Author Archives: Arab America

A prominent Holocaust scholar has canceled a prestigious lecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in protest over the firing of Professor Steven Salaita.

Professor Todd Samuel Presner, the director of Jewish studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), wrote to UIUC Chancellor Phyllis Wise to tell her he would not visit the campus as long as she was in charge.

His letter, dated 28 March and addressed to Wise and UIUC trustees, was publicly released today (full text and a PDF copy are below).

Presner had been scheduled to deliver the 2014-15 Rosenthal Lecture, titled “A Message in a Bottle: Holocaust Testimony and the Jewish Future,” on 27 April.

He said a workshop also planned during his visit would not be canceled, but would be moved off campus and he would not accept any funding or payment from UIUC.

Silencing dissent

“I have thought long and hard about whether I should join with thousands of colleagues in an academic boycott of UIUC due to your actions in the Steven Salaita case,” Presner wrote, noting that “sixteen departments have passed votes of ‘no confidence’ in your administration and others expressed ‘grave concerns’ about what they see to be ‘the abrogation of shared governance’ and ‘the right to free speech.’”

Presner said he would not second guess the decision of the American Indian Studies faculty to hire Salaita as they were the ones qualified to evaluate his scholarship, nor defend the tweets criticizing Israel over which he was fired.

“At the same time,” Presner wrote, “I also believe that we need to thoughtfully and honestly confront the complex and violent reality that spawned these speech acts (and many others, on both sides). That’s a tall order when the silencing of dissent at all levels of public and private discourse is ever‐more prevalent and particularly when that silencing comes from the very places that are meant to protect it.”

Presner criticized Wise’s infamous claim that Salaita lacked “civility” and said that a “far more chilling” message came from the disregard Wise and the university trustees showed for the opinions of faculty, shared governance and the recommendations of the university’s own Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure.

“To deliver the Rosenthal lecture at UIUC while you are at the helm of this institution would be to condone your actions and the leadership of your office and Board,” Presner wrote. “It would essentially mean that it is acceptable to carry on with business as normal. I will not do that.”

Jewish ethical tradition

Presner also wrote about the ethical values that informed his decision: “As a scholar of the Holocaust, I am particularly attuned to the horror of anti-Semitism and the return of fascism throughout Europe and the world. My research on the Holocaust is deeply connected to the Jewish ethical tradition, linking memory with the possibility of building a more just future.”

Presner’s action follows other high profile cancelations of speeches at UIUC, including by Princeton professor and noted public intellectual Cornel West, and Brandeis University law professor Anita Hill.

Salaita has sued university trustees, administrators and donors over his firing last August as he was about to take up a tenured position in the American Indian Studies program.

Todd Samuel Presner’s Letter

28 March 2015

Dear Chancellor Wise and Members of the Board of Trustees,

In December of 2013, I was invited by Professor Matti Bunzl, then Director of the Program in Jewish Culture and Society at the University of Illinois, to deliver the 2014-15 Rosenthal Lecture in Jewish Studies and also to present a second research project at UIUC’s Jewish Studies Workshop. As the Director of UCLA’s Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies and a professor of German-Jewish studies, I enthusiastically accepted the honor. I planned to deliver two talks at the end of April at UIUC: The first, the Rosenthal lecture, was called “A Message in a Bottle: Holocaust Testimony and the Jewish Future.” It looks at a unique trove of letters and messages that were literally buried in bottles during the Holocaust to ask what it means to write to the future from the standpoint of present annihilation. The second, a workshop, was called “The Ethics of the Algorithm: Close and Distant Listening to the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.” Using methods from the digital humanities to analyze the entirety of the archive’s database, the project asks where questions of ethics are to be found in algorithms, information systems, and data structures. As a scholar of the Holocaust, I am particularly attuned to the horror of anti-Semitism and the return of fascism throughout Europe and the world. My research on the Holocaust is deeply connected to the Jewish ethical tradition, linking memory with the possibility of building a more just future.

I have thought long and hard about whether I should join with thousands of colleagues in an academic boycott of UIUC due to your actions in the Steven Salaita case. At UIUC, sixteen departments have passed votes of “no confidence” in your administration and others expressed “grave concerns” about what they see to be “the abrogation of shared governance” and “the right to free speech.” I have followed closely the details of Salaita’s complaint posted on the Center for Constitutional Rights’ website, the university’s motion to dismiss, the report of UIUC’s Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure, and your unwillingness to respond to the investigation by the UIUC AAUP Chapter Policy Committee on Academic Freedom and Shared Governance, which concludes that you have “violated [the] principles of shared governance and of academic freedom, both in procedure and in substance.” What standards and values could be more central to the entire enterprise of higher education?

I am writing to let you know that I have decided to cancel my Rosenthal lecture in Jewish Studies at UIUC out of protest but that I will still come to Urbana-Champaign in April to meet with faculty, staff, and students. I will not accept any payment, including honoraria, from the university, nor meet on campus or make use of any campus facilities. But rather than unilaterally boycotting UIUC, I will come to Urbana Champaign – with my own funding – to meet with faculty and students as well as to give my promised workshop in Jewish Studies off campus. To use the words of Professor Susan Koshy at UIUC, I believe that academic boycotts are “a blunt instrument,” levelling punishment in an undifferentiated way at an institution. Although they may, indeed, have exerted some pressure on your administration, the boycotts have also prevented some critical conversations from happening and possible, new coalitions from forming.

