Author Archives: Arab America

Stop by a women’s shelter in Syria today, and the inhabitants will tell you just how bleak the future looks. After more than four years of civil war, the pervasive sexual assault that has become a blight on the country, regardless of allegiance, shows no sign of abating. As violence increases, more women are growing convinced that the end of the war is more significant than who emerges as the winner. The protracted conflict is leaving women to bear the brunt of the war, and they are reaching their breaking point. At the end of the day, a woman who runs such a shelter near Damascus told me, the politics of those who torment and rape these Syrian women doesn’t matter — for most victims, the line between opposition or the regime is blurred, if they can tell the political identity of the perpetrator at all.

Women have been targeted by both sides. Recent reports by Human Rights Watch, among other groups, have documented instances of severe beatings of women in areas where regime forces conduct house raids. As regime soldiers carry out door-to-door searches and arrests in cities like Daraa, and other areas controlled by government forces, they often detain and abuse the women of these homes to terrorize their neighborhoods into submission. In areas where rebels exercise greater control, well-coordinated extremist organizations like the Islamic State (also called ISIS and ISIL), have imposed a host of restrictions on the dress and behavior of the women in the region. Last year, the United Nations reported that many of these women, including the ones who’re displaced into such strongholds, are subjected to rape and other forms of abuse.

Source: foreignpolicy.com

His literature is inherently political with an existential urgency – a rare talent, according to the jury. The prize was awarded to Fatah in Berlin by Berlin Mayor Michael Müller and the President of the Academy of the Arts, Klaus Staeck. The Berlin Art Prize is worth 15,000 euros ($16,000).
Sherko Fatah is the son of an Iraqi Kurd and a German mother. He was born in 1964 in East Berlin. In 1975 the family left for Vienna – eventually settling in West Berlin, where Fatah studied philosophy and art history. His life is marked by two languages, two cultures and two Berlins. He regularly visited friends in Iraq during his formative years, where he experienced first hand the misunderstandings between the Arab world and the West. In 2001 he published his debut novel, “The Borderland.” His most recent work, “The Last Place,” was released in autumn 2014 and centered on the kidnapping of a German and his translator by an Islamist terrorist group in Iraq.
The Academy of the Arts has awarded the prize – officially titled the “Berlin Art Prize – Jubilee Foundation 1848/1948” – on behalf of the State of Berlin since 1971. The award was established in memory of the March Revolution of 1848 by the Berlin Senate. It is awarded annually on March 18 – and includes six smaller art prize recipients, who each receive 5,000 euros.

Source: www.dw.de

Interview: Despite Orientalist ideas and fears of ‘terrorism’ dominating the West’s perceptions of the ‘Islamic World’, Linda Kamaroff is using art to show another side of the contemporary Middle East.

Source: www.alaraby.co.uk

JERUSALEM — Benjamin Netanyahu’s apparent reelection puts Israel on a course toward ever deeper confrontation with the world. To govern, his Likud Party would need to depend on ultranationalists — a recipe for neither stability nor bold moves toward Mideast peace.

Source: www.statesman.com

LANSING — Gov. Rick Snyder on Tuesday named utility executive and state government veteran Nick Khouri as the state’s new treasurer, and said current Treasurer Kevin Clinton will return to the private sector after about 16 months on the job.

Khouri, of Plymouth, served as chief deputy treasurer under former Gov. John Engler. He will become the third state treasurer of the Snyder administration when he takes office April 20.

Source: www.freep.com

Gov. Rick Snyder on Tuesday named utility executive and state government veteran Nick Khouri as the state’s new treasurer.

Today Israeli citizens are going to vote for their next government in a country often labeled as “the only democracy in the Middle East”. Ironically, they will be voting on ballot cards produced in an illegal Israeli settlement in the West Bank by Palestinians, who will have no input in the political process.
In fact, approximately 4.5m Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have no say in deciding which Israeli political party will control every aspect of their lives.

Source: www.independent.co.uk

There’s a loaded moment in Maz Jobrani’s new memoir, “I’m Not a Terrorist, but I’ve Played One on TV,” in which this Iranian-American comic finally catches a break in the stand-up world. It’s 1999, and he’s been invited by Mitzi Shore, owner of the Comedy Store in Los Angeles, to become a regular at her venerable club.

There’s a catch, he discovers. Ms. Shore wants him to perform in a turban and a robe. “Was this racist?” Mr. Jobrani writes. “Was there a word for being both flattered and insulted at once?” Wearing this garb onstage is “the Persian equivalent of blackface.” He reluctantly agrees to do it. A man needs to eat. Luckily, Ms. Shore soon agrees it’s a bad idea.

