Jadaliyya جدلية

Jadaliyya  is an independent ezine produced by ASI (Arab Studies Institute), the umbrella organization that produces Arab Studies Journal (www.ArabStudiesJournal.org) and runs the Documentary Film Collective, Quilting Point. Jadaliyya provides a unique source of insight and critical analysis that combines local knowledge, scholarship, and advocacy with an eye to audiences in the United States, the Arab world, and beyond. The site currently publishes posts both in Arabic and in English.  Jadaliyya is run and produced on a voluntary basis by an editorial team and expanding pool of contributors committed to discussing the Middle East and North Africa on their own terms. Where others see only a security threat, conflict, or data on a graph, we see a region inhabited by living communities and dynamic societies.  

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Text of Resignation Letter by ESCWA Executive Secretary Rima Khalaf

[The following text is the resignation letter submitted by ESWA Executie Secretary Rima Khalaf in response to the formal request by UN Secretary General that ESCWA withdraw the publication of a report that asserts Israel is committing Apartheid. Click here to access the full ESCWA report, which has since been removed from the UN website.]

Dear Mr. Secretary-General,

I have carefully considered your message conveyed through the Chef de Cabinet and assure you that at no point have I questioned your right to order the withdrawal of the report from our website or the fact that all of us working in the Secretariat are subject to the authority of its Secretary-General. Nor do I have any doubts regarding your commitment to human rights in general, or your firm position regarding the rights of the Palestinian people. I also understand the concerns that you have, particularly in these difficult times that leave you little choice.

I am not oblivious to the vicious attacks and threats the UN and you personally were subjected to from powerful Member States as a result of the publication of the ESCWA report “Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid”. I do not find it surprising that such Member States, who now have governments with little regard for international norms and values of human rights, will resort to intimidation when they find it hard to defend their unlawful policies and practices. It is only normal for criminals to pressure and attack those who advocate the cause of their victims.  I cannot submit to such pressure.

Not by virtue of my being an international official, but simply by virtue of being a decent human being, I believe, like you, in the universal values and principles that have always been the driving force for good in human history, and on which this organization of ours, the United Nations is founded. Like you, I believe that discrimination against anyone due to their religion, skin color, sex or ethnic origin is unacceptable, and that such discrimination cannot be rendered acceptable by the calculations of political expediency or power politics. I also believe people should not only have the freedom to speak truth to power, but they have the duty to do so.

In the space of two months you have instructed me to withdraw two reports produced by ESCWA, not due to any fault found in the reports and probably not because you disagreed with their content, but due to the political pressure by member states who gravely violate the rights of the people of the region.

You have seen first hand that the people of this region are going through a period of suffering unparalleled in their modern history; and that the overwhelming flood of catastrophes today is the result of a stream of injustices that were either ignored, plastered over, or openly endorsed by powerful governments inside and outside the region. Those same governments are the ones pressuring you to silence the voice of truth and the call for justice represented in these reports.

Given the above, I cannot but stand by the findings of ESCWA’s report that Israel has established an apartheid regime that seeks the domination of one racial group over another. The evidence provided by this report drafted by renowned experts is overwhelming. Suffice it to say that none of those who attacked the report had a word to say about its content. I feel it my duty to shed light on the legally inadmissible and morally indefensible fact that an apartheid regime still exists in the 21st century rather than suppressing the evidence. In saying this I claim no moral superiority nor ownership of a more prescient vision. My position might be informed by a lifetime of experiencing the dire consequences of blocking peaceful channels to addressing people’s grievances in our region.

After giving the matter due consideration, I realized that I too have little choice. I cannot withdraw yet another well-researched, well-documented UN work on grave violations of human rights, yet I know that clear instructions by the Secretary-General will have to be implemented promptly. A dilemma that can only be resolved by my stepping down to allow someone else to deliver what I am unable to deliver in good conscience.  I know that I have only two more weeks to serve; my resignation is therefore not intended for political pressure. It is simply because I feel it my duty towards the people we serve, towards the UN and towards myself, not to withdraw an honest testimony about an ongoing crime that is at the root of so much human suffering. Therefore, I hereby submit to you my resignation from the United Nations.

