Losing Our Moral Compass Or When Genocide Becomes A Necessity And Can Be Explained

We have often wondered what led so many Germans to just sat by or appeared to ‘collaborate’ during the Jewish genocide, or the Rwandans to engage in mass slaughter of each other, or the Serbians to look away as Sarajevo burned, or the Pakistanis to celebrate the slaughter of the Bengali. And many more such situations that leave so many ‘civilized’ and ‘decent’ people asking themselves that old question: how can a people do this to another?

Well, this is how we do it.

Civilized, decent people very much like ourselves, very much like our neighbors, reveal the lies, hyperbole, ethnic hate, religious delusions, ethno-centric racism that is worn easily and comfortably and thousands of innocents will quietly bleed, die and disappear. And all along we will go about convinced that we were just, civilized and humane. We refuse to raise our consciousness and our sense of morality and justice above primitive ethnic, religious, and nationalist allegiances.

Max Blumenthal continues to reveal an ugly side of our society that today has become a force so contorting that it is simply murderous and genocidal. And yes, what is happening in the name of Israel, in the name of ‘liberty’ and ‘civilization’ – what has been happening there for over 100 years, is an ethnic cleansing, a ethnic genocide of a people who are ‘not Jews’. And it is events such as this, held on the very streets of our very modern city, that fuel it all.

And lets be honest: a strain of American Jewry – more fundamentalist, rabid and hate filled than anything we can find elsewhere, is fueling murder and slaughter. There is so much evidence of it that even Israeli journalists have had to step up to expose it – see Akiva Eldar’s piece called U.S. tax dollars fund rabbi who excused killing gentile babies.

And then there was this recent discussion, thanks for Tikum Olam, that sent chills down my spine (click the CC to get the english translation):

On the streets of New York City, they are dancing in anticipation of Palestinian blood. They are calling for kill. They are lusting for death. And we still have to wonder how the Germans, or the Rwandans, or the Serbians did it? Right under our noses, and right where our fine media, with its self-proclaimed liberal and civilized values, finds it impossible to report, reveal and condemn.

Never again…..indeed!

Who Was That Strange Man I Met In Gaza And Why Was He Drawing Cartoons As People Died?

It is a world that I have lost touch with, but while I was in it, however marginally, it was filled with an incredible array of intelligent, passionate, engaged and generous people. Post-war Sarajevo bought me in touch with writer Stacy Sullivan, photographer Paul Lowe, photographer and editor Leslie Fratkin and last and definitely not the least, the graphic artist Joe Sacco.

And though my first meeting with Joe Sacco was rather brief – a brush past and a ‘Hello’ at a small cafe in Sarajevo, I finally got to know him better in the Palestinian city of Rafah in Southern Gaza. I ran into him on the streets of that city back in 2003 and learned that he was there working on a new book and research project on an event, a massacre, that had taken place back in 1948 in the city of Khan Younis, a few miles from Rafah.

Over grilled chicken and endless rounds of what he liked to call ‘the official drink of Rafah’ i.e. Mirinda Orange, we talked about his work, about my project and photographic aims, about the occupation of Palestine, and about the meaning of life in a prison like Rafah. It was during that period that we both met the American peace activist Rachel Corrie, and together stood over her body at the morgue in Rafah.

Joe Sacco’s work from that period is now complete, and emerges in the form of a new book called Footnotes In Gaza and the excellent blog Mondoweiss as a preview that I encourage you to go and see – just click on the image below:

From Joe Sacco's New Book "Footnotes In Gaza" Copyright Joe Sacco

The work is an example of rigorous research and journalism. It digs deep into the history of a period that Israel’s nationalist myths have determinedly erased, but that live in the memory and souls of its victims. Patrick Cockburn reviewed the work for The New York Times calling it “…one of the few contemporary works on the Israeli-Palestinian struggle likely to outlive the era in which they were written.”

For those who speak of ‘peace’, works like this remind us that it is not merely peace we seek, but justice as well. For without justice, there can be no peace.

Joe Sacco is a Guggenheim Fellow and author of a number of graphic books including Palestine and Safe Area Goradze amongst others.

Get to know him.

Tariq Ali On The Mess In Afghanistan And Why Its Only About To Get Worse

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

UPDATE: A recent article in The Boston Review, titled God, The Army & PTSD by Tara McKelvey raises a number of important questions about the increasing use of Christian religious/spiritual material at military institutions, including the pop-psych mumbo-jumbo of Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life by Pastor Rick Warren, to treat soldiers suffering from PTSD and other psychiatric problems. For example, it points out that:

When a 2006 Government Accountability Office report raised questions about whether soldiers were getting the psychiatric help they needed, an assistant secretary of defense disputed the report’s findings, pointing to the fact that soldiers were being referred to chaplains. During this time contracts for veterans’ services were increasingly parceled out to leaders of faith-based organizations rather than to secular ones, even though veterans’ advocates opposed any bias toward faith-based treatment and argued that replacing empirically proven, nonsectarian programs with faith-based ones was a mistake.

As one commentator points out in the responses to this piece:

Major Hasan would have been familiar with the conditions described in this essay. As psychiatrist at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center for the last five years he would have both treated patients for PTSD and have been familiar with the preference for faith based treatments described in this article.

We hear from Major Hasan’s family that he complained about religious harassment during his tenure at Walter Reed but we do not know specifics. It is reasonable to believe that his patients suffering from PTSD might not have liked being treated by a Muslim and almost certainly heard specific opinions about Islam and Muslims from those patients. The inevitable investigation into Major Hasan’s career will reveal the dynamic of those patient interactions.

This is, again, about asking human questions about a human, criminal act so that we may know meaningful and actionable facts and truths about such heinous acts. I raised this point in the main essay (see below) some weeks ago. Searching for the psychology of ‘Muslims’, as the learned Tunku Varadarajan wants to do, or exploring the pages of a religious text, while erasing daily and ordinary social, political and lived reality of an individual is a false, and frankly, racist approach. It seems to be particularly reserved for anyone who can be labeled ‘Muslim’. That word – ‘Muslim’ has now come to take on the meaning of a special species – devoid of individuality and history and to be seen only as a mob, mass, collectivity, blob and spiritually programmed pathology.

∞

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.

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!!

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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’.

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!

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?

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?

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.

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!

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

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.)

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!

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?

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.

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.

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!

∞

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The Limits of Photojournalism And Things More Worthwhile

It is perhaps the most interesting, creative and compelling book of photography I have ever read. I have looked and read it over a dozen times in the last 8 years.  Edward Said & Jean Mohr’s ‘After The Last Sky: Palestinian Lives’ is perhaps the only example that I know of of a brilliant writer and a sensitive photographer collaborating to produce something remarkably insightful, intelligent and provocative at the same time.

For the first time a writer has worked directly from photographs to produce essays that speak to the deeper, human and ever lasting issues concerning the question of Palestine and the lives of the Palestinians in exile and under occupation.  And has done so without resorting to hysteria or sensationalism. As a book, an endeavor, setting aside its subject, it is a masterpiece of photojournalism that informs and elevates its subject beyond images and words alone.

And similarly, Jean Mohr, a wonderful Swiss photographer I fear is mostly forgotten these days, has traveled beyond the devastated and desperate Palestinian landscapes to excavate the gentle and human rhythms and to reveal the humanity and daily ordinariness of Palestinian’s life.

This is real photojournalism; engaged, creative, insightful, committed, patient, lasting, influential and thought provoking.  It is photojournalism that attempts to contribute to the dialogue about an issue, without seeming desperate to sensationalize or be recognized.  It is photojournalism that goes beyond the personality of the photographer, and instead highlights the lives of the subjects, and issues on hand and the questions that are relevant.  It is real photojournalism, and for the last 8 years, Said/Mohr’s ‘After The Last Sky’ has been my personal measure of how photojournalism should be done.

Anything less is mere picture making.

