Author Archives: Arab America

The Institut des Cultures d’Islam is presently comprised of two buildings located in the French capital’s densely populated Goutte d’Or neighborhood, many of whose residents have roots in the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa.

Run by the City of Paris, the ambiguously named cultural center took 10 years to get off the ground. The City was both looking to alleviate the need for more mosques – the center houses a mosque, run by the Grand Mosque of Paris – and to showcase contemporary artwork linked to the greater Middle East.

“We don’t ask that [the artists] be believers, but they can be of Muslim culture, or else artists who are not Muslim but are interested in the cultures of Islam,” ICI president Jamel Oubechou told Le Monde several years ago. “Or artists who are Muslim or from Muslim cultures who live in non-Muslim countries.”

While cultural centers are generally given the green light in France and the additional mosque took some pressure off the city, the Institute’s chosen name enraged certain politicians, who felt it was a poor choice in this staunchly secular country.

ICI is now hosting “Cherchez L’erreur” (What’s wrong with this picture), an exhibition of work by leading female artists from the Arab world and Iran.

The show opened the week after the deadly attacks on the Charlie Hebdo newspaper and the kosher supermarket, and the killing of a police officer.

So social tension and tragedy provided the backdrop for “Cherchez L’erreur.” The show’s opening evening was taken over by representatives from the Socialist-run Paris municipality, anxious to reinforce the need for diversity, tolerance and cultural understanding, representing a united front against the rising far-right and openly Islamophobic National Front party.

“Cherchez L’erreur” is the project of Franco-Tunisian curator and author Michket Krifa – who recently directed the photography festival in Bamako, Mali, and co-edited the 2011 book “Arab Photography Now.”

Affected by last summer’s bloody events in Gaza, Syria and Iraq, Krifa was at a loss as to what to do. “We’re all so impotent, faced with what’s happening in the Middle East,” she said. “People rose up for a better life and for more rights and now it’s just total chaos.

“Women, in a sense, are the guardians of the temple that is daily life. Men go off to war and the women try to keep a routine. They have an eye for detail and intimacy.”

The exhibition’s title refers to what she hopes is obvious: “War and instruments of war are what’s wrong with the picture. It’s daily life that is the norm.”

The show takes place on two floors of ICI’s main building and the ground floor of a second building nearby. Aside from the sculptures of Morocco-based Franco-Algerian artist Zoulikha Bouabdellah, the work is photographic, including a few short films and the widely viewed video of Palestinian poet Rafeef Ziadah’s 2011 performance “We teach life, Sir.”

While the artists were aware of the Paris events, it’s not surprising that they did not feel their work was related to them.

East-Jerusalem-based photographer Tanya Habjouqa is showing her ongoing project “Occupied Pleasures,” in which she explores the notion of pleasure in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

“For me, the horrors of what happened in Paris do not have any relation to the exhibit, [which, however,] “shows humanity under strife,” Habjouqa said. “That is what is needed in times such as the violent events that unfolded with Charlie Hebdo. This terrorism is something that we are well aware of in the Middle East.”

To Habjouqa, whose photographs are at times surreal, at other times joyful, “this exhibit is a reminder” and a tribute to humanity and humor in the face of a region she feels “has been reduced to stereotypes.

Source: www.dailystar.com.lb

On the hugely popular “Arabs Got Talent” TV show in Beirut last month, five young musicians in checkered black-and-white scarves brought the house down with a traditional Arabic song that left the judges weeping and earned a ticket straight to the finals.

In the Gaza Strip there was much weeping and celebration too, especially at the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music, where the group, made up of four boys and a girl aged between 12 and 16, learned to play their instruments.

For the past three years, Anas an-Najar, a teacher at the conservatory, has dedicated himself to the band, honing their skills on the zither, lute, drum and wooden flute, while the fifth member sings in soaring, lilting melodies.

Because they will perform live on the finals show on Feb. 28, Saudi-owned broadcaster MBC has asked them not to speak to the media. But their success — a YouTube video of their performance has been watched more than 8.7 million times — has drawn the school where they practise into the spotlight.

Occupying a single floor of a non-descript building owned by the Palestinian Red Crescent Society in Tel al-Hawa, a middle class neighborhood of Gaza city, the conservatory would barely pass notice from the outside.

On the inside, the walls are lined with posters of Arab and Western musicians — Tchaikovsky next to Kamal Al Taweel, a renowned Egyptian composer — and the classrooms are a hive of activity as dozens of students are put through their paces.

Started in 2008 as a project of the AM Qattan Foundation, which runs cultural programs in the Arab world, the school was taken over by the Edward Said National Conservatory in 2012, becoming its fifth branch in the Palestinian territories.

Despite three wars in six years and a blockade imposed by Egypt and Israel, playing music has steadily gained popularity in Gaza, serving as an outlet in times of hardship.

