Author Archives: Arab America

SHANNON QUINN, INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS DIRECTOR For many students at GW, the complex array of issues learned in international affairs classes in the Elliott School seems a world away. Although the…

Source: www.gwrooseveltinstitute.org

When Method Man dropped his mid-90s single “P.L.O. Style,” some fans were puzzled by the Wu Tang Clan member’s abrupt foray into Middle Eastern politics. Named after the embattled Palestinian Liberation Organization, Method’s track has always been more than just a gritty and bass-saturated strut session.What do you think?

Considered a terrorist organization by both the United States and United Nations until 1991, the P.L.O. moved past its legacy of organized attrition wars against Israel into a more political, diplomacy-oriented group. Still, vast amounts of bloodshed, both random and shrewdly organized, has been inflicted and endured by its members, leadership and satellite supporters. To simplify a bit (alright, a lot), the P.L.O.’s strife with Israel is and always has been about territory, respect and the kind of steadfast motivation that only group ideology can bring (this goes for both sides). This strife often led to the brandishing of guns and manufacture of violent imagery. For Method to wade into such deep and turbulent waters with a track like “P.L.O. Style” seemed to some brave and others foolhardy, but the MC’s true inspirations for the track have always been murky–until now.What do you think?

In a brand new recorded interview with journalist filmmaker Sama’an Ashrawi, Method spoke quickly but in depth about what it was that he saw in 90s Palestinian imagery. The Wu Tang leader and his friends, he recalls, used to frequent a pro-P.L.O. store in their Staten Island neighborhood, and often caught glimpses of intimidating, gun-toting figures in photos taken in Palestine and put up proudly on display at the shop. “The same way Wu Tang respected how the kung fu dudes was doing their thing and shit, we respected how the P.L.O.s got down,” Method says in the clip. “They’re freedom fighters and we felt like we were fighting for our freedom everyday, too, where we lived at.”What do you think?

Method’s comments about the parallels between the struggle for minority justice in both America and Palestine come at a very contentious time. Across the countries late last year protests and rallies were held in the name of Eric Garner, Michael Brown and other victims of unjust police violence, and at those rallies numerous banners flew calling for the liberation of Palestine and rollback of Israeli settlements. Currently figures including Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, Lupe Fiasco, scientist Stephen Hawking and more have either expressed their displeasure with Israeli policy or supported Palestinian liberation outright. While Method Man’s comments don’t go so far as to call for a free and unmolested Palestine, it’s now clear that Middle Eastern issues were plenty present and affective in the creation of one of the MC’s greatest tracks. Watch the full interview below.

Source: www.okayplayer.com

Beirut’s main fish market will reopen before dawn Wednesday following a 2-week closure to perform major renovations.

Located in the Karantina area north of Beirut, the market was ordered shut by Beirut Governor Ziad Chebib earlier this month over food safety and sanitation violations.

The market’s flooring was replaced, walls were painted, sewers were renovated, workers were provided with uniforms and the fish display tables were covered with glass.

The market was supposed to reopen after one week. However, a series of heavy storms that battered Lebanon forced a suspension of the renovation.

A delegation of officials from the market’s administration, Beirut’s municipality and the health ministry toured the market Tuesday to inspect the renovations.

Source: www.dailystar.com.lb

Hollywood stars who chose to wear the creations of Lebanese designers on the red carpet at the 87th Academy Awards topped the lists of the best dressed of various U.S. publications and fashion blocs. 

Jennifer Lopez took the plunge in a sparkly Elie Saab. Indeed, the “Selena” actress looked like royalty on the Oscars’ red carpet Sunday. In the name of fashion, J Lo dragged her massive train behind her like a princess at her coronation. 

The actress even acknowledged her incredibly long train, revealing to reporters: “You can’t party in this dress, not even me.”

J Lo failed to disappoint in her extravagant Elie Saab ball gown, a nude beaded number with yet another of her jaw-dropping necklines. 

She paired her flowing belted gown with a Salvatore Ferragamo clutch, Neil Lane jewels and Giuseppe Zanotti shoes.

Another red carpet darling, Emma Stone, also wore Elie Saab. According to the Huffington Post, Emma Stone’s Oscar 2015 dress was “arguably the best of the night.” 

The redheaded beauty looked ravishing in a long-sleeve, chartreuse custom-made Elie Saab gown. While the night was really all about her nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her role in “Birdman,” fashion critics could not stop talking about her dress and bright orange lipstick. 

According to critics, Stone took one of the biggest risks for daring to wear chartreuse, but since that beaded citrus green gown was another one of Elie Saab’s stunning creations, it was a risk well worth taking. 

Zuhair Murad’s creations were also out in force on the red carpet at Hollywood’s Dolby Theater. Jenna Dewan, actor Channing Tatum’s wife, wore a white sleeveless gown with plunging neckline and crystal detailing from the designer’s spring 2015 haute couture collection.

