Al-Azhar mosque

So Obama is planning to speak in Egypt on June 4, a choice some are saying is a signal that America wants our "autocratic ally" to be a model for other Arab nations. He's rejected the resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh in favor of Cairo, a move that is considered bold, since anything in Cairo will be harder to secure.

Now the question is finding a venue within Cairo, and there's talk that it may be Al-Azhar, one of the oldest universities in the world and Egypt's center of Islamic learning. Pro: Al-Azhar can hold 1,000 people. Con: What to do with all the shoes?

I doubt this will be the final choice, but I'll be interested how the media in both countries will respond if it is. In Egypt Al-Azhar is the center of state-sponsored Islam; Sheikh Tantawi is known as a mouthpiece of the government, always giving Muslim cover for Mubarak's policy decisions. Obama speaking there would be an endorsement of Mubarak, not the Islamists. But would that be understood in the U.S.? Or would it just be read as Barack HUSSEIN Obama speaking at a mosque?

O'Donnell seems to believe that torturing only works on wussies. He identifies himself as just such a person, and says Hannity is one, too. This is why Hannity thinks torture would work, O'Donnell explains: since it would work on him, he thinks it would work on everybody. Hardened warriors, however — be they in the American military or members of Al-Qaeda — are not susceptible to a little waterboarding, a little fingernail-pulling, the occasional afternoon spent being electrocuted. They are real men. And torture doesn't work on real men.

Merriment ensues, since this take on the situation casts Hannity as a wimp. In other words, he's kind of a girl.

Forgive me if I don't find being "too feminine to endure torture" as much of an insult. I mean we're not talking about a snake bite here, or the ability to keep running after you get that stitch in your side. We're talking about undergoing physical pain so horrific it can bring on a spontaneous heart attack in an otherwise healthy individual. Yes, military personnel do get some training in withstanding these techniques, but when it comes to pain at this level, stamina and commitment to one's cause don't mean much. And that's the thing: terrorist groups know this, which is why they do things like refer to each other by code names, and ensure that the chains of communication are so convoluted that the individuals most likely to be caught won't have any information to give.

(In the movies, of course, all the bad guys sit around a table and plan the whole operation together. That way when Kiefer Sutherland captures one of them he can conveniently shoot him in the knee and immediately he'll learn where the bomb is, who put it there, where that guy is now, the first middle and last names of everyone involved in the plot, and all the passwords to their computers.)

Outside of Hollywood it's not so tidy. The "ticking time bomb scenario" isn't unworkable because terrorists are immune to pain: it's unworkable because if you've only captured one guy by the time the bomb has started ticking, you're screwed. You won't get much useful information out of him, because he doesn't have much useful information to give. This is true even if he tells you absolutely everything he knows, which he probably will and then some.

And here we have the other problem with O'Donnell's take. Members of Al-Qaeda, in his imagination, are inhuman, almost literally: so inhuman they don't respond to pain. He tries to pass this off as a progressive argument — since it falls under the rubric of "therefore we shouldn't torture!" — but in doing so he's glossed over all the human rights implications of being a nation that okays torture, not to mention all of the foreign policy decisions that lead desperate people to turn to terrorism in the first place.

He also continues to cast this conflict in gendered terms, where torture is masculine, whether you're enduring it or dishing it out, and cracking under it is feminine and wimpy. Under that logic, if Sean Hannity decides that you know what? he'd rather not be waterboarded, it's not because he's a hypocrite: it's because he's a pussy. If he does go through with it, though, well by gosh buy that man a beer!

Everything about this is heartbreaking, but I was especially moved by the girl who gave a speech about the political situation and had to cover her face to hide her identity. She's only 12 or 13 but already fearing personal reprisals for speaking out in favor of something as basic as her right to go to middle school.

More about the video at alt.muslim

Mary McDonnell and Edward James Olmos appeared with two of the show's executive producers, four UN officials, and moderator Whoopi Goldberg at a panel to discuss human rights, religious conflict, terrorism, gender issues, and other moral conflicts and dilemmas addressed on Battlestar Galactica. The whole panel (about two hours) is available on the UN webcast archives (scroll down to 17 March 2009).

Later, McDonnell responded eloquently to a question about the imperatives of the military versus the rule of democracy and Roslin’s role in executing the fleet’s enemies. For a woman who had been perceived, early on, as a tentative former schoolteacher, President Roslin didn’t blink when it came to tossing a fractious Cylon into space. In fact, in time fans started to call her character “Madam Airlock.”

“She can talk about how she was haunted by the airlock,” Eick said. “But she’s also the one who made it a verb.”

At a time when countries like the U.S. are re-thinking the environmental cost of suburban living, Egypt is just beginning to build green spaces outside its largest city — and in the desert, the environmental toll is potentially even higher than in the U.S. and Europe. But urban areas in the U.S. and Europe don't face the level of overcrowding Cairo does, either. So it's a conflict.

I think people should be careful about talking about "the Israeli lobby" (or worse, "the Jewish lobby") as the sole cause of America's Middle East policy being what it is (see "Anti-semitism and U.S. Middle East policy" by Stephen Zunes, a Palestinian supporter, for more on that). Not that Cole is doing this — he writes on all sorts of aspects of this conflict — but I want to note it here because I don't want this link to be read in isolation and then perpetuate that line of thinking.

However, it is undeniable that the pro-Israel side of this issue is much more organized than the pro-Palestinian side, especially when it comes to doing sustained lobbying of U.S. Congress members. And I think Cole is right when he says this is more effective than street activism. Here, he lays out a model for organizational strategies that anti-occupation activists could apply to counter the weight of AIPAC. They are surprisingly… doable.

I've seen some gruesome pictures in the past few days. Bodies of children contorted in a fashion I didn't know was possible, even in death. I could post them, but you've seen them, too.

So instead I'll post some links questioning the way we in the U.S. traditionally talk about the Palestinian conflict. I don't know of any other country, including Israel itself, where the language used to talk about this issue is so consistently used to squash debate and cover Palestinian reality.

+ + +

Abu Aardvark asks "whether to define the current Israeli attack as against 'Gaza' or 'Hamas'":

The stakes are clear. If the attack is defined as against "Gaza", then what follows is solidarity with the Palestinians and demands to stop the killing. If the attack is defined as against "Hamas", then what follows is the division of Arab opinion along sharply polarized lines defined by their views towards the Islamist movement.

Juan Cole writes that we are entering the age of micro-wars. This is a long post that successfully backgrounds the current conflict. It also questions the assumption (really a rhetorical tool more than an actual assumption, even among those who deploy it) that Israel always acts defensively:

Israel's political tradition seeks expansion if possible; if not possible, it seeks a balance of power with its enemies. If that is not possible, it seeks to be held harmless from its avowed foes. If that is not possible, it is willing to wage total war to punish the enemy population until it accepts at least a cold peace. Where necessary, Israel is willing to give up territorial expansion to get the cold peace.

Adrian at OpenLeft talks about "the 'Arab rejectionist' dodge":

Defenders of Israel's policies often short-circuit any meaningful dialogue on the Arab-Israeli conflict by reducing the problem to the Arabs and their alleged "rejectionism," i.e. their refusal to accept Israel's right to exist. This argument conveniently removes Israel's actions from the realm of moral consideration because it implies that changes in Israeli policy will ultimately have no impact one way or another on the ongoing conflict.

In his Salon blog, Glenn Greenwald writes about the killing of civilians as a political objective (as opposed to unfortunate consequence) for both sides in this conflict, and how, in the U.S. particularly, this objective is treated as smart policy when the Israeli military engages in it but an act of insanity when "terrorists" do the same.

He also differentiates between American Jews whose cultural identification with Israel impacts their views on this conflict and neocons whose motives are far less noble. He is critical of both groups, but makes what I think is an important distinction between the two:

Still, there is a substantial difference between, on the one hand, basically well-intentioned people who are guilty of excessive emotional and cultural identification with one side of the dispute and, on the other, those who adopt the Goldfarb/Peretz psychopathic derangement of belittling rage over widespread civilian deaths as mere "whining" or even something to view as a strategic asset. The latter group is a subset of war supporters and evinces every defining attribute of the Terrorist.

Those who giddily support not just civilian deaths in Gaza but every actual and proposed attack on Arab/Muslim countries — from the war in Iraq to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon to the proposed attacks on Iran and Syria and even continued escalation in Afghanistan — are able to do so because they don't really see the Muslims they want to kill as being fully human.

In Haaretz, Yossi Sarid asks "If you (or I) were Palestinian."

Officially termed the Mexico City Policy, these restrictions mandate that no U.S. family planning assistance can be provided to foreign NGOs that use funding from any other source to: perform abortions in cases other than a threat to the woman’s life, rape or incest; provide counseling and referral for abortion; or lobby to make abortion legal or more available in their country.

Called the "gag" rule because it stifles free speech and public debate on abortion-related issues, the policy forces a cruel choice on foreign NGOs: accept U.S. assistance to provide essential health services – but with restrictions that may jeopardize the health of many patients – or reject the policy and lose vital U.S. funds, contraceptive supplies and technical assistance.

This is one of those cases where I get worked up when people say there are no differences between Republicans and Democrats. We can fight battles both epic and tedious here in the U.S. to make incremental change in reproductive rights within our borders, but in the stroke of a pen the president can make a decision that affects millions of women abroad, with no debate here at home or even much awareness of it.

This is not me defending the Democrats so much as it is me lamenting the disproportionate role the U.S. plays in world affairs. However, since that is the case (at least for now) it seems there should be less focus on the president's positions on things he can't control (i.e. stuff that's decided at the local level or in the other branches of government) and much, much more attention to his views on foreign policy. (Note also that there's more to "foreign policy" than "war." See above.)

First of all, as other people have amply demonstrated, Prop 8 was not lost by people of color, despite what Dan Savage and a whole lot of other people think.

Brown People Did Not Pass Prop. 8

Propositioning Privilege: The reality is that white people are not being blamed as a racial group for the loss because of the sense that queer=white and there is no racial investment that would benefit from an argument that pathologized whiteness as inherently homophobic in the way that white privilege benefits from pathologizing blackness this way. This is a great, comprehensive look at how both sides of the Prop 8 campaign were handled.

Racialicious roundtable on Proposition 8

More links at Alas, A Blog

Furthermore, if it weren't for people of color most of the gay marriage bans still would have passed and McCain would have won the election in a landslide.

Even acknowledging this, I don't think it excuses the way No-on-8 campaign was run. I don't live in California, so I can't really speak to this outside of what I've seen on the internet, but I do want to say a few things about white Left movements, including but not limited to white queer movements, and how they (try to, sort of) do alliances with people of color. This has been brewing for me for a while now; it's not a new problem and I know other people reading this have thought about many of these things so forgive me if it comes off as repetitious or preaching to the choir. I think it still needs to be addressed.

1. Think about how you use civil rights imagery. There are parallels there, and they should be drawn, but to compare the passing of Prop 8 with lynching and Jim Crow disrespects Black history. Even the Loving decision, which is the most obvious parallel (and one Mildred Loving herself endorsed) had a profoundly different history than the history of gays and lesbians. Angry Black Woman discusses the background on that decision and how it was frankly not a huge priority during the civil rights era: So I have to wonder why the No on 8 people chose to present this as a parallel of the African-American Civil Rights Movement. To my mind, this helped trivialize their desire to marry, particularly among older blacks who remember when being able to marry white people was the least of their worries.

I think for white people the relationship is clear: if it was wrong to discriminate against relationships on the basis of race, it should likewise be wrong to discriminate against relationships on the basis of gender. But sexual 'relationships' between races had been going on for generations; what made Loving historic for a lot of people was that it was finally talking about such relationships in the context of mutual consent and agency for both partners — as opposed to systemic sexual violence against women of color by white men and the lynching of Black men perceived to be pursuing white women. It wasn't so much "yay! we get to marry white people! this is the best day of our lives!" :p Which is related to:

2. Think about how you talk about "sex" and "freedom." White people tend to think of consent as an individual thing. Did she, singular, say yes? They're not usually thinking of the three or four hundred years in which white men raped slaves and live-in domestic workers, or the women and girls today who are caught up in the sex trafficking industry. The right not to have sex was a lot harder to win than the right to have it, and I think a lot of folks (myself included) are skeptical of feminist/queer movements when they treat history as if it's all "our sex lives used to be so repressed and limited but hurray now we're free!" Add to that the number of Black men who've been falsely accused of raping white women, and there's an additional layer of reluctance to sign up for a cause that makes more cops the answer to sexual violence and invests a lot of energy in saving white women from all manner of discomfort while having little to say about the imprisonment of Black men for the most petty of crimes. Reluctance especially when, again, white movements treat sexual violence solely as an individual problem (one man raping one woman) rather than a community problem (one race or nationality being granted total sexual agency under the law and another race or nationality just hoping and praying to stay the hell out of their way).

