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“Imaginary Homelands”—Lebanese American Prose
Interesting survey of different authors, though I wish discussions of Arab American literature were less Lebanese-centric.
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Gilad Atzmon's anti-Semitic beliefs | SocialistWorker.org
"While Atzmon is a very talented artist and outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights, he is also an anti-Semite who should be totally marginalized by the Palestinian solidarity movement."
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"Then came a time when the enemy was absent. For the porcupine it’s was a time of calm and silence: no need for escape, no fear, no danger. It was an ideal life at first but after a while everything became boring and the porcupine felt that the world was now empty without the fox. He tried to remember the days of escape, tried to see the fox in front of him, and feel those exciting moments again. But he couldn’t remember the face of the fox. He thought: I can never see her perfectly. Why? Shame on me; I don’t even know what my enemy looks like! And the porcupine wished to see the fox once again." -- from "Adventure over the Hill"
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FRONTLINE: Tehran Bureau: The Green Movement and the Working Class | PBS
"Do you think the continuation of the Green Movement will enable it to represent labor issues after it has passed through the current political demands?
That is inevitable. The Green Movement cannot succeed unless it raises social justice demands, which include workers' demands at the center. During the Khatami era, Reformists failed because they did not take the demand for social justice seriously, and did not make efforts to organize social forces. When there were disturbances in Islamshahr [a working-class city near Tehran], Reformist newspapers paid them no attention. Reformists better have learned from these experiences. " -
"Rather than rely on a traditional enumeration of historical facts, the author reexamines previously held notions regarding concepts such as Phoenicianism, which she regards as “an important ideological tool in the construction of a specifically ‘Lebanese’ (as opposed to Syrian) nationality.” Her analysis of the period correctly concludes that Syrian emigration was due primarily to the changing economic conditions in Syria at the time, and not to flight from the Ottoman regime, the 1860 civil war. Nor was it an expression of a migratory trait handed down by the ancient Phoenicians. She also addresses the thorny issues of gender, sexuality, and marriage practices of the period; demonstrating how these were intricately tied to the incorporation of Syria into a capitalist economy, thus causing profound changes in the sexual division of labor."
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Israeli GLBT Politics between Queerness and Homonationalism « Bully Bloggers
"LGBT activists in Israel now find themselves in a double bind. Victories for civil rights, which are gained with hard labor, and often with the government’s representatives explicitly objecting to them in the courts, are quickly co-opted by the government in its efforts to present Israel’s liberal credentials. Gay rights have essentially become a public-relations tool. In this campaign Israel is portrayed as a progressive “western” country, as opposed to “backwards”, homophobic Islamic countries. This is then used to justify Israel’s own version of the “war on terror,” including the occupation and attacks on the Palestinian population. Consider, for example, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s introduction of the issue of gay rights in Iran in his speech to the United Nations in 2009, or his recent suggestion that human rights groups sail to Iran and Gaza, “places where homosexuals are hanged,” rather than criticize Israel. A further dimension of this process is the co-optation of the plight of gay Palestinians, often through the creation of a false narrative according to which Israel supposedly gives them safe haven. . The recent campaign promoting Tel Aviv as a mecca for gay tourism is but one example of how gay rights are used to re-brand Israel as a land of freedom: while Tel-Aviv is a friendly and integrated city when it comes to the gay community, the freedoms it offers are denied to Palestinians as well as other marginalized groups such as migrant workers."
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"We all have noticed that gay, bisexual, lesbian, trans and queer people can be instrumentalized by those who want to wage wars, i.e. cultural wars against migrants by means of forced islamophobia and military wars against Iraq and Afghanistan. In these times and by these means, we are recruited for nationalism and militarism. Currently, many European governments claim that our gay, lesbian, queer rights must be protected and we are made to believe that the new hatred of immigrants is necessary to protect us. Therefore we must say no to such a deal. To be able to say no under these circumstances is what I call courage. But who says no? And who experiences this racism? Who are the queers who really fight against such politics?"
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Middle East Report Online: “We Are All Jordan”…But Who Is We? by Curtis Ryan
" "We Are All Jordan," the Hashemite regime responds when anyone hints at tensions between the kingdom's Palestinian citizens and the East Bankers whose roots lie east of the Jordan river. The tensions exist, nonetheless, and they are acquiring a newly sharp edge as East Bankers feel their hold on the levers of state power slip away. Exaggerated as the feelings may be, there is an emerging politics of disenfranchisement that inverts the norm in Jordanian history, whereby Palestinians are on the bottom and East Bankers on top."
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Debate between J.J. Goldberg, Hannah Mermelstein, Kathleen Peratis and \nYonatan Shapira on the BDS campaign.
