Sunday, December 20, 2009

Links via Diigo (weekly)

Links of interest for the week ending in December 19, 2009.

  • tags: poetry, identity, diaspora

  • Joseph Massad responds to Helem.

    tags: queer, sexuality, lebanon, lgbt

  • To the Western women obsessed with Eastern women's oppression: ever stop to think about the violent, hyper-masculine, misogynist societies YOU live in?

    tags: rape, violence, women, gender

  • US sanctions on Iraq killed as many as a million Iraqis, including hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths of children who could not get medicine or sometimes food. (See this for starters). These new sanctions have already passed in the House - if they pass in Senate as well, they will only worsen the US war on the Iranian people.

    tags: iran, imperialism

  • "CASTRES, FRANCE -- When Muslim worshipers showed up at the Bilal Mosque early Sunday morning, they found two pig's ears and a poster of the French flag stapled to the door; a pig's snout dangled from the doorknob. "White power" and "Sieg heil" were spray-painted on one side, they recalled, and "France for the French" on the other."

    tags: europe, islamophobia

  • Collected here are links to several more news articles detailing the massacre of civilians in northern Yemen, ordered by Obama and carried out by the US air force.

    tags: imperialism, yemen

  • "A group calling itself the Iranian Cyber Army has hacked Twitter and an Iranian opposition website, replacing it with an anti-American message."

    God bless them. I wish they could do this every day 'til Twitter went out of business forever.

    tags: iran

  • "Yemeni government allegedly benefited from US military equipment and intelligence support under the pretext of fighting "al-Qaeda" although the attacks have mostly killed civilians."

    tags: imperialism, yemen

  • In addition to continued occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and continued support for Israeli occupation of Palestine, Obama has expanded the US empire to include military involvement in Pakistan, Somalia, and now Yemen as well.

    tags: imperialism, yemen

  • "Despite all the activism and writing about Copenhagen, few are putting shorter work hours (i.e., consuming productivity gains in the form of more leisure than commodified goods and services) on the environmental agenda. Why?"

    Read the two links in the above post. Climate justice and labor justice are closely linked, and in order to be successful the former may not be possible without the latter.

    tags: labor, environment

  • "When celebrating Christmas, it would be a good idea to think about the birthplace of Jesus. What is like in the Holy Land under occupation, injustice and racism? How does Christmas feel when the Holy Land is under siege?"

    and from the YouTube channel's main page...

    "What happened in Palestine since 1947 has never happened before, in terms of the combination of the elements: brutality and racism of the occupier, the injustice of granting one peoples land to others, duration of this injustice, complicity and apathy of the civilized world as well as Palestinian people's will to resist all that against all odds.

    Hence the term the Never-Before Campaign: Injustice that is unfolding like never before met with resistance and resilience, also like never before."

    tags: palestine, israel, apartheid, race

  • Deeb's work is important in shattering Weber's deeply racist and Eurocentric conflation of modernity with secularism. Her book "An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi'i Lebanon" elaborates on this topic at greater length and is very much worth reading. This short article summarizes some of the larger arguments she makes in that book.

    tags: islam, modernity, lebanon, gender

  • "But, let me recall one fact: my full name is Christopher Warren Michael. And beyond that, I'm Jewish-American. And beyond that, I'm a US citizen. So, this little Jewish-American Prince, with a WASPy little name and a US passport, is able to claim a minor victory over the semi-legal machinations of the Patriot Act, perhaps. What if my name was Abu, or Javed, or Al-Sulayman, or Barack Hussein for good measure? What if my mother tongue was not US English? Or what if I simply didn't have the benefit of a solid education? Would I now be paying off my student loans? Would I now be sitting at home, with my wife, writing this article? Or would I still be in detention, awaiting my charge two years post facto? Would the bright orange of those Rikers shoes come to encase my entire body, as in those fantastic pictures from Gitmo? Would I have fared otherwise if I had answered that boy differently? If I wasn't an atheist, Jewish-American US citizen? If I didn't have the clean, Anglo name of Christopher Warren Michael? Would I have won a magnificent legal suit? Or would my brother still be waiting?"

    tags: race, patriot act


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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