Mick Hartley

In Silwan

The Guardian's CiF at last features a piece on the horrific racism to be found in the Middle East:

It's searing hot, but there's some pleasantness about the stone-flagged path rising from the centre of Silwan, Jerusalem. Maybe it's the breeze, or the stone houses oozing coolness into the air, or maybe it's the wide-open mountain landscape. There are three of us – Ilan, the director, Michael, the cameraman and me, the interviewee. We're making a film on the blatant institutional discrimination against the residents of this Palestinian east-Jerusalem neighbourhood; authorities favour the Jewish settlers who are not hiding their desire to Judaise the neighbourhood, to void it of its Palestinian character.

Even before we position the camera, a group of orthodox Jewish girls, aged about eight to 10, come walking up the path in their ankle-long skirts, pretty, chattering, carefree. One of them slows down beside us, and pleasantly asks us if we want to film her. What would you like to tell us, we ask. I want to say that Jerusalem belongs to us Jews, she says as she walks on, only it's a pity there are Arabs here. The messiah will only come when there isn't a single Arab left here. She walks on, and her girlfriends giggle and rejoin her. [...]

Two minutes pass by, and an ultra-orthodox Jewish family comes striding up the path. The husband, all in black, asks Ilan: say, do both Jews and Arabs live in this neighbourhood? Both Palestinians and Jews, Ilan replies, but most residents are Palestinians. It's only temporary, the ultra-Orthodox man reassures him, pretty soon there won't be a single Arab left here.

I exchanged glances with Ilan and Michael. We've been here for less than 15 minutes, we haven't asked anyone on what they feel about Arabs or the future of Jerusalem, we only stood for a short while in the street. Hate flowed toward us like a river to the sea, freely, naturally. Do you think, I ask Ilan, that we'll run into someone who'll say something positive, something human, something kind about human beings? Forget human, Ilan replies, I wonder if we'll run into someone who'll be content to just say something nice about the clear Jerusalem air.

The point, of course, is not that this is a fabrication. I have no reason to doubt that this is an accurate account of what these film-makers found. The point is that this is appearing in the Guardian: a paper with a very poor record of balanced reporting on Israel and Palestine. I'm not an avid reader of CiF, but I don't recall many articles on the grotesque anti-semitism to be found across the Muslim Middle East documented by organisations such as MEMRI: Jews as apes and pigs, Holocaust denial, citing of the Protocols, and so on and on and on. If such attitudes were regulalry exposed by Guardian writers, then an article like this would be a welcome contribution to the debate. But they're not.

The piece appeared originally in Hebrew at the Israeli blog Haokets. That is, it was written by Israelis, living in a country with a free press, and taking advantage of that freedom to confront the intolerance and anti-Arab racism of many ultra-Orthodox Jews. We'll have a long wait to see anything comparable from within Arab or Iranian societies.

If you were an editor sitting on your arse in your office in London waiting for those exciting critical reports and exposés to come in, it's not hard to see how you might end up with a one-sided view: reports from the Arab world critical of Israel; reports from Israel critical of Israel....

Blow It Out Yo Ass

An interesting anatomical detail concerning the failed assassination attempt on Prince Muhammad Bin Naif, Saudi Assistant Minister of Interior for Security Affairs, by an al-Qaeda suicide bomber (via):

In one version of the events, Al-Arabiya, a Saudi-owned television network, said the attacker concealed the explosives in his anus, allowing him to evade detection. The network also quoted an expert as saying that the method of concealment aimed the blast away from the target, while blowing the bomber to bits.

No Sense of Humour

Since it's a common theme in UK media circles to sneer at Americans with their supposed lack of a sense of humour ("they don't get irony" etc. etc.), it's worth noting this ridiculous story about Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour show:

The eighty-third episode of “Theme Time” was entitled “Street Maps” [see here], and premiered last December. It featured music by everyone from Woody Guthrie to Green Day. After playing Roger Miller’s “King of the Road”, Dylan discussed the origin of the word “Hobo”. Then Dylan, pretending to share a secret with his audience, said,

“You know I don’t usually like to tell people what I’m doing, but I am talking to a couple of car companies about possibly being the voice of their GPS system. I think it would be good if you’re looking for directions and you heard my voice saying something like, ‘Take a left at the next street…no, a right…you know what, just go straight.’ I probably shouldn’t do it, ‘cause whichever way I go, I always end up in one place: on Lonely Avenue. Luckily I’m not totally alone. Ray Charles beat me there.”