More than 250 students now apply to the conservatory each year, with between 30 and 40 gaining places. The staff of 13 gives lectures on music theory, individual lessons and instruction for small ensembles to a near-full orchestra.

“Music is able to transfer these students from a world full of pressures to another more comfortable world,” said Khamis Abu Sha’ban, the school’s deputy administrator.

“LANGUAGE OF PEACE”

In a rehearsal room, the orchestra is practicing with intensity, the conductor asking individuals to repeat passages to get the phrasing precise. The school, which bought most of its instruments in Egypt or Syria or received them as donations from Belgium’s Music Fund, lends them to the students.

“Music is the language of peace and harmony,” said 11-year-old Firas Al-Shrafi, who has been learning the zither since he was four. “It brings joy to our souls at a time of sadness.”

While music may be gaining popularity among the young in Gaza, it remains less of a draw than other activities. As students practiced their scales last week, some 17,000 youngsters graduated from a week-long military camp run by Hamas, the Islamist group that has controlled Gaza since 2007.

Still, for those bitten by the music bug there is one focus: getting better while cheering on the five young Gazans hoping to become the first Palestinians to win “Arabs Got Talent”.

“A lot of work has been done with those children,” said Abu Sha’ban of the young hopefuls. “We wish them victory.”

Source: kfgo.com

The 19th-century fad for Orientalism was a fantasy depiction of ‘exotic’ lands and people. Robert Everett-Green explores a new exhibition that decodes the works, revealing the colonialist aims behind the paintings’ lavish surfaces

Source: www.theglobeandmail.com

  The Lebanese passport is the 88th most valuable in the world, and as a result, any holder of valid Lebanese passport can visit the following countries without making any prior visa plans. Burundi: Visa on arrival – 30 days; obtainable at Bujumbura International Airport   Cambodia: Visa on arrival.   Cape Verde: Visa on … Continued

Cancer affects all of us, whether you’re a son, mother, sister, friend, coworker, doctor, or patient. Cancer is not something one anticipates ever happening to themselves, or their loved ones. Abdalla Ibrahim, 14 year old son of Yacoub and Wisam Ibrahim, certainly never expected to be diagnosed with stage four Hodgkins Lymphoma. 

Abdalla, brother to his five siblings: Nour, Rania, Wedad, Yousef, and his twin, Adel, has lived a life surrounded with love and support, but now needs your help to get him and his family through this tough time. The Ibrahim family is a strong family, but with life’s ups and downs sometimes you need to look to your neighbor, friend, and community for a shoulder to lean on. 

They say tough times never last, but tough people do, and Abdalla is one tough young man. With Abdalla’s family and friends, and your support, he will be able to beat this disease and come out a cancer survivor. Abdalla is an eighth grade student at Stout Middle School, a football player for the “Dearborn Junior Pioneers” and the Detroit Lion’s number one fan. He has aspirations of going to college and becoming a lawyer one day, and hopes “this is just another story to tell in the future.” 

Many have asked how they can help Abdalla and his family. Any donations to help support Abdalla’s battle, his future and the American Cancer Society  would be greatly appreciated.

Help Abdalla have the chance to tell his story and make a difference in the world.

Source: www.gofundme.com

Famous author Amos Oz said on Sunday that “in a few short months we can reduce the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to an Israel-Gaza conflict.”

In a speech on the IDF and Israeli society at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Oz was explaining that he believes peace could be reached quickly with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and the West Bank Palestinians, so that the conflict with the Palestinians would be limited to a conflict with Hamas in Gaza.

Oz urged accepting the principles of the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, saying that if it had been offered to Israel 50 years ago, the country “would have been dancing in the streets.”

Next, he said that Israel did not win the 1973 war as many think, but “Sadat won the war because he broke the status quo.”

He explained that Egypt’s attack, led by then president Anwar Sadat, pushed Israel eventually into making peace with it and giving up the Sinai Desert.

Further, Oz slammed right-wing politicians from Bayit Yehudi and the Likud as trying to “start a religious war over the Temple Mount.”

He said that if they want this religious war, it should be “without me and my children.”

Oz said that he is not disputing Israel’s right to ascend the Temple Mount, which he said is undisputed.

Rather, he said that just as he may have the right to cross a road where the light is green and a policeman signals him to go, but he might decline to go if a truck is bearing down on the intersection at a dangerous speed, the state should decline to exercise its right to make praying on the Temple Mount into a bigger conflict.

Oz also slammed the government on “trying to put America in its place,” implying that the current government has played diplomatic hardball too roughly with its big brother diplomatic ally.

He added that continued “occupation of over two million Palestinians” could kill the country.

Following Oz, former Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) director Ami Ayalon slammed the government’s war policy in the summer Gaza war.

