shirts vs. skins

2011-02-26T09:09:00.002-05:00

Oh noes, is this another one of those posts where I lazily delegate my opinion-having duties by posting someone else's words?

on second thought

2011-02-12T17:27:00.003-05:00

Maybe we should focus on the present.

today is a positive day

2011-02-12T09:45:00.002-05:00

I haven't really felt compelled to write in a long time, so of course the time I do decide to is the one time that I don't really need to say anything, because who needs an explanation right now? We all see it, we all know, and the whole world is so stoked for once. There are some dictator supporting hypocrites jumping on the bandwagon that will have to answer for their flip-flopping and the struggle is still far from over, but we have hope now. That is to say not some bullshit speeches from politicians trying to posture their way into our hearts without any substance but the real thing; and with the anger directed in all the right places for once because our leaders have always been complicit. Besides all that I'm more than happy that Tunisia was the spark because let's face it; before that point most people had forgotten they existed and now they're our heroes. Of course, I'm also ecstatic that everyone hates the Saudi royals as they totally should.

As for what this means to me (because this really is all about but me and MY feelings,) look at how the last decade started out and what followed that and then how this one started. In 2001 as far as politics go my world was pretty miserable but I was still watching an uprising in Argentina. Being the total nerd and news junkie I was I'd read about the massacres and torture perpetrated on behalf of US installed dictators in South and Central America and for me this was an amazing scene. It was obvious to me that one day the pendulum would have to swing back in the Arab world, I just didn't know it would be this soon. And o hai there the left, I missed your relevance.

The last decade also ended with some of the ugliest sectarianism yet, unless you're Iraqi in which it's just more of the same old stuff but apparently we should be happy because there was a 6% decrease from the previous year. In that light seeing the scenes and solidarity in the last month have been even more emotional; after revisiting manufactured phot-ops of the past decade it's even moreso. I'm not going to lie, as amazing as everything is right now it's really bittersweet thinking what could have been in Iraq if the last 30 years hadn't happened. Had chemical weapons not been sold, had the first war not happened and the US stood by when the first intifada was crushed (according to some because they feared the next gov would be pro-Iran), countless people killed and scattered, then starved untill another million died and still were bombed through the 1990s till 2003 when, well, you know. Feeding dictators then starving people is really not the best of combinations. I don't often say it but looking at Gaza these days reminds me so much of what Iraq went through in the 90s on a lot of levels besides the basic loss of life and deprivation and it worries me, a lot.

Also if this age does anything I really hope it kills some of the idiotic patriotic chauvinism among Arabs and cheap shots about ethnicities and nationalities that I have to look at on a daily basis. If you have a blog and you do this, I'm sorry what the fuck are you thinking? Just stop.

Let me hope that this all continues through to my birthday: March seems to always be an atrocious month for MENA and so much shit is associated with that time of year (stupid wars, Halabja, stupid political movements that shall not be named) and it'd be nice for that to change. Since money is power I hope one day we'll see that change come to the Gulf as well. After all this, I can definitely dream.

2010-12-01T10:59:00.001-05:00

The invasion of 2003 and the dismantling of the Iraqi state and its institutions dealt a severe blow to Iraqi Christians. The political regime the US installed atop the rubble of the state it dismantled complicated already existing tensions among various groups. The most significant factor is the discursive transformation of ethnic and religious identities into political ones and institutionalizing them as such by constructing a quota-based political system in which sect and ethnicity are the only circulating currency. It forced most Iraqis to fall back to their primordial identities. Thus Christians became Christians first and foremost, as did other groups. When we were filming the documentary About Baghdad in July of 2003, I met a bookseller at the famous al-Mutanabbi Street in old Baghdad. He spoke admiringly of Gramsci and Marx, but then asked us if we would visit and film the headquarters of their new “Christian Chaldean Party.” I expressed my surprise that a Marxist-sounding intellectual would found such a blatantly ethno-sectarian party. “What can we do? That’s the only way to get into the new system and be represented. There is no other way,” he said. More viscerally, the dismantling of the police and army and the institutionalization of militia culture left the great majority of Iraqis defenseless. In the mayhem and chaos that followed and led to the civil war, Christians, without a militia of their own or a party representing them, were even more vulnerable targets for kidnapping and murder. The lack of security and safety and the chaos unleashed the violence of various terrorist groups that targeted churches and priests. Thousands of Christians were displaced within Baghdad and many thousands sought refuge in Iraqi Kurdistan, especially during and after the civil war and the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad’s neighborhoods. Christians, including clergymen, are still being attacked and murdered in Mosul and elsewhere, prompting demonstrations in Baghdad and Mosul demanding justice and an inquiry.

In the 1950’s, it was estimated that Iraq’s Christians were 6% of the population. The tumultuous years of dictatorship, wars and sanctions drove many abroad, bringing their percentage down to 3% (750,000) on the eve of the 2003 invasion. Now their numbers have dwindled even further. It was not my choice to be born into an Iraqi Christian family, but even as a secular atheist, I must say that it is sad to have to contemplate the notion of a day when Iraqi Christians could become a relic of the past in Iraq. Throughout the 20th century no church was ever attacked in Baghdad. It was inconceivable that members of a congregation would be held hostage and executed on a Sunday while praying or celebrating. The Iraqi regime called its operation to storm the Sayyidat al-Najat church and “save” the hostages “Tahrir” (liberation). I couldn’t help but think of the notion of “lethal liberation” carried out in 2003 and still ongoing.

The Night Bus or How to make a sappy war movie

2010-08-02T10:00:00.004-04:00

I'm starting to come to the conclusion that the US just isn't any good at making Serious Movies anymore. They can make movies about explosions, badasses and bromantic comedies but for anything else I'm going to have to go elsewhere. I haven't even touched the ever growing pile of low-grossing war/terrorism movies that Hollywood has put out over the last decade. Their lack of success never really suprised me much: most of the decent movies about Vietnam didn't come out till well after that war was over. It's not just a lack of interest; it's just really difficult for anyone to look at something so big while we're in the middle of it. Besides, while something is actually happening we really should have other things to worry about than how fast we can turn it into art, like, say, stopping wars.

Whenever I do catch these kind of movies they're usually pretty heavy-handed about having some message of "look, we are all the same" or there is some kind of narrative of the Rebellious White Guy that runs against the grain of his commander/company/organization and works with the brownies to help them do whatever it is that they want to do (stop me if you've heard this one in half the movies you saw last year.)

Of course there is nothing inherently wrong with understanding or cooperation and this cliche has produced movies I truly like (see District 9,) but when it runs against historical accuracy it's worth pointing out. And worth asking why we can't ever make a movie about shitty things that happened without fictionally trying to redeem some of the involved parties? What's wrong with showing what divisions exist in this world that can be pretty impossible?

That's kind of a long intro to explain why I get wary of movies that try to tell us that we're all the same when really we're not. If you know what it's like to see something done really beautifully, intelligently and with political relevance after seeing it done absolutely horribly 10,000 times then you can appreciate where I am at right now. The Night Bus by Iranian director Kiumars Poorahmad, who I'd never heard of before, is about (you guessed it) the Iran-Iraq war and takes on a lot of the same themes while managing to avoid annoying the hell out of me.
Obviously, the political context is different; American movies are often apologetic and trying to make it seem like they're there to help. Most often the narration will execute this by finding the one Good Brown Guy that Rebellious White Guy can work with and they're on their way to saving everyone else (a certain Turkish movie about the Iraq war that shall never be named on this blog again has the exact same premise and failed spectacularly because of it.) The Night Bus succeeds not because its politics are different but because it doesn't force its entire plot to revolve around this stupid premise. It shows the shitty things happening and it's from that that we are supposed to figure out that war is bad and that we fight for stupid people. When the Good Iraqis and Good Iranians can find common ground, it doesn't undo all the shittyness that that happened to them or derail the rest of the story to find a resolution that will let good things happen to good people. The war goes on, much like it did in real life.

Truth be told, there were definitely a couple of points in the film that I noticed that I could have dissected here, but in the end they were overwhelmed by the beauty, storytelling and stellar acting. Or maybe I am just letting them slide because I am consistently wowed by Iranian movies these days, but this is definitely of the the better ones that I have seen so far. Highly recommended.

Get it here(English,Arabic & Farsi subs.)
(I looked around the internet for a dvd but I can't seem to find one, if you know where I can get one drop me a note.)

WTF

2010-06-20T23:23:00.001-04:00

this is telling (in which I try to be positive)

2010-06-20T11:43:00.000-04:00

Remember the Israelis that thought they'd send a message to Turkey by sending their own boat to Cyprus? Well, Bibi is telling them not to, but look at why:

Israeli government officials persuaded the activists to cancel the voyage, because they were worried that the media attention would remind international media of the Gaza flotilla when most of the world’s attention had shifted to other issues like the British Petroleum spill and the World Cup.

“The publicity we already received did its part in reminding the world [that the Turks are occupiers],” one of the organizers of the flotilla said. “Personally it’s depressing for me that we didn’t get to go. But the government officials we spoke to were professionals, and they told us that doing it now was not right for the state, so we listened to them.”

Apparently paying attention to one occupation reminds you of others, who knew? At least Bibi is honest about his intentions, which is more than I can say for the people who cry about every other humanitarian problem in the world if you mention Palestine, and then conveniently forget about it. When they do it with issues that have been close to my heart for some time to provide cover for people who have been on my shitlist for a long time, it's personal. But it works both ways, if they want to play that game, good: it's the perfect oppourtunity to raise the issue of Palestine (and our own indigenous peoples for us North Americans) so go ahead and bring it.

If you read the American academics they really freak out when Armenian genocide is raised in US politics cause NATO is still a big deal. So long as there are troops in Iraq and Afghanistan Turkey still matters, not to mention that now that Turkey is no longer buying Israeli arms it opens up a big market for US manufacturers, which I guess is just another reason for me to be stoked for any signs of deterioration of that relationship. Despite my dislike of the Turkish state I still think the deterioration of relations with Israel is good however it happens, but I'm never going to see all these issues as mutually exclusive. I'm only glad that the Armenian Genocide is already recognized in Canada so I won't ever have to see Harper play that card, and playing is the right word.(link lifted from JSF, definitely one of my favourites of the many Jewish anti-Zionist blogs around.)

pride parody posters

2010-06-18T18:27:00.009-04:00

I probably should stop slagging FB cause if I used it I probably would have seen these a lot sooner. Either way, simple & effective, but I guess you don't have to do a lot to undermine such a badly chosen slogan. Allright, that's enough procrastinating.

intersections-a link dump

2010-06-18T10:43:00.003-04:00

There are about fifty thousand sites whose main purpose are sharing links but every once in a while I have thoughts that aren't expressible in two lines and that I don't necessarily want to share with all my cousins and everyone I went to elementary school with, so until something better comes my way I'll be around here. But feel free to send other site suggestions my way if you have any.

Bekhsoos has a statement from queer Arab groups condemning the US Social Forum for unfortunately hosting an LGBT Workshop conducted by what's essentially an Israeli propaganda group. How that happened is anyone's guess. I do remember in 2006, and I'm sure many of you have since, hearing quite a few times how great Israel is to the gays and the womens, and apparently that is enough to suspend the basic human rights-like breathing-of those other uncivilized peoples. Sometimes this came from people I thought I knew and would have expected to know better, but we shouldn't assume that lefties will know their shit when it comes to I/P. It's been a recurring theme this year and especially this month, more on this when I have time, even though I'm sure I can't have a lot to say that hasn't already been said at this point.

EDIT: Of course right after I type that a nice, long article about Arab-Palestinian organizing at USSF and in the left in general pops up. I like the conclusion, too.
If we want to achieve and benefit from genuine solidarity, then not only must we speak about Palestine to everyone, everywhere, as Edward Said advocated, but we must also speak to our own Arab and Palestinian communities about everyone else.
Solidarity, it is a two way street.

An Armenian perspective on Israel-Turkey. I've been especially curious about the Pali-Armenian perspective since this whole thing started. Pro-Israel groups recently exploiting crimes that they've been enabling since their existence is pretty disgusting, but I'm also concerned that the romanticisation of all things Turkey lately will result in some people taking Turkish state propaganda at face value along with the stigmatization of people they were historically at odds with. Turkish nationalists like to complain that it's Armenians keeping them out of the EU which is stupid, the majority of EU member states don't recognize the genocide themselves, so why would that be their biggest beef with Turkey? I hope people will remember that there were a lot of Kurds on the flotilla and that lots of Palestinians ARE Armenian.

Timely piece at Salon, via Mondoweiss by a journalist that tried to expose the ADL's role in Armenian genocide denial and lost his job over it.

Friedman. I really hate to link to that but it's useful as an example of two camps neocons seem to be falling in these days. Friedman here doesn't opt to play up Turkey's shitty human rights record but instead romanticizes the oldschool Kemalist pro-Israel Turkey that he loves: the only thing wrong with Turkey apparently is that they've taken to defending Iran lately and have a religious president. With people like him and Robert Gates that seem to be looking to engage rather than push away Turkey, it suggests they believe there is still something to salvage. It's hard to know how things will play out but some kind of normalization is something I still don't totally rule out if a UN inquiry happens. Anyways, remember when Friedman wrote that stupid book about the environment and tried to make himself over as a hippie? I DO.

