military, politics and geo-political entanglements. For some odd reason President Obama can’t see that it can also be communicated with in simple, worldly, adult language without resorting to false and frankly cynical and hypocritical exploitation of religious texts and quotes, like a high school kid desperate to decorate a poor term paper that lacks content but may sound interesting if a few ‘notable’ quotes are thrown in!

∞

As President Obama walked off that Cairo stage to go and bask in the glow of the glory that was being orchestrated for him by his obsequious hosts and minders, a General McChrystal was being appointed to head the operations in Obama’s favorite war in Afghanistan. As Tom Engelhart explained in a recent post on the fabulous Tom’s Dispatch blog site:

General McChrystal comes from a world where killing by any means is the norm and a blanket of secrecy provides the necessary protection. For five years he commanded the Pentagon’s super-secret Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC)…McChrystal gained a certain renown when President Bush outed him as the man responsible for tracking down and eliminating al-Qaeda-in-Mesopotamia leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The secret force of “manhunters” he commanded had its own secret detention and interrogation center near Baghdad, Camp Nama, where bad things happened regularly, and the unit there, Task Force 6-26, had its own slogan: “If you don’t make them bleed, they can’t prosecute for it.” Since some of the task force’s men were, in the end, prosecuted, the bleeding evidently wasn’t avoided.

Tomorrow we will explain the war in Afghanistan as that between the liberal values of the United States of America and obscurantist, mysoginist and barbaric values of ‘radical Islam’. General McChrystal, with his legacy of broken souls and bodies, his torture centers and assassination teams, his professionally executed operations of terror and mayhem, will be left to the sidelines and forgotten. Some old orientalists, or obfuscators (perhaps a newer version of a Ahmed Rashid!) will be trotted out to explain why ‘they hate us’.

∞

President Obama stood in Cairo and wove a fantasy. A fantasy that claimed that there is something called ‘Islam’ that he could speak to as if he was speaking to a homogeneous entity. A fantasy that claimed that America does not in fact have interests and protects interests with military and other means in the Middle East. A fantasy that denies the roots of the violence that does in fact plague that region and emanates from within regimes whose despotic and irrational leaders are amongst America’s closest allies. A fantasy where the tiresome, outdated, discredited and artificial construct of ‘the clash of civilizations’ is trotted out to obfuscate the hard political and economic factors that in fact create alliances and foster the conflicts.

∞

The speech on June 4th 2009 will sadly not go down in history as a great moment in diplomacy. There is an air of desperation about the writings that are trying to claim it so. Much like the photo-op in the White House Lawn the day the Oslo Accords were signed, we will drown our fears under misguided hopes and self-imposed delusions while the relentless machinery of imperial power and politics will continue to cut its merciless path through a region cursed with oil and men of supreme venality.

A few hours after this speech President Obama headed to Buchenwald where he said:

I have no patience for people who would deny history

Indeed Mr. President.

Indeed.

ADDENDUM: I was reminded by a friend that in fact there could be religious motivations for the explorations of algebra e.g. man’s need to measure time more precisely, or to work out the geometries and structures of complex domes, mosques or even the decorative patterns that decorated it. A similar argument has in fact been made by Kim Plofker in his new book Mathematics in India – that Indian innovations in mathematics may have been driven by a need for temple designs or astrology. Regardless, as has already been argued, these remain worldly requirements to serve worldly needs and for universal relevance and application must apply consistently across man’s known world. Their measure of innovation comes from their universality, their non-specificity to any one set of beliefs of religious values.

New Possibilities For Overcoming Boredom

These are pivotal times for photographers and documentarians. Many of the conventions of the craft are being questioned by a new generation of artists and story tellers. With the internet liberating many photographers from the conventional ‘gatekeepers’ – editors, gallery curators, publishers and other voices of ‘authority’, a new generation is going out and producing deeply engaging and complex bodies of work.

There has been a tendency towards mimicry in classical photojournalism. Stephen Mayes spoke about this recently at a presentation at the World Press Photo awards in Amsterdam. I had said something similar, though not as articulately, some months earlier in a blog post on my The Spinning Head blog about the failures of photojournalism.

I have often been asked and challenged on this issue. I always respond by using the example of Darfur, and the crisis in Chad. This story has consistently been represented as a ‘humanitarian’ crisis and a ‘genocide’, with a very clear demarcation between the ‘good’ and the ‘evil’. Practically every photographer on the globe has travelled through rather difficult and demanding bureacracy and terrain to get to this story. Practically all of them have come back with the same story, and with the same images. The height of this coverage coincided with Colin Powell’s visit to the region. Some have made it their ‘calling’ using this crisis as their call to humanitarian arms.

However, I have yet to see a photographic treatment of this situation that captures of historical, economic and social complexities that define the conflict. Most, if not all, the photographers have represented this story in the classical modes of reporting on Africa; a people helpless and victimized, waiting to receive ‘our’ benign and angelic help. The images are constructed to evoke the greatest pathos and emotions. They never attempt to provoke or make an argument (other than the conventional one). In fact, most of the images hark back to structures pulled directly from the coverage of famines in the Sudan from over 20 years ago!

Susan D. Moeller’s book Compassion Fatigue makes for disturbing and fascinating reading. She raises some very demanding and critical points about the way mainstream media (and particular image driven media) cover events such as famines, assasinations/death, war/genocide and pestilence. The points she makes, in particular in the chapters devoted to the coverage of famines, is that editors and media organizations work with templates that they then apply to the all news situations.  A famine in Somalia is covered in exactly the same way as one in Bihar, and the story unfolds over the course of a few days in precisely the same format.

Moeller insists that compassion fatigue is a major cause of the failure of international reporting today. It constrains editors because it leads editors and reporters to not cover situations they believe will not interest their readers. It prioritizes American self-interest (Moeller is obviously writing for the US audience) focusing on stories with an obvious American centric interest. It reinforces simplistic, formulaic coverage of events – if starving babies worked in the Sudan in 1980s it will be used to work again in the 1990s. It demands more and more sensational coverage with a propensity to posit the recent situation as ‘more extreme’ and requiring more hysterical and inflammatory language to have it noticed by the audience (think swine-flu!). It encourages media to quickly move on to the next ‘exciting’ and sensational event so that boredom does not set in.

Luckily a lot has changed since Moeller’s work though sadly I believe that the templates remain the same. Hence my point about the mainstream coverage of Darfur and in particular the way most photojournalists have concentrated their story telling to be from within the refugee camps, with few if any stepping out of this convention to explore alternative and perhaps provocative angles to the situation.  This was made even more obvious when Mahmood Mamdani published a piece called The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency in the London Review of Books. He bought so many interesting angles to the story that I was left even more disappointed – so much that needed to be said was being left out!

There is a great and complex story to tell about this crisis. And it can be explored from places far away from the camps, and from angles that can help us understand what motivates and sustains it. Instead we continue to see coverage that posits it as a ‘humanitarian’ catastrope, or a racially motivated ‘genocide’ being perpetuated by ‘the Arabs’ against ‘the Africans’.

The internet, and the ability to bypass the gatekeepers, makes this lack of depth and complexity even more egregious. Nothing can stop an intelligent mind from producing and publishing an insightful analysis of any situation. Nothing can prevent an engaged mind from speaking out and sharing with the world his/her perspectives and ideas on a subject. More importantly, the complexity and ‘fuzziness’ of issues can now be confronted head on, with doubt and uncertainty being allowed to come through in the works of the photographer/photojournalist.

Fazal Sheikh’s recent work in India, Moksha and Ladli and The Circle, are brilliant examples of a concerned photographer taking on a very complex issue; discrimination against women in modern day India. Without hysteria, moralizing, self rightousness or arrogance, he quietly, in his own, intelligent and sensitive way, turns his camera to a subject that is often ignored and rarely acknowledged. And he does so by placing himself, his views and his grapplings with this issue center stage. You can see samples of these books online on his website, though each book is a masterpiece of production and worth having in your library. I have the last 2, and have ordered the latest one The Circle.

What is important about this work is that as a photographer he is choosing the stance he takes, and the perspectives from which he explores the subject. Without being confined by the restraints of compassion fatigue, as would be a conventional journalist, Fazal can be free to explore the issue as a human being, as a man, and as a thinking mind.

The Hungarian photographer Balazs Gardi is doing something similar, though with a very different approach, with his new project about the world water crisis. A story too complex for magazine editors, most of whom just shrugged when he suggested it, Balazs is working to build a broad inquiry into this question, while balancing his need to continue to work for publications.

Our workshop in Ajmer, India will give us a chance to explore some of these ideas and question many of our assumptions about photojournalism and documentary photography. Most importantly, I hope that it will allow us to see the possibilities we each possess as individual intellects, creatives and actors, to articulate and produce works that are unique, insightful and determined to serve a purpose other than the quick sale, the double-page spread or the competition award. I hope that we will be able to examine India, a nation covered from angles so cliches as to at times completely bury its lived reality, from perspectives that challenge us individually, and confront us with our fears, prejudices, preconceptions and free us to find new insights about issues and about ourselves.  A tall order, but why aim any lower?

The real revolution in photography and photojournalism is taking place not in the tools of the trade, but in the stories we can tell, the way we can construct them and bring them to the world. We are no longer constraint to the printed page and its linear story telling limitations. We are also no longer constrained by ‘gatekeepers’ who decide for us which of our works is acceptable or not.

Yes, it all sounds too idealistic and I am the first to admit that it may be nothing more than wishful thinking. But at least we can think it today, to imagine the possibilities, while remaining grounded in our daily reality. Just 5 years ago, as I began my career, imaging this was not even possible. As I stood in doorways and corridors, often out on the streets, waiting/begging for an audience with an all-powerful editor, I could hardly imagine how I would try to do something on my own.

So if nothing else, at least these possibilities exist. I think that we are moving to an age when the best, the brightest and most compelling are no longer waiting in corridors, but simply going out and producing fabulous work.

Its all quite scary, and at the same time very exciting.

The Allure of Ajmer: On Saints And Empire Building

As soon as that holy man of virtue departed from Delhi to other worlds, the country, in general, and the city in particular, fell into a turmoil and were subjected to ruin and destruction

The man in question is Delhi’s most famous Sufi saint Nizam al-Din Auliya of the famous Nizamuddin Auliya shrine located in the old city of Delhi. The ruin and destruction refered to here by the Bahmani poet Isami is the collapse of the Tughluq empire.

From amongst all Sufi orders, the Chistis were most closely associated with the construction of the Indo-Muslims states in India. In paticular their patronage was central to the planting of such states in regions of South Asia never previously approached by Islamic rule.

It is this central role in the creation of the Islamic empires in India that is taking us to perhaps the city most associated with a Chishti saint – Ajmer. The shrine of Moinuddin Chishti is sacred to all faiths and the saint significant enough for the Emperor Akbar to visit on 14 separate occasions. While working in Jammu Tawi in Jammu recently I repeatedly saw Hindu owned businesses decorated with a replica or photographs of the shrine.

The role of the Sufis in the arrival, spread and consolidation of Indo-Islamic rule in India is what I hope to explore in my own project. It is what is taking us to Ajmer, Rajasthan. I hope that it will offer us a chance to challenge many of the fundamental ideas about when and how Islam arrived and spread across the region. And give us a deeper understanding of the syncretism that Sufi Islam found with Bakhti Hindu practices which later gave rise to a pluralist tolerance between the two communities, including a willingness to share a sacred space (such as these shrines) and the creation of a deep tradition of anti-clericalism in poetry and literature.

I will be putting together a broader essay on the Sufis and their role in the construction of the Indo-Muslim political state for my own project site. I will let you know when that comes together.

Some interesting reading material, if you have the time or the inclination:

Richard M. Eaton’s essay in Gilmartin’s Beyond Turk and Hindu which we told you about earlier, plus

P.M. Currie, The Shrine And Cult of Mu’in al-Din Chishti of Ajmer

Christian W. Troll (ed) Muslim Shrines in India – Their Character, History and Significance

The Workshop Schedule

Sara and I went over this a few times, but we finally arrived at a proposed schedule for our workshop.

Please note in particular the dates for submissions and review of story ideas:

Preparation Work & Deadlines

• Story l/ideas must be sent to Sara and Asim by June 15th
• Story review/comments from Sara and Asim by June 30th
• Story revisions due to Sara and Asim by July 10th
• Stories approved by July 15th

The Workshop In India

• August 9 — arrive in Ajmer
• August 10th – workshop begins
  • Day 1: Group meeting & talks (location to be determined) from 8 am to 6 pm
  • 15 minute portfolio review for each student
  • Asim and Sara discuss: aftermath project, engaged photographer vs mainstream photojournalism; story narrative and structure;
  • Day 2 – day 5: Start to shoot, then group meetings at 6:00pm – 8:00pm
  • Day 6 – Group discussion day for mid-point reflection, re-direction as needed, feedback, questions, etc
  • Day 7 thru Day 11 — continue shooting in field, but written story outlines are due
  • Day 11 — written story due. no shooting if written stories have not been finished.
  • Day 12 — final edits, visual stories
  • Day 13 — wrap up, show finished stories.
  • August 23 (Sunday) — travel to Delhi to catch flights home

I am working with some people in Ajmer to arrange a decent hotel for us. I am assuming that most all of you know how to navigate yourself to the city of Ajmer. Trains from Delhi are the easiest and actually the most fun. Just email me if you have any questions about that. There is usually a need to book a few days in advance, and you can do that online with a credit card.  Otherwise, if people know their schedule I can arrange for a friend to do this and email us the e-tickets.

Contact me at <asim.rafiqui@gmail.com> and I can send you details.

So the above is the general outline. There may be small adjustments here and there, particularly once we are on the ground and working. We will remain flexible and reasonable of course.

Feel free to contact me and/or Sara if you have any questions regarding the workshop, story ideas or something else.

Best

Asim Rafiqui

World Press Photo And The Numbness of Repetition: Stephen Mayes Speaks

Stephen Mayes, World Press Photo Secretary for six years, gave a widely noted keynote address at this year’s event in Amsterdam. In what can only be described as a strange coincidence, he echoed sentiments I had written about back in the summer of 2008 that photojournalism today has become repetitive and conventional.  To quote from my earlier post:

There is another underlying reason why photojournalism is dying, and that we are still not prepared to confront.  The reason is that most photographers and photojournalists are purveyors of cliches and repetitive, predictable stories.  Mental asylums, prostitutes in third world countries, drug addicts in third world countries, the homeless, street kids, dying HIV/AIDS patients in Africa, polluted cities, Latin American migration pathways, KKK, burqa/taliban/fanatics in Islamic countries, China pollution, China growth, China mingyons, China modern, China rich, India AIDS etc. etc.  One could create a Chinese menu of a couple of pages to represent a belief amongst photojournalists that photojournalism is about pathos and emotions, and that there are some ’subjects’ that are what it does. We have lost our love of the story.  We are no longer telling interesting stories.  In fact it could be argued that photojournalism today is basically middle class voyuerism.  It carries with it the stifling and infantile morality of a middle brow suburban family and attempts to deliver ’shock’ stories to titillate them into watching. Or it just reduces to historical and charter-tour cliches stories that could be rich, complex and eye-opening.

In a strikingly similar vein you can hear the far more experienced and articulate Stephen Mayes speaking at the World Press Photo awards this year.  You can hear an audio recording of his talk.

I was particularly struck by his comments that reflected much of my thinking on this issue.  As he says in his talk (as scribed by Jens Haas from the Notes From Nowhere blog) :

The overwhelming impression from the vast volume of images is that photojournalism (as a format for interpreting the world) is trying to be relevant by copying itself rather than by observing the world. Nowhere is this more obvious than at World Press Photo where every year the winners stimulate a slew of copyists (in style and content). It’s easy to understand why when we consider that the last twenty years has seen an explosion in the numbers of professional photojournalists and a collapse of the traditional markets. As more photographers compete for less page space, a lot of work ends up in competitions as the only outlet – and as the largest, World Press Photo gets more than its fair share.

Every year, the jury is astonished by the repetition of subjects and the lack of variety in the coverage. From the infinity of human experience the list of subjects covered by the entrants would fill a single page, and (excluding sports as a specialist area) could be reduced even to three lines:

- The disposed and the powerless
- The exotic
- Anywhere but home (the American election would be one of the exceptions to this rule.)…

This is the general view, the blurred impression of 470,214 images and of course there are many exceptions. But meanwhile hospitals and the sick (and especially mental hospitals), the afflicted, the poor, the injured are photographed way in excess of their actual numbers. And I have a feeling that there are as many photographers as drug users in the Kabul’s Russian House. As one juror said this year, “90% of the pictures are about 10% of the world.”…

- Over represented: commercial sex, suffering black folk, Muslim women in veils, same sex couples kissing, holding hands
- Under represented: middle class, affluent drug users, real sex, personal sex, black culture and expanded vision of black life outside Africa.

I encourage you to listen to his entire talk.

I recently raised this issue in a workshop I held in Dubai for young photographers just starting out on their careers or thinking about pursuing photojournalism as a career. Too many too quickly confine their ideas about ’subjects’ and ‘focus’ to the conventional arenas of photojournalism as they know and understand it. Few were able to jump to the realization that photojournalism is also about story telling, and that there are so many stories that are just not being told! And all too often they chose subject based around pathos and emotions. Few could think of ideas that were built around a new set of objectives for example to provoke thought and make an argument. None thought about stories from within their own lives, or their own social spaces in the UAE.

There is a whole new world of photography. Its greatest change is not in the technologies that we are being told will save us – not in multimedia, not audio sound recordings or any such, but in the fact that we can now do our own stories, new stories, and take them out to the world without first having to get the approval of an editor, a curator or a jury. And with this liberty comes the possibility of re-inventing what photojournalism is, and how we go about telling stories, and of course, the stories we tell.

So lets begin.

The Dust From Blood Filled Eyes: On Bangladesh and Acknowledgment of Crimes

Chapter 9 of Totten, Parsons & Charny’s book Century of Genocide is dedicated to Bangladesh.

But my earliest realization of the horrors that had been inflicted on the people of Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) in 1971 came through two poems by Faiz Ahmed Faiz.

Stay Away from Me (Bangladesh I)

How can I embellish this carnival of slaughter,

how decorate this massacre?

Whose attention could my lamenting blood attract?

There’s almost no blood in my rawboned body

and what’s left

isn’t enough to burn as oil in the lamp,

not enough to fill a wineglass.

It can feed no fire,

extinguish no thirst.

There’s a poverty of blood in my ravaged body—

a terrible poison now runs in it.

If you pierce my veins, each drop will foam

as venom at the cobra’s fangs.

Each drop is the anguished longing of ages’

the burning seal of a rage hushed up for years.

Beware of me. My body is a river of poison.

Stay away from me. My body is a parched log in the desert.

If you burn it, you won’t see the cypress or the jasmine,

but my bones blossoming like thorns in the cactus.

If you throw it in the forests,

instead of morning perfumes, you’ll scatter

the dust of my seared soul.

So stay away from me. Because I’m thirsting for blood.

Bangladesh II

This is how my sorrow became visible:

its dust, piling up for years in my heart,

finally reached my eyes,

the bitterness now so clear that

I had to listen when my friends

told me to wash my eyes with blood.

Everything at once was tangled in blood—

each face, each idol, red everywhere.

Blood swept over the sun, washing away its gold.

The moon erupted with blood, its silver extinguished.

The sky promised a morning of blood,

and the night wept only blood.

The trees hardened into crimson pillars.

All flowers filled their eyes with blood.

And every glance was an arrow,

each pierced image blood. This blood

–a river crying out for martyrs—

flows on its longing. And in sorrow, in rage, in love.

Let it flow. Should it be dammed up,

there will only be hatred cloaked in colors of death.

Don’t let this happen, my friends,

bring all my tears back instead,

a flood to fill my dust-filled eyes,

to wash this blood forever from my eyes.

(Translations by Agha Shahid Ali, from his book The Rebel’s Silhouette)

These poems, when I first came across them in the early 1980s, cut past all the obfuscations and euphemisms that until then had been used by Pakistanis to speak about the 1971 conflict. More than any official history book, these words revealed how a nation inflicted such deep and inexcusable suffering on to its own body politic. And much of it on the basic of vanity and bigotry.

It is estimated that nearly 3 million East Pakistanis were killed in a 9 month period. Over 10 million were displaced because of the mayhem created by members of Pakistan’s military and political establishment. The East Pakistani’s crime was a determined, non-violent political movement to claim their rightful place at the head of the Pakistani government.

The 1970s elections had been fairly and overwhelmingly won by the then province of East Pakistan. But handing the levers of power to a people spoken about it the lowest and most rascists terms by the members of West Paksitan’s elite was unthinkable.

A genocidal campaign to break them was more palatable.

And it was a campaign carried out with the encouragement and support of that ‘liberal, democratic’ leader, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. In his excellent memoir Journey to Disillusionment, Sherbaz Khan Mazari reveals the inside story of this ambitious and ultimately flawed individual who not only precipitated 2 major wars, but began and sustained his career by getting in to bed with Pakistan’s military henchmen.

His later legacies would include the mutilation of Pakistan’s constitution in 1973 with the infusion of questionable, obscurantist and basically unjust ‘Islamic’ clauses and amendments that would lay the ground work for regional calls for ‘Sharia Law’, and are in fact the foundations for the recent crisis in Swat. But I will write more about Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and his legacy in a separate post.