I met Jean Mohr in Jerusalem in 2003 at an exhibition sponsored by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). He was one of my earliest influences and inspirations, and in fact my early work on the Sattar Edhi Center in Karachi, Pakistan was inspired by one of his pictures from the same center.  Lets be honest, I set out to imitate him! I was drawn to him because of the complexity of his images that never crossed the line into voyeurism, sensationalism or some desperate attempt to titillate.  In person he was appropriately shy – I seemed to scare him.  I thought I saw his champagne glass shake with fear when I introduced myself to him and said that he had been a major influence on my work! The creative, exciting conversation that i had imaged we would have never materialized.  After a few minutes of clumsy and formal introductions and pleasanteries, Jean Mohr was pulled away (or found an excuse to leave?) and I never got a chance to speak to him again.

I have on my shelves a few hundred books of photography and photojournalism.  Most of them large, expensively bound tomes that suggest gravity of intent and purpose.  Serious artists at work.  Only a handful have I poured over in detail, savoring each page, and learning something new from it.  Robert Frank’s “The Americans’ is one that I have come back to again and again.  That is a cliche.  Said/Mohr’s “After The Last Sky’ is in fact not even on my photography book self.  It is instead placed in along my other books.  And that I think is it’s highest achievement.

Said/Morh’s “After The Last Sky’ is the only photography book I know that is filed under ‘Middle East History’, and not under the ‘Photography’ section of any mainstream bookstore.  In fact, that is where I remember finding  my copy – in the ‘Middle East History’ section of the Barnes & Noble store on 555 5th Avenue in Manhattan in 2001.  And that is this book’s greatest achievement – that it has lifted itself away from the shallow and limited value of being just another photo book to being a book about history!

My shelves are laden with these high art tomes of photography.  Most mere decorations.  Clutter.

And so much of today’s photojournalism is mere clutter.  Illustrations really, not illuminations.  We no longer seem to know the difference.  We no longer appear prepared to go beyond the picture and to reveal the more complex political, economic, social and historical issues at stake.  Perhaps worse, there is something rather close to middle class voyeurism in what passes for essential photojournalism.  This is perhaps a little discussed subject when it comes to the field of photojournalism i.e. the class divisions between those who make the pictures and those who become the subjects and how it influences what, who and how we represent.

A brief perusal of the kinds of subject matter that is recognized as ‘photojournalism’ or ‘documentary photography’ reveals this bias;  drug addicts (anywhere), transvestites (anywhere, but especially in Asia), prostitutes (anywhere, but especially in Asia), drugs and drunks in Russia, street children, the mentally ill (like shooting fish in a bowl!), strip clubs/strippers, prisons, the physically handicapped, hungry/pleading Africans, crazy/blood thirsty Africans, exotic ritual/false exotic culture stories that offer us the ‘other’ as primitive etc.  All subjects popular with young photographers, grant committees, and photojournalism education institutes shoving students out towards the ‘downtrodden’ neighborhoods to find their stories. All about comunities that can ’shock’ middle class sensibilities and offer us a mean to sneer, pity, or simply express remorse.

There have been many discussions and endless arguments about where photojournalism stands today and what ails it.  Few seem prepared to say that it has stagnated, and that its creative energies are being wasted on the purchase of new toys and technology gizmos rather than on the complex and demanding art of constructing and telling new stories from new angles and in new ways.  To the human art of seeing our world for its complexities and attempting to speak about them.

I continue to look for stories that connect us to them, reminding us that their lives and our lives are connected in intricate, obvious ways if we would only bother to look. From Kivu to Khartoum, to speak of African alone, what transpires there is directly connected to what transpires here.

Maybe a new photo reportage on Zimbabwe perhaps that does not fall into the simplistic and easy narratives about a nation misruled by a yet another mad African leader – see again Mamdani on Zimbabwe . Or something on Africa’s HIV/AIDS crisis that reveals to us how effective indigenous, small scale programs of prevention and care have been in contrast to the waste and corruption engendered in the multinational/NGO industries involved in the matter – as demonstrated by Helen Epstein in her book ‘The Invisible Cure’.

And maybe that is why Said/Mohr’s work continues to stand out because it is not constrained by the limits of the image, or the need to have a story published in a weekly news magazine, or the preferences of a particular photo editor.  It reveals connections, human, political, social and historical, between its subject and us and does so without cleansing the matter of its uncomfortable realities.

It remains a work liberated from the constraints of the craft, and the media structures that sustain and also constrain it.  Jean Mohr does not like to write, but in the book’s Introduction he reveals the personal, moral and perhaps dissident motivations for his nearly 50 years of work on the lives and displacement of the Palestinians.  He tells of a conversation with ‘… a respected reporter and a perfect connoisseur of the world of photography.’ where this individual asks:

‘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!’ (From After The Last Sky, page 7)

It seems to me today we are all working on ’something more worthwhile!’ i.e. avoiding works that question our prejudices and misunderstandings, or are just politically impolite and rude, or focus on issues and angles that may reveal new truths and insights to situations considered known.

I simplify; photographers like Jason Ezkenazi, Jon Anderson, Simon Wheatley, Sara Terry to name a few continue to pursue the complex, complicate and demanding.

I am speaking about works that take risks, that reveal independence of thought, and a commitment to confront our seemingly endless need to simplify.  Works that are not constrained by the need for the obvious image, but given flight by the possibilities of what the subject can reveal.  Works that are about teaching us which questions to ask.

I have struggled with these thoughts for every year that I have been working as a professional.  They are guides in my personal journey as a photographer, with all my current works revealing the vast distances I  have yet to travel to reach these ideals.

In the mean time, today, the last day of 2008, I have a copy of ‘After The Last Sky’ in my hands, and a prayer in my heart for the voiceless and forgotten people of Gaza.  As Darwish himself said it best (didn’t he always!)

Where should we go after the last frontiers,

where should the birds fly after the last sky?

The Anti-Semite In Me

In 2002, just before I left for Gaza to begin nearly 2 years of work on the impact of Israel’s occupation of that land, I wrote a short email to Edward Said.  Much to my surprise, he wrote back.  It was a short response, wishing me luck with my project and expressing an interesting in seeing my work once I thought it was ready to be shown.  Edward Said died about a year later and I never got a chance to take him up on his offer, though I knew that he had made it out of politeness.  And I could never tell him how much even that polite offer had meant to me and how much it had inspired the work that I did eventually manage to produce.

I am thinking of Gaza today as its people are once again asked to bear the brunt of the world’s indifference and casual justifications for their murders.  On this first day alone, over 200 have been been quietly killed. Indeed, it is Israel that is carrying out the air raids but it is we who have permitted this to be done.  Prepared as we are to quickly forget the political aspirations of the Palestinians, eager as we are to reduce this struggle from the broader one about throwing off an occupation to a petty one about ‘rockets’ and ‘retaliations’.  All to avoid the fact that we are not prepared to ask of Israel the very things she and her citizens insist on asking of European powers that once wronged her people: justice, compensation, respect for law, criminal prosecution, acknowledgment of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

After 2 years of work in Gaza the images were published in a few obscure and unread Internet and print journals.  It took just a few days for the reactions to come in and unsurprisingly I was accused of being an anti-semite, and a supporter of terrorism. By friends, and by strangers. The work had offended them, and dismissed as the rantings of a misguided, unqualified and naive photographer. 

Apparently I had not understood anything, or realized the foolishness of my ways.  Many who attacked me were quaintly ignorant of the history of the conflict.  And determined to remain so.  Most had in fact never even been to Israel but defended her history and her actions on the basis of a religious, ethnic, or some other affiliation.  Many had read a book or two, largely biased.  Most had not read the best of even Israel’s own.

Israel’s academies and individuals have produced some fine historical research and independent writings about her emergence as a nation, its Palestinian victims and the perpetuation of myths that sustain the conflict.  It surprises me even today and I can’t help but admire the courage of these men and women who have so bravely carried out their work as Israeli citizens about Israel’s history, in a national and social atmosphere imbued with an extremely militant and sectarian nationalism.