In the dumbest pseudo-scandal related to Israel-Palestine in this country yet Canadian MP Libby Davies is being pressured to resign over some incredibly bland statements that are historically accurate. But Libby Davies is also one of 3 MPs that went to Gaza after it was bombed and that's considered Palestinians human beings which is problematic in this country's current state of bizarro-politics. Anyways, people are concerned the NDP (her quasi-socialist party) won't adequately defend her and there's a campaign to pressure them to. On one level it's really fascinating how much time and energy my government puts into suppressing all things Palestine lately, honestly if someone told me 5 years ago that politicians would be this worried about a bunch of student activists I would have thought they were nuts. How things change.

Istanbul Calling: decent journalist's analysis blog based in Turkey.

WOMAN

2010-06-14T23:32:00.000-04:00

Ever since I watched the World Cup concert it has embedded this song in my head and I am taking all of you down with me.

some scattered thoughts on Turkey, Israel, the Kurds...I think that's everyone

2010-06-14T10:39:00.007-04:00

My feelings about the Turkey-Israel schism are complicated, to say the least. Readers of this blog should by now be aware that I am not much of a fan of the Turkish state, especially Kemalism and its disturbing attitude to ethnic minorities, repressive laws that jail anyone who has an alternative view to official state accounts of Turkish history, harassment of scholars of the Armenian genocide abroad, and most lately their role in devastating Iraqi agriculture and now its water supply, too. For all these reasons it never surprised me much that Turkey and Israel were such close allies throughout the 20th century.

Despite a lot of sympathy for the Palestinians among its people, the Turkish state had closer ties to Israel than any Arab state (though Egypt was pretty close.) Despite all the hype about Erdogan among Arabs in the past year, this relationship has only changed in any substantive way in the past two weeks with talks of cancelling defense agreements and water and energy deals with talks of keeping relations between the two countries to "a minimum," whatever that means. Meanwhile a free trade zone with Lebanon, Syria and Jordan was set up and the US is blaming the EU's longtime shutting Turkey out for this supposedly new east-oriented foreign policy.

I don't have a lot of love for Kurdish politicians either, who killed off thousands of their own people in a civil war in Northern Iraq in the 1990s, repress political dissidents, seized territory from Christian and other ethnic minority villages and that's not even getting into the whole PKK mess. Regardless, anyone with any principles whatsoever needs to recognize that the treatment of Kurds in Turkey has been atrocious and hasn't changed significantly enough under the AKP. With all that said there are some differences between the significance of raising the Palestinian issue and the Kurdish one.

Essentially, both the Israeli and Turkish governments do not give a crap if a bunch of random people in the US or the UK don't like them. Protests of such governments should be directed not only at their actions but also at our own governments' consent and material support for such regimes and at changing those policies, otherwise our protests are little more than useless performance art. There isn't an equivalence between the attitudes of Western governments towards Israeli vs Syrian, Iranian or even Turkish policies. Israel has only been rewarded with a deepening of ties with Western countries in recent years, as Naomi Klein so succinctly explained:

The world has tried what used to be called "constructive engagement." It has failed utterly. Since 2006 Israel has been steadily escalating its criminality: expanding settlements, launching an outrageous war against Lebanon and imposing collective punishment on Gaza through the brutal blockade. Despite this escalation, Israel has not faced punitive measures—quite the opposite. The weapons and $3 billion in annual aid that the US sends to Israel is only the beginning. Throughout this key period, Israel has enjoyed a dramatic improvement in its diplomatic, cultural and trade relations with a variety of other allies. For instance, in 2007 Israel became the first non–Latin American country to sign a free-trade deal with Mercosur. In the first nine months of 2008, Israeli exports to Canada went up 45 percent. A new trade deal with the European Union is set to double Israel's exports of processed food. And on December 8, European ministers "upgraded" the EU-Israel Association Agreement, a reward long sought by Jerusalem.*

It is in this context that Israeli leaders started their latest war: confident they would face no meaningful costs. It is remarkable that over seven days of wartime trading, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange's flagship index actually went up 10.7 percent.
A trade agreement was also signed between Quebec and Israel in 2008, and of course just last month Israel was admitted into the OECD with Turkey's support. Conditions for the billions of US aid dollars still have yet to be placed on Israel with respect to the situation in Gaza, Jerusalem, or the expansion of settlements. Turkey, on the other hand, still isn't any closer to getting into the EU. When people tell me Israel is singled out, basically I agree: they're singled out for preferential treatment. As far as activism goes, to act as if they're the only government in the world that gets targeted is absurd, Tibetan activists single out China, activists for Ken Saro-Wiwa singled out Nigeria and Shell and Iraq activists and the Brussells tribunal singled out the USA. That's what activists do. Getting away for something for sixty-plus years doesn't entitle you to immunity (sorry, Polanski) and time is up.

As far as Israel criticizing Turkey for the Kurds goes, I don't know why they'd want to go there considering that they provided the weapons that killed them. As for the Armenians, the Israeli record there isn't great either. American companies are going on trial for selling chemical weapons to Saddam, and I am all for everyone else being held accountable. If they do go there, it wouldn't be anything new. The Kurds have long been used as pawns by Iran, Syria and the US in regional disputes only to be abandoned when they were dealt the severest of repurcussions.

We could talk about Turkey and Iran forever but I hope people reading all this make distinctions between governments and their peoples and also know that there were Kurds among the flotilla activists, including one of the dead. At the same time, it was unfortunately really predictable that it had to be the death of foreign activists and not Palestinians that would spark global outrage and any kind of a policy change(how lasting that change will be is still yet to be seen.) I hope that most people are smart enough to realize that ultimately this isn't about Turkey, it's about the Palestinians, and not fall into the trap of defending anyone that doesn't deserve it.

oh Turkey, you never change

2010-06-01T09:59:00.000-04:00

even after all this:

Turkey sees no impact on Israel drone delivery
ANKARA
Tue Jun 1, 2010 5:26am EDT
June 1 (Reuters) - Turkey's Defence Minister Vecdi Gonul said on Tuesday a diplomatic crisis with Israel after the Jewish state stormed a Turkish-backed aid convoy will not affect the planned delivery of Israel-made Heron drones to Turkey.

Israel's long-time Muslim ally Turkey has recalled its envoy to Israel and cancelled joint military exercises after Israeli marines raided an aid flotilla bound for Gaza on Monday.

Earlier this year, the two countries, which have a close military alliance, wrapped up the purchase of 10 Heron drones in a deal worth $180 million.

My point being, we all need to clean up our own houses.

Toronto-sometimes Canada-roundup and PSA

2010-05-25T14:29:00.000-04:00

It's not that I don't find US politics interesting, it's that their northern neighbours have a lot of our own shit to deal with and nobody really cares. Canadians, unfortunately, tend not to notice either unless Canada gets some attention on a global scale, which is probably why we will be talking about defunding of reproductive health and STFU-gate and protest zones, but not other things. Here's some other stuff that's been happening:

1. June 24 has been declared an action about Canada's record on Indigenous Rights, just in time for the G8/20 summit. Australia and New Zealand have both changed their positions on the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, making the US and Canada the only two countries left that have opposed it. If you need more inspiration to be pissed off I recommend clicking the Canada tag on Int Cry, other good resources here, here and here. (Feel free to send other suggestions my way.)
In related news, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for the genocidal residential schools finally starts up in June.

2. 18 year old Alexander Manon died while being pursued by Police near York U. Cops say that he had a heart attack and died on his own, his family's lawyer is wondering then where the bruises and the pool of blood came from.

3. New book out about the Christian right in Canada.

4. Immigration raids, they happen here too.

5. Quebec has caught the French flu and for some bizarre (racist) reason the province is trying to pass a law barring anyone chooses to cover their face from accessing government services of any kind, including healthcare, just like Belgium has. Muslimah Media Watch pointed out that only 25 people in Montreal actually wear the niqaab, demonstrating that Quebec's politicians need to get outside more and stop watching so much French TV. Unfortunately much of the population is in support of the law but hearings have recently been postponed till August with reports that the bill is getting little positive feedback. It's still not too late to act and the No on 94 Coalition has suggestions of action and people to write. Australia recently defeated a bill proposing a similar ban in a vote of 26-3, hopefully that can be repeated here though the bill should just be found unconstitutional anyways.

6. Toronto Pride is (AFAIK) the most recent victim of the Conservative defunding spree. Last year a Minister was punished for giving funding to Toronto Pride. Last year also was the start of a serious campaign of pressure to get Toronto Pride to ban Queers Against Israeli Apartheid from marching or get defunded and an official motion that said as much was introduced to city council but was deferred. It's since been revealed that Pride told city council they would censor the group and have now followed through.
What's a queer Palestinian to do?

For those that haven't been keeping track this isn't an isolated incident but part of a string of attacks on various groups having anything to do with Palestinians, some explicitly political, others not. Last February funding was cancelled for UNWRA, a few weeks after Kairos, a Christan aid organization, lost funding for having Palestinian group Sabeel among many groups it was affiliated with, before that the board of government agency Rights and Democracy was stacked by conservative appointees and cancelled grants for three Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups. The Tory appointed board members' harrassment of R&D's president and his death by a heart attack all eventually culminated in other board members' resignation.

Universities hosting Israeli Apartheid Week and the student activists involved also became the targets and object of much of Canadian politicians' energy and time. Numerous politicians visited campuses to condemn the event and Ontario parliament passed a motion to condemn the lecture series-the federal government couldn't have passed one in time due to parliament having been suspended for Harper to avoid dealing with the fallout of an unrelated torture scandal.

Iraq round up

2010-05-19T13:14:00.007-04:00

Iraq is probably the most underposted topic around these days. Couple that with my anticipating that some bloggers are going to be milking the Rima Fakih pseudo-controversy for all it's worth this week, I thought that some of y'all might want something (anything) else to read and I am here to help you out with that. Here are some stories you might have missed over the last month or so.

1. Parents of children with birth defects in Falluja are suing the British military, saying they knew about chemical weapons use. Apparently, US soldiers are also taking Iraqis to court.

2. Another Kurdish journalist was murdered, his body showing signs of torture, for criticizing the KRG. Apparently others demonstrating over his death have also been threatened.

3. HRW reported on "routine and systematic" detainee torture.

4. Iraqi parliamentarians' salaries, 40 times the national average, are exhausting state budgets.

5. Petition to stop the deportation of refugees from Lebanon. Refugees in Lebanon are of varying nationalities but I'm always happy to see stuff like this or this and post about it. Beirut is a city with about a billion problems but some awesome activists.

6. Amnesty called out the UK, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands for forcibly repatriating Iraqis to "extremely dangerous" areas in breach of UN guidelines.

7. Amnesty also calls on the Iraqi gov't to protect civilians from violence. April saw increases in civilian deaths.

8. Culture in Chaos: really interesting article on the state of Iraqi art these days.

9. Juan Cole speculates on what "withdrawal" will actually look like-I tend to read him-and US-based academics on this particular subject-with a skeptical eye but I thought I'd put this out there. Unfortunately I find a lot of US discourse about Iraq these days to basically be a referendum on whether you support Obama or not.

10. Girl sold into sex slavery and escaped only to be put behind bars when she returned home.

11. Tony Blair's ties to Gulf oil were revealed and literally nobody noticed.

12. Refugees International says the US still has a responsibility to support and work to reintegrate Iraq's displaced (via 1000 yard stare.)

it's gospel day

2010-03-21T17:58:00.002-04:00

Ya know what that means.

A late Happy Nowruz to anyone that celebrates, btw.

widow nation

2010-03-20T17:44:00.008-04:00

Ayad Alkadhi's work has already been posted on a bunch of sites, for good reason, but I think this new set is my favourite by far.

For more def check out his site.

my $0.02 that nobody asked for

2010-03-09T07:45:00.010-05:00

People based on their political orientations seem to be expecting me to be either really angry or stoked that the Hurt Locker won. Since I haven't seen the film I can't comment on its content and how it depicts war or Iraqis. As for the notion that I should be excited that a woman has won a best directing Oscar, well it's sad it's taken so long, but the numbers should show why that's no surprise:

Women directors actually dropped by 2% since 2008, accounting for just 7% of directors on the 250 top-grossing movies of 2009. That's the same number as 1987. Only 2% of the top 250 films credited female cinematographers, and just 8% of writers were female; 86% of the films had no female writers credited.

Representation still isn't that great either-with just under 30% of speaking roles in top grossing films going to females-never even mind the kind of representation.

Anyways don't take my word for it, this article (that's been posted all over the place) said it best:

When I started taking film classes at UCLA, I was quickly informed I had what it took to go all the way in film. I was a damn good writer, but more importantly (yeah, you didn’t think good writing was a main prerequisite in this industry, did you?) I understood the process of rewriting to cope with budget (and other) limitations. I didn’t hesitate to rip out my most beloved scenes when necessary. I also did a lot of research and taught myself how to write well-paced action/adventure films that would be remarkably cheap to film – that was pure gold.

There was just one little problem.

I had to understand that the audience only wanted white, straight, male leads. I was assured that as long as I made the white, straight men in my scripts prominent, I could still offer groundbreaking characters of other descriptions (fascinating, significant women, men of color, etc.) – as long as they didn’t distract the audience from the white men they really paid their money to see.