Source: www.jpost.com

In many parts of the United States, if you want to win an election, you need talking points full of misinformation and bigotry towards Muslims to scare the wits out of non-Muslim Americans in to voting for you (and others to fund your campaign). Events in the Middle East simply provide more fuel to an already-raging fire, and convince officials elected to serve all of their constituents that their inappropriate and bigoted comments will not only go unchallenged but will be applauded.

Take, for example, Texas state Representative Molly White’s idea of southern hospitality: as American Muslim Texans descended on Austin for an Annual Capitol Day to celebrate their civic right to free expression, the freshman Republican posted on Facebook:

Most member including myself are back in district. I did leave an Israeli flag on my desk in my office with instructions to staff to ask representative form the Muslim community to renounce Islamic terrorist groups and publicly announce allegiance to America and our laws.

A McCarthy-esque welcome to her Muslim constituents by a right-wing politician is disgusting – but White’s not the only Republican to try to convince the general public that American Muslims are not patriotic, do not integrate into society at large and have no idea how to engage the civic process. She’s just the one most lacking in irony, given that she did so while the Muslim Texans she apparently dislikes were engaging in the civic process.

Texas is home to large pockets of American Muslims, many of whom have lived there for decades. And White earned a rebuke from the speaker of the Texas house, who responded to complaints about her actions by saying that “Legislators have a responsibility to treat all visitors just as we expect to be treated – with dignity and respect.”

Source: www.theguardian.com

Whenever the subject of Islamist terrorism comes up, the national conversation almost always circles back to a somewhat bigoted question: are Muslims more violent than other kinds of people because of their religion?

What these conversations usually lack is data; that is, evidence that Muslim societies are actually more violent than other ones. And it turns out, according to UC-Berkeley Professor M. Steven Fish, that judging by murder rates, people in Muslim-majority countries actually tend to be significantly less violent (bolding is mine):

Predominantly, Muslim countries average 2.4 murders per annum per 100,000 people, compared to 7.5 in non-Muslim countries. The percentage of the society that is made up of Muslims is an extraordinarily good predictor of a country’s murder rate. More authoritarianism in Muslim countries does not account for the difference. I have found that controlling for political regime in statistical analysis does not change the findings. More Muslims, less homicide.

Fish further fleshed out these findings, for example by re-running the numbers to exclude non-Muslim-majority states with extraordinarily high murder rates (Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica, Lesotho, South Africa, and Venezuela). Countries with lots of Muslims were still less murder prone by a pretty large margin. You can read more details on Fish’s findings in his book, titled Are Muslims Distinctive?

If Islam itself were in fact the key cause of Islamist terrorism, you’d expect ordinary Muslims to be more violent than ordinary non-Muslims. There are over a billion believing Muslims globally; if their religion were intrinsically prone to violence, the data would bear that out. In fact, it does nothing of the sort.

Still, there’s no denying that Islamist extremist terrorism is a real phenomenon and real problem the rightly receives widespread study. (Fish offers his own argument, that Islamist terrorism is best understood as a reaction to Western foreign policy, but his case is exceedingly unpersuasive.)

That’s not to say you can absolve the West completely. Foreign invasions of Muslim countries clearly played a role in fueling the growth of violent Islamist movements. The US-led invasion of Iraq, for example, created widespread chaos and violence, and that chaos and violence gave way to extremism. But the West is only one among a variety of factors at play in the broader 20th and 21st-century trend of Islamist extremism. Other factors have included the prevalence of dictatorship in the Muslim world, Sunni-Shia sectarianism, and, yes, theological doctrines developed by modern Islamists such as Muhammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab and Sayyid Qutb.

In that sense, though, Islam is like almost any other religion: its core tenets can be read both to prohibit and to justify political violence, depending on who’s doing the interpreting. That doesn’t mean Islam is intrinsically violent. It just means Muslims are people like everyone else. This data should be an important reminder of that distinction.

Source: www.vox.com

Cuba’s former president Fidel Castro compared NATO’s recent statements to that of Nazi SS and accused US and its allies of igniting conflicts abroad. Castro slammed John McCain for backing Israel and accused both of being involved in the creation of ISIS.

‘Stop NATO!’ Anti-militarist protest gains momentum in Wales ahead of summit

Apparently referring to the pressure the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has been trying to exert on Moscow in connection with the Ukrainian crisis, which coincides with calls for theramping up of military budgets of NATO member countries, Cuba’s iconic leader accused Western politicians of hypocrisy and aggression.

“Many people are astonished when they hear the statements made by some European spokesmen for NATO when they speak with the style and face of the Nazi SS,” Castro wrote in a column published in Cuban state media.

“Adolf Hitler’s greed-based empire went down in history with no more glory than the encouragement provided to NATO’s aggressive and bourgeois governments, which makes them the laughing stock of Europe and the world.”

Castro, 88, also attacked US Senator John McCain over his policies in the Middle East, describing him as “Israel’s most unconditional ally.”