There’s a similar moment in “No Land’s Man,” a new book from Aasif Mandvi. He’s best known for being, as he puts it, the “senior Middle East/Muslim/All Things Brown correspondent” on “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.” New to New York City and scrounging for work, he wears a turban and does a broad Indian accent while auditioning to be a snake charmer in a television ad. (Mr. Mandvi was born in what is now Mumbai but grew up in England and the United States.) The emotion he feels is shame.

While discussing this and the other roles — cabdrivers, terrorists, deli owners — he was asked to play, Mr. Mandvi quotes a friend’s useful term for acting out painful racial stereotypes in order to find work. That term is “patanking.” It derives from the way the Indian accent sounds to American ears.

Source: mobile.nytimes.com

Senior UN officials in Jerusalem have been accused of caving in to Israeli pressure to abandon moves to include the state’s armed forces on a UN list of serious violators of children’s rights.

UN officials backed away from recommending that the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) be included on the list following telephone calls from senior Israeli officials. The Israelis allegedly warned of serious consequences if a meeting of UN agencies and NGOs based in Jerusalem to ratify the recommendation went ahead. Within hours, the meeting was cancelled.

“Top officials have buckled under political pressure,” said a UN source. “As a result, a clear message has been given that Israel will not be listed.”

Organisations pressing for the IDF’s inclusion on the list since the war in Gaza last summer – which left more than 500 children dead and more than 3,300 injured – include Save the Children and War Child as well as at least a dozen Palestinian human rights organisations, the Israeli rights organisation B’Tselem and UN bodies such as the children’s agency Unicef.

Source: www.theguardian.com

Choruses of beeping horns echoed through this Arab city in northern Israel as word spread that an alliance of Arab parties had received 14 seats in the next Parliament, making it the third-largest bloc.

Long-divided Arab parties’ forming a coalition was unprecedented; so was the size of their new bloc, offering a good reason for Nazareth and other Arab towns to rejoice.

“This is a great achievement,” said Ahmad Tibi, a veteran Arab politician who was elected to Parliament on Tuesday, speaking at the alliance’s headquarters in Nazareth. Men and women cheered and waved flags bearing the alliance’s slogan, “The Will of the People.”

“We will have before us great challenges. We will fight racism, we will fight fascism; we will defend our rights, regardless of the government,” he said. “Today, we are stronger.”

Yet as the euphoria fades, it remains far from clear what influence the Arab cohort, which calls itself the Joint List, will actually have.

Exit polls on Tuesday night showed that the race between the Likud party, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the center-left Zionist Union, led by Isaac Herzog, was very close. But as the votes were counted, Likud actually had a substantial lead.

Source: www.nytimes.com

iMany had hoped that Benjamin Netanyahu would be defeated in yesterday’s Israeli election. I was not one of them.

Many had already written him off – pre-election polls showed his Likud Party lagging behind the allegedly center-left Zionist Union, headed by Yitzhak Herzog and Tzipi Livni.

But I kept in mind the 1996 election where Netanyahu was universally thought to be the loser well after the votes had been cast.

In the wake of the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, it had been expected that his “dovish” successor Shimon Peres, who had launched a bloody invasion of Lebanon months earlier in the hope of proving to the electorate his tough “security” credentials, would easily win.

But on that election night, Netanyahu told his supporters, “The hour is still early and the night is long.” As the votes were counted, he pulled ahead beating Peres and securing his first term as prime minister.

Netanyahu did it again on Tuesday. With virtually all the votes counted, Likud has thirty seats, the Zionist Union has 24 and the Joint List of predominantly Arab parties is in third place with fourteen.

It seems all but certain that Netanyahu will retain his post as Israel’s prime minister and head another fanatically right-wing government.

Truth in labeling

Let me be clear: I am not happy that Netanyahu won, as such. Netanyahu is a blood-soaked killer. He should be put on trial for his many crimes, from the relentless theft of Palestinian land to last summer’s massacre in Gaza – and I yearn to see that day.

But reveling in the murder of Palestinians and calling it “self-defense” barely distinguishes him from his rivals. Livni, a fugitive war crimes suspect, was one of the proud and unrepentant architects of Israel’s massacre in Gaza in 2008-2009, that undoubtedly served as Netanyahu’s model.

Her partner Herzog has faulted Netanyahu for not attacking Gaza viciously enough.

Netanyahu’s ugly election-day incitement that the “Arabs are advancing on the ballot boxes,” revealed once again his true feelings that Palestinian citizens of Israel are not legitimate citizens deserving full rights. But Tzipi Livni has frequently expressed the same view.