Respectfully

Rima Khalaf

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Open Letters from CUNY Faculty and Students to President Chase Robinson Regarding the Replacement of Dr. Anny Bakalian, Associate Director of the Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center (MEMEAC)

The following letters have been sent by faculty, PhD students, and MA students affiliated with the Middle Eastern Studies Program and theMiddle East and Middle Eastern American Center at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York, to Chase Robinson, President of the Graduate Center. The letters address proposed cuts that would replace the position of Associate Director, currently held byDr. Anny Bakalian, with a part-time college assistant. Fifty-two faculty, fifty-nine PhD students, and twenty-five MA students have signed these letters. More information can be found here.]

1 March 2016

Dear President Robinson:

We the undersigned CUNY faculty are writing to express our grave professional concern about the CUNY Graduate Center’s plans to replace the Associate Director of the Middle East and Middle East American Center (MEMEAC), Dr. Anny Bakalian, after her retirement, with a part-time college assistant. This proposed change in staffing will have a devastating impact on MEMEAC, an intellectual and interdisciplinary home for many faculty in Middle Eastern Studies at CUNY, and on its MA program, which is a nationally and internationally recognized academic success, a prestigious asset, and highly profitable for the Graduate Center.

While we recognize that under any circumstances it would be difficult to find someone with Dr. Bakalian’s talents, expertise, and dedication to the position, our experience tells us that for MEMEAC and its MA program to continue to grow and flourish Anny must be replaced with a full-time HEO of similar qualification, able to serve under the same terms of reference. We understand the Graduate Center’s need to cut costs where possible, but feel strongly that trying to save money with this position would be fundamentally counter-productive. With no central line Graduate Center faculty hired to teach in the MA in Middle Eastern Studies program, and with MEMEAC’s director engaged with many other teaching, administrative, and advising tasks, to have the day to day administration, coordination, and advising of the MA program run by a part-timer and perhaps a rotating cast of graduate student helpers would, almost certainly, ensure the slow demise of that program. The duties of the Associate Director are myriad and include working with international students, coordinating teaching and activities across various CUNY campuses, as well as running the MA program and coordinating our offerings with various PhD programs and their students.

More widely, MEMEAC’s academic and cultural credibility, which relates to the all-important matter of fundraising, depends significantly on the nationally- and internationally-rated cultural and scholastic events that have become its trademark. These are the dedicated responsibility of the Associate Director, demanding a specialist facility, long and flexible hours, diplomatic and many other related skills, and self-evident contemporary authority likely to be far beyond what can be reasonably required from a part-time college assistant. By making the latter sort of appointment, these value-added but essential functions of MEMEAC will quickly deteriorate, eventually leaving little of what has been achieved during the last fifteen years.

Over and above the MA program, MEMEAC has consistently been one of the top centers in New York for cultural and academic events related to the Middle East. It now easily competes with Columbia and New York University in that regard, despite having fewer resources. MEMEAC’s unique place in New York, without a full-time HEO Associate Director, would quickly be diminished. This would not only have a negative impact on the morale and intellectual lives of CUNY’s MEMEAC affiliated faculty, but would also jeopardize the Center’s attractiveness to future donors, visiting scholars, presenters, and performers. Should MEMEAC become less active in this outreach role, other centers, such as ALWAN and the increasingly active New York campus of the Lebanese American University, would quickly take its place, and in relatively close-knit Middle Eastern circles this would soon be widely known, compounding the rate of MEMEAC’s decline.

At a time when the Graduate Center is actively seeking ideas for new MA programs, it defies logic to destabilize one of our most successful and flourishing programs. We urge you to reconsider the decision to replace Dr. Bakalian with a part-time college assistant and respectfully request a meeting at your earliest convenience to further discuss the matter.

