42 posts tagged “middle east”

Gerald Bull. Not many Vermonters know that this uber-genius was using Northern Vermont as a firing range for the testing of long range weapons (superguns) intended to be used by Saddam Hussein. Though his death is shrouded in a bit of mystery (A lot of people wanted to kill him for different reasons), the reasons WHY so many wanted to kill him are not. He was too smart about something that was too dangerous. Namely, superguns.

A good movie for discussing the ethics of high-end arms dealing and the free market application of dangerous science. A classic case of technology smarts disconnected from moral smarts in my opinion.  

Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience

Warfare puts human beings into the most intense of human physical, psychological, and emotional experiences that one can imagine. In war, a person is being attacked and/or is attacking. One is facing one's ultimate destiny and making choices about the destiny of others. Decisions have to be made faster than they can be made well. It is too late for ethical thinking for the most part and too early for the contemplation of meaning. In peaceful times, we cultivate the broadening of the scope of individual vision. We ask people to see things from an enemy's point of view, to depress of clutch of decision making until we have determined where we ought to head. In war, this field of vision is reduced, either by superiors or by the demands of the day's fight.

Operation Homecoming is an opportunity for soldiers to reflect on the many facets of their experience – their anticipations, their fears, their pain, their choices, their injuries, their deaths, their enemies' deaths, their own deaths. It is an attempt to answer the question, “What are we doing to humans when we recruit them to go off to war? What are we doing to ourselves?”

This movie speaks for itself. I cannot add. I cannot subtract.

First of all, I cannot believe that this video was made 15 years ago. Secondly, I came away from it with a good deal of respect from the journalist telling this story. He interviews all the people I myself would wish to interview if I were trying to get to the heart of this issue. The video definitely takes the position that Israeli settlements are against international law and that it is the policy of the Israeli State to acquire what they regard as land that belongs to them that was lost thousands of years ago. Israeli law allows the State of Israel to appropriate land that cannot be (or will not be) proven to belong to someone else. Once declared state land, settlements can be built on that land or expanded to it. Once settlements are there, the natural resources (water) can be expropriated to the settlement's needs. Infrastructure and roads to that settlement can be justified and these will in turn provide a greater access to and from employment centers that can avail themselves of the workforce in the settlements.

That said, Michael Ambosino, the journalist who is telling the story, is not adverse to letting the Israelis who are responsible for the process - those who construct the laws, those who enforce them, and those who benefit them – try to explain the ethics of what they are doing. Professionals from the Israeli policy making establishment, law enforcement establishment, and settlers themselves are interviewed along with Palestinian villagers, lawyers, town planners, and victims.

What emerges is a picture of a divided community. I might even say a sick community. I could not but think that if one had to invent a name for the illness, one might not be able to do better than to call it a severe case of “injustice poisoning”. One sense that both Israeli settlers and Palestinians feel the injustices. The damning paradox that haunts them all is that one community's antidote has become the other's poison. Seeking a rectification of an injustice, they inflict it. And indeed the stage is continually being set to make the cycle seem interminable.

The danger for most Americans is that the basic formula for media attention in America has long favored the Israelis. One sees in a movie like this that Israel is using force in this conflict while attempting to seem as though they are not. The Palestinans on the other hand, are often left with no force but visible force. This documentary leaves me with difficult questions. How does one cure “injustice poisoning”? How does one “recover” from it? How does one pursue justice when the sovereign to which you must appeal for it is the source of the injustice you suffer? How do do you respond to a system of injustice differently than you might to an unjust person?

Question for Comment: Over and over, one sees that the belief in a divine being that justifies a person's actions serves as a reason to act without moderation or the application of long term caution. If the God of the Jews, the God of the Muslims, and the God of the Christians sat down to a negotiation table about the fate of Jerusalem, what would that debate sound like? Which would be most likely to conceed? Which to make threats? Which to compromise? Which to apologize?

Tonight's movie was another in an anthology of movies about perceptions of Islam and Arabs in the U.S. It is difficult to know if I should recommend it to anyone or not. And apparently, I am not alone. In many ways, the movie serves as a container carrying a number of crucial issues that Muslim's in the United States (or maybe more specifically in some U.S. Cities). If it were to be regarded as a “slice” of what life is really like in the U.S. I suspect that it would fail. One might better regard it as a caricature and not a portrait.