Benvenisti’s Sacred Landscape, or Pappe’ ‘The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine’, or Sternhell’s “The Founding Myths of Israel’ to name just a few.  I list the Israeli’s first because I will be accused of ‘bias’ or anti-intellectualism if I list voices from the Arab and the rest of the world, a world painted as irrationally hostile to the Middle East’s ‘only liberal democracy’.

But for those interested in works that reflect academic rigor, intellectual honesty and excellence in research, they should also look at Khalidi’s  ‘The Iron Cage’, or Shehadeh’s  ‘Strangers in the House’ or Nusseibeh’s  ‘Once Upon A Country’, and Edward Said’s masterful ‘The Question of Palestine’.  And there are a lot more.

Some years ago journalist Jonathan Cook wrote an essay called From Highcombe to Nazareth: How I Found Myself with the Islamic Fascists He was writing some years after my time in Gaza, but it captured wel the things I felt back in 2004.  Jonathan has been accused of being an anti-semite as well for his rigorously researched writings and honest appraisal of the realities of Israeli politics and policies in the Occupied Territories.

If you have not read Jonathan’s work, make sure you do.  He has written 3 books on Israel and a number of insightful articles and essays on the situation inside Israel, her management of the Occupied Lands and on broader geo-political matters.  I am proud to call Jonathan a friend.  He has also been called an anti-semite.  I guess misery loves company.

We live in a world where an unarmed population, trapped inside what can only be described as a prison, is being attacked with missles and soon with sophisticated armoured vehicles.  One of the most powerful military nations in the world has convinced us, us with our civilized codes of behavior and morality, that this tiny little portion of the earth with its dangerous and barbaric people, are a threat to its existence.  We have been convinced that this is about ‘rockets’ and ‘peace’ all so that we do not remember that this is actually about an occupation, oppression, dispossession and simple theft.

We live in a world where we, the educated, modern, evolved, superior, civilized and wealthy have decided that the evil that we confront is the unarmed, hungry and trapped masses of Gaza who have the temerity to refuse our ‘peace’ and to demand something more: justice, compensation, respect for law, criminal prosecution, acknowledgment of war crimes and crimes against humanity. And I find, illogically perhaps, that I cannot be part of this civilized, modern, progressive, evolved, superior world.

I find that I remain accused of being an anti-semite.

I can’t look away.

I can’t explain it away.

I can’t accept the ‘truths’ I am supposed to.

I can’t accept that the only alternative to ‘us’ is the ‘terrorists’.

I can’t forget their history.

I can’t ignore their dispossession.

I can’t excuse their murders.

I can’t justify their suffering.

I can’t remain numbed by a media bought.

I can’t ignore their courage.

I can’t ignore their right.

I can’t explain away their struggle for justice.

I can’t transform what is clearly wrong into a geo-politically convenient, socially acceptable, polite-company approved  ‘right’.

I can’t.

I have with this same naivete and foolishness continued my work on the Palestinians – both in Israel and in the Occupied Territories.

I remain in awe of the courage, dignity and determination of the Palestinian people.  I am proud of having stood alongside them.  And if being an anti-semite can be contorted to mean anyone who argues for the rights and justice of the Palestinian people who have suffered decades of dispossession, expulsion, and oppression, than I remain an anti-semite.

And for those who may have forgotten, this is the Palestinian flag, bloodied and torn as it may be today and for decades past, but that it is the Palestinian flag.

Read: Chris Hedge’s ‘Party To Murder’

Read: Sara Roy’s ‘If Gaza Falls’

Read: Tariq Ali’s ‘From The Ashes of Gaza’

Read: Richard Falk, Princeton University emeritus professor of international law who has also been an investigator of Palestinian human rights for the United Nations, report on Gaza human rights, where if I may summarize the following statements can be clearly read

1. ‘…a policy of collective punishment, initiated by Israel to punish Gazans for political developments within the Gaza strip, constitutes a continuing flagrant and massive violation of international humanitarian law as laid down in Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.’
2. ‘…an urgent effort should be made at the United Nations to implement the agreed norm of a ‘responsibility to protect’ a civilian population being collectively punished by policies that amount to a Crime Against Humanity.’

NOTE: The term “anti-Semitic” (or “anti-Semite”) usually refers to Jews only.  It was coined in 1873 by German journalist Wilhelm Marr in a pamphlet called, “The Victory of Jewry over Germandom”. Using ideas of race and nationalism, Marr argued that Jews had become the first major power in the West. He accused them of being liberals, a people without roots who had Judaized Germans beyond salvation. In 1879 Marr founded the “League for Anti-Semitism”.  (See Wikipedia Entry)

However, The term Semite means a member of any of various ancient and modern people originating in southwestern Asia, including Akkadians, Canaanites, Phoenicians, Hebrews, Arabs, and Ethiopian Semites.

Unfortunately, It Was A War Crime

For those of you who may have missed it, Vice President Dick Cheney recently admitted on TV to Jonathan Karl of ABC news that he in fact did authorize the use of torture techniques such as waterboarding and other forms of torture.  The dialogue went like this:

KARL: Did you authorize the tactics that were used against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?

CHENEY: I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared, as the agency in effect came in and wanted to know what they could and couldn’t do. And they talked to me, as well as others, to explain what they wanted to do. And I supported it.

KARL: In hindsight, do you think any of those tactics that were used against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others went too far?

CHENEY: I don’t…

KARL: And on KSM, one of those tactics, of course, widely reported was waterboarding. And that seems to be a tactic we no longer use. Even that you think was appropriate?

CHENEY: I do.

And just for those who may have not realized, but waterboarding “…has been defined as torture by the United States since at least 1903, the first military court-martial. The United States views waterboarding conducted for intelligence purposes during wartime as a war crime, and it has prosecuted both civilian and military figures involved in the chain of approval of its use. Penalties applied have ranged up to the death penalty. The crime is chargeable under the War Crimes Act and under the Anti-Torture Statute. There is no ambiguity or disagreement among serious lawyers on this part, and Cheney’s suggestion that what he did was lawful and vetted is the delusional elevation of political hackery over law.” This clarification and public service details from Harper’s Scott Horton.

I leave you with a statement from Major General Anthony Taguba (Ret.), a man who was forced to retire because of his statements about the Abu Grhaib prison, as published in a recent report for Physicians for Human Rights

“After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.“

Indeed.

UPDATE: David Cole, Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, has written a new piece in the New York Review of Books called ‘What To Do About The Torturers’ which examines 3 books that detail America’s torture program and its proceedings.  The books also provide us with details that yet again confirm the collaboration and support of the highest members of the Bush administration in the institution and functioning of the torture program at various sites in the USA and abroad.

UPDATE: Scott Horton at Harper’s has written an extensive piece Justice After Bush about the need for, and alternative ways, to prosecute the Bush administration that ‘… did more than commit crimes. It waged war against the law itself. It transformed the Justice Department into a vehicle for voter suppression, and it also summarily dismissed the U.S. attorneys who attempted to investigate its wrongdoing. It issued wartime contracts to substandard vendors with inside connections, and it also defunded efforts to police their performance. It spied on church groups and political protesters, and it also introduced a sweeping surveillance program that was so clearly illegal that virtually the entire senior echelon of the Justice Department threatened to (but did not in fact) tender their resignations over it. It waged an illegal and disastrous war, and it did so by falsely representing to Congress and to the American public nearly every piece of intelligence it had on Iraq.’

Dialogue Between Bigots: Part VI of VI

This is the final installment of the interview, part VI, of ‘Dialogue Between Bigots’

EDITOR: Spanish, French Portuguese and Italian derive from Latin, yet can one argue that today these are the same language? They have diverged to the point where they are mutually unintelligible and hence different languages. All Indo-European languages derive from Sanskrit (including Farsi), yet can one claim they are the same as Sanskrit?
Christianity, Judaism and Islam have a common genetic origin, for sure, but over time these religions have diverged to the point of being mutually exclusive.