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"I think the only way to define Palestinian universal identity is to say that there is no such thing. The moment you bulk people together is the moment you take away their humanity."
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David Shasha: Israel's Sephardic-Ashkenazi Rift: The Shas Paradox
"In concert with the marginalization of the Sephardi elite class was the concomitant attempt to resocialize the Sephardim. Guided by the implicitly racist assumption that Sephardim were less capable than their Ashkenazi brethren, most Israelis saw them as culturally and intellectually "backward," like the Arabs in whose countries they once lived. The Israeli political system forced many Sephardim to live at the margins of society, where they often found themselves caught between the warring forces of religious extremism and imposed secularization.
It should be remembered that one of the most important Israeli cultural products of the early 1960s, Ephraim Kishon's "Sallah Shabbati" -- a deeply misguided and racist portrayal of bumbling Sephardi immigrants cast in the most offensive terms possible -- was produced in this racially charged climate. Its assertions of Sephardi barbarity and incompetence permeated all levels of Israeli society." -
Sandip Roy: Joel Stein and the Curry Problem
"Of course, Stein doesn't mean he is in any way in favor of Indians having their heads bashed in. Why, in the piece he says he actually liked some of the Indians that moved in. At least the smart ones, the dorky ones who liked to play Dungeons and Dragons.
The problem was the smart ones brought in their less smart cousins ("merchants") and the merchants brought in "their even-less-bright cousins, and we started to understand why India is so damn poor." This is immigration reform in a nutshell. Give us your engineers, but not your cabbies and Dunkin Donut-wallas. Except those cabbies and 7/11 owners and motel proprietors work damn hard for their little piece of the American dream.
I think in a way the Indian community is also so obsessed with its presidential scholars and spelling bee champs, with its Indra Nooyis (Pepsico head) and Dr. Sanjay Guptas, it gives short shrift to the little guys, the ones that run gas stations on baking highways in the middle of nowhere, take classes during the day and work graveyard shift at the 7/11. They are the muscle and sinew of our community. But to Joel Stein, they are just so much litter strewn all over his old hometown. That's his problem -- too many Indians. " -
Al-Ahram Weekly | Culture | Thus spoke Nasr Abu-Zayd
On the sudden and untimely death of Nasr Hamed Abu-Zeid.
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The Angry Arab News Service/وكالة أنباء العربي الغاضب: l'affaire Octavia Nasr
On Octavia Nasr's dismissal.
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The Angry Arab News Service/وكالة أنباء العربي الغاضب: Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah
On the recent passing of Ayatollah Fadlallah.
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ei: The Last Queen of the Night
"It is a beautiful name for an equally beautiful flower. It sounds like one of those names given to famous cities around the world, like Paris's "City of Light" or Beirut's "Pear of the Middle East." These names were given for a reason. Well, from now on, I've decided that Gaza should be called "Queen of the Night" -- if for anything, for the flower that blooms. "
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Looks like an interesting memoir. For another great Arab American female comic book artist, check out the works of Jennifer Camper (I highly recommend her piece "Ramadan," which is a fictionalized story of a queer, Arab, Muslim girl in America).
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When the Personal is Political: Dr. Samar Habib » Muslimah Media Watch
Go figure: when it comes to censoring a queer Arab woman from the academy, the neocons and the Salafis find common ground.
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Smadar Lavie, "Lilly White Feminism and Academic Apartheid in Israel"
"If one is to add up Mizrahim (Jews of Asian and North-African origins) with Palestinian citizens of Israel, the majority of Israeli citizens are of Arab descent. If so, why does Israeli academe bestow the professorial privilege only to a handful of Ashkenzi ladies?"
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Fighting talk: The new propaganda - Robert Fisk, Commentators - The Independent
"How many times did I just use the word "terror"? Twenty. But it might as well be 60, or 100, or 1,000, or a million. We are in love with the word, seduced by it, fixated by it, attacked by it, assaulted by it, raped by it, committed to it. It is love and sadism and death in one double syllable, the prime time-theme song, the opening of every television symphony, the headline of every page, a punctuation mark in our journalism, a semicolon, a comma, our most powerful full stop. "Terror, terror, terror, terror". Each repetition justifies its predecessor. "
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Israel's gay propaganda war | Jasbir Puar | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
"Israeli pinkwashing is a potent method through which the terms of Israeli occupation of Palestine are reiterated – Israel is civilised, Palestinians are barbaric, homophobic, uncivilised, suicide-bombing fanatics. It produces Israel as the only gay-friendly country in an otherwise hostile region. This has manifold effects: it denies Israeli homophobic oppression of its own gays and lesbians, of which there is plenty, and it recruits, often unwittingly, gays and lesbians of other countries into a collusion with Israeli violence towards Palestine."
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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