Author Archives: Arab America

AMHERST, Massachusetts — When Saudi Arabia and its allies began to bomb Yemen last week, it was not the first time that Yemen’s neighbors turned the country into a battleground. Both the Obama administration and the Saudi monarchy would do well to recall the last time Yemen became a pawn in regional power struggles.

In the fall of 1962, Saudi Arabia’s King Saud watched nervously as Egyptian troops poured into Yemen. Egypt had undergone a revolution 10 years before and, under the leadership of its charismatic president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, it had been transformed from a friendly fellow monarchy to a fire-breathing republic.

Source: www.nytimes.com

first heard about the writer Kamel Daoud a few years ago, when an Algerian friend of mine told me I should read him if I wanted to understand how her country had changed in recent years. “If Algeria can produce a Kamel Daoud,” she said, “I still have hope for Algeria.” Reading his columns in Le Quotidien d’Oran, a French-language newspaper, I saw what she meant. Daoud had an original, epigrammatic style: playful, lyrical, brash. I could also see why he’d been accused of racism, even “self-hatred.” After Sept. 11, for example, he wrote that the Arabs had been “crashing” for centuries and that they would continue crashing so long as they were better known for hijacking planes than for making them. But this struck me as the glib provocation of an otherwise intelligent writer carried away by his metaphors.

The more I read Daoud, the more I sensed he was driven not by self-hatred but by disappointed love. Here was a writer in his early 40s, a man my age, who believed that people in Algeria and the wider Muslim world deserved a great deal better than military rule or Islamism, the two-entree menu they had been offered since the end of colonialism, and who said so with force and brio. Nothing, however, prepared me for his first novel, “The Meursault Investigation,” a thrilling retelling of Albert Camus’s 1942 classic, “The Stranger,” from the perspective of the brother of the Arab killed by Meursault, Camus’s antihero. The novel, which was first published in Algeria in 2013, and which will be published in English by Other Press in June, not only breathes new life into “The Stranger”; it also offers a bracing critique of postcolonial Algeria — a new country that Camus, a poor Frenchman born in Algiers, did not live to see.

Source: www.nytimes.com

The Palestinians became members of the International Criminal Court on Wednesday, cementing the most significant and contentious step so far in their new strategy of seeking statehood through international forums.

Palestinians hope to use the court to bring international pressure to bear on Israel and call it to account for policies and actions that the Palestinians maintain are war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the Israeli assault on Gaza last summer and the continuing construction of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.

However, the Palestinian leadership refrained from immediately taking the more provocative step of requesting that the court look into specific cases that may implicate Israeli officials. Instead, the Palestinians said they would wait to see the progress of a preliminary examination that the court’s prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, began in January.

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“Palestine remains one of the most important tests of the will and ability of the international community, and international institutions, to uphold universal values,” Riad al-Malki, the Palestinian foreign minister, said during a 30-minute ceremony at the court in The Hague. “It is a test the world cannot afford to fail.”

Source: www.nytimes.com

For the rappers that make up DAM, “make believe,” fair-weather feminism can be just as troubling as the gender inequality they see on a regular basis.

This past week the Palestinian hip-hop trio released their latest single “Who Are You?/مين انت” with sights set uncompromisingly on the gender stereotypes and double standards faced by women in their community. MC’s Tamer and Suheil Nafar, Mahmood Jreiri, and singer Maysa Daw (the group’s most recent–and sole female–member) penned the song as part of a partnership program with the United Nations Population Fund, reports Middle East-focused newssite +972. 

Source: magazine.good.is

Franklin Lamb
National Museum, Damascus

International condemnations from citizens and governments have reached near fever intensity as most of us are horrified and disgusted at what jihadi militants are smashing and decimating in Syria. And also in places like Mosel and Nimrud in Iraq and increasingly in Africa and Asia from Somalia to Timbuktu in Mali on to Pakistan and beyond.

Officials and citizens in Syria continue organizing grass roots heritage campaigns and workshops to save our shared global heritage which has been in their protective custody for thousands of years. But never has our heritage faced more ravaging and serious threats than today and an intense international debate is happening on the subject of how best to preserve artifacts from the ancient world in the midst of war and religious extremism.