3. Think about how you talk about Black churches. For many white gays and lesbians, the church is a place of repression and silencing, and one of the first institutions they are ready to abandon when they come into adulthood. But the church has played a different role in black communities — Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and many many other civil rights leaders tied their work to religious tradition. Black churches have been a powerful source of progressive organizing in communities of color, as well as a source of emotional and financial support for people who are struggling. I'm not saying there isn't more work to be done there, and I'm not saying religion played no role in getting people to support Prop 8. But to speak of African-American religiosity as if it's the same thing as your white neighbor's homophobic Bible-thumpin' Leviticus-quoting Rapture-believing denim-jumper-wearing young-earth anti-science women-get-back-in-the-kitchen 700 Club brand of Christianity is to shit on the people who brought you school desegregation and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Black churches are potential allies, and indeed many religious leaders have already come out in favor of LGBT rights, but those alliances aren't going to get very far if white Leftists keep talking about them as if they are forces of institutionalized oppression when in reality their role in American history has been precisely the opposite.

4. Think about how you talk about your neighborhood. I'm not going to go into the whole history of gentrification except to note that it goes beyond where any one person decides to locate. It's about how you treat and speak about your community. Would the elderly want to live in your neighborhood? Not would they be welcome but would they actually want to? Would they have things to do? What about families with small children who are not part of your particular subculture or political community? Would you send your own kids to the local schools?

I know white Leftists and/or LGBT folks live all over the map and these issues aren't germane to everybody, but "building community" seems to be something we value and devote a lot of time to without thinking about the impact it has and the message it sends to people outside "our" (actually quite insular) community. I've seen this come up a LOT, not just around Prop 8 but in general when the possibility of POC/queer alliances comes up.

5. Think about how you talk about other people's neighborhoods. I saw a fair bit of No-on-8 people talking about their reluctance to canvass in "bad" areas. I am going to go out on a limb and guess these were pretty much all communities of color. As far as I can tell, the Yes-on-8 people weren't complaining about this. Now to some extent that's apples and oranges because queer and transgender people have different concerns about safety than straight people (even Mormons) do when they're walking around in unfamiliar territory, but those concerns apply in white neighborhoods as much or more so and I didn't hear anyone saying "I can't doorknock in the suburbs or they'll kill me." I know when I hear someone say they won't go into certain parts of the city, even someone else's city, I feel like a wall just went up between us — even if I'd previously seen this person as a friend or ally — because that's the kind of neighborhood I live in. And I'm white. So think about how that comes across. As others have said repeatedly in the past few days, the No campaign didn't ask for those votes, so it is disingenuous to express shock after the fact.

6. Queerness does not negate whiteness. Neither does communism, anarchism, or any other brand of radical politics. This one was hard for me when I was younger, because the force of what for the sake of brevity I'll call Mainstream Society^TM was so strong that I saw all people who were any brand of "other" as natural allies. To an extent, there's value in that world view. In 1991 I went to a large demonstration in Chicago that was organized by CISPES, ACT UP, and the anti-war movement; the point was to solidify connections between groups that might otherwise seem disparate and single issue, to reject divide-and-conquer strategies of the Right, and to make sure our activist work was attentive to the interrelatedness of different forms of oppression.

But "interrelatedness" != "same as," and at some point I had to confront how my work on Issue X didn't give me an automatic pass on Issues Y and Z. Nor did it undermine the institutionalized benefits I'd received from growing up in a white family in a country where race matters very deeply. Over time I also realized how what I thought of as my "alternative" status was actually alienating to many people of color: that in many ways my flagrant disregard of Mainstream Society^TM was the ultimate sign of white privilege. I could go around carrying a placard with my hair dyed three colors and clothes covered in safety pins, but if an African American woman my same age walked out of the house with so much as a rip on her sleeve or a scuff on her shoe she risked being pegged as a charity case and borderline illiterate. That was difficult for me to work out, because the way I presented myself wasn't just a fashion thing — it was a rejection of mainstream beauty standards for women and traditional notions of gender. Appearance and self-presentation were politicized for me. I'm not saying we should all go around in pantsuits and business casual and try to be as safe and non-threatening as possible when talking about politics (don't read me that way), nor am I saying there aren't people of color who are also concerned about how these issues intersect (don't read me that way either), but when I looked at this whole thing from the perspective of people who were already, inherently, considered suspect and outsiders, it made the issue much more complicated for me. I used to be all "get out there! mix shit up!" end of story. But when you can put on a suit and tie and put your daughter in her Girl Scout uniform and go to church to pray to Jesus and still lose your child in a directed attack because of who you are, it makes me a lot less critical of people who might be reserved about pushing the envelope, especially if they're expected to do it in solidarity with people who've never shown much solidarity with them. Which brings me to:

7. Acknowledge your debt. This goes back to #1 and #3 above. If you're going to present your issue (I'm thinking of Prop 8, but other stuff, too) as the outgrowth of the civil rights movement, then it seems smart to learn more about that movement and to get to know people who were involved in it. Civil rights weren't gifts from enlightened white people, nor were they just part of the natural progression of history. They were earned with blood. Don't be casual about that. Don't bring it up only in the context of how it relates to your issue(s). And if you are going to ask for people to support your issue on principle, not because it benefits them but because It's Just The Right Thing To Do, you might work harder to support their issues on principle, too. By "support" I don't mean "agree with it in my mind"; I mean get out there and ask where you can be of service. In the case of California, there were at least two ballot measures that directly affected minority communities. I saw very few white activists write about these, especially compared to the number of straight POC I saw writing about Prop 8. ladyjax writes more about this: When white people roll up on Black folks about being oppressors, there's some truth to it but that gets lost when people start to remember: 'Hmm, that rally for (immigration rights, education, housing, etc. etc.). I didn't see you there.' … Sometimes the fight isn't always about what you want but about reciprocation.

8. Stop assuming African-American support. Everything I'm saying here could fall under the umbrella of "don't take people of color for granted," but I wanted to say something specifically about what seems to be a common assumption — that African Americans, even more than other minorities and definitely more than white people, "should just understand" what gays and lesbians are going through "because it happened to them, too." First of all, as I (and many others) said above, the parallels between the two movements are not nearly as clear as they've been made out to be. Second, to make this an issue of understanding or the lack thereof, rather than resentment at being ignored and trivialized or pushed out of one's own neighborhood, isn't helpful. But most of all, it misses the mother of all points, which is that Prop 8, like most everything that sucks, is overwhelmingly about white money and white power. Even if they voted yes in higher percentages, African Americans are not more guilty than whites, who funded this thing and got it done. Black homophobia isn't especially galling because of their history in this country. White homophobia is especially galling because white conservatives have the resources and, my god, the energy to make defeating LGBT rights such a priority.

9. Stop assuming African-American NON-support. The flip side to the white liberal saying "there's no point in asking for African-American support because we know we already have it" is the white Leftist saying "there's no point in asking for African-American support because we know we'll never get it." Either because of beliefs about Black homophobia or (more charitably) beliefs about Black communities having more pressing priorities, it's still a reluctance to form alliances. Over and over again, at least in blogs, I've been seeing black and brown women saying "no one approached us" or "we weren't asked to help." These are women who voted no anyway (if they're Californian, or from one of the other states that had a ballot measure of this kind), but while doing so some have bitterly pointed out it's another sign that people of color are being treated as silent foot soldiers in a movement while white organizers take over the leadership.

10. Finally, there are queer people of color! I almost didn't include this because it seems too obvious to mention, but I don't want the fact that I am addressing a white audience right now to be taken as a sign that I'm ignoring queer POC or that I'm painting the queer movement as exclusively white. That's been another huge issue in this debate. (See Pam's House Blend post about the treatment of Black gay activists after Prop 8 passed, The N-bomb is dropped on black passersby at Prop 8 protests and ask yourself with friends like these….?) I have much more to say about this, especially as it relates to the treatment of Islam by gay and lesbian activists because that's where most of my attention goes anymore, but really it merits its own post.

What I will say is that I've read some excellent stuff lately (offline) about building alliances between queer communities and immigrants/people of color, and/or about addressing racism in queer organizing, and as much as I like it it still needles me that so much of it assumes an audience of white gays and lesbians, exclusively. Never straight people of color, and, well, the existence of LGBT people of color would ruin the whole argument so they're just left out altogether. The assumption seems to be that white people can be educated about race but queer POC come from backgrounds so hopelessly homophobic that their only choice is to try to assimilate into a white queer community (who will try to be "more sensitive" but will ultimately still control and define the community's agenda).

But when the argument is always framed that way — "I know y'all are good on gay and lesbian issues, but now let's talk about race" — well, just who are you talking to there? I did it myself above, without thinking about it, by linking to the CISPES web site (in case someone doesn't know what that is) but not bothering to link to ACT UP (because I assume anyone reading me has heard of that). That's what I'm talking about. So if you're trying to build alliances but are always assuming that your audience is already politicized around queer stuff but isn't politicized around race issues, you are implicitly communicating your exclusion of people for whom it works the other way around, or who have been prioritizing both things long before they ever stumbled across whatever you're on about at this moment. But again, a post in itself. This one's long enough.

The World Reacts – The New York Times

Reactions around the world (photos) – Huffington Post

US election: International reactions – BBC

Barack Obama is 'President of the world' – CNN

Pakistan 'Wary of Barack Obama' – SKY News

Suddenly, it may be cool to be an American again

Victory celebrations in Kenya, where Nov. 5 was declared a public holiday:

Obama's half-brother is carried through his village in Kenya:

At the elementary school Obama attended in Indonesia:

(I love how the other kids around him are going dude — chill. Because every classroom, everywhere in the world, always has that one, awesome, way-too-into-it kid.)

I care about the executive branch rather a lot. The main issues for me since 2001 have been civil liberties, the war(s), and the treatment of Arabs, Muslims, and immigrants here in the U.S. I put these things even above health care, abortion, education, queer issues, and the redistribution of wealth — not because I don't care about those things too, but because I think that democratic process, transparency in government, and a political culture favoring civil rights and human dignity are the bare minimum prerequisites to getting anything else done. This is the umbrella under which all other political issues fall, and the executive branch is where these things happen. Foreign policy in particular, as has been amply demonstrated these past seven years, is almost exclusively the domain of the president and his or her administration.

This is why I supported Obama over Edwards in the primary and even though he's disappointed me since then (e.g. FISA) I still believe he's the candidate most likely to speak for me, in part because of his Constitutional law background and in part because his international upbringing exposed him to governments that run on corruption and opacity and he has addressed this specifically in interviews, saying one of the reasons he "loves America" (always a softball question) is that you don't have to pay a bribe to open a business or a school (always a surprising answer). I think a lot of interviewers hear that and think whatever, weirdo because they never follow up on it, and yet he keeps saying it and it's kind of a big deal to me, that he's lived elsewhere and knows what happens when corruption permeates every pocket of society and he therefore gets why the rule of law is important. When I heard him speak in Iowa last winter he said, in answer to someone's question about the Bush administration's overreach, that one of his first priorities as president would be to go line-by-line over the changes that were made in the past two terms giving the executive branch too much power and to make sure those laws were changed. I haven't heard him raise this issue elsewhere so I don't know how committed he is to it, but he did say it and I hope We The People force him to do it.

So when I think about grassroots organizing, I'm not so much thinking about who's running for office at the local level or what dollars are being spent on which potholes; I'm thinking about changing the national mood to one more responsive to progressive issues. I want people who will push their politicians to do the right thing, and I want politicians who are responsive to that.

In January of 2007, someone asked me, "If you were to try to turn someone on to Obama, where would you start?" I didn't answer her then, but one of my first thoughts was this speech, from 2006. If you scroll to the end there's a bit about abortion that surprised me. A doctor in Chicago wrote to say he was considering voting for Obama, even though Obama was pro-choice, but would not do so as long as he was painting pro-lifers as "ideologues driven by perverse desires to inflict suffering on women." Obama considered this, thought it was a fair point, and changed the language on his web page — without changing his position on abortion. This, to me, felt like a significant change from the way Clintons did business. Rather than keeping the rhetoric and changing the policy, Obama kept the policy and changed the rhetoric.