I was stunned. I’d just moved from a state that still held Ku Klux Klan rallies only to find an even more insidious form of bigotry in California – running an industry that shaped our entire culture. But they kept telling me lots of filmmakers wanted to see the same changes I did, and if I did what it took to get into the industry and accrue some power, then I could start pushing the envelope and maybe, just maybe, change would finally happen. So I gave their advice a shot.

Only to learn there was still something wrong with my writing, something unanticipated by my professors. My scripts had multiple women with names. Talking to each other. About something other than men. That, they explained nervously, was not okay. I asked why. Well, it would be more accurate to say I politely demanded a thorough, logical explanation that made sense for a change (I’d found the “audience won’t watch women!” argument pretty questionable, with its ever-shifting reasons and parameters).

At first I got several tentative murmurings about how it distracted from the flow or point of the story. I went through this with more than one professor, more than one industry professional. Finally, I got one blessedly telling explanation from an industry pro: “The audience doesn’t want to listen to a bunch of women talking about whatever it is women talk about.”

This also explains why so many Hollywood movies about racism still usually have to have some white guy be at the centre of everything(which brings us to Avatar.) Also worth noting because I get weirded out by the criticism of her making a typical "guy flick" to get to the top(what decade is this,) but not as much as I get weirded out when people make a point about how amazing it is that a man would produce any of very few iconic strong female characters out there (the Buffys, Ripleys, etc.) Well, it's not really because they're usually the only people allowed to depict anyone as anything. This movie probably does have a million problems that are totally valid and will be fun to pick apart in another post, but then so does a pseudo-liberal blockbuster with a strong anti-war message. As far as I'm concerned this isn't about her, it's about the limits of what stories any people are allowed to tell in the industry.

we have a debt to haiti-not the other way around

2010-02-18T09:36:00.000-05:00

Naomi Klein & Avi Lewis go into more detail.

plus ca change (jamais)

2010-02-15T14:20:00.002-05:00

As for the recent poll that says a majority believe rape victims had it coming; Jezebel nailed it today:

Harrison may be right that women engage in victim-blaming as a way of feeling safe, convincing themselves that only people who act a certain way get raped. It's possible, too, that a decline in the numbers of young women who identify with feminism have made more young people convinced that a woman who wears a short skirt is "asking for it." Natasha Walter has written that young British women find such activities as pole dancing and posing in skimpy outfits empowering — but at least according to the survey, they seem to think these very activities make it okay for men to rape them. Do 18-24-year-old women believe that "ownership" of their sexuality — the freedom to dress and dance sexily if it makes them feel good — also means ownership of rape? Do they think rape is an acceptable consequence of free sexual expression? Whatever the case, the survey revealed another disturbing statistic: more than 10% of respondents weren't sure they'd report being raped to the police, and 2% said they definitely wouldn't. In a society where victims are blamed for as little as "flirting" with a rapist, it's all too easy to see why.

Consider also in the US women are given out sexual assault prevention advice such as, just don't use elevators or stairs, ever. We have a long way to go, we have not even begun.

only a matter of time

2010-01-11T22:21:00.003-05:00

When I was growing up I got used to Iraq dominating headlines a lot of the time, so when I got older and went to college and started reading up on history I was surprised to find out how peripheral Iraq is considered in the Middle East in the last few hundred years and how Egypt-centric everything was(for obvious reasons.) That goes culturally as well cause I expected most arabs would know the same singers I do, and all the songs I took for granted but that isn't always the case. Iraq being deficient in the Rotana pop stars category (not really a bad thing)doesn't help matters much. Meanwhile North American press is youth culture obsessed so for every 50 or so articles I read or get sent about OMG metal/emo/indie/electrorap IN ARABIC I was just wishing that someone would play me the classics. Of course somebody already was, I just hadn't found them yet. Enjoy:

Qurna - Mukhalef from zab on Vimeo.

[via]

the politics of boners for erdogan

2010-01-11T10:00:00.000-05:00

With all the hype about Turkey and Erdogan's angry words over Gaza in the past year people seem to have forgotten that the Turkish state is still one of Israel's biggest allies and supporters. So I was really pleased when I came across this statement from Turks calling them out on it:

Government cabinets of the Republic of Turkey have been important constituents of the alliance. Whereas the Turkish-Israeli relationships were extended to the military sphere under the Çiller and Erbakan cabinets, it was during the Ecevit period that Turkey organized the first air force exercises with Israeli participation under the code name “Anatolian Eagle”. The still existing Turkish-Israeli Inter-parliamentary Friendship Group in the Turkish parliament was formed by 289 deputies (183 of them from the AKP) during the first year of the AKP in government. After the attack on Gaza, many deputies, in the first place Nursuna Memecan of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), resigned from the Group. Among those, who have not, the CHP (Republican People’s Party) Deputy Onur Öymen is noteworthy. The AKP government, on the other hand, while enhancing relations on all levels, successfully employs the hypocrite discourse of “Our Muslim brothers and sisters are dying in Gaza!! One Minute!”

The Turkish capitalist hegemony, both its religious and secular wings, all of its institutions and foremost the Turkish Army are defenders of this alliance. The central pillars of this strategic alliance are military cooperation and arms trade. There are trade and cooperation agreements between Turkey and Israel on a broad spectrum reaching from agriculture to seed technologies, husbandry and irrigation, chemistry and energy allocation, telecommunication to tourism, to security and environmental technologies. The trading volume between Turkey and Israel in 2008 was app. 2.6 billion dollars. 1.8 billion dollars of this amount came from trade on military equipment and technologies. A boycott campaign in Turkey that will aim at the policies of adding new munition to the arsenal of the state of Israel, will be a step further on the road leading to true peace in the Middle East, a peace the people of the Middle East are so desperately waiting for.

What are we going to aim at? And how?

As a part of the people of the Middle East, we never hesitate to stand up against all forms of oppression and occupation of the imperialists. While the people of Palestine are resisting in our close neighbourhood and developing an important anti-imperialist front, we became natural allies in this front.

Turkey is the most important ally of Israel in the Middle East. To organize an effective boycott campaign here against Zionism and against Israel will be the most meaningful act of international solidarity with the Palestinians.

To defend their honor and freedom, the Palestinians are in a long process of total war against Zionist barbarism. In the name of all the labourers, the discriminated and oppressed of the world, Palestine stands at the target of the oppressors. It is the duty of all humans on the planet to stand by the side of the people of Palestine, and to support their resistance in all fields. We have to question ourselves at the first place. Today, everybody should be aware of the fact that, anyone who does not expressively take part in the struggle for the cessation of any partnerships and cooperation in the crimes committed by the Zionist regime and the imperialist powers behind, is an accomplice in the first degree in those crimes. We declare that we are not going to be their accomplices, and that we are going to boycott Israel, until this complicity is totally eliminated out of our lives!

Our word is open and clear: We are not going to be accomplices in the violation of rights of the Palestinians! We will crush Zionism appearing in any form in our lands! We will not let Israeli soldiers use the air, land, the sea of the lands we are living on. We will resist, following the example of the Palestinians, not only for one month or one year, but until the occupation is lifted and until the Palestinians of Israeli citizenship gain equal rights. We will expose the close bonds between Israeli and Turkish capital and boycott their products! We will focus our efforts on announcing to the public that research led in our universities should not flow into the development of technology and equipment that makes Israeli occupation possible. We will work on inquiring such research partnerships and announce to the public on specific examples, so that a public pressure can be organised, to lead our universities to gain distance to Israeli universities and companies. We will boycott cultural products and artworks supported by the Israeli State and so, frustrate Israel’s efforts of image restoration by using channels of cultural and artistic production.

End All Military, Trade, Diplomatic, Academic and Cultural Relations with Israel!

For:

The lifting of the siege on Gaza

Stopping Israeli racism

The right of return of the Palestinian refugees to their homelands

The end of occupation in the West Bank and Gaza

The end of the Apartheid System on Palestinians of Israeli citizenship

The right of self-determination of the Palestinian People

Well said, thanks guys.

malalai joya

2009-12-06T23:06:00.000-05:00

Just the start of the documentary is uploaded, I need to find the rest of it. I feel incredibly priveleged that I got to see her speak last month, I hadn't gotten around to reading her bio and life story untill after the fact. Her life is both amazing and yet it's also totally unremarkable and what you hope you would do if you lived the same circumstances. Every country needs more people like her. That is people who are courageous and put their money where their mouth is, being inflammatory on the internet does not cut it, SORRY.

If you didn't know who she was now you do.

this picture makes me happy

2009-12-06T22:22:00.000-05:00

if no one else blogs a story does it make a sound

2009-10-14T11:06:00.005-04:00

With the news of the Obama nobel thing I really can't make sense of the world anymore, I've come to the conclusion that October is officially brought to us by the Onion. The last couple of weeks have truly been surreal. Here's some stories that are far less surprising.

1. Democracy now talks to Iraqi labour leaders about lack of basic rights to unionize without repression. Anyways, lack of labour rights is not just a holdover of Saddam's regime

Decree No. 45 (2003), issued by Bremer's occupation authority, which suspended the election activities of trade unions and put them under the mercy of a ministerial committee, is still in force. Furthermore, the government is still insisting, till this day, on its unjust Decree No. 8750 (2005) that called for freezing of the movable and immovable assets of the unions, in a blatant manifestation of interference in their affairs that resulted in paralysing unions' work and activities. The position of the government has regrettably remained unchanged in spite of many appeals and several meetings between the representatives of the General Federation of Trade Unions in Iraq and key government officials, and despite the many promises given by these officials to find quick solutions to these outstanding issues.

2. Norwegian press says that Peter Galbraith, architect of Iraq's constitution and fierce advocate of the country's partition, had a stake in Dohuk's oil fields(via Reidar Visser.) You didn't think that anyone actually thought that splitting up the country was a good idea, did you?
ETA: It's come to my attention that there's theories floating around that this revelation about Galbraith is retribution for his having spoken out on Afghan election fraud. . I have no idea if there is any validity to this whatsoever, but if there is him being right about one thing doesn't change anything else, but Visser points out that DNO was being examined far before any of this, and this information came out by chance. Either way this level of corruption among people involved in Iraq is really nothing new or shocking, but it needs to be acknowledged, still, as long as the list is already.

3. New book out on the effects of depleted uranium.

4. Nothing to do with Iraq, this image is from a demonstration in Beirut to rebuild Nahr al Barid camp(see here.) It's already been posted a bunch of places but who will dare stop me from doing the same.

deep stuff

2009-10-09T12:50:00.001-04:00

I don't get why everyone got so excited about Sesame Street doing Mad Men-they've done Beckett. So much cooler.

2009-10-09T12:43:00.004-04:00

The state of Iraqi Women is a huge subject with so much to talk about. Political analysts have a tendency tend to treat it and other "humanitarian issues" in Iraq as an afterthought as something not all that integral to our understanding of "real" politics, which I think is quite problematic. Their current state is also not something you can talk about without an understanding of the progression of their situation over the last 60 years, unfortunately it's this perspective that's seriously lacking in the (very few) books even remotely touching on the subject that I've seen around.

Enter Nadje Al-Ali's book, Iraqi Women, which I've already namedropped here. Her most recent, What Kind of Liberation, focuses on Iraqi women living with war and occupation, this lecture takes the longer perspective.

I can't embed the full video for some reason, the rest is here.

chutzpah round the world

2009-10-08T07:36:00.001-04:00

North America wasn't the only place outraged last week. The PA really outdid themselves this time.

Normally I don't like posting about things when there are already about a million people saying it better than I would but it really didn't feel right having two posts about Hollywood and then sitting this one out. Saree Makdisi's article is a must read.

The most depressing thing about this is talking to people who don't follow this stuff-bring up the UN and they're like 'oh yeah that ass made another Holocaust speech.' Sweet.

important

2009-10-05T13:46:00.000-04:00

I need to find this on youtube.

addendum: only in my backyard

2009-10-05T13:35:00.003-04:00

Before I let go of this subject and let everyone move on with their lives, Laila Lalami's post on Polanski's support adds some more insight(it makes it worse:)

Bernard-Henri Levy, the French philosopher who once said that the Muslim veil was “an invitation to rape,” has now been confronted with an actual case of rape, but appears to think there should be an exception for genius filmmakers. Levy has drafted a petition in defense of Polanski, and it has been signed by Salman Rushdie, Milan Kundera, and Paul Auster, among others. It is true that Levy has fought against rape—but in regions like Darfur and Bosnia. Now that the perpetrator is in his own backyard, he talks of his outrage as seeing Polanski “apprehended like a common terrorist.”

-not as shocking as the founder of the Feminist Majority saying he should be let go, but still.

sorry kundera, your books were overrated anyways

2009-10-05T09:03:00.007-04:00

Look, everyone knows someone that was raped, and since 1 in 4 women have been assaulted at some point in their lifetime everyone that doesn't live in a monastery actually knows a whole fucking lot of people that were raped, they just won't know who all of them are. The Beauty Myth cited a poll conducted at UCLA in the late 1980s that asked college age males whether they would rape a girl if they were certain they would get away with it-30% said they would, but when the wording of the question was changed from "rape" into the phrase "force a woman into having sex," 58% answered in the affirmative(p. 165.) Language matters; Whoopi thinks that there's rape and RAPE-rape, but just any old rape is bad enough for Chris Rock.