Subjects being examined include whether international collectors and museums-and even international institutions and police agencies should stop returning or repatriating suspected stolen artifacts to the lands from where they originated, including thousands from Syria. Some Museum directors, archaeologists, collectors argue in favor of the proposition that favors retention or partage of endangered artifacts unlawfully removed from source countries. In this context “partage” means sharing of a country’s antiquities which was the colonialist- even orientalist- system put in place mostly in Egypt, Iraq, Turkey and Afghanistan to divide up ownership of excavated artifacts during the beginning of the 20th Century. The advocates of partage usually are quick to point out that developed countries would hold the treasures of countries at risk for safe keeping but not in perpetuity. But at least keep them in lockup until a conflict is over and security for the irreplaceable heritage objects can be substantially assured.

According to the New York Times this week, given the violence in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and northern Africa, the former director of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, is advocating that museums become much more circumspect about rushing to return antiquities. His reasoning is based on a claimed fear for the safety of the antiquities once they arrive back in the source country.

This observer has to date detected no widespread support for this argument in Syria which if adopted could seriously delay repatriation of Syria’s looted and smuggled antiquities. Syrian officials and scholars interviewed me overwhelming reject this point of view as does the Syrian public. Some have noted that using the destructive frenzy by Islamic State extremists to lobby against repatriation seeks to justify discredited practices and reeks of neo-colonialism.

In point of fact, support for repatriation-immediate return has gained ground in antiquities circles in recent years and this is the position of antiquities officials in Syria. The above noted argument is also opposed UN Specialized Agencies including the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) which strongly opposes museums and collectors acquiring ancient objects if the items left their countries of origin after 1970.

The widely shared UNESCO policy is focused on impeding archaeological smuggling by curtailing demand while upholding the sovereignty of source nations. Repatriation is also enshrined in international treaties, international customary law and the laws of many nations including the European Union countries and the United States and Canada.

The current trend is that museums and art dealers are agreeing to send back or repatriate vaguely documented or disputed artifacts to Syria, items often obtained under dubious circumstances. Ricardo L. Elia, an archaeologist at Boston University who believes the Western market for antiquities spurs the plundering of global archaeological sites was quoted this week in the NY Times as declaring “It was only a matter of time before some in the art-collecting community tried to turn this cultural nightmare to their own advantage by advocating retaining antiquities looted elsewhere.”

But some antiquities experts say pillaging by jihadists and radical groups in Syria challenges UNESCO orthodoxy because irreplaceable antiquities ought to be considered the common property of all mankind and that wholesale repatriation endangers the cultural heritage of the very countries it supposedly benefits. This argument claims that the sources country may not be able to protect and preserve its antiquities particularly during periods of violent conflict like those raging in Syria and Iraq. A former vice chairman of the American Bar Association’s Art and Cultural Heritage Law Committee, Mr. Peter Tompa stated this week, “If the people of these lands are indifferent and even hostile to their ‘cultural heritage,’ what’s the point in reserving it for them to ignore or destroy?”

But this argument has to date been largely rejected. The Association of Art Museum Directors, which circulates guidelines for some 250 museums in the US, urges its members to cooperate fully when their antiquities holdings are challenged and the association supports immediate repatriation of Syrian looted and smuggled antiquities. This practice is preferable so as not to weaken or obscure the right of Syria to possess and protect its stolen antiquities and increasingly, according to UNESCO, the Syrian Ministry of Culture and its Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums are very capable of safeguarding and preparing for their exhibition and the return of tourists once the crises is over.

Source: www.scoop.co.nz

A series of events in Italy during the month of March show that, despite the government’s strong ties with Israel and recent efforts to shut down the debate on Palestine, the boycott divestment and sanctions movement is becoming more and more mainstream.

In mid-March, a speaking tour by Omar Barghouti, among the co-founders of the BDS movement, brought the aims and goals of the campaign to standing-room only crowds at universities and institutions in Rome, Bologna and Turin.

At an event at Parliament organized by MPs for Peace, Barghouti detailed the movement’s motives and successes and called on Italy, as Israel’s top arms supplier in Europe, to suspend military trade and joint research projects. Barghouti also urged MPs to join efforts to suspend the trade agreement between the European Union and Israel. On the Italian Parliament’s recent ambiguous vote on the recognition of a Palestinian State, which left so much up to interpretation that it was welcomed by both Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Barghouti explained that it wasn’t the vote itself that mattered, but what comes after. “If, for example, it is followed by a motion for a military embargo, then it becomes more than just a symbolic measure.”