When you say Islam offers variations and adjustments, what does that mean? Let’s consider one example that goes to the heart of the matter. Christianity says that Christ was crucified for our sins, and he arose three days later in fulfillment of His promise to us. Islam says that at the last minute, a woman was substituted for Christ and it was she who was actually crucified. Christianity says God manifested himself as the Trinity (the Father, The Son and The Holy Spirit). By definition, to be a Christian is to accept the Trinity and the Crucifixion and resurrection (you can throw out everything else). Islam says there is no Trinity, period. Now, I ask you, are these the same religions? These are mutually exclusive, diametrically opposite, irreconcilable positions.

Of course there is cultural interaction, particularly on the peripheries and borders of civilizations. But that is not the norm nor the point under discussion. I am referring to the law of the land and where it derives from. Again, to use a secular example, If I live in Detroit, I am subject to US laws, if I live in Windsor, I am subject to Canadian laws, even though these cities are next to each other and separated by Lake Superior (a 15 minute drive across the bridge). The laws of the land are well defined even at the peripheries, though the cultural practice not dealing with legal issues may in fact be muddier (i.e., music, art).

One cannot ignore 2000 years of Christianity, 1400 years of Islam, and 3000 years of Judaism when considering the origins of these systems. The weight of thousands of years of history cannot be dismissed, and this is manifestly obvious even from a cursory examination of today’s civilizations. If Islam and Christianity were so similar, why do they lead to such starkly different civilizations today?

As for your comments on Sharia, I am not referring to the process. Sharia, irrespective of how it is arrived at, is a body of law that is supreme and cannot be superseded. That is the point.

You can disagree with me or Daniel Pipes about this point, but to say that he has not studied his demons is an ad hominem argument. It suggests there is something wrong with him, which is not fair. He is not the only one who shares this opinion — as you say yourself, even Muslims (and not fundamentalists, either) have this opinion. And I again I point to 1400 years of history to demonstrate this.

The Caliphate was a political structure, to be sure, but it was an Islamic political structure. It was a direct expression of Islamic law. It began as an Islamic governance system and stayed so until its dissolution when the Ottoman empire ended. There is no legal mechanism within Islam to separate the religious from the secular, unlike Christianity, where the secular principle was expressed by Christ himself (“My Kingdom is in heaven” and “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s”). The examples you provide are all because of Colonial influence. Before European colonialism, there were no secular structures in the Islamic world. Of course, the secular principle was not always applied in Christendom, but that’s a different discussion.

Again, I think we have different definition of “nation.” A nation is a group of people with a common culture, language, religion and history. It is not a race-based entity, it is a belief-based entity. Are there pure races? No. Are there pure individuals? Yes. Are there pure nations? Yes. Are there mixed nations? Yes.

I think you under-estimate the cohesive force of religion. What does a Christian in Iraq have in common with a Christian from Trichur or a Christian from Texas? A lot more than you may realize. Similarly for a Muslim from Baghdad and a Muslim from Bangladesh. Your worldview is fundamentally shaped by your religion, and ultimately I, as a Christian from Baghdad, would have much more in common with a Christian from China than a Muslim from Baghdad..

I don’t think my views are bigoted or biased. I am bi-cultural and worldly, and I don’t come to these conclusions lightly. But we are talking about different things. You are talking about the machinations of empires, which I don’t dispute, and I am talking about religions.

I am not aware of modern persecution of immigrants in Europe. Can you give me examples

In conclusion, the problem with Edward Said and his Orientalism is that it is unbalanced and dismisses legitimate Western argument, criticism and points-of-view. It’s like that old joke, just because you are paranoid, it DOESN’T mean there ISN’T anyone out to get you Edward Said ultimately misses, dismisses, trivializes or just plain ignores the point that there are real and irreconcilable differences between civilizations and they cannot be deconstructed away are made to appear to be pathologies afflicting the West. That’s ridiculous.

As you have tried to argue that Islamic civilization is not monolithic, so is the case with the West.

END OF INTERVIEW

Dialogue Between Bigots: Part V of VI

This is part V of the interview ‘Dialogue Between Bigots’

AR: I think you are being very liberal in your belief that European law begins with the Bible and that Islamic law begins with the Koran. To claim that Europe takes from the Bible and Morocco from the Koran is to indulge in a terrible simplicity that can only be achieved by suspending genuine intellectual engagement in the history of societies and the development of their social, legal and criminal systems. Perhaps a re-reading of Michelet’s ‘History of France’ is due or at the very least Todorov’s ‘Imperfect Garden’. Lets remember that Europe also has an Islamic/Muslim heritage. I speak not just of regions that were part of various Muslims entities, like Spain or Italy or cities like Genoa, but i mean by the centuries of relationships that have existed between Europe and the east. Anyone familiar with the history of a city like Seville, or Sicily, or Venice for example, will be hard pressed to tell me where ‘the west’ starts and ‘the east’ ends. Through commerce, trade, travel, study, administration, settlement, conquest etc. Europe and the Middle East shared and exchanged over centuries and consistently and constantly. Here is Pankaj Misra on Venice.

For me at an intellectual level these ‘religious’ civilizational divisions do not ring true nor do they reflect reality. And i would add that I think you under value European law, and Arab or other national laws, by linking them to just Bible or some other religious text. In fact, I would say that you denigrate their laws. Thank goodness for laws that allow rights for homosexuals, for abortion, for contraception, and many other liberties and humane rights we have instituted despite our religious texts instructions! One would like to believe that we have left the simplistic, inhumane, often cruel black & white simplicities of these religious texts behind. Remember, the Bible took us to the inquisition, a justice and religious institution the taliban would really have loved!

It also appears that you do not understand what ’sharia’ is. Sharia is not laws. Sharia is a method of arriving at law. It is a judicial, legal process that also includes Ijma (consensus), Qiyas (reasoning by analogy) and centuries of debate, interpretation and precedent. Furthermore, that there are many different versions of these processes that rely, traditionally speaking, on different versions of the hadiths to execute their process. There are at least 4 recognized schools of hadiths for example. a sharia process can begin in the Koran (or not) but that is a start, not the end. It can’t be of course because the Bible, the Koran, the Torah and in fact most any religious text are very simplistic, in fact quite banal in their ideas of right and wrong and life’s complicated problems are best not handled by referring to them directly. ‘Thou shall not kill’ is not a very interesting legal precept. So, there is no one sharia because sharia is not law, it is a procedure to arrive at law. It requires legal experts, religious experts, academics, it is open to debate and challenge, it is open to review and study, it is open to interpretation and revision. As any other legal system in the world. What comes out on the other end is the judgment of men to respond to the needs of their society to best offer justice. and as all legal procedures, sometimes it is good, other times it is bad. and in the latter case can be changed – or prevented if it serves someone’s power interests.

I will add that Islam does not offer a political system. There is a great myth, very popular amongst orientalist and religious fundamentalists that Islam offers ‘a complete system’. There is no discussion what so ever in any aspect of the philosophy of the religion on ‘political systems’. Daniel Pipes loves to bring this one up all the time and it is actually quite funny because the rest of us can see how little people like him have really bothered to study and understand their demons. I think that Daniel Pipes actually claims that the political system offered in Islam includes ‘tawhid‘, ‘risalat‘ and ‘khilafat‘. Well, 2 of those concepts have nothing to do with politics – tawhid is monotheistic belief in one god (shared with Christianity and Judaism), and risalat is that this one god has sent messengers (e.g. Jesus is in Islam’s structure itself). So this is not politics.

Khilafat is simply a version of a monarchy and given divine Islamic sanction. No European king would have survived long without the claim of the divine sanction, and the support of the church. It is not defined by any religious declaration, or divine ordination. Calling it an ‘Islamic’ political system would be like calling Constantine’s dictatorship a ‘Christian’ political system! And it is not the preferred or sought after political model for any Arab or Muslim state in the world today.  For example, Iran has a parliamentary system. It is a constrained one, but nevertheless, they hold elections, they elect their representatives, and participate in the government. Pakistan has a parliamentary system designed around the British system, and is different from the Iranian.