Who cares, you ask? For the doctor in question, and I think for a lot of people on the independent center-right, especially those presumed to be Palin's constituency, there is no one issue that really moves them. (If there were, they'd have picked a side already.) And they are not nearly as committed (some would say vulnerable) to a right-wing Christian agenda as Democrats think they are. What they want is to be heard. They want to stop being ignored and invisible in the world they see on TV and the movies and in the speeches of those in power. It's not that they need abortion to be illegal and gay marriage to be outlawed; it's that they're terrified they'll wake up tomorrow and be living in an episode of Sex & the City. I mean hell, that terrifies me. But what Obama's "gift with words" — alternately celebrated and maligned — has brought to the table is the lullabye he is singing to people who are really afraid right now. Instead of moving immediately to the right at any whisper of opposition, he'll spell out why progressive policies aren't threatening. Which they aren't! At least if you're not a billionaire. In this sense it is NOT 1992 all over again, and I'm bored with people who have no other way to think about a potential Democratic presidency.

There's also his nerdy interest in data over personalities when it comes to choosing who advises him. Not all of that data is comforting (University of Chicago economists) but I have returned to this article several times since it was published in March because, even though its point seems to be the non-partisanship and non-ideological stance of an "Obama shop," what I take away from it is his willingness to take research seriously. Clinton, in contrast, was famous for agreeing with whoever was the last person to talk to him.

A couple weeks ago a friend posted this article from an Obama organizer, which also speaks to this shift away from old Democratic habits: There are great examples of this kind of organizing if you go back to the social movements of several decades ago. But the Obama campaign is the first in the Internet era to realize the dream of a disciplined, volunteer-driven, bottom-up-AND-top-down, distributed and massively scaleable organizing campaign. For anyone who knows how many times this has failed to happen, this is practically an apocryphal event.

And my friend asked what I think is the important question, can the Obama machine be mobilized for progressive/radical politics after the election? Some might find it cynical to doubt the momentum can be sustained — quit raining on the parade! — but what I find notable is that the question can be entertained in the first place. A new era of mobilizing around progressive politics… and it's to be found in the Democratic Party? What? Whether or not it comes to pass, the landscape has been permanently altered.

The trouble is, picking up litter or helping a sick neighbor or raising money to build a playground — these things are not what Obama's talking about when he says "community organizing." He's never properly defined what he IS talking about, though. In his memoir, Dreams From My Father, he admits that he, too, was confused about his job description when he first moved to Chicago and began doing this work. So it should be no surprise that others are unclear on it as well.

Aaron Schutz, one of the writers at Education Policy Blog, has two excellent posts that help define what community organizing is, and, importantly, what it isn't:

What is Community Organizing? What isn't Community Organizing?

How Do Community Organizers Think? (What is Organizing Part II)

He has more on the resources page of his web site.

The group is a Palestinian NGO that specializes in Fair Trade and "justice tourism", focusing in tours and pilgrimages that include critical examinations of the history, culture, and politics of the Holy Land. In so doing, they try to support the local community through the creation of economic opportunities and positive cultural exchange between guest and host, the protection of the environment, and political/historical education.

I've never been to Palestine, and the politics of tourism are part of the reason why. In college in Cairo I had a Palestinian friend whose girlfriend was American. I remember her going to Jerusalem for a week or two during one of the school breaks. My friend could not go with her. In fact he'd never been there, and probably still hasn't. He couldn't go to visit his grandfather's grave, while she, with her American passport, could come and go without incident. Even my Egyptian friends, who were less likely to be blocked outright at checkpoints, said the surveillance they'd be under wasn't worth whatever they'd get out of the trip. It just didn't occur to them to see Palestine as a tourist destination.

I'm still not sure how I feel about this. I have several American friends who've gone to the West Bank, and somewhat fewer to Gaza, on social justice trips. They usually went by invitation of Palestinian activist groups or individual Palestinian friends. They stayed in Palestinian homes, came back with notebooks packed full of information, and used the experience to educate Americans about the occupation. In some cases they'd set up exchanges with Palestinian schools and NGOs and had helped fund those organizations. These are all good things, things I support. But the politics of going in the first place rarely came up for debate, and that does bother me.

On the other hand, I say this as someone who has been to Germany many times, and never thought twice about it until two friends told me their mothers would not step foot in the country that had killed one's parents and tortured the other's father. It was a matter of principle.

But Germany is different, one could argue; it's taken active steps to come to grip with its past. Israel: not so much. It hasn't even come to grips with its present. Yet I also remember one friend criticizing a musician with progressive politics for touring in Israel. "There are some places you just don't play," he said. "Yes," another friend said, "but if you're going to make that argument, the first place you'd boycott would be the U.S." Touche.

So, I'm conflicted.

The antonym of "Arab" is:

a) decent
b) family man
c) citizen
d) all of the above.

If you, like John McCain, answered "d," pat yourself on the back. You've just earned yourself some praise from unexpected corners — including much of the liberal blogosphere — for finally reining in the vitriol of your most rabid supporters. In this case? By agreeing with a woman in your audience that the word "Arab" is a slur. She pins the word on Obama; McCain says that's just not nice.

What's notable here is that McCain, like everyone in his audience, knew immediately where she was going with this. He knew that to "respect" Obama in this case meant to defend him from the (supposedly heinous) charge of being Arab, and he did this not by saying "actually his father's family is Luo, from Kenya…" but by calling Obama a decent family man, a moniker he apparently believes no Arab could claim.

Ana Marie Cox of Wonkette, who was present at the event in question, reports that the woman, Gayle Quinnell, said "Arab terrorist," which would render McCain's comment more defensible. But in the video there is no indication that Quinnell said "terrorist." She just said "Arab." Some have wondered if the word "terrorist" was inaudible. This might be true, but Quinnell keeps speaking after she says the word "Arab," before McCain reclaims the mike.

I am guessing Cox simply misremembered the exchange: that the words "Arab" and "terrorist" are so thoroughly linked by now that to make the former an adjective of the latter has become second nature.

It's not. In Egypt all the American rhetoric about democracy comes with so many caveats and explanations of what's meant by the word "democracy" — explanations Egyptians hear and Americans don't — that no one sees it as 'America failing to live up to its promise' or anything so forgiving. The issue here isn't rhetoric without teeth: it's that no one has been promised democracy in the first place. They've specifically been told that the U.S. will not be promoting democracy if it threatens to come at the expense of stability. Meanwhile American foreign aid dollars are the only thing holding up Mubarak's regime.

This isn't true.

WHAT I WAS EXPECTING: People would be watching all the crap TV we export, including our crap news, including FOX. If someone spoke enough English, and cared enough, they could, in theory, watch all this crap American TV and come to the conclusion that the American people are either bombastic and stupid or decent and well-intentioned but either way they are separate from their government. Which is criminally insane.

WHAT I'VE FOUND INSTEAD: It's the other way around. The government looks smart, the people invisible (at best) or (at worst) in need of guidance from our overlords.

I was thrilled to get CNN International, since it's so much better than the regular CNN and in Boston we only get it for one hour a day. The problem is… it's too good. When Jesse Helms died there were no sappy and embarrassing obituaries, nor any glee from other corners. It was just reported. Here's who he is, he's dead now, moving on to unrest in Pakistan or child soldiers in West Africa. And the John Edwards affair? Only made the scroll on the bottom of the news. If I didn't have internet I would have missed it entirely. (I'm assuming they made more of it at home.) There's none of the joking about politicians, nothing about Bush's gaffes and failed policies. He does stuff and it's reported. Objectively and without context. Like he's a real politician, the kind other countries have.

I never thought I'd miss the underbelly of American media, but after being here for almost two months, watching only CNN and BBC and Al-Jazeera English, I've started seeing the U.S. in a different light. On television, our government looks scary-competent. It looks cold. And the American people — when they are featured at all, which is rare — look like cold and calculating minions of it. We look much more intentional than we really are. "Yes," we are saying to the world (unsmiling), "George Bush is our president. We like him, because he is powerful. We are more powerful than you."

One can, and I probably would, argue that this is closer to The Truth than the Jay Leno/Jon Stewart version of America, where George is a fuck-up who lies and bumbles, but not really Darth Vader, and the American people just kind of got stuck with him ha ha oh well.

Yet this cold version also misses the level and intensity of American opposition. I've gotten frustrated with German friends in the past who are critical of the U.S. government, particularly this administration, but obstinately refuse to acknowledge that I am too, probably way more than they are. But now I can kind of see it, because people who speak for me are not in power, and in this kind of news format, where it's Australia (60 seconds) –> France (30 seconds) –> South Africa (60 seconds) –> U.S. (30 seconds) –> Russia (60 seconds)….. there's no room at all for people like me. So why WOULD they think I exist? They watch the news, right, they're informed? And they don't see me. So my opposition looks like a defensive posture I'm adopting only because I'm under fire, in the moment, rather than the thing that drives me every day of my life.

It's making me re-think some of my reactions to Egyptian, and more broadly Middle Eastern, reactions to American policy. If you imagine an America with NO Left — not an ineffectual, underfunded, oppressed, or just generally embarrassing Left, the kind we complain about to each other, but literally NO Left, no anti-racist movement, no religions outside of God-told-me-to Crusader Christianity, no voices at all other than those of 5 or 6 politicians who are photographed disembarking from airplanes — I can see why it probably seems hopeless that anyone could ever deal with us. And maybe it really is! That's not my point. My point is that at home I feel American opposition and diversity. Here, I don't see it.

Virtual politics

A tool to mobilise?

"Foreign embassies follow up on these blogs and groups and report back to their countries," said Yassin. But most, if not all, of the bloggers' posts distort and misrepresent reality. "They send the wrong information about Egypt to the world," he claimed. Councilor Murad Hassan went further, insisting they deliberately manipulated facts, circulated fabricated pictures, and magnified individual incidents to mislead public opinion. "In addition, the kind of language they use to express their opinions is unsuitable and strange to our society," Hassan told Al-Ahram Weekly.

I said, before I even came here, that I was amazed how popular Facebook is in Egypt. Now that I'm here I've seen firsthand how common it is — even with people as old as me — to end conversations with "Are you on Facebook?" rather than "What's your phone number?" or "What's your e-mail?" I've started doing it myself.

I'm still not sure why it's so big. (One woman told me it was because "we're Arabs – we'll chat for hours with anybody about nothing." Ha.) But I think a real reason is that people are so mobile, especially with going back and forth to the Gulf. And Europe and elsewhere abroad, but especially to the Gulf, which is something members of all classes do. (Europe etc. is more of an upper-class thing.) On Facebook your information stays stable, even if your address and phone number change two or three times a year. And the 'groups' feature lends itself to organizing in a way that's less risky than it would be in Real Life.

This has been going on for several months now. It'll be interesting to see what comes of it.

ETA: rfmcdpei adds more links on this.

Today the bowab came upstairs with a top of mine that had fallen off the clothesline on my balcony. I thanked him profusely, he was very nice, and then said he wanted money. I thought that was strange, because people don't usually ASK to be tipped for small favors like that, but whatever so I gave him a few pounds.

He took it and I started to shut the door and then he called me back. No, he said, it's the first of the month and he wanted his monthly fee. "Adil has it," I told him. (Adil is his brother, the regular doorkeeper; this guy is filling in for a few weeks while Adil is in Aswan.) No, he repeats, this is the first of the month. I need to pay again. "Adil I pay two month," I tell him. No, that was only one month's fee. I pretend not to understand. He knows I'm lying and goes to get the landlord, who lives upstairs.

Seriously? I don't care. We're arguing over $10, which I'm more than happy to pay to a guy who really needs it, who is going to be the first person I scream for if I encounter an intruder (or, more likely, a gecko), and the guy who can potentially make my life really difficult if he decides he doesn't like me.* But when I first got this place I was told by others that the bowab fee I was being quoted was outrageous, more than twice what they normally charge, and that my landlords were probably trying to scam me by making me pay their fee, too. I was told I absolutely under no circumstances should pay this sum again in August, because if I do the landlords will think I'm a gullible foreigner and charge me more for furniture they'll claim I damaged when I move out, or make me overpay the electricity bill.

They have a point. Yesterday the garbage guy came and asked me for the trash fee, which he claimed was twenty pounds. But then my neighbor across the hall opened his door and he told him it was five pounds. "Eh?!" I said. "He five pounds, me twenty?" Okay, he said, he'd charge me five, too. Since I mentioned it. And because that IS the going fee I wanted to shriek, but I let it go, because I wasn't as mad as I was stunned that I'd actually successfully bargained for something.