Barghouti also met with leaders of the metalworkers unions of Italy’s three national confederations, FIOM-Cgil, which has endorsed BDS, FIM-Cisl and UIM-Uil, representing altogether over 500 hundred thousand workers. In a joint statement, the unions recognized that the BDS campaign “has proven itself to be the main form of nonviolent struggle for an end to the Israeli occupation and the Israeli government’s continued violation of the Palestinian people’s human rights.”

In an effort to stimulate the discussion on BDS, local organizers sought debate opponents for Barghouti’s public talks, though without much luck. Pro-Zionist figures and opponents of BDS either did not reply to requests or turned down the invitation.

Source: mondoweiss.net

Muslim leaders in eastern Idaho were deeply offended by Islamophobic statements contained in a Monday newsletter distributed by the Bonneville County Republican Central Committee.

In the newsletter, an article entitled “Islam in Idaho” warns that Muslims are “infiltrating” the state. It claims Muslims have been taught to “be ready to rise up and kill” non-Muslims and to be “two-faced,” in order to deceive people into believing their intentions are good.

The article called on newsletter readers to “demand that our lawmakers and law enforcers pay attention and ascertain whether or not there is a potential threat.”

“Please, don’t wait until something bad happens,” the article later said.

After learning of the article’s contents, Idaho State University professor Daniel Hummel, a practicing Muslim who teaches political science, said it simply is a rehash of conspiracy theories espoused by radical anti-Muslims.

“This is the same garbage that we’ve been hearing forever,” he said.

When such extremist views are espoused by those who have a degree of power, Hummel said, it can threaten the safety of Muslim communities.

“We’re seeing hate crimes go up year by year, and so stuff like this — especially coming from the top of an organization like the Bonneville County GOP — is really disconcerting for us living here in eastern Idaho,” he said. “Vigilantes” could take such assertions seriously, Hummel said, and commit hate crimes against area Muslims.

Bonneville GOP chairman Doyle Beck said Wednesday afternoon that he was “in Texas in a helicopter” and not available for comment. Wednesday night, Bonneville GOP executive director Becky Prestwich said she wrote the article, which is unsigned but appears below a picture of Beck.

Prestwich said she regretted that she wasn’t more specific in her comments. She said the article was concerned with radical Muslims, not all Muslims. Prestwich said she believes that at least 10 percent of Muslims are radicals.

Ibrahim Hooper, national spokesman of the Council on American-Islamic Relations — the largest Muslim civil rights organization in the country — said Hummel is right to worry about such rhetoric.

“What we see is that the level of anti-Muslim rhetoric goes up and then we see a minority of bigots turn that hate rhetoric into violent actions,” Hooper said.

The article specifically attacked the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which Prestwich characterized as a front group in an interview with the Post Register.

“Muslims are taught to be ‘two faced,’” the article said, “that is, to present the face of friendship to enemies but to inwardly hate them. To wait to be called to jihad and be ready to rise up and kill the enemy when called. Given that type of deeply ingrained teaching, are we to take them at their word when organizations like CAIR dispute that there are any nefarious intentions?”

The article also painted Muslims as violent toward other religions.

“There are at least 109 (chapters of the Quran) that advocate violence and death towards infidels,” the article said. “And make no mistake; if you are not a Muslim, you are an infidel. Period.”

Not true, Hooper said.

“I’ve been a Muslim for many decades,” he said. “I’ve never heard an actual Muslim use the word ‘infidel.’ The only time you hear that is from anti-Muslim bigots.”

Scientific polling does not support the notion that American Muslims are hostile toward other religions. In fact, it is the exact opposite: Among American religious groups that were polled, Muslims and Mormons had the most positive views of other religions.

Among the groups surveyed, Gallup found Mormons and Muslims had the highest percentage of religiously “integrated” members, at about 45 percent. That compares to about 35 percent of Protestants, Catholics and Jews rated as religiously integrated.

According to the study, “Integrated individuals go beyond a ‘live-and-let-live’ attitude and actively seek to know more about and learn from others of different religious traditions. They believe that most faiths make a positive contribution to society.”

Hummel said there was a long history of constructive relations between The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and American Muslims. Mormons often are very supportive of the right of Muslim communities to build places of worship, Hummel said, because they have experienced attempts to block construction of Mormon places of worship.

