Mick Hartley

Reporting Gaza

With the Israeli attacks on Hamas' positions in Gaza comes a ratcheting up of the hatred in the Arab and Muslim media.

You have to register to view MEMRI's video clips now (it's free) but here's a grotesque diatribe from three women - faces hidden, slits for eyes - on the glories of martyrdom which appeared on Al-Aqsa (Hamas-run) TV yesterday. Transcript here:

If one of our men dies, a thousand men will set out in his place. We, the women, will set out. We are the granddaughters of Yassin, Al-Bana, and Al-Qassam. We are all the daughters of Palestine, the daughters of steadfast Gaza. We will set out, booby-trapped. From every home, a bomb will set out, and it will explode among the sons of Zion. We are no less than Fatima Al-Najjar and Rim Al-Riyashi [two Palestinian women who blew themselves up among Israelis]. We will blow ourselves up among those traitors, those apes and pigs.

This clip features a selection of clerics appearing on Egyptian TV from the last few days. The level of virulent anti-Semitism is....well, here's Sheik Amin Al-Ansari:

It is told that the Israelites killed more than 70,000 prophets in a single day. It’s not the people they want to eradicate, but Revelation itself. They do not want there to be any revelation, purity, religion, or religious law. The secret behind the war between the Jews and non-Jews is that they want to have a monopoly on the spiritual and ideological leadership of the world, and eventually, the physical leadership. [...]

By the “Chosen People,” they mean that they are a people, and all those who are inferior to them are not peoples. In other words, they are human beings, and all others are not. They are people, and all others are not. They are human beings, selected by God to be the leaders of all beings. So what about the rest of mankind? They view them as pigs. That’s the truth. Pigs! So why do they look like human beings? So that they will be worthy of being servants of the Jews, who could ride on their backs and such their blood. That’s why when a Jew kills a Palestinian child, he considers him to be a little pig. What difference is there between the two?! On the contrary, he might show mercy for the pig, as an animal that should not be harmed. The Palestinian child is worth less to him than a pig.

And so it goes. There's the Iranian Children's TV show, with the hostess exhorting her young studio audience to feel for the children of Gaza:

These children were defenseless. They were so young that they didn't know anybody but their parents. Except for strolling down the street and looking for a flower to smell, these children didn't do anything. They didn't understand what war is. They didn't understand what murder, massacre, and crime are. They didn't understand what evil is. But before they had time to grow up, they got a taste of the enemy's evil. [...]

We all loathe those enemies. We all loathe them. We are furious at them. We identify with the Palestinian children.

For a change from the familiar reporting of, as George Szirtes puts it, 'evil Israelis kill innocent Palestinian children', Harry's Place is the place to go. This past week they've really gone into overdrive. Too many good posts to link individually. Best of the blogosphere....

Update: the latest HP post, by Michelle Sieff, is especially worth reading.

May You Never

Another New Year Honours list, and, for me personally, another year of bitter disappointment. Still, John Martyn got an OBE:

Groaners

The Groaner - a deep rasping male singing style, and about as far from Bing Crosby as you can get -  features in quite a few African and Afro-derived musical styles. Here's the South African Mahlathini with the Mahotella Queens:

The reggae groaner was "The Voice of Thunder" Prince Far I (a man with whom I once shared a joint, but perhaps that's a story for which the world is not yet ready). There's a short clip of the man in action here, otherwise it's singles like Wisdom, or Throw Away Your Gun (sad, given his death from shooting in 1983) and the extraordinary Rastafarian Deck of Cards (if you get a pub quiz question about the connection between Wink Martindale and Prince Far I, well, now you know).

As for the US, well, quite a few blues singers had rough dark voices - Howlin' Wolf would be the obvious example - but no one came close to Blind Willie Johnson, here with John the Revelator.

They're all dead now (Mahlathini died in 1999). It'd be a shame if the tradition had died out with them. Is that kind of hyper-masculine style seen as too crude or offensive nowadays?

Painting the City

By the bottom lock on the Hertford Union Canal, Hackney Wick:

LRA Massacre in the Congo

The Eastern Congo continues as a kind of lawless African badlands, overrun by renegades from the various civil wars originating in neighbouring countries like Rwanda and Uganda:

Uganda's army has accused the Lord's Resistance Army rebels of hacking to death 45 civilians in a Catholic church in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Capt Chris Magezi said the scene was "horrendous... dead bodies of mostly women and children cut in pieces". The attack happened on 26 December.