Pakistan has never formally acknowledged its crimes in Bangladesh, nor prosecuted any of those involved which includes some of the top member’s of the military brass and the political establishment On May 16th when the Bangladeshi Foreign Minister officially asked the Pakistani Government, through its Bangladesh High Commissioner, for an acknowledgment, prosecution and an apology, the Pakistani envoy responded by saying ‘Let bygones, be bygones’

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Saiful Haq Omi is a young Bangladesh photographer. One of a new generation of amazingly talented photographers emerging from that country. In fact, I can’t stop talking about photographers like Shehzad Noorani and Munem Wasif and others that this often forgotten country has managed to unleash onto the world stage. They are in my opinion amongst the very best working anywhere in the world today.

In a short email exchange, as I congratulated Saiful Haq on being a finalist for the prestigious Alexia Foundation Grant, (NOTE: he was also a finalist for the 2009 Aftermath Grant) I mentioned to him how much I would love to visit Bangladesh some day, and do some work there, as a small gesture of friendship and atonement for what I know has been a bloody, brutal and perhaps most painful to a new generation of Bangladeshis, an unacknowledged crime.

His response, as all Bangladeshis seem to respond when I raise this issue – with a combination of gentle humility and anxious openness was – and I quote:

I was born 10 years after the war ended, 1980. But I have carried war in my heart. Almost half of my family died , they were all killed. And if you come to my home , on the 26th of March- Our liberation day or on the 16th december , our victory day you would hear that someone still cries. And that is my mother who is crying.

I carry the war in my heart , I carry the war which I never saw, but I will carry till my last day. The War is Me!

Perhaps the Pakistani envoy would do well to  remember that it is the victim that chooses to forgive, to decide whether a bygone is a bygone. The sheer arrogance, callousness and inhumane indifference exhibited by the ‘official’ voices of Pakistan is stagering if not outright criminal!

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We lack processes for forgiveness. For a region that has seen so many genocidal massacres, I find it strange that we, the people of South Asia, have few if any processes for forgiveness. Sara Terry is an American photographer who has done extensive work on the aftermath of war. Her project on post-war Bosnia – Aftermath: Bosnia’s Long Road to Peace, remains for me one of the finest examples of photojournalism that i know of. More recently she has been involved in a brilliant and creative project documenting indigenous practices of reconciliation and forgiveness in the continent of Africa.

We would do well to learn from the Africans. I can’t wait to see the results of Sara’s work.

In the mean time, as the official voices of Pakistan remain silent if not outright dismissive, members of the Action For A Progressive Pakistan have come forward and spoken from which I quote:

The outrageous dismissal of Bangladesh’s demand by the Pakistani foreign office – “let bygones be bygones” – is a shameful reflection of Pakistan’s constructed amnesia over the horrific actions of its Army and its political leadership. Not only has there never been a move on the part of the Pakistani state to apologize to Bangladesh, there has not been any sustained effort by citizens’ groups to pressure the government to publicly acknowledge the truth.

As Pakistanis, we find this unconscionable. We find it unconscionable that the Pakistani army raped, killed and pillaged our brothers and sisters in East Pakistan in 1971. We find it unconscionable that the Pakistani state has steadfastly refused to acknowledge these atrocities for the past 38 years, leave alone hold those responsible for them accountable as suggested by its own Chief Justice in the State commissioned inquiry. We reject the Pakistani state and army’s claim that these atrocities were committed in our name.

Its not much. But it is a start. I hope that the Bangladeshis will be patient as we work ourselves towards the truth. It is a lot to ask, perhaps unreasonably so of a people terribly wronged. But it may be the only thing that can offer the tears that eventually remove the dust from our blood filled eyes.

A Kinda/Sorta Conversation With Magnum’s Peter Marlow

No I have actually never had a conversation with the great Peter Marlow. I have never even met him. But he wrote a blog post back in 2007 to which I responded with some comments.

I am posting these comments here now because I realize that these comments, made back in July 2007, contain within them the seeds for what eventually has become my ‘The Idea of India’ project I am currently working on. It surprises me to see the continuity of thought that I was able to sustain – something I can’t claim I have ever achieved before – and that eventually, nearly 12 months later was expressed as this new project.

Peter’s original post explored how the Balkan conflict was ‘officially’ represented in Serbia, and that even today it is best referred to as ‘NATO aggression’. As an American visiting Serbia for a series of exhibitions Peter found himself in a slightly uncomfortable position and had to carefully negotiate what is still clearly a very sensitive issue in the country. While giving a talk at a workshop that he held for Serbia photojournalists, Peter explains that he..

…showed a press card created by our New York office, bizarrely for the ID photograph they used a shot of me wearing anti-flash goggles on the deck of the aircraft carrier. As many of the people in the room had shot the story from the ‘receiving end’ I could feel a strong reaction as soon as I mentioned the ‘Kosovo Crisis’ and my own coverage of it. I asked the audience if this was the right terminology, and was told rather sharply by one photographer that the correct expression was “The NATO Aggression”.

I was reminded of a recent experience I had had in Japan while on assignment there for National Geographic (France) magazine and decided to write a response to Peter’s post which read something like this:

peter;

your experience with the serbian photojournalists reminded me of a recent experience i had with some japanese manga artists. while on assignment in japan i had the opportunity to speak to a couple manga artists famous for their works depicting the horrors of the aftermath of the hiroshima bombings. i was moved by the power of their work and by the immediacy of their memories of the terribly day of the bombing. their work powerfully depicted the sufferings, and later the humiliating abandonment of the victims by their own fellow japanese.

however, i was also very perplexed when i realized that throughout our conversations we avoided any discussions about the broader, historical context of the event. no one mentioned that japan at that time was a nation at war, that millions had died in countries in asia resisting her expansionism, that her occupations iin south-east asia and south asia were brutal and resulted in unmentionable atrocities and so on and so forth. we only talked about hiroshima decontextualized from wider events.

the issue of history, japan’s role in WWII, her occupations and war crimes of course remain controversial issues even today and her history books continue to face criticism for their avoidance of specific facts.

see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_history_textbook_controversies

these are painful issues and not easily resolved. and i am not suggesting that the war justified the hiroshima bombings. i am merely suggesting that ignoring facts is an act of will, a choice that one makes perhaps because one is determined to hold on to one’s prejudices or beliefs. or simply that playing the role of a victim takes less effort!

calling the war in kosovo merely ‘NATO aggression’ is neither historically correct nor a defensible position. it is an act of transforming oneself into ‘a victim’, hence excused from broader moral issues. it encourages us to simply not make an effort beyond our current beliefs. it is a prejudice that suggests a determination to not examine or give a hearing to the wider issues at play in the conflict, including human manufacturing of history, the use of propaganda, the cold lies and manipulations of politicians, the atrocities and injustices carried out ‘in the name of the nation’ and other abstract, little examined assumptions.

your suggestion for a series of workshops in serbia is a fabulous idea. i do believe however that photography can avoid falling into the trap of pandering to any one side ‘of the same story’, but to use photography’ to develop an awareness of the broader story, to help a nation question her prejudices, to encourage citizens to confront uncomfortable truths and view points and use photography as a way to raise awareness, change ideas, and develop new dialogues where previously only rhetoric may have existed.

kosovo and serbia have continued to hold on to their rigid myths with little or no effort to develop a new dialogue that may spare them further wars and further suffering of their people. prejudice, hate, and self confirming and aggrandizing beliefs still fill the air in both regions. photography may never convince people to change their ideas, but it can certainly begin the process by encouraging them to step into uncomfortable situations and confronting those we may have previously dismissed or disliked.

i am sorry that this is so poorly written. i am still waking up here in sweden.

today we are told that photography has no role to play in bringing forth the truth, and that it is merely to be reduced to illustration or art. but i disagree. photography is not just the pictures, but also the research and act of stepping out to take the pictures. these intellectual and physical elements also differentiate one photographer from another. some are better at it than others in clearly measurable ways!

and they are perhaps the most important elements in helping us learn, grow and change – we have to read, and we have to step out into new world, confront people there, and actually engage and deal with them. this is where photography outdoes literature, poetry, paintings etc. because it is the only creative endeavor that forces us to create and maintain a dialogue with our subjects. other endeavors allow this dialogue, but do not necessarily demand it (i will say nothing about works by people like jeff wall etc.)

imagine, a group of serbian photographers having to do personal stories about life in kosovo, or on the edges of divided cities like mitrojvica! i can see the workshop going far beyond the banality of aesthetics, exposure control, RAW processing or frame filling! it steps into a whole new world where perhaps we can once again begin to discover the reasons why man picked up the camera in the first place and started to bring pictures back home – to amaze us with the incredible things we saw in the world, and to surprise us with what we had never expected!

Asim (July 24th, 2007)

Creating Tempests In Tea Cups Or What Else Can A Photo Editor Do!

The following recently appeared on the pages of the New York Times:

“A picture on May 5 with the continuation of a front-page article about the porous Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and the strategic advantages it offers to Taliban insurgents fighting American troops, showed a silhouetted Taliban logistics tactician, who was interviewed for the article, holding a rifle, creating the impression that the weapon belonged to him. The Times subsequently learned from the photographer that the rifle belonged to the owner of a home in Pakistan where the interview took place, and that the Taliban tactician had held the weapon only for the purpose of the photograph.

“Had The Times known this information at the time of publication, it would not have used the photograph to illustrate the article.”

The image in question is here:

Photography By Zachary Canepari

There have been a round of blog and online discussions on this matter so I will not repeat most of what has been said. In fact, most of it is trivial, misleading and completely misses the point.

When I read this public ‘apology’ by a paper that I have repeated accused of indulging in shoddy, manipulative and in fact irresponsible journalism (see my two blog posts titled The Worlds Most Dangerous Nation and Only Interesting If Its Madness) when it comes to regions Pakistan/Afghan I could not help but laugh.

I found their language and their justifications condescending and manipulative.

∞

It is condescending because it attempts to convince us of the ‘integrity’ of this newspaper which will not let stand even the most ‘minor’ infractions. It attempts to create in our minds the idea that this publication adheres to only the highest and most rigorous standards of journalistic ethics. So high that even this young photographer’s minor infraction deserves a public flogging and a kowtowing to the readers.

We are supposed to forget that this is a newspaper that has repeatedly sent its photographer’s into the US military embedded photographer program, and that continues to in fact provide most all its reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan from these embedded (read: censored, controlled, scripted, manufactured, crafted, sculpted, curtailed, manipulated, overseen and monitored) positions and perspectives. We are supposed to believe that journalist ethics are less about the way we gather the news and more about the way we present it.

We are supposed to forget that this is also one of a number of American newspapers whose journalists failed to ask even the most basic of questions and failed to examine even the most public of facts during the build up to the invasion of Iraq. Their ethical reporters were on the front lines of journalistic jingoism, helping sell the war to the American public.

And far from being an anomaly in the past, it even now continues in its refusal to ask hard questions about what in fact is actually taking place inside Southern Afghanistan, and continues to publish reports and pieces by a number of its journalists whose entire reporting relies on official government sources from the American, Afghani and Pakistani sides.

The same news publication’s journalists and photographers continue to win international and domestic awards despite the fact that they have mostly been at the mercy of a masterfully planned and executed military propaganda machinery.

And yet the newspaper has never taken it upon itself to let us know that it understands that the perspectives it reports in its pages when it comes to Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are completely and near-absolutely colored by military and political interests that rather not tell us the truth but only that which will help us continue the misguided and unjust conflicts in the regions.

Into this foray arrives a young photographer, who produces for effect a picture that he knew he would need to produce to have it published in this newspaper. He should have been sanctioned for his manipulation, but a public flogging seems completely over the top. It has unnecessarily, and for a trivial manipulation, damaged the career of an otherwise talented and hardworking individual.

In the scheme of journalistic manipulations, from reporting from within the embed program to mindlessly repeating the inanities of ‘power brokers’ just to maintain access to them, Zachary Canepari’s infraction is trivial. It should have elicited nothing more than a behind-the-door reprimand. Lets keep in mind that neither the photograph nor the manipulation were important to the story that was run, or affected what the story attempted to discuss.  In fact, it was a pointless illustration (its just a silhouette!) and the story could in fact have stood on its own even without it!

∞

The apparent apology is also manipulative. It places the entire responsibility on the shoulders of the young photographer and hence (as has been done many times by many publications in the past) acquits  the editors at the publication.

Editors (and not just photo editors, but the main editors) have significant influence in determining what kinds of pictures are made because they have a significant influence on what kinds of pictures are published. And the dirty little secret of photojournalism is that all photographers, particularly young and ambitious ones, learn quickly what editors want.  All photographers want their pictures published and they, either through experience or by watching the work of others, quickly absorb and understand what kinds of pictures a certain editor is looking for and prefers to run.

No where is this ugly reality more true than at wire agencies. Having watched the mind numbing repetitiveness of images being produced by local Palestinian, Afghani, and Kashmiri wire news photographers, I could not help but understand that they are simply taking orders from the desk editors, who are in turn, simply taking orders from their client publications. Wire photographers only shoot what sells, and what sells is what the editors are buying. The machinery of mass produced conflict imagery is little examined or understood, while the fantasy of the ‘independent’ photojournalist ‘exploring’ and ‘discovering’ the world carefully managed and sold.

And even major news magazines do this, as I have learned from direct experience. Editors will in fact even call their photographers and tell them what kinds of images they want. The same has been confirmed to me by a few other photojournalists working for major American news magazines – that editors will tell them what they want in the image, in particular, the kind of ‘mood’ and ‘atmosphere’ they are looking for.

This has happened to me on at least 2 occasions while working for two different American weekly news magazines. The editors, disappointed that my images from one of Pakistan’s frontier cities, were not ‘appropriate’ insisted that I had to produce images with a greater atmosphere of ‘menace’ and ‘threat’! When I failed to do so, they simply went to their archives and used the work of another photographer because it fitted the ‘atmosphere’ they were trying to create more than my work did.

On another occasion and with a different weekly news magazine I had an editor explicitly ask me if I could confirm that the people in the region of Mohmand, (FATA) Pakistan that I had photographed were ‘Al-Qaeda and/or Taliban supporters’ because that would be the only way she could actually consider running the work. When I refused to ‘confirm’ this, the work was shelved.

Photographers learn quickly what will publish and what will not.

Zachary Canepari, an otherwise fine and talented young photographer, has recently been shooting a lot of assignments for the New York Times newspaper. I find it impossible to believe that he was not  aware of the kinds of images and the mood that the editors were looking for.

Organizational cultures influence our behavior within them. We become aware, without even explicitly being told, which behaviors are awarded and which sanctioned. Young photographers shooting for the New York Times, (or other mainstream American newspapers) quickly learn how certain regions of the world need to be depicted and the kinds of images that in fact get published.

It is why we continue to see a the same sorts of pictures being produced from places like Afghanistan and Pakistan that we have been seeing for years; burqa clad women, bearded and demonic looking protestors, maniacal mosque worshippers and fanatical mullahs. And it is why it comes as no surprise that these shallow, embedded and conventional depictions continue to win major awards.

The visual language that a photojournalist employs does not occur in a void but in fact reflects a publication and editorial environment where that language is understood, received and celebrated. Those that speak this language the best are awarded with publication, fame and ‘authority’. This remains a little discussed fact and most all editors in fact distract us from this broader reality by constantly nit picking on minor image manipulation issues. As was recently done when a jury dismissed the work of a Danish photographer for making the sky look a bit too blue!

The outcome of that last non-existent controversy was the photographer declaring that in the future he would only participate in competitions with pictures made in ‘black & white’!

Can there be a better description of the idiocy of these discussions than this one? A competition that will accept the absolutely artificial and manipulated representation of the real world that is b&w photography,is the same one whose jury was ‘angered’ that a photographer had made his sky a bit too blue!

We are truly in the land of morons!

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There are serious questions about journalistic integrity and ethics that need to be asked. From the kind of language that is used in reporting, to the means by which news is in fact actually gathered to how suceptible to power it has become. These are questions at the heart of the crisis that inflicts American journalism today. However, useless discussions about the extent of Photoshop manipulation or ’set up’ images seem rather besides the point and nothing more than the grand standing of photo editors who realize that these trivialities are pretty much all that is left for them to pontificate on as the broader decisions about content and context have been taken away and handed to MBAs and advertising executives!

Blood Is Not Thicker Than Water: On The Death Of My Friend Raza Khan

A Raza Khan photograph - Peshawar 2008 while on assignment for Stern Magazine. As he dropped me off on this corner and drove off to run a quick errand, he shouted back 'Asim, now don't wander where I can't find you. ok? I will be back and then we can do other things!'. I did not wander.

Raza was my rock.  He was my eyes and ears on the dangerous Pakistani frontier with Afghanistan. He was the only person in Pakistan I trusted with my life and I repeatedly placed it in his hands. He never ever let me down.

He was officially a fixer, but Raza Khan was far, far more than that.

There isn’t a photograph I have made in the tribal regions of Pakistan that did not have the help and/or advice of Raza Khan.  From the streets of Peshawar, to the alleys of Jalozai,  the mountains of Mohmand, and into the dangerous center of Mingora, Swat, Raza Khan was always by my side, always watching, always, protecting, always alert to anything and anyone who may pose a threat to me. I never ventured to Pakistan without calling him first. Often he would drive all the way from Peshawar to meet at the Islamabad airport.

Raza Khan died last week in a car crash. He fell asleep at the wheel of the car he was driving. Perhaps he had just pushed him once too often trying to help a couple of foreign journalists get their jobs done.

In 2008 while shooting in the crowded bazaar’s of Peshawar, Raza Khan asked me to hand him my wallet for safe keeping.  ‘They will target you because you look like a foreigner’, he said. I handed it to him. 15 minutes later his pocket got picked! We laughed at the irony, at the sheer stupidity of the situation. I had no cash, no bank cards and at least 2 weeks of assignment work to complete.

A few hours later Raza Khan turned up at my hotel room with $1000 in cash – ‘You return it to me whenever you can. I made a mistake. Your work has to continue’.

In 2004 Raza Khan asked me to take a photograph of him and me together.  We were in the wilds of the Mohmand tribal agency. We asked a passing truck driver to stop and take a picture of the two of us together with the mountains as a backdrop. As we stood together he put his hands around my shoulders and said ‘Show this to your wife so she can believe that you have family in Mohmand.’

He had always wanted to take his daughter for a dinner at Peshawar’s PC Hotel and he told me the last time I saw him, which was in 2008, that he would bring her with him the next time I came back to Pakistan and that we could all eat together. The honor that he had bestowed upon me with that statement made me blush. A deeply conservative Pushtun, Raza Khan had actually suggested that I, a non-family friend, could meet his daughter who would otherwise never be allowed into the company of strangers. It was then and there that I realized that I had long passed from being merely a friend, that I was no longer just another photographer working with him, but that our relationship had evolved to something far more, and deeper.

It was then that I realized that I had become family.

I will ask permission from his sons to take his family, and in particular his daughter, to dinner to the PC Hotel in Peshawar the next time I am in Pakistan. It is a promise that I must keep.

Raza Khan was my eyes and ears on the dangerous Pakistani frontier with Afghanistan. He was the only person in Pakistan I trusted with my life and I repeatedly placed it in his hands. He never ever let me down.

I can’t remember the last time I wept at the loss of someone.

I can’t remember at all.

I have wept for Raza.

I don’t want these tears to dry because I don’t want to forget him

Note: Time Magazine’s former Pakistan bureau chief Tim McGirk was a close friend of Raza Khan and has written a short obituary remembering him and celebrating his spirit, courage and generosity.

Time Out: India

No, I have not run out of things to say. I am simply traveling in India continuing my The Idea Of India project work.

I am now in Jammu and will soon be traveling on to Srinagar, Kashmir for a few days. In the mean time I will not be updating this blog, but plan on getting back to work on it with new posts starting May 16th 2009.

So, now would be a good time to read through some of the more lengthy archive pieces!

Or simply appreciate the peace and quiet.

The Lunatics Have Taken Over The Asylum! How We Americans Privatized Our National Treasury

One of the least realized and understood consequences of the financial/economic crisis is that the National Treasury of the United States of America has effectively been privatized and handed over to the very criminals and psychologically deranged business goons who crippled us in the first place.

For more, read a recent piece in The Atlantic magazine called The Quiet Coup Simon Johnson reveals the hideous truth

And if you are still not convinced, you can read Naomi Klein writing in Rolling Stone Magazine

Or if you still want more, you can read Matt Taibi in his piece called The Big Takeover

President Obama has yet again decided to fight the wrong war with the wrong people and against the wrong people.  I wrote about his plans in Afghanistan earlier – plans based on a misreading and a misrepresentation of the causes of the crisis in that country.

The lunatics have taken over the asylum!

What My Brain Feels Like Right Now!

I am in Dubai to teach a photo workshop. I am feeling disoriented and lost here and can’t really even think of anything intelligent. In fact, that I loved this video should tell you about where my mind is and how well it is working. Have a drink!!!

more about “What My Brain Feels Like Right Now!“, posted with vodpod

In Your Face Baby: Photography the Bruce Gilden Way

This man works with Leicas, those cameras infamous for being ‘discreet’ and ‘invisible’.

This nonsense that has accompanied this lovely camera has misled and confused many a young and experienced photographer.

Watch Bruce Gilden – you don’t have to like his work, or him, but watch him. Using these so-called ‘discreet’ cameras, he is working direct and in-your-face.

Its aggressive, its based on pre-focus and pre-exposure,  and its a translation of his vision into specific images.