The newsletter article alleges that the Pocatello mosque, which opened last year, was built “over the objections of many of the citizens of that town.”

But Hummel and another ISU professor said that was untrue. The community generally was supportive, they said, with only a small minority raising objections. Several churches supported the mosque. Among its biggest supporters were members of the Mormon church.

“There’s a reason why people of the LDS faith support the Muslim community all over the country,” Hummel said. “Because they lived it.… They know and experience, on a day-to-day basis, religious discrimination.”

Professor Sean Anderson, chairman of the ISU political science department, said the newsletter invoked similar stereotypes as those used to justify persecution of Mormons, as well as Catholics, at earlier times in American history.

Blaming all Muslims for the actions of terrorists who claim to be Muslim, Anderson said, is akin to blaming all Christians for the actions of Aryan Nations, whose Christian Identity movement, formerly headquartered in northern Idaho, claims to be Christian.

Anderson, a self-described “moderate Republican” who formerly served as a precinct committeeman, said he worried such rhetoric would undermine the party’s credibility.

“(Opponents) could paint all of the GOP as being racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, bigoted,” he said. “It tarnishes the reputation of the party.”

Dr. Fahim Rahim, of the Idaho Kidney Institute, a practicing Muslim and local philanthropist, asked Prestwich to “stop spreading hatred and fear.”

“We Idahoans are building bridges of love and understanding so our next generations can thrive and love each other regardless of our culture, religion and identity,” Rahim said in an email. “Please don’t spoil it for your political gains.

“We cannot let such people divide us and our kids and create hatred among them. I want my kids and your kids to grow up in the future and look each other in the eye with love and tolerance. This is what America is all about. And more importantly this is what humanity is all about.”

Source: www.idahostatesman.com

Imagine that you had digital access to all the books that have ever been written. Imagine further that you could search through them just by a few keystrokes. And that you could find out how frequently any word or expression of interest to you were used through the ages. Do you think this would be an extraordinary tool?

In fact, that tool already exists and it currently can search through more than six million books. That is possible first because Google has already digitized about a quarter of the 130 million books that have ever been written, and secondly, because two brilliant scientists have produced a software that allows anyone to perform such word searches and in a number of languages.

I recently read the book that those two young scientists — Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel — published in 2013, where they describe their work, give all kinds of illuminating examples and explain why this may be regarded as a quantum leap in our exploration of various aspects of history. The book, Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture, gives a number of examples of word comparisons that can be performed through time (going back to the earliest book available) and where, in each case, one sees how humanity sometimes gradually and sometimes suddenly changed its mindset: Men and women (spoiler: the word “women” overtakes “men” in books in 1983), war and peace, gold and oil, coffee and tea, science and religion, Catholics and Muslims and many more. One quickly sees how this tool indeed becomes a “lens” on human culture.

As I have mentioned, the tool can be used by everyone; it is freely usable online, at: https://books.google.com/ngrams. In December 2010, Aiden and Michel published a paper presenting their work in the top journal Science and simultaneously released the tool, the “Ngram Viewer”, which allows anyone to do search comparisons between words or expressions from 1500 to today, or actually to 2008, to be accurate. The next day, it was on the front page of the New York Times, and within 24 hours, it got more than three million visits. Clearly, they had hit on something.

I remember hearing about the Ngram Viewer a few years ago and actually visiting the webpage and doing a few searches for fun, but I had not grasped its historical and cultural significance. The book explains this very well, and in witty style.

Indeed, applications range from the linguistic to the socio-political: One can investigate and come to understand the history and evolution of irregular verbs, social norms (through expressions, such as “slavery”, “heaven and hell”, “terrorism”, etc.), scientific topics (“evolution”, “space ship” or “space travel”, “cancer”, “autism”, etc.), how people become famous (and which types of personalities society prefers), how quickly various technologies spread through society (trains, telephones, radio, TV, internet, etc.), and many other trends.

The moment I understood all this, and well before I finished the book, I went online and decided to do some “interesting” searches. On the barebone webpage, I saw the languages menu, and I immediately thought: ‘Yes, I’ll search through the Arabic heritage; there are so many things one can learn from the frequency with which some words or expressions have been used in Arabic books through history!’ How disappointed — I was to find that Arabic was not one of the available languages: American English, British English, Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Russian and Spanish.