Source: www.dailystar.com.lb

Update: The inflammatory posters calling Palestine solidarity activists anti-Semites and likening them to terrorists have appeared at multiple other college campuses.

One person texted me an image of a poster calling activists “#Jewhaters” that was found at DePaul University in Chicago.

Source: mondoweiss.net

The decision by the chancellor and Board of Trustees at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to revoke a job offer to Steven Salaita because of his anti-Israel tweets prompted a wave of activism by faculty and students on my campus—protests, rallies, teach-ins, no-confidence motions, petitions, and open letters to the chancellor and president.

I joined in those actions both as an individual and as a member of the three departments in which I work: English, Asian-American studies, and the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. The university’s decision also triggered a sweeping boycott signed by thousands of scholars in the United States and around the world, who refused to participate in any lectures, conferences, or events organized at the university until Salaita was reinstated. That boycott inspired additional discipline-specific boycotts, some of which further specified that the signatories would not participate in any tenure and promotion reviews for the university.

For someone like me, who is inside the university and supports Salaita, the boycott represents an experiential impasse. I find myself in the impossible position of being the target of a boycott as a member of an institution whose actions I and many others here have challenged. Unlike faculty members outside Urbana-Champaign whose safe target is another university, our target is our own. The frequently repeated joke here—How do we boycott ourselves?—captures this problem. How do you oppose your own institution yet protect valuable parts of it at the same time?

In the 10 years I have been on this campus, we have built some of the strongest ethnic- and indigenous-studies programs in the country. I have worked on several searches, and we have hired stellar faculty of color in the departments of English and Asian-American studies.

But in less than six months, I have watched the results of my own labor and that of so many others weakened as the crisis batters vulnerable units, demoralizes the faculty, and intensifies student anxiety. Junior faculty members who accepted positions here just before the Salaita crisis are now part of a stigmatized institution, struggling to understand the implications for their careers. Should they stay or try to leave? Can they leave?

Source: chronicle.com

Israel Defense Forces soldiers killed a Palestinian man overnight Tuesday, in a refugee camp outside of Bethlehem.

According to IDF sources, soldiers entered the Deheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem. Clashes erupted with Palestinians throwing stones and bricks at the troops, One IDF soldier sustained a light head wound and was taken for treatment. The soldiers opened fire, and one Palestinian was hit, then taken to receive treatment.

According to Palestinian doctors, the 19-year-old victim, identified as Jihad Shehadi el-Jaafari. A was hit by one bullet in his chest, and taken to local clinic where he died shortly after from loss of blood. Palestinian sources said that the clashes broke out as IDF soldiers entered the camp on an arrest mission. One witness stated that Aljaferi was on the roof of his home looking down at the soldiers during the clash.

The Deheisheh camp was established in 1949 by the Jordanian governmen on land leased to the United Nations. Pope Francis visited there during his trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories in 2014.

Source: www.haaretz.com

Concomitant with Israel’s founding in 1948, its armed forces systematically expelled Palestine’s native population and razed some 500 of their communities to the ground in the largest and most successfully denied ethnic cleansing campaign in modern times.

A mere six and a half decades later, who knows about Damoun, for example? Who remembers it except for its surviving refugee sons and daughters and their descendants?

Imprisoned in Gaza’s open-air jail or in Lebanon’s camps, they are terrorized daily by Israel’s sonic booms or real air raids to force on them an alternative narrative of history. Yet Damoun was another Palestinian village, of an equal size to that of Arrabeh, my home village.

Like Arrabeh, it was continuously inhabited for some 4,000 years, since the days of the Canaanites who first founded it. And like the rest of Palestine, each had absorbed into itself one conquering invader after another, adapted to a softened version of their dictates, practiced an altered version of their beliefs, and survived on the gifts of its good earth and its hardy crops, its olives, figs and wheat.

Now Damoun is forever gone, replaced by a jealously exclusive Jewish settlement named Yasur in an open, premeditated and so far successful revision of history.

The fate of Damoun, and of the other hundreds of erased and largely forgotten Palestinian villages, serves as a lesson to us, members of the Palestinian minority in Israel.

Source: electronicintifada.net

JERUSALEM — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hailed a controversial U.S.

Source: www.washingtonpost.com

A controversial fixer for arms deals linked to an alleged corruption scandal that engulfed Nicolas Sarkozy has been refused entry to Britain.

Source: www.independent.co.uk

PHILIP METRES is the author and translator of a number of books, including Sand Opera (Alice James 2015), I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky (forthcoming 2015), Compleat Catalogue of Comedic Novelties: Poetic Texts of Lev Rubinstein (Ugly Duckling Presse 2014), A Concordance of Leaves (chapbook, Diode 2013), abu ghraib arias (chapbook, Flying Guillotine 2011), To See the Earth (Cleveland State 2008), and Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront (University of Iowa 2007). His work has appeared in Best American Poetry and has garnered two NEA fellowships, the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, five Ohio Arts Council Grants, the Beatrice Hawley Award, two Arab American Book Awards, the Cleveland Arts Prize, the Anne Halley Prize, the PEN/Heim Translation grant, and the Creative Workforce Fellowship. He is professor of English at John Carroll University in Cleveland. Were it not for Ellis Island translation, his last name would be Abourjaili.