And while he is absolutely committed to the theft and colonization of occupied Palestinian land, that too does not distinguish Netanyahu from his ostensibly dovish predecessors.

A recent interactive feature published by The New York Times shows that Israeli settlement construction in the occupied West Bank (excluding occupied Jerusalem) was often far higher under the supposed peace-seeking governments of Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert.

But what has distinguished Netanyahu is that he strips away the opportunities for the so-called “international community” to hide its complicity with Israel’s ugly crimes behind a charade of a “peace process.”

Moreover Netanyahu’s open alliance with the most racist, white supremacist, Islamophobic and bigoted elements of the North American and European right – his speech to Congress earlier this month was a manifestation of this – place Israel in the correct ideological camp. Israel can no longer practice apartheid at home, while falsely presenting itself as a beacon of liberalism around the world.

In short, Netanyahu’s re-election is like the “Nutrition Facts” label on a box of junk food: it tells you about the toxic ingredients inside.

No Palestinian state

Netanyahu’s clear declaration days before the vote that he will not allow a Palestinian state was simply an affirmation of the real policy of every Israeli government since 1967, to which Herzog and Livni would have adhered.

Herzog and Livni would not have permitted a Palestinian state worthy of the name. Rather, with international support, they would have attempted to draw Palestinians back into “negotiations” over what would at most be a ghetto-like bantustan designed to legitimize Israel’s theft of vast tracts of land, its annexation of Jerusalem and its abrogation of the rights of Palestinian refugees. (Ben White’s analysis of this horrifying plan for permanent apartheid is a must read.)

Herzog too had vowed to continue building settlements on stolen Palestinian land. But he would hide this expansionist policy behind one of the cosmetic and fraudulent “freezes” during which colonization continues unabated.

Had the Zionist Union won, there was a very grave danger that the Palestinians would have been dragged back a decade into fruitless Oslo-style “negotiations” that would have served as a cover for continued sugbjugation and colonization.

Such negotiations have provided the principal excuse for the so-called international community to endlessly defer holding Israel even minimally accountable.

The refrain from gutless officials is always some version of “yes, isn’t it terrible what’s going on, but there’s a peace process and we support the peace process.”

The one positive outcome of Israel’s election is that path seems to be closed.

Step up BDS

We should be under no illusion that with Netanyahu’s re-election, European, North American and Arab governments are suddenly going to end their complicity with Israel.

There’s every reason to believe that the Obama administration, for instance, will continue its relentless campaign of opposing Palestinian rights and efforts to hold Israel accountable in any forum.

But the Israeli Jewish public’s choice to re-elect Netanyahu should make it clear to people around the world that Israel does not seek peace and does not seek justice. It will continue to oppress and ethnically cleanse Palestinians until it is stopped.

Negotiating with such a regime is pointless when its power over its victims remains vast and unchecked. The message we should take away is simple: the proper treatment for a polity committed to occupation, apartheid and ethno-racial supremacy is to isolate it until it recognizes that it must abandon those commitments.

Palestinians have asked the world to do that through boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS). Netanyahu makes the case a little easier, so it’s time to step it up.

Source: electronicintifada.net

The Storyteller of Jerusalem is a remarkable and unique memoir of the life and times of Wasif Jawhariyyeh, a talented composer, oud player, poet and chronicler from the Old City of Jerusalem. The memoir is a collection of observations, notes on his personal life and recordings of historical moments in Jerusalem’s history. Spanning over four decades, they cover the city’s most turbulent changes.
His account takes us from the Ottoman period into the era of British control, and the lead up to the establishment of Israel, covering the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, known as the Nakba. Through his writings we gain an insight into the changing Jerusalem as it grows outside the confines of the city walls and passes hands. We are offered intimate glimpses into these times and the characters that shape them.

Source: www.palestinebookawards.com

An annual security report submitted recently to the US Senate by James Clapper, director of National Intelligence, removed both Iran and Hezbollah from the list of terrorism threats to the United States for the first time in years.

The unclassified version of the “Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Communities” dated 26 February, noted Iran’s efforts to fight “Sunni extremists”, including elements affiliated with the Islamic State group who were perceived to constitute the “preeminent terrorist threat to American interests worldwide”.

Last year’s report described the global terrorist activity of Lebanon’s Shia Hezbollah group to have increased in recent years to “a level we have not seen since the 1990s”, however this year’s report mentioned the group only once saying it faces a threat from ISIS and Al-Nusra Front near Lebanon’s orders.

Meanwhile, despite removing Tehran from the list, the report described it as source of cyber-attacks and a regional threat to the United States because of its support for Syrian regime President Bashar Al-Assad and its hostile policies against Israel.

Source: www.middleeastmonitor.com