This fictitious story was used by Dylan as a humorous way to introduce the next song, and was not taken seriously at the time. However, the program was premiered on BBC 6 radio in the United Kingdom on the evening of August 23.

And the Telegraph immediately came up with this:

Bob Dylan, the legend of folk and rock music, could soon be directing drivers down Highway 61 as car giants frantically bid to sign him up as the new voice of their sat nav systems.

The singer - a global superstar who has sold more than 70 million albums in a 45-year career - revealed that two major motor manufacturers had approached him to provide a audio road map commentary.

The 68-year-old is currently enjoying radio success on BBC 2 and 6 with his unique "Theme Time Radio Hour" show delivered in tone once described as "sandpaper singing".

He disclosed the offers from the sat nav firms on his radio show on BBC6 on Sunday night.

Now that's not having a sense of humour.

The BBC picked up the story, as did the NME. And, of course, the Guardian:

Bob Dylan has spent the better part of the past 40 years on the road, hawking his music around America and abroad seemingly without a pause. So it is perhaps fitting that he is considering lending his extraordinary voice to a GPS navigation system.

The usually impenetrable singer-songwriter revealed on his BBC Radio 6 show that he is in negotiations to become the latest celebrity, after Kim Cattrall and Homer Simpson, to be satnaved. "I am talking to a couple of car companies about being the voice of their GPS system," he said.

The move would finally solve the existential doubts that Dylan himself identified in his song Like a Rolling Stone: "How does it feel. To be on your own. With no direction home." Answer: It feels fine, you just switch on the gadget.

It's sweet really: they manage a little laboured joke of their own at the end there, while spectacularly missing the point.

And then the story headed back over the Atlantic to the NYT and Washington Post. 

Mainstream journalism, eh? Full of humourless idiots.

You're On Your Own

There've been a number of articles recently about women in Islam, and the (non) response of western feminists. So do we get to hear the other side of the story? - the view from a western feminist? Yes indeed we do. Here (at CiF, of course) is Geraldine Brooks, explaining why "finger-wagging won't help Muslim women":

By Allah, we're an arrogant lot.

By "we", I mean modern western feminists, a group among which I am generally proud to be included. Except when we're full of ourselves.

Western feminism is not the only ideology exquisitely sensible of gender injustice. Nor are western feminists the only ones willing or able to speak up about it. Muslim women have been doing this themselves for decades, loudly and often effectively. To cite just a few examples: It was Egyptian Muslims, Huda Shawari and Saiza Nabarawi, who publicly threw off their veils in 1923 at the Cairo railway station, leading to wide acceptance in Egypt that wearing hijab is a personal choice. Tamam Fahiliya, a Palestinian Muslim, started a women's group to protest honor killings in 1991. In the US recently, a young Muslim writer named Asra Nomani posted her list of theses regarding women's Islamic rights on the door of her local mosque in West Virginia, sparking spirited nationwide soul-searching among members of America's fastest growing religion. And in Iran, it is observant Muslim women who have achieved the most positive change in matters of economic and social equality.

By contrast, western feminist finger-wagging or attempts by pro-western governments to alter Islamic laws by fiat have been spectacularly counter productive. In 1979, Anwar Sadat enacted mild reform of marriage and custody laws, but by 1985 Egypt's Islamists had succeeded in having those laws struck down.

Well, it's one way of arguing. If any advance is made, it's because of the Muslim women themselves. Any setback, though, is due to Western interference. And so we must leave well alone. Even feminism is an ideology apparently restricted to the West. Muslim women, who may also be "exquisitely sensible of gender injustice", are excluded from the ranks. They have to fight their own battles.