Yours sincerely,

Ervand Abrahamian, Baruch College and Graduate Center Ammiel Alcalay, Queens College and Graduate Center Tony Alessandrini, Kingsbororough Community College and Graduate Center Talal Asad, Graduate Center Nebahat Avcıoğlu, Hunter College and Graduate Center Hamid Bahri, York College Jennifer Ball, Brooklyn College and Graduate Center Beth Baron, City College and Graduate Center Marlène Barsoum, Hunter College and Graduate Center Ülkü Ü. Bates, Hunter College Alexander A. Bauer, Queens College and Graduate Center Moustafa Bayoumi, Brooklyn College Stephen Blum, Graduate Center Avram Bornstein, John Jay College and Graduate Center Habiba Boumlik, LaGuardia Community College Lale Can, City College Marvin Carlson, Graduate Center Sami Chetrit, Queens College and Graduate Center Dina Dahbany-Miraglia, Queensborough Community College and Graduate Center Craig Daigle, City College Simon Davis, Bronx Community College and Graduate Center Alex Elinson, Hunter College and Graduate Center Louis Fishman, Brooklyn College Arnold Franklin, Queens College Erik Freas, Borough of Manhattan Community College Emily Greble, City College and Graduate Center Elhum Haghighat, Lehman College and Graduate Center Samira Haj, College of Staten Island and Graduate Center Amr Kamal, City College Andrea Khalil, Queens College and Graduate Center Suha Kudsieh, College of Staten Island Marnia Lazreg, Hunter College and Graduate Center Mandana Limbert, Queens College and Graduate Center Dina Le Gall, Lehman College and Graduate Center James De Lorenzi, John Jay College Xerxes Malki, John Jay College Feisal G. Mohamed, Graduate Center Loraine Obler, Graduate Center Kristina Richardson, Queens College Christa Salamandra, Lehman College and Graduate Center Victoria Sanford, Lehman College and Graduate Center Jillian Schwedler, Hunter College and Graduate Center Roger Sedarat, Queens College Miryam Segal, Queens College and Graduate Center Jonathan Shannon, Hunter College and Graduate Center Christopher Stone, Hunter College and Graduate Center Jane Sugarman, Graduate Center R. Shareah Taleghan, Queens College Stanley Thangaraj, City College Bryan Turner, Graduate Center H. Aram Veeser, City College and Graduate Center Devrim Yavuz, Lehman College

***

29 February 2016

Dear President Robinson:

We, the undersigned, PhD students at the Graduate Center, CUNY, affiliated with the Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center (MEMEAC), are writing to express our grave concern regarding the decision to replace the Center’s Associate Director, Dr. Anny Bakalian, with a part-time college assistant following her retirement in summer 2016.

There are over fifty-five “MEMEAC PhD students” at the Graduate Center in at least thirteen programs, including Anthropology, Comparative Literature, English, Ethnomusicology, History, Political Science, and Sociology. Our dissertations focus on the Middle East and North Africa and their diasporas; consequently, MEMEAC functions as our area studies home. More importantly, MEMEAC has filled a number of gaps in our disciplinary programs. For example, the shortage of professors in each program specializing in the Middle East makes many MEMEAC PhD students feel underrepresented in their departments and at a disadvantage in comparison to their peers working on other area studies. Our departments often do not provide the resources and networks—ranging from language instruction and faculty mentorship to opportunities to meet renowned scholars and access to grants—specific to the study of the Middle East and necessary for a rigorous and immersive intellectual experience. MEMEAC has therefore served to supplement our disciplinary programs. In the past decade, several doctoral programs have enticed strong prospective students who work on the Middle East to choose the Graduate Center by selling MEMEAC as an added value.

MEMEAC’s Associate Director has been the catalyst in building an academic Middle Eastern Studies community within the Graduate Center. The Center offers graduate students advisors and mentors, a connection with students and faculty specializing in the Middle East across disciplines, professional development opportunities, research assistantships, student conferences, workshops, and relationships with other Middle East institutes and centers at nearby universities. In light of the increasingly competitive job market, it is imperative that doctoral students on the job market demonstrate the kind of interdisciplinary knowledge fostered by such a program. Further, Graduate Center alumni specializing in Middle Eastern Studies maintain ties with the Center and are invited to speak. Active alumni are invaluable for current MEMEAC PhD students as models and mentors, and they provide important information about job openings and invitations to present at panels at the Middle Eastern Studies Association and other conferences. It should thus be evident that the many responsibilities and functions of the Associate Director cannot be fulfilled by a part-time college assistant.

