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?

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.

For Edward Said: Remembering 25th September 2003

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

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

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

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

• Democracy Now!: Edward Said

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

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

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

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

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

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

Really?

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

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

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

I really can’t remember!

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?

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.

Where The Head Spun: Sunday, 12th July 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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).

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

The Dust From Blood Filled Eyes: On Bangladesh and Acknowledgment of Crimes

Chapter 9 of Totten, Parsons & Charny’s book Century of Genocide is dedicated to Bangladesh.

But my earliest realization of the horrors that had been inflicted on the people of Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) in 1971 came through two poems by Faiz Ahmed Faiz.

Stay Away from Me (Bangladesh I)

How can I embellish this carnival of slaughter,

how decorate this massacre?

Whose attention could my lamenting blood attract?

There’s almost no blood in my rawboned body

and what’s left

isn’t enough to burn as oil in the lamp,

not enough to fill a wineglass.

It can feed no fire,

extinguish no thirst.

There’s a poverty of blood in my ravaged body—

a terrible poison now runs in it.

If you pierce my veins, each drop will foam

as venom at the cobra’s fangs.

Each drop is the anguished longing of ages’

the burning seal of a rage hushed up for years.

Beware of me. My body is a river of poison.

Stay away from me. My body is a parched log in the desert.

If you burn it, you won’t see the cypress or the jasmine,

but my bones blossoming like thorns in the cactus.

If you throw it in the forests,

instead of morning perfumes, you’ll scatter

the dust of my seared soul.

So stay away from me. Because I’m thirsting for blood.

Bangladesh II

This is how my sorrow became visible:

its dust, piling up for years in my heart,

finally reached my eyes,

the bitterness now so clear that

I had to listen when my friends

told me to wash my eyes with blood.

Everything at once was tangled in blood—

each face, each idol, red everywhere.

Blood swept over the sun, washing away its gold.

The moon erupted with blood, its silver extinguished.

The sky promised a morning of blood,

and the night wept only blood.

The trees hardened into crimson pillars.

All flowers filled their eyes with blood.

And every glance was an arrow,

each pierced image blood. This blood

–a river crying out for martyrs—

flows on its longing. And in sorrow, in rage, in love.

Let it flow. Should it be dammed up,

there will only be hatred cloaked in colors of death.

Don’t let this happen, my friends,

bring all my tears back instead,

a flood to fill my dust-filled eyes,

to wash this blood forever from my eyes.

(Translations by Agha Shahid Ali, from his book The Rebel’s Silhouette)

These poems, when I first came across them in the early 1980s, cut past all the obfuscations and euphemisms that until then had been used by Pakistanis to speak about the 1971 conflict. More than any official history book, these words revealed how a nation inflicted such deep and inexcusable suffering on to its own body politic. And much of it on the basic of vanity and bigotry.

It is estimated that nearly 3 million East Pakistanis were killed in a 9 month period. Over 10 million were displaced because of the mayhem created by members of Pakistan’s military and political establishment. The East Pakistani’s crime was a determined, non-violent political movement to claim their rightful place at the head of the Pakistani government.

The 1970s elections had been fairly and overwhelmingly won by the then province of East Pakistan. But handing the levers of power to a people spoken about it the lowest and most rascists terms by the members of West Paksitan’s elite was unthinkable.

A genocidal campaign to break them was more palatable.

And it was a campaign carried out with the encouragement and support of that ‘liberal, democratic’ leader, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. In his excellent memoir Journey to Disillusionment, Sherbaz Khan Mazari reveals the inside story of this ambitious and ultimately flawed individual who not only precipitated 2 major wars, but began and sustained his career by getting in to bed with Pakistan’s military henchmen.

His later legacies would include the mutilation of Pakistan’s constitution in 1973 with the infusion of questionable, obscurantist and basically unjust ‘Islamic’ clauses and amendments that would lay the ground work for regional calls for ‘Sharia Law’, and are in fact the foundations for the recent crisis in Swat. But I will write more about Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and his legacy in a separate post.

Pakistan has never formally acknowledged its crimes in Bangladesh, nor prosecuted any of those involved which includes some of the top member’s of the military brass and the political establishment On May 16th when the Bangladeshi Foreign Minister officially asked the Pakistani Government, through its Bangladesh High Commissioner, for an acknowledgment, prosecution and an apology, the Pakistani envoy responded by saying ‘Let bygones, be bygones’

∞

Saiful Haq Omi is a young Bangladesh photographer. One of a new generation of amazingly talented photographers emerging from that country. In fact, I can’t stop talking about photographers like Shehzad Noorani and Munem Wasif and others that this often forgotten country has managed to unleash onto the world stage. They are in my opinion amongst the very best working anywhere in the world today.

In a short email exchange, as I congratulated Saiful Haq on being a finalist for the prestigious Alexia Foundation Grant, (NOTE: he was also a finalist for the 2009 Aftermath Grant) I mentioned to him how much I would love to visit Bangladesh some day, and do some work there, as a small gesture of friendship and atonement for what I know has been a bloody, brutal and perhaps most painful to a new generation of Bangladeshis, an unacknowledged crime.

His response, as all Bangladeshis seem to respond when I raise this issue – with a combination of gentle humility and anxious openness was – and I quote:

I was born 10 years after the war ended, 1980. But I have carried war in my heart. Almost half of my family died , they were all killed. And if you come to my home , on the 26th of March- Our liberation day or on the 16th december , our victory day you would hear that someone still cries. And that is my mother who is crying.