So I feel the need to do this with the bowab and the landlord, too, at least for the sake of appearances. I'm not worried about losing ten dollars, or honestly even being overcharged for the electricity bill, which is pretty cheap here, too, but I AM worried about being one of those horrible Americans who just goes around dripping cash everywhere without arguing, not realizing that that can be just as offensive as failing to tip at all. When every interaction is loaded with the expectation of future favors being granted or rescinded, a dollar is never just a dollar. You overpay this guy now, it means he owes you later. Do that too much and you're building up a mountain of obligations the other person can never hope to reciprocate, thereby solidifying your dominance over him. Some people thrive on that dynamic, and do it on purpose, making sure they're never the one who owes, only the one who's owed. There's a fine line there between "noble and generous" and "asshole." Since I never know where that line is, these situations always stress me out.

Another example: a few days ago I got a Coke from the kiosk. I took it out of the cooler, paid for it, drank it, and returned the bottle. I've done this hundreds of times and never thought twice about it. This time, the friend I was with discreetly told me what I've been doing is mildly offensive. I should drink it first, then return the bottle, and then pay for it, and that I should hand over the money in a low-key way. I had been treating this as An Official Financial Transaction, you-give-me-soda = I-give-you-cash, but culturally I should have been pretending that they were happy to host me and that the money I give them is just sort of a tip or an expression of appreciation; an afterthought. To be so obvious about paying for something made me seem rude and unappreciative of their hospitality. That would never in a million years have occurred to me if someone hadn't pointed it out. I can see it now, but before it would have seemed like "here, I'm just helping myself to your stuff, and I'll pay you on my own terms, servant."

I met a guy the other day originally from Guatemala but now living in L.A. who finally got his citizenship and was celebrating his right to leave the country by traveling around the world. He wanted to know how much a cab from the airport was. I told him twenty pounds. He said okay, I got screwed. I said yeah but I don't think it's malevolent? It's like there's a sliding scale operating all over the country; you're charged by what it's assumed you can afford. Tourism is a major industry and we're how a lot of people earn their living. He agreed with this.

But that only works if you're here for a couple weeks, if it's understood you don't know A from B, and if there's no expectation of an ongoing relationship. What confuses me more is the shopkeeper around the corner who saw me admiring some skirts in his window the other night. He invited me to have tea with him and his nephews. Do I politely refuse, not wanting to put him out? Or do I politely accept, not wanting to turn down his hospitality? Am I _expected_ to buy something afterwards, or does he merely hope I will?

We start to chat and it turns out he's really nice, a lovely older man who speaks English with a slight British accent. I tell him my father's coming in two weeks and he wants to take us to see whirling dervishes and the mosque near the Khan, even invites us to his house in Alexandria. If I take him up on this, which I'd actually like to do, how do I go about paying him? To say how much do you charge? would be unthinkable; we're having tea; we're pretending we're friends. On the other hand I would rather pay him directly than to waste half an afternoon being pressured to buy something from his friend of a friend who will slyly give him a kickback from my purchase while he carries on with the charade that he's doing this out of pure generosity. It feels cheap and cynical to worry about that, but stupid and naive not to.

So how to address it? When X's sister paid the driver she hired for the day she made me get out of the car before she did so because the conversation was so awkward she didn't want to embarrass him any more than was strictly necessary, or maybe she was worried I'd say something stupid. Neither of them wanted to admit our pleasant day driving around town had, at root, been a matter of us hiring him, that our whole facade of a relationship was in fact marked by hierarchy.

Americans don't care. They'll say right out loud HOW MUCH DOES THAT COST? like they can buy their way into anyone's good graces. What's troubling is that in a third world economy like this one, they often can. But that doesn't mean anyone's in love with that dynamic.

In the end I paid the bowab. Of course. And now I'm all worried anyway that I argued with him in the first place. Do I look miserly? Ungrateful? I'm especially embarrassed that I gave him a few pounds for bringing my top upstairs. I honestly thought that's what he wanted, but now I know I look like I was shitting on his good deed by giving him this tiny amount of money for it, which said both "I'm paying off my obligation to you" and "that obligation is worth almost nothing to me, or I would have given you more."

I could, no lie, spend my entire summer torturing myself over things like this.

* This article's tone is offensive. The information is basically true, though. Kitty was deported once because her bowab fed someone in power information about the number of men she was entertaining in her apartment.

My instructor said it was the strongest and longest she'd felt since 1992. The earthquake of 1992 is to Cairo as Katrina is to New Orleans in a lot of ways — it was a moment when the government committed epic fail. Hundreds of people were killed while the administration basically stood around and said, "Gee, that's unfortunate." The Muslim Brotherhood stepped in, providing tents and food and water for people in poor neighborhoods, and the moment became a kind of catalyst or rallying point for the Islamist movement for the next five years or so, the closest Egypt's come to having a revolution since Mubarak's been in power.

Last night I went to the restaurant/pub around the corner and spent a couple hours talking to two journalists, both in their twenties, working for the foreign press. One of them said he wakes up every day and wonders how this city works at all.

The movie was Hassan and Markus, with Omar Sharif and Adel Imam. Omar Sharif played a Muslim cleric who denounced Islamism, had his house firebomed, and was put into some kind of witness protection program where he was given a Christian identity. Adel Imam played a Christian who denounced pro-Christian violence, had his car blown up, and was put into the same program, posing as a Muslim. They unwittingly move into apartments across the hall from each other and their families become friends, each thinking they are "secretly" the same religion as the other. Wacky hijinks ensue.

Best line: After a building is blown up in a terrorist attack, some government PR guy trying to do damage control has a meeting with the press and says, "We are happy to report 75 were killed, all of them Egyptians! Not a single foreigner was harmed in this event!" The audience was rolling.

I really liked it and thought it was funny, but it was definitely a "message" film, with the Muslim (but really Christian) saving the lives of the wife and daughter of the Christian (but really Muslim) at the end, after their house is set on fire, and ending with both families bravely walking arm-in-arm through a riot scene between Muslims and Christians who are all screaming "Allahu akbar!" and "We will die for the cross!" and beating each other with sticks.

Not that I'm intolerant of "message" films. I was raised on afterschool specials, after all. But this one had a too-tight equation of the Muslim and Christian experience in Egypt, which I think is apples and oranges in a lot of ways. Coptic Christians are facing persecution for their religion, i.e. as minorities. Muslims' complaints against the government are broader, and more political than religious, though they take an Islamist form and use Islamist rhetoric. To go from one scene of the Muslim trying to muddle through a Christian prayer to another of the Christian trying to muddle through a Muslim prayer, and so on over and over, ignores the different social and economic position of both groups, in Egypt and internationally, reducing everything to a matter of faith and fanaticism, full stop. Maybe there was more I was missing because my Arabic is so bad and it wasn't subtitled, but I don't think so.

Although, as I said, I did like it. Especially because I like Adel Imam.

Lila Abu-Lughod has some good articles on the way Egypt, through its government-controlled media (which includes the censorship of film), has controlled the portrayal of Islam and Islamists. She's worth looking up if you have access to a university library.

Housing in Egypt isn't, typically, something you rent, or take out a mortgage on. You either have an apartment or you don't. If you don't, you live with your parents or your in-laws. If you do, you either bought it outright, or you are living in someone else's apartment but with rent control your payments are negligible. X's family, for example, pays 15 pounds a month (about $3), which was the going rate for a three-bedroom under Sadat. Legally they can't be kicked out for three generations.

These laws might be changing, I'm told, but in the meantime they are the reason many apartments sit empty, or are only rented to foreigners. As an American, I have no legal right to stay in a rented apartment for generations, and my landlord can charge whatever s/he likes. I had a landlord once who flipped. out. when she realized I was married to an Egyptian; she'd rented to me alone and was convinced, once she learned of his existence, that we were going to park there until our grandchildren grew up. She would show up every day and make our lives miserable until we finally moved out.

This situation results in a couple things. One is that it's not the norm to pay thirty or forty percent of your income in housing every month, the way Americans do. This sounds good, but it makes people very sensitive to food prices, since salaries are low and that's where most of a lower-class family's income goes. In the U.S. if you lose your job or otherwise have financial problems you can often downscale your housing, and it will make a real difference in what you have left to take home. Here, that's not really an option. (I realize I'm glossing over what "downscaling" might involve for American families who were never living in a mansion in the first place, but you see what I mean by this.)

The other issue is that there is a housing shortage, in spite of so many apartments sitting empty. Because no one rents temporarily, and because affordable permanent housing is hard to find, and because most couples expect to have their own apartment when they get married, and because dating is mostly taboo, you end up with a lot of young, idle men still living with their parents into their 30′s, unable to get married or even have a serious long-term romantic relationship, working at jobs far below their skillset and unable to save any money. This is a huge social problem with no good solution. Changing the rent control laws would throw thousands, maybe millions, of people out of their homes. But the current situation is unsustainable, too, since Egypt's population is young.

I had one day to find an apartment and was really stressed out about this, since it's always been a headache at home. Here, though, I found there were tons of available flats, that is, tons available to me, a foreigner (see above). Some of the prices, though, were insane. There were landlords asking over ten thousand dollars a month. I didn't understand how this was even possible (it's Cairo, right, not Manhattan), but I was told that it was summer, and families from the Arab Gulf come here on vacation and drive up all the prices.

My sister-in-law, however, had unbelievable stamina. She spent ten hours with me, in near-hundred-degree heat, going from flat to flat and haggling in Arabic with all the simsars. Most of the places, including the one I ended up with, were bigger than what I needed, but in Egypt it's not common to live alone, so finding a studio or one-bedroom is rare. I also knew I didn't want a share, which I could have gotten through my school, because K will be coming next month. I also wanted to live in an expat area, again because K will be coming, and not try to be creative and live in someplace like Imbaba again (which would be impossible anyway, as a foreign woman without a husband). We looked at several that were very old and not kept up well, which I was willing to take if necessary, but when we saw this one the contrast was so great that I knew I wanted it. At first I couldn't afford it, but after aforementioned haggling I could. I think they were willing to go lower because it's only a two-month lease. It is extremely clean — certainly cleaner than my apartment in Boston — and most of the furniture is new. The landlords are a young couple who live upstairs. School is a five-minute commute by taxi.

I'm very happy with this. And very relieved. I had warned K. beforehand of a mile-long list of things she'd have to be prepared to put up with, like having minimal hot water and having to do our laundry in the sink, which isn't so bad but can seem worse when you're fourteen and it wasn't your idea to come here anyway. But things have been fine, better than I could have hoped for or expected.

An Egyptian scratched Aladdin's lamp and a genie emerged, offering him a wish.

"I wish for a bridge to the United States," the Egyptian said.

"Hmm," the genie said. "That's much too difficult. Can you wish for something else?"

"Okay," the Egyptian said. "Then I wish for Hosni Mubarak to be out of power."

"Hmm," the genie said. "Would you like the bridge to be one lane, or two?"

======

2.

Mubarak is sitting with [presidential chief of staff] Zakaria Azmi and asks him, "Who is a better leader, me or Gamal Abdl-Nasser?"

"Well, you," Azmi says. "Nasser feared the Russians."

"Good," Mubarak says. "Then who is a better leader, me or Anwar Sadat?"

"Well, you," Azmi says. "Sadat feared the Americans."

"Good," Mubarak says. "Then who is a better leader, me or Omar ibn al-Khattab?"

"Well, you," Azmi says. "Omar feared God."

One on the presentation of the Iraq situation prior to the war, from the founder of FAIR:

In the fall of 2002, week after week, I argued vigorously against invading Iraq in debates televised on MSNBC. I used every possible argument that might sway mainstream viewers — no real threat, cost, instability. But as the war neared, my debates were terminated.

In my 2006 book Cable News Confidential, I explained why I lost my airtime:

There was no room for me after MSNBC launched Countdown: Iraq — a daily one-hour show that seemed more keen on glamorizing a potential war than scrutinizing or debating it. Countdown: Iraq featured retired colonels and generals, sometimes resembling boys with war toys as they used props, maps and glitzy graphics to spin invasion scenarios. They reminded me of pumped-up ex-football players doing pre-game analysis and diagramming plays. It was excruciating to be sidelined at MSNBC, watching so many non-debates in which myth and misinformation were served up unchallenged.