With prominent scholars such as Talal Asad, Ervand Abrahamian, Stephen Blum, Marvin Carlson, and Vincent Crapanzano having recently retired or retiring, the Graduate Center is left weakened, less attractive in disciplinary programs, and even more impoverished in Middle Eastern Studies. Replacing the Associate Director with a college assistant working twenty hours per week will diminish a thriving center that serves several stakeholders in the university. While we are aware of the gravity of the fiscal crisis, we firmly believe that terminating the position of MEMEAC Associate Director is shortsighted and will in the long term be harmful to the interests of the Graduate Center and its current and future doctoral students working on the Middle East.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned [the letter has fifty-nine signatories]

***

10 March 2016

Dear President Robinson:

We the students of the Master’s Program in Middle Eastern Studies (MA-MES) at the Graduate Center, CUNY, have serious concerns regarding the replacement of Dr. Anny Bakalian, the Associate Director, with a part time college assistant upon her retirement. We believe this decision would have a deleterious effect on the quality of our education and negatively impact the number of master’s students in the future.

The Associate Director assumes a series of mediations that begin with prospective applicants when we consider applying to the MA-MES Program. Her guidance becomes even more crucial when we enroll and start taking courses, and eventually complete the thirty credits and graduate. Students’ time in the master’s program follows widely divergent trajectories; however, the Associate Director is the one person who connects each student to the Graduate Center and makes sure that their experience is personalized and positive. Services offered include individualized advising depending on each student’s future goals, such as locating a thesis advisor for those taking the PhD route, or choosing an internship and focus on a capstone project for those seeking professional employment. The language requirement of the program entails many conversations with the Associate Director—where to study Arabic or another Middle Eastern language; summer abroad experiences, and which universities issues graduate credits for transfer. Many of us remember our encouraging exchanges with Dr. Bakalian before deciding to join the program. Further, out of state and international students recall helpful advice on managing the move to New York City, as well as taking advantage of its vast resources such as institutes, museums and performances at affordable prices. We have met many of the MA-MES alumni who regularly return to the Graduate Center for MEMEAC activities and we are grateful for this amazing networking opportunity. In short, the Associate Director is the glue of the program, connecting students, faculty, alumni and the Graduate Center. For the students this position ensures we get the most out of our master’s degree. The absence of a similarly qualified Associate Director would not only severely impede our ability to locate and utilize the considerable but far-flung resources available to us in the CUNY system, it would also jeopardize the existence of the program. Only a full-time person could try to fill the responsibilities necessary for the MA-MES Program to excel.

We understand that the Graduate Center is expanding master’s programs like our own in order to provide revenue because of the CUNY fiscal crisis. Considering that paying students expect a top-notch education and quality academic services, if this is neglected then future potential students will look elsewhere, and enrollment is sure to suffer. We think it is in the academic and financial interests of the Graduate Center to find a qualified replacement for Dr. Bakalian. Certainly, her responsibilities go beyond the MA program, but we are able to speak directly to her role in our success and the pride of our degree.

Sincerely,

The MES Master’s Students [this letter has twenty-five signatories] 

#jadaliyya 

http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/24092/open-letters-from-cuny-faculty-and-students-to-pre

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Hasan al-Turabi and Contemporary Islam http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/24081/hasan-al-turabi-and-contemporary-islam #jadaliyya

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Discourse Polarization and the Liberal Triumph in Egypt

Jadaliyya co-editor Bassam Haddad reflects on various points surrounding the discourses that have shaped how Egypt is covered and discussed:

“Good Morning, I’m Late, But an Egypt Expert Now!”

Many commentators, on all sides of the political spectrum, come to the Egyptian scene as spectators who did not closely follow the events between 11 February 2011 and 30 June 2013. And they know much, much less about the Egyptian polity prior to 2011. Thus, judgments often proceed from a priori positions regarding false binaries such as “Islamism” vs. “secularism,” as though there is no history prior to 2011, or as though there was no record of policies to judge during Morsi’s presidency. More often than not, analyses embrace all-encompassing narratives that present Egypt as a battlefield featuring only a few actors (“Islamists vs. liberals”; “Army vs. Muslim Brotherhood”;  “Revolutionaries vs. Counter-Revolutionaries”). Such accounts effectively erase the many processes and actors that do not fit into these binary categories. As with Syria, we end up witnessing entrenched ideational/impression-based camps rather than dynamic analysis that is amenable to revision. The discourse on Egypt becomes more important than what is actually happening in Egypt. The same applies to local Egyptian media if observers are glued to one venue.