Forget being invisible, start being risky. Step out, and put that camera in your face and get close to the subjects. Be invisible by being insistent and professional and focused.

I am not a fan of Bruce Gilden’s work – not all of it at least, but he is an example of what I mean when I say that being invisible is about being part of the situation you are working in, and making sure you take your space in that situation.  Its not the size of the equipment, or the ’shutter noise’ and any of that nonsense. Its just the photographer’s determination to fit in and to take what s/he came to get.  With politeness and with the subject’s permission of course.  Of course.

more about “In Your Face Baby: Photography the Br…“, posted with vodpod

Kill The Fly On The Wall! Joel Meyerowitz At Work

It is one of the most persistent myths in photography – the photographer (and his/her equipment) so silent and discreet that they may as well be a fly on the wall.

It is believed to be a skill fundamental to street and documentary photography.

It isn’t. And no matter how often I tell students this they seem to forget!

Invisibility is a state of mind achieved largely by being visible and in the center of the situation until such time that your presence there is permitted and assumed and people begin to go about their actual business.

Here is Joel Meyerowitz working the streets of New York City. Far from discreet or invisible, he is in fact ‘in your face’ most all the time anticipating movements and the placement of objects (people, street signs, gestures. etc)

Having a small camera can help, and a quiet shutter is more polite, but they are not the key to this kind of work .

So forget your shyness, stick that short focal length lens on and charge into the crowd! (Speaking of which, I will post about Bruce Gilden’s technique as well – talk about in your face and taking risks!!)

more about “Kill The Fly On The Wall! Joel Meyero…“, posted with vodpod

The Dance of The Photographer: Gary Winograd

Gary Winograd’s technique reveals the tenacity, focus and consistent willingness to fail that lies at the heart of great photography.

We can hide behind our equipment but the fact remains that the secret to producing compelling work, or at least attempting to since most of us will never produce even one masterpiece (and Winograd produced dozens in his life time!), requires nothing more complicated than hard work, consistency, determination, and a willingness to spend hours out in the locations where one is searching for an image.

A rather pedestrian reality to the myth of great photography. I can’t think of any one of the masters who did it any other way.

Watch Winograd in action as he works a location to get a few frames – its obsessive, its filled with failed attempts, and it is risky.

And its fast! Using pre-focus techniques, hand held light meter readings (or maybe not!) Winograd works with a speed that at times defies belief!

more about “Garry Winogrand“, posted with vodpod

The Lost Art of Visualization: Some Old Man Explains

See it before you shoot it.

The image is made in the mind before it is captured on the frame or CCD.

A very basic lesson that I find few of my students remember these days with their super fast, 1000 auto focus point digital cameras and the infinite ability to just ‘fix it later’.

So here is some old man, perhaps you know him, talking about this issue.

( Full disclosure; I have never been a fan of Adam’s work, finding it rather overly technical and cold. But I respect his rigor, and his commitment to the craft, and the singular passion and belief with which he carried it out.)

more about “The Lost Art of Visualization: Ansel …“, posted with vodpod

Not Just Dancing: Our Music Carries Our Pain

There is an increasingly perceptible gap between our need for social transformation and America’s insistence on stability, between our impatience for change and American’s obsession with order, our move towards revolution and America’s belief in the plausibility of achieving reforms under the robber barons of the ‘third world’, our longing for absolute national sovereignty and America’s preference for pliable allies, our desires to see our national soil free of foreign occupation and America’s alleged need for military bases.

Eqbal Ahmed in a dialogue with Samuel Huntington, from No More Vietnams: War and the Future of American Policy

The streets of Pakistan may not be filled with photogenic ‘rebel types’ to fill our evening TV screens here in Europe and the USA. However, voices for change, social justice and rights are strong and largely coming from a new generation of students, activists, intellectuals and ordinary citizens. I can’t help but feel that we are saying farewell to the accommodations and compromises of our parent’s generation, and that a new Pakistani society is working its way up into the seats of power and civil society. And that it is a society that is young, educated, religiously conservative but without being fanatical and intellectually empty.

And as always, when it comes to nations of ‘the other world’, these changes are largely being missed by a media largely obsessed with matters of American policy and insisting on seeing Pakistan less as a diverse, complex and sovereign nation and more as a ‘vassal’ state to American state power and geopolitical priorities in South Asia.

The rock band ‘Laal’ (means the color red in Urdu) has been a musical voice for these transformations. Below is a beautiful version of one of Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poems put to music, at a time when the citizens of Pakistan have confronted power and achieved the reinstatement of the ousted Supreme Court Justices -  a landmark moment in Pakistani political, social and civic history.

This video itself captures the anger, frustration and marginalization that sits in the hearts of the ordinary Pakistani.

Faiz’s words give these feelings the immortality, dignity and the honor that they deserve.

The video has English translations for those of you who may not understand Urdu.  Particularly Faiz’s magnificently musical, lyrical Urdu!

more about “Not Just Dancing: Pakistan’s Activist…“, posted with vodpod

The Definition of Courage: The Israelis Speak

The testimonies now being given by a number of Israeli soldiers who took part in the recent war on Gaza, a war that Richard Falk, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights, called a criminal act, offer us a glimpse into acts of human and individual courage.

There is no other way to describe the actions of these young men who were involved in what was nothing short of an international war crime against the unarmed civilian population of Gaza.

The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz has been publishing a series of testimonies – the paper’s Amos Harel’s has two pieces, IDF in Gaza: Killing civilians, vandalism, and lax rules of engagement and ‘Shooting and crying’.

The Inter Press News Agency also had a piece, Israeli soldiers expose atrocities in Gaza

The matter is so large that even the otherwise obfuscating New York Times just had to give it some attention in a piece called Further Accounts Of Gaza Killings Released

And you can read Richard Falk’s views on the matter here Israel’s war crimes which was published recently in Le Monde Diplomatique.

These soldiers are finally exhibiting some bravery because it takes none to hide inside armoured vehicles and tanks and tear apart an unarmed civilian population.

But to speak honestly in the face of a nation whose conscience, morality and sense of moral right and wrong has been drowned by sectarian and ethnic prejudices requires nothing short of courage.  These soldiers were commanded to kill for god, (and yes, there were rabbis with the soldiers handing out booklets telling them that palestinians can be killed with impunity to protect the ‘holy land’!) and country, a command that in all nations sanctions murder in return for medals, political posts, and mythical immortality. They could have chosen the easy way out, and just moved on.

And we should not underestimate this act.

This is not the first time Israel’s soldiers have spoken out. They are in fact a rare example to the soldiers of all nations who have been asked to commit acts of murder against innocents.

We should also not forget this; that they are offering us an example of the individual conscience over collective passions and hypnosis. Not an easy act.

Our International institutions of justice and law have failed us, usurped as they are by the powerful and militarily footloose!

The young Israeli men (and maybe women?) know well that their silence will not be questioned, and that no international institution will be able to touch them – Israel enjoys an impunity in the court of law that most all other nations (other than the USA) probably envy!

And yet they are speaking out, reminding us the real nature of war once all the nationalist and political jingoism has been cut through -  lies that in fact some of Israel’s more ‘cultivated’ minds like Amos Oz, or David Grossman and Yehoshua (to name a few) insist on reproducing for us and by their reputations transforming into ‘truths’!

Now once again and probably for just a little while the thin veil, woven mostly by cowardly political, journalistic and corporate apparatchiks, is lifted to show us what life is like on the other side of the Israeli guns.

Richard Falk in his piece on Israeli war crimes was not optimistic that anything will or can be done to bring to book the military and political leaders who carried out their acts.

As we listen to these young men fighting to save their conscience, morality and souls, we can only wonder if anything will become of their words and acts?

Probably not.

Not yet at least.

But we can hold on to the belief that these testimonies are now part of the official records and histories. And for as long as we continue to collect those we can have hope that some day, if not tomorrow then the day after, justice will indeed be done.

To courage, then.
UPDATE: More details are continuing to emerge, as they have been for many years by the way, of the’ lax rules of engagement’ (read as: kill first and wonder later) under which the Israeli army has operated in the West Bank and Gaza for decades.

FURTHER UPDATES: The Guardian updates the situation with this piece about t-shirts being sold to the IDF, and further revelations about the killings of civilians by the Israeli army.

Confused? The Crisis of Credit Visualized

Its quick and simple; we were taken to the cleaners by a group of people who knew exactly what they were doing. Or at least that when things fell apart they will just get away with it! If you still have the patience to try to understand what the sub-prime and the associated economic crisis in the USA (and the world) is, take a look at this:

more about "Confused? The Crisis of Credit Visual…", posted with vodpod

Where The Head Spun: March 15th 2009

Michel Lewis tries to understand the Icelandic man, and the destruction of an entire country at the hands of fishermen-turned-bankers. Paragraph that made me laugh and reminded me of the rhetoric of the ‘Asian Tiger’ era:

Icelanders—or at any rate Icelandic men—had their own explanations for why, when they leapt into global finance, they broke world records: the natural superiority of Icelanders. Because they were small and isolated it had taken 1,100 years for them—and the world—to understand and exploit their natural gifts, but now that the world was flat and money flowed freely, unfair disadvantages had vanished. Iceland’s president, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, gave speeches abroad in which he explained why Icelanders were banking prodigies. “Our heritage and training, our culture and home market, have provided a valuable advantage,” he said, then went on to list nine of these advantages, ending with how unthreatening to others Icelanders are. (“Some people even see us as fascinating eccentrics who can do no harm.”) There were many, many expressions of this same sentiment, most of them in Icelandic. “There were research projects at the university to explain why the Icelandic business model was superior,” says Gylfi Zoega, chairman of the economics department. “It was all about our informal channels of communication and ability to make quick decisions and so forth.”

∞

William Pfaff ponders on why the citizcns of the Republic looked away while the Bush Administration tampled all over their constitution and interternational law. A comment that stuck out:

Very few people among the American public seemed to care-except Fox television executives, who recognize a commercial opportunity when it hits them between the eyes.

Fox began a drama in which each program was devoted to the American president’s torturer doing whatever had to be done to thwart a new threat to the American republic. The hero would apply one of the tortures pronounced legally OK for Americans to use, until the terrorist, gasping or screaming, blurts out where the nuclear bomb has been planted.

This turned out to be one of the most popular programs on the air. It seems that President Bush himself watched. People in the torturing business joked that they got some good ideas from the program.

∞

The New York Times Book Review, generally predictable and pointless, did however carry an interesting review of a very interesting writer and on a very interesting subject.  Rashid Khalidi, is a professor of Arab studies at Columbia University, the director of its Middle East Institute and holds the ‘Edward Said’ chair of Arab studies at the University.  His new book is called Sowing Crisis: Cold War And American Dominance in the Middle East. For all the simpletons who may have asked ‘Why do they hate us!’ it may be time to actually read something and ask a more intelligent question.  An excerpt:

Immediately subsequent to the sudden disappearance of its Soviet rival, in 1990–91, the United States engaged in an extraordinarily confident assertion of its suddenly unrivaled power in the Middle East via its leadership of a grand coalition against Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in the Gulf War of 1991, and in convening the 1991 Arab-Israeli peace conference in Madrid, which led to the 1993 Oslo Accords, signed on the White House lawn. Both were unprecedented initiatives in various ways. Although nominally a collective effort, the 1991 Gulf War was the first American land war in Asia since Vietnam. Meanwhile, Madrid witnessed the first multilateral peace conference in history bringing together all the parties to the conflict, Arab and Israeli, and all relevant international actors. Moreover, it constituted the first and only serious and sustained American (or international) effort in over half a century at a comprehensive resolution of the Palestine conflict.

In light of these apparently radical departures in American policy immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it would be useful to revise our understanding of the Cold War as simply a prolegomenon to the current era of unfettered American dominance over the region. Such a revision would help us answer a number of questions: Was the United States previously as constrained by the presence of its Soviet rival as sometimes seemed to be the case, and as these two novel departures immediately after the demise of the USSR seemed to indicate? Alternatively, was America in fact more dominant in the Middle East throughout the Cold War era than may have appeared at the time?

∞

No Pharaohs In The Modern World: The Liberal Muslim & Indian Democracy

The stranglehold of the orthodoxy, especially in its political and religious form, has to be loosened and slackened. The answer lies in more and more Muslim communities moving towards democracy. There is no short cut to democracy. . . . There is no place for pharaohs in the modern world. (Mushirul Hasan)

Martha Nussbaum has had a deep and committed engagement with India – a land she calls ‘her second home’, for many years now.  This American philosopher with an interest in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political philosophy and ethics, has found a deep interest in modern India’s struggles with democracy and ethics.

Nussbaum is currently Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, a chair that includes appointments in the Philosophy Department, the Law School, and the Divinity School. She also holds Associate appointments in Classics and Political Science, is a member of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, and a Board Member of the Human Rights Program. She previously taught at Harvard and Brown where she held the rank of university professor.

Her latest missive on the situation in India comes as a bit of a surprise because it addresses a subject few have had the will to address; liberal Muslims confronting violence, discrimination and injustice, and yet choosing the path of the law, non-violence and intellectualism to confront it.

A new essay Land of My Dreams: Islamic liberalism under fire in India Martha Nussbaum offers a fascinating history of one of Delhi’s great liberal educational institutions, the Jamia Millia Islamia.  As Nussbaum describes it in her piece:

Jamia was born radical. Its curriculum emphasized the study of nationalism as well as the study of Islamic history and the Qu’ran; its admissions policy welcomed male and female, Hindu and Muslim; its pedagogy emphasized debate and contestation in the teaching of all subjects, including religion, denouncing the mere “passive awareness of dead facts.” The school had strong links with theorists of progressive education such as Bertrand Russell and Rabindranath Tagore and thus gave substantial weight to the arts and vocational education.

The piece is as much about the Vice-Chancellor of the institution, Mushirul Hasan, whose story, as Nussbaum points out, reminds us of 3 things:

First, the values we associate with classical liberalism-such as the defense of the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, and procedural due process-are not exclusively Western values. During the independence movement in India, they were reinvented by a colonized people who had seen just how little their Western masters honored such norms.

Second, these values are not tepid and centrist, as we sometimes hear, but rather, truly radical in a world of nations increasingly under pressure both from external violence and from internal quasi-fascist forces.

And finally, Hasan’s story shows that there is a distinctive and genuinely Islamic form of liberalism, long-lived and drawing inspiration from religious texts and their central concepts.

Unfortunately The Boston Review magazine allows people to comment on the essays they publish.  The reactions to Nussbaums’ piece stretch the realm of decency and coherency. I suspect that in the coming weeks the number of ‘comments’ consisting of slurs, abusive dismissals, sexist denigrations and outright insults against this scholar, philosopher, humanist and ethicist will only grow. These commentators do a disservice to not just Nussbaum, but to the very community that apparently think they are defending by abusing the writer and her works!

Martha Nussbaum is also the author of a book on the rise of Hindu fundamentalism and the threat to Indian democracy called The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future which was reviewed by Pankaj Mishra in the New York Review of Books

The ICRC Torture Report & The Search For The Truth

Contents
Introduction
1. Main Elements of the CIA Detention Program
1.1 Arrest and Transfer
1.2 Continuous Solitary Confinement and Incommunicado Detention
1.3 Other Methods of Ill-treatment
1.3.1 Suffocation by water
1.3.2 Prolonged Stress Standing
1.3.3 Beatings by use of a collar
1.3.4 Beating and kicking
1.3.5 Confinement in a box
1.3.6 Prolonged nudity
1.3.7 Sleep deprivation and use of loud music
1.3.8 Exposure to cold temperature/cold water
1.3.9 Prolonged use of handcuffs and shackles
1.3.10 Threats
1.3.11 Forced shaving
1.3.12 Deprivation/restricted provision of solid food
1.4 Further elements of the detention regime….

This is the Table of Contents of the recently released ICRC Report On The Treatment of Fourteen ‘High Value Detainees’ in CIA Custody.

It is also clear and precise in its indictment, for example:

The allegations of ill-treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill-treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

The tireless and determined Mark Danner of the New York Review of Books has written more on this report and it makes for compelling and anxious reading.

Senator Patrick Leahy, Chairman of the US Senate Judiciary Committee, has been speaking across the country trying to garner support for an investigation into the actions of the Bush Administration and its now nearly countless violations of American and International Law.  We, Americans and non-Americans, need to join our voices to his. In his own words, his actions are meant to:

One path to that goal would be a reconciliation process and truth commission. We could develop and authorize a person or group of people universally recognized as fair minded, and without axes to grind. Their straightforward mission would be to find the truth. People would be invited to come forward and share their knowledge and experiences, not for purposes of constructing criminal indictments, but to assemble the facts. If needed, such a process could involve subpoena powers, and even the authority to obtain immunity from prosecutions in order to get to the whole truth.

Whether this will come to pass, I can’t tell.  That he is at least demanding it gives me hope.

Crime Scene Investigation:Wall Street

“ProPublica is an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest.”

That is how this non-profit journalism site, let by Paul Steiger, the former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal. Stephen Engelberg, a former managing editor of The Oregonian, Portland, Oregon and former investigative editor of The New York Times, is ProPublica’s managing editor, describes itself.

They have initiated a series of investigations into the many financial corruptions scandals now breaking out as a result of the economic and business crisis now infecting America.

It makes for important and insightful reading, not the least because it reveals how so few took so many for so much!

This crisis is underpinned by theft and lies – by criminal acts that were either ignored or willfully accepted as the price of success.  And the investigations and court cases are only now beginning.

As an aside; ProPublica, despite lacking ‘cool tools’, or fancy multimedia, or even celebrity/entertainment gossip, appears to be quite successful.

They are one of a few such models being attempted by an industry that is struggling to find its way forward.  I find it interesting that a group of mainstream editors are in fact returning to the foundations of journalism; investigation, public interest, non-alliance with corporate advertisement dollars and  the avoidance of the push of profits.

I do not have data to judge how well these organizations are doing – though their reporting is first class.  I will add further information as I find it.

But I can only hope that this return to the responsibilities and intent of the 4th estate is successful and emulated by others.

Play It Again Sam!

There are articles/essays that I find myself repeatedly returning to. They stand the test of time and in this age of throw-away journalism and me-too punditry, these masterpieces are reminders of why real writing and engaged journalism holds such an appeal and how it can cut past prejudices and indifference.  I will continue to link to others in this post as I think of them.

Ken Silverstein’s Parties of God is perhaps one of the clearest and most honest pieces written about the emergence of popular democracy in the Middle East and in particular within Islamic political institutions. Its appearance in a mainstream American magazine was surprising, and necessary. Favorite paragraph:

Talking about political Islam, or Islam at all, is difficult for Americans because our stereotypes are so strongly held. Islamists are imagined as poor, uneducated fanatics who, having turned to God for comfort and sustenance, are particularly prone to irrationality and violence. They do not allow their women to drive (when in fact women drive in every Muslim country except Saudi Arabia); indeed, every woman in a veil is seen as a victim of male oppression. When Islamists in Indonesia attack Playboy or Muslim Brothers in Egypt denounce racy Lebanese dancers, it is a sign not only of backwardness but of sexual repression, which is smugly asserted to be a root of Islamic terrorism. (It is doubtful that Osama bin Laden, who has at least three wives, turned to terrorism out of sexual frustration.) Fear of appearing sympathetic to movements that are frankly hostile to the U.S. government is, I suspect, another barrier to frank discussion of Islamic movements, as is the media’s clear bias in favor of Israel.

Pankaj Mishra’s 3 part essay on Kashmir – Death In Kashmir, The Birth Of A Nation & Kashmir: The Unending War, about the conflict there remains amongst the best primers on the situation ever put to the news/magazine page.  A must read for anyone trying to figure out what is going on in Kashmir, even though it was written in 2000 at the height of the militancy, it still remains relevant and honest and insightful.  There are too many favorite paragraphs but here is one that reminds us that life in this so-called ‘heaven on earth’ was very difficult and cruel even before partition:

The oldest among Kashmiris often claim that there is nothing new about their condition; that they have been slaves of foreign rulers since the sixteenth century when the Moghul emperor Akbar annexed Kashmir and appointed a local governor to rule the state. In the chaos of post-Moghul India, the old empire rapidly disintegrating, Afghani and Sikh invaders plundered Kashmir at will. The peasantry was taxed and taxed into utter wretchedness; the cultural and intellectual life under indigenous rulers that had produced some of the greatest poetry, music, and philosophy in the subcontinent dried up. Barbaric rules were imposed in the early nineteenth century: a Sikh who killed a Muslim native of Kashmir was fined nothing more than two rupees. Victor Jacquemont, a botanist and friend of Stendhal who came to the valley in 1831, thought that “nowhere else in India were the masses as poor and denuded as they were in Kashmir.”

What Ails Photojournalism: Part IV

(Continued…) Many predicting the death of the newspaper are wrong.  It will not die.  It will change.  The newspaper will become something different, its content will not compete with the internet, but complement it.  It will be read differently, and it will not just be on your mobile phone.  It will be everywhere, and all sorts of media will continue to play a part.  Video has many limitations, not the least of which is that it has to be seen end to end and anything longer than a minute or two is taxing and difficult to concentrate on on a tiny hand held device.

So there are a lot of issues and obstacles even in the new world.  Books are still around because they are cheaper, easier to carry, easier to store, easier to retrieve and share than anything technology has offered so far.  I am willing to bet that the book will survive a long time.

The sky is not falling.  Its colors are changing.

i think people like Anderson complaining about lack of editorial opportunities or credibility of amateurs are missing the point.