Source: rt.com

Since the beginning of 2015, the Civil Administration of the Israel Defense Forces has demolished 77 homes, livestock pens, farm buildings and other structures of Palestinians in Area C of the West Bank, since they were built without building permits. As a result, 110 people, around half of them children, lost their homes at the height of the winter, according to a report compiled by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Between January 19 and January 26, the Civil Administration demolished 41 structures, OCHA said, far higher than the weekly average for 2014 of nine demolitions per week. In the seven-day period, Civil Administration inspectors delivered 45 construction stop orders and two demolition orders.

In 2014, the Civil Administration demolished the homes of 969 Palestinians — a total of 493 homes and ancillary structures — built without permits, in Area C of the West Bank, which under the Oslo Accords is under exclusive Israeli control. In East Jerusalem seven Palestinian buildings were demolished, including two on January 29 in the Jabal Mukkaber neighborhood. Buildings were also torn down in Isawiyah, Shoafat and Ras al Amud. In East Jerusalem, 208 Palestinians were displaced in 2014 after Israel demolished 97 buildings. In 2014, according to OCHA figures, the Israeli authorities destroyed 590 Palestinian-owned structures in Area C and East Jerusalem, displacing 1,177 people.

The 41 structures demolished by the Civil Administration between January 19 and January 26, according to OCHA, were in Bedouin and other pastoral communities in the area of Hebron, Jericho, Ramallah and Beit Iksa, northwest of Jerusalem. They included buildings that were donated by European humanitarian organizations. Construction stop orders were issued for a park funded by donor nations in the Yatta area and buildings in the Ramallah area and near Tubas, in the northern Jordan Valley.

The IDF’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories said in response that according to its data, the Civil Administration took action against 408 illegally built Palestinian structures in 2014, 118 of which were destroyed by their owners. It added that in January 2015, 42 buildings were the target of law enforcement. 

Source: www.haaretz.com

I’m the girl banned from attending Christian religion classes, and Sunday mass
Although I am a witness to the crucifixion of Jesus
In Train Station Square at the height of the morning
Even then, all the windows were open and the blood was racing the cars on the asphalt
The eyes of the girls were running in Heaven, catching the forbidden rocking chair.

I am the girl banned from love in the squares
I stood in the middle of the street and gathered in my hand the stars of the sky, individually,
And the sweat of the street vendors
The voices of beggars
And the people who love God as they damn this moment that the creatures of God approved
To crucifying Jesus naked in the crowded square on the clock arms as it declared one at noon
I, the girl banned from saying no, will never miss the dawn

Source: arablit.org

At the start of the year, the extremist anti-Islamic group the Freedom Defense Initiative purchased 50 controversial ads to be displayed on San Francisco city buses. The ads – perceived as out of step with the city’s largely liberal metropolitan community – called for an end to aid to Islamic countries and depicted a Muslim leader consorting with Hitler, essentially equating Islam with Nazism. In response to these Islamophobic messages, street artists affiliated with the Bay Area Art Queers Unleashing Power acted quickly to cover the ads with vibrant images of Pakistani-American superhero Ms Marvel along with comic-style blurbs trumpeting messages of equality: “Calling All Bigotry Busters,” “Stamp Out Racism” and “Free Speech Isn’t a License to Spread Hate”.

The bus art has been called “graffiti”, “defacement”, and “supremacist criminality” by some, but for an overwhelming majority the culture-jamming demonstration holds a powerful significance. For the first time ever, Muslim Americans have a visible, mainstream superhero they can call to arms. As a major Marvel character, Kamala Khan (Ms Marvel’s alter ego) stands alongside Wolverine, Captain America, Iron Man and the X-Men. Her image is synonymous with her message: freedom of speech belongs to everyone. Ms Marvel comic co-creator and writer G Willow Wilson, a Muslim American herself, likened the bus art to a freedom of speech “call and response”, ultimately summing up her sentiments with a tweet that ended with “Spread love.”

This isn’t the first time comic characters have influenced and informed readers about social-justice issues. Superman has a 75-year history of reflecting and enacting essential virtues such as patriotism, honesty and freedom. A force for good. But we’ve come a long way since the days of homogeneous heroes and damsels in distress. In fact, the largest comic publishers, DC Comics and Marvel, have begun to move towards more inclusive and diverse superhero narratives in both written form and on screen. From releasing the first female Thor title to introducing a mixed-race Spider-Man, Marvel has shifted its spotlight to tell stories more readers can relate to. Agent Carter, a one-shot mini-series spin-off of Agents of SHIELD, with Hayley Atwell reprising her Peggy Carter character from the Captain America films, has had decent reviews. With a Supergirl television series just announced by CBS and a Wonder Woman film set for release in 2017, DC Comics is breaking similar ground. 

Source: www.theguardian.com