“The Brotherhood is Only a Party that Opposed Dictatorship”

Many commentators know about the Egyptian state or dictatorship under Mubarak, including its economic exploits and the marriage of money and power; concessions to, and collaboration with, Israel; and the repression of political alternatives. However, most know little about the history of the Muslim Brotherhood nor for that matter the organization’s preferences, behavior, and policies after Morsi’s election. The most egregious common mis-analysis is the jettisoning of the Muslim Brotherhood’s role in cajoling the army and re-entrenching the security state and some of its social and political corollaries under Morsi’s leadership, and before. The idea that the Brotherhood was also being used by the army (as Tamarod was) is noted. More important, however, is that there were explicit decisions by the Brotherhood/Morsi to strengthen the hand of the ancient regime and a near absence of an institutional curtailing of the security state’s power or the probability of its abuse of power. The Brotherhood, for those who only see a past of an underdog opposing authoritarian rule, is much more than and much less than that. Their social and economic record prior to 2011, notwithstanding the services they provided, is very much of a black box, or irrelevant, to many commentators and instant “experts.”

The Media’s Binary

The media have played an exceptionally delusional role inside and outside Egypt, supporting partisan narrative in their maximalist version. Unending and thorough demonization of the Muslim Brotherhood was countered by most Brotherhood supporters/defenders with utter neglect of their excesses, complicity with the army/fuloul, and transgressions, especially after 2011. Watching one or the other type of television stations (or reading one or the other publication) exclusively prejudices outcomes beyond reason. Most dangerous has been the vitriol in most liberal Egyptian media against the Muslim Brotherhood and pretty much everything they stand for today or stood for in the past. This discourse mobilized not just bodies, but minds, preparing them to anticipate, accept, and perhaps justify violent and brutal action against them. The reactionary Muslim Brotherhood equivalent about the “other” is and was at play, in media and action. Perhaps we are accustomed to it and were unmoved. Yet this reactionary equivalent of the Brotherhood pales in comparison with the institutional and coercive action-backed discourse against them.

Continue reading here.

[globalwarmist]

Bahrain’s rulers treat the country they took over approximately 230 years ago as a typical business model. To protect their investments from the people of Bahrain, they have brought in tens of thousands of Sunni mercenaries from countries such as Pakistan, Jordan, Syria, and Yemen to maintain their authoritarian hold on power. This also serves a purpose of changing the demographics of Bahrain from a Shia majority into a Sunni majority, as the regime only allows for the political naturalization of Sunnis. Through their membership in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Bahrain’s rulers have forged alliances with other Gulf monarchies, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Such alliances have shielded Bahrain from international scrutiny and accountability. Bahrainis often complain that Bahrain is not Al Khalifa’s country and Bahrainis are not their people. They accuse the rulers of treating the country they conquered by force as a privately owned money hub and do not care about the consequences of their irreversible and damaging actions.

My Parents’ Bahrain by Maryam Al-Khawaja

The poor coverage of Bahrain in Western media is nothing surprising. It would do you good if you read this heartrending account by Maryam Al-Khawaja, the acting President of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, whose father (Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja) and sister (Zainab Al-Khawaja) are currently imprisoned for their peaceful activism. Maryam was also recently banned from entering Bahrain.

(via globalwarmist)

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"The Mummy Returns" by Nidal El Khairy

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Jadaliyya Co-Editor Noura Erakat Discusses Resumption of Peace Talks on Al Jazeera's 'The Stream'

In this episode of Al Jazeera's The Stream, Jadaliyya Co-Editor Noura Erakat joins Dimi Reider, Hussein Ibish, and Gil Hoffman to discuss the significance of the resumed talks. Noura explains that returning to the negotiating table benefits the United States and Israel, and will likely result in an economic plan that incrementally improves the lives of Palestinians without altering the power dynamics at all—thus extending the shelf life of the current Palestinian leadership. She emphasizes:

[W]e shouldn't lose sight of that what is fundamentally at issue here isn't that Palestinians can't govern themselves in statelet or some sort of territorial entity. The fundamental issue here is that Palestinians as a population are subject to a settler-colonial regime which deems them inferior to their Jewish Israeli counterparts.