It was bad enough to be silenced. Much worse to see that these ex-generals — many working for military corporations — were never in debates, nor asked a tough question by an anchor. (I wasn’t allowed on MSNBC unless balanced by at least one truculent right-winger.)

Except for the brazenness and scope of the Pentagon spin program, I wasn’t shocked by the recent New York Times report exposing how the Pentagon junketed and coached the retired military brass into being “message-force multipliers” and “surrogates” for Donald Rumsfeld’s lethal propaganda.

The biggest villain here is not Rumsfeld or the Pentagon. It’s the TV networks. In the land of the First Amendment, it was their choice to shut down debate and journalism….

What makes me really angry? Is that this article is followed by comment after comment saying versions of "I don't watch TV," "who watches cable news?" "who believes this stuff in the first place?" "we all know Corporate Media lies," on and on.

Hurray, you don't watch television. HOW FANTASTIC FOR YOU. I appreciate non-participation as one strategy — will even call it the best strategy — against the way the Big Media^TM machine is currently constructed, but that yawn-and-dismiss tactic is INSUFFICIENT. Not when millions of other people DO watch television, DO get the majority of their international news from cable television, and DO use that information to vote and otherwise influence political events. I don't have any great answers here myself; it's not like I run something larger than the Pentagon and can combat this kind of thing in my spare time. But this guy is making some excellent points, if not strictly new ones, and I would appreciate having many more discussions about the issue without seeing them consistently bogged down in "you watch Hardball? what's wrong with you?" discussion-closers.

Sheesh.

Another one, this one about Debbie Almontaser, the Yemeni-American woman who was forced to resign as the principal of NYC's first Arabic bilingual high school. It's long-ish, but worth reading, especially pages 4 and 5, for another example of the oh-so-helpful role media (this time local media) play in defining political issues. Even I — who had been following this case, and wrote about it elsewhere last summer — was under the impression that she was fired because she was wearing an "intifada" t-shirt. While I personally don't have any problems with that, this article says she wasn't even doing that much: she was on the board of an organization that had an office that was sometimes used by a group of young women who were selling an "intifada" t-shirt:

Critics of the Madrassa Coalition say its tactics are typical of campaigns singling out Muslims: They lean heavily on guilt by association. The nuances of the claims against Ms. Almontaser were lost as the controversy lit up the blogosphere, said Chip Berlet, a senior analyst at Political Research Associates, a liberal organization outside Boston that studies the political right. One Web site, MilitantIslamMonitor.org, displayed photographs of Ms. Almontaser wearing her hijab in different styles, suggesting that she had undergone a public relations makeover to “disguise” her “Islamist agenda.”

But no worries. "She's certainly not a terrorist" –Mayor Bloomberg.

With the huge, blinding, blinking-lights-in-neon caveat that I Am Not An Islamic Scholar, and that I welcome comments from those who are, I need to rant about this because the whole idea of "reinterpreting" the hadith from a modern standpoint just doesn't make a lot of sense if you know how the hadith works. This is NOT because everything in Islam is set in stone and there can be only one interpretation and Muslims are conservative fanatics who believe a seventh-century code is the only proper guide to life in the modern era and therefore cannot bear the idea of new readings on old problems — it's because the hadith is already considered potentially unstable. But there is an established way of dealing with this. All Muslims know that, hence the collective "huh?" at this becoming such a big story in the West over the last few days.

To make the first of what I'm sure will be a series of scandalous simplifications, a hadith can be compared to an ancient game of telephone. Unlike the Qur'an, which was considered divine and memorized word-for-word, hadiths were stories told about (not by) Muhammad and were intended to complement (not replace) the Qur'an. Some of these were told by multiple people, though wording and details vary from person to person. Taken collectively, the hadith describes the traditions and sayings of Muhammad (the sunnah), which is the second-highest source of fiqh, or Islamic jurisprudence, after the Qur'an.

Of course, like any game of telephone, there is danger in a story becoming corrupted as it goes through a chain of narrators. Allowing for this, each hadith is verified individually according to several factors, such as the character of the original narrator and the reliability of his or her memory, whether or not the chain of narration is unbroken, the number of narrators telling the same story, and so on. What you get, in the end, is a collection of thousands of hadiths with varying degrees of reliability. It is perfectly possible to have a hadith told by one unstable guy whom no one liked who had an ulterior motive and no one to back up his story, a story which doesn't even make sense anyway because no one believes Muhammad would really have done that thing this guy claims he did. Right? So that hadith would still be part of the conversation around Islamic law, but it would be classified as a fabrication or otherwise unsupportable by a variety of methods used to validate individual hadiths. In casual conversation these are usually referred to as "weak" hadiths (although the word for weak, da'if, has a specific meaning in this context).

By the same token, you can have a very "strong" hadith, let's say one told by twenty different companions of the prophet who were all noble servants of God and had no motive to lie, telling a story that seems consistent with the Qur'an, followed up by an unbroken chain of narration — and still argue about the applicability of that hadith to modern circumstances. For cases like this there are a number of "lower" sources of Islamic interpretation,* such as reasoning by analogy, decision by consensus, and, at the lowest level, the acceptance of default cultural practice when it does not conflict with any of the above.

This process happens all the time. It is an assumed part of 'official' Islamic jurisprudence, as well as a common conversation that goes on informally among Muslims on a dead regular basis. This is a good example, or this debate about the hijab, or this post regarding Islam's association with misogyny.

So when the BBC article says that the Turkish Department of Religious Affairs claims "that a significant number of the [hadiths] were never uttered by Muhammad", that's a serious case of non-news. Yet the tone of the article, and the tone of discussion around it, implies that this is a shocking new development in Islam, one that only a secular state like Turkey would have the balls to initiate and the kind of thing we could only see in our present world climate, now that Islam has been called on the carpet and ordered to modernize.

Okay, you say, so acknowledging the (sometimes) problematic sourcing of (some) hadiths is old hat, but what about the "strong" hadiths perceived to be incompatible with modernity? Isn't Turkey so very brazen and forward-thinking to go there, too? From the article:

Prof Mehmet Gormez, a senior official in the Department of Religious Affairs and an expert on the Hadith, gives a telling example.

"There are some messages that ban women from travelling for three days or more without their husband's permission and they are genuine.

"But this isn't a religious ban. It came about because in the Prophet's time it simply wasn't safe for a woman to travel alone like that. But as time has passed, people have made permanent what was only supposed to be a temporary ban for safety reasons."

The project justifies such bold interference in the 1,400-year-old content of the Hadith by rigorous academic research.

Prof Gormez points out that in another speech, the Prophet said "he longed for the day when a woman might travel long distances alone".

So, he argues, it is clear what the Prophet's goal was.

Fine… but still not new. Feminists in Tunisia, for example, successfully achieved a ban on polygamy by arguing that it was permissible in the seventh century as a means of protection for widows and orphans during wartime, but that monogamy was clearly the Qur'anic ideal. This law, passed several decades ago, would have been even more controversial than what Turkey is doing now because these women were arguing about the Qur'an, not the hadith, and the Qur'an is considered the literal word of God.

Likewise, we hear of women trained in this "new" thinking going to rural parts of Turkey to explain that honor killings are not Islamic:

One of the women, Hulya Koc, looked out over a sea of headscarves at a town meeting in central Turkey and told the women of the equality, justice and human rights guaranteed by an accurate interpretation of the Koran – one guided and confirmed by the revised Hadith.

She says that, at the moment, Islam is being widely used to justify the violent suppression of women.

"There are honour killings," she explains.

"We hear that some women are being killed when they marry the wrong person or run away with someone they love.

"There's also violence against women within families, including sexual harassment by uncles and others. This does not exist in Islam… we have to explain that to them."

Yet another noble effort. Yet again, nothing new. There are so many examples of this I'm not going to list them here; suffice it to say that sending educated women into rural provinces to explain "true" Islam to illiterate peasant women is a well-established tradition in the Middle East and Central Asia, one that goes back at least 100 years, to the beginning of the feminist movement, and arguably much longer if we widen the discussion to include the historic role of Islamic schools in the teaching of literacy. My daughter's great-aunt, for example, born in 1920, got her first job as a teacher driving throughout Saudi Arabia, teaching girls in village schools. This was during a time of great upheaval, when the role of educating women was hotly contested. When this right was defended it was done so via the argument that women should learn "proper Islam" in place of "ignorant cultural practices." As evidenced by the Turkish case, elements of that debate continue today, on remarkably similar terms. Whether or not you find that position sufficiently radical to result in real change for women, at least situate it historically and acknowledge that this is not an example of bold new thinking.

Okay, you say, so it's not "new." Whatever. It's still good, right? This idea that Islam is subject to interpretation? Isn't it exciting to see people take up a project like this, in the face of certain fossilized versions of religion?

My problem here is that the perception of "newness" IS the story. It conforms to the view that Muslims occupy an earlier point on the progress timeline, and must be ripped, by force if necessary, into the modern era. (The Guardian article on this subject is called "Turkey strives for 21st century form of Islam" — in case we forgot that most OTHER Muslims are of the Dark Ages variety.) Sure, we may hate military intervention, but how else to foster change in a region where (we erroneously believe) people are still adhering to a form of religion unchanged and unquestioned for 1,400 years? That Muslims might — finally! for once! — be taking on this task through their own initiative is exciting only in the sense that we privately congratulate ourselves for having pushed them into it. When they stand up, we'll stand down. And so on.

The Guardian article makes this connection explicit:

The exercise in reforming Islamic jurisprudence, sponsored by the modernising and mildly Islamic government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, is being seen as an iconoclastic campaign to establish a 21st century form of Islam, fusing Muslim beliefs and tradition with European and western philosophical methods and principles.

The result, say experts following the ambitious experiment, could be to diminish Muslim discrimination against women, banish some of the brutal penalties associated with Islamic law, such as stoning and amputation, and redefine Islam as a modern, dynamic force in the large country that pivots between east and west, leaning into the Middle East while aspiring to join the European Union.

"Muslim beliefs and tradition" are balanced against "European and western philosophical methods and principles." They get to claim "stoning and amputation"; we get to claim "modern" and "dynamic." To drive this point even further into the ground, both articles rely on the tired trope of this leading to the possibility of "an Islamic reformation": an ahistorical idea rooted in the notion that Islam has remained stagnant.

In a related vein, the excitement here betrays a belief that extreme forms of Islamic conservatism begin with overly literal readings of Islamic texts. I've found this belief to be very popular with people who know a lot about, and are disgusted by, Christian fundamentalism. Islamic fundamentalism, they extrapolate, must be similar, only like using the Muslim Bible or whatever instead. I bet they hate science and abortion, too! In addition to ignoring some major theological reasons for this analogy not holding up, it's a framework that ignores the role of political circumstances, particularly colonialism, in shaping Islam-as-political-project. That's a separate and much longer discussion, but I'm noting it because I think, despite the fact that the word "terrorism" is never used, the read-between-the-lines hope being expressed here is that if Muslims only KNEW they had good, solid Islamic alternatives to Waging War On The Infidels, they would pack up and go home.

This is part of why the word "revised" is so problematic in this context. Read this sentence again:

One of the women, Hulya Koc, looked out over a sea of headscarves at a town meeting in central Turkey and told the women of the equality, justice and human rights guaranteed by an accurate interpretation of the Koran – one guided and confirmed by the revised Hadith.

There is no need to develop "revised Hadith" to make this point, since honor killings have never been an accepted part of Islamic practice. To note this is not to criticize the Turkish project itself, but to critique, again, its portrayal as daring innovation, because if anything such a portrayal lends credibility to the idea that actually honor killings ARE part of "real," "authentic" Islam. Not only is this false, but it is exactly the opposite of the project's intent. The implication is that, until last Tuesday, Muslims spent over a thousand years laboring under a medieval religious tradition; the only question now is whether or not they will accept "revisions" undertaken by a secular country like Turkey.

Which is an interesting subject itself. Had it not been for this rush of Western interest, I'd be optimistic. Turkey is secular, but its recent election was won by a (slightly) more conservative pro-Islamic party, and whatever the country's modern politics, it still retains an association with the Ottoman Empire, which would have been the proper site for a major Islamic project such as this one. More problematic is that it is being undertaken by a government agency, and government-sponsored mouthpieces of religion (an unfamiliar concept in the U.S., but popular abroad, not only in Muslim countries) are prone to issuing verdicts that are inevitably taken with a grain of salt. Still, the aim of this project sounds like something akin to Google — not the creation of new content, but the organization of old. Although this is being described as an attempt to overwrite all previous forms of Islam, I think, among Muslims, it would have been taken for what it was: an unusually ambitious but ultimately common and therefore familiar attempt to apply Islamic jurisprudence to modern circumstances. I have no particular problem with that, so long as it is understood to be part of a much larger discourse (and not, say, a state-sanctioned Wahhabist-style attempt to render all other readings moot).