We are indeed facing change, but it is also an opportunity.  However, to find the opportunity we have to stop repeating the cliches of the camera industry or video industry, or those selling video journalism workshops and all the rest interested in selling us new toys.  We have to start to recognize that the economics has changed, that the previous outlets that kept us satiated are no longer able to do so for financial reasons.  that new toys, new software, sound along with pictures, is not the essential answer.  That media storm does not know what the future is going to be, that just because you have video, audio and text will not really make you a star.  Those who are doing better today are the ones who were doing better in the past anyways.  assuming a greater creative and editorial and also cost burden may make it interesting for a magazine/newspaper occasionally, but its an unsustainable model.  media storm stories cost a lot of money, and use a lot of resources, and take a long time to produce.

In the end, it is the big boys of news that will continue to thrive here.  And if you want to play with them, then you will have to fit into their structure somehow.

This piece sees photojournalism as an autonomous craft.  It is not.  It was from its birth intimately tied to the economics of publications.  When photographers challenged these they were left to starve.  Look at Eugene Smith’s career.  Now, finally, we are able to liberate ourselves from this stiffing, suffocating environment.  Now, finally, photojournalists can free themselves to be something beyond mere picture takers for ready-made stories or hacked together propaganda.  Its a brave new world complete with uncertainty and possibilities.

I say this as I sit here and stare into the void – confident that I have strong new ideas, scared that no one will value them, determined that i have no choice but to step into the void itself.  Your second reference about ‘tenacity’ was right on the mark.  Like any field where you pursue a passion a love and a need to be free of the machinery of the capitalist, you must be prepared to pay a heavy price.  Our societies do not value those who do not serve the interests of others, but merely their own whims, curiousities, loves and fears.

By the way, in conclusion; i am wrong in all that i say!

We are all wrong.  We cannot predict what will happen tomorrow.  We can only look at the facts in our face.  I am wrong.  I will be proven wrong and that is just fine.  What i am not prepared to do is to accept the incomplete justifications for known realities.  It is too easy and too unthinking.  Simply telling me that photojournalism is dead, long live citizen journalism, is nonsense.  There is no such thing as citizen journalism.  Citizens are not journalists – it denigrates the works of real journalists.  Citizens can only be bystanders, or witnesses to random events.  They cannot analyze, help us understand, nor can they be expected to follow up and follow through.  They cannot and will not investigate, pursue, search, question and create a context.

phew, and a good morning to you all!

asim

What Ails Photojournalism: Part III

(Continued)…Photojournalists will have to liberate their minds from these constraints – the weekly magazine editor looking for the ’sensational’, and the printed page looking for the simplistic, to go after stories that are beyond news, beyond crisis, beyond the sensational and concentrate instead on the creative and the excitingly compelling.  Too many pander in the obvious.  Too many are purveyors of cliches.  I see so many photographers on your blog who continue to represent the world through the false exotic.  Steve McCurry too, with his recent work on Buddhists, carefully eradicated any evidence of the presence of the Han Chinese and the oppression of the Tibetans by the Chinese administration.  Instead, we received an idealized, fossilized, pre-18th century vision of the place.  Everything that would suggest our engagement with the current dilemmas facing Buddhism, Tibet etc. were just not there.  Cliches, false exotics.  They may have technique and such, but they lack story telling creativity and often just plain curiousity that could reveal new ideas and new ways of telling.  Furthermore, they have to stop ‘documenting’ the obvious that is in front of them.  For I am not talking about story telling as a method to layout photographs.  I mean the very ideas themselves – the issues and the subjects that are pursued, need to take a leap forward.

We have seen these changes in art, in literature, in poetry and such.  Yet, photojournalists young and old seem trapped in conventions, and prejudices.  they are offering variations to the same most of the time, rarely if ever a creative leap.

Why is this story idea shift important? Because it will allow us to engage a new community of people and work with groups, institutions, individuals and organizations far beyond that which we have so far.  Not that this is new, but it has to become a standard.  Photojournalism and photography schools are failing at this miserably.  Places like ICP produce hacks mostly, machine-tool photographers, me-too documentarians pushing out and working within structures of conformity.  Worse, they are never trained or educated to understand that there are markets outside of the editorial space.  Even I do not know this market, but I know that it is there.  It is more a matter of positioning yourself beyond the technicalities of photo making.

Ernesto Bazan, a photographer i believe you should feature on your site, has taken a very individual path to photography and such.  Workshops, his own publishing book, engaging students, a personal vision, a passion for the craft, a willingness to work in many different arenas, a talent to engage a wide range of people beyond the photo editor and the weekly magazine.  His career is a testament to the incredible opportunities available to professionals and creatives.  If you look at his work, his passion, you would not think that things are falling apart.  Rather, that there are more ways today to be a professional photographer and photojournalist than ever before!  That the old standards, the old outlets, are not necessary if you are creative, driven and intelligent enough to articulate to others.

So Anderson lamenting the decline of editorial sales is not related to the rise of amateurs.  The amateurs are in fact not competing with the professionals.  Again it is not as if they are a competitive alternative.  But, that editors are choosing to do away with a requirement of quality and rigor in order to save cash.  And why would i say that? Because where publications have the funds, they choose to work with the professionals consistently.  Look at the New York Times Sunday Magazine – Kathy Ryan still have the budget, and she works with the best she can find.  Until her budget is cut, and then things will change.  But she is not trawling Flickr.  But the news pages maybe, Time magazine is, but then again Time and Newsweek have lost their vision, their raison d’etre so to speak and since they are now mostly run by MBA hacks, there isn’t a soul there that can understand how these magazines need to change.  MBAs work with formula’s and strategies driven by an obsessive slavery to ‘customer preferences’.  This is one of the great falacies of our time.  Where customer preference is important, so too is creativity and offering an interesting product.  Something Apple understands, or peer-to-peer designers do too (ok, poor analogies, i admit ) Our newspapers are run and controlled by people who see news as just a product, apply MBA tools and spreadsheets to ‘improve sales’, assume that if you pander to the infantile and the consumerist, sales will increase.

And yet, The Economist goes from strength to strength, and Time/Newsweek are weaker than ever before.  The Economist offers nothing fancy, merely pretentious high brow and often complicated and engaging news.  They too are a public magazine and yet have found a segment to grow and expand.  Newsweek is pandering to the useless and the empty for example.

These rends more than technology is what has displaced hard news stories and hard documentary journalism.

Our industry, photojournalists, do not want to face the realities.  Newspapermen/women do not want to admit their limitations.  It is easier to suggest, sexier and commercially more lucrative for many companies, to suggest that what we are facing is a tectonic shift in technologies of use.  This sounds like the internet bubble when the store front was to disappear and the internet to win all.  Well, guess what? That did not happen, the sky did not fall, brick and mortar companies in fact won that battle by adjusting and become smarter about the dual store front strategy and outlasted and out foxed most all the badly designed and poorly managed internet only firms.  Today, a new generation of internet firms have a solid real world foot print e.g. Amazon, which maintains of the largest and most sophisticated warehousing and warehouse management systems in the world.  The future is an amalgamation. (Continued…)

What Ails Photojournalism: Part II

(Continued…) We have lost our love of the story.  We are no longer telling interesting stories.  In fact it could be argued that photojournalism today is basically middle class voyuerism.  It carries with it the stifling and infantile morality of a middle brow suburban family and attempts to deliver ’shock’ stories to titilate them into watching. Or it just reduces to historical and charter-tour cliches stories that could be rich, complex and eye-opening.

Just look at National Geographic – if its Iran, its Persipolis.  if its Bolivia, its the Antiplano.  if its Pakistan, its the Taliban.  Tiresome, boring, repetitive, predictable, uncreative, uninteresting stories about some of the most interesting and evolving countries in the world!  Even the formulas and mechanics of photojournalism are boring and predictable.  This magazine refuses to go and explore places in new ways, to produce angles that are creative and interesting, and that challenge our thining and ideas about a place.  Is Persipolis really all that one has to stay about Iran today? This incredibly complex and incredibly interesting country is left silenced!

The Missouri School beliefs are so old and hollowed that they produce not more than what i call comic book photojournalism.  By the way, I was at the MPW in 2002 so i have seen this personally.  Look at the recent multimedia piece that MediaStorm did called ‘Common Ground’ – this is so trite, so simplistic, as to be boring and predictable from frame #1.  Family packing, family walking to car, family hugging – its like a linear story book, with pictures that attempt to create nothing interesting, to provoke no thought or make any argument.  Its is a join-by-numbers photography, which after a while, the viewer can start to complete herself!!  The picture illustrate the obvious!

Someone once said that Bertold Becht’s work was never about pathos or emotions, but always about the need to provoke though and make an argument.  That is a good comment about the state of photojournalism.

And keeping true to the argument for the need for the particular; photography has been growing in areas that we have not been paying attention to.  More photo books are being published and bought, more workshops are being held, more people are broadening their repertoire of works and finding creative ways of funding their projects.  That is, the changes being bought about today are in fact creating some powerfully interesting responses.

Not the least of which is – people are starting to tell new stories in new ways.  And i do not mean multimedia here – multimedia is merely a mechanism that can never hide the banality or predictability of a subject.  It is a means to an end, but if the end if poor, no amount of flash and dash will save anything.

We have to remember that it is newspapers that are turning increasingly to amateurs.  It is not a ‘rise’ of the amateur.  The amateur picture has been found to be mostly free, easily found, and little paid for.  This is its reasons for popularity.  There is no such thing as ‘an army of amateurs’ – these are rhetorical constructs that have no meaning.  What there is in fact is an ‘army of photo editors with no money and personal careers to save’ who have desperately tried to hide the fact of their economic and editorial castration by distracting us with false arguments of ‘citizen’ journalism, an euphemism for ‘cheap’.

Our only hope (i speak of editorial photographers, photojournalists etc. and not of fashion, commercial and other photographers who by the way are doing just great what with all the increase in advertising as a business) is to accept the challenge of the reliance on the amateur work to produce work that could only be done so by a professional.  of course multimedia will be an important part of this – it is a tool of course – and allow us to tell great stories in new ways, but i personally believe that the challenge we face is the need to tell new stories, better stories, from new angles and to overcome our class, nationalistic, religious and other prejudices to find broader and more engaged human experiences to share.

Now, I am not so naive to believe that the latter recommendation will change the state of photojournalism and its economics.  Far from it.  What I do believe is that by broadening, extending our ideas of what photojournalism is about, it will allow us to free ourselves from the constraining mediocrity of the typical photojournalism end game i.e. publication in a magazine like Time or Newsweek.  Too much of what passes for photojournalism is done with the belief, mostly hidden, that the customer is the magazine editor, that the structure is the linearity that is necessitated by the printed page.  Photojournalists and news photographers shoot for a sheet of paper.  Their universe of individuals and characters is restricted mostly to editors, writers, photo editors, their assistants, other photographers and hangers-on.  99% of photojournalism magazines, festivals, competitions and such caters to itself.  It is one of the more closed artistic/non-industrial crafts in world.  Our language, our references, our aethetics, or ideas of what is ‘photojournalism’ and what is not is so limited, has change so little in the last 50 years, and has such little relevance or interest outside of its own community, that we have stagnated.  Visa Pour L’image or Look3 may as well be a gathering of astro-turf salesmen.  There will always be a few curious outsiders, but they are not really that important to the event, nor are they engaged to carry something away from them. (Continued…)

What Ails Photojournalism: Part I

A long suffering friend received this long, winded discussion from me as his breakfast treat – dated July 2008 (and not November 2007 as I had previously stated!), I let loose some thoughts about photography and photojournalism and the worries that we were all dealing with.  It was written in a single breath and hence carries within it errors of insight and judgment.  But I think it remains interesting enough, particularly now when we are so desperately trying to understand why the world of the photographer is changing.

∞

I apologize.  Over 4 cups of coffee I had to get these thoughts down.  A recent piece in the Columbia Journalism Review created an avalanche of thoughts that i had to get down.

See here: http://www.cjr.org/essay/flickring_out_1.php

Anyways, this is a long commentary, at times rambling, so i apologize and ask that you proceed with caution 

The Columbia Journalism Review piece was interesting.  I have kept up with a number of publications that come out from my Alma Matar so I had seen this piece earlier.  As with many such pieces, I was once again left with a sense that they tend to say things a bit too obviously, and with an exaggerated sense of prescience that may in fact not be warranted.

What I am saying is that perhaps the situation is not all that bleak.

First, you notice that the piece concentrates on daily news stories only.  In fact, it is one of the errors of this piece that it conflates the works of a Kratochvil with those of a local newspaper photographer.  And most such pieces continue to speak of photography as one monolithic craft, which in fact it is not.  Even the much read Vincent Laforet piece made this mistake, to say nothing of the banal suggestions he offered at the conclusion of it.  I was dismayed more by the reactions of readers who actually thought they walked away with some insights

But, I digress.

We must speak of photography in the particular.  Daily news photographers are facing a threat from amateurs and local professionals who the latter who have shown that they possess the same tools and the same drive.  Particularly when it comes to the coverage of international i.e outside USA events and such.  But there is a false belief that this is happening because of the emergence of camera phones or multimedia.  This is an example of the cart before the horse, an example of incomplete evaluation of an industry and an insistence on not seeing the real driving forces behind the decline of news, and of photojournalism as a related part of the news industry.

The first assault on daily news photojournalism emerges far before the arrival of multimedia and take places in the form of economic cutbacks and the economics of wire photography.  Wire agencies were the first attack on the staff photographer.  Reuters, AP, AFP and others argued that their local stringers, could work harder, for cheaper, and get the needed images without the newspapers having to send out their staff.  Over time this in fact has become the model.  We have to keep in mind that major American newspapers started cutting back overseas bureaus and reducing photographic staff way before any multimedia capabilities arrive at our doorstep.

Russell Baker writing in the new york review of books pointed out in a piece about the decline of the newspaper as we know it that:

“Journalism was being whittled away by a Wall Street theory that profits can be maximized by minimizing the product. Papers everywhere felt relentless demands for improved stock performance. The resulting policy of slash-and-burn cost-cutting has left the landscape littered with frail, failing, or gravely wounded newspapers which are increasingly useless to any reader who cares about what is happening in the world, the country, and the local community. Cost-cutting has reduced the number of correspondents stationed abroad, shriveled or closed news bureaus in Washington, and crippled local reporting staffs which once kept an eye on governors, mayors, state legislatures, small-town rascals, crooks, and jury suborners. It has also shrunk the size of the typical newspaper page, cutting the cost of newsprint by cutting news content.”

you can read that piece here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20471

There was a transformation in the newspaper industry in the 1980s.  Most all the major newspapers went from being family own operations to publically owned or privately supported businesses.  And with that transformation came the primacy of profits over responsibility, economics over effectiveness.  It also became a mantra in the USA that the local trumps the foreign; readers were increasingly narcissistic and wanted to read about their class and its petty needs (fashion, holiday travel, accessories, technology toys, cars, real estate, design and interior decoration) and about gossip (celebrity).

Hence, there has been no reduction in the fees and payments made to photographers working to produce fashion, style, food, architecture, interiors etc.  As more and more magazines have offered more and more space to such works, these photographers who focus on such work, have and are doing just fine in soliciting major fees and in fact even taking their works into galleries.  There the problem is that there is a large nunber of competitors, but the wons that come out in front demand very high fees.

But foreign news and photojournalism (stories of pathos and emotion) have lost out, because the newspapers are not interested in selling or representing this.  The principal fall of such work comes from a belief that it just does not sell well.  And advertisers too are reluctant to allow their ads to sit besides stories of HIV victims in Zimbabwe for example.  When a pharmaceutical company pays a magazines hundreds of thousands of dollars in ad revenue a month, it can without trying convince editors that that story about kids suffering from the after effects of some depression drugs would not be a good idea to run.

My point being – there are powerful economic forces at play that have resulted in the decline of photojournalism.  These same forces compel editors to seek cheap and free images of sites like Flickr.  This is a cause and effect debate; flickr has not led to the decline of photojournalism, but in fact the decline of budgets as led to the desperation to use flickr, wire agencies, local stringers etc.  Another proof of this is that day rates for photographers have not increased in the last 10 years at least because the budgets created from the board do not allow editors to do this.

So Allisa Quart’s piece misses all this that is taking place in the news industry, and that has a direct impact on all facets of the industry.  It is as if we photojournalists have our heads in the sand, and in fact continue to falsely believe that multimedia will save news photography.  It will not.  Amateurs are not replacing professionals, but in fact have become the last resort of editors desperate to find content for little money.  There are rare situations where the camera phone has given us images we would not have otherwise seen, there is no doubt.  And this is to be celebrated but not considered a threat to professionals.  Abu Ghraib being an example.  Such situations are rare and far between and cannot replace the need for the daily.  Furthermore amateurs do not commit themselves to a story, they merely do the convenient as it presents itself to them.  Professionals will always been needed to pursue, commit, investigate, take risks, go the distance.

Photos are not journalism.  Journalism is an endeavor with a commitment to communal and social responsibility.  It is a public service with the objective of keeping check on abuses of power, the rights of the individual, the protection of the well fare of the community, the exposure of the illegal, the tracking down of the downright unjust.  I said this before in a lightstalker post, journalism will rely on amateurs the day it itself become amateurish.  It is not multimedia that will save journalism or photojournalism, but a commitment to quality and a commitment back to the public service.  We are far from this realization.

So what next? This is not just a tirade.  There is another underlying reason why photojournalism is dying, and that we are still not prepared to confront.  The reason is that most photographers and photojournalists are purveyors of cliches and repetitive, predictable stories.  Mental asylums, prostitutes in third world countries, drug addicts in third world countries, the homeless, street kids, dying HIV/AIDS patients in Africa, polluted cities, Latin American migration pathways, KKK, burqa/taliban/fanatics in Islamic countries, China pollution, China growth, China mingyons, China modern, China rich, India AIDS etc. etc.  One could create a Chinese menu of a couple of pages to represent a belief amongst photojournalists that photojournalism is about pathos and emotions, and that there are some ’subjects’ that are what it does. (Continued…)

How The Israeli Arms Industry Learned To Dance With Bollywood.

Rafael is an Israeli arms manufacturer and here is their attempt to convince ‘feminine’ India of her need for protection thanks to the modern, macho, western Israeli man?

With lyrics such as ‘I believe In You.  You believe In Me. Together. Forever. We Will Always Be. Dinga Dinga Dee’ we have a glimpse of the sophistication of the world this video emerges from and is distributed in to.

more about “Iron Eagle Nominee: Israeli Armsdog-M…“, posted with vodpod

Why TV Makes You Stupid: Example 1

more about “The Daily Show Eviscerates Santelli a…“, posted with vodpod

An Unnecessary Education

One of first things my father exclaimed when I returned from the USA with an engineering degree in hand was ‘So, now can you fix my refrigerator?’ Some part of me wanted to believe that he meant it as a joke, but another part realized that in fact he was being serious; an education is an investment for future returns that must manifest themseves in practical achievements and solid job/working capabilities.

Why else would you want to send your child for an education?

∞

The New York Times recently carried a small piece by Patricia Cohen called In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth. It regurgitated arguments against a humanities education that we have been hearing for decades, perhaps since the very birth of the field itself.

And these are arguments that we all of course well understand; at a time when millions have lost their jobs, other millions confront the possibility of being laid off, and still more, mostly students, prepare to enter the ‘workforce’ it is natural and indeed common sense to question whether one has employable skills. Particularly in the USA where most of its graduating body will be burdened with large college loans that become payable within weeks after they leave their institutions.

(When did an education become bondage? More about that in a separate post.)

Ms Cohen aptly in facts asks:

But in this new era of lengthening unemployment lines and shrinking university endowments, questions about the importance of the humanities in a complex and technologically demanding world have taken on new urgency.

Derek Bok, ex-President of Harvard University and a man we would expect can defend a liberal arts education on grounds other than ‘practical’ is quoted as saying ‘“The humanities has a lot to contribute to the preparation of students for their vocational lives.’

Despite an attempt to remind us of the importance of a Humanities education in helping students navigate life beyond the pay check, Ms Cohen ends her piece with this ominous note:

As money tightens, the humanities may increasingly return to being what they were at the beginning of the last century…the province of the wealthy.

That may be unfortunate but inevitable…The essence of a humanities education — reading the great literary and philosophical works and coming “to grips with the question of what living is for” — may become “a great luxury that many cannot afford.”

Unfortunate indeed!

∞

I believe that a humanities education is today more important than ever before!

There, I have said it. So now let me explain.

I think that Mark Danner said it best in his commencement address to the graduating students of the Department of English of the University of California at Berkeley in 2005.

Titled ‘What Are You Going To Do With It!‘, he argued that:

whether you know it yet or not, you have doomed yourselves by learning how to read, learning how to question, learning how to doubt.

And this is a most difficult time-the most difficult I remember-to have those skills.

Once you have them, however, they are not easy to discard.

Finding yourself forced to see the gulf between what you are told about the world, whether it’s your government doing the telling, or your boss, or even your family or friends, and what you yourself can’t help but understand about that world-this is not always a welcome kind of vision to have. It can be burdensome and awkward and it won’t always make you happy.

We are living through the aftermath of one of the most corrupt, venal, covert and violent American administration never elected to power. During those 8 years we have seen our finest journalists, intellectuals, politicians and citizens derailed by lies, obfuscations and the seductions of access to power.