Now, speaking of ‘Hindu’, ‘Muslim’, ‘Christian’ or other such, I have to ask where does one find ‘pure’ nations in our world? Where are these communities who have been so isolated and segmented that their collective behavior is only influenced by some ‘nation gene’? Are the Assryians so pure that their 2000+ years in the middle of a region of rich trade, artistic development, intellectual development, social development, economic progress, never affected them? Is there nothing Arab culture, traditions, values, morals, and norms that have affected them or been adopted by them? I believe that we are never just ‘Muslims’ or ‘Christians’. Nations are not just ‘Muslims’ or ‘Christians’. They are many different things. Just as an individual identity is made up of many things, and s/he stresses one or the other at certain times, but contains with him/herself all. This is of course simply Edward Said’s argument read back in an amateurish way.

To argue that my ‘Muslim’ identity is the most important or the only important part, is a choice, not a fact, and a misleading and narrow fact at that. Governments can through coercion create common actions amongst men and common opinions. But this abstraction of ‘nations’ is a very weak and poor construct. Just your language alone, and the other languages that have influenced it, reveal that falsity in this belief. Christianity is not ‘pure’. As a creed it carried over myths, rituals, structures of earlier religions and societies. And also absorbed the behaviors and values of people who lived in and around the lands in emerged in. When in fact Freud examined the life of Moses in ‘Moses and Monotheism’ he was doing precisely this – examining the various strands of culture and history and ethnicities that were absorbed/adopted by the Jews as they adopted Moses, an Egyptian, into their religion.

As for Lebanon, my point is tangential to Lebanon’s war so i will not address it here. My point was about how one understands man’s actions in this world. We do not run around trying to understand the brutalities of the Christians in Lebanon by studying the bible, or claiming to have found some verse there that justifies genocidal madness. My point was about the way to understand the behaviors of men.

Your last set of comments sadden me that because the contain in it so many false assumptions and misunderstandings about the Middle East, Muslims, Islam, modernity, democracy and such that i don’t even know where to begin.  But as I said, we are on opposite ends of the spectrum here. To me statements like ‘Islam needs to modernize’ are deeply bigoted comments. And they are simplistic as well. They paint America as a purveyor of good and justice in the world when in fact it is not that alone but something else as well. They suggest a belief in the intellectual and moral backwardness of millions of people and dozens of cultures that inhabit the Middle East, and do so without once acknowledging their real lived histories and struggles against colonialism and imperialism. They engage in sweeping generalizations about falsely concrete concepts that are in fact abstractions and contested forms (e.g. ‘Islam’), fail to point out our (American) deep economic, political and historical connections to countries like Saudi Arabia, obfuscate our role in the repression of modern democracy in the Middle East (e.g. assasination of Mossadeq in Iran for example, or the constant funding of dictators like Mubarak, the Shah, the Saudi family, the kings of Jordan etc.), its mindless unthinking support of the repression and brutality of Israel’s occupation of Palestine, its complete disregard for the human and political aspirations of the people of the lands where American claims it ‘interests’, etc. etc.

You condemn regions, cultures, peoples and societies to backwardness, barbarism, terrorism and extremism by conveniently leaving out our shared history.

Dialogue Between Bigots; Part IV of VI

This is Part IV of the interview ‘Dialogue Between Bigots’

EDITOR: Whereas I agree with you that there is nothing inherently ‘Islamic’ about laws in many nations i.e. your statement is prima facie true. However, the question is what is the source of the common law of the land in Pakistan, in Iran, In Saudi Arabia? You will, of course, find examples of secular law or behavior, but the common law springs from the Koran, just as the common law in Christendom (the West) springs from the Bible. To me the question is not whether a system is secular or not, it is where its common law derives from. Even Sweden, with its famed secularism, derives its common law from the Bible, so that even if Swedes don’t know they are Christians, for the most part they act according to Christian law. It is the historical tradition and culture that determines whether a country is Muslim or Christian or Hindu or Buddhist.

Only Islam (and to a lesser extent, Judaism) offers a complete system — religious and political. Because Shari’a cannot be superseded by and other law, it ultimately shapes societies into an Islamic image. This is not true in Christianity. From the beginning Jesus articulated a distinction between church and state, i.e., Christianity does not offer a political system.

When you speak of the influence of religion on American politics and law I don’t know what supreme court decisions against family planning laws you are referring to. I assume you
mean abortion. The issue for Christians is not family planning, that is a red herring, the issue is taking a human life. If you believe that the fetus is a human being with a soul, then you cannot support abortion, because that is murder. No one argues against family planning. There are a hundred different ways to do that (i.e., condoms, birth control pills, natural methods, abstinence, &c.).

I don’t claim that America is not a religious state, it is (segments of it, at least). There is nothing wrong with that, just as there is nothing wrong with an Islamic state. If that’s what the people want, more power to them. The issue is tolerance of others. When different religious groups live with each other, there should not be religious violence. If there is proselytizing, let it be peaceful and let the merits of the arguments determine the winner. But that has not proven to be the case historically with Islam. See ‘Symposium: Islamic Cultural Genocide’

Now, blaming unscrupulous leaders may be true for the immediate past, i.e., in the post-colonial era, but how do you account for the persecution of minorities in previous eras? This persecution started almost immediately after the Caliphs established themselves in Baghdad, and has lasted since. Again, one cannot ignore the history. I think we may be speaking at different levels. I am not so much concerned with geographic states as much as nations, which may span borders. Nations conform to a code of behavior (i.e., Hindu, Christian,
Muslim), and that is what concerns me. Looked on in this light, one sees the larger patterns in history.

As for your comments about the Christians in Lebanon; Lebanon was destabilized because Yasar Arafat and his PLO moved into Beirut. What choice did the Christians have but to fight? There is no excuse for the Sabra and Shatila massacres, of course, but that is not germane to what happened to Lebanon.

As for Europe, I will say that Europe is firmly a Judeo-Christian civilization, it is not an accident that it is called Christendom. Europe is now losing this, and that is why it is beginning to ask questions. It should not lose its heritage, of course, because it is a proud heritage, it is part of the mosaic of cultures that make up our world. I think as Islam is practiced now by the majority of Muslims, it is incompatible with most of the world. It needs to modernize, it needs to catch-up.

And as for why America is in Iraq, I can tell you my opinion about why America is in Iraq. This is my opinion, of course. The Iraq war is to contain Saudi Arabia, which is the real backer of Islamic extremism. Saudi Arabia has spent $80 billion dollars to date on spreading Wahabism. The war on Islamic fundamentalism will be won only when the ideology is defeated. This is a long range plan to modernize the Middle East, liberalize Islam, introduce democracy and raise the standard of living in the area so that the people will have other outlets beside fundamentalism. There is also the divide and conquer strategy. Look for Iran to become a nuclear power (with covert or tacit support from the US) so that it will stand opposed to the Sunni states. The funds spent on spreading Wahabism will be redirected to defense spending.

Dialogue Between Bigots: Part III of VI

This is Part III of the interview ‘Dialogue Between Bigots’

EDITOR:  By Islamic states I mean the countries that are majority Muslim and whose power structures are in the hands of Muslims. Iraq is not an Islamic theocracy, but it is surely an Islamic state. It’s history, tradition and values are shaped by Islamic religion and culture. Let us narrow the discussion. Let’s focus on Iraq and it’s history since 1800 — though we must keep in mind the 1400 year weight of Islamic history and tradition in Iraq. I will rephrase the question. I am not sure that your statement that secular governments exist in the Middle East is true. There are governments who don’t emphasize Islam, except when convenient to retain power (e.g., Saddam), but the governments are Islamic in substance. Are there truly secular governments, like Sweden, for example? Actually, your comments below are a good response to the question as it was framed. I think you have answered the question very well Why don’t you incorporate the comments below into your answer and we can take the discussion from there. This organic discussion is turning out well.