Now, however, Turkey has been put on the defensive. This week, Mehmet Görmez, the director of the project, issued a statement decrying the BBC article, saying the Directorate of Religious Affairs is going so far as "to take the appropriate legal measures for redress" because the project was so inaccurately portrayed:

"Our project is not aimed at effecting a radical renewal of the religion, as is claimed by the BBC. Our objective is to help our citizens attain a better understanding of the hadith. Though I underlined several times during our interview with a BBC reporter that our project cannot be considered a reformation of Islam, he distorted the facts, saying Turkey is preparing to publish a document that represents a revolutionary reinterpretation of Islam — and a controversial and radical modernization of the religion." …

A fresh look at the hadith collections — the gathering of which began some 200 years after the death of the Prophet Mohammed — and how they are utilized and interpreted within the framework of Islamic jurisprudence, while sure to generate a degree of criticism and controversy, is a far cry from attempting to change, in effect, some of Islam's most important historical records…

"I had an interview with BBC reporter Robert Pigott around two months ago about the project. I underscored during our interview that it cannot be termed a revolutionary reinterpretation of Islam. But, his article read 'the very theology of Islam is being reinterpreted in order to effect a radical renewal of the religion.' This does not reflect the truth."

If this denunciation speaks louder than the original misreporting, the project may still find an audience. If not, I'm guessing it'll be tossed in the pot along with other ideas assumed to be Western-tainted pseudo-Islam, inciting not "revolution" or "reformation," but reactionary backlash and a further retreat into religious conservatism.

* This process is Sunni — Shi'a practices vary.

Thursday morning (the 27th) my sister and I were leaving a gas station when I glanced at the newspaper rack and saw The Waterloo Courier's headline that Benazir Bhutto had been assassinated. I reacted the way you do when you hear something big, with what!'s and oh-my-god!'s, and then went searching through the rest of the rack to see if it was in any of the bigger papers, like The New York Times. It wasn't.

Now here is the thing. I honestly did not know if 1) it wasn't in any of the other papers because the news was so fresh that they hadn't gotten the story by the time they went to press, 2) if it was in the other papers but not considered enough of a story to make the front page, 3) if it had happened several days earlier and was old news by now, and I just hadn't heard it because I hadn't been following things, or 4) if it was even true.

Of course #1 did turn out to be right. The story broke, hard, within the hour, and then it was on every TV station, every radio station, my parents were talking about it, half my friends list posted about it, and my husband texted me the news on my phone.

But I thought about my reaction later, and realized what a crap shoot it's become, trying to predict what news will actually make it out of the apparent black hole that is the quote-unquote Muslim world. This goes for all international news, really, but I'm speaking about Muslim countries because so many Muslims complain about the way they're portrayed in the Western press, and I think this is often interpreted as a complaint, solely, about being portrayed negatively. Which is also a problem. But I think the larger issue is that, for all the news that we get in this country about Islam, the Middle East, and to a lesser extent South Asia, so much of it is the same five or six stories, re-hashed, continually, with American actors and American perspectives always, always, unrelentingly at the center. In retrospect it seems ludicrous that I could have thought Bhutto's assassination might be a page 16 blurb in the obits section, but then in so many other cases that's exactly how things have worked.

While I'm here and on the subject: HijabMan's sister and brother-in-law are in Pakistan right now and have been posting dispatches and analysis.

(My husband: "Highly regrettable! That's one step under 'not helpful'! You know they're really pissed when they call something 'not helpful.'")

elephantkitty = an American couple doing research in Lahore, and they've been writing about the situation. They posted this very readable background on the recent history of Pakistan, plus other interesting stuff, like The L-Word's function in international diplomacy. Go read.

Most interesting, to me, were the interviews with Sabrina Harman, the other female (besides Lynndie England) who did jail time over this, and the background she provides for the specific pictures that include her. She said she's always taken photos, of everything, her whole life. She said she always smiles for pictures, knee-jerk reaction, it's how she is. She said they got the thumbs-up sign from Iraqi kids, that it was habit to do that for each other, especially for the camera. And she said the picture of her next to a corpse was a man she'd been told had had a heart attack in the shower, and fallen. She had no idea he'd been murdered — "it was just a body." She's not excusing herself so much as explaining herself, and listening to her you can see how, from her perspective — not being on the other side of the camera, not seeing what we see — she probably really didn't understand the full gravity of what adding those four factors together would produce, namely:

Not that she was completely ignorant of it, not that she risked life and limb to stop what she was aware of and what she did understand — but the Milgram footage is relevant.

Overall they did a good job showing how impossible it is to view Abu Ghraib as "Animal House on the night shift". They traced the origins of specific torture acts and stress positions to Guantanamo and the Brazilian military ("and Israel!" I yelled at the TV — but it's not just those three; torture's been considered a science for hundreds of years, and the photos of Abu Ghraib prove _somebody_, somewhere, knew what they were doing).

My only complaint was that they stopped with Rumsfeld and the Geneva Conventions, making this into a conversation about torture, full stop, rather than a conversation about occupation in general. Assumption being that if we'd just had more controls in place, a better chain of command, better translators, better intelligence, better facilities, more security around the prison, more training for the soldiers, more soldiers period, or whatever… THEN this could have been a well-oiled machine, cue flowers-and-candy scenario.

But support for war was support for THIS, straight A to B; this is what occupation looks like in practice. If it hadn't been Abu Ghraib, it would have been something else. The folks in charge seem to be okay with that, which I find appalling, but almost as egregious are the members of the mainstream media who accept the "few bad apples" explanation and then turn to Iran and ask all the same questions they did about Iraq — does he have the bomb? would he ever use it? — without turning around and asking if the U.S. is actually capable of "installing democracy" (sic) in that county, not just when we're also tied up in Iraq, but ever.

"Killing Saddam during the Hajj means they're willing to provoke Sunnis to the highest degree," one pilgrim said.

(I have mixed feelings about Bill Maher, and I'm willing to argue about where "being wrong" might more accurately be described as "lying" or "spin that works on the gullible," but the first 45 seconds of this are priceless anyway.)

It's really powerful. Hopefully coming to a theater near you.

I can't listen anymore. I'm done. There is absolutely nothing that has come out of this war that wasn't predicted before it began. I'm open to hearing people say "I weighed the evidence and at the time I believed X, but now I think Y." I'm even open to hearing hawkish ends-justify-the-means -style arguments. But I'm totally OVER hearing people Americans tell themselves there was just no way, oh *twists hands*, anyone could have seen what was coming round the corner.

¹ Published 08/14/02. Just one example.
² Favorite line: "The extent of the global spread of protest is highlighted by the fact that even the Polar region saw protests with a group of scientists at the US McMurdo Station in Antarctica holding a rally."

Girl, Iraq.

She looks exactly like my daughter.

( credit )

This time in Dahab. Dahab is (or least was?) a hippie "resort" on the Sinai Peninsula. I never went there, but I had so many friends who did, most of them Egyptians. Dahab had hotels that were basically thatched roofs on poles, with sandy floors. For two dollars management would give you a bamboo mat for your bed; bring your own water. In the mid-90s one guy I knew wrote an article for Cairo Today about whether the concept of Generation X applied to Egyptians. Fittingly, he did all his research in Dahab. Egypt's only tattoo artist also lived and worked there. After a few years he quit tattooing women, a concession to his mother on her deathbed. Wish I remembered his name.

Maybe it sounds annoying from afar, but I always saw that city as a rare example of cross-cultural melding that didn't, for once, involve the crushing ubiquity of corporate interests. I understand the politics of hippie tourism can be just as problematic as the regular kind, and maybe I'm biased because the only folks I knew who went there weren't foreigners. But the idea of it, the way my friends talked about it, embodied something I liked, a lot, about Egypt. That and Siwa are the two places I regret skipping.

Qaeda-Iraq Link U.S. Cited Is Tied to Coercion Claim

During his time in Egyptian custody, Mr. Libi was among a group of what American officials have described as about 150 prisoners sent by the United States from one foreign country to another since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks for the purposes of interrogation. American officials including Ms. Rice have defended the practice, saying it draws on language and cultural expertise of American allies, particularly in the Middle East, and provides an important tool for interrogation.

"Cultural expertise" — you mean torture, right? Oh, no no:

They have said that the United States carries out the renditions only after obtaining explicit assurances from the receiving countries that the prisoners will not be tortured.

Hmm. Let's read on.

Nabil Fahmy, the Egyptian ambassador to the United States, said in a telephone interview on Thursday that he had no specific knowledge of Mr. Libi's case. Mr. Fahmy acknowledged that some prisoners had been sent to Egypt by mutual agreement between the United States and Egypt. "We do interrogations based on our understanding of the culture," Mr. Fahmy said. "We're not in the business of torturing anyone."

Now, maybe Mr. Fahmy is speaking here in the Clintonian sense. They're not in the business of torturing anyone, as in they don't hang a sign on the door that says "Pesky fingernails getting in your way? Not enough electricity in your genitalia? Torture! Available now! Year-end close-out sale on all the latest coercion techniques! Hurry while supplies last!" Maybe he means that, in Egypt, torture is one of the few things not yet privatized, though if the World Bank has its way I'm sure they'll get around to that eventually.

On the other hand, if we take a more global view, I'd say that's exactly what Egypt is in the business of doing. When the U.S. outsources interrogation, where is it going to go? Norway? There's a reason Egypt is the second-largest recipient of American aid, and it's not so much because the Americans are worried about 5-year-old Ali getting enough Vitamin B.

Nevertheless, we, as in Americans, still like to think of torture as aberrant, a shameful secret, because although we know our own government "crosses the line" sometimes (like my euphemism?), we understand that when such information comes to light it should involve hearings, investigations, and the rolling of heads. This is why names like "Abu Ghraib" and "Rodney King" are used in conjunction with the word "scandal," even by those who aren't surprised.

Contrast that with the time an Egyptian friend of mine had to stop by the local police station in Cairo to do some paperwork. The errand took longer than he expected because the cops were busy beating a man they'd picked up for having sex with another man. They left him bloody on the floor of his cell and might have continued until he was dead, but the line was backing up out front and they had other work to do. My friend got his papers signed and left. He did not report the incident, because there was no one to report such things to, and even if there had been it would only serve to implicate himself. He'd seen that kind of thing before and knew there was nothing you could do about it. Such is life in a police state.

Keep in mind these were junior cops in a random cop shop in Cairo, not members of the intelligence hand-picked by the Americans to interrogate members of Al-Qaeda. Does Condoleeza Rice seriously expect us to believe that suspected terrorists in a back room are going to get a warmer, more welcoming treatment than Random Gay Guy gets in full view of the public at large? Why are they even continuing with this charade, saying we don't export terror, no, we're only interested in the Egyptians' "cultural expertise"? If I had to guess, I'd say it's because Egyptians (and the torture victims) have no recourse to complain about the situation, and Americans don't care.

In other Egypt news, the Muslim Brotherhood made record gains in Egypt's parliamentary election last week, despite violence at the polls which left at least six dead as the government tried to prohibit Islamist sympathizers from voting. ([Pictures])

Meanwhile Israel readies forces for strike on nuclear Iran.

I'm so glad the world is safer for democracy.

But at the same time people are asking "why Egypt?" and it upsets me that the press isn't contextualizing this. It's being treated as yet another tragic loss of life, which of course it is, but ultimately a footnote to London: All this violence! It's just terrible! What is the world coming to!

There's no acknowledgment that Egypt's fate is wrapped up with our own, and I don't mean that in a generic "we are all brothers on this ball called Earth" kind of way. I mean it as in Egypt is considered the first place grand prize for al-Qaeda and its sympathizers. Destabilizing America and its economy via 9/11 was an attempt to make the U.S. re-think its support for this and other corrupt regimes in the Middle East (as opposed to some kind of commentary on our culture or lifestyle — if that were true, they would have bombed Las Vegas). And while it would be nice for Bin Laden et. al. if Tunisia or Qatar swung Islamist, it's Egypt and Saudi Arabia that they're really after.*

They've made no secret of this. None. That's what it's been about from the beginning. These are the two most influential countries in the Middle East, and at present both are deeply in bed with America, which might be an afterthought except that America is deeply in bed with Israel and has spent the last 15 years crushing Iraq. Al-Qaeda has no hope or interest in turning Western countries into Islamic theocracies. But this is absolutely their intention in Egypt. Fucking with us is a means to that end, not the other way around, so if anything is going to send FOX News into a fit of paranoia it should be the escalation of violence in Sinai, not the bombings in London.