Let me provide you with a bit more about my reasoning in arriving at this position. Your faculty, who are experts in the field, selected Salaita for a position in your American Indian Studies Program. I respect their judgment, and since I was not asked to evaluate his scholarship, I will not do so here. As you know, much has been written, on all sides, interpreting, justifying, condemning, and explaining the tweets that Salaita sent during the Israel-Gaza conflict this past summer. I neither defend his tweets nor do I offer an assessment of his scholarship, which was vetted by your faculty members, the hiring committee, and outside peer reviewers. While I vigilantly defend freedom of expression and the special protections afforded unpopular speech, I will not defend anti-Semitic remarks or racism of any kind. I’ve read passionate indictments of Salaita’s tweets and also passionate defenses. The same goes for his scholarship. I want to be unequivocally clear about my own position: I condemn anti-Semitic speech and also recognize his right to express his views. At the same time, I also believe that we need to thoughtfully and honestly confront the complex and violent reality that spawned these speech acts (and many others, on both sides). That’s a tall order when the silencing of dissent at all levels of public and private discourse is evermore prevalent and particularly when that silencing comes from the very places that are meant to protect it.

The reason that I have decided not to give the 2015 Rosenthal lecture has to do with the way that your office – together with your Board – circumvented the principles of faculty governance, rejected the process of academic peer review, and ignored every level of faculty and decanal jurisdiction beneath the Chancellor’s office. Besides your insistence on “civility” as the dubious touchstone for all academic discourse, the other – far more chilling – message that you sent was this: The faculty members in the American Indian Studies Program, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, UIUC’s Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure, and all the existing procedures and practices of shared governance no longer apply in UIUC’s new “state of exception.”

Without consulting UIUC’s scholarly community, your office and Board now decide what constitutes appropriate scholarship and speech on campus. I am deeply disturbed by this precedent and fear that faculty governance at UIUC has been undermined. To be sure, public institutions like UIUC (and UCLA, for that matter) must be responsive to the diverse communities they serve. This includes listening to voices outside of the formal levels of shared academic governance including students, alumni, elected officials, taxpayers, and philanthropic partners. But until now, these voices have always been and should properly remain advisory to the academic experts – the faculty – of the university.

To deliver the Rosenthal lecture at UIUC while you are at the helm of this institution would be to condone your actions and the leadership of your office and Board. It would essentially mean that it is acceptable to carry on with business as normal. I will not do that. At the same time, I do not agree with punishing your faculty and students. As such, I will come to Urbana-Champaign on my own to give my workshop and meet with faculty, staff, and student leaders to formulate ways that we can work together to preserve the principles of shared governance and academic freedom while also engaging with the broader public and our donor communities for the common good. I also hope that we can discuss ways that the Jewish tradition actually enables productive dissent and how we can responsibly support freedom of speech without spiraling toward anti-Semitism or unilateral boycotts (whether of institutions or of whole countries).

By way of concluding, I would like to draw your attention to some of the most “uncivil” speech acts in the history of Judaism, ones that certainly wouldn’t be tolerated at UIUC because they are, among other reasons, disrespectful to those in power, critical of injustice, and downright uncivil. You will find them in the Hebrew Bible, and they go by the name of the prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah, Amos, and Hosea. They spoke very harshly and used some of the most critical language imaginable to condemn violence and critique avarice, injustice, nationalism, and war. They have their modern incarnations, too, such as Heinrich Heine, not to mention civil rights leaders such as Abraham Joshua Heschel, Cornel West, and Anita Hill, of whom the last two, I understand, recently declined invitations to speak at your institution. What these figures have in common is an unimpeachable commitment to ethics and justice. They speak truth to power and pay the price for doing so.

Chancellor Wise, I fear that you have done significant harm to UIUC. I will close by reminding you of another tradition within Judaism: the notion of Tikkun Olam, repairing the world, or making whole again that which has been smashed. I remain hopeful.

Very sincerely,

Todd Samuel Presner

Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director, UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies Chair, Digital Humanities Program
Professor of Germanic Languages and Comparative Literature
University of California Los Angeles

Source: electronicintifada.net

The 10th annual Atlanta Arab Festival kicks off this weekend.

The festival showcases Arabic food and music, but Angela Khoury, the director of the Alif Institute, which organizes the event, said on “A Closer Look” festival goers will have a bigger opportunity.

“They will have a chance to meet Arab-Americans to learn about the culture.”

“It’s really about bridging with people,” Khoury explained.

The Atlanta Arab Festival at the Alif Institute gets underway at 11 a.m. Saturday and runs through Sunday afternoon.

Source: wabe.org

In March, during Art Dubai, two old friends, both leading figures in Arab cultural life, met at the fair and talked about ways in which the Arab and European worlds could relate better. Zaki Nusseibeh, born Palestinian but now a citizen of the UAE and a revered intellectual in his adopted country, was for over 30 years interpreter and advisor to Sheikh Zayed Al Nahyan, the founder and first president of the Gulf country. Jack Lang was a famously radical and media-friendly minister of culture through most of the 1980s under President Mitterrand, and has been revitalising the Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA) in Paris since 2013. In January this year, just after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, IMA held a very timely and healing conference “Renewals in the Arab World”.
Lang was one of the first to support the Louvre in Abu Dhabi, which will be the first universal museum outside the western world when it opens next year. The desire to create this certainly stemmed fr om Zaki Nusseibeh, who believes that it will educate people in the validity of other cultures and as such, be a bulwark against the kind of narrow-minded fundamentalism that has given birth to Islamic State. In fact, at the end of the discussion, Nusseibeh gave his endorsement to the institutions such as the British Museum, with its antiquities fr om all over the world: a member of the audience asked what was being done to protect the cultural heritage in the war zones of the Middle East, and he said, “We are grateful that many of these treasures are in international universal museums”. A.S.C.