And as citizens we have been convinced to support torture, accept the loss of our civil liberties, celebrate pre-emptive war, condone war crimes, remain quiet about the rape of a nation, look away from nepotism, ignore cronyism, tolerate blather masquerading as politics, surrender our citizen’s rights, believe that the enrichment of the few is in fact ‘liberty’, believe in ‘ghosts’ called ‘Islamofascism’, gamble with our pensions, imprison ourselves in criminal mortage scams, watch our kids die in wars of greed, walk away from our jobs without support or rights, tolerate being unemployed, toleratebeing homeless/evicted, privatize the National Treasury, rape our protected parks, devalue community, suspect civic duty, consider the lunacies of the christian right, fear every thing, accept a dysfunctional health care system as ‘best of class’, believe that only ‘the individual’ matters while society as a whole does not. And a lot more.

To say nothing about the ecological disaster unfolding around us, a clear consequence of exclusively technical minds unable to balance technological progress with ecological responsibility.

To say nothing of the financial disaster unfolding around us, a consequence of corruption and greed in an industry where the word ‘ethical’ and ‘asshole’ are synonyms.

To say nothing of the loss of our civil liberties and the abuse of our democratic institutions by a lunatic cabal called The Bush Administration, and their imitators across the globe, a consequence of a citizenry too easy befuddled by slogans and sound bites, and too involved in its ‘technical’ pursuits to give a damn.

One would think that if there ever was a time for ‘..learning how to read, learning how to question, learning how to doubt’, it would be now!

∞

This issue – the role and value of the humanities in public and civic life, occupied Edward Said for many decades. His two books on the issue, Representations of the Intellectual and Humanism and Democratic Criticism make for essential reading for those trying to understand why we should even bother with subjects like philosophy.

In Representations of the Intellectual, Said quotes from C. Wright Mills’ Power, Politics , and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills, reminding us:

The independent artist and intellectual are among the few remaining personalities equipped to resist and to fight the stereotyping and consequent death of genuinely living things. Fresh perception now involved the capacity to continually unmask and to smash the stereotypes of vision and intellect with which modern communications (i.e. modern systems of representation) swamp us. These worlds of mass art and mass-thought are increasingly geared to the demands of politics. That is why it is in politics that intellectual solidarity and effort must be centered. It the thinker does not relate himself to the value of truth in political struggle, he cannot responsibly cope with the whole of live experience.

You may want to re-read that.

In Humanism and Democratic Criticism he goes on to add:

That the humanities as a whole have lost their eminence in the university is…undoubtedly true. As Masao Miyoshi has claimed…the American university has been corporatized and to a certain degree annexed by defense, medical, biotechnical, and corporate interests, who are much more concerned with funding projects in the natural sciences than they are in the humanities. Miyoshi goes to to say that the humanities…have fallen into irrelevance and quasi-medieval fussiness, ironically enough because of the fashionability of newly relevant fields like postcolonialism, ethnic studies, cultural studies, and the like. This has effectively detoured the humanities from its rightful concern with the critical investigation of values, history, and freedom,[my italics] turning it…into a whole factory of word-spinning…and specialties, many of them identity based, that in their jargon…only address like-minded people, acolytes, and other academics.

If you think that that is just hog-wash, check out this story unfolding at Harvard Medical School! And for an even greater depth and insight, read this fantastic piece by Marcia Angell called Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption where she also reveals the involvement and influence of pharmaceutical companies have at American universities and colleges.

Our education programs, even the ‘acceptable’ ones are under attack by corporate and industry interests.

So who is educating whom, about what?

∞

Martha Nussbaum wrote an entire book arguing for a greater stress on a humanities education. Called Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform In Liberal Education she presented a series of case studies of a new generation of creative educators in America, and various arguments for the singular importance, nay, centrality of a humanities education for the future of American democracy and society.

In an essay discussing the book, she points out that a ‘liberal’ education:

“”liberates” students’ minds from their bondage to mere habit and tradition, so that students can increasingly take responsibility for their own thought and speech. In his letter on liberal education, Seneca argues that only this sort of education will develop each person’s capacity to be fully human, by which he means self-aware, self-governing, and capable of respecting the humanity of all our fellow human beings, no matter where they are born, no matter what social class they inhabit, no matter what their gender or ethnic origin.”

But what prevents us from understanding this?

Nothing more complex than fear. As Nussbaum explains:

Liberal education is in one way frightening. For it requires opening the personality to change and questioning, to the possibility of moving out of the security of one’s own comforting habits. In this time of fear, it is all too easy… to resist this challenge, to look for comfort to a less challenging idea of education, rooted in pre-professional and economic aspirations. To close one’s “inner eyes” is comforting; to open them with an educated compassion is difficult and painful.”

∞

The New York Times may not understand why all this matters. But then again, this is the newspaper that for example showed us during the build up to the war on Iraq that the pursuit of journalistic truth and the execution of the responsibilities of a democracy’s 4th estate were just another “…great luxury that many cannot afford.”

In a world where power has increasingly sophisticated tools and techniques to ‘convince’ a citizenry of its priorities, we need more who can think, question and understand.

We are attempting today to extricate ourselves from decades of crass corruption and scandal. America today stands at one of its lowest political, economic and cultural moments.

It is now, more than ever, that we need a generation that knows ‘…how to read, … how to question, … how to doubt.’

UPDATE: 25th July 2009: Chris Hedge’s new book Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy & the Triumph of Spectacle includes an impassioned plea for the need to centralize a humanities education. He argues, similar to what I have argued here, that it is the inability to ask the larger questions, something that one learns through a strong humanities foundation, that we have ended up in the economic and other crisis we face. He argues that the increasing focus on a for-profit vocational training reduces individuals to knowing simply how to ‘maintain the status quo’, to jimmy a few things around to keep them going. Hence the incredible financial bail outs that maintain the very system that eat itself and the country’s wealth! You can hear an interview with Chris Hedges here & here.

Where The Head Spun: March 3rd 2009

Arundhati Roy’s had some amusing comments on Slumdog Millionaire and India’s desperate need to celebrate ‘own’ it in some fashion. Favorite paragraph:

“To have cast a poor man and a poor girl, who looked remotely as though they had grown up in the slums, battered, malnutritioned, marked by what they’d been through, wouldn’t have been attractive enough. So they cast an Indian model and a British boy. The torture scene in the cop station was insulting. The cultural confidence emanating from the obviously British ’slumdog’ completely cowed the obviously Indian cop, even though the cop was supposedly torturing the slumdog. The brown skin that two share is too thin to hide a lot of other things that push through it. It wasn’t a case of bad acting – it was a case of the PH balance being wrong. It was like watching black kids in a Chicago slum speaking in Yale accents.”

Vinod Mehta’s complaints about the same movie but without the acidic wit!

D.T.Max discussed one of my favorite writers David Foster Wallace. Favorite paragraph (too many, but here is one)

His goal had been to show readers how to live a fulfilled, meaningful life.

“Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being,” he once said. Good writing should help readers to “become less alone inside.” Wallace’s desire to write “morally passionate, passionately moral fiction,” as he put it in a 1996 essay on Dostoyevsky, presented him with a number of problems. For one thing, he did not feel comfortable with any of the dominant literary styles. He could not be a realist. The approach was “too familiar and anesthetic,” he once explained. Anything comforting put him on guard. “It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most ‘familiarity’ is meditated and delusive,” he said in a long 1991 interview with Larry McCaffery, an English professor at San Diego State. The default for Wallace would have been irony—the prevailing tone of his generation.

But, as Wallace saw it, irony could critique but it couldn’t nourish or redeem. He told McCaffery, “Look, man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?”

Pankaj Mishra explains the banality of modern day democracies. Favorite paragraph:

“Shallowness and ignorance have been our lot in the mass consumer societies we inhabit, where we were too distracted to act politically, apart from periodically deputing political elites to take life-and-death decisions on our behalf. We were shielded from many of the deleterious consequences, which worked themselves out on obscure people in remote lands. The free world’s economic implosion is bringing home the intolerable cost of this collective deference to apparently efficient elites and anonymous, overcomplex institutions.”

Dude, Where Is My Anthrax?

Deadly chemical and biological weapons may be missing from the stockpile of one of the world’s largest producers of such weapons of mass destruction

These ‘agent’s’ may fall into the hands of dangerous lunatics who may decide to reek havoc on innocent civilians!

Why are we not scared?

Why has our media not inundated us with slogans, graphics and a symphony of melodies to draw our attention to this ’sensational development’?

Because the nation in question is our own United States of America and the ‘agents’ are missing from the inventory of a U.S Army institution that has already been confirmed as a source of deadly biological weapons, and whose employees have already carried out attacks against civilians!

Why are we not scared?

Read on.

∞

In late 2001 and early 2002, journalists, politicians and others began receiving Anthrax laced packages and envelopes. The attacks killed 5 people and seriously injured 17 others. It was quickly labelled Al-Qaeda’s ’second wave’ – 9/11 attack at the World Trade Center being the first.

Intoxicated by the hysteria in the aftermath of 9/11, many a respectable journalist, pundit and politician fell over themselves to ‘reveal’ evidence of Saddam’s Hussein’s involvement in this chemical weapons warfare.

It was obvious to all who the attackers were after all they were signing their packages with statements like ‘DEATH TO ISRAEL’ and ‘ALLAH IS GREAT’.

We were quickly told, obviously told, that it could only have been those damn towel heads again – the bane of American existence and way of life, them with their penchant for irrational acts of violence as taught to them by their hateful religion (here I am paraphrasing the respectable but fear ridden Pope Benedict XVI – more about his insanities and idiocies in a separate post!), them who ‘hate us for our freedoms’ as someone so eloquently put it!

We went to war. Saddam was hung. The Anthrax was forgotten, at least mostly.

Justice achieved?

∞

A few days ago the far-from-the-mainstream, non-profit press reported that the United States Army has decided to shut down its research at the U.S Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID).

Lest you think that this will significantly harm our research into health cures, the USAMRIID is in fact a U.S. Army biological weapons research facility in Maryland a.k.a. a germ warfare research and development center.

And the reason for the closure – the Army is unable to maintain an accurate inventory of all the deadly biological agents in its refrigerators and laboratories!

(WHAT!)

Even more shockingly, this is the same facility that the FBI has identified as the source of the Anthrax used to in the 2001 attacks! And the employer of the man now confirmed to have been the perpetrator!

(No, sadly it was no towel head)

It is now known that Bruce Ivins, who worked at this very lab for over 18 years, engineered the attacks, stealing the deadly materials with ease and bypassing the lax inventory and control mechanisms, sending out letters to his intended victims by signing them with the words ´DEATH TO ISRAEL´and ÁLLAH IS GREAT´.

The FBI has revealed that the evidence against this man, who committed suicide before he could go to trial, is indisputable – see recent article in Science magazine.

However, this is the FBI, and I seriously doubt that we know the whole truth. The blame for the entire episode has been placed on the shoulders of one lunatic, but I at least find it unlikely that it ends there!

We may never know the extent of this or who else was involved and may still have access to the deadly materials.

We may never know the truth.

But we do know the lies.

∞

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks these Anthrax attacks played into the hands of the scaremongers, and those desperate to find an argument to go to war against Iraq.

The atmosphere of that year derailed many a fine journalists – so many ‘award winning’ journalists suspended their responsibilities, common sense and intellectual courage and refused to challenge the slop that was being cast at them. A couple of examples from 2 major international papers to support this point:

The Guardian: Iraq ‘behind US anthrax outbreaks’

The Wall Street Journal: The Anthrax Source

Then there were the professional scaremongers, those who anxiously commit all their reserves to feed their prejudices and paranoias without waiting for any evidence. Laurie Mylorie, publisher of something called ‘Iraq News’, was repeatedly interviewed and featured as a ‘journalist’ which allowed her in an interview in 2001 to say things like :

There is also tremendous evidence that subsequent anthrax attacks are connected to Iraq. The cumulative evidence that Iraq was a key player in the September 11 attack and subsequent anthrax attacks is overwhelming. (Newsmax archive)

And in another interview, she continued thanks to her ‘research’ with this line without actually stating any sources for her claims that:

…at least two labs have concluded that the anthrax used in the U.S. was coated with two additives linked to Iraq’s biological weapons program: bentonite and silica.

Bentonite is a trademark of the Iraqi weapons program. Iraq is the only country in the world that uses it.

The German newspaper Bild also reports that according to Israeli security, Mohamed Atta, who organized the 9/11 attacks, was given a vacuum flask of anthrax when he met with the Iraqi counsel in the Czech Republic.

We also know that Saddam has enormous quantities of anthrax. In 1995, before U.N. weapons inspectors were expelled from Iraq, they estimated that he had produced 2,000 gallons of anthrax – enough to kill every person on earth. God knows how much he has now, in addition to his weaponized smallpox and other deadly biological weapons. (Newsmax archive)

Oh, by the way, what is this unique and deadly ‘additive’ called Bentonite? A quick research on any geological and mining book will tell you that Bentonite is mined extensively in Wyoming and South Dakota. It is not “a chemical additive” and it is not unique to Iraq. It is widespread and common, it is mined and used for drilling mud i.e. getting the rock chips out of a drill hole when drilling for oil or deep water. Oh, it is also mined for the clumping-type kitty litter.

And in case we comfort ourselves that this is just one lone moron or a few exceptions, we just have to turn to The David Letterman Show to find that in fact a US Senator by the name of John McCain (remember him?), went on TV and gave these statements in an interview:

LETTERMAN: How are things going in Afghanistan now?

MCCAIN: I think we’re doing fine …. I think we’ll do fine. The second phase – if I could just make one, very quickly – the second phase is Iraq. There is some indication, and I don’t have the conclusions, but some of this anthrax may – and I emphasize may – have come from Iraq.

LETTERMAN: Oh is that right?

MCCAIN: If that should be the case, that’s when some tough decisions are gonna have to be made.

Oh come on, he did not say that! Yes, he did, and thanks to the internet, you can watch it here!

(Aside: by the way, this is the same interview in which John McCain, when asked about his ‘counter terrorism approach’ responded by saying “The more serious these people [terrorists] think we are and believe we are – and we are serious – then I think they might, you know, go back to selling camels or whatever enterprise that they might want to engage in.”)

Interestingly, there have not been as many journalists or celebrity US Senators speaking out since we learned that in fact the attack was carried out by an American, who worked at a US Army germ warfare research facility, who stole the weapons grade Anthrax from a lab that had trouble tracking its inventory, who had become delusional and who signed his letters with ALLAH IS GREAT and DEATH TO ISRAEL to exploit the racism and Islamophobia being fostered in the post 9-11 America.

In the meantime, innocent scientists working at this lab were harassed and abused simply because of their ‘Arab’ ethnicity.

The USAMRIID center is now being closed because it cannot track its inventory!

The germ warfare programs are being investigated because there is evidence to suggest that they are in fact a greater source of danger to America than any delusional belief in imagined chemical terror attacks.

We challenge lesser nations to prove themselves worthy of the weapons of the civilized. The Americans have constantly been worried about Pakistan’s ‘loose nukes’. In fact, the consistently Islamophobic New York Times Sunday Magazine recently published a major piece on how Pakistan’s nukes were ‘not in control’ – I wrote about this in an earlier blog piece called ‘The Most Dangerous Nation’.

And yet, here we are, in Maryland none the less, confronted with the real, factual event of a closure of a major germ warfare center, a center from which an American military researcher, a man who worked for nearly 18 years at the lab, stole weapons grade chemicals, and carried out terrorist attacks against innocent civilians on America’s shores.

And whose inventory of deadly bacteria, viruses and germs is not properly accounted for!

Who should we be watching?

Is anyone worried?

Gaza On My Mind

Wikipedia has an entry about Professor Ammiel Alcalay.

How cool is that?

It says that he is ‘…an American, scholar, critic, translator, and prose stylist. Born and raised in Boston, he is a first-generation American, son of Sephardic Jews from São Tomé and Príncipe. His work often examines how poetry and politics affect the way we see ourselves and the way Americans think about the Middle East.’

He is also the author of one of the most amazing books I have read in the last decade – Memories of Our Future.

The Midwest Book Review said that it was “An outstanding anthology of essays surveying the complexities of Mediterranean cultures; the diverse, changing space of the Balkans, Middle East, and North Africa-areas of diasporas, dislocations, and genocidal exterminations provoked by nationalism and religious fanaticism. Of special interest are his observations and analysis of the Israeli/Palestinian confrontation, Arab/Jewish poetics, and Jewish identity in America.”

Professor Alcalay (he is a Professor at the City University of New York), recently sent me a poem he wrote while thinking about Gaza and the horrors being unleashed there.  I was in Gaza when I first read it, and I asked that he allow me to share it with the rest of you.  So I am reprinting here.

The poem recently in the appeared in the CUNY Graduate Center Advocate magazine’s February 2009 issue (http://gcadvocate.org)

GAZA

(after Mahmoud Darwish & Yehezkel Kedmi)

Skin can be torn to shreds and melted anywhere, houses dissolve and earth ripped apart below your very feet. But can the sea itself sustain a wound?

The name of these talks cannot be Madrid or Oslo but only Gaza because politics are politics and Washington and Tel Aviv propose velocity can drown out consciousness, extinguish the memory of life and the meaning of home.

Home is where the sea goes but there is no sea in Gaza.

How long can the fishermen mend their nets?

How many nets are even left when walls descend from a sky with no
horizon and the beach is only one more part of the prison yard?

How many trees are left in the minds of the wise and caring elders,
how many intricate hems left in the battered fingers of loving mothers,
searching for water day after day, or another cup of flour or rice to keep
their meager tables grand and sate the groaning chasm in the bellies of their beloved? How many more unborn can suffocate waiting to get across an imaginary line the earth still refuses to recognize? Why do madmen keep sending boys to do the job they thought they’d done for generations, extinguishing the very breath of their souls as they keep the great illusion
alive, the great illusion that this is war and not just slaughter, plain and simple?

There is no sea in Gaza and the only waves left signal a final light, the flash
of burning flesh in white phosphorus. Once I saw some men in Gaza waiting patiently by the side of the road, waiting and hoping. Waiting to work, hoping
to feed their children. Some still wait and others don’t. But the olive trees
and orange groves and fishing nets grow upside down in an endless sea
of blood about the sky above our heads and on some truly clear nights
you can hear them flow within the veins behind your eyes.

Ammiel Alcalay
January, 2009

My most recent work from Gaza is now also online. I am very pleased and honored to present it alongside Professor Alcalay’s work.  That the poem was released to me just as my images were ready to be shown was a beautiful coincidence.

This work was funded by a generous grant from the Pulitzer Center On Crisis Reporting in Washington D.C.

You can see the main gallery of images here: Gaza Undone

And a series of portraits I made of some victims of the recent conflict here: Portraits of Loss

The Tears of The Goddess

Dinesh Khanna is a photographer and a friend.  Based in India he has been working on a project with First City Magazine examining the contradictions and ironies of life in his native country of India.

I loved this image of his because of how quietly it provokes so many thoughts and speaks to so many truths.

A goddess, worshiped, cared for and loved perhaps just a few hours earlier, now lies in a garbage heap, stripped of all her divine powers, and left in her essence; waste.

A god who served her purpose.

Some, righteous and arrogant, will see this as an image of a Hindu god.

Much like the Lahori booksellers I met some years ago who were proudly selling copies of Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not A Christian, not realizing that Russell’s was an argument not against Christianity, but against all religions!

But this image is in fact an image of all religious philosophies – used as they are to serve the base instincts of man and discarded when in conflict with these instincts.

The goddess has been humbled.

Will man ever be?

A World Very Serious And Very Small

They were brilliant analytical minds.

But they were also incredibly illiterate, indifferent, frequently stupid and for the most part comfortable in their ignorance.

At one of the top American management consulting firms, I kept running to such Jekyll&Hyde-ian characters.

But the firm was not unusual – this seems to the the normal modern human mental condition and there appears to be no contradiction between the two states.

Jekyll and Hyde are indeed one!

∞

As an adolescent, the American writer David Foster Wallace was a regionally ranked junior tennis player.  He could have been a major athlete.  However, luckily he choose instead to write.  In his book A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again David Foster Wallace describes his time with some of the lesser known players on the professional tennis tournament circuit.

He describes the grinding schedule, endless practice sessions and the tremendous talent needed to just be an ‘also ran’ at the professional level.  The lives of those who compete here are completely owned by the schedules of the competition, the level of training and practice required, the constant focus on diet and health, the travel, and the singular mental and physical focus on nothing but the game and the body’s ability to perform it. As he writes:

If you’ve played tennis at least a little, you probably think you have some idea of how hard a game it is to play really well.  I submit to you that you really have no idea at all.

To compete and succeed, even at a mediocre level, you have to surrender yourself to the culture of the sport, and disconnect yourself from the world around you.  In tennis, as in the rest of the world today, success is assumed for the specialist – good at just one thing, that one thing that s/he has been working and preparing for since childhood.

But this has a price, and it is described best by Wallace himself as he spends time with the tennis professionals and notices that despite their obvious intelligence and skills, they remain largely vacuous and insipid:

But we prefer not to countenance the kinds of sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get so good at one particular thing.  Oh, we pay lip service to these sacrifices…But the actual facts of the sacrifices repels us when we see them; basketball geniuses who cannot read, sprinters who dope themselves, defensive tackles who shoot up bovine hormones until they collapse or explode.

We prefer not to consider the shockingly vapid and primitive comments uttered by athletes in postcontest interviews, or to imagine what impoverishments in one’s mental life would allow people actually to think in the simplistic way great athletes seem to think.