But isn't "escalation" just another name for "same shit, different day"? From an ideological perspective yes, but from a tactical perspective no. Several radical groups split from the Muslim Brotherhood after the Brothers denounced violence in the 1970s; among them were Islamic Jihad, who assassinated Sadat, and al-Gamayya al-Islamiyya, who began targeting Egypt's tourism industry in 1992. Contrary to popular opinion, tourists were not targeted for their quote-unquote "immorality"**, but because tourism is a major industry in Egypt and provides the country with one of its primary sources of foreign currency, which Egypt needs to pay back its foreign debt and thus be eligible for more loans and American aid (which it in turn needs to continue propping up its otherwise incapacitated economy). Destabilize the tourist industry, in other words, and you destabilize Mubarak's regime, which is utterly dependent on it. Between 1992 and 1997 there was a string of attacks aimed at tourists and tourist targets, culminating with the Luxor massacre. Tourism did in fact drop, though probably not as much as the Islamists would have liked.

Of course Mubarak, dictator that he is, responded to these attacks in kind, by indiscriminately rounding up and torturing those believed to be associated with the Islamists. This silenced some elements of the movement and invigorated others. An uneasy truce was finally declared after the Luxor massacre and after a time al-Gamayya al-Islamiyya was presumed crushed, its followers either dead, imprisoned, or reformed. But there was a smaller, fourth contingent, too: those who slipped out of Egypt and began training in Afghanistan. They became America's problem in 2001.

Remarkably, though, there were still no major incidents in Egypt, in spite of the growing anti-Western sentiment following the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the continued parade of human rights abuses by the Egyptian government for everything from "tarnishing Egypt's image abroad" to reports of gay activity and Satanism. (Apparently the gays, the Satanists, and the image-tarnishers are not much for blowing things up.) That changed with the Taba bombing*** last October, which was the first terrorist incident in Egypt since Luxor seven years earlier. With that the country reverted back to the Bad Old Days, including the imprisonment of over 2,500 Egyptians who might have been involved, or knew someone who was, or knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who was. As the Western press was falling all over itself praising Mubarak (and by extension Bush) for introducing the possibility of democracy in Egypt (which was overstated anyway) Mubarak was overseeing the illegal detention and torture of thousands of its citizens, a fact that the Americans conveniently chose to overlook. The Sharm El-Sheikh bombing, which coincided with the first day of the Taba trial, was in part a retaliation for this sweep. This is the biggest terrorist attack in Egyptian history**** and more proof that revolutionary Islam, a movement thought crushed in 1997, is making a comeback in the largest and most politically powerful country in the Arab world. It also once again floats the fundamental question — common to Iraq and Algeria — over how a country can achieve full democracy when a slim majority or large minority advocates a form of Islamic rule that is inherently undemocratic. So far the most popular compromise seems to be "initiate human and civil rights in every corner except where they involve women," but I'm not satisfied with that answer.

What bugs me most, though? Americans have no language to talk about modern terrorism except through the lens of personal fear. So you can never ever discuss the subject, lest someone think you fell asleep in statistics class and are afraid for your own life, and that's, like, the dorkiest thing ever, worse than reading The Hardy Boys in elementary school or cross-stitching something that says "Bless This House" and hanging it in your living room. That leaves us talking about it in terms of tragedy, which of course it is, and discussing the possible civil liberties issues these events might raise, as of course we should, but as long as an attack like this gets written off as more of the same, *sigh* its real foreign policy implications will be ignored and remain unchallenged. Which is the sort of thinking that got us into this mess in the first place.

* Actually reclaiming Palestine is the first place grand prize, but the cooperation of Egypt is considered rucial to this process.
** Although I'm sure there was no love lost there, either. There HAVE been isolated cases of soldiers shooting at Israeli sunbathers in Sinai, but these are not generally considered part of any organized terror campaign.
*** In addition to its connection to the tourist industry, Sinai is significant because it's still controlled under the terms of Egypt's peace treaty with Israel, which among other things limits the police force Egypt can maintain there. Diaaudin Dawood, chairman of the Nasserist Democratic Party, said, "It is indeed a no man's land as it falls under Israeli-termed peace agreements that emasculate Egyptian control over the region."
**** Well, recent history anyway. Egypt has a lot of history.

I'm pretty sure it's not supposed to work that way.

Hey, I don't write the headlines.

Family of American Woman Killed by Military Bulldozer Files Suit Against Catepillar, Inc.
Family of Rachel Corrie Charges Bulldozer Manufacturer Knowingly Sold Machines Used to Violate Human Rights

NEW YORK, NY — March 15 — The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and partnering law firms today filed a federal lawsuit against Illinois-based Caterpillar, Inc. on behalf of the parents of Rachel Corrie, the 23-year-old American peace activist and student who was run over and killed by a Caterpillar D9 bulldozer on March 16, 2003.

The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western Federal District of Washington, alleges that Caterpillar, Inc. violated international and state law by providing specially designed bulldozers to Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) that it knew would be used to demolish homes and endanger civilians. The Corries daughter Rachel, a student at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, was there as a volunteer peace activist protesting the demolition of Palestinian homes when she was brutally killed. Much of the world community, including international human rights organizations and the United Nations, has consistently condemned these demolitions as a clear violation of international humanitarian law.

The Corries also filed a tort claim today in Israel against the State of Israel, the Israeli Defense Ministry and the IDF for their role in the death of their daughter. They are represented by Advocate Hussein Abu Hussein.

Rachel’s mother, Cindy Corrie, stated, “As we approach the two-year anniversary of Rachel’s killing, my family and I are still searching for justice. The brutal death of my daughter should never have happened. We believe Caterpillar and the IDF must be held accountable for their role in the attack on my daughter Rachel.”

Jennie Green, Senior Attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, stated, “International law clearly provides that corporations can be held accountable for violations of international human rights. Rachel Corrie, a young American killed abroad because Caterpillar purposefully turns a blind eye as to how their products are used, must have access to justice.”

Over the past four years, the IDF has used Caterpillar bulldozers to destroy more than 4,000 Palestinian homes, injuring, killing, or leaving homeless scores of individuals in the process. Rights groups have sent over 50,000 letters to Caterpillar, Inc. executives and CEO Jim Owens, decrying the use of Caterpillar bulldozers to carry out human rights abuses.

Plaintiffs Craig and Cindy Corrie are represented by lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Ronald J. Peterson Law Clinic at Seattle University Law School, and the Public Interest Law Group PLLC in Seattle, Washington.

http://www.rachelcorrie.org/

Constitutional Change
By Paul Schemm and Lina Atallah

Soon after the euphoria following the announcement that Egyptians would be able to choose their presidents for the first time ever, activists and opposition politicians began to question how different the new system really is.

On 2 March, the parliament's constitutional affairs committee drew up a framework for the amendment, including conditions for presidential candidates. The results have been almost universally condemned by the opposition and independent political commentators.

"We refuse to go back to the referendum system from a back door," roared a headline in the opposition daily Al Wafd a day later.

The new conditions require candidates to have the support of a certain percentage of elected parliamentarians or members of the local councils in the governorates. The obvious problem for the opposition here is that currently 80 percent of the parliament is controlled by the ruling party, along with the vast majority of local councils. In fact the government itself, in the form of presidential chief of staff Zakariya Azmi, once described the councils as riddled with corruption. (more)

+ + +

Any Takers?
By Ursula Lindsey

Even though the constitution is being changed to allow them to field candidates for presidential elections this fall, most parties and opposition groups have serious reservations regarding whether it will be in their power, or their interest, to run.

President of liberal Al Wafd Party Noman Gomaa says he has reached no decision regarding his own possible candidature. “I have no answer currently. It’s not easy to say. It’s a decision to take in the month of May when the text [of the amendment] is published. There are voices and opinions in the party… saying we should present ourselves, take the opportunity to try, but it’s not decided yet.”

Mounir Fakhry Abdel Nour, a member of parliament for Al Wafd, says he will advise the party not to present a candidate. “It has never been in the minds of Egyptian politicians to be able to challenge the president,” he says, “and as a result political parties do not have the means—financial, physical, organizational—to do so.”

(more)

+ + +

Growing anger at arrests
With thousands said to be still detained without charges in the post-Taba crackdown, the situation in Sinai remains tense, reports Mustafa El-Menshawy

Although Arish, the capital of North Sinai, appears calm, tensions are palpable just beneath the surface. Police patrols and checkpoints seem far too frequent for such a sleepy beach town, and most people are unusually nervous about talking to strangers. Almost every week, dozens of people stage a sit-in after Friday prayers demanding that their relatives — detained after last October's Taba blasts — be released.

The blasts were blamed on nine suspects, all from North Sinai — two were killed in the attacks, two others died after clashes with police, and the five remaining are in custody. According to human rights groups, however, some 2,400 local residents have also been detained; local and international human rights groups have said many of them have been subjected to "brutal torture".

"My husband has been detained since October, and I [was] only [allowed to] visit him this week at the state security office in Cairo. He looked pale and ill, and complained that he had been brutally beaten by the interrogators," Sabha Turefi told Al-Ahram Weekly. "He said he had been blind-folded, with his hands tied behind his back, and stripped down to his underpants despite the cold. He complained about being electrocuted, and hung by his hands from the door for hours," the traumatised 25-year-old wife said, in tears.

She said her husband had done nothing wrong; in any case, the authorities have at no point indicated what, if any, charges these individuals were being held on. Turefi said her husband's offence was that he was "bearded. Can you imagine?"

Others who were detained and released told similar stories of interrogations accompanied by torture, including electrocution. Those who had not been tortured said they had heard screaming, or saw security forces inflicting pain on other detainees.

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Opening the window
By Amira Howeidy

The New York-based international rights group, Human Rights Watch (HRW), released a 43-page report on Tuesday documenting mass arrests and torture in Sinai following the 7 October bombings at the Taba Hilton and two Sinai tourist camps, which killed 34 people, and injured 159.

Two weeks after the bombings, the Interior Ministry identified the assailants as nine Sinai residents; five were in custody, two were killed in the attack, and two remained at large. The ministry said the ringleader — one of the two suspects killed during the bombings — was Iyad Said Salah, a Palestinian with a criminal record who had turned to Islamist extremism, provoked by the Israeli incursion into Rafah at the time into carrying out the attack. Although the ministry announced that the investigation now boiled down to a hunt for the two remaining suspects, subsequent events revealed a far wider security operation was actually taking place.

At least three Egyptian human rights groups documented that mass arrests continued until early December. According to these groups, 2,500 to 3,000 people were detained without charges. The impact of this revelation, made just two months ago, was short lived, limited to a few reports in the opposition press; other news — from the release of an Israeli spy to Coptic-Muslim tension in Upper Egypt — soon drove the story into the background.

Joe Stork, the Washington-based director of HRW's Middle East and North Africa division, told Al-Ahram Weekly that Egyptian human rights groups had "opened a brief window" on the case, "then it was shut again. We are trying to open the window." Stork wrote HRW's Mass Arrests and Torture in Sinai report, and carried out its research with Ahmed Seif El-Islam, director of the Hisham Mubarak Law Centre, and Aida Seif El-Dawla, chair of the Egyptian Association Against Torture.

They visited Sinai in mid-December for two days, interviewing former detainees, and eyewitnesses to arrests in Al-Arish. In every one of the score of cases HRW investigated, the State Security Investigation (SSI) apparatus had detained individuals without informing them of the reason why. They were usually arrested in pre- dawn raids (many during the month of Ramadan), and those who were picked up were usually held for three days to one week without being charged. While some were released, most were transferred to Tora prison in Cairo and Damanhour Prison in the Nile Delta, the report said. Most of the detainees were Islamists, or thought to be. "This suggests that the official statement [issued by the Interior Ministry on the Sinai bombings] did not fully reflect the investigation into the attacks," the report said, "or that the government was using the occasion to carry out a much broader crackdown against potential opponents, particularly identified as having Islamist sympathies."