Zaki Nusseibeh: Tell me about your life in the arts.

Jack Lang: It has been a question of conviction. Ever since I was a child, my love of art was total. I always rejected censorship; in Nancy we created an avant-garde theatre and never let it be censored. In 1985, Martin Scorsese could not show his film “The last temptation of Christ” in France. I welcomed it, but it encountered great hostility; there was even a bomb in a small cinema of the Quartier Latin wh ere it was showing.

ZN: Sheikh Zayed allowed the film about Mohammed [Mohammed, Messenger of God (1976)] to be shown. On another front, you fought a huge battle for I.M. Pei’s pyramid to be built in front of the Louvre and for the Opéra of the Bastille. How did you get people to follow you?

JL: When I became minister of culture in 1981, I had the good fortune to enjoy a close friendship with President Mitterrand. We were a duo—we hardly needed to speak. We managed to do difficult things to which there was huge opposition, such as moving the Ministry of Finance out of the Louvre.

ZN: President Mitterrand and Sheikh Zayed became close friends. After Presidents De Gaulle, Pompidou and Giscard d’Estaing, Sheikh Zayed was worried when a left wing president came along, but they managed to have an intellectual relationship. They worked together, for example, on the library of Alexandria [a joint Egyptian-Unesco project started in the 1980s and opened in 2002].

There was a major row in France when the Louvre Abu Dhabi was announced, but you were one of the first cultural figures to support the plan. You said it was a way of reinforcing cultural ties between countries. How do you see this happening in practice?

JL: The Louvre Abu Dhabi will be a new Louvre of a kind that we can’t have in Paris, wh ere we have kept the separation of departments because their heads supported the Louvre Abu Dhabi and as a consequence we had to protect their positions. But in Abu Dhabi we will be able to put different kinds of art from all nations together; it is a transverse vision that will have a positive influence on Paris.

ZN: In my first interview with Sheikh Zayed in 1968 he described his three pillars for Abu Dhabi: first, a federation of emirates to protect the state; second, to bring prosperity to those around him and to other nations; third, while reinforcing the heritage, to build bridges to the rest of the world. Culture is no longer seen as centred on the west. We here in the UAE are at an axial point between three billion people.

Now tell me about the Institut du Monde Arabe. It was proposed by President Giscard d’Estaing in 1974 to be a showcase for Arab art. You chose Jean Nouvel, who is now the architect of the Louvre Abu Dhabi. You have come to it now with a clear mandate to bring it to life again.

JL: It is a house for everyone in the Arab world. I am an internationalist. Arabic is a major language; how can we encourage a new generation to discover its deep culture? In the 16th century, the Franciscan François Ximenes de Cisneros gave us the great polyglot bible in Greek, Arabic and Hebrew. What equivalent are we doing now? At IMA we aim to become the main centre for Arabic online.
So far as exhibitions are concerned, we did the Hajj show with loans from the King Abdul-Aziz Centre in Saudi Arabia, and the Moroccan contemporary art show has been very successful. We are holding symposia presenting various aspects of Arab civilisation to provide another face besides the dreadful news in the media. The next conference will be on the city in the Arab world, and IMA is going to publish a major book about Arab Modern art.

ZN: Your second passion is education. You believe that education and culture are closely linked. How can we bring them to young people?

JL: [The late President] Bourguiba in Tunisia achieved a great deal through education and it is one of the reasons why the protests against the dictatorship were successful there. That is why the terrorists attacked the Bardo Museum, which is full of Roman treasures. The lack of education can explain prejudice and ignorance, but on the other hand, the people who perpetrated 11 September were educated people.

ZN: Sheikh Zayed used to say that the most important pillar of society is education and he paid parents in the UAE to send boys and girls to school. I believe there is a deep failure in the educational systems in both the east and west. Islam is a religion of peace, but in it, as in other religions, there are fascists who can exploit it for power, and young people can be brainwashed.
Sheikh Zayed said that it was chance whether you were born into one religion or another and what counts is whether you do good. There are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world; in France, 10% of the population is Muslim. We need to look deeper into our pasts. France has had great scholars of Islam and we must all work together but also rediscover out own intellectual history.
Now, tell us about your writings.

JL: I’ve written books on law (I am a university lecturer in the subject); recently, I was in the UAE, not for cultural purposes, but to propose a new international law on piracy along the Somali coast. But I have also written about François I and Lorenzo de’ Medici.

ZN: Are you an optimist?

JL: I am, and it is people who give me hope, new ideas and new projects. What is less exciting is political life in most countries. People with a vision, like Sheikh Zayed or the current rulers of the UAE, are rare.