A rebel spokesman has denied responsibility for the killings, which follow a collapse in the peace process.

The UN says at least 189 people were killed in several attacks last week.

Some reports say more than 100 people were killed in the church alone.

The armies of Uganda, South Sudan and DR Congo carried out a joint offensive against the rebels in mid-December after LRA leader Joseph Kony again refused to sign a peace deal.

The LRA leader, who has lived in a jungle hideout in north-eastern DR Congo for the last few years, is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity....

Aid officials requesting anonymity near Doruma, which is about 40km from the border with South Sudan, confirmed to Uganda's Daily Monitor newspaper and to the AFP news agency that the massacre had taken place.

"Bodies of the women and children, with deep cuts are littered inside and outside the church," an aid official told The Monitor.

Witness Abel Longi told the AP news agency that he recognised the LRA rebels by their dreadlocked hair, their Acholi language and the number of young boys among them.

The brutalised young boys, of course, were forced into the LRA by Kony's unique recruitment methods (pdf). And are very possibly being fed by aid agencies.

Islam and Our Elders Require It

Kurdistan features disproportionately in stories of honour killings. Not unrelatedly, female circumcision is widespread. Here's a feature in today's Washington Post:

Sheelan Anwar Omer, a shy 7-year-old Kurdish girl, bounded into her neighbor's house with an ear-to-ear smile, looking for the party her mother had promised.

There was no celebration. Instead, a local woman quickly locked a rusty red door behind Sheelan, who looked bewildered when her mother ordered the girl to remove her underpants. Sheelan began to whimper, then tremble, while the women pushed apart her legs and a midwife raised a stainless-steel razor blade in the air. "I do this in the name of Allah!" she intoned.

As the midwife sliced off part of Sheelan's genitals, the girl let out a high-pitched wail heard throughout the neighborhood. As she carried the sobbing child back home, Sheelan's mother smiled with pride.

"This is the practice of the Kurdish people for as long as anyone can remember," said the mother, Aisha Hameed, 30, a housewife in this ethnically mixed town about 100 miles north of Baghdad. "We don't know why we do it, but we will never stop because Islam and our elders require it."

Kurdistan is the only known part of Iraq --and one of the few places in the world--where female circumcision is widespread. More than 60 percent of women in Kurdish areas of northern Iraq have been circumcised, according to a study conducted this year. In at least one Kurdish territory, 95 percent of women have undergone the practice, which human rights groups call female genital mutilation.

The practice, and the Kurdish parliament's refusal to outlaw it, highlight the plight of women in a region with a reputation for having a more progressive society than the rest of Iraq. Advocates for women point to the increasing frequency of honor killings against women and female self-immolations in Kurdistan this year as further evidence that women in the area still face significant obstacles, despite efforts to raise public awareness of circumcision and violence against women....

Supporters of female circumcision said the practice, which has been a ritual in their culture for countless generations, is rooted in sayings they attribute to the prophet Muhammad, though the accuracy of those sayings is disputed by other Muslim scholars. The circumcision is performed by women on women, and men are usually not involved in the procedure. In the case of Sheelan, her mother informed her father that she was going to have the circumcision performed, but otherwise, he played no role.

Kurds who support circumcising girls say the practice has two goals: It controls a woman's sexual desires, and it makes her spiritually clean so that others can eat the meals she prepares.

There's a photo gallery to go with the story of Sheelan. Despite the editor's warning - "some images in this gallery may be disturbing because of their violent or graphic nature" -  there's actually nothing graphic about them at all. Disturbing though....yes.

Casualties Down by Two Thirds

The figures may still be unacceptably high, but considering the talk of civil war that was commonplace a year or so ago, this is surely something to celebrate:

The number of civilians killed by violence in Iraq has fallen by two thirds in 2008, researchers say.

Official Iraqi figures say 5,714 people were killed in 2008 compared to 16,252 the previous year.

The non-governmental organisation Iraq Body Count also said the number of deaths was down by two thirds, but put the figure between 8,315 and 9,028.

US military casualties fell from 900 in 2007 to just over 300 according to the independent website icasualties.org.