Polanski himself doesn't think he did anything wrong and that we're all just le jealous, but then he didn't rape nobody:

"“If I had killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But… f—ing, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to f— young girls. Juries want to f— young girls. Everyone wants to f— young girls!”

He never denied anything in the victim's testimony yet, in his mind, this was just fucking. Fucking a drugged child 3 years below the age of consent that told him to stop 3 times is still just fucking apparently.

The now-infamous massive petition demanding his release is outrageous on multiple levels, not just in the how dare they way, but how does a person not see from a mile away how batshit insane they look adding their name to that, and not being able to sense that maybe this is the kind of thing you don't want to be seen publicly speaking up about even if for some godforsaken reason that is how you feel. Maybe like 50 years from now we will look back on people who signed this thing in the same way that we gossip about Walt Disney being an anti-semite today, but I'm not so sure. In the meantime people have started to compile lists of celebrities that have erred on the side of sanity and not defended this dickbag, but the idea that one has to scour the internet to even find people that aren't going out of their way to support rapists isn't all that comforting to me.

The one attempt people seem to consistently make to defend him is that the victim doesn't want to deal with the case anymore, and yeah, looking at what just happened do you really have to wonder why? Guy plead guilty and denies nothing in a case that could not be anymore black and white and yet hordes of extremely powerful (and not so powerful) people are still bending over backwards to defend him, and not even just that but to articulate his entitlement to freedom from all legal consequences. Do you really have to wonder for a second what chance the rest of us have, or why the vast majority of rapes are never ever reported, why the vast majority of those that are never go to any kind of trial and the vast majority of the few that do don't end up being seen all the way through and thus never result in a conviction-but don't take my word for it.

As soon as that petition was released this ceased to just be about him. It takes a village as they say, abuse happens not just because of the abuser but those who continue to legitmize their actions in public discourse. The arguments against his defenders in this case are obvious since they are all pretty damn pathetic, and I don't think I need to tell anyone that this isn't something unique of Hollywood, Europe or some kind of bluestate/redstate bs. It's been clear to me for quite a while that nobody, nobody, has yet figured out how to deal with rape, this case is just one of the more egregious examples. Rape is one of those things everyone is against in theory but when the victim is somebody you don't know and the accused is somebody you do that all seems goes out the window. You don't have to be a survivor to know this for a fact, I can't count how many times I've seen it happen in supposedly radical communities, in circles where people should know better, where they have gone to a million workshops about how to support survivors of sexual assault, and yet still...

In this sitch I am all for activists to start pie-ing people again, beyond that has anybody got any better ideas? I'm all ears.

my government

2009-07-09T11:33:00.001-04:00

Minister of State for Tourism Diane Ablonczy is no longer responsible for the delivery of a key tourism stimulus package, and one of her caucus colleagues says it's because her office gave some of the money to a gay pride parade.

Saskatchewan MP Brad Trost, a fellow Conservative, told the anti-abortion website LifeSiteNews that Ablonczy was being punished for the decision to give $400,000 from the Marquee Tourism Events Program to Toronto's Pride Parade, which was held this year on June 28.

ETA: I don't think it's impossible that there were political reasons for this as well.

can't you get a restraining order on this guy

2009-07-02T10:23:00.002-04:00

Obama now officially does not give a shit.

2009-07-01T10:34:00.001-04:00

All the details of this meeting took me back to the Saddam's time staring with the speeches that were glorifying Maliki and ending with Maliki's instructions to hold celebrations all over Iraq to show happiness as if Iraqis can not experience happiness without these instructions. Yes, most Iraqis are very happy with the withdrawal of the American forces but they don’t need any instructions that remind them of dark era. Iraqis will be happy if they forget the "Miserable Days".

After six years Iraqis are still waiting for the "Achievement Day" when the successive governments provide them with the necessary services.

Hahaha give this man the ten thousand dollars.

thanks for the memo

2009-06-26T00:02:00.011-04:00

"The most important misapprehension that people have about Iran is that it's like every other country in the region and it's not. People are better educated there, they're more sophisticated, they are more middle class, there aren't very many truly poor people and in the upper class the women are much better educated and much more active than in any other society in the region."

Hey I wish the Iranian people the best too, at least the best that they can possibly get out of the situation they're in right now(though as anyone who has even the most superficial knowledge of Iranian history knows, they have an incredible capacity to deal with crappy governments.) But why is it when so many liberals and leftists feel the need to convince the right wingers that Iranians are human beings, it's a portrait they paint as a contrast to all those "special" people that they are surrounded by? Not that I didn't already know that that was how they felt, cause believe me, this is not the first time I ran into this sentiment and it won't be the last.

This really wasn't what I wanted my first post on the aftermath of the Iranian elections to be about, but there it is. If anyone cares though I concur with this guy.

iraqi agriculture

2009-06-23T23:50:00.002-04:00

Another (older) article on this subject here. Of course, it also hasn't helped that Turkey has been blocking the flow of the Tigris and Euphrates. I think this is just the tip of a much broader policy that was implemented post-2003, which unfortunately didn't get much attention with all the militia action and drama, though they are not unrelated. Something much deeper than simple "regime change" happened here, and more comprehensive than just about oil, or about disbanding the army, though that is a part of it.

alexei sayle is for palestine

2009-06-23T00:01:00.000-04:00

I really get the cynicism over celebrities + politics believe me I do but I really could not resist posting this video, which is intrinsically awesome, by someone inherently awesome themselves.

Posts of substance are to come, I swear.

stolen from africville

2009-06-05T11:36:00.000-04:00

The story of “Stolen From Africville” outlines the rise and fall of the historic Black community of Africville Nova Scotia. Africville was a peaceful and thriving community whose roots can be traced back to the mid 1700s and the historic Underground Railroad.

However, under the guise of “development”, the Nova Scotia government bulldozed the land in 1969… In 2004 the United Nations conducted an assessment of this tragic injustice and recommended reparations for the Africville community. To this day nothing has been done.

http://stolenfromafrica.com/

(via)

what else have I been watching

2009-05-23T10:57:00.006-04:00

The Canadian government be a total spaz. I don't really expect most people to have been following what's been going on up here the past six months or so, though perhaps you heard about Galloway being banned from the country (honestly I do not like him for a number of reasons but that is ridiculous any way you slice it), potential new Mccarthyism and the ruling party as well as the Liberals have personally been waging campaigns against Apartheid Week and visiting University campuses to pressure them to not host the event, not to mention immigration raids(yes we have those here too.) That is just scratching the surface.

On a semi-related note, a few of Muslimah Media Watch's people started a brilliant blog called Muslim Lookout, dedicated to looking at the Canadian media's discourse on Muslims, immigrants and other racialized Canadians. Check them out.

more untimely blogging: ie I am clearing out my tabs

2009-05-23T10:27:00.005-04:00

Can you believe it's been over two months? I am still around and still reading everybody's stuff but I have just been doing more absorbing than composing. I can't really bring myself to get into twitter and facebook, at least not for posting. The format of the first one is irritating and it, like blogging, just seems like another antisocial media, more about projecting yourself onto the world than having conversations, as it seems so many people are on it for the purpose of self promotion. Personally I am still trying to figure out what I want to do with this thing after all these years. I don't really fit in with the activist or academic bloggers, and I sure as hell aren't here to try and start up a writing career(though maybe I gave some people the impression that I just really, really want an NGO job.) I'm not interested in talking about my personal life either, and you definitely will not be seeing any posting my of my family's life stories hell no.

My other issue with is with all the self promotion there tends to be a myopic approach to the presentation of the information. More: this is my prediction, my analysis turned out to be right ie look at me I am the only one clever enough to see these things. I've been getting into podcasts more lately and I like that format, and it seems to give people less room to talk past each other when they talk in real time. Though it's logistically less convenient to produce and potentially can be rill boring, but twitter isn't?

Anyways, what have I been reading. How much do you not care. Some are recent, some, not so much.

1. On Bibi's gift to Obama at their meetup.

2. Ten conceptual sins in analizing Middle East politics. Quite a lot to debate here.

3. Case study in twisting information in violence against women in the Middle East, in this case in the reporting on a UN report in Iraq. Look, domestic violence is a huge problem and Iraq definitely has its unfair share of every kind of problem in the world, especially for its women, as many of my posts attest to. Believe me, we really don't need to sensationalize this shit to tell that story, and this case is a good example of sensationalism. Outside of a few pockets, the rates of what get called honour killings in most of the Middle East don't actually differ significantly from the numbers of women murdered by their boyfriend or family in North America AFAI have read, I'm quite sorry to say. Lebanon and Jordan have about 15-20 a year, with populations of 5 and 6 million, you can do the math yourself.

4. Break.

5. Indigenous Youth Delegation to Palestine. Rad.

6. On Saudi Arabia's role in Iraq.

7. You already knew this right:
“Over half of what is described as aid goes to the global south in the form of loans for private sector consultancy, technical assistance or works projects and the five richest countries can get up to 90 per cent of the business,“ said Dr Bracking. "Poor countries, already up to their eyes in debt, are forced to pay it back at great cost to their citizens.
Just a reminder you don't have to wage a war to fuck people up, though it certainly helps.

8. Tell me this does not surprise you:
Readers will recall some spirited conversation with sometime National Post writer "Raphael Alexander" on the subject of Canadians vs. "Canadians." The latter are folks with the misfortune to have funny-sounding names, and who "will never be wholly Canadian because no person born abroad can ever fully understand what it is to be Canadian."

As it turns out, Canadian employers tend to agree with "Alexander" that names are important. It seems as though those "Canadians in law only" have been falling to the bottom of the hiring pile. UBC economics professor Philip Oreopoulos has prepared a working paper, released yesterday, showing conclusively that equally-qualified Canadians are unequally treated--based upon name discrimination. Young people entering the labour market are 40% more likely to be called to an interview, Oreopolous indicates, if their names are (say) "Brenda Martin" or "Bob Smith" instead of (say) "Abousfian Abdelrazik" or "Abdihakim Mohamed."

just saying

2009-03-09T20:10:00.003-04:00

I will most likely be out of commission till the anniversary passes but I've been reading and watching some things on the subject I want to eventually turn into a post-with said anniversary being so close to my birthday I'm not bent about having other things to think about at that time of year for the first time in quite a while. In the meantime check this out:

Or on a different note this:
(via)

Or read this and/or this.

I also posted in the other blog. Since tis the season I should probably mention that international women's day didn't bring much good news to the silly country I live in either-among others-but I mean what else is new. I've also been thinking alot lately about the ways in which folk pay lip service to solidarity with women around the world both on the internet and off, but that is a subject that requires more time than I have to do it justice right now.

2009-03-07T13:05:00.001-05:00

WANTED: Bloggers on the Middle East capable of class analysis.

pride and predator?

2009-02-21T19:47:00.000-05:00

Finally, a movie for me.

now for something completely different (because Obama bashing is getting too easy)

2009-02-21T19:39:00.024-05:00

There is a kind of parallel in the unprecedented swell in outrage against the operation in Gaza and in the lead-up to the Iraq war despite the difference in scale. Turnouts at the demonstrations a little over a month ago were at least 10 times what I remember during the July 2006 bombing, and definitely much larger than turnouts I've seen for much less controversial wars, and others around Europe and North America I know had similar observations. That's where the similarities end though, because the outrage at Israeli actions soon materialized into concrete and specific activism with specific demands (occupation of Universities, the BBC, reenergization of boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns, and some real successes at punishing those complicit in the occupation.)

In the case of Iraq activism, after a decade-plus of work against the sanctions and then the lead-up to the war bringing about the largest demonstrations coordinated worldwide ever, with tens of millions in the streets, mostly people that had never attended a protest of any kind in their lives, only for the movement to completely die not even six months after the war started. There are many factors that contributed to that, along with an unfortunate reality that the left for the most part didn't take much of an interest in developing its position beyond 'us there=bad', and many didn't expand their post-war analysis any further than that. You might think that position might be enough, and if this were a protest against gentrification or something I might be okay with that, but the US was doing a lot more in Iraq than just being there, and had been doing a lot more since 1991, with longterm and massive implications that can never be reversed. This was left out of the narrative and instead post-war Iraq debates were dominated by discussion of whether the war was good for America or not or were entirely focused on arguing over the numbers of bodycounts. A handful of projects like Jubilee Iraq, Hands off Iraqi Oil, 3iii came about that actually were working on specific issues that were impacting Iraqis and had some concept of cooperation with Iraqis themselves but overall interest just dropped in favour of more generic arguments about the war on terror. Meanwhile the right dominated and manipulated rhetoric of faux concern for the actual population to their ends(or at least they did untill CNN discovered that there are dogs in Iraq) and the monopoly they had on that rhetoric ensured that they were never challenged on that level.

For that reason I was struck when I stumbled upon this four year old talk by Naomi Klein in which she articulated some of the same problems with the US left, a fear of complexity, and a need to take leadership from actual Iraqis, a need to take the position for justice to happen there despite the efforts of the Bush admin, that justice was something that was even desirable, not simply for the troops to come home(and no the two aren't mutually exclusive.)

I don't agree with everything said here but keep in mind that this was early 2005, what I'm interested in is the ideas, particularly about the fear of complexity among some activists. The unfortunate lazy outlook by democrats and some on the left* that a victory would mean seeing the Bush admin fail, when in fact seeing the Bush admin's projects collapse under their own weight were as much the democrat's failure as his, proof that they had just given up at countering their claims and at ever holding them accountable. That isn't enough to sustain a movement, it's enough to build political capital for the opposing party, but not enough for a movement.