Source: www.theartnewspaper.com

By Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships NEW YORK – Today, The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, the premier graduate school fellowship for immigrants and children of immigrants, announced their 2015 recipients. The thirty recipients, called “Fellows”, were selected for their potential to make significant contributions to US society, culture, or their academic … Continued

My story begins on a Monday night, huddled in a chair on Parrish Beach, fist trembling, clenching my tear-soaked kufiyya. It is an ordinary April evening, and yet again, I am reminded of what it means to be a Palestinian-American on this campus. I just got out of an event hosted by the Swarthmore Students for Israel (SSI) in which a film titled “Crossing the Line 2: The New Face of Anti-Semitism” was screened. The film portrayed a variety of out-of-context, angry Palestinian activists, along with a series of mostly white Jewish students reacting to how “oppressed” they felt by the angry activists bombarding them with statistics and demonstrations on the systematic erasure of Palestinian culture.

I could write an entire article about the problematic, one-sided, racist, Islamophobic content of the film, but this is not the intent of my article. After the film, SSI members called one of the students involved in the film via Skype (Daniel Mael), and we proceeded to have an “open discussion” on the film’s content. SSI members helped facilitate the discussion, but the end result was an offensive lack of closure and solidarity. In other words, I did not thinking this event provided an outlet for constructive dialogue on anti-Semitism in the Israel-Palestine movement (or the issue of the Israel-Palestine conflict in general).

Over the past few months, Swarthmore has made me painfully aware of my ethnicity as a Palestinian-American. In fact, there have only been two spaces in which I felt moderately comfortable sharing my views on the issue of Palestine: Munazamat al-Amal and OASIS.

Munazamat al-Amal is a group representing Greater Syrian culture (i.e. the region containing Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, etc.), and it takes a firm pro-Palestinian political stance. As a leader of al-Amal, one of my questions to Mael was about how Palestinian movements can be anti-Zionist, but not anti-Semitic (because the film and speaker conflated these two terms throughout the event). This question was not even remotely addressed except for when Mael accused Palestinians of “bullying” Israel by presenting Israel as the sole actor in the oppression of Palestinians (something which very few people in the pro-Palestine movement actually think).

What the Swarthmore community needs to understand is that being anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic are two very different things: the former implies criticism of specific genocidal and sectarian actions committed by the state of Israel, and the latter implies hatred of Jews or supporting the oppression of Jewish people. Invalidating anti-Zionist or pro-Palestinian demonstrations as “anti-Semitic” not only trivializes the oppression that Palestinians encounter on a daily basis, but it is also antithetical to the very important cause of combatting anti-Semitism itself. I agree that there should be no tolerance of anti-Semitism in Palestinian demonstrations; if anything, Palestinians, as an oppressed people, should stand in solidarity to combat anti-Semitism. However, condemning our work as Palestinian activists as inherently anti-Semitic normalizes the type of oppression Palestinians encounter on a daily basis.

That being said, what can Swarthmore do to promote truly open, fruitful conversation on the issue of Israel-Palestine? One answer is to continue its active support of artistic spaces, such as OASIS. OASIS (Our Art Spoken in Soul) is the spoken word poetry collective on campus. I am a performer and board member for this organization, and ever since the Israeli military’s invasion of Gaza last summer, my poetry has re-focused to play more of an activist-driven role.

Other than al-Amal, OASIS has been the only space in which I have felt comfortable talking about Palestinian issues. As many people who attended our showcase know, I have written poems ranging from personal narratives such as my family’s experience or nightmares on systematic oppression, to larger issues such as pinkwashing and the entire concept of a narrative capturing Middle Eastern “reality.”

I was able to bring these poems to the College Union Poetry Slam Invitational (CUPSI) a few weeks ago. CUPSI was an essential experience because it allowed me to connect with other Arab artistic activists and hear lots of critical response and dialogue, responding to the Palestinian issues I discuss in my work. However, I fear that administrative support for OASIS and CUPSI will become increasingly scarce in the coming years, despite OASIS’s role as a necessary resource for marginalized voices on campus and its integral role in the development of my Palestinian identity.

At the end of the meeting, SSI leader Nat Frum advertised another Anti-Semitism event as important because “it deals with an issue that Swarthmore has been surprisingly silent [on].” It is not my place to comment on the validity of this statement, given that I am not a member of Swarthmore’s Jewish community and so I have no idea what various groups have done to combat Anti-Semitism. However, I cannot help but reflect on this choice of words: “surprisingly silent.” If there’s anything the Swarthmore community has been “surprisingly silent” on, it’s the systematic erasure of Palestinian culture; it’s the fact that Students for Peace and Justice in Palestine (SPJP) is hailed as the legitimate voice for the Palestinian cause on campus when, in reality, all Palestinians on campus who were in SPJP have lost patience with it and left; it’s the fact that the last student to stand up for Arab culture on this campus was made fun of all over Twitter; it’s the fact that an Arab cultural group has been non-existent during my entire time here at Swarthmore.