The improvement has been greatest in Baghdad itself, says the BBC's Caroline Wyatt in Baghdad.

Official Iraqi figures indicate that around 2,300 people were killed in the capital this year.

Preventing Vice

It's all part of a day's work for the lads in the Religious Police:

The Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice closed down the only women’s park in Yanbu on Thursday. The move resulted in the loss of 60 jobs for local women, Al-Watan newspaper reported yesterday.

Suleiman Al-Hamadi, vice chairman of the commission’s Yanbu branch, said the reason for the closure was complaints by people in nearby houses that they were disturbed by the sound of music from the facility. “The commission closed the park with the permission of the local administrator as it received many complaints from local residents about loud music and singing from there,” Al-Hamadi said.

Local women frequented the facility, as it provided health and sports clubs meant exclusively for women.

Update, from MEMRI:

Abdallah bin Bakhit, Saudi liberal and columnist for the Saudi daily Al-Jazirah, stated in an interview on Al-Arabiya that "the time has passed" for the Saudi religious police, and that it should be abolished.

He said that the organization employs extremists who reject cinema, resist women's driving, and encourage polygamy.

In response, Al-Jazirah banned Bin Bakhit from continuing to write for it.

The End of Time

Upcoming Event: The End of Time. Date: Thursday January 1st 2009. Place: London Muslim Centre, Whitechapel.

From the Telegraph:

The End of Time event at the East London Mosque, which is being publicised on internet sites including Facebook, will feature a videotaped lecture from Anwar al-Awlaki, who is banned from entering the United States after allegedly acting as a spiritual adviser to three of the September 11 terrorists.

Mr Awlaki, who lives in Yemen, has been described as "an al-Qaeda supporter" by the US Department of Homeland Security, which has accused him in recent months of using video lectures to "encourage terrorist attacks".

He is due to deliver a video lecture at the mosque in Whitechapel on New Year's Day. Speeches will have titles such as The sound of the trumpet – the real terror starts.

Other speakers will include Suhaib Hasan, who advocates implementing sharia in Britain, and Khalid Yasin, who has described the beliefs of Christians and Jews as "filth".

The publicity material for the all-day event appears to be a clear reference to the attacks on New York, and features meteors raining down on Manhattan, setting fire to the city and shattering the Statue of Liberty. [...]

Robin Simcox, of the Centre for Social Cohesion, said: "That these extremist speakers are being given a platform by such an allegedly mainstream mosque, in one of the most Muslim-populous areas in the country, should be cause for serious concern."

Tickets for the event are being sold on the internet by a little-known company called Noor Pro Media Events, based in East Ham in London.

No one from the company was available for comment.

A spokesman for the mosque said: "We didn't organise this event, they are just using our facilities.

Harold Pinter 1930 - 2008

I won't miss his recent politics, but in all the obituaries I've not seen mention of one element that I loved about Pinter: his poetry of London. I first heard Mick, in The Caretaker, before I moved down here, and the magic of those London names - in one of his glorious monologues here to the wretched Davies - still lingers.

You know, believe it or not, you've got a funny kind of resemblance to a bloke I once knew in Shoreditch. Actually he lived in Aldgate. I was staying with a cousin in Camden Town. This chap, he used to have a pitch in Finsbury Park, just by the bus depot. When I got to know him I found out he was brought up in Putney. That didn't make any difference to me. I know quite a few people who were born in Putney. Even if they weren't born in Putney they were born in Fulham. The only trouble was, he wasn't born in Putney, he was only brought up in Putney. In turned out he was born in the Caledonian Road, just before you get to the Nag's Head. His old mum was still living at the Angel. All the buses passed right by the door. She could get a 38, 581, 30 or 38A, take her down the Essex Road to Dalston Junction in next to no time. Well, of course, if she got the 30 he'd take her up Upper Street way, round by Highbury Corner and down to St. Paul's Church, but she'd get to Dalston Junction just the same in the end. I used to leave my bike in her garden on my way to work. Yes, it was a curious affair. Dead spit of you he was. Bit bigger round the nose but there was nothing in it.

It was the only time I've ever seen a play and then gone out and bought the book. Still have it, actually: an old Methuen paperback, blue spine, cost 6s 0d net, with a photo on the front of Donald Pleasence as Davies and Alan Bates as Mick.