The realities of top-level athletics today require…An almost ascetic focus.  A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to their one chosen talent and pursuit.  A consent to live in a world that, like a child’s world, is very serious and very small.

∞

Martha Nussbaum in her book The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, And India’s Future, describes a visit to the ‘dazzling’ Swaminarayan temple in Bartlett, Illinois – an enclave of the Gujarati community in the United States. She and her assistant are taken for a guided tour of the temple by a young man.  As she describes it, he lectures them about the sect’s beliefs, telling them that the voice of the sect’s leader is the direct voice of God.

At one stage in the tour he points to a beautifully carved limestone and marble ceiling and asks them why they think that the ceiling if glowing? Nussbaum expects some sort of spiritual answer, but instead the man turns to her with a smile and says ‘Fiber optic cables! We are the first to bring this technology to a temple!’.

For Nussbaum this young man, member of a Hindu community that has supported the hate-filled and violent ideologies of Hindu fundamentalist groups like the HSS and the VHP, represents a very modern product of our modern education system – educated people with tremendous technological sophistication and an equally tremendous ideological [and i will add; intellectual] docility.

They lack a capacity for critical thinking, knowledge of the world, a compassionate imagination and the imagination of otherness as Nussbaum argues in her works.  They are mechanical products, nearly machines, that are ‘programmed’ to excel at their tasks, but lack the thought processes and facilities to know how to think about the world around them, deal with its myriad social and political complexities and to retain a curiosity to explore it.

Dr. Ali Al-Tamimi, a Salafi Muslim scholar and a brilliant computational biologist captures well the chasm between the two ends of the brain that seem to increasingly be drifting apart in modern man.

∞

Dr. Ali Al-Timimi was a brilliant man – a computational biologist, a Salafi Muslim scholar and most recently, someone convicted on terrorism charges.

Milton Viorst in his article on Dr. Timimi’s life, ‘The Education of Ali Al-Timimi’, quotes Dr. Timimi’s doctoral thesis advisor, Curtis Jamison at George Mason University in Washinton D.C. saying that Ali’s innovations in computational biology were at the threshold of a significant breakthrough in cancer research.  While at the University Ali had published and co-published at least a half a dozen scientific papers.

In his introduction to his doctoral thesis, Dr. Timimi declares, while discussing Christian dogma and European scientific innovation,  that:

This combination of an unwavering belief in a Divine ultimate cause…led to a type of rigidity of thought … It was only … the drifting away and then final divorce of Western intellectual thought from the Church that led to a sharp break from philosophical and theological notions of life. Emancipated from philosophy and theology, and coupled with the foundational discoveries of embryology … cell theory … and genetics … biology set on a new direction with the appearance of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

Here was a man of superior scientific and intellectual intellect, a man at the top of his field, and someone raised with a clear understanding and awareness of the need to maintain a healthy and necessary divide between faith and science – two endeavors with vastly different objectives and motivations.

In the Muslim community however Dr. Timimi was best known as a religious scholar.  A Salafi scholar – purist and fundamentalist (I use this term to mean as those who wish to return to the base roots of a belief). And in his religious beliefs he remained profoundly fundamentalists. And saw no contradiction between his belief in science and the instincts of doubt that fuel it, and the certainty of faith.  As Viosrt describes it, Ali is known to have told his congregation that;

We have the true source of knowledge, the Koran and the Sunna, something which is inerrant. And therefore, because of that true source of knowledge, our ability to think and our ability to interpret is more correct than theirs.

There is sufficient evidence to argue that the US Government case against Dr. Ali Al-Timimi is weak at best.  But my interest is less in Dr. Ali Al-Timimi’s unfortunate run in with the US Government and it’s over zealous legal and secret service goons in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

(Aside: The travesty of justice that led to his life imprisonment, and the ruin that this has meant for his family, is yet another shameful legacy of the hideous Bush administration that has now thankfully passed us. I will write about this and other such cases in a separate blog post.)

I am more fascinated by Dr. Ali Al-Timimi’s ability to contain such brilliant rational and scientific skills and yet hold on so dogmatically to his unverifiable fundamentalist beliefs.

Here is a man whose entire professional and intellectual life was fueled by doubt and questioning and how it can liberate us towards greater truths and knowledge about the world around us.  And yet, Dr. Al-Timimi remained a fundamentalist – someone who unquestioningly took as ‘truth’ all and any Islamic stories, histories, verses, phrases, rumors, rules, laws, and gossips that came down to him.  For him, the belief that all this is an ‘actual voice of God’ was never to be examined or at the very least considered with an element of humility and doubt.

And I speak here not of a doubt that discards faith, but instead one that elevates it from mere rules and regulations, from chores and rituals, to the beautiful, spiritual and human.

He was creative and innovative at work, rigid and dogmatic in his faith.

It is a way of seeing the world in compartments, of using the human mind as a tool that uses certain skills towards certain tasks and other skills towards other, never allowing the two to influence each other and possibly inform each other.

∞

A recent example of the power of dogma and the seduction of unthinking can affect the minds of otherwise intelligent people are the ‘entrepreneurs’ using modern technology to help the Jewish orthodox overcome the Kosher restrictions imposed on them by the Shabbat.  Usually interpreted as a day ‘away from work’, it can also be seen as a beautiful requirement to step away from all worldly demands and to offer oneself towards the divine, towards contemplation and what Pieper called Leisure – see Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture.

A piece in the New York Times, typically unthinking and stenographic, called ‘Entrepreneurs Find Ways to Make Technology Work With Jewish Sabbath’, raises some troubling questions.

We learn from the article that:

(A firm has)… created the metal detectors used to screen worshippers at the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest site, in a manner that uses electricity in a way not prohibited on the Sabbath. It also developed pens that use ink that disappears after a few days, based on a rabbinic interpretation that only forbids permanent writing, and Sabbath phones, which are dialed in an indirect manner with special buttons and a microprocessor.

Unprepared to engage their minds to question the fundamental modern day relevance of their ancient restrictions and dogma, a group of fine minds are producing toys that help them ‘fool’ the system, reducing the religious ideas to ‘tasks’ and ‘chores’, and cleverly avoiding perhaps the ‘intentions’ behind the restrictions in the first place.

So a lamp that has a top you can twist to block its light, so as to avoid ‘pressing’ the on/off switch since that is non-Kosher, has become a big seller amongst religious Jews.  That ‘indirect’ dialing is Kosher.  Actually this phone is really incredible; it dials all the numbers all the time all day in a sequence – to dial a number you pick up a pen and ‘interrupt’ it from dialing the number you actually want to dial.  A sort-of negative logic here – I  stop it from dialing the numbers that I actually want to dial – and the phone connects you.

Get it?

Pressing a button is a violation of the Kosher law.  Inserting a pen to block the phone number from dialing is not.

Am I missing something?

∞

I spent a few years working at a major management consultancy in New York City.  The firm recruited the best graduates from the best business graduate programs in the United States of America and Europe (how and why I made it in is the topic of a separate blog post).

These men and women went on to advise Fortune 500 CEOs on the fine points of strategy, competitiveness, market creation, product innovation etc.

They were young, confident of their right to lead, smart and ambitious. The best corporations would lure some of them into their management teams with massive salary and bonus packages.

Some were pulling in over a million a year before they were 40 and enjoyed business class travel, 5-star hotels, the best restaurants, limousine services, and anything else necessary for them to remain focused on their responsibilities and deliver to their client’s highest expectations.

I spent 3 years at the firm, struggling to keep up with the go-go-go attitude of my colleagues, many of whom surrendered all pretense at a personal and social life simply to impress the firm’s partners of their ‘commitment’ to the mission of the organization.  The culture within the office could only be described as paranoid competitiveness -  each step, gesture, posture and word could have implications for your success within the firm.  It’s ‘up or out’ policy ensured that every one was constantly on edge, and easily manipulated into working long hours and weekends at the expense of everything else that life may offer.

It required every ounce of one’s focus to stay within it and survive, let alone progress.  There was no time for anything else.

And that included any broader engagement with society, culture and politics, or the celebration of common intelligence, worldly knowledge, and a healthy dose of critical thinking.

In the offices, these creatures shone.  Outside the office they were practically Neanderthals!

What mattered was the job and the office and the life the revolved around what took place there – there outcomes mattered, performance mattered, ideas mattered for after all we could measure them in terms of revenue, salary increments, bonuses, and privileges.

What mattered was not thought, but performance; not intelligence, but achievement; not critical thinking, but delivery.

What mattered was making the small world, the only world.

To The Last Man: Fighting The Wrong War in Afghanistan

Perhaps the most illuminating moments in Eroll Morris’s documentary The Fog Of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara is when Mr. McNamara begins to offer his explanation for why the war in Vietnam went so terribly wrong.

Aside for the detailed discussions about the escalation of the conflict due to domestic political issues, he makes the following statement which I believe best captures why nations, any nation, can find itself mired in a conflict and unable to resolve it.

Let me quote Robert S. McNamara himself

“Let me go back one moment.  In the Cuban Missile Crisis at the end I think we did put ourselves in the skin of the Soviets. In the case of Vietnam we did not know them well enough to empathize.  There was total misunderstanding as a result.

They believed that we had simply replaced the French as a colonial power and we were seeking to subject South and North Vietnam to our colonial interest, which was absolutely absurd. And we…we saw Vietnam as an element of the cold war and not what they saw as…a civil war.”

Robert S. McNamara then discusses how he later met with his ‘former enemy’ – on a trip to Vietnam in 1995 he meets with the former foreign minister of Vietnam, Tran Van Lam, and quickly getting into a heated argument which went a something like this (as told by Mr. McNamara in the film):

TVL: ‘You were totally wrong! We were fighting for our independence, you were fighting to enslave us!

RSM: Do you mean to say that it was not a tragedy for you when you lost 3, 400,000 of Vietnamese…killed…what did you accomplish?

You did not get anything more than we were willing to give you at the beginning of the war!

TVL: Mr. McNamara, you must have never read a history book! If you had you would have known that we were not pawns of the Chinese or the Russians….did you not know that?

Don’t you know that we have been fighting the Chinese for over 1000 years?

We were fighting for our independence!

And we would fight to the last man and we were determined to do so! And no amount of bombing or US pressure would have ever stopped us!

President Barack Obama is about to escalate a war in Afghanistan that I fear will prove once again to be the wrong war.

He and his administration have, without blinking an eye, adopted the language and rhetoric of the discredited Bush administration about the reasons and goals of the conflict in Southern Afghanistan.  President Barack Obama, much like his predecessor, claims to be fighting ‘the war against terror’ and supposedly ‘Al-Qaeda’ forces in Afghanistan, when in fact what he faces is a large scale Pushtun nationalist insurgency against the US-backed minority kleptocracy that current sits in Kabul.

Since 2001 the Bush administration and its allies in Kabul have attempted to convince us that the ongoing conflict in the country is against Taliban and Al-Qaeda forces, most of which are finding safe havens in Pakistan.  This has been the public face of America’s policies in the country, though it is evident to many who travel and work there, that it hides as much as it reveals.

Under US tutelage Afghanistan has become one of the world’s largest narco-state, with crime and criminality the principal means of business, law and life.

With few if any reporters working independetly in the Southern Afghanistan region, it has been impossible to get voices outside of the official American/NATO ones.  However, one individual who has spent considerable time in the country, as both a reporter and a social worker, is Sarah Chayes.  She was a correspondent for National Public Radio from 1997 to 2002 and later founded an agribusiness cooperative in the country.  Her stark and honest assessment of the situation in the country comes from direct experience in the region where the insurgency is most extreme.

Here is what she had to say in a piece she wrote for The Boston Review called ‘Days of Lies and Roses: Selling Out Afghanistan’

Our first error was to subordinate every other concern to a cowboys-and-Indians-style hunt for al Qaeda and the Taliban leadership-a hunt that has thus far proved singularly fruitless. We collected a posse of former anti-Soviet commanders who had been repudiated by the Afghan population for their rapacious and bloody-minded behavior after the Soviets withdrew in 1989. Because we believed them essential to our hunt, we installed these thugs in positions of local power, bolstered them with the priceless weight of our partnership-made unmistakable to ordinary folk by the uniforms we issued to their militiamen, the guns we armed them with, and the bricks of cash we delivered to their homes and offices.

And she a few lines later adds the devastating conclusion that:

But in my view it is precisely this decision to ignore good governance and cultivate criminality that has led to the disastrous security conditions in the Afghan south. The independent-minded Afghans relinquish sovereignty to a state apparatus reluctantly, and only for as long as the state can either cow them or be seen to be acting in their practical interests. The current Afghan government is doing neither. The only obvious alternative-or beneficiary of a protest vote-is the Taliban.

The Obama administration is walking in to the wrong war.  Rather than recognize that nearly 7 years of rape and pillage of the lives, livlihood and welfare of the people of the Pushtun people of the South by a group of once anti-Soviet warlords is fueling a rebellion, they prefer to sink their heads in the quicksand of ‘the war against terror’.

Nothing that Mr. Gates has recently said, or President Obama parroted, acknowledges the complexity of the situation on the ground in the country.  There is talk of sending more troops, or the continuation of the bombing campaigns in the Southern provinces and Pakistan that are killing many, many civilians, and many other mind numbing regurgitations of ‘terror networks’ and ‘havens’ and ‘flushing out’ Al Qaeda and what not.

Even the Swat rebellion of local militants against the Pakistani government and the heavy handed presence/response of the Army is lumped into the broader ‘Taliban/Al-Qaeda’ collective.

There is a collective silence about the situation in Southern Afghanistan, and its fall out in Pakistan.  Writers, journalists, intellectuals and others seem oblivious to the fact that a people live in these areas, and that their voices need to be heard and engaged.

Instead, there is a determined effort or ignorance that insists that the entire region is ‘infested’ with terrorists that deserve little more than more American bombs and more  troops.  We insist on seeing the entire region and its people only through the prism of American foreign policy myopia’s – as we did in Vietnam, and refuse to see how the locals see the war.

In an extensive piece in the New Left Review called ‘Afghanistan: Mirage of a Good War’ writer Tariq Ali had this to say:

The argument that more NATO troops are the solution is equally unsustainable. All the evidence suggests that the brutality of the occupying forces has been one of the main sources of recruits for the Taliban. American air power…is far from paternal when it comes to targeting Pashtun villages. There is widespread fury among Afghans at the number of civilian casualties, many of them children. There have been numerous incidents of rape and rough treatment of women by ISAF soldiers, as well as indiscriminate bombing of villages and house-to-house search-and-arrest missions.’

The Afghans, particularly the Pushtuns, have been resisting imperial occupation of their lands for centuries.  This current insurgency may have more modern day causes, but it is a direct lineage of a battle for autonomy and independence from foreign invaders that the Pushtuns have fought repeatedly and are fighting again.

The Americans think that this is one of the many battles in ‘the war against terror’.

The Pushtuns however are not fighting this war.

There is a Pushtun nationalist insurgency in the works.  It is being actively supported by Pushtun communities residing in Pakistan. It has been fuelled by the rapacious and criminal regime that currently sits in Kabul and has used its position to not only pillage the country, but enrich a few, and carry out ethnically defined pogroms and acts of revenge for the last 7 years.

And the USA has been funding this.

The war begins in Afghanistan and not in the ‘havens’ of Pakistan.

And it can only end there.

President Obama is stepping into his first quagmire.

We are about to once again fight the wrong war.

Echoes of Guantanamo

It begins with the Haitians.

HIV/AIDS infected Haitians in fact.

It begins with George Bush, the senior.

It begins in 1991.

Jean-Bertrande Aristide has been overthrown – a democratically elected President evicted by a military junta which later had to use excessive force to contain the protests of the citizens of the country.

Nearly 250,000 refugees fled the country in the face of the 1991 coup and a systematic campaign of executions and torture against Aristide partisans.

These ‘boat people‘ as George Bush’s administration labelled where, in clear violation of international law, forcibly repatriated despite clear evidence of threat to their lives.  The administration insisted on calling them ‘economic refugees‘ and forcibly turning them away from the shores of the USA.

In 1992 George Bush, sitting comfortably in his house at Kennebunkport, issued Executive Order 12,807, ordering the Coast G to return all boats and people to the country from which it came.

This order was onlly the latest in acts of indifference and cruelty that came years after a policy of forced repatriation that had already been in place – despite 4 years of the horror of the Duvaliar regime, and another 6 of a bloody military junta ensconsed in the palace at Port Au Prince.

The United States Supreme Court supported the actions of the government and the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) – an act that led Professor Kevin Johnson of the University of California to call the decision ’shameful acquiescence’.

But continued pressure from human rights groups and from the U.N High Commission of Refugees, amongst others, led to a compromise.  The forced repatriation was a violation of international law, and it was hypocrtical since most all Cuban refugees were being given immediate asylum.

The government decided to do something.

And the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay was born.

And nearly 34,000 refugees were detained there in the most decrepit and inhumane of conditions.  And with this came the arguments of the extra-legality of the facility that would later be perfected for the illegal incarceration of suspected ‘Al-Qaeda’ and ‘Taliban‘ supporters.

‘While conceding that the Haitians are treated differently from other national groups who seek asylum in the US, the Government argued that the U.S. Constitution and other sources of U.S. and International law do not apply to Guantanamo’ – (Powell, page 59)

Confronted with the realization that the refugees where being detained at the facility for long periods of time – nearly 2 years for some, without a meaningful hearing, the administration called upon the finest legal minds it could find to justify its practices.

So basically, US officials could intercept boats of refugees fleeing persecution and detain them indefinitely and without access to legal advice and a fair trail at the US detention center at US military base at Guantanamo because it was not on US soil.  A policy that led one human rights lawyer to state:

‘The US policy of forced repatriation violated international legal
obligations of the United States under Article 33 of the Protocol
relating to the status of Refugees and undermines the credibiity of the
US commitment to international law in the eyes of the rest of the world’ – (O’Niell, page 39)

And amongst these detained refugees, there were about 250 very special refugees; the ones identified as HIV+.  And they were sent to Camp Bulkeley, the ‘HIV detention camp’.

What happened to them there is best read in Paul Farmer’s powerful book on health and human rights called ‘Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights and the New War on the Poor’ Suffice it to say that they were victims of the most inhumane, cruel and callous treatment at the hands of US military, health and legal officials.

There was little or no public outcry about the treatment of the Haitians.  Most Americans never even noticed the hypocrisy of a policy that gave instant asylum to even terrorists arriving at our shores from Cuba – men involved in the bombing of civilian aeroplanes or assassination attempts on President Castro.  We continue to harbor these terrorists on our shores today.

The Haitians however, fleeing from genuine repression, torture and killings, were repeatedly stopped and returned to the very shores where certain death awaited them.

In 2009 the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay is expected to close.

Its legacy of torture, humiliation, beatings, illegal courts, and inhumane treatment of the innocent (as most nearly all of the even recent so-called ‘terrorist‘ detainees are), weak and suffering will not so easily be forgotten.

Gaza Diary: January 30 2009 10:33 PM

Are you from Pakistan?

I am not sure how he knew for we had not met nor spoken to each other.

I was just about the get up to leave Al-Awda mosque in Rafah, Gaza when a man sitting behind me introduced himself and asked if I was from Pakistan.

How did he know? Why did he think so? Nothing about my appearance that day – I in my conventional trekking pants and checkered shirt, suggested my background.

How did he know?

The way you said your namaaz, specifically the way I said the final salaams (face turned right, and then left) was different from the way they did it here in Gaza and he had only seen that method when he had lived in Pakistan some years earlier.

Here, the told me, you wait for the Imam to say both salaams (left and right) before the congregations follows.

In Pakistan, we do so at the same time as the Imam.

Yes, indeed, I am from Pakistan – a Kashmiri born in Pakistan in fact.  He smiled, and vigorously shook my hand and said in near perfect Urdu ‘Ap say mill karr bahoot khushi hoey!’ – ‘It is a pleasure to meet you!’

I was taken aback! It was the last thing I had expected to hear – Urdu, Pakistan’s national language – spoken here in the heart of a Gaza refugee camp.

This was back in 2004.  Since then I have met a number of people in Rafah who speak a little Urdu and love to practice it whenever they meet me.

Many Palestinians had been allowed to travel to Pakistan after the Olso accords.  Policemen, doctors, physical therapists, accountants, engineers and others spend a few years in the country and learned a little of the language there.  They had been welcomed there, appreciated the support that they saw in the country for their struggle, and obviously felt at home there.

At a local physical rehabilitation center there was even a small club of Urdu speakers to which I of course was immediately made a member.

And again, on this recent trip, I continue to receive warm welcomes from people when I tell them that I am originally a Kashmiri from Pakistan.  There is a relaxing of attitude, a clear and obvious sense of camaraderie, a dissolving of some of the distance that exists between a foreign photographer and a Palestinian from Gaza. There is a look of recognition and gestures that suggest that they believe that I recognize something of me in them too.  And their struggle and their predicaments here in Gaza.

That since I am a Kashmiri, another region struggling for its identity and liberty, and a Pakistani, a country that has argued for the rights of the Palestinians, and of a Muslim background, that I to some degree understand who they are and what they are.

I can’t say that I actually offer all this to the Palestinians.  But I know that I love to speak Urdu in Gaza for the simple reason that it is the only place in the world where I can call myself just Pakistani – not Kashmiri/Pakistani/American/Swede etc. and not have it become a fact that taints you in the eyes of the other.