The intent of this article is not to attack any individual group or person, but rather, to serve as a call to action. In the short term, al-Amal will be planning some sort of demonstration before the end of the semester, and if anyone is interested in helping with this, I urge you to either email me (gabraha1@swarthmore.edu) and/or come to our meeting next Monday night at 8:00 pm in the Intercultural Center. In the long term, moving into the end of this year and start of next year, I am interested in having al-Amal serve as an open space for discussion on Palestinian peace issues, in a way that is cathartic yet sensitive to participants. If anyone would like to be kept in the loop regarding al-Amal’s development moving forward, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

On a slightly different note, regarding issues this campus has been “surprisingly silent” on, I am also interested in resurrecting some sort of Arab cultural society on campus, and if this is something students (Arab, Arab-American, or non-Arab) would like to see, please reach out so I can keep you informed regarding these conversations. I would love to discuss ways at making these aforementioned goals a reality so that Arab culture and Palestinian human rights issues will no longer be something Swarthmore is “surprisingly silent” about.

Source: daily.swarthmore.edu

“The Surge” brought Sgt. William Griffin to Iraq in 2007. His tour of duty was intense, dangerous and – he recently recognized – historic.

At California State University San Marcos, Griffin took several history classes taught by Professor Ibrahim Al-Marashi. The courses ranged across continents and centuries, from the ancient Hittite empire to Alexander the Great, from Saddam Hussein to a certain Army sergeant.

“He helped me realize that I am actually a part of history,” said Griffin, 30. “He gave me a perspective on my own life that I never realized until I sat down and talked with him.”

“The enemy is a spiritual enemy,” he told an audience in 2003. “He’s called the principality of darkness. The enemy is a guy called Satan.”

While Al-Marashi’s lectures cover ISIS, al-Qaeda and other manifestations of radical Islam, that’s just one aspect of his courses. Today, the professor stressed, students need a more comprehensive view of this region’s politics, economics, faiths and cultures.

“There is a whole swatch of students who have been affected by Iraq and Afghanistan,” the 41-year-old Iraqi-American said. “Getting a greater picture of what sent them in the first place, the greater trajectory that brought them to Iraq and Afghanistan, is important.”

This approach is also popular. Thanks in part to veterans like Griffin, Al-Marashi’s classes are SRO.

“I’ve never had an empty seat,” the professor said. “Students appreciate context, how we got to where we are.”

How did Al-Marashi get here? Why is this Muslim scholar a favorite of students who have fought radical Islam? And how did he play a minor, yet controversial, role in the 2003 invasion of Iraq?

Source: www.utsandiego.com

“My body is a pill, small, and love is the wrong man’s tongue to tell me so,” began Safia Elhillo at the 2013 College Union Poetry Slam Invitational (CUPSI). Her performance of “What I Learned in the Fire” secured NYU as first-place finishers at the competition, making them the best college slam team in nation for the second year in a row. Two years later, Elhillo is bringing her talents to Vassar for a night of Spoken Word Poetry, hosted by Vassar’s Wordsmiths. The event, Love Started the Fire, is named after her 2013 poem and is a showcase of poems from Vassar’s CUPSI Team and which will also feature some of Elhillo’s own performances.

Elhillo is now a New-York based, Sudanese-American poet.In addition to pursuing an MFA at the New School, she is part of a group called the Divine Fabrics Collective. Founded in 2012 at an IHOP on the Lower East Side, the group is comprised of four poets. Their goal is “to write with nuance, artfully shit-talk and deliver new work at high octane levels.”

Kelly Schuster ‘15, a member of the group and Vassar’s CUPSI Team discussed Elhillo’s writing in an emailed statement. “She writes about loss and mourning and language and she’s wonderful.”  But, she approaches the topic of loss in hopes of reclaiming, not mourning. Fascinated with words and descriptions, she aims to build a presence of things lost and imaginary. She has appeared on TV1’s Verses and Flow and was a finalist in the 2011 Women of the World Poetry Slam.  She published a short book of poems, The Life and Times of Susie Knuckles, with Well&Often Press and has been featured in several other publications.

Love Started the Fire comes at an exciting time for Vassar’s Wordsmiths. Schuster ‘15, explained, “I am on the Vassar CUPSI Team along with Royal Scales ‘17, Ellie Vamos ‘17, Andrew Yim ‘16, and Cheikh Athj ‘16, with Hannah Matsunaga ‘16 as our coach. I believe in the power of this team and our ability to create meaningful art so fully. I think we collaborate beautifully together and I hope to continue making art with this group for a long time.”

The group certainly does work well together.  Their coach, Matsunaga said, “The CUPSI team placed 9th out of 68 teams at this year’s competition,” which placed them among the top teams in the nation.  The annual CUPSI tournament was held in Virginia this year and is poetry’s equivalent of nationals, explained Matsunaga. Schuster wrote in an emailed statement, “[The performance was] incredible, and draining–invigorating and exhausting.” And, the group secured this spot with even more competition present. CUPSI team member Scales explained, “this year the ‘I’ actually stood for International because we had our first team not from the U.S compete, Ryerson University in Toronto.”

Overall, the group had positive sentiments to share of their experiences. “My experience with Wordsmiths has been great so far. Every workshop, open mic, and performance inspires me,” wrote Matsunaga.

For Schuster, spoken word allows words to take on new meanings. She wrote, “The transformation that happens over the course of a performance poem, to the audience, to the performer, to the space, to the work itself, engages my senses and transports me to another world–something that words on a page just can’t do for me. Spoken word creates an opportunity to transform someone’s understanding or perception of something that doesn’t require them to know how to read in order to engage.”