HRW said it interviewed several former detainees who provided "credible accounts of torture" at the hands of SSI investigators; others spoke of seeing other detainees who had been badly tortured. The report included horrifying testimonies from two of the detainees. 26-year- old Hamid Batrawi, whose four brothers were already in custody, was arrested on 22 November while driving from Al-Arish to southern Sinai. He was taken to a police station near Suez, and then transferred to the SSI headquarters there. Upon his arrival, the SSI officers asked why he had not mentioned that his brothers had been arrested. He was then stripped to his underpants, his hands tied behind his back, and hung by his hands from the top of an iron door, "causing excruciating pain to his shoulders". With his toes just touching the floor, which was wet, wires were attached to his toes and underpants. He was then beaten with a hose, and administered jolts of electricity every couple of minutes; the shock intensified when his toes rested on the wet floor. This continued for about four and a half hours, after which he was transferred to Suez hospital. When Seif El-Dawla visited him in hospital, she said he could not talk, see or walk.

The second detainee, Abdel-Nour Sayed (not his real name) was picked up from his home at 3am on 18 October; he was held with 200 other detainees for six days in small rooms with no toilet facilities. He told HRW that he was tortured during his first interrogation session upon the orders of a man "who did not speak" and who "was not Egyptian".

Although the report does not address the possible involvement of non-Egyptian interrogators, Sayed's words re-triggered questions about the nature of Israel's role in the investigation. Egypt allowed the Israeli army to enter the area immediately after the bombings to help with rescue operations, official statements at the time said.

Mass Arrests and Torture in Sinai was released during a well-attended press conference at the Hisham Mubarak Law Centre; significantly, around a dozen female relatives of the detainees had come to Cairo from Sinai for the event.

Iman Ahmed Himdan said that security forces stormed her house looking for her husband Ahmed Abdallah Himdan, who was at large. "When they didn't find my husband at home, they took my 16-year-old brother, and started threatening him, and calling him indecent names," Himdan, who wears a black niqab (face veil), said. "The police didn't know I was Ahmed's wife, but when I saw my little brother go through this, I was provoked, and shouted, 'I'm Ahmed's wife, leave my brother alone.' So they took both of us," she told the Weekly. The couple had only been married for three months, and Himdan was two months pregnant. "We were taken to the SSI north Sinai headquarters. My brother was blindfolded, stripped, and beaten severely. Both of us were threatened with electrocution if we didn't tell them where my husband was. We were held for a week, during which I had a nervous breakdown, and an abortion." Himdan and her brother were only released when her husband handed himself in. He's still in custody, she said.

Himdan's cousin, Samah Abu Shita, had a similar experience when police stormed her house "from the window, the balcony and door", during which they stepped on her four-month-old baby girl, and broke one of her ribs. "Our men have done nothing but live as committed, practicing Muslims; they have nothing to do with any illegal activity, and they haven't been charged with anything," she said. Her husband and four brothers have been in custody since November. According to the HRW report, only 100 detainees have been released; some 2,400 remain in detention.

Other victims of the post-Taba bombing security crackdown include the director of the Hisham Mubarak Law Centre, Ahmed Seif El-Islam, who told reporters at Tuesday's press conference that his house was broken into, and his laptop stolen, at around the same time that the centre issued its initial report on the Sinai arrests. "Back then I thought it was just a burglary," he said. But then, on Monday 21 February, his house was broken into again — this time in broad daylight at noon. His new laptop was stolen, and all of his papers thoroughly searched. "I got the message," he said, "and this is my reply: I will not be silenced, and I will gladly give my blood for freedom."

The press conference fell into a shocked silence.

"There is this disregard, this lawlessness, on the part of the security services that even goes beyond the emergency law, that the authorities have not addressed," Stork told the Weekly. "They have not investigated these abuses, as far as we know, or prosecuted anybody. This issue of impunity is a very important one."

Since December, Stork's requests to meet with Egyptian officials have been ignored; only on the eve of the press conference, on Monday at "midnight", was he informed that he would be meeting with officials at the Interior Ministry and the Prosecutor-General.

In what appears to be a coordinated government reaction to the HRW report, the Foreign Ministry issued a statement on Tuesday taking issue with HRW for not notifying the authorities in advance about the report, "to allow time for a studied response". That HRW issued this report based on fieldwork, the statement said, "demonstrates Egypt's openness and transparency in human rights issues". It rejected HRW's recommendation that the Egyptian government cancel the emergency law, arguing that only the "Egyptian people have the legitimate right to end the emergency law though their representatives in parliament".

It said that only five people were held in custody in connection with the Taba bombings.

Rights activists reported last month that Egyptian police had detained 2500 people in Sinai and tortured many of them in the hunt for those behind the 7 October bombings targeting Israeli tourists in Taba and two other resorts, which killed at least 34 people.

…

The report by human rights groups in November, which quoted victims and witnesses, said police had hanged men by their arms for hours, with electrodes attached to their toes, and burned their skin with devices that looked like oven lighters.

It also said security forces had taken 140 Sinai women hostage in the hope their families would turn in their menfolk.

The government says it does not condone torture and punishes torturers when it comes across abuses.

Egypt has blamed the blasts on a Palestinian and three Sinai Bedouin, saying there was no indication the bombers were linked to al-Qaida, as Israel and the United States have suggested.

Most of the alleged bombers and accomplices come from al-Arish in north Sinai, close to the border with the Gaza Strip, the government said.

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After three days of listening to graphic testimony at the refugee hearing of South Dakota war resister Jeremy Hinzman, one observer sitting near me shakily remarks, "If you're not a pacifist after sitting through this then nothing will make you into one." In this harshly lit hearing room on Victoria, a refugee board adjudicator is going to have to rule on a most shocking proposition: whether this former soldier of the U.S. 82nd Airborne ought to be granted asylum because he fears participating in war crimes in Iraq.

Those packing the room – mostly Quakers and other peace types – are busy trying to send subliminal messages to presiding member Brian Goodman through their anti-war buttons and peace quilts.

Round one has already been lost. A technical legal ruling forbids Hinzman's counsel, Jeffry House, from arguing the illegality of the war in Iraq and a soldier's duty not to participate in such a war. House considers the ruling a huge ground for appeal should Hinzman be denied refugee status.

But House has another card up his sleeve – an Ontario Court of Appeal precedent in the case of Fereidoon Zolfagharkhani, who deserted from the Iranian military upon learning that Iran intended to gas Kurds. Zolfagharkani was a paramedic, and it would have been his job to treat Kurdish people who didn't die from the attacks so they could withstand interrogation. He won the right to asylum in Canada, and House hopes a similar logic will work in Hinzman's case.

The point at issue is whether Hinzman, as a member of the 82nd, would have been forced to kill civilians or participate in violations of the Geneva Convention during his tour of duty. So House has entered exhibits of media reports from the Washington Post, Democracy NOW and Human Rights Watch with such titles as U.S. Military Attacks On Population Centers, U.S. Military Attacks On Health Clinics and U.S. Military Attacks On Civilians.

Info relating specifically to the exploits of the 82nd Airborne are easy enough to Google. I did the search myself and found a Human Rights Watch report documenting actions of the 82nd Airborne that resulted in the deaths of seven unarmed civilians.

As that report details, "soldiers from the 82nd Airborne's 3rd Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment raided the apartment of Fadhil Hamza Hussain al-Janabi in al-Mahmudiyya on the outskirts of Baghdad after receiving a tip from a local pool hall about 'bad guys' in the neighborhood… Al-Janabi's 19-year-old daughter Farah was killed, as was a neighbor."

Outside reports of the 82nd, Hinzman's case turns on how well he can articulate the growing worries he harbours about becoming a killing machine. During his wife's pregnancy back in South Dakota, Hinzman began to disdain his training, which included chanting, "Trained to kill! Kill we will!" Fatherhood, he says, cemented his belief that, unlike the other soldiers, he couldn't make the grass grow with bright red blood.

Two months after his baby's birth and several months before shipping out to Afghanistan, he filed a very complicated conscientious objector (CO) application. "I didn't feel I could kill. I could have done other jobs in the Army," Hinzman says.

What happened then isn't entirely clear. Somehow, the papers were lost and Hinzman resubmitted his CO application. At this point he was in Afghanistan doing kitchen duty. Then one day while scrubbing pots, he says, superiors pulled him from his duties, brought him in front of a tribunal and quickly denied him CO status.

Upon returning to the U.S., he came to realize his only option was to flee to Canada. He led a hard double life, he says – by day training to deploy to Iraq and by night planning an escape route north.

"We were going to Iraq to jack up terrorists. We were told this was a new kind of war, that these people weren't human and that they were not to be treated in a humane way. We were told by commanders in pep talks that these people are evil."

Needing more specifics on who the army considered evil, presiding member Goodman asks, "Who were they referring to as terrorists?"

Hinzman chillingly replies, "They associate everyone in the area as a terrorist."

"The entire population of Iraq was considered a terrorist?" Goodman asks.

"We referred to Iraqis, Saudis, Kuwaitis, Yemenis, Iranians as terrorist, as they came from the Middle East," comes Hinzman's reply.

Somewhat disbelieving, Goodman asks again, "All Arabs from that region were terrorists?"

"Correct, sir."

Though the war in Iraq isn't on trial, House manages to highlight U.S. soldiers' propensity to kill Iraqi civilians. When he introduces his star witness, Marine Staff Sgt. Jimmy J. Massey, immigration rep Janet Chisholm weakly objects. "He doesn't have a similar position in the Army," she says of Massey, and suggests he couldn't possibly be an expert on the Geneva Convention.

The soft-spoken, bespectacled Massey, who is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder from his tour in Iraq, was not only trained in the Geneva Convention since boot camp but was also assigned to ensure firefights were clean – i.e., carried out according to the army's Standing Operating Procedures and the Geneva Convention.

Within Massey's first 48 hours in Iraq, his platoon of 45 had slaughtered 30 unarmed men, women and children at checkpoints. Marines are trained to set up checkpoints according to a set procedure, but Massey testifies that military fearmongering "was giving us the mindset that every Iraqi was a terrorist."

Now the former Marine even questions whether their procedure for trying to stop a vehicle entering a checkpoint could have been sending the wrong message to approaching Iraqis. As cars moved towards them, a Marine would flash what they believed was the international "Halt" hand symbol, a closed fist in the air. Of course, it is easily mistaken for the internationally recognized brotherhood or solidarity gesture, which is exactly the same.

All this happened in a matter of seconds as the fear of suicide bombers created itchy trigger fingers. "We fired at a cyclic rate. We pulled the trigger and didn't stop," Massey says.

"I witnessed Marines putting rounds into enemy combatants who were expiring. It is not uncommon for a Marine to put rounds in the head of someone playing possum," he says.

Besides trying to establish the realities of soldiering in Iraq, the hearing also puts Hinzman's religious beliefs under the microscope. The war resister and his family attend twice-weekly Quaker gatherings. They are tenders, not members, but Hinzman says that after years of quiet contemplation, he would apply to become a member.

The other question before the refugee board is whether Hinzman is a refugee by reason of a well-founded fear of persecution. To establish this, he would have to show that the U.S. government and its military would persecute him for reasons of political opinion, religion or membership in a social group – namely conscientious objectors to military service in the U.S. Army in Iraq.

All this Goodman will have to weigh to determine if the horrors that he repeatedly heard in gross, exacting detail meet the requirements set out by the Court of Appeal. With written submissions from House and Chisholm not due until the end of January, a ruling probably won't drop until March. Then the world will learn whether Canada considers the actions of the U.S. Army in Iraq to be so dire that conscientious objectors are in need of our protection.

The first was a depiction of the three goals in the war on terror and the democratization of the Middle East: Iraq – a tactical goal, Saudi Arabia – a strategic goal, and Egypt – the great prize.

The triangle in the next slide was no less interesting: Palestine is Israel, Jordan is Palestine, and Iraq is the Hashemite Kingdom.

In related news, Richard Perle really hates Syria. And he thinks Israel should replace its "socialism" with more nationalism. Damn commies.

To reinforce this point, the Prime Minister [ed. Netanyuhu] can use his forthcoming visit to announce that Israel is now mature enough to cut itself free immediately from at least U.S. economic aid and loan guarantees at least, which prevent economic reform. [Military aid is separated for the moment until adequate arrangements can be made to ensure that Israel will not encounter supply problems in the means to defend itself]. As outlined in another Institute report, Israel can become self-reliant only by, in a bold stroke rather than in increments, liberalizing its economy, cutting taxes, relegislating a free-processing zone, and selling-off public lands and enterprises.

That paper is from 1996. At least no one can say they haven't been taking the long view.