Perhaps the Palestinians like to speak it because it reminds them of a time of hope when the new possibilities offered by the Oslo Accords were to be prepared for in Pakistan.  Today none of those possibilities exist as the accords have been betrayed.

But the language they heard as they dreamed their dreams in a far away land is perhaps the only reminder of that special time so long past and the excitement and joys that had accompanied it.

I love to speak Urdu in Gaza.

Gaza Diary: January 24 2009 18:00 PM

The water pipe has many names.

In the balkans it is called a ‘lula‘ or ‘lulava’.

In Egypt and the Persian Gulf it is often referred to as a ’shishe’.

In Iran it is called a ‘ganja’ pronounced as ‘ghelyoon’.

In India and Pakistan it is called a ‘huqqa’.

In the Palestinian Territories, the Levant, Iraq, Jordan, Greece, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Israel, it is called by the beautiful name of ‘narghile’- a word that has its roots in sanskrit.

But I doubt if it has ever been called a weapon of defiance.

In 2003 I decided to rent an apartment in the city of Rafah, Gaza and document the lives of the people living along the border with Egypt. These mostly refugee neighborhoods were under assault from Israeli armored bulldozers and tanks – all part of the construction machinery being used to build the steel wall along the Philadephia Corridor – the code name the IDF used to describe the stretch of land it controlled between Rafah, Gaza and the Egyptian border.

Today it is the stretch of land that is being used by the Palestinians for the construction of tunnels, and the area the Israeli Air Force concentrated on as it attempted to destroy these tunnels.

One afternoon as I walked around these neighborhoods photographing displaced families, destroyed homes and the bulldozers working the area, I ran into a group of Palestinian men preparing to sit and smoke a narghile.

They had spread out, in sight of a group of Israeli tanks protecting a bulldozer demolishing yet another Palestinian home in the area, a small blanket on the edge of the construction area, but within the 100 meter ‘no go’ zone the Israeli’s insisted on enforcing between the steel wall and any Palestinian building or person.

The men invited me to join them.

I hesitated, knowing full well that within minutes the tanks would approach this group of men and either threaten them or simply shoot at them. But I did.

And sure enough, before we had managed to take our first few puffs of the narghile we saw the tanks starting to move towards us to investigate. We were soon forced to pack and leave.

When I asked the men why they had chosen to smoke there where they were sure to provoke the Israeli’s they laughed. To me it had seemed a careless act of bravado. I suspect that it was also a small act of defiance – to be where the Israelis had warned them not to be.

Last night in Gaza City, I went out for a narghile with some young Palestinians I have come to know while working here documenting the aftermath of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead.

We sat and talked about ordinary things. The Palestinians always ask me the most ordinary questions; how do you spend your time with your wife? What do you do when you are not working? How do you play with your daughter? What games do you enjoy?

In turn, they tell me about their most important aspirations, and I am always struck by the ordinariness of them; The desire to find a good wife. The hope of finding a job that will bring them financial security. The hope of children, many children.

Ordinary things that over a narghile become the thing of dreams. And the water-pipe, a small act of defiance in the face of the incarceration and deprivation of life in Gaza.

An object that enables pleasures still available to the people here; companionship, conversation and the laughter of friends.

And in the aftermath of the horrors of this last confrontation with Israel, a small act of living life, a small act of defiance.

Gaza Diary: January 22 2009 14:25PM

On the Getty Images archive you can type in ‘Gaza Destroyed’ and retrieve over 5,500 images to select from.  If you run the query ‘Gaza Funerals’ you will get back over 7,000 images.  I was unable to check the Corbis archives because at the time of writing this entry their site was undergoing maintenance.  But I am confident that I would find a similarly large number of images for both the queries above. 

The challenge for a photographer arriving in Gaza is that s/he is walking into a place that has been consistently and extensively photographed for decades, and that there are many fine, talented and professional Palestinian photographers who carry out this task for their various agencies.  In addition, some of the best and most talented international photojournalists have also made Gaza the focus of their work.

I have arrived in Gaza in the aftermath of Israel’s most recent military operation against the region, Operation Cast Lead.  And I find that though the scale of this latest venture is larger than anything I can remember from my previous travels to Gaza, its impact and consequences are very familiar. 

The official numbers state that over 1,300 people have been killed, of which it is believed that nearly 400 were children, about 50,000 made homeless, and over 5000 left seriously injured.

I arrived in Gaza just as the cease fire had been declared and I had been immediately struck by how familiar it all seemed.

The day before as I stood on the Egyptian border with Rafah and watched Israeli jets dropping their payload on buildings and tunnel construction sites I was unsure of my decision to proceed.  Cowardice has been my best friend and protected me from many dangers. 

Why would I not listen to it now?

My first trip to Gaza was in 2003.  I then returned and continued to document the situation here, particularly in Rafah, Gaza, in 2004 and 2005.  The settlers were still in Gaza then, and so were activists from the International Solidarity Movement, and the armored bulldozers and their accompanying tanks that were constructing the massive steel wall along Rafah’s border with Egypt. 

Home demolitions were frequent along the Rafah border as bulldozers tore down Palestinian homes to make way for this steel wall.  Tank patrols would terrorize residents living along the border, and there would be frequent firing into these neighborhoods resulting in deaths and maiming of residents.
 
As a photographer I documented my fair share of funerals, Hamas marches and families salvaging their belongings from the ruins of their destroyed houses. 

And now, as I walk through the devastation in Gaza from the most recent Israeli operation, I am struck by how familiar and how similar it all looks.  My photographs from this morning look little different from those I took back in 2003, 2004 and 2005!  In fact, a simple re-edit of the captions of my previous work and I could convince you that the photograph was taken just yesterday!

The scale is different.  Absolutely.  But the visible consequences are the same as: dead bodies and lost lives; destroyed homes and displaced families; angry funerals and political exploitation; protest marches and armed men promising revenge; physical destruction and families trying to rebuild. 

We have been here before.  We are here again.

As I walk through Gaza with my little camera in hand, and around me scramble some of the world’s finest photojournalists capturing yet more of what we have already known and seen, I am desperately trying to find my own voice to this story.  And it is not helping that I know that in the not too distant future there will be yet more confrontations, and more military operations, and more funerals, and marches, and destroyed homes and displaced lives. 

The cycle repeats itself.

Is there a way to stop the images from doing the same?

Learning To Read

On January 10th, 2009, America’s paper of record, The New York Times, ran this piece

A Gaza War Full of Traps & Trickery by Steven Erlanger

I had wanted to write a response to this piece of ‘journalism’, to explore the way in which it had been put together and published on the pages of this apparently fine journalistic outlet.  Instead, Chris Hedges beat me to it. I quote him, speaking about precisely this piece of reporting by Mr. Erlanger,

“In this story, unnamed Israeli intelligence officials gave us a spin on the war worthy of the White House fabrications made on the eve of the Iraq war. We learned about the perfidious and dirty tactics of Hamas fighters. Foreign journalists, barred from Gaza and unable to check the veracity of the Israeli version of the war, have abandoned their trade as reporters to become stenographers. The cynicism of conveying propaganda as truth, as long as it is well sourced, is the poison of American journalism. If this is all journalism has become, if moral outrage, the courage to defy the powerful, the commitment to tell the truth and to give a voice to those who without us would have no voice, no longer matters, our journalism schools should focus exclusively on shorthand. It seems to be the skill most ardently coveted by most senior editors.”

You can read Chris Hedge’s complete piece here: The Language of Death

We will do well to remember that our newspapers today lie.  That wire agencies deliberately obfuscate and modify.  That as our ’sources’ for news diminish, the ability to control what you read and see becomes easier.  The few corporations that are now in control of our ‘eyes on the world’ are increasingly skewing matters away from the struggles of the weak and, in their desperate rush to rub shoulders with the powerful, representing the views and needs of the powerful; corporations, lobbyists, politicians, demagogues and dictators.

The language and phrases being used require us to read carefully, between the lines and with a sensitive eye towards the meanings and use of words.  We can no longer afford to take statements like ‘Israel has a right to defend itself’ or ‘It is a terrorist organization’ at face value and have to bring to bear on these statements skepticism, a critical eye and the ability to evaluate the complete meaning and political priorities that support such statements and rely on them for pushing forward other agendas.

Mark Danner gave a commencement speech to students at the University of California, Berkeley that is worth reading today.  Called ‘Humanism & Terror (What Are You Going To Do With It)’ He reminds that the power to understand language, to read critically and comprehend language may be the most powerful tools left to the individual in confronting the overwhelming power to obfuscate and confuse that the power barons of our world now possess.

We are living a Huxley-an nightmare as lies are made into truths, as the weak are made into terrorists, as state terrorism is dressed as ‘defense’, as the helpless are transformed into ‘grave threats’, as ethnic cleansing is transformed into ’security measures’, as a massacre of innocents is represented as ‘a war’.

Read carefully.

What We Are Is Only What We Do

Huwaida Araf is a young American of Palestinian descent and a founder of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). Here is a video of what it means to have the courage of your convictions

In 2003 I was in Rafah, Gaza on the day Rachel Corrie, another brave woman, another member of the ISM, was crushed under an Israeli bulldozer while trying to stop it from destroying the house of a Palestinian doctor along the Rafah/Egypt border.

She, and her ISM colleagues, showed me then too what it means to have the courage of your convictions. I had known her briefly – we would often run in to each other in Rafah, and even shared a lunch one afternoon as we discussed how control of water sources in the West Bank may be determining where settlements and Israeli presence is focused.

Then, as today, the Palestinian protesters were engaged in non-violent resistance to a brutal, maiming, dehumanizing and murderous occupation force.

Members of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) block Israeli tanks accompanying armoured bulldozers used for destroying Palestinians homes along the Gaza-Egypt border - September 2003 Photo By Asim Rafiqui

I had never met a young woman like her – passionate, committed, sharply intelligent and determined.  She was only 24 years old.

At 24 I was still trying to figure out how to date women!

And they were all young and from many different countries around the world.  And some paid with their lives while fighting for something they believed in, something that gave them a reason to live before it killed them.

Rachel Corrie died that year, and so did Tom Hurndall just a few months later.  Shot by an Israeli sniper he too was 24, young, and committed.  His killer was a Bedouin in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) who was singled out for prosecution despite his statement that there was a policy of shooting at unarmed civilians in effect.

I suspect that there still is.

It is conventionally believed, and the truly ignorant and arrogant will lecture the Palestinians on this, that the Palestinians have not engaged in non-violent resistance to the occupation.

The facts are that that is all that they mostly day.  Every day and all the time.

The construction of the separation Wall has been resisted peacefully each and every day of its existence and these peaceful protests have been met with live bullets, tear gas and beatings.  I know, I have been there.  And yet they continue, despite the threats to their lives.  The Palestinians even went to the highest court that would hear them – the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and presented their case.

The ICJ found that the construction of the wall and its associated regime were in breach of international human rights and humanitarian law.  It also said that Israel was under an obligation to cease construction of the wall, dismantle the structure and make reparation for all damage caused by that project.

That was back in the summer of 2004.

Many deaths ago.

Many disppossessed acres go.

Many lost olive groves ago.

Many lost school days ago.

Many humiliations ago.

Many summary arrests go.

Many settlements go.

Many beatings ago.

Many imprisonments ago.

10 Myths About Pakistan!

Mohammed Hanif is a Pakistani writer, best known for his recent novel ‘A Case of Exploding Mangoes’

Just as I had finished posting my recent diatribe against the New York Times Sunday Magazine’s piece on Pakistan, I came across an Op-Ed Hanif wrote in The Times of India that discusses what are the most popular myths about the country.

So, In Mohammad Hanif’s own words, copied here without his or the Times of India’s Permission:

Ten Myths About Pakistan by Mohammad Hanif, for The Times of India

Living in Pakistan and reading about it in the Indian press can sometimes be quite a disorienting experience: one wonders what place on earth they’re talking about? I wouldn’t be surprised if an Indian reader going through Pakistani papers has asked the same question in recent days. Here are some common assumptions about Pakistan and its citizens that I have come across in the Indian media…

Pakistan controls the jihadis: Or Pakistan’s government controls the jihadis. Or Pakistan Army controls the jihadis. Or ISI controls the jihadis. Or some rogue elements from the ISI control the Jihadis. Nobody knows the whole truth but increasingly it’s the tail that wags the dog. We must remember that the ISI-Jihadi alliance was a marriage of convenience, which has broken down irrevocably. Pakistan army has lost more soldiers at the hands of these jihadis than it ever did fighting India.

Musharraf was in control, Zardari is not: Let’s not forget that General Musharraf seized power after he was fired from his job as the army chief by an elected prime minister. Musharraf first appeased jihadis, then bombed them, and then appeased them again. The country he left behind has become a very dangerous place, above all for its own citizens. There is a latent hankering in sections of the Indian middle class for a strongman. Give Manmohan Singh a military uniform, put all the armed forces under his direct command, make his word the law of the land, and he too will go around thumping his chest saying that it’s his destiny to save India from Indians . Zardari will never have the kind of control that Musharraf had. But Pakistanis do not want another Musharraf.

Pakistan, which Pakistan? For a small country, Pakistan is very diverse, not only ethnically but politically as well. General Musharraf’s government bombed Pashtuns in the north for being Islamists and close to the Taliban and at the same time it bombed Balochs in the South for NOT being Islamists and for subscribing to some kind of retro-socialist, anti Taliban ethos. You have probably heard the joke about other countries having armies but Pakistan’s army having a country. Nobody in Pakistan finds it funny.

Pakistan and its loose nukes: Pakistan’s nuclear programme is under a sophisticated command and control system, no more under threat than India or Israel’s nuclear assets are threatened by Hindu or Jewish extremists. For a long time Pakistan’s security establishment’s other strategic asset was jihadi organisations, which in the last couple of years have become its biggest liability.

Pakistan is a failed state: If it is, then Pakistanis have not noticed. Or they have lived in it for such a long time that they have become used to its dysfunctional aspects. Trains are late but they turn up, there are more VJs, DJs, theatre festivals, melas, and fashion models than a failed state can accommodate. To borrow a phrase from President Zardari, there are lots of non-state actors like Abdul Sattar Edhi who provide emergency health services, orphanages and shelters for sick animals.

It is a deeply religious country: Every half-decent election in this country has proved otherwise. Religious parties have never won more than a fraction of popular vote. Last year Pakistan witnessed the largest civil rights movements in the history of this region. It was spontaneous, secular and entirely peaceful. But since people weren’t raising anti-India or anti-America slogans, nobody outside Pakistan took much notice.

All Pakistanis hate India: Three out of four provinces in Pakistan – Sindh, Baluchistan, NWFP – have never had any popular anti-India sentiment ever. Punjabis who did impose India as enemy-in-chief on Pakistan are now more interested in selling potatoes to India than destroying it. There is a new breed of al-Qaida inspired jihadis who hate a woman walking on the streets of Karachi as much as they hate a woman driving a car on the streets of Delhi. In fact there is not much that they do not hate: they hate America, Denmark, China CDs, barbers, DVDs , television, even football. Imran Khan recently said that these jihadis will never attack a cricket match but nobody takes him seriously.

Training camps: There are militant sanctuaries in the tribal areas of Pakistan but definitely not in Muzaffarabad or Muridke, two favourite targets for Indian journalists, probably because those are the cities they have ever been allowed to visit. After all how much training do you need if you are going to shoot at random civilians or blow yourself up in a crowded bazaar? So if anyone thinks a few missiles targeted at Muzaffarabad will teach anyone a lesson, they should switch off their TV and try to locate it on the map.

RAW would never do what ISI does: Both the agencies have had a brilliant record of creating mayhem in the neighbouring countries. Both have a dismal record when it comes to protecting their own people. There is a simple reason that ISI is a bigger, more notorious brand name: It was CIA’s franchise during the jihad against the Soviets. And now it’s busy doing jihad against those very jihadis.

Pakistan is poor, India is rich: Pakistanis visiting India till the mid-eighties came back very smug. They told us about India’s slums, and that there was nothing to buy except handicrafts and saris. Then Pakistanis could say with justifiable pride that nobody slept hungry in their country. But now, not only do people sleep hungry in both the countries, they also commit suicide because they see nothing but a lifetime of hunger ahead. A debt-ridden farmer contemplating suicide in Maharashtra and a mother who abandons her children in Karachi because she can’t feed them: this is what we have achieved in our mutual desire to teach each other a lesson.

Edward Said Discussses His Work ‘Orientalism’

Edward Said discusses his work ‘Orientalism’ in this series of video discussions.

This work has recently been denigrated by some.  Most of these critics seemed to have waited until his passing to send out their works.  Sadly all of them actually miss the ideas that are in fact discussed in his book! Instead, they attack what they imagine is Said’s anti-Western stance, which is in fact not at all what the book or his research is about.

His consistent and powerful criticism focused on how political power and political aspirations influences knowledge, art and research and asked us to understand that relationship so that we could better understand a work and the prejudices and/or choices that were made in the production of it.  Said’s criticism used Western works because his principal focus was only the single most powerful political structure of the last 300 years – colonialism.

A structure of control and power that controlled most of the globe at its height, it was and remains an important influence on how the centers of world power speak about the rest of the world, whether it is in movies, theater, poetry, fiction, academic research and of course political discourse.

His writings help us understand how knowledge is created and the many influences that go into its production.  It does not ask us to dismiss the works of the ‘Orientalists’ but to see what may restrict or limit it.  He asks us to read critically, keeping in mind influences and priorities outside the academy that were a definite part in the nature of the works being produced.  And to hence understand the prejudices and inherent limits of these works and scholars.

His second book on the subject, ‘Culture & Imperialism’ continued this analysis into the realm of the creative arts.

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

The Most Dangerous Nation

The obsession with things ‘Islamic fundamentalist’ and ‘Al Qaeda” has been turned into a veritable multi-billion dollar industry and this despite the very little concrete and independently verified evidence to suppor the many claims of underground ‘Islamic/Al Qaeda’ cells and networks.

The Pakistanis are of course very much involved in this business, particular many of our journalists, and intellectual writers who find an easy audience amongst the ‘powerful’ in Europe and the USA.  The vast majority of the claims made by these journalists and writers are of course unexamined, unchecked and what is worse, unverifiable.  They are however writing for papers as diverse as The Christian Science Monitor, Asia Times, Time Magazine, Newsweek and others.  And when they are not writing, they are feeding and ‘guiding’ foreign journalists to where these stories can be ‘excavated’ and supported.

I had earlier written a post called ‘Only Interesting If Its Madness’ about how American newspapers and magazines have found that selling stories about the madmen of the Middle East and Islam is big business because it confirms America’s fears and paranoias and nothing sells better than that.

And the Pakistanis are unfortunately thick in the middle of this business, churning out articles, essays, research and what not based on the most species of information and the most biased of sources.  But it reels in dollars, and convinces otherwise intelligent international journalists and intellectuals who are also of course tied into the entire industry of fear.

But perhaps what worries me most is how little journalistic practice is involved in the writing and publishing of these pieces on ‘Al Qaeda’ or ‘Islamic terror’.  No one is asking about the sources, or bothering to confirm facts. It is as if none of the usual standards of journalism apply.  What matters is that we just rush out and print it.  From Carlotta Gall’s shameless piece on the front page of the New York Times simply regurgitating then Pakistan military government’s claim that ‘Al Qaeda’ had killed Benazir Bhutto at a time when the body parts were still lying around on the streets, to more recent piece on Pakistan by David Sanger suggests that we have now suspended our intelligence and common sense just to get our ‘by line’ printed on the pages of publications.  At no point was there a challenge, a questioning of the source, a scepticism that is crucial to the definition of journalism.

When it comes to Pakistan, no one is asking any questions as long as they confirm that it is ‘mad’, that it is ‘on the edge of an Islamic takeover’ and that it is ‘dangerous’.  And sadly, some of our supposedly finest minds are in on this game, sending out stuff that at times is staggering to read.  We are feeding the beast, perhaps seduced by the easy association with those in ‘power’, with their attention and their ability to make us, small post-colonial minds, feel ‘important’ and relevant.

Not a single major Pakistan intellectual, writer, artist or politician has challenged the story of Pakistan that has been constructed in international media.  Not a single person seems to want to say ’show me your sources’, or investigate where certain stories have emerged from.  We are all just going along for the ride.

And all this despite the complete lack of credibility that is the real reputation of mainstream American journalism today.  Just read Bill Moyer’s talk about it. For after all, all the main newspapers in the USA, the same papers that repeatedly tell us that they are on the front lines of the democracy and the protection of the citizens of the country that they serve the interest of the public (when in fact they are private, profit making enterprises), failed to ask a single sceptical question of the American administration on its rush to war in Iraq.

An entire intelligence community was bent and mutated to serve the needs to go to war.  It is now a well known fact that evidence was falsified, informers were paid, dissenters were silenced, and lies disseminated to newspapers and journalists to build a care for pre-emptive war against a nation that was not a threat to even its neighbors, let alone the USA.

Some more articulate comments on this issue come from the tireless Mark Danner

Iraq: The War of the Imagination

The Secret Way To War

Or Michael Massing’s work more specifically on the failures of American journalism and the shameless pandering to nationalist and patriotic fervor that led them to ignore facts, distort evidence and simply close their minds to doubts they later claimed they had, so that they participate and profit from the mindless march to war and the destruction of millions of lives and a nation.

Now They Tell Us

Unfit To Print

The End of News

And there are many more pieces of analysis of the failure of American’s so-called ‘best’ newspapers and their finest.