AR: Thank you for taking the time to put these clarifications together. i am glad that we are actually discussing these specific points because i feel that most American media is too quick to jump to use too many unconsidered labels and phrases when it comes to speaking about anything ‘Muslim’.

So in the same spirit – i think that you mean ‘Arab’ states, and not ‘Islamic’ ones. For example, India is a nation with a deep Islamic history, heritage and culture, but it is not an ‘Islamic’ state. There are 130 million Muslims in the country, and its laws and codes are deeply influenced by this heritage, but it is not an ‘Islamic’ state by any means. and more controversially, neither is Pakistan. There are powerful, state supported religious fundamentalist political organizations in the country and they have been allowed to distort the law or contravene the constitution, but the nation and its legal and civil code procedures are less influenced by dogmatism than by pragmatism. Pakistan’s blasphemy laws for example have been foisted on the country by fundamentalist mysoginists in the pay of authoritarian rulers searching for a support base but are contested daily by a battery of legal experts, women’s rights activists and citizens. There is nothing inherently ‘Islamic’ about them, other than a small group of fundamentalists shouting loudest to claim that they are. The voices of opposition often get lost.

We are too quick to grab the ’sensational’, the demeaning, and to claim it as ‘Islamic’. Any Arab nation as any other is a contested space and in fact there is no one ‘Islam’. A Pakistani from Baluchistan will be horrified to sit with a Chechyan and vice versa! They would not recognize what the other calls ‘Islam’ where alcohol sits comfortably with namaz.  Though there are common ritual practices, but like all cars with 4 wheels but that does not make the similar, the importance is in the differences.  We are not merely our religions, and do not see our world only through that prism.

In Iran, with all its grandiose theocratic weirdness, can reveal a very modern and pragmatic approach to birth control and family planning. In Morocco recent adjustments to its family code captures the rich and complex dialogues prevalent in most any nation whether Arab or other. My point being that the social and legal laws of these country are far more complex, far more interesting when seen in the specifics and not just sweepingly called ‘Islamic’. There is little in common in the way issues of family planning, or inheritance or such are handled in Iran vs how they are handled in Lebanon for example. The richness of the region, the richness of the variety of peoples, ethnicities, cultures, histories, traditions of the region (the Middle East, South Asia, or any nation that is predominantly Muslim in heritage) is lost if we do not see the specifics.

Labeling a country as ‘Islamic’ hides more than reveals, obfuscates more than clarifies.

You are right that few if any country in amongst the Arab states can claim a truly ’secular’ government and you are right that few if any country in amongst the Arab states can claim a ’secular’ government such as Sweden. But even ’secular’ governments reflect influences that would not be defined as secular.  For example, would you contest the United States government and its administration, its supreme court and its recent adjustments against family planning laws are not influenced by conservative Christian thought? Would you call the USA a truly secular state when both Obama and Bush were at Saddleback church just this week, to say nothing of the many other churches both conservative and liberal, that they have been trawling through to get to ‘voters’? If America is a secular democracy, then why is it so important to constantly shake your religious credentials, to seek ‘counsel’ from influential (and really wealthy) pastors? See Kaplan’s ‘With God on their side’, or Woolride & Mickeltwaith’s ‘The Right Nation’ or Hedge’s ‘American Fascists’. But this is not just me reading in my apartment.  I did an entire story for National Geographic magazine called ‘Religion and Power’ over the course of many months on the influence of the religous right on American society and politics.

The point being – nations and their laws have a lot of influences, and bring many centuries of heritage to them. But they need not necessarily only be determined from the point of view of a religious heritage. Pakistan is a Muslim state, but this heritage is not an all encompassing and exclusive influence on its laws or even its society.

What instead I do see and that which I think is the principal threat to minorities in Arab states and that we should discuss is this; most all Arab states have unpopular and unscrupulous leaders who have failed their nations and contorted their societies. These same unpopular leaders have exploited radical Islamic groups to bolster their power and allowed at times for these groups to contort their constitutions and civic code. This is of course not a uniform situation, but is true for Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the gulf states etc. In such nations religion is merely a tool of politics and power. The persecution of the Copts by the Muslim Brotherhood was a political move, one that in fact can change as the political demands change. In fact, the welcome that the Arab Christians receive in Syria could change in the future if the political dynamics change. So whether a minority has a hope of being part of the fabric of an Arab state requires us to look at the politics and power plays of that state, and the value placed on religious groups to grab and maintain power.

For example, Lebanon is a deeply divided sectarian country, but its wars began of the arrogance and bigotry of its Christian minority! In Lebanon they are not a persecuted minority, but in fact the instigators of tremendous horrors against fellow citizens. This is history though I have of course generalized here to make a point. But it would be wrong to run around stating that there is something inherently ‘Christan’ about their behavior or arrogance or violence in acts like the massacres at Sabra and Shatila. It would be in fact idiotic. I would be a fool to go searching into Lebanon’s 1400 year Christian heritage to understand their behavior, or trawl the bible to find some passages on rape! It can’t be understood merely from the prism of religion. We have to look at the real world, at specific political, secular events and actions, and more importantly that desperate quest for power and control that drives all men.

And this is no different than what is happening all over Europe for example, where a weird Islamophobia has taken over nations such as Denmark, Italy and France, where political leaders repeatedly refer to Europe’s imagined exclusively Judeo-Christian heritage and insist on separating themselves from the ‘Muslim disease’ etc. etc. Pankaj Mishra wrote a wonderfully clear piece about this recently called ‘A paranoid, abhorrent obsession’.

Creating such stark divisions between ‘us’ and ‘them’ of course helps us avoid the more complex questions; Europe’s tremendous economic problems in the last decade and related unemployment, the emergence of the EU and the associated sense of a loss of local identity (national identities being extremely important and entrenched here in Europe).  These are the unspoken realities that are avoided by turning our wrath against poor, marginalized, and weak immigrant communities.

Europe is not just a Judeo-Christian civilization even if we go back to the Greeks whose main centers of culture and learning were always on the other side of the Bosphoros! But of course, Goytisolo’s life was spent arguing this, but a more recent book speaks about it rather clearly and well.  You must read David Levering Lewis’ ‘God’s Crucible’.

I agree, I think we are best to discuss the modern history of Iraq, post WW II, post colonialism.

The weight of 1400 years of Islamic history in my opinion is not as relevant in shaping this country as the weight of a 100 years of colonial control and power politics of post-colonial influence. The Baath party is not an Islamic heritage left over, neither were the kings foisted on Iraq upon its creation during the demise of the Ottoman empire. And to not speak about the discovery of oil and its contorting effects on Iraqi politics would be criminal. Islam, Muslims, 1400 year heritage – this actually has little meaning and will not help us understand where we are today or why we are where we are today.  I would deem it intellectually irresponsible, if not morally irresponsible, to seek the sourcs of Iraq’s trauma in ‘Islam’ or the ‘Koran’, when in fact the 12 year sanctions regime, the Oil For Food program, the repeated invasions and the current occupation seem to be more pertinent.

The dismemberment of Iraq has political and power drivers based squarely in the USA, driven less by issues of religion, and more by issues of oil, strategic depth, fear of Iran etc. We would be all naive and irresponsible to speak as if this was a necessary war, that lies were not told, that the nation was not forced into this mess because of the need and greed of a few in the neo-conservative movement. I would prefer that neo-conservatives were more honest about their intentions – the petty lies and childish language to hide
their real intents are so amateurish that it only makes them look silly.

So cutting through all the nonsense, Iraq is just an occupation, its political structure conveniently created to serve American economic and military interests, and created I believe to ensure continued instability and weakness in the nation so that the US and continue to maintain an involvement and control, and in particular, control the important assets; oil, bases, police and borders. There are no nation building intents, not in Iraq nor in Afghanistan. There are merely control and own intents, and those too short term. The sectarian structure of politics is less due to any ‘heritage’ or ‘history’ or Iraq, but more based on a continuity of belief that occupied countries are best governed by divisions not unity. This is the oldest colonial model in the book i.e. find all the ethnic and sectarian dividing lines and exaggerate them through ethnically determined largesse. This is nothing new. Its boringly old in fact.