¤

FADY JOUDAH: Sand Opera is ultimately a book about love, its loss and recapture, and the struggle in between. Many will completely misread it as another political book of poems, in that reductive, ready-made sense of “political” which is reserved for certain themes but mostly for certain ethnicities. So part of that misreading is due to the book’s subject matter or its Abu Ghraib arias, and also because it is written by an Arab American.

PHILIP METRES: I love the fact that you read Sand Opera as a book about love. The longer I worked on the book, the more I felt compelled to move past the dark forces that instigated its beginnings, forces that threatened to overwhelm it and me. Love, as much as I can understand it, thrives in an atmosphere of care for the self and other — the self of the other and the other of the self — through openness, listening, and dialogue. Because the book was born in the post-9/11 era, it necessarily confronts the dark side of oppression, silencing, and torture. Torture, as Elaine Scarry has explored so powerfully in The Body in Pain, is the diametrical opposite of love, the radical decreation of the other for political ends. The recent release of the so-called “Torture Report,” and the torrent of responses (both expressions of condemnation and defensive justifications) has felt like a traumatic repetition for me. Didn’t we deal with this during the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the “Enhanced Interrogation” debate? Even now, the political conversation seems to skip over the fact that torture contravenes international law and is a profoundly immoral act, and moves so quickly to debate its merits — whether any good “intelligence” may have been gleaned from it. Why is that the writers who have gained the widest platforms were veterans of the war, some of whom participated directly in interrogation — for example, Eric Fair’s courageous mea culpa December 2014 Letter to the Editor in The New York Times — while Arab voices, like Iraqi writer Sinan Antoon’s, are so hard to find and so marginalized?

Yes, Good Morning, Vietnam, Platoon, Apocalypse Now, and now it’s American Sniper. The question of agency is a serious one here. It’s what I call the Oliver Stone syndrome, where the humanity of the victimized is further diluted by the humanity of the victimizer who just can’t let go of their moral agony. Or in Edward Said’s words, it is “the permission to narrate.” Agency belongs to those who have tortured or shot Arabs and lived to tell about it. It is literature’s version of the Patriot Act, behind the mask of “professionalism,” “plurality,” and “experience.” The representatives of power’s soft remorseful side get the front row tickets at the table of public discourse.

Source: lareviewofbooks.org

This video titled “Israel – Fighting for Your Freedom” by Naftali Bennett neatly shows how Israeli politicians seek to exacerbate and exploit Islamophobia for the benefit of Israel.

Bennett, economy minister and leader of the ultra-racist Habayit Hayehudi (Jewish Home) party, stands on a hill in the occupied West Bank and, apparently addressing a European audience, declares: “Your war for freedom of speech starts right here.”

But more specifically, according to Bennett, it depends on Israel and its violent settlers continuing to occupy and steal Palestinian land in the West Bank.

Here’s what Bennett says:

I’m standing on the hills of Judea and Samaria, what many call the West Bank. Tel Aviv is just nine miles in back of me [sic]. To the north we have Hizballah. To the east we have ISIS. To the south we have Hamas.

Israel is in the forefront of the global war on terror. This is the frontline between the free and civilized world and radical Islam. We’re stopping the wave of radical Islam from flowing from Iran and Iraq all the way to Europe.

When we fight terror here, we’re protecting London, Paris and Madrid. If we give up this piece of land and hand it over to our enemies, my four children down there in Raanana will be in harm’s way. It’s just one missile away from hitting them.

To expect us to give up this land does not make sense. Your war for democracy starts here. Your war for freedom of speech starts right here. The war for dignity and freedom starts right here.

Violent policies

While Bennett markets himself as a lover of freedom and democracy in English, in Hebrew he boasts about how many Arabs he has killed.

Similarly, Ayelet Shaked, a senior lawmaker in his party, also became notorious last summer when she openly advocated genocide of the Palestinians.

Now Bennett seeks to exploit the rising tide of anti-Muslim hatred, turning it not just into generic support for Israel but specifically into support for Israel’s most violent and racist policies: its occupation and colonial theft of Palestinian land and its subjugation of millions of Palestinians to a system of permanent apartheid.

Bennett is of course not alone in trying to exploit recent incidents in Europe for Israel’s benefit. His coalition partner and election rival Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quick to exploit the recent shooting attacks in Paris and Cophenhagen to exhort European Jews to abandon their homelands so they could fill up the West Bank settlements.

Bennett’s video can also be seen as an effort to make a “positive” case for Israeli colonial settlements, amid a growing European boycott.

Source: electronicintifada.net