There were other reasons for the left's weakness: that this was all relatively soon after September 11th and Americans were still finding the space to fight for their own rights-it was around this time that international solidarity became severely uncool(though there are a lot of other reasons for that that are a whole nother post.) Practically of course I get that it's much easier to boycott someone like Lev Leviev than it is to have an effective boycott campaign against an oil company or a security company or a corporation contracted to build infrastructure(though there have been successes of this type with respect to the Israeli occupation as well,) and I'm well aware that BDS campaigns started well before 2008.

These are all things that have been on my mind since about 2004 and have come back into focus since the 5 year anniversary. Over the past year or so I've been looking forward to the end of this war (with ground troops anyways) if only because I've been sick of hearing the same old arguments from the same people. And of course these are generalizations and don't apply to a lot of people, there have been some people working amazingly hard on various issues and last of all I don't disclude myself from this criticism, but I can't say I haven't been frustrated by conversations I've had over the last almost six years. This isn't meant to be one of those blogs whining that certain issues get more attention than others, but the last couple of months have proved how awesome activism's potential is and it got me looking back at this post that I started writing almost a year ago and wondering what the fuck happened. I don't know what the difference is, maybe it all was a matter of really bad timing, but anyways that's what I'll be pondering as the next anniversary rolls around, if anyone cares.

*ps: I don't mean to conflate the left and democrats but I will when they use each other's talking points for the sake of brevity. Either way I've had just as many issues with "radical" as "liberal" approaches to Iraq over the years.

**Did you know that oil workers are still banned from forming trade unions? The fuck?

2009-02-21T19:04:00.003-05:00

Obama's problem is that a growing number of Americans are concerned about what the Bush administration did and are eager to press the issue. The extent of public concern has been reflected in several recent public opinion polls, including one in February by USA Today showing that nearly two-thirds of Americans support investigations of the Bush administration's use of torture and warrantless wiretapping; roughly 40 percent support criminal investigations.

Obama=meh; his supporters-I still have hope.

phalangepunx?

2009-02-18T09:17:00.002-05:00

What. The fuck.

EDIT: to wash that from your eyes and ears try John Waters' VD playlist. It's awesome, I promise.

so i'm not really much of a pali rap person

2009-02-16T21:43:00.001-05:00

but OMG these girls:

but we're so much nicer

2009-02-16T21:25:00.001-05:00

I love when Canada gets crap from other countries(when it deserves it). See the UN Human Rights Council review:

Of the 45 states that spoke during the three -hour session, 30 raised concerns about the rights of Indigenous peoples. Some of the strongest recommendations came from states that have traditionally allied with Canada in the promotion of human rights.

The United Kingdom, for example, recommended that Canada give its “highest priority” to addressing “fundamental inequalities” between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people including through “resolution of land claims and reconciliation of governance and self-government.”
The governments of Norway and Denmark called on Canada to reconsider its opposition to the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The Norwegian representative said, “We believe the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is unique as a universal framework for improving implementation of existing rights of Indigenous peoples in all countries of the world.”
The government of Norway also called for “comprehensive reporting and statistical analysis of the scale and character of violence against Indigenous women so that a national strategy can be initiated in consultation with Indigenous representatives to respond to the severity of this issue.”
Switzerland expressed concern over the lengthy process for resolving Indigenous land disputes and the concessions demanded by the government as a condition for settling claims. Switzerland urged Canada to “redouble its efforts” to resolve land disputes and to improve the mechanisms for doing so. (via)

Incidentally, Kate Beaton made me aware that today is also Louis Riel day.

RIP Lux Interior

2009-02-06T13:18:00.006-05:00

I don't mean to turn this blog into a compendium of dead musicians but I can't really let anything to do with the Cramps pass, it's just unfortunate this time the reason's quite the bummer. I am not good at eulogizing, what can you say about someone who besides being so awesome also turned so many of us on to so much truly righteous dirty country and r&b. I really don't want to be one of those jaded old people but I wonder alot why it is so many of the best rock shows I've been to in my lifetime were by people in their 50s who've been so adept at putting the post-adolescents to shame. Songs the Lord Taught Us has been a staple in my life for a decade plus and he will be missed. Since I went looking around youtube I decided this is now also a Poison Ivy appreciation post, cause I don't think you can really talk about either of them as separate from the other anyways. And damn look at her.

And yes I know my taste in music makes no sense.

other people's postings ie procrastination

2009-02-04T15:57:00.002-05:00

-Late birthday present: Pajamas Media will die in a little under 2 months.
-Interesting post comparing Gaza and Iraq-sorry non-French speakers.
-The Jews of Syria: I finally got around to reading this, fascinating stuff.
-Guy Delisle is blogging from Jerusalem, with his wife stationed there with Doctors Without Borders. I never knew he was french Canadian.
-Jane Rubio: interesting blog on migrant workers in Beirut and other things.
-Nadje Al-Ali has a new book out about women and post-war Iraq. Anyone interested in either subject needs to read Iraqi Women, which I promise is way more interesting than the title makes it sound.

2009-02-04T00:36:00.002-05:00

Damn guys no one told me Yma Sumac died.

Who will freak me out in the future. Not crappy avant-garde imitators, that's for sure.
Rest in peace.

speaking of boycotts

2009-02-04T00:03:00.002-05:00

Kabob can't get a break. First Italy and now..

"During the war we recorded a 80-90% drop in the number of Jews who came here to dine," said Dokhol Safadi, chef and owner of the mythical Diana restaurant in Nazareth. "I can understand them," he added, "unfortunately it wasn't very pleasant for them to come here during this time. Even now, after the war has ended, we have about half the amount of costumers we were used to."

Another well-liked spot for Mideastern gourmet, Elbabor, located at the entrance to Umm al-Fahm in Wadi Ara, has also felt the war's painful effect on business. In the first 10 days of the war the situation was very bad – nearly a complete boycott, said owner Husam Abbas. However, this Saturday things showed a slight improvement, with drop in the number of visitors reaching only 30%.

Arab-owned shops and restaurants in Jaffa have been standing virtually empty since the fighting in Gaza began, Ayini Kathtat, a waiter at the famous hummus hub Ali Caravan, said that many regular customers have simply stopped coming, and that some passersby taut and even curse the workers.

"Is it my fault that there are wars? I live here like everyone else. We all just want to earn a decent living. People need to understand that living together is the only option, force will get us nowhere. For some reason, whenever there are security problems Jaffa is being boycotted… I don't get it, what did we do to hurt you? It's a shame because at the end we all lose," he added. (via)

this made my day

2009-01-28T08:46:00.001-05:00

Shamelessly lifted from alfalasteenyia because I will find any excuse to post this picture:

somebody put this in a shitty beer commercial

2009-01-28T08:20:00.009-05:00

It is also important to say that we organized/co-organized/participated in the 4 demonstrations at the Egyptian Embassy, 2 demonstration in Awkar, 1 demonstration at the European Commission, 1 demonstration at the Canadian Embassy after its vote in the Human Rights Council

If there's a silver lining to Obama-mania it's going to be Canadians ever getting over that lazy 'at least we have it better than the US' brand of status quo politics. Honestly that is the closest thing they have to USAUSAUSA style patriotism up here(part of the reason why I like this place is it's not so rabidly nationalistic.) The US' hand in the Middle East is more high profile and on a bigger scale but yes we do have our own issues too that need to be addressed.

If you've written your politicians and taken your local divestment campaign as far as it can go under a Harper (or Charest) government, don't forget to boycott those companies that encourage participation in occupation, support or otherwise benefit from the inequal access to land and resources in the occupied territories. This is something anyone can do and it does make a difference.

what you mean words have meaning

2009-01-28T08:15:00.009-05:00

The Republican vice presidential candidate attracted criticism for accusing Mr Obama of "palling around with terrorists", citing his association with the sixties radical William Ayers. The attacks provoked a near lynch mob atmosphere at her rallies, with supporters yelling "terrorist" and "kill him" until the McCain campaign ordered her to tone down the rhetoric. But it has now emerged that her demagogic tone may have unintentionally encouraged white supremacists to go even further. The Secret Service warned the Obama family in mid October that they had seen a dramatic increase in the number of threats against the Democratic candidate, coinciding with Mrs Palin's attacks.

You know I don't want to sound like a broken record, at the time the bombing broke out I had like five posts half-written on way more interesting topics than another generic post on xenophobia but I can't really choose to avoid this shit, it's brought to my face whether I ignore it or not. Obama will most likely be fine but the people he's tied to will still be affected by it.

What I never got into in the Khalidi post was the disturbing lasting implication there is the untouchability of Arabs(Palestinians in particular) who are just too sheisty to trust being legitimized in a very public way. Beyond all claims of suffering called either disingenous or staged or part of some shadowy agenda, the notion that Arabs control the UN's agenda(seriously?), and then perennial classic generalizations like they're just jealous of our freedoms, culminate in even apolitical aid being politicized(something that was also seen among donor countries during the first year or so of sectarian violence in Iraq.) Talking this way about politicians is one thing, stereotypes and generalizations like these bleeding over to the people is quite another. It's something you keep in mind when crises blow up like they have in the last month and the reason why I try to catch the stereotypes year round as much as I can. We still have a long way to go, lord knows what most people are thinking about when they see videos like this one

what is wrong with people

2009-01-18T11:20:00.001-05:00

There are rumors that the Israeli government may declare a unilateral cease fire Saturday. They had better. Because if they ruin the Obama inauguration by splashing the bloody bodies of dead Palestinian children all over the press during the next few days, no Americans, even the most pro-Israeli, are going to forgive them. The war has left 1,140 Palestinians dead, over 300 children, and over 5,000 wounded including many women and children, as well as 13 Israelis (4 of them civilians killed by rocket fire). We pay for these wars, we provide the fighter jets, bombs, and tanks. And we don't want our money used for this sanguinary purpose in the first place; we have enough to be guilty about all on our own.

liberal blogs

2009-01-15T16:10:00.000-05:00

Similarly, one could say that Israel is in a privileged position compared to Palestinians locally (in terms of localized power in the Israel/Palestine conflict), while also arguing that Jews are subordinated compared to Arabs globally (in terms of globalized power to affect the terms of discourse and sanction in international institutions such as the UN).

What?

2009-01-15T08:00:00.005-05:00

Isolating Israel commercially is all well and good in the unlikely, however noble event that the people could bring it about. But what every Western government has failed to say overtly, but whose silence on the current matters has spoken (in particular, the British and US veto on the first United Nations resolution, and the US abstinence from the vote on the second), is this:

That Israel's occupation, war crimes, collective punishment policies, military and economic superiority to all other Middle Eastern countries- is absolutely in, will always be in, and has always been in, our National Interests.

Until that long-held, 'vital' interest is altered fundamentally, every citizens private protest will be carried out in vain. Ever get the feeling you got born having already lost the debate?

EDIT: I don't totally agree with this statement, but there's something to it.

plus ca change(okay not really)

2009-01-14T08:56:00.002-05:00

a doctoral thesis written by an American anthropologist, Jane Philips. The thesis, called Lebanese Folk Cures, is not dated but appears to have been published in the early 1950s from field work initiated in the mid 40's, right after WW2. It is based on interviews with a large number of Syrian immigrants to the US (Syrian means Lebanese in this context), and of interviews with almost a thousand people in Lebanon.

Philips reviews the social and anthropological work done on the Syrians in the US, in order to frame her work. Some of the stuff she reports is fascinating. Examples (p 79-80):

"A masters thesis (from Columbia University) in 1912 states that Syrians have developed lying to a "fine art"...among the Syrians in the United States, peddling is the principal occupation, factory work is second, while only 2 percent of the gainfully employed are professionals.

Another master's thesis in 1915 characterizes the Syrians as filthy and lazy...educators agree that the little Syrian girls are stupid, although the boys are bright, aggressive, good in arithmetics and bad in English.

Another thesis in 1929 studies retardation with special regards to the Syrians. Italians are thought to me more retarded than Syrians..."

:|

2009-01-14T00:01:00.001-05:00

JUBAIL – The Ministry of Labor is planning a day to honor model housemaids. The move has come in appreciation of the well-mannered housemaids working for Saudi families.
Hatab Al-Anzi, Director of Public Relations at the ministry said Dr. Ghazi Al-Gosaibi, Minister of Labor, has given his directives for studying the idea aiming at reinforcing the principle of honesty among housemaids, Al-Watan Arabic daily said.

It's too easy too be snarky about such things, Saudi isn't alone among Arab countries in being so horrible to its foreign workers, as everyone that reads Angryarab knows, but their government never fails to touch my gag reflex.

Case in point.

other people's postings: gaza

2009-01-11T09:30:00.010-05:00

This is just some linkage for people that don't usually follow Arab/Middle Eastern blogs and a summary of some things I've found interesting, as a lot of the roundups I have seen on certain mainstream websites have been extremely lame. This is obviously not comprehensive as I've been a little overwhelmed by the awesome volume of posting coming from since this started, feel free to add to it.

If you only read one article offering context to the lead up to this crisis read Avi Shlaim.