These performances hinge on a unique balance between the performer and the audience. This interaction can weigh heavily on the competition’s outcome. “Because there is a competition at stake, slam can also be a toxic space where people expose traumas in ways that sometimes may be cathartic, but also sometimes may be unhealthy for the performer or audience if they aren’t ready to share. At CUPSI we saw a lot of emotionally reckless performances being performed and then rewarded with high scores, which can create a dangerous cycle that encourages artists to put themselves in unsafe mental spaces in order to win,” writes Schuster.

Nevertheless, Spoken word can be both entertaining and uplifting. Its history is rooted in making the art of poetry more accessible.  The slam, or competition aspect of spoken word, was popularized in Chicago in the 1980s as a reaction to the more elite and academic styles of poetry, Spoken Word quickly became a way for more diverse performers to express themselves.

“The idea behind slam poetry is that anyone off the street can perform or judge the competition which allows for the space to, in some ways subvert the elitist power structures that typically dominate spaces of art-making,” wrote Schuster.

The openness of the slam attracts the competition and craft to many college campuses where its messages resonate with students.  Slams have transformative qualities that can better oneself and his or her community.  Schuster explains, “I hope to use this form as a space of healing and community-building, but always a way to be critical and reckon with my own privilege while striving to center the voices whose stories are typically silenced by this society.”

After their impressive performance at CUPSI this year, the group has lots of content to share alongside another highly regarded young poet. The Wordsmiths award-winning showcase and Elhillo will perform this Friday, April 17, at 8:00 p.m. in Rocky 200 for Love Started the Fire.

Source: miscellanynews.org

Israel’s high court on Thursday upheld a 2011 law imposing stiff sanctions on those advocating boycotts of Israel or its colonial settlements in the occupied West Bank and Golan Heights.

The so-called Law for the Prevention of Damage to the State of Israel through Boycott allows entities to sue and win compensation from individuals or organizations that call for economic, cultural or academic boycott. It also allows the finance ministry to financially penalize any organization that receives state funding that participates in such calls.

The court threw out only one minor provision of the law, which would have allowed anyone to sue for boycott-related damages without showing proof they were harmed.

Sawsan Zaher, an attorney for Adalah – the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, said the law “harms Palestinians more than others because they are on the frontlines of struggling against the occupation and the violation of the human rights of their people under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza.”

In a press release from Adalah, Zaher added that the law would also hit Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem hard, as it would prevent them from using the “main civil protest tool of boycott to end the occupation.”

Source: electronicintifada.net

When I started reading properly about the first Palestinian intifada, it was all over. I had experienced the tail end of it. I lived in al-Eizariya and worked in Jerusalem in 1992, within the then dynamic, yet family-like atmosphere of the Palestine Human Rights Information Centre, which alas, is no more.

Its demise is a long story involving its support of banned organizations, disputes over funding, restrictions on West Bank fieldworkers traveling to East Jerusalem and the death of Palestinian leader Faisal Husseini. It was finished off by the closure of its offices and raid of its database by Israeli forces almost ten years ago.

When I read about the first intifada, I saw Gaza as the shield, Ramallah the brain and Jerusalem the heart. But there was always a curious little town on the outskirts of Bethlehem that attracted me: Beit Sahour, which seemed like a flower.

The stories from Beit Sahour uplifted and charmed: the organized nonviolent resistance, the coordination committees of teachers, doctors and other professionals, the role of women, the drive for agrarian self-sufficiency and the strike actions of the pharmacists. Yet in all this, I found no reference to cows. I, like the Israeli forces, must have been looking in the wrong place.

The Wanted 18 was a surprise. It is a film about a real story that captivated director Amer Shomali’s imagination as a child, the story of how the town of Beit Sahour bought 18 cows from an Israeli kibbutz in order to start producing its own milk. It tells the tale of a town trying to attain independence by boycotting taxes and produce. It is the story of nonviolent resistance, its heroics and psychology.

Brave men, women … and cows

I saw the film first at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in Amsterdam, knowing nothing about it or its makers. I assumed it was about brave men and women, which indeed it was, but the story was told in such a way that one could only comprehend the people if one also understood the cows, their individuality and unexplored potential. “Maybe,” says the narrator, “you think cows are lazy, eating all day with nothing in their heads. Maybe you should think again.”

The Wanted 18 is a complex story told playfully. There are comic strips, cartoon figures with big lips, animals with long eyelashes, a magical white calf that defies expectations by leaping over a two-meter-high fence, and jokes that rely on exaggeration and irony. Cartoon cows fart in the opening scenes. Ha ha! It’s a laugh!

After the screening, in a Skype interview from Ramallah, Shomali was sweet, jokey, with a fresh face and a cutely accented voice. “I grew up in a refugee camp in Syria,” Shomali’s voice chirpily explained. “We could not go out,” he added without resentment. “Boring life,” he said, disposing of it.

But none of the humor and buoyancy detracts from the force of this film, its intelligence, politics and careful editorial choices. There are no unwarranted digressions. Each character is given their say and their space as the extraordinary individuals that they are. It is the modestly portrayed gravitas of these personalities that make this film such an achievement. Even more so, when set amid what they have been up against.

“The only thing we controlled was the air that we breathed,” one interviewee states. The occupation, says another, “put it into your head that you are subhuman, you are not equal.” Not subhuman, superhuman. Not unequal, but confidently superior.