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With Our Ideas We Take Our Portrait: Reflecting on the Work of George Azar

George Azar is a Lebanese-American photographer and filmmaker who has been documenting life in the Levant since 1981. At that time he left California to photograph the Lebanese civil war with an eye to the complexity of the human experience of those events. When the first intifada began in 1987, Azar documented life in the West Bank with the same fine-grained approach. During the second intifada, Azar’s This is Palestine project moved in a different direction by focusing on what, as Darwish says, makes Palestinian life worth living.

In this collection, the second in a series of Palestinian youth commentary on photography, Palestinians who grew up in Bethlehem during the second intifada look at Azar’s photographs of their city from the first intifada and in more recent years. Comparing the first intifada with contemporary days, they recognize similar hopes and fears. They also detect changes. Azar’s work makes us wonder: What is the different resonance of a homemade flag as opposed to one produced in a factory, far away? We read here about a famous Bethlehem oven that demonstrates the creativity and work that goes into maintaining Palestinian tradition. These writings also embrace the ambiguity of images that capture Israeli violence and Palestinian steadfastness in one gesture. Together they highlight how Palestinians have refashioned their identities in the face of political trauma while maintaining a commitment to collective survival.

Click here to continue reading and for more images from the collection.

[jadaliyya]

Sexual Violence in Egypt: Myths and Realities

In memory of Eman Mustafa.

Last September, sixteen-year-old Eman Mustafa was walking with a friend in the village of Arab Al Kablatin Assiut, when a man groped her breasts. She turned to face him and spat in his face. He shot her dead with an automatic rifle as a price for her bravery. Mustafa’s death was an eye-opener call to those who claim that sexual violence is an urban issue. Thanks to human rights organizations and activist groups, Eman's killer was sentenced to life imprisonment in June 2013.

Violence against women across historical, cultural, and national divides continues to be a socially accepted practice, if not a norm. In the realms of both policy and social awareness, we have collectively failed to tackle this issue with serious rigor. As a result, we seem to be witnessing an increase in sexual violence and brutality.

In Egypt, sexual harassment is widespread and touches the lives of the majority of women whether on the streets, in public transportation, or at the work place, the super market, or political protests. It is true that sexual harassment still lacks a unified definition, but it is not difficult to identify unwelcome verbal or physical sexual violation. Many Egyptians, women included, are unclear as to what constitutes sexual harassment. Others sadly, do not think it is a problem. One thing is clear though, and that is the actions of the various governments of the last thirty years have been limited to statements of regret and unmet promises.

Continue reading...

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Bahrain and the Kissinger Cables

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Is The Egyptian Revolution Aborted? Interview With Hossam El-Hamalawy

Bassam Haddad interviews Hossam El-Hamalawy on the June 30 events, breaking down the "coup vs. revolution" binary, and providing a general overview of the events leading up the recent protests in Egypt.

Click here for a synopsis of the interview as well as a full transcript.

[jadaliyya]

Anti-Imperialist Transnational Feminist Studies theorizes the US war on terror as a racialized, gendered, and sexualized imperialist war that operates through military and economic policy in order to advance and consolidate the system of capitalism. AITFS contextualizes the US war on terror within the restructuring of US domestic and foreign policy, which entailed an expansion of the conjoined heteropatriarchal, racist, and classist structures of the prison industrial complex (PIC) and the military industrial complex (MIC), both driven by the economic neo-liberalism of the late twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries. Historically, the Reagan era’s neo-liberal economic policies and the war on drugs during the decades leading up to the war on terror set this process into motion. Notably, throughout this period, the MIC has worked through a neo-liberal system in which functions of the military were increasingly transferred to bodies outside of the state, including private corporations, subcontractors, and universities. Paralleling this process, the US prison industrial complex has also undergone privatization so that nearly all prison-related service providers are for-profit companies and are sustained by a racist, classist, and heteropatriarchal criminal justice system.