There are many models of governments in Muslim countries that are not sectarian, so there is nothing ‘natural’ about such a structure. It is always created, and historically we can see that occupying powers love to deal with divided communities because it makes it easier to control them. Its just simple politics and pragmatic administration.

I  hope that this is not just proving to be a huge annoyance. The interview seems to have all but disappeared. But really, I appreciate your patience and tolerance of my long responses and digressions.

Dialogue Between Bigots: Part II of VI

This is Part II of the interview ‘Dialogue Between Bigots’

EDITOR: In your opinion, is it possible for Islamic states to adopt secular systems of government, and to allow non-Muslim minorities to integrate in Muslim dominated political structures? Put another way, given the history and tradition of these areas, Iraq in particular, did the Americans have any choice other than to work with sectarian structures?

AR: Sorry, i don’t mean to be rude but i do not understand your questions because 1) I can’t tell what ‘Islamic’ states you are talking about, 2) what is the time frame that you refer to as when you speak of the ‘history and traditions’, 3) what do mean when you say ‘these areas’ and 4) secular governments do exist so why would you want to know if they can?

Perhaps I can explain the reasons for confusion.

Most Arab states are not ‘Islamic’ but more closer to secular states, not ‘Islamic’ ones. They may not be democratic, but that is a different issue. Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Lebanon, Algeria, Tunisia, Syria and the non-Arab Turkey are secular/non-denominational governments, not ‘Islamic’ governments. Only Saudi Arabia and post-revolution Iran qualify as religious states and Islamic ones at that. But ‘the region’ including Saddam’s Iraq were not ‘Islamic’ by any definition, though i have no idea what an ‘Islamic’ government would be like. So we have to be very specific and very clear here.

Furthermore, what time frame are you talking about where you would want to examine issues related to minorities? Minorities have flourished in Arab lands since time immemorial.  For example, the modern history of the Middle East demonstrates that Arab Christians have been at the forefront of the Arab nationalism, that there is an indigenous Christian community that has had centuries of fertile exchange with Muslims in these regions. To say nothing about their artistic, intellectual, and political contributions. There is nothing inherently ‘foreign’ about Christians in the Middle East. If you go back even further in time, lets say to the time of the emergence of the Islamic empire as it meets up with the Byzantine and the Sasanian, we see a rich exchange of ideas and even common sharing of religious practices. e.g. see Fowden’s ‘The Barbarian Plain’.  To suggest that non-Muslim minorities cannot ‘integrate’ into Arab/Islamic societies would betray a terrible lack of knowledge of history. After all, for example, where did the Jews go after the inquisitions and their expulsion from Spain? Where did the Syrian orthodox church live and flourish for so many centuries? So this question about ‘integration’ is ahistorical.  The Sephardic Jews, the Copts, the Orthodox Christians, Armenians, Zoroastrians, Manichaen and many many more.  The Arab lands are not ‘pure’ or isolated.

There have indeed been periods of persecution, but there have also been periods of tremendous tolerance and acceptance. So this question makes no sense, unless you want to speak in specific circumstance e.g. the recent backlash against the Christians in the Middle East which indeed is taking place. But then we have to speak about each country specifically – the backlash against the Christians in Lebanon has a different set of political, historical, social reasons than say that against the Copts in Egypt. And we have to be specific about what time frame we are talking about.

On the whole there has been centuries of exchange and tolerance in the Middle East and that remains the norm, not the exception.  If there have been persecutions, they are in fact the execptions to the larger norm.  For example, if you ever go to Beit Sahour in the West Bank, OPT you will find Muslims and Christians sharing shrines, and praying at monasteries. Professor Glenn Bowman of the University of Kent at Canterbury has written extensively about this. In Syria too you will see practices that the two religions share. In Rusafa in Syria there stood a shrine to St. Sergius right next to which stood a mosque, with a large hall joining the two structures.

There were hundreds of such locations all over the Levant. Today there still are many that bear witness to the tremendous sharing between the two communities. Muslims even pray like the orthodox! The sounds of the Sufi saints come from those of the choirs. In Alleppo in the Casbah you can hear this music again and feel that the choirs of Seidnaya have entered the streets. I speak of today, not a millenia ago. William Dalrymple has written extensively about this in his work ‘From The Holy Mountain’

The middle east is vast, and a diverse region. Tunisia is not Lebanon is not Iraq is not Egypt. We can’t speak about ‘areas’ we have to be specific about what country we are speaking about. After WW II the post-colonial trajectories of each nation need to be very specifically known and kept in mind as we discuss developments. For example, why has Morocco managed to maintain a very open relationship with its Jewish community despite the majority of the Jews choosing to leave the country? And why is it different for example in Lebanon? The answers lie in specific histories and not through generalizations of ‘Islamic intolerance’, a sweeping simplicity that explains little but confirms many prejudices.

The Middle East has had many secular governments, some elected ones too. Turkey is a secular government, so is Syria, so too was Iraq, so is Egypt.  Besides the much spoken about fear of Islamic parties being elected and creating theocracies is a false one as even ostensibly Islamic parties have a real habit of behaving with politically savvy and democratic insight once they come to power. I recommend you read Harper magazine’s Ken Silverstein’s piece on the rise of Islamic democracy to better understand how and what these Islamic political movements are and how they behave.

Finally, as to your last point on whether the Americans had a choice – we can certainly discuss that endlessly though I will admit that i am not as well qualified to answer that one. I suspect that the Americans did have a choice. Furthermore, from a long term perspective, they should have insisted on it because a sectarian structure will not work and is the principal reason for the instability today. To say nothing about the illegality of the war, the carnage in the post-invasion period etc. Furthermore, we would be naive to ignore the history of the creation of Iraq particularly the role of the British in its creation, the deep influence of British intellectuals and orientalists on the minds and actions of the American administration (for example Bernard Lewis was not just an important encourager of the invasion but deeply entrenched in the think tanks advising on what needs to happen post-Saddam!) and the seeming seamless continuity in the assumptions about the ‘Arab mind’ between the British ideas and the current set of colonial administrators.  A book that I myself am going over again is Fromkin’s ‘A Peace to End All Peace’ and I highly recommend it to understand the history of the creation of the modern state of Iraq.

I will just conclude by saying that it is important for me that questions are carefully framed and in particular that they do not nudge responses into expected places. All that being said, I am not the best person to speak to about the future of the middle east or the politics of the region or the real-political actions.

Dialogue Between Bigots: Part I of VI

A few months ago I was asked by an editor in Europe to speak about my work, in particular my work in the Arab world.  She had seen some of my photographs from Northern Iraq that focused on the struggle of Iraq’s Assyrian Christian community as it confronted a resurgent Kurdish nationalism and a raging Iraqi militant resistance.  The editor wanted to discuss not just the specific issues related to the Assyrian Christian community, but broader issues related to the ‘Muslim’ world.

The interview quickly fell apart.  In fact, it fell apart on the very first question.  I had been vary of giving an interview.  In fact, I generally don’t like to do interviews because I find that nothing but inconsistencies and confusions leave my mouth.  The opening question set of a series of short essays between me and the editor that spanned a range of issues and ended by no conclusive insights and/or understandings.

I wanted to share this interview with you.  Since it is a long series of issues, I have edited the original content and of course protected the identity of the Editor herself.  I hold myself completely responsible for the breakdown in what should have been a simple and basically benign dialogue.  That morning perhaps I was tired, perhaps I was overly sensitive. Perhaps I was perceptive to the dangers that come from not examining assumptions that lie behind a question.  Very often an interview will ask a loaded question, filled with assumptions that predetermine the nature of the answer, or necessarily place the interviewee on the defensive.  Or so I feel.  On re-reading some the responses I can’t help but think that I was rather pompous and self important in some of the responses.  However, I do feel that I touched on a number of issues that I feel are often ignored in discussions about matters in the Middle East and the Muslim world in general.  So if you can excuse the bombast, here is the interview as it transpired, edited for this blog of course.