These men and women — Jad Ishaq, Siham Taweel, Ghassan Andoni, Jalal Qumsieh, Makram Saad, Anton Shomali and his mother, Ayman Abu Zuluf, Naji Musleh and, importantly, the butcher’s wife — were exceptional in not only coping with, but challenging great difficulties, and developing strategies to survive with dignity and humor. As one Palestinian interviewee states, “It was very clear. Mentally we were superior to them.”

Source: electronicintifada.net

Seattle artist Mary Ann Peters takes a multi­media strategy in her new show at James Harris Gallery, “what stays the same is never so.”

Along with paintings and a powerful art installation, she includes a sculpture, a tapestry and altered photographs, while hovering on the edge between the figurative and abstract.

The results are uneven, but the best works are knockouts. And her restless, curious search for every possibility offered by her subject matter is unmistakable throughout.

Peters is a second-generation Lebanese American, and her work seems both to channel ancestral memories in image-specific ways and to weigh her cultural heritage in a more internalized or conceptual manner.

According to the gallery’s press release, “messy heaven” (Peters has a penchant for lowercase titles) responds to “questionable and sometimes heinous actions used to access an enviable afterlife.”

It depicts an explosive tumult of clouds laced with mechanical debris. Peters’ sweeping, feathery brush strokes have a wind-shear volatility. Her restless heaven isn’t just messy. It’s chaotic and kinetic, dynamic and destructive.

“jinn” is an even more intricate affair, combining a finely rendered landscape with rectangular maplike elements. All sorts of shapes, textures and visual rhythms are at play in it.

Peters’ “storyboard” paintings incorporate more recognizable figurative elements. “storyboard (4),” for example, depicts a Monet-esque pond or gentle stream. The paint’s fine-combed horizontal and vertical brush strokes play off each other to create a shimmering effect. A rippling, upside-down human face, looming from under the water surface, adds an eerie element. In other “storyboards,” vigorous actions or haunting presences are similarly subject to distortion or dissolution.

Her installation “the world is a garden” occupies a whole room but doesn’t yield its secret at first glance. Initially, it looks like an opaque, three-panel screen — nothing more. But move back and forth in front of it, and a lavish flower world becomes visible behind it.

Peters’ inspiration for the piece was a quotation by 14th-century Berber-Muslim philosopher-historian Ibn Khaldun: “The world is a garden, its walls are the state.” Peter’s installation ingeniously evokes a potential terrestrial paradise that can only be accessed in a shifting, constrained, restrictive manner. You have to experience this brilliant piece in person. There’s no earthly way to photograph it.

Other entries in the show are less impressive: the title piece (eight ink-altered photographs of a spider web), a tapestry that recreates an anti-colonial political cartoon, bronze sculptures of pita bread. The paintings and installation are the must-see here.

Marianne Ibrahim Gallery
If you go to James Harris Gallery, be sure to visit Mariane Ibrahim Gallery (formerly MIA Gallery) two doors away. Its inaugural exhibit in its new space at 608 Second Ave., “Maïmouna Guerresi: Light Bodies,” is as varied in medium as Peters’ show.

Guerresi, who divides her time between Italy and Senegal, is an extraordinary photographer, creating captivating mysteries (large-scale floating figures seemingly kept upright by their ankle-length attire) and enigmatic multi-paneled domestic scenarios laced with threat (“Red Table” seems quite calm until you notice the gun shells on the tablecloth).

Her video installation, “Milk Light,” is — like Peters’ “the world is a garden” — unphotographable. It consists of three illuminated, liquid-filled bowls in which images of hands dipping into liquid are projected from overhead. It’s both meditative and disorienting — and again, something not to be missed. (11 a.m.-6 p.m. Wednesdays-Fridays, noon-5 p.m. Saturdays, through May 1; 206-467-4927 or marianeibrahim.com).

Source: www.seattletimes.com

Being Muslim and Arab American themselves, both Duenya Hassan ’16 and Saif Fiaz ’17 thought they were in for an easy spring semester when they enrolled in “Arabs in America/America in Arabs.”

“I was like, ‘I got this. It’s going to be an easy class,’” said Fiaz, a biology major whose parents are Pakistani. “But I’ve learned a lot. I was surprised.”

Hassan, a government and gender, sexuality and women’s studies major whose parents are Palestinian, echoed Fiaz. “I didn’t think I’d learn as much as I have,” she said.

Stephen Sheehi
They attribute some of that learning to the style of the class taught by Stephen Sheehi, Sultan Qaboos bin Said Associate Professor of Middle East Studies at William & Mary. In addition to traditional class readings, essays and discussions, students must design and post multimedia blog entries integrating current events and issues with the class materials. The class materials are prescribed, but students can take off in any direction they choose as long as they relate it back to the material.

“They are encouraged to think in terms of multimedia, using written sources, videos, music, to explore what activists – not only intellectuals – are doing,” Sheehi said. “They explore the political conditions affecting the Arab-American experience and how Arab Americans answer those conditions, how they forge their own identities.”

The blog, “Arab American Tribe,” had Hassan and her classmates responding within days to the shooting deaths of a Jordanian couple – both graduate students – and the sister of the wife in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in Feburary. Their post examined the reluctance of the police and media to label the murders as a hate crime, in contrast to Muslims around the world.