Israeli Ambassador: "We have no grand political scheme"
-no really? Marc Lynch is a great source of analysis on the regional reaction, which (along with the global reaction) is a fascinating subject in and of itself and needs its own post.

AJE interview with congressman Keith Ellison on the American response to the crisis. He chose to abstain in lieu of opposing congress' motion supporting Israel by the way.

Fisk being Fisk ie awesome:
I've reported the excuses the Israeli army has served up in the past for these outrages. Since they may well be reheated in the coming hours, here are some of them: that the Palestinians killed their own refugees, that the Palestinians dug up bodies from cemeteries and planted them in the ruins, that ultimately the Palestinians are to blame because they supported an armed faction, or because armed Palestinians deliberately used the innocent refugees as cover.
His Egypt article seems to have pissed a lot of people off.

This is incredibly cheesy and also pre-emptive to say: I don't believe in Obama, but I believe in the people that believed in him. (However, I also believe in the people that knew better.)

EI prank calls Israeli officer: this one is really making the rounds.

Laila Lalami: While the Palestinians were being bombed, Mahmoud Abbas (who only fifteen years ago would have been labeled a terrorist because of his membership in Fatah, but who is considered an acceptable partner now that Hamas is around) was sipping coffee with his good friends, the Saudi princes. In fifteen years, Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh will be sipping coffee with someone else while Ehud Olmert, Ehud Barak, Tzipi Livni, and the other Israeli leaders who support this illegal occupation bemoan the lack of a real partner in peace. And so it goes.

Also, not that I'm biased at all, but untill Turkey alters its policy to Israel on their massive amount of arms trade or water, I won't give Erdogan a word of praise. I really don't get everyone's boner for this guy.

Sabotabby's war on uninformed cliches on war in the Middle East.

Complaints on the content of speeches at the protest marches. Posting this because this definitely isn't the first time I have heard this sentiment and it was also discussed when I tuned into Kan Ya Makan last Tuesday, I'm not Palestinian though so I'll leave it to those who are to weigh in.

Gaza and Palestinian blogs:
Raising Yusuf is by a mother and journalist from Gaza who is in the US at the moment.
Tabula Gaza
Rafahkid
Moments from Gaza: group blog
Improvisations is back: Palestinian-American and one of the best blogs on the Middle East (contains photos not for the faint of heart.)
Falasteenyia: another Palestinian-American that never stops.

Other blogs:
Global Voices documents the world internet reaction.
Arabist: Egyptian-authored essential reading list on mid-east politics.
The Magnes Zionist: Israeli-American orthodox studies professor.
Land and People: Lebanese prof posting updates, btw if you are interested in "development" politics at all you need to add this one to your reader.
Mazen Kerbaj is an awesome Lebanese artist and tends to have a bunch of new cartoons every time shit hits the fan, this is no exception(sorry to everyone that likes Latuff but I still think he sucks big time.)

News/resources:
Al Jazeera English were the only ones in Gaza from the start: stream/youtube
Maan News
...and all the usual suspects

q: are we going into an election year

2008-12-27T18:56:00.004-05:00

a: yes, yes we are

What, me cynical?

2008-12-18T15:20:00.001-05:00

http://talkislam.info/2008/12/15/i-must-be-doing-something-right-my-post/#comments

Christ, where do I even start?

break

2008-12-03T23:59:00.005-05:00

Nomeansno in Slovenia. Fuck yesss

Footage from the shows on the live record was uploaded too.
Sound quality is better on these but I'm such a sucker for the other performance right now.

Kay, back to boring the internet.

in brief

2008-12-03T22:30:00.007-05:00

I want to go more in depth about the ridiculous Toronto Life article on Aqsa Parvez' murder** later but first I want to nitpick this:

But there is growing concern that recent waves of Muslim immigrants aren’t integrating, or embracing our liberal values. Aqsa’s death—coming in the wake of debates about the acceptability of sharia law, disputes over young girls wearing hijabs at soccer games, and the arrest of the Toronto 18—stoked fears about religious zealotry in our midst. Is it possible that Toronto has become too tolerant of cultural differences?

I thought I was done arguing about "sharia in Ontario" since that issue died here like three years ago but I still run into people all over the internet and the press that totally misunderstand the issue.

Ontario at the time had separate courts set up to handle family issues like divorce according to religious law for religious groups like Catholics and Jews. Muslims at the time just wanted into a system that other religious groups already had in Canada as was their right. The McGuinty government then in the wake of the controversy this generated, abolished all the religious courts. For some reason this always gets framed as an issue of Muslims not being able to "integrate" and trying to impose their ways on a secular Western country, when in fact what they were actualy trying to do was be integrated into the existing system.

Anyways, I'm glad the courts were abolished, though not about the circumstances that pushed our leaders to actually act. The idea of separate institutions for different religious groups is a throwback to the days before the waves of immigration to the country in the 1960s, when the only groups of influence in the country were Protestant Anglos and Catholic French Canadians. It's more reflective of the bi-cultural system than the multicultural model that followed it, and with the few religious groups trying to gradually expand it to include them it becomes a matter of which groups are the biggest and thus hold the most sway. Besides that, accomodating the Catholic minority in this way today just doesn't make sense since Quebec has since become by far the most secular part of the country; the Catholic school boards have been abolished there and if you want your kid to get a religious education you have to pay for it out of your own pocket. Yet in Ontario we still fund Catholic schools with public money.

**The deadline has passed for submissions now but this is worth a look.

2008-12-03T22:21:00.003-05:00

Why is it when people disagree with female commentators it so often takes the form of a statement of how stupid she is coupled with a comment on how hot she is? It's so predictable but there's something very telling about this. Just so you know though; if you do this, you're never funny.

And yes I know youtube comments are the lowest form of everything.

dreams/madness

2008-11-25T15:51:00.000-05:00

I don't think you need me to tell you that Iraq has been the site of production of a lot of documentaries but very few movies. One of very few exceptions to the trend, Mohamed al Daradji, after filming his first feature, Ahlaam, decided to make a documentary premiering this year about the experience of making the movie in Iraq in 2004, which among alot of other things involved he and his crew being kidnapped and nearly executed by militiamen only to be arrested by coalition forces.

Stoked as I am to still be hearing things about him, I will be even more stoked when I will be able to find a DVD of his first film. The reviews for the current one look promising so far, here's hoping he gets some exposure, lord knows he deserves it at least as much as every other hyped project on Iraq that's come out in the past few years.

with all that said

2008-11-05T23:03:00.001-05:00

I can't stop watching this:

in which i beat a dead horse

2008-11-05T22:49:00.036-05:00

As of right now I've written like five never ending drafts on the Rashid Khalidi smear ridiculousness and how disturbing the implications are. Of course, smears like this and hysteria in North America over anything even remotely tied to Palestinians are not anything new and contrary to what some want to believe they aren't solely a feature of the neocon right but accepted in the mainstream discourse in the USA.

I really want to be happy for the people that got what they wanted despite our ideological differences. Personally I'm sympathetic to the concerns of those voting strategically, even if the difference between candidates were a single issue, but I feel that way because I think you can and should differentiate between voting for someone and total endorsement and loyalty. There's been a lot of (imo very valid) criticism of how weak Obama and co. have been at denouncing the racist connotations of the smears against him (as opposed to merely pointing out that they are factually incorrect) and the irony that it was Colin Powell that had to come out and clearly point out how fucked up the Arab/Muslim smearing is, or that you had neocon Chris Hitchens coming out to skewer Republicans for smearing Khalidi's good name. But if you're going to be critical of him for not coming out strongly enough, I think you also have to acknowledge there's been a leadership deficit among said smeared Arabs and Muslims to demand better from him and ask hard questions(on either policy and why his campaign people won't let him be seen with Muslims,) something that should be happening whether they want him to win or not.

This time around fearmongering didn't win because it took a backseat to the economy and relief about the impending end of the Bush dynasty, but we shouldn't forget that these issues didn't magically materialize in 2008 (or 2001 for that matter) and they're sure as hell not going to go away after this win. At this point we have absolutely no reason to believe he'll be any less tepid in the future; and even if we did untill we actually see it there's no excuse to not be demanding it. This is all a bit of an echo of what some others have been saying, and of course it's easy for me to criticize not being American, but I just want to add mine to the chorus cause I sincerely hope people can get their shit together and be critical now that this (huge) moment has passed.

so what is the really right answer?

2008-11-05T09:10:00.001-05:00

Never forget.

ATTN: US people: your election thing is boring and takes too long

2008-11-04T00:37:00.002-05:00

but this is pretty funny:

Get the latest news satire and funny videos at 236.com.

stand corrected

2008-10-29T10:14:00.004-04:00

1. Greg Palast, after watching the election fraud of 2000 and 2004 decided this time around to start talking about it before the fact. This year almost 1 in 9 registered voters in New Mexico and 1 in 5 in Colorado had their names pulled off the voter rolls among literally millions of others, something both parties have done. The Huff Post interview and his website are well worth checking out.

2. We have an actual whistleblower. Jesus christ.
That's nice to know now but it would have been nice for something to have been done about it like four years ago. But I'll settle for ever.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6mTjFOHVgk

3. Hobsbawm on the economic crisis.

4. AJE's film series on Iraq is pretty great so far.

5. Many of these ideas sound reasonable. Indeed, Iran is the most powerful and stable country in the Persian Gulf, and the United States has for too long often treated it as an unruly child to be ignored or a criminal to be punished. But Mr. Baer undercuts the force of his argument when he throws out a list of more ambitious recommendations that would require the reshaping of the Middle East.

The United States should leave Iraq and “drop the mess” into Iran’s lap. The partition of Iraq should happen as quickly as possible. Iran should not be prevented from being allowed to administer the holiest sites of Islam with Saudi Arabia. Jordan should be turned into a Palestinian state. Why not hold a referendum in Bahrain to determine whether it wants to return to its status as an Iranian island? Why not redraw the borders of the Middle East in both Israel’s and Iran’s favor?

These proposals could be the subject of Mr. Baer’s next book. Perhaps he could begin it by explaining why he seems to hold the Iranians in such awe and the Arabs in such contempt. As he writes at one point, the Arabs “lack the spiritual and intellectual depth of Iranians.” How does he know?

O_O
Allright that whole article is one giant anyeurism but still.

6. I didn't know Fawaz Trabulsi had a Znet page, but they've been off my radar for a while anyways. I like his take on Iraqi federalism since I'm being forced to look at the subject again(ugh this so isn't funny.)
On that note Reidar Visser weighed in on the super contentious topic of the history of sectarian violence in the country.

7. Joe Biden, Colin Powell, and most likely Hillary. Together.
I'm just saying.

2008-10-19T23:14:00.002-04:00

Wow I was a bummer today and I didn't even start on Canadian politics.

Here is some beautiful stuff from Mali.

oh yeah

2008-10-19T12:43:00.009-04:00

This is for everyone sick of hearing about Obama.

Haha sike.

Anyways as someone pretty powerless to do anything to affect this election I'm honestly pretty unmoved by alot of the hype around it, but then I don't have to be. Neither candidate stands where I'd like them to on the issues, but that's a given and I don't think there's a lot that really needs to be said on that(and if anyone is still thinking of voting for a third party, Nader agrees with the Biden plan on Iraq so I'm not going to give them any more credit just cause they have no chance of actually implementing their policies.)

It's considerably less sexy and dramatic than the shit slinging of the last six months or so but what concerns me at this point is where the movement for election reform is at, why there's still a total lack of accountability on actually getting votes counted, and the whole lot of nothing that was done about the 2000 election fraud.
And as for nowadays, well...

I really don't feel good about this.

look what you people made me do

2008-10-19T11:17:00.021-04:00

I'm posting about the election AND posting daily show videos in one post, what is this 2004? Sometimes they're still spot on.

If you're outside the US, try this link to watch it.

At this point the nasty arab/muslim smear campaigns are pretty old hat subject with every blog in the universe, but the Daily Show touched on something that's been lacking in the discussion.

There's no question that campaigners banked on those negative associations, with the Islamophobic propaganda video Obsession being distributed with newspapers in swing states. On Democracy Now the author of a FAIR report on the rise of Islamophobia in the media in recent years, which discussed four major incidents including the election campaign, chose to contrast the case of the Obama muslim/arab smearing with a case in 1990 in Poland where the incumbent candidate for prime minister was smeared as secretly being a jew. In that case, the issue was treated by the media as an example of the state of anti-semitism in Poland, but this time around the coverage is all about Obama:

In the case of the rumor campaign against Barack Obama, labeling him a Muslim—and we now know that this was started, the person who’s taking credit for it, is a known anti-Semite who had run for office in Connecticut on a platform opposing “Jew power” in America. And so, a known anti-Semite starting a whisper campaign about Obama being a Muslim, and all the American press can talk about is the fact that Obama is being smeared, not about the fact that a huge swath of humanity is being smeared in this election.