In the course of the movie, a number of stereo-types are reinforced even as the movie seems to want to break them down. Each of the issues that it seeks to deal with I suspect are real issues but each has been somewhat over dramatized to make them impossible to ignore. The central character, Mustafa, is an Egyptian American who has brought his family to Los Angeles to start a new life. The decision leads to numerous difficulties for he and his family particularly in the heightened security situation post 911. Mustafa's teenage son evidences significant identity issues and makes it clear that he no longer wishes to be a Muslim and that his experiences in America cause him to lose respect for his family, his ethnicity, and his father in particular. Mustafa's sister has to deal with her dislike for family traditions of familial marriage (she does not wish to marry her first cousin from Egypt) but also must deal with the fact that she does not like the way American men treat women either (to be specific, one particular man who is also serving as a caricature of American men I might add). Mustafa's friends are also caricatures in many respects. One is an “Al-Jazeera head” who regards all American news as propaganda and all Jews as Zionists. Another is a young actor who simply wants to assimilate into American culture, much like the Irish did but keeps getting assigned roles as a Middle Eastern terrorist, thus further embossing the stereotypes that he himself is suffering from. Indeed, one realizes that in his particular case, stupid American television producers it seems will not hire him if he does not conform to the stereotype for them.

I will confess. I have an appreciation for what this movie was trying to do. But I felt like the exaggerations – of both Middle Eastern culture AND American culture went too far. I think anyone watching who had never lived here would simply get false impressions of what American society is like reinforced (i.e. we are not all dope smoking, religion doubting, scandal mongering, Islamaphobic, women groping, propaganda slurping, racists). I think anyone watching who had never actually lived in a Middle Eastern culture might get false impressions of what Middle Eastern or Islamic culture is like reinforced (i.e. the arranged marriages, the family honor uber alis, the solving an offense by taking hostages, the inability to make ethical decisions without reference to the Koran, the constant yelling at each other and the expression of emotion with violence, etc.)

In a way, it is like seeing a beautiful Impressionist painting converted to glow in the dark fluorescent paint. Sometimes, one prefers to have to do a little work in constructing meaning from subtle clues. Sometimes, too much intensity distorts reality to the extent that it becomes hard to see what is real. Truth is often a more subtle thing. My guess is that a family of Muslims living in America might watch this movie and say “We too have problems like this, but they are not this overt.” Similarly, Americans might watch this and say, “These things probably do happen but certainly not to this degree”. I should have probably been able to recommend it more highly had it all been toned down somewhat (and a bit less swearing on the part of one particular character. The pervasiveness of his obscenity laden speech throughout the movie would make it exceptionally difficult to show in American high schools where I suspect some scenes could be beneficial in getting a conversation started about prejudice and how it often functions to bring lies into reality.

On the whole, I think there needs to be more movies about the complications of families making transitions as a result of cultural assimilation. I would just like to see more that did not see culture in such binary ways (i.e. forcing people to decide EITHER/OR). Surely, people are rational enough to realize that there are ways to adapt without complete capitulation and surely there are people who realize that no culture is a great deal like its caricatures.

P.S. I cannot for the life of me figure out why they chose this cover for the movie. It really tells you nothing about it.

Question for comment: Caricatures often tell us more about a person than a photograph but this is only because the viewer knows that he is looking at a caricature. Is a movie that caricaturizes groups of people helpful or harmful in helping to dispel stereotypes?

Black Money is a Frontline documentary on the use of bribery in high places. Its principle focus is a business deal between the British government, the British Aerospace company BAE, and the Saudi royal family. Its greatest challenge is that the deal it is seeking to report on, is secret. Ostensibly to allow the Saudis to buy American arms without going through Congressional publicity, the deal allows the Saudis to purchase things from American companies without anyone but those companies knowing apparently. But under the veil of privacy, millions and billions of dollars can be spent for the benefit of those people making the deal.

Portions of the movie will make excellent fodder for a discussion in my Ethics class next Fall I suspect as it contains numerous interviews with people who hold different perceptions of what it means to be ethical at that level of money making. For example, if a deal is obtained by means of a bribe and that deal enhanced Britain’s’ anti-terrorism alliances, provides jobs for British subjects, and keeps a key ally in the Middle East (The Saudi Royal Family) happy, might not the utilitarian’s consider it “right”? Is a law that forbids companies from influencing the people making a foreign companies business choices undermining a business owner’s right to pursue a source of income for himself or herself and a company’s employees? Or is that law an attempt to make it clear that the use of kickbacks to the people high in the decision making food chain is wrong for some more fundamental reason than pragmatic outcomes?