Nadine Naber writes on Transnational Anti-Imperialism and Middle East Women’s Studies

[arabious]

From the book Dust: Egypt’s Forgotten Architecture. Photos by Xenia Nikolskaya.

This book is not about history, it is about time, and if buildings are the objective correlative of history then dust is the correlative of brute time. Let us take note that Cairo is one of the most dust-polluted cities in the world. It is impossible to beat the Cairene dust in its incessant accumulation that seems to go faster than anything else in town. Nothing can go faster than the speed of dust. (via Jadaliyya)

[jadaliyya]

The state seeks order; it can control only those whom it orders. It cannot cope with the demand of "freedom"; it has to ask questions such as “freedom for whom,” “freedom for what,” or “freedom under what circumstances” in order to tuck freedom into neat boxes. Order draws borders, fixes identities, and defines. It attempts to establish a hierarchy. By telling parents to take their daughters and sons home from the park, it both brands the resisting bodies as "children" and tries to trigger into action the nucleus of society: family. Through its rhetoric of security, it attributes the risks of its own making to the resisting bodies. It hangs its own flag or banner on the bodies that it prefers knocking down rather than protecting. It punishes those who do not obey; it uses punishment as retaliation. It operates through censorship, threats, and propaganda.

Excerpt from Occupy Gezi as Politics of the Body

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In case you missed it, Jadaliyya's military wing/satire page (Tough Niece) has a Twitter page.

Click here to follow.

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Above image: Rifqa Il Kurd sits with Noura Erakat, discussing the takeover of her home by settlers to the Delegation. Image by Dr. Ralph C. Watkins.

Below is an excerpt from Jadaliyya co-editor, Noura Erakat's introduction to her diary entries while in Palestine:

Even after editing the original diary, the one before you now, I remained uneasy. It does not do justice to the layers of violence, historical depth, and struggles within each of these local encounters. It was simply personal. However, because of my conviction in the justness of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, freedom, and dignity, I feared that the personal could appear unfair and even manipulative. Absent these binaries and rife with the complexity it deserves, I believe the justness of the cause would be just as piercing. Israeli settler-colonialism, apartheid, and occupation should not cease because Palestinians are good and Israelis are bad. Those structural conditions are an anathema to all whom they directly and indirectly impact—whether they happen to manifest across historic Palestine or elsewhere. Still, my writings reflected a jarring encounter with the brute crudeness of violence—as if I were discovering it for the first time. This, perhaps, is the power of bearing witness, over and over again.

Click here to read the rest of the introduction, as well as her diary entries accompanied with images.

[jadaliyya]

Force Feeding Is Torture: Just Ask Yasiin Bey (a.k.a. Mos Def) (Video)

Yasiin Bey, the rapper-actor-political activist formerly known as Mos Def, has added his voice to the rising chorus of people protesting the brutal force feeding of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. Today, 120 prisoners are on hunger strike, many since late February. Every day, forty-four to forty-six are force fed.

In order to illustrate and help publicize the pain and humiliation involved in this process, Bey volunteered to subject himself to the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) involved in force feeding. The video below shows this experience. The video was made by Reprieve, a human rights organization based in the United Kingdom which has represented dozens of Guantanamo prisoners, and was directed by the Bafta award-winning director Asif Kapadia.

What Bey endures is brutal, as you can see for yourself. But the full treatment in accordance with the Standard Operating Procedure manual is even more brutal. When a force feeding order is given, a guard shackles the prisoner and places a mask over his mouth to prevent spitting and biting. A feeding tube is inserted through his nose. Medics use a stethoscope and a test dose of water to check that the tube has descended all the way to his stomach. When the tube has been secured with tape, “the enteral nutrition and water that has been ordered is started, and flow rate is adjusted according to detainee's condition and tolerance.” The feeding can be completed in twenty to thirty minutes but might take up to two hours. After the “nutrient infusion” is completed, he is placed in a “dry cell” and observed for up to sixty minutes for any “indications of vomiting or attempts to induce vomiting.” If he vomits, he can be put through the whole process again.

Continue reading here.