Surprisingly enough after 28 million copies of Obsession get distributed in swing states, somebody thinks it's a good idea to gas a mosque in Dayton, Ohio.
Poor Obama.

hey look who's still on the internet

2008-09-19T15:11:00.003-04:00

the random things we find on youtube. This is Samira Tawfik:

One day I will get back into making posts of substance(for the 3 people that care,) I try not to speculate on when that's going to be since I am cursed to not post for months whenever I promise to and likewise somehow ending up posting a lot right after I claim I'm not going to have time to so I'm just not saying anything. In the meantime I'll make this blogspot even more trivial and livejournally by expressing my feelings through songs.
I got tagged to make this list like 2 months ago and my laziness got the best of me when I discovered that muxtape and my computer just do not get along. There's still one day left of summer, technically, and I'll take any excuse I can get to be trivial and self indulgent so here's what I listened to a lot lately:

The Dogs: class of 1970

I found this band a little while back through a blog that doesn't exist anymore, after hearing 70s riff-age ripped off by a lot of ok bands and a lot of really bad ones since I started listening to music I didn't think I could get excited to hear this kind of stuff ever again, funny how I can be so wrong. Fed Up is great and pretty easy to buy these days, just sayin.

Lou Reed: perfect day
I thought I was someone else

New Order: love vigilantes
This is really not the best New Order song and far from my favourite but it is catchy and it's been stuck in my head for like a month.

The Fastbacks: light's on you

I know I just made a post about them but truth be told I have been digging this song a lot lately, deal with it.

Fear: let's have a war

Somehow I slept on this band for way too long.

Curtis: don't worry (if there's hell below we're all gonna go)
This really speaks to me.

The Boss: born in the usa
"No surrender" is probably my favourite song from this album but I never noticed how angry this song was before. Also some of the videos people made for it are pretty funny.

bad blogging compendium

2008-07-25T14:00:00.012-04:00

Isn't the whole point of blogging that it be either timely or offers some insight that other media didn't-this post will be none of those things. This is just some random stuff I would have posted about if I'd had the time or energy while I was away. Maybe you have seen them, I don't really care, but I think that most of us are taking breaks from computers of late anyways, which is as it should be.

1. I am sad for Oshawa(I don't care what your political inclinations are, it sucks.)

2. Turkey's interfering with US scholarship on...guess what subject. Really, though, this is nothing new.

2.5 Can I just say how much I enjoy it when Turkey fails at European things, whether it's the Euros or the EU: doods you are not in Europe, get over it.

3. Harper apologized for residential schools. Global Voices didn't really cover this for some reason(edit: I guess because not a lot of people outside Canadian press had much to say to it.) Some people were moved, a lot of people called the current government out for policies that deliberately undermine indigenous sovereignty(refusing to sign onto the UN declaration of Indigenous rights, ingoring the Kelowna accord, etc.), Kevin Annett is still angry.

The 2010 Olympics could be really interesting.

4. That Dunkin Donuts-Rachel Ray thing will not go away.

5. I know I just made a post about making fun of activists being lame but seriously WTF

See the rest of them here, the Kim Kardashian one is a winner. I THINK I'VE FOUND MY THRESHOLD.

5.5 I wonder if Kardashian is like the shame of Armenians everywhere or if they don't know who she is. I wonder who our equivalent would be.

6. Best news out of Lebanon I have seen in a while (though it may have changed some lately.)

7. Iraq troika: oil deals, agriculture, and Hariri shows he cares.
Don't worry though, freedom's still on the march.

8. Towelhead is seriously the worst book I have ever read in my life. I still can't believe they're making it a movie. I can't believe there are people that want to see it. I can't believe I haven't been exploiting the hell out of my ethnicity to get a book deal, what have I been doing with my time?

Other stuff I have been looking at:

If you are into slice-of-life type comics at all I have to strongly recommend Manu Larcenet's Ordinary Victories (Le Combat Ordinaire) it is amazing, though not perfect, but what is? Actually if anyone has recommendations for franco-belgian comics send them my way, I mean any genre, I read a wide range of stuff.

I do not usually like sports writing, but King Leary by Paul Quarrington is a great example of fiction on the subject of hockey that deserves to be read.

If for some reason you don't already know Kate Beaton's history comics are adorable, though occasionally Canada-centric. That girl seems to be (internet) everywhere lately.

Speaking of being really untimely; I just started watching Buffy like two weeks ago. I really want there to be Buffy bands like there are Potter bands; scary and yet somehow oddly endearing at the same time. Hell, maybe I'll go see Batman in like 5 years.

Still trying hard to stay away from the petty election-related drama, it hasn't been going great so far.

RIP

2008-06-03T14:14:00.001-04:00

i can't let this slide

2008-05-27T19:49:00.002-04:00

From this NYT article on the new Sandler movie:

Not surprising, they had little difficulty recruiting Israelis to play opposite Mr. Sandler. But finding Arab actors who would even audition for “Zohan” proved challenging, and some who worked on the film said they had initially been leery of appearing with Mr. Sandler, who is Jewish and supports Jewish charities and causes.

The little addendum is a little suspicious to me. If anyone was completely opposed to working with Jews, they wouldn't be trying to make a career as a Hollywood actor, period, or else they are really, really dumb.

It could be that they are leery of appearing in a movie that makes light of a really touchy political conflict, where one side is almost always portrayed as terrifying, and also that in its premise it portrays a killer as a lovable guy.

It might also be that, according to the article, that the movie shows a bunch of Arab-Americans calling a Hzbollah hotline and asking how to make a bomb. I mean it's not like Arabs aren't accustomed to being portrayed negatively in hollywood, as stupid and violent, misogynist or racist terrorists, even the ones that live in the US.

I don't know jack about Sandler's politics and what he believes, I'm assuming most people don't. All I could find by googling is that he donated some money to Giuliani's campaign-I would figure that most people would not be aware of that, though I am assuming that this movie was shot in the NE and NY Arabs would be more aware of the details of his campaign. Giuliani came out against any Palestinian state, which is a really not mainstream positon these days.

Having problems with any of these things doesn't sound nearly as racist as saying that the actors did not want to touch "Jews and Jewish causes." That's a much less complicated statement and easier to say in a half-sentence unchallenged and without needing any clarification, since most of America already believes that anyways.

Ugh, there is my angry after school special public service announcement.
I think that satisfies my quota for the next 6 months or so. Anyways I like Maysoon Zayid (and usually like Adam Sandler) so I am giving this movie the benefit of the doubt untill I see it, my issue for now is with the NYT reporter's total irresponsibility with that line in perpetuating one of the most harmful stereotypes about Middle Easterners. I know it's just a drop in the ocean but it's so frustrating to have this shit thrown at you all the time.

2008-05-17T20:37:00.003-04:00

I'm furious right now, and the same people still can't shut up, but they don't matter.

God bless his family.
If you live in safety count your blessings, remember there are so many people that would give everything to be in your position.

2008-05-15T07:23:00.002-04:00

I picked up A Thousand Splendid Suns a little while back and I just noticed the afterword, which is about the Afghan refugee crisis briefly and the author's work with the UNHCR. There's this line:

UNHCR provides assistance to more than 20 million displaced people around the world, not only in Afghanistan but in places like Columbia, Burundi, Congo, Chad, and the Darfur region of Sudan.

It's dated January 31, 2007. No disrespect whatsoever to the travesties that are happening right now in Central Africa and Darfur, but there are some pretty huge omissions, here.

Also, I like Khaled Hosseini.

a couple of things

2008-05-15T06:36:00.003-04:00

i really do not get some people's boner for making fun of darfur (or tibet) activists. i mean if you think some of the goals or politics of specific groups are sketchy, just say so, but making fun of some earnest high school and college kids...really doesn't send the right message, and it's not helping anyone.

on the other side of the coin, if you're posting about say, tibet, africa or north american indigenous issues just so you can make some stupid point about how "you'd never see a palestinian activist talking about this" or "if what was happening in china was happening in the middle east everyone would be talking about it" you can seriously fuck right off. if you're going to post about these things, post about them because you actually care about them. using other people's pain for your stupid polemics are just as reprehensible as the stupid strawman that you oppose.

way better than little mosque on the prairie

2008-05-08T10:14:00.003-04:00

1 more

the fastbacks

2008-05-02T14:58:00.007-04:00

The thing about coming of age in the mid/late 90s I think is you get exposed to a lot of hyped bands from before your time without really getting the context of why people loved them. The Fastbacks is one of those for me-I'd liked what I heard ok when I first heard them well over ten years ago but it never really clicked for me till much much later when I heard their first album ...and his Orchestra as well as Very Very Powerful Motor (which contains a sweet Pointed Sticks cover), their second full length, and I was totally sold. They have a way less saccharine feel than their later stuff I was first exposed to and some really sweet riffs, though anyway you slice it it's still really melodic punk rock-just a little looser and rougher around the edges and the vocals-which can be a really good thing. I love the original version of K Street.

Both these albums are still pretty easy to find on CD. Bike Toy Clock Gift, their live record, is so great and also not so easy to track down so I'm uploading it.
Here.
myspace

huh? i thought we were all just naturally lazy

2008-05-02T07:18:00.005-04:00

How else could the market decide this generation's worth less?

The trend towards reduced wages for young males is one that emerged in the early 1980s in many economically developed countries, Morissette said, noting economists speculated new technologies were pushing out young workers.

Others believed the recession during that time may have prompted employers to try to cut labour costs by reducing the wages of fresh hires in order to avoid seriously harming morale and productivity among senior workers.
...
The decline of the manufacturing sector in Ontario and Quebec - exacerbated in recent years by the loss of many automotive jobs and outsourcing to countries with cheap labour costs - has resulted in a 20-per-cent reduction in the number of blue collar union jobs, as well as lower wages for those who remain, Morissette said.

"We know unionized jobs pay usually 10-to 15-per-cent higher wages than non-unionized jobs and that has certainly contributed to reducing the wages of young men during that period," he said.

According to the latest census data, the salaries of blue-collar labourers in processing, manufacturing and utilities, for example, fell four per cent between 2000 and 2005, while machine operators and fabric, fur and leather product manufacturers dropped more than seven per cent.

Even though unemployment is low in Canada, there's been a shift towards a service-based economy - sometimes referred to as the Wal-Martization of the workforce. Often paired with lower salaries, Morissette suggested it's responsible for about 15 per cent of the decline in young people's wages.

the never agains

2008-04-27T10:43:00.010-04:00

The anniversary for the Armenian genocide passed a few days ago. This is one of those issues that has always been close to my heart, but what I wasn't expecting was that Armenian genocide recogition politics would be an issue put front and centre this past year, 90 years later. Usually I have trouble getting across to people just why recognition is so important so long after the fact, but last year with all the brouhaha going on in Eastern Turkey we have a very clear illustration of why: Turkey's attitude to its minorities (sorry I meant "mountain Turks") did not change dramatically after WW1, just like anti-semitism in Europe did not begin with the Nazi party(that's where it ended, not began, we should always remember that.) Hitler famously said "who remembers the Armenians" when asked what the blowback would be of his final solution, and indeed after WW1 the issue was dropped by Western powers as Turkey's strategic importance in the Cold war became priority, it was clearly shown that when you gloss over such injustices, selectively or not, you are implicitly legitimizing them everywhere.

The recognition of this history for what it is, without downplaying or sanitizing it, says that it should not be, that it should not have been. I think that's so important to recognize: coming up two weeks from now is another anniversary of a complete travesty that for many people is still considered a cause for celebration. Treating the holocaust as a unique event in history and not the culmination of an ongoing European problem served many interests. In the aftermath of WW2 when everyone was saying "never again" and the allied countries were all organizing anti-racist conferences to condemn Germany's crimes, Britain and France were still brutally occupying their colonies, the US still had segregation and Jim Crow laws, and of course there was no mention of the Pogroms or the Dreyfus Affair, supporting apartheid South Africa and, yes, they also did not remember the Armenians.

Last fall I will never forget (there's that phrase again) watching a BBC talk show during the fighting between Turkey/Kurdistan and the panel was all agreed, "why are they bringing up the genocide now." As if there was ever a convenient time to piss Turkey off, as if this wasn't something that had been ongoing for 90 years. "They" was implied to be the all-powerful (note sarcasm) Armenian lobby, as if the genocide was just an invention of ethnic politics, as if it wasn't an absolute consensus among Middle Eastern (and many other) academics that what happened was a systematic genocide and that all Western governments should recognize it. Even more amazing was the host of the show saying "we get so many emails from Turks who just can't understand why we use the word genocide" imagine if he said "we hurt so many Russians' feelings when we use the word pogrom." If you coddle people here, where exactly do you stop? Why do we tolerate for Armenians what we never would to be said about the Holocaust?

If this is all simply an academic question, then why are Turks still going to jail for merely discussing it, why are Turks prone to harrassment for speaking out on this issue even after they were exiled from Turkey? History must not be glossed over, and the more that these issues come to light the closer we will be to having a culture that condemns these things. That is why the intro to A Little Matter of Genocide discusses the Armenian Genocide and current treatment of Roma in Europe (which is still reprehensible btw) and why Ward Churchill supported genocide recognition, because these issues are all connected.

Which brings me to Canada. Canadians have this really annoying thing about feeling good about themselves because they have things just a little bit better than the USA: we are just a little more liberal, have a functioning healthcare system(OMG just like almost every 1st world and some 3rd world countries!!1), wanted to ban landmines, etcetc. For that reason I very strongly recommend watching this documentary. We all learned about the residential "schools" that all natives were forced to attend in elementary school, but I don't think anyone comes out of it with more than an incredibly vague idea of how brutal they were, how bad the abuse was, that the last residential school closed in 1998. That healthy and deathly ill children were forced to mix, spreading disease, the result of which was according to a doctor sent by the Canadian government to inspect the schools in the early 1900s, most schools had a death rate of 35-60%. Go to the website, check it out on googlevideo, if you are Canadian it is required viewing. Think about it every time you see this stupid commercial.