There have actually been some digitisation efforts made with Arabic or Islamic manuscripts. For example, the Yemeni Manuscript Digitisation Initiative, the largest of such efforts, covers 50,000 books from the 10th century to the present; the Welcome Arabic Manuscripts collection has about 1,000 digitised texts on the history of medicine; and other such initiatives, often found in western universities. Compared to the millions of books that Google and Ngram allow one to search, those manuscript collections are a tiny fraction of the Arabic/Islamic heritage. The Arab-Muslim world may currently have other fish to fry, but this is an important cultural development that some governments or cultural foundations should seriously consider.

In fact, it is not just books that are being digitised (Google says it will be done with all 130 million of them by 2020), newspapers are being digitised (one Australian foundation has already taken care of 100 million articles), and of course our current online activity (emails, tweets, facebook posts, Instagram pictures, YouTube videos, etc.) is already digital. Soon, the sum total of our digital records will provide both scholars and the general public extraordinary fields to plough, where human history, society and culture could be examined from various angles.

The Arab world must move its history and culture from the dusty shelves of old libraries and private collections to the digital, open and immediately accessible world of today and tomorrow.

Nidhal Guessoum is a professor at the American University of Sharjah. You can follow him on Twitter at: www.twitter.com/@NidhalGuessoum.

Source: gulfnews.com

LAUSANNE, Switzerland — Iran and European nations said here tonight that they had reached a surprisingly specific and comprehensive general understanding about next steps in limiting Tehran’s nuclear program, but officials said that some important issues needed to be resolved before a final agreement in June that would allow the Obama administration to assert it has cut off all of Iran’s pathways to a nuclear weapon.

Source: www.nytimes.com

BETHLEHEM, West Bank — The runners looped four times through this city, following a route that took them from the Church of the Nativity, traditionally considered Christ’s birthplace, down Bethlehem’s main avenue and alongside Israel’s looming separation barrier, scrawled with graffiti and blackened from hurled projectiles.

The Palestine Marathon, held last week, is a hemmed-in affair, much like the city where it is run. “In Bethlehem, there’s not a continuous 42 kilometers,” huffed Marwa Younis, 32, as she ran. “You have to run back and forth.”

But that is exactly why the organizers of the Right to Movement: Palestine Marathon chose to stage it here. What better way to draw attention to the constraints Palestinians say they face in their daily lives?

Source: www.nytimes.com

France sees a window of opportunity after Israel’s elections to get the United States on board with a new push for Mideast peace, and is preparing a draft UN Security Council resolution in about 12 days, according to French diplomatic officials.

The draft would define the pre-1967 frontier as a reference point for border talks but allow room for exchanges of territory, designate Jerusalem as capital of both Israel and a Palestinian state and call for a fair solution for Palestinian refugees, one official told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

While the substance of the French draft may not differ much from past failed efforts to revive Mideast peace talks, France is hoping this time to avoid a U.S. veto at the UN because of increasing American frustration with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The French official described a possible “backdoor” for negotiations now, and said “all actors including the Americans now realize that all other ways have been explored, without success.”

Source: www.haaretz.com

After more than five years and much diplomatic wrangling, Palestine has joined the International Criminal Court (ICC). Now, the prospect of Israel being held accountable for war crimes has greatly increased, and that will have significant repercussions for the peace process and for Palestinian statehood.
ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda opened a preliminary investigation on January 16. This can investigate everything that has happened in Palestinian territories since June 13 2014 – the date that Palestine formally accepted ICC jurisdiction. This is also the date when Israel broke a ceasefire with Hamas leading to Operation Protective Edge, which raged throughout the summer of 2014, leading to the deaths of at least 1,473 civilians in Gaza and bringing widespread international condemnation against Israeli actions.
The story dates back to 2009, when the Palestinian Authority requested that the ICC investigate Israel over Operation Cast Lead, but was rejected for not being a state. It was rejected for full membership in the United Nations in 2011, but was granted the status of non-member observer state the following year.
Palestine then joined numerous international organisations, such as UNESCO, and while the question of its statehood remains controversial, it has now been allowed to join the ICC. In the interim it has periodically indicated it would refer Israel to the ICC, but was held back by pressure from the US, the UK and France – and because using the threat suited Palestinian political interests.

Source: www.juancole.com