In Iran, on the other hand, a young generation of Koranically-literate Islamic revolutionary women sparked a national conversation on personal status issues, using Islamic jurisprudence rather than legislative measures. By educating women in the use of Islamically sanctioned pre-nuptial agreements, for example, an Iranian woman can secure for herself the right to divorce in set circumstances, to continue study or work after marriage and to establish her share of property if the marriage is dissolved. All of this was done without parliamentary debate, because Muslim women argued their case from within the Islamic establishment.

Which must explain why women in Iran now lead such liberated lives, what with the stoning for adultery and being arrested for immodest dress (ie some hair showing) and all the rest. 

Is she - a self-styled feminist - really suggesting that Muslim women are better off ignoring western influence, and embracing Islam and all its ways? Yes she is: 

Reporting in Iran in 1995, I witnessed a similar exercise of Muslim feminist power. A university professor had looked out on his incoming engineering students and commented with disgust about the number of females, who would marry and waste their training. The women in the group who were the more "westernized" and less Islamically "correct" in their dress and beliefs felt their position too tenuous to object. But a band of chadoris, young women who were conspicuously observant, led a demarche on the professor, demanding a retraction and an apology. Which they got.

I'm not saying here that a human right is what the local despot says it is. I find the kind of moral relativism that justifies practices such as female genital mutilation disgusting and fatuous. What I am recommending is a little humility. Western feminists with a genuine desire to raise the status of oppressed women in Afghanistan or elsewhere should call their nearest mosque and make an appointment to talk to the sisterhood there. (I'm not talking about Wahhabi or Salafi-dominated mosques, which really are hopeless.) But in the majority of mosques they will learn of efforts long afoot to reclaim the positive messages about women's rights in the Koran, messages obscured for too long by patriarchy and oppressive social customs. It is those efforts that we western feminists should support if we care about the women, and not the sweet sound of our own politically correct bleatings.

Astonishing. When the call for universal women's rights can be dismissed as "politically correct bleatings" by a liberal Guardian feminist, you know some line's been crossed.

So what should western feminists be doing to help their Muslim sisters? They should, apparently, head to the nearest mosque and have a chat. Discover the true positive message of the Koran. Hell, maybe even convert. Why not? Anything rather than be an arrogant westerner with that horrible preachy finger-wagging insistence on women's freedom.

Muslim women: embrace your subservience!

Das Moto-Baby

Here's a wonderful site for vintage ephemera (via). Check out, for instance, Hypnotist Posters, Film Poster Paintings from Ghana, "Dying Speeches" Execution Broadsides, Tibetan Anatomical Paintings.....and much much more.

Voting in Afghanistan

Photos from the recent election, at The Big Picture:

[Shah Marai/AFP/Gertty Images]

"An Afghan man watches as election workers count votes at a polling station in Kabul on August 21, 2009."

In the Name of Culture

A couple of essays on women, Islam, and western feminists feature in the latest issue of Standpoint. As well as the excellent piece from Clive James (already linked to by Norm), there's this from Nick Cohen:

 [T]he stubborn fact remains that mainstream opinion does not consider the oppression of women a pressing concern when it is done in the name of culture or religion, particularly in the name of once-subordinate cultures and religions. The misogyny they generate does not move hearts or stir passions. Governments that stifle half their populations do not face boycotts or demonstrations outside their embassies, motions of condemnation at international conferences or opprobrium in everyday political discourse.

The comparison with the international anger directed at Apartheid is instructive. The oppression of blacks was once an affront to the conscience of the world. When we turn to the oppression of women, however, we find that the United Nations loses its conscience and encourages the ideologies of their oppressors. In 1990, Muslim foreign ministers challenged the first line of the UN's Declaration of Human Rights by replacing the ringing statement that "all human beings are born free in dignity and in rights" with the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights which announces that "all human beings are God's subjects". The UN's declaration says that everyone is entitled to its stipulated rights and freedoms "without distinction of any kind". The Cairo declaration says that rights can be restricted for a "Sharia prescribed reason". Nothing in it prevents forced marriages of pre-pubescent girls, or the death punishments for apostasy, homosexuality and the betrayal of a family's "honour".  [...]