And now, despite this stain on their record, despite the fact that the intelligence community is completely discredited and the administration too, the same papers and their editors continue their march, turning their eyes to Pakistan yet again.  Here is a new piece in this weeks New York Times Sunday Magazine by David E. Sanger called ‘Obamas’ Worst Pakistan Nightmare’.

And just a few lines into the piece, we start to get a good idea of the sources of Mr. Sanger’s alarms and worries.  For example, ‘…members of the federally appointed bipartisan Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism made it clear that for sheer scariness, nothing could compete with what they had heard in a series of high-level intelligence briefings about the dangers of Pakistan’s nuclear technology going awry.’

Sounds familiar does it not? A commission appointed by the very administration that lied to us about Iraq is an opening source of Mr. Sanger’s piece!

A few lines down there is more – ‘By now Obama has almost surely been briefed about an alarming stream of intelligence that began circulating early last year to the top tier of George W. Bush’s national-security leadership in Washington.’

Now, if I am not mistaken, isn’t this again the same ‘top tier’ that promised us chemical weapons factories, nuclear sites, and a 45-minute time line to the destruction of the ‘free world’! All of which by the way were proven to be lies.

You would think that a writer working on a piece will try to find then another set of sources for the ‘fears’ and ‘alarmist views’ that underpin this essay.  Well, no.

The next source is ‘one of the most senior officials in the Bush administration, who had read all of the intelligence with care’ !

A senior Bush administration official who had read all of the intelligence with care.  My, how impressive that sounds.  Senior.  Official. Intelligence.  Care.  All the words that offer us authority and ensure that we may not ask the obvious question – was the intelligence concocted? Is the official much like those who fed us these ‘truths’ about Iraq?

But apparently only I am thinking of these things as Mr. Sanger proceeds unheeded and drops in the paragraph that every American editor’s wet dreams; ‘The Osama Bin Ladin’.  We are told about a ’secret meetings’ (well, how secret could they have been if knew about them!) with mad Pakistani scientists and Osama Bin Laden! The American officials love this ’smoking gun’ – to somehow create a link that their target ‘met’ with Osama Bin Ladin – that bogeman who pops up everywhere and anywhere, whenever we need him, where ever we want him.  From Iran to Gaza, from Pakistan to Afghanistan, from Iraq to…..North Korea next?

Eerily similar to the arguments about how some Al Qaeda members had ‘traveled’ through Iraq – arguments that have conclusively been shown to be lies, they are used to istill real fear in the minds of the reader – oh no, there is that supernatural beast Al Qaeda again and so it must all be true and real.  And so here, in this piece, because it lacks anything ‘concrete’, any real evidence, any serious investigation i.e. because it lacks journalism Mr. Sanger has to bring in the ’smoking gun’ statments to further close the readers mind by overwhelming it with fear and scare the intelligence out of her!

Mr Sanger is fed the right ‘details’ of a meeting by some unspecified American intelligence source, but later quotes George Tenet himself saying that the specifics of the meeting were ‘ frustratingly vague’.  That is, they have no idea what the meeting was about for it could as well have been about the weather.  It may never even have happened other than in the minds of those who imagined it.  Some well paid source maybe?

But that does not stop Mr. Sanger saying that someone had a canister of nuclear material at the meeting!

A meeting about which the so-called intelligence organization knew ‘frustratingly vague’ details i.e. not even if it took place, or who was there, or what little was said, is the basis of Mr. Sanger putting in the sensationalist ideas that nuclear material was present, that trigger designs were discussed.  This does not sound ‘frustratingly vague’ to me, but a writer who seems to have more details than even Mr. Tenet!

And this level of sloppy journalism, in fact, clearly irresponsible journalism continues through the article which is burdened one after another with incredible claims.  At no point does Mr Sanger express any doubts, ask any questions, challenge any of his sources.  In fact, he writes to ensure that we realize that the American sources and their statements are ‘true’ and/or carry ‘more weight’, while the Pakistani responses and sources are ’shifty’ or ‘questionable’.

This idiocy continues and ends at the article, where in the very last paragraph we have this gem: ‘At the end of Bush’s term, his aides handed over to Obama’s transition team a lengthy review of policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, concluding that in the end, the United States has far more at stake in preventing Pakistan’s collapse than it does in stabilizing Afghanistan or Iraq.’

A Bush aide hands President Obama a review of policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan! We may now understand how American foreign policy follies continues from one administration to the next! If the Obama Presidency is being briefed by possibly one of the most corrupt, lawless, discredited, criminal, violent, murderous administration in American history, then our hopes are truly over!

The American journalist’s love of rubbing up to power, to be known as someone with access to the ‘inner’ corridors of power, is perhaps its greatest failing at the moment.  Mr. Sanger is spending all his time in the offices of ‘officials’ and eating too much of the fine cuisine available at fine restaurants that I am sure he is dined at.  In Pakistan he is traveling through the living and dining rooms of the small elite – unable to speak the country’s language, ignorant of her history and her cultural diversity, uninterested in confronting it as a complex entity, Mr. Sanger has produced the classical American piece on Pakistan; sensationalist, fear mongering, officially sanctioned, and fed.

He now steps into the small footsteps of the likes of Carlotta Gall, David Rohde and others who have looked at Pakistan not through their own intelligence, but through the reports and supplied statements of ‘American officials’ or ‘Pakistani Government spokesperson’ or, left largely unsaid, the local journalists and fixers they pay large wads of cash to come back with stories about the mad men with nuclear weapons sitting in mountain caves and breathing the destruction of America with each breath.

None speak the language of the country.  None know the history of the country.  None understand the historical and cultural ties that still connect us to issues and matters in India.  None have traveled outside the sanctioned corridors to report on the nation.  They are blind, deaf and mute, and need others – American officials, Pakistani officials, translators and fixers (official and otherwise) to give them what they need.  And since they are unable to understand the very nation and its dynamics they are supposed to be reporting on, they simply feed the editors what the editors want – the stories to confirm the stories the editors are hearing from the ‘officials’ in Washington d.c..

Children create monsters to help deal with their evolving emotions and fears.

It seems that we are all still children.

What A Tangled Web We Weave

Samuel Huntington, author of the infamous book ‘The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order‘, died on December 28th 2008.

In an obituary in the New York Times, a newspaper famous for retrospectively bestowing garlands of respectability onto  the lives of even the most questionable of men, thought it ‘uncanny’ i.e. a reflection of his brilliance, that in that book he had written (predicted?) that ‘Somewhere in the Middle East, a half-dozen young men could well be dressed in jeans, drinking Coke, listening to rap, and between their bows to Mecca, putting together a bomb to blow up an American airliner.’

Huntington’s thesis that the modern world will see inevitable conflicts between what he claimed were separate ‘civilizations‘ with irreconcilable cultural and religious differences, captured the world’s imagination.  There is no doubt that this idea, offered first in an article in the journal ‘Foreign Affairs’ remains perhaps one of the most discussed, debated, celebrated and denigrated political and social constructs in modern memory.  And that is no small achievement.

It would be too easy to label him a hack and dismiss him. He was certainly not that. He was indeed a conservative, perhaps even a religious conservative, but he had the honesty to speak his mind even when it would surprise his erstwhile supporters, for example when he stated that ‘Western intervention in the affairs of other civilizations is probably the single most dangerous source of instability and potential global conflict in a multi-civilisational world.’

So I will discuss him in a slightly different way.

In 1874 Friedrich Nietzsche wrote his essay ‘On The Use and Abuse of History’ a rather dense treatise on the value and dangers of an excessive immersion in the study of history.  I will not go into a lengthy discussion on Nietzsche – I am certainly not qualified to do that, and I want to spare the handful of people who bother to read this blog in the first place.  I will though focus on a few points in Nietzsche’s piece that came to my mind as I was reading about Samuel Huntington.

The entire argument of Nietzsche’s piece is in its first few sentences.  Beginning with a quote from Goethe, ‘Incidently, I despise everything which merely instructs me without increasing or immediately enlivening my activity’, Nietzsche goes on to summarize that ‘…we must in all seriousness despise instruction without vitality, knowledge which enervates activity, and history as an expensive surplus of knowledge and a luxury, because we still lack what is still most essential to us and because what is superfluous is hostile to what is essential.’

The danger as Nietzsche saw it was that ‘…in the historical method of reckoning so many false, crude, inhuman, absurd, and violent things always emerge that the fully pious atmosphere of illusion in which alone everything that wants to live can live necessarily disappears. But only in love, only in a love overshadowed by illusion, does a person create, that is, only in unconditional belief in perfection and righteousness.’

History was then to be studied to serve man, to improve our world and our society, and to help us learn from our mistakes.  The worst that one could do was to become an historically educated man ‘…who believes He has to do nothing other than continue to live as he has been living, to continue loving what he has loved, to continue to hate what he has hated, and to continue reading the newspapers which he has been reading. For him there is only one sin, to live differently from the way he has been living.’

And that is what Huntington became.

His writings have been criticized by many so I will not repeat those here.  The criticisms hinge on the many erasures that Huntington had to employ to create the illusion of distinct and separate ‘civilizations’ and their inevitable clash.  Not the least of the erasures being an acknowledgment of real, lived human existence and the extensive and daily economic, social and cultural interactions taking place between the peoples of the world every moment of every day of every year of  known human history.

But for me personally his greatest mistake was his lack of a love overshadowed by illusion - the ability to see the possibilities of human life and human sharing.  Whether these possibilities ever existed could be debated endlessly, but what matters to me, and what I feel was missing in his thinking, was the idea that these possibilities should exist.  Huntington read the history that he wanted to read.  He found in his readings, lectures, writings and research the antagonisms that he was looking for and that he believed confirmed his world view.

For Huntington, and for the millions who support his world view, something called ‘The West’ stands for liberty, democracy, human rights, religious freedom, tolerance, respect for the individual and so on and so forth.  All that is good in man becomes all that ‘The West’ stands for and represents.  And in opposition to all this stands the rest, ‘The East’, ‘The Orient‘ etc. But much of this belief in Western culture and its supposedly unique values, the values for which Western powers have repeatedly found it necessary to kill and destroy, is based on a very simple, and in fact, concocted construction of the West’s idea of its own heritage.

These concoctions include the belief, to quote the French historian Marcel Detienne from his new book ‘The Greeks and Us’,  not only “…that both the abstract notion of politics and concrete politics one fine day fell from the heavens, landing on ‘classical’ Athens in the miraculous and authenticated form of Democracy (with a capital D), but also that a divinely linear history has led us by the hand from the American Revolution, passing by way of the ‘French Revolution’, all the way to our own western societies that are so blithely convinced that their mission is to convert all peoples to the true religion of democracy.”

And again from Detienne ‘In his Instructions, Lavisse declared that what secondary-school pupils need to be taught, without their realizing it, is that ‘our history begins with the Greeks’. Our [French] history begins with the Greeks, who invented liberty and democracy and who introduced us to ‘the beautiful’ and a taste for ‘the universal’. (Lavisse was an important influence in matters of French education in the 19th century)

These concoctions in other cases also included outright theft, as Jack Goody discusses in his book ‘The Theft of History’, in which he argues that ‘Since the beginning of the 19th century, the construction of world history has been dominated by western Europe.’ and ‘What has characterized European efforts…has been a propensity to impose their own story on the wider world, following an ethnocentric tendency…and the capacity to do so due to its de facto domination in many parts of the world’.  Goody argues that the study of history has to take a new direction and that ‘A more critical stance is necessary….That means…being sceptical about the west’s claims (or indeed Asia’s), to have invented activities and values such as democracy or freedom.’ And so on.

I am reading the book as I write this.  I have to thank a friend, a writer who wishes to remain anonymous, for pointing me to a recent Le Monde Diplomatique article that refers to  both these books.

Jack Goody is a British social anthropologist. He has been a prominent teacher at Cambridge University, he was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1976 and he is an associate of the US National Academy of Sciences.  Marcel Detienne is a Belgian historian and specialist in the study of ancient Greece. Currently he is the Basil L. Gildersleeve Professor of Classics at The Johns Hopkins University.  He was also was at one time a directeur d’études at the École pratique des hautes études, where he taught until 1998.  He was also a founder of the Centre de recherches comparées sur les sociétés anciennes in Paris.

No light weights here.

How we read the world is a reflection of how we read ourselves.  Edward Said always loved to quote Cesaire’s Cahier d’un retour particularly these lines

and man must still overcome all the interdictions

wedged in the recesses of his fervor and no race has a

monopoly on beauty, on intelligence, on strength

and there is room for everyone at the convocation of

conquest

We as individuals are in need of history but that reveals to us the myriad connections, interactions, and pollutions that give our our culture (social, religious, political, human) the complexity, depth, beauty and righteousness we believe it possesses. Even until the end Samuel Huntington was unable to overcome all the interdictions.

He simplified history on the basis of an idea of his heritage, his ‘western’ heritage which in fact is a man made heritage, cleansed of its complexity and eastern influences, including Islamic.  It is a myth that the west traces its heritage to the Greeks and that it’s heritage begins there, exclusive of the rest of the world.  Even a brief review of David Lewis’ book “God’s Crucible’ reveals how deeply Arabic and Islamic thought, ideas, habits and values influenced European thought, ideas, habits and values.   And I will not even begin about China and her technical advances centuries before anything similar emerged anywhere else in the world, including Europe.  His idea of ‘the west’ was based on a false premise, a myth created in the late 18th/early 19th century and since made to appear as definitive and true! And he never  able to incorporate or understand the many challenges to this myth that have emerged in the academies of Europe, America and elsewhere.

His thesis not only simplified the world into a caricature of itself, but it erased histories.  Particularly modern, 20th century American history. The Middle East, Huntington’s maniacal young men in American jeans drinking Coke, are all constructs whose histories has been erased to satisfy a belief in the irrational, inhuman propensity towards violence, intolerance, injustice and repression that resides within ‘the other’.  They do not posses the American attitude.  They do not possess reason. They do not possess pain. They do not possess a sense of injustice. And most perversely, we have nothing to do with them there.

This reductive understanding of violence and confrontation is today being employed all over the world.  One cannot but be surprised at the ease with which Huntington’s ideas have armed the most bigoted and racist nationalist and religious ideologies around the world with an intellectual framework to justify their actions.

The most inhuman of humans, men and women with lives based on violence, expropriation, thuggery, greed and corruption, speaking to us of our vaunted values.  How much they all share and how little we seem to recognize the connections.

It may be easy to ask ‘Why do they hate us?’ and go home convinced that you have separated yourself from the evil.  Or to fall into the seductive trap of believing in the inevitable conflict between ‘Jews’ vs. ‘Muslims’.  But reality is more inter-twined, and the imagined protagonists greater collaborators than we are prepared to accept.  I was reminded of this by a recent piece by Joseph Massad, an Associate Professor at Columbia University, called ‘The Gaza Ghetto Uprising’.

There is no ‘us vs. them’. We are them, and they are us.

My latest photography project in India is about rediscovering the connections between India’s two most troubled communities – the Hindus and the Muslims.  Convinced of their ‘civilizational’ differences, not only did India’s Muslim elite, influenced by European ideas, construct a separate and distinct history and heritage for itself, but insisted that it required its own separate nation.  Millions died, millions more were displaced and today nearly 2 billion people, the residents of India and Pakistan, are held hostage to these same, ancient, outdated ideas.

Maybe Samuel Huntington saw something inevitable in that clash. His history and reading of it would suggest that.  But perhaps if had looked a little more closely into the history of the region he may have found that in fact the clash is a modern construct, a very 19th century construct, and one that was instigated less by irreconcilable differences, but more by the exigencies of the pursuit of political power and by a handful of European educated, elite men.  I will write more about that in a separate post.

We need history, but as Friedrich Nietzsche argued, we need it for living.  Samuel Huntington lives, in the hearts and minds of millions, particularly the powerful and the despotic.  That is not a legacy he would be proud of.  But it is the one that we, the rest of us who found something interesting and educational in Huntington’s writings but were not seduced by them, have to confront and address.

Unraveling Bitter Threads

The only man I have ever felt envious of was a ‘celebrity’ documentary filmmaker who once told an interviewer that his success was a result of his complete lack of introspection!

Introspection has been the bane of my existence.

I heard Faiz Ahmed Faiz before I ever read him.  His poem ‘Don’t Ask Me for That Love Again’ - sung by the likes of Begum Akhtar and Noor Jehan is famous for its bold challenge to the Beloved (whether this is mortal or the Divine is usually left unspecific) to accept that his social commitment, his sense of moral outrage, is more important than even his love for him/her.  Agha Shahid Ali in his book ‘The Rebel’s Silhouette’ called it ‘revolutionary’.

I did not know that when I first heard it.  But if I ever have to explain how my life fell offs its well structured, predictable, conventional, safe, insular and material success oriented railway track to its current antithesis then I always begin by turning to this poem.

That which was then ours, my love,

don’t ask me for that love again.

Many have tried to explain the unraveling of what had so carefully been constructed for me, particularly those ‘friends’ and ‘colleagues’ who have continued on their paths and are now successful bankers, entrepreneurs, managers and what not.  And I accept that their explanations may be truer than my own. I know that they are crueler.

I however believe that the seeds of doubt about the ideas and views of my life were planted when, just days after I had heard this poem, I saw something that affected me more deeply than I could have then imagined.  The circumstances were so coincidental, between the hearing of this poem and the sight, that I can only look back and weave them into some sort of meaningful event.  At the time though, I had no such awareness

The world then was gold, burnished with lights…

and only because of you.  That’s what I had believed.

I heard a recording of the poem, sung by the famous Pakistani/Indian singer Noor Jehan, in the home of a private maths tutor.  Abdul Rehman was a bit of a rebel, a radical teacher at the boy’s school I attended.  Private tuition was essential because the school fees apparently only guaranteed us corporal punishment and verbal abuse.  You had to pay someone extra to get to the education.

Abdul Rehman loved music and was not shy about playing it while we worked through of exercises and lessons.  I remember him stopping us and asking us to listen to the words.

All this I had thought, all this I had believed.

But there were other sorrows, comforts other than love

The rich had cast their spell on history:

dark centuries had been embroidered on brocades and silks.

A few days after hearing the poem I encountered, while walking back from the local market, 2 small children, no older than 5 perhaps, holding hands and sifting through offal outside a butcher’s shop looking for something to eat.

Bitter threads began to unravel before me

as I went into alleys and in open markets

saw bodies plastered with ash, bathed in blood.

There are moment of one’s life that make such an impression that they become only more vivid with the passage of time.

I have never forgotten those two small children and the gentle way they held each other for support.  Their uncertain steps, their dirt covered skin, their hair of a color that suggested something other than natural.  And those eyes, eyes that cast a look that cut through all the desperately enacted civilized veneer of a middle class society living amongst so much deprivation, as they attempted to figure out what parts of the discarded entrails could be taken as food.

I stopped.

I looked.

I stared.

I remember a feeling of embarrassment at being the only one stopping to stare.

I moved on but acutely aware that I had seen something remarkable and that some barrier had been breached.

I saw them sold and bought, again and again.

This too deserves attention.  I can’t help but look back

when I return from those alleys – what should I do?

That was over 20 years ago, but as Faiz said ‘I can’t help but look back when I return from those alleys – what should I do?’. Those 2 children have never left me.  It is with them that I begin to see the world more clearly, to understand my place in it, to question what passes for ‘life’ amongst the upper echelons of society and to explore the makings of our modern world and why it is the way it is.  Perhaps most importantly, those 2 children, the dregs of Pakistan’s modernity, made me understand a country that I had until then loved unconditionally and defended thoughtlessly.

There are other sorrows in this world,

comforts other than love.

Don’s ask me, my love, for that love again.

(Faiz Ahmed Faiz, from Agha Shahid Ali’s translation)

I am thinking about all this because Gaza is burning.  Hundreds are being killed on the basis of false premises and prejudiced values.  Hundreds are being killed to serve the power aspirations of a handful of powerful people.  Dare we question the obvious? Dare we begin to ask ourselves how we are part of this process where the struggles of the weak have become synonymous with ‘terrorism’, the oppressions of the powerful with ‘liberty and democracy’. I am thinking of all this because each hour our respectable and valued news organizations continue to fill the air waves and the digital highways with a world view defined by the powerful and justifications for mass slaughter and murder that require us to believe that we are on the side of the civilized for as long as we say nothing in the face of this madness.

I am thinking of this because I am thinking of the Palestinians and I am thinking back to an anecdote Eqbal Ahmed spoke about – a meeting between Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Edward Said in war torn Beirut in 1980.  I am thinking about another poet, Mahmoud Darwish, who became a voice of his people and of their suffering.  Faiz gave voice to the best that is in Pakistan, for which he was jailed, tortured and later sent into exile.  The Palestinians too have been permanently been sent into exile.  Or, better if I end this by quoting Darwish himself:

They fettered his mouth with chains, And tied his hands to the rock of the dead.

They said: You’re a murderer.

They took his food, his clothes and his banners, And threw him into the well of the dead.

They said: You’re a thief.

They threw him out of every port, And took away his young beloved.

And then they said: You’re a refugee.

(Mahmoud Darwish)

I envy the man with no capacity for introspection.  It saves him from being a refugee from this world of powers that obfuscate it and manipulate it so that we believe it is a heaven, a civilized place where lives are lived with intentions and actions that serve the greater good.  I am thinking about all this today, yet another today like so many thousands of previous ones and many more to come.  Insha’allah.