EDITOR: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be interested in Iraq and Assyrians?

AR: My interest, as in most all the projects I do, is in confronting the reductive historical narratives created by political opportunists and religious fundamentalists. In particular, I am interested in documenting situations where the complex tapestry of life and history has been destroyed to serve some political or economic end. This interest is a reflection of my own personal life and experiences. As a Kashmiri i am heir to a complex and varied heritage that includes Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islamic beliefs, culture, philosophy, art, poetry and secular intellectual writing. This diversity has been lost in Kashmir because of a movement for liberation that has recently deteriorated into a sectarian conflicts. Such sectarian rewritings of history are of course a global problem.

We face them here in Europe today, a region suffering from a serious bout of xenophobia and Islamophobia as entire histories of the continent are revised to exclude the presence and influence of Islam and the Muslims on Europe’s development in the past and today. And i saw a similar situation in what took place in Iraq after the American invasion. I was appalled by the quick and convenient reliance on a sectarian politics by the Americans, a sorry reflection of the practices of British colonialists across the Middle East and in South Asia. The damage that British policies did in India during their reign can still be seen today as South Asian continues to struggle to overcome the divisions within their societies and build a sense of citizenship and belonging that extends beyond the clan and the religious group.

Documenting the plight of the Assyrians as a way to speak out against the marginalization and erasure of the presence of minorities, and the destruction of the complex fabric, multi-ethnic and multi-religious, of Iraqi society and life. Whether it had existed under Saddam or not remained irrelevant since it was being destroyed under the direction of an American occupation. I felt that there was a shocking ignorance of Iraqi society and history, and that it;s cleavage along sectarian lines could only signal further disintegration and oppressions. These are of course not unique insights for anyone who has read even a basic book on the history of the country and the broader region. In the rush to speak about the liberation of the Kurds the Assyrians appeared conveniently forgotten. Such tribal politics can only succeed by inflicting tremendous suffering and dispossession on another. We have see this repeatedly in the wake of 20th century nationalisms, with the horrors of the Armenian genocides, the destruction of the pluralist cultures of many cities in what was once the Ottoman Empire, in Israel etc. etc.

When Nuri Kino, to whom I was introduced to by a friend in the USA, spoke to me about this community, I  saw a situation that i wanted to say something about. Sadly most local and international media failed to see the significance of their struggle, and i believe still do not see it. A few voices if any have argued for the need of a secular political structure in Iraq.

CONTINUED:

Only Interesting If Its Madness

Read: Edward Said’s “Covering Islam: How The Media And The Experts Determine How We See The Rest Of The World”

I have been stereotyped: my life and lived experiences negated by photo editors in the USA in particular.  I am nothing but my ethnicity, a man from my country of my birth 42 years ago.  My name marks me as a ‘Muslim’, my ethnicity marks me as a ‘South Asian’, my birth marks me for work within the confines of the geography of the country of my birth. My birth on an unexceptional day in Karachi nearly 42 years ago was of greater interest and relevance than the nearly 18 years I spent studying, working, learning, and becoming in the United States of America (a country of which I am a citizen).  I am the ‘Pakistani’ photographer and never allowed to be anything else, or asked to be elsewhere.

(Aside: I have in fact managed to produce work in places as diverse as Iraq, Haiti, USA, Japan and India thanks to editors in Europe and a few more open minded ones in the USA itself)

As a result I have done extensive work in Pakistan, particularly in the tribal areas and on the subject of religious fundamentalism in that country.  From 2001 (post 9/11) until as recently as 2007, the only subjects that any American news magazine or news paper ever asked me to cover was directly related to issues of religious extremism and ‘Islamic’ radicalism.  There was nothing else that interested them, nothing else about the social, political, economic or cultural dynamics of the country that was of interest.  Not even if it perhaps helped explain the violent and fundamentalist phenomenon they were in fact interested in.  And it was not just me, but a number of my colleagues in other countries of largely muslim citizens also complained about the narrow minded determination to view any and all their nation through the prism of ‘religion’ and/or ‘religious fundamentalism’.

In fact, a recent, cursory review of The New York Times Sunday Magazine revealed an extremely disturbing trend; that any and every story that had anything to do with people of a Muslim heritage had to be covered from the angle of ‘fundamentalism’ and/or ‘extremism’ within and about those people and their country.  Take a look for yourself:

“The Next Islamist Revolution”, January 2005

“Next Gen Taliban”, January 2008

“In The Land Of The Taliban”, October 2006

“Islam On The Outskirts Of The Welfare State”, February 2006

“A Dishonorable Affair”, September 2007

“Where Boys Grow Up To Be Jihadis”, November 2007

“Islam, Terror And The Second Nuclear Age”, October 2006

“Hizbollah’s Other War”, August 2006

“Iraq’s Jordanian Jihadis”, February 2006

“The African Front”, December 2007

“Whose Iran?”, January 2007

“Policing Terrorism”, July 2007

This is a quick search and I continue to add to this list.  Its incomplete, but it reveals a trend.  I can’t imagine that further research will prove this trend wrong, though i do believe that it will only strengthen the blinkered focus.  Here is a major, American newspaper/magazine of record, that has consistently and single-mindedly revealed to us broad swaths of the world and its real diversity only through the frightening filters of ‘radicalism’, ‘extremism’ and a perceived hatred that is directed against ‘our way of life’.  And it is all about Muslims and about this religion that perplexes and confuses most American editor, journalist, commentator, op-ed writer or pundit. Islam and Muslims have been reduced to an ‘essence’ believed to be within their ethnic makeup and one that they can’t but follow mindlessly and without any individual moral judgement or choice.  Their social, political and economic histories largely erased, their acts of violence seen as somehow inherent to the ideology and teachings of the religion itself and not as acts carried out within specific historical, political, geo-strategic and human circumstances.

It is perhaps no surprise that so many of today’s major photographers and photojournalists proceed into the world Islamic and return with pictures that simply evoke fear.  For example, Magnum’s brilliant Paolo Pellegrin who found such beauty and dignity amongst the mourners at Pope John Paul’s funeral, or at a fashion show in New York, yet could not help but depict Egyptian’s protesting against their American supported dictatorship as demonic figures that could only inspire fear and perhaps even loathing

I can think of so many others; Bertrand Meunier, Jehad Nga, Ziyah Gafic, Ben Lowy, Alex Majoli – photographer’s whose works have been inspirations for me, who show such tremendous sensitivity and insight on so many of their subjects and yet fall right back to the cliches and fearsome depictions of anything that comes close to being of Muslim and/or Islamic heritage.

I generalize too much, admittedly, about these photographers and their works.  I also accept that in the end the choices of which pictures to run are made by editors, not photographers.  And as I have learned from personal experience, American editors put a lot of pressure on you to come back with images that are more ‘menacing’, and carry a greater message or ‘impending violence’ or ‘threat’ when it comes to illustrating stories from regions Muslim.

Its only interesting if its madness.

Many of my images that show something close to common humanity lie unused in my archives.  But I continue to make them, and will continue to do so.  This paranoid, abhorrent obsession too will pass.

ADDENDUM: My friend and photojournalist Miguel Ribeiro Fernandes gently reminded me that such stereotyping affects many other regions and people’s of the world, that my work itself has carried cliches from Muslim/Islamic regions and peoples, and that most photographers, regardless of their backgrounds and personal idiosyncracies, face some form of stereotyping from editors looking to categorize them for possible assignment work based on their perceived strenghts.  All true and all points I acknowledge.

UPDATES: I will add further links from the New York Times Magazines & its determination for things Islamic/Terrorist as I come across them:

• The Palestinian Terrorist & Me