Diversity not assimilation? Never again? ORLY? How about ALL THE FUCKING TIME.

happy thoughts

2008-04-18T20:55:00.004-04:00

I think it's really important to remember how easy it is to just not look at stupidity on the internet, much more so than life. I'm going to start practicing that again, it's important to keep things in perspective, to a certain extent.

Actually that is pretty appropriate, I discovered Superchunk when Detroit was the first song on a tape I happened to get in the mail when I was dealing with some especially stupid crap in my life, it's funny how these little things reach out to you when you're at a total low. It's always going to be associated with that in my head, but I've also just happen to be listening to them lots lately; after all it's springtime.

I kind of liken this nostalgia kick I'm on to how some people look at pictures of baby animals, like

Look at how young they are, is it not cute?

internet squared

2008-04-18T17:31:00.007-04:00

I've learned that whenever I say I'm going to be posting alot or absent in the near future I'm jinxing myself for the opposite to happen so I'm not going to do that. Here are some random things I've been looking at.

1. Have I ever mentioned how much I dislike Daily Kos liberals anyways? Wanna take bets on how long it'll take till we see posts praising cluster bombs?

2. Bitch mag's writing is hit and miss for me, but they can be pretty sharp. I liked this article on the craptastic articles that so often appear on yahoo frontpages about the pseudo science that always just happens to reinforce our particular culture's gender stereotypes. Funny how that is!
See also: Sabotabby's evolutionary psychology bingo card. If you run into the paper March issue there's also a great article on online harrassment and misogyny beyond Kathy Sierra.

3. Secret Iraq CPA documents my eight year old found. I don't know that this will really be earthshattering but it's still a good read.

4. Cradle of Civilization:

This is like fifty minutes long, but a must-see as far as I'm concerned.

5. ...then read this and be bummed out.

this really horrifies me for some reason

2008-04-05T19:56:00.001-04:00

All that competition puts a premium on staying awake. Matt Buchanan, 22, is the right man for the job. He works for clicks for Gizmodo, a popular Gawker Media site that publishes news about gadgets. Mr. Buchanan lives in a small apartment in Brooklyn, where his bedroom doubles as his office.

He says he sleeps about five hours a night and often does not have time to eat proper meals. But he does stay fueled — by regularly consuming a protein supplement mixed into coffee.

2008-04-05T18:42:00.003-04:00

So at one point I posted about food but sadly lately that's been neglected. My love of Ethiopian food is going strong these days, but cooking it myself has been hit and miss. I've had success with this recipe for yellow split peas (the variation with the tomato paste/spice mixture and not the ginger root,) adjusted for more water (over 4 cups,) and cooked longer to the point that the peas make a mushy, hummus-like texture and not a cooked lentils texture. I could do with more recommendations in this category, either for recipes or cookbooks. Either way I will be reporting back.

ANNOUNCEMENT

2008-04-05T10:05:00.004-04:00

I am officially delinking stuff white people like. I am a libertarian-free zone, I hereby reject and denounce, and disassociate myself from my previous defences of this website, though at the time I had not accumulated all the intelligence I have now.

who says we don't talk about the issues

2008-04-01T07:08:00.001-04:00

I'm still not tagging my posts. Google you can't tell me what to do!

a note on today's posts

2008-03-20T23:38:00.012-04:00

today is not a day to assess iraq's many issues and future prospects for me: iraq's problems don't neatly revolve around this milestone, and they should not be paid lip service to on this date only to be forgotten after. iraqis, those in the region, and the world will be dealing with the fallout of this war for decades to come-whether some of us choose to forget that or not. this week it was the fifth anniversary of a very fatal american-anglo decision that passed, and that's what i think this is a time to reflect on. despite world opinion turning against the war so much as of late, i think this has been very lacking in the current discourse, which is really unfortunate.

i'm going to post another big boys song now for the hell of it:

sinan antoon

2008-03-20T23:19:00.004-04:00

Under Saddam Hussein there was something called the Iraqi state. I want to emphasize that what the US did is not only overthrow Saddam—that’s a byproduct—it destroyed the Iraqi state, which is something that took eighty-five years to build, all of its institutions and everything. That was not all the product of Saddam. Saddam was a latecomer. What the United States did is destroy an entire state, entire infrastructure, all of the institutions, so that there, you know—so, of course, life was better when you had a system that was functioning.

If you only watch one piece of anniversary coverage by the way, I would make it this one.

What happened to Charlie's eye? I hope he's OK!

now and then

2008-03-20T18:38:00.011-04:00

The war began with a mesmerizing display of American might. But the United States made a basic misjudgment about the Iraqis’ readiness to share power.
-NYT

The only lesson we ever learn is that we never learn
-Fisk

This is the war that started with lies, and continues with lie after lie after lie
-Cockburn

i really don't want to keep playing noam chomsky all the time but sometimes the contrast is just so striking. i really do believe that people know better, what i would ask is when we'll start acting like it.

2008-03-20T18:36:00.001-04:00

General William Westmoreland, Commander of U.S. Forces in Vietnam, offered the following explanation for similarly staggering Vietnamese body counts (an estimated 3 million Vietnamese died in that country's French and American wars): "The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient."

today i will travel back in time

2008-03-20T08:36:00.005-04:00

all the way to 2003:

observations on the media, silence and int'l women's day (links ahoy!)

2008-03-16T11:46:00.011-04:00

Iraqi Women's League petition to take action to stop violence against women.

Before I get into the ugly details; because we usually focus on the horror stories, especially when they're from the MENA region, I think it's really important to acknowledge Morocco's amends to its family law for the good and attempts at realizing this law into daily life and attitudes, joining Syria and Tunisia (and the former Iraq) in the club of Arab countries that have done so. It doesn't make everything perfect of course but it's a great step in the right direction.

I tend to take Int'l Women's Day for granted as these issues are something I perpetually think about, but I did a search to see what people are saying about Iraqi women on that day seeing as we are at one hell of a low point and the 5th anniverary is coming up, and everyone's supposedly sick of talking about this war. It does seem that with the talibanization of Basrah, murders in Kurdistan, threats and assassinations, being confined to their homes, refugee women selling themselves to live, others being trafficked against their will, estimates of between 1-2 million widows in the country stuggling to get by, people don't really seem to have a lot to say on this day.

Women for Women International released a poll of Iraqi women on their situation few days ago, but the BBC seemed to be alone among Western news agencies in picking up the story, save for a mention in this one on the French AFP.
Well, with the exception of UPI's article which tried amazingly hard to make things sound better than they were. For example: "more than 40 percent of the women interviewed said the ability of school-aged girls to receive an education improved since 2003" sounds way better than the way it was put in the study: "76.2% of respondents said that girls in their families are not allowed to attend school, and 56.7% said that girls’ ability to attend school has gotten worse since the U.S. invasion." And then there's this: "The group noted that Iraqi women in the central and southern regions felt optimistic about the future of Iraq and found that sentiment was on a general rise. Those findings, however, contrast with the notion that barely a third of Iraqi women shared that attitude across the board"-in other words, 73% of the women surveyed were not optimistic, but if you only look at the ones that replied optimistically, Iraqi women are optimistic.

There were a handful of other articles: Iraq topped the Toronto Star's laundry list of the worst countries for women, one about a female MP- led demonstration in Baghdad from the AFP that no one picked up. If you just look at the US press this narrative is completely absent.

LA Times blog had this post about the women's day celebration in Nadi Ilwiya, a club that's a meeting place for the Baghdadi upper class, which out of context is the most vague, ahistorical, apolitical, substanceless take on Iraqi women today that you could possibly make-"Iraqi women say that they have "suffered"-want to liberate selves some day-eat lunch-ignore poor women." No mention here of organizing to help poor women, that getting assistance for the 90+% of Iraq's 1-2 million widows that are recieving nothing is one of the larger issues they're organizing around. No mention of the demonstrations against threats and violence against women that were being held in Baghdad that same day, no mention of the climate of fear they live in whatsoever. If these issues had been recognized in another piece in the LA Times, or in any other US media, we would have a completely different situation, but they have not. The articles I mentioned here are not examples, they are literally all the coverage that I could find. The women's groups' editorial titled Heroines-the daily life of Iraq's War Widows was completely ignored, just as Dahr Jamail's column on Iraqi women's plight never appeared in any paper in the US or Europe. So be sure that few saw this image, or know what it's about:

One week later CNN's Women of Iraq documentary is nearly as bad about sanitizing the realities which Iraqi women live. The show wasn't really about the problems that Iraqi women are facing today-the gendered violence and discrimination-so much as a handful of interviews with Iraqis that happen to be women. Even their profile of Yanar Mohammed and the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq managed to avoid a focus on this question. OWFI was described merely as an organization "for a secular government," their work helping trafficked and threatened women took the backseat of the story, as did the extent of the deterioration of women's rights in Iraq, discussing these things would require challenging the success narrative being told about the war and talking about things like the law and the political situation-and of course there was absolutely no mention of OWFI's very harsh criticism of the occupation. The case they were working on that was discussed was that of a woman on death row-a tragic story, but also one that easily can be talked about without stepping on those other difficult issues. But the show was barely about even that, it was Oprah goes to the Mideast: the perspective of the piece was myopic, hyperfocused on these women as personalities, and their relationships with their families, on confessing their emotions. The bigger picture was hardly an afterthought. If this story existed alongside others that took the overall situation much more seriously, I would say so what, but when this equals the total information we are getting on this story in the US, which is not much, something is seriously wrong here.

I do also have to give credit where credit is due, and say that Ben Lando got it right, one week later:

Iraq's ambassador to the United States, Samir Sumaida'ie, began his welcome to the International Women's Day celebration he was hosting this week not with the praises for his countrywomen, but with a moment of silence.

guys i love amadou & mariam so much

2008-03-08T11:47:00.011-05:00

lyrics (warning: my french is rusty, but i did my best here)

It's at the Manhattan fast-food Dakar Senegal, cinema Paris,
Tomorrow I will be gone,
The Dakar station, Bamako Mopti
There are no problems? Everything is fine
Today I get married, I trust
Amoul solo, Gao, Algeria, Tunisia, Italy.
There are no problems, I like!
I have in the Manhattan fast-food Dakar Senegal, cinema Paris
Elevator to the ghetto

It is midnight in Tokyo
It is five o'clock in Mali
What time is it in Paradise?
It is midnight in Tokyo
It is five o'clock in Mali
What time is it in Paradise?

(Amadou and Mariam / translation)
We who leave our country
The children of the country must not forget us
We who are inside this thing
This thing that none of us can name
We who are in distant countries
The children of the country must not forget us

It was at the Manhattan fast-food Dakar Senegal, the grandmother to the hospital
Grandfather all goes well, me here, you there, the visa at the Consulate
Number 39, I wait
To the civil state already the year 2000, already 2000 years
At the Manhattan fast-food Dakar Senegal, cinema Paris,

It is midnight in Tokyo, It is five o'clock in Mali
What time is it in Paradise?

Dakar, Bamako, Rio de Janeiro
Where is the problem? Where is the border?
Between the walls sneak into the elevator to the ghetto
At the Manhattan fast-food Dakar, Senegal, cinema Paris,

We who leave our country
The children of the country must not forget us
We who are in this thing
This thing that none of us can name
We who are in distant countries
The children of the country must not forget us

It is midnight in Tokyo, it is five o'clock in Mali
What time is it in Paradise?

one more.

2008-03-08T10:24:00.021-05:00

Feministing had a thread about their favourite "feminist" movies(however you choose to define that seems to vary quite a bit,) The Legend of Billie Jean and Girls Town topped the list, which i have not seen(weird cause actually I like Lili Taylor a lot.) There were a lot of other interesting suggestions, ie the Scream trilogy, Princess Mononoke (if you are going to say that I would also add Nausicaa to the list.) Among my personal faves classics-wise would be The Passion of Joan of Arc and Fiddler on the Roof.

Unsurprisingly Canada's Ginger Snaps and sequels got a lot of votes, the horror coming-of-age movie in which a girl gets her period and subsequently starts growing a lot of body hair, being really bitchy and hungry for boys untill she wants to tear them to pieces, in this case because she gets bitten by a werewolf.

Also a Canadian but grossly underappreciated interpretation of the coming of age story, New Waterford Girl, will always hold a place in my heart. Set in Catholic small-town Nova Scotia, in which the new transplant from New York gets into a fight with her friend's baby daddy who won't take responsibility. She discovers that she has a rare gift and her punches can tell who is a liar: if the recipient falls to the ground, he's guilty, if he withstands the hit, he's telling the truth. Her services immediately become popular with all the knocked up girls of New Waterford who are birth control-less and whose boyfriends won't own upto what they did. JUNO AND ALL TEEN PREGNANCY MOVIES TO COME YOU OWE THEM. Anyways, it's a funny movie, and Mark Mckinney does a cameo and so does, uh, Ashley MacIssac and the guy in that Alanis Morrissette video(<3 Canadian star system.)
[I actually haven't seen Juno yet but I'm sure it's very good. No hate.]

palestine, texas

2008-03-06T20:06:00.002-05:00

Homeland security preparing to seize Apache lands.