I carry the war in my heart , I carry the war which I never saw, but I will carry till my last day. The War is Me!

Perhaps the Pakistani envoy would do well to  remember that it is the victim that chooses to forgive, to decide whether a bygone is a bygone. The sheer arrogance, callousness and inhumane indifference exhibited by the ‘official’ voices of Pakistan is stagering if not outright criminal!

∞

We lack processes for forgiveness. For a region that has seen so many genocidal massacres, I find it strange that we, the people of South Asia, have few if any processes for forgiveness. Sara Terry is an American photographer who has done extensive work on the aftermath of war. Her project on post-war Bosnia – Aftermath: Bosnia’s Long Road to Peace, remains for me one of the finest examples of photojournalism that i know of. More recently she has been involved in a brilliant and creative project documenting indigenous practices of reconciliation and forgiveness in the continent of Africa.

We would do well to learn from the Africans. I can’t wait to see the results of Sara’s work.

In the mean time, as the official voices of Pakistan remain silent if not outright dismissive, members of the Action For A Progressive Pakistan have come forward and spoken from which I quote:

The outrageous dismissal of Bangladesh’s demand by the Pakistani foreign office – “let bygones be bygones” – is a shameful reflection of Pakistan’s constructed amnesia over the horrific actions of its Army and its political leadership. Not only has there never been a move on the part of the Pakistani state to apologize to Bangladesh, there has not been any sustained effort by citizens’ groups to pressure the government to publicly acknowledge the truth.

As Pakistanis, we find this unconscionable. We find it unconscionable that the Pakistani army raped, killed and pillaged our brothers and sisters in East Pakistan in 1971. We find it unconscionable that the Pakistani state has steadfastly refused to acknowledge these atrocities for the past 38 years, leave alone hold those responsible for them accountable as suggested by its own Chief Justice in the State commissioned inquiry. We reject the Pakistani state and army’s claim that these atrocities were committed in our name.

Its not much. But it is a start. I hope that the Bangladeshis will be patient as we work ourselves towards the truth. It is a lot to ask, perhaps unreasonably so of a people terribly wronged. But it may be the only thing that can offer the tears that eventually remove the dust from our blood filled eyes.

The Definition of Courage: The Israelis Speak

The testimonies now being given by a number of Israeli soldiers who took part in the recent war on Gaza, a war that Richard Falk, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights, called a criminal act, offer us a glimpse into acts of human and individual courage.

There is no other way to describe the actions of these young men who were involved in what was nothing short of an international war crime against the unarmed civilian population of Gaza.

The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz has been publishing a series of testimonies – the paper’s Amos Harel’s has two pieces, IDF in Gaza: Killing civilians, vandalism, and lax rules of engagement and ‘Shooting and crying’.

The Inter Press News Agency also had a piece, Israeli soldiers expose atrocities in Gaza

The matter is so large that even the otherwise obfuscating New York Times just had to give it some attention in a piece called Further Accounts Of Gaza Killings Released

And you can read Richard Falk’s views on the matter here Israel’s war crimes which was published recently in Le Monde Diplomatique.

These soldiers are finally exhibiting some bravery because it takes none to hide inside armoured vehicles and tanks and tear apart an unarmed civilian population.

But to speak honestly in the face of a nation whose conscience, morality and sense of moral right and wrong has been drowned by sectarian and ethnic prejudices requires nothing short of courage.  These soldiers were commanded to kill for god, (and yes, there were rabbis with the soldiers handing out booklets telling them that palestinians can be killed with impunity to protect the ‘holy land’!) and country, a command that in all nations sanctions murder in return for medals, political posts, and mythical immortality. They could have chosen the easy way out, and just moved on.

And we should not underestimate this act.

This is not the first time Israel’s soldiers have spoken out. They are in fact a rare example to the soldiers of all nations who have been asked to commit acts of murder against innocents.

We should also not forget this; that they are offering us an example of the individual conscience over collective passions and hypnosis. Not an easy act.

Our International institutions of justice and law have failed us, usurped as they are by the powerful and militarily footloose!

The young Israeli men (and maybe women?) know well that their silence will not be questioned, and that no international institution will be able to touch them – Israel enjoys an impunity in the court of law that most all other nations (other than the USA) probably envy!

And yet they are speaking out, reminding us the real nature of war once all the nationalist and political jingoism has been cut through -  lies that in fact some of Israel’s more ‘cultivated’ minds like Amos Oz, or David Grossman and Yehoshua (to name a few) insist on reproducing for us and by their reputations transforming into ‘truths’!

Now once again and probably for just a little while the thin veil, woven mostly by cowardly political, journalistic and corporate apparatchiks, is lifted to show us what life is like on the other side of the Israeli guns.

Richard Falk in his piece on Israeli war crimes was not optimistic that anything will or can be done to bring to book the military and political leaders who carried out their acts.

As we listen to these young men fighting to save their conscience, morality and souls, we can only wonder if anything will become of their words and acts?

Probably not.

Not yet at least.

But we can hold on to the belief that these testimonies are now part of the official records and histories. And for as long as we continue to collect those we can have hope that some day, if not tomorrow then the day after, justice will indeed be done.

To courage, then.
UPDATE: More details are continuing to emerge, as they have been for many years by the way, of the’ lax rules of engagement’ (read as: kill first and wonder later) under which the Israeli army has operated in the West Bank and Gaza for decades.

FURTHER UPDATES: The Guardian updates the situation with this piece about t-shirts being sold to the IDF, and further revelations about the killings of civilians by the Israeli army.

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

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 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?

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.

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