The emancipation of women is necessary and essential for white-skinned women in London but not for brown-skinned women in Lahore. Or, to move from the global to the local, the emancipation of women is necessary and essential for white-skinned women in Hampstead and Highgate but not for brown-skinned women in Bethnal Green and Bow.

On a similar theme, here (via A&L Daily) is Judy Bachrach, on being a woman in a Muslim country.

Middelheim

If you go to Antwerp (and you should) I'd recommend a trip to Middelheim Park in the leafy eastern suburbs, which has a fine open-air collection of sculptures. 

Some are out on the lawns, in the open:

  

Others lurk in the woods:

Or sit on the paths:

It's the one place in the city I try to see on each visit.

It's not as though Antwerp lacks cultural sites, of course - far from it - but as Rembrandt is to Amsterdam, so Rubens is to Antwerp, and I know which city has the better of that one. The Christ in The Elevation of the Cross in the cathedral looks like he spent so much time working out it's a wonder he ever managed any preaching or miracle-working. 40 days in the wilderness? More like 40 days on an intensive protein bulk diet regimen combined with long sessions pumping iron. Gotta look good on that cross.

I much prefer the landscapes. Water and sky:

That's the Rupel, south of Antwerp, just before it joins the Schelde. There are now wind turbines up by the power station ahead instead of the old windmills, but not much has changed.

Stinking of Oppression

Colonel Gaddafi tends to be seen generally nowadays as more mad than bad: a colourful eccentric, with an odd predilection for sleeping in tents and surrounding himself with female bodyguards. It's a view that fits in nicely with his recently improved relations with the West, but, as Michael J Totten points out, Libya is no joke:

Qaddafi’s one-man rule, however, is almost uniquely grotesque. He closely studied Nicolae Ceauşescu’s vicious regime in Romania and imposed the same system on Libyans after he overthrew King Idris in 1969. His government is so repressive that the Islamic Republic of Iran looks libertarian by comparison. Unlike in Iran and even in Burma, there are no protests against government power in Libya ever. State control over the people is absolute....

I’m one of the very few Americans who has visited Libya since Qaddafi seized power. (Setting foot there was illegal until recently.) And I can attest that it is, indeed, one of the most thoroughly totalitarian countries on the face of the earth.

The place stinks of oppression. You can’t escape the state without leaving the country or going off-road and into the desert. Informers and secret police are omnipresent and all but omniscient. Hotel rooms are bugged. No one can travel from one city to another without a thick stack of permits and papers. I saw propaganda posters and billboards literally everywhere, even alongside roads in the wilderness where nobody lived. State propaganda is even carved into the sides of the mountains. Pictures of Qaddafi hang inside every building, and an entire floor of the museum in the capital is dedicated to glorifying him personally. Libya even looks like a communist country, with its Stalinist tower blocks outside Tripoli’s old city center and its socialist-realist paintings depicting happy proletarians in their Workers’ Paradise.

No one I met would talk about politics if there was the slightest chance anyone might overhear us. Those who did open up when we were safely in private were unanimous in their hatred, fear, and loathing of the regime. And they made sure to tell me that their entire families would be thrown in prison if I repeated what they said to anyone.

Miss Burka 2009

An inspiring TV report on a "moral beauty" pageant held in Saudi Arabia, which really needs to be watched to capture the full experience:

Reporter: Female beauty is no longer dependent on looks alone. This has been replaced by moral values and conduct – the new criteria in the first contest of moral beauty queens in Saudi Arabia. In the contest, which was organized by a women’s festival, several girls competed for the title.

Contest supervisor Khadhraa Al-Mubarak: In our contacts with girls in general, we noticed that they follow false notions, due to the purposeless Western notions, conveyed by some TV channels. The girls are preoccupied with their external appearance only. This is how we came up with the idea of creating an alternative. So we thought of a contest for the title of moral beauty queen.....

Moral beauty queen Aya Al-Mula: We were like sisters in a family. It was very nice. The contest focused on external skills, such as home design or skin care....