“In class we were talking about racial hierarchies within the U.S. and how Arab Americans have had this process, according to Matthew Jacobson, of becoming white,” Hassan said. “The first Christian Arabs were able to assimilate, to integrate, and to receive many of the privileges the majority received. After 9/11, you see this flip. You have discrimination against Arabs, and, at this point, it doesn’t matter if they are Muslim or Christian, because it’s based primarily on physical appearance.

“In looking at this incident, we were trying to understand where Arab Americans fit into this racial hierarchy now, and because the media portrayed this as some lone incident, whether there are sentiments the public has about this issue.”

Duenya Hassan
Similarly, Fiaz and his group blogged on the Muslim Blind Trust Experiment, a series of videos in which blindfolded Muslims on city streets challenge passers-by to show trust by hugging them. 

The videos are making their rounds on social media, but Fiaz’s group took a more critical look at actual research on social hostilities toward religion as well as government restrictions on religions in different parts of the world. In short, the higher a region’s social hostility toward a particular religion, the higher the likelihood government will move to restrict that religion and its expression.

“It gives us a feel for what’s really happening in the world, as compared to just writing about [the material] or doing a project,” Fiaz said. “Professor Sheehi gave us a lot of creative power and the ability to think bigger than what the class is.”

Fiaz, Hassan and their classmates are also gaining the technical skills needed to run the blog, including collating the information from different members of the group, posting the written material, formatting it and embedding photos, graphs, video and music files.

“I’m a bio science major, so you aren’t usually assigned blogs about organic chemistry,” Fiaz joked. “But it’s very relevant once you leave college. It’s something people expect you to know how to do.”

“I’m used to doing papers all the time,” Hassan said. “This was really different. It helped you think about what you were writing about because you don’t have this structure to rely on where you just plug in the information. You had to think about what you were writing so it made sense in the short amount of space you have. I actually looked up other blogs to see what I should do, because I’ve read a few, but I hadn’t done it before.”

The blog then drives class discussion. Sheehi lectures on Tuesdays. Blog entries have to be posted online Wednesday night before the class talks about them on Thursday, giving presentations and critiquing one another’s work.

“At the core, there are some fundamental skills they are learning,” Sheehi said, “including how to integrate the material they’re learning in looking at the larger picture in the United States. And then how to present it. Technically, you can have great blog material and present it pretty poorly. So how do you present to a class of your peers? How do you synthesize material? How do you unpack the material you wrote?”

Saif Fiaz
Fiaz said he was surprised at the level of engagement in the class, an Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Program offering. “We have at least 20 people in the class,” he said. “I was expecting maybe 10 or 15. That was one of the most significant things: that our culture – my culture – and the Middle East are more prevalent than I perceived them to be in American culture. We have discussions that go on past the hour and a half we have for class.”

On a personal level, Fiaz said the course has helped affirm his own identity. “I’m surprised how parallel my experiences are with some of the stories we’ve read of first-generation immigrants in class. I like to see that. It makes me feel better about what I’ve gone through, because I feel like I’m not the only one.”

As for Hassan, one of the scholars assigned in the class, Nadine Naber, inspired her to focus her honors thesis on the activism of Palestinian-American women through in-depth profiles.

“I wanted to cover this political landscape, but it was just so broad,” she said. “After reading her piece, it was like, ‘Wow, this piece gets across this bigger issue of Palestinian-American women, their activism in America and how that fits into the global context.’”

In talks with Sheehi, Hassan decided to try to interview either Naber or a Palestinian academic in San Francisco with whom Naber works. Turns out Sheehi knew her and emailed on Hassan’s behalf. The professor agreed to the interview, and now Hassan is trying to procure funds to pursue the project.

“The issues Sheehi brings up, he tries to make you think outside the box,” Hassan said, “just asking those questions that other classes are sometimes afraid to ask or other students are afraid to bring up in another context. When actually you’re in college and this is the best time to raise those questions.”

Source: www.wm.edu

On April 6th, another conference to generate employment in the Arab world took place: The National U.S.-Arab Chamber of Commerce (NUSACC) partnered with the Arab Maghreb Union and the Union of Arab Maghreb Economic Chambers to host about 50 North African government officials and private sector executives for one week of public conferences from April 6-10 in Washington, D.C. and Texas. Since the Arab Spring, the West has focused on individual entrepreneurship in MENA. Not surprisingly, both Arab transitioning countries (Tunisia and Egypt), and non transitioning (the UAE, Qatar, Jordan, Morocco and Saudi Arabia) are pursuing the industry-government coordination model to promote entrepreneurship by sponsoring large industry conferences. What’s the impact of these large industrial conferences on Arab world unemployment? Are we seeing local Arabs employed, or “diverted” on to the more romantic path of entrepreneurship? Encouraging entrepreneurship in the Middle East and North African region morphs into generating employment opportunities, when in fact, implementing this approach requires more time, skills and resources that compete with large industry forums catering to bigger (often foreign) firms.

Ironically, through the industry-government coordination model, many of the development-related conferences attempt to generate local employment by advocating for entrepreneurship and attracting foreign investment through multi-national corporations (MNCs). Yet such conferences, like the Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES), have largely occurred in Arab countries that have not experienced their own “Arab Spring,” such as Morocco and the United Arab Emirates. Furthermore, the focus on individual entrepreneurship in MENA is misleading; MNCs are the actors with more access to financial capital — not individuals.

Source: www.huffingtonpost.com