If a bank offers a customer a free toaster for opening a checking account, is it guilty of a bribe? How is it different if the British government offers a Saudi prince a free airplane for choosing its aerospace company to purchase jets? Where are the lines? I suppose much depends on the powers that have been granted to those making the deal and whether or not the benefits the dealmakers derive would not want those who gave them power to make the deal to know.

For what it is worth, no one has ever offered to bribe me.

Question for comment: How do explain the National Debt to a child who will have to pay it?

I just got the opportunity to listen to Barak Obama's speech in Cairo June 4. I would highly recommend it as it sets a tone for a future based on possibilities rather than practicabilities, a future based on a chosen way of seeing the world rather than an inherited one. Naturally, the question will have to be settled: Can we really chose new ways of seeing the world, or must we endure the ones that we have earned by our past behaviors and mistakes? Obama's speech also asserts, without an argument, that the world can move forward without arguing about the validity of its episimological sources of cultural values because, and this is the lynchpin of the assumptions he makes, those sources (Bible, Talmud, Qur'an) are fundamentally, not in conflict about anything that "really" matters.

Though asserting that he was himself a Christian, in a number of places he made reference to "our Holy Quran". Rhetorically, it was extremely effective. But on a pure logical level, I can see it being fraught with difficulties. The question is, will people respond on a level of logic or a level of sentiment? I suspect the later. And maybe therein lies our salvation as we make our way forward. Can one argue for some things (peace, human values, non-violence) on the basis of an authority that - if read in entirety - ALSO rejects some of the same propositions that you are arguing for? i.e. the status of Jerusalem or the West Bank/Judea-Samaria?

“The Holy Koran tells us …”

“The Talmud tells us …”

“The Holy Bible tells us …”

President Obama makes a powerful argument that these sacred books all agree on certain things. But what of the differences? He advocates - by his silence - ignoring them. Regard them as authoritiative where the ends are consistent with a peaceful world. Neglect the aspects of their messages where those messages might lead to contrary ends. I think that is essentially the argument that he is making.

“Faith should bring us together” he says, " As the Holy Quran tells us, be conscious of God and speak always the truth. . . . Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad joined in prayer”

In several places, he made the argument that America and Islam are not based on competing assumptions and he said so with such authority that his tone of voice and assurance carried the argument. But I myself feel a need to think more on the matter.

"America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition," he said, "The freedom to live as you chose. These are not just American ideas. They are human rights and that is why we will support them everywhere.”

And it is at this point where the most interesting debate should occur. Are the Qur'an or the Bible or the Talmud really arguing that human beings should be given the freedom to live as they chose? Is a religion whose name MEANS submission, a religion of choice? Is the Talmud a record of a debate about what humans want to do? Or is it a record of people trying to discern in the minutest of detail what God wants them to do? When Jesus says in his Sermon on the Mount "Anyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them is like a man who builds his house upon sand and when the floods come ..." is He advocating autonomy from divine command? When the Apostle Paul says "Have this mind in you that was in Christ ..." is his goal the autonomous individual, free to live as they chose?

Barak Obama has taken the approach that all sources of certainty can be regarded as equally valid and authoritative as long as none are. No one thus wins. No one looses. No one must admit to having been misled for a few hundred or thousand years.

It remains to be seen if this argument, made forcefully and diplomatically, and frequently enough, can carry the day.

Question for Comment: If we assume for a moment that major Western Religions are a Ven Diagram of concentric circles - each advocating certain assertions that are common and certain assertions that are exclusive, is there any reason to retain the exclusive elements if the result is irreconcilable conflict?

 Honestly, I did enjoy this movie. Reyhan, the widow, is expected by her family to agree to become the second wife of her husband's brother. Instead, she decides to take a small step over local traditional lines and run her former husband's restaurant herself. All well and good if her cooking was not so good and her brother-in-law did not himself own his own restaurant down the road. With plates of piping hot food and good ambiance, Reyhan takes no prisoners in this war between men, women, social traditions, and healthy appetites.

What is particularly enjoyable about this movie is how it portrays the conflict between traditional ways of caring for women and children and widows and "progressive" ways of doing the same and does so by using two characters who do not, at least at the beginning, seem to be diabolically wrong in their intents. One character loses in the end and the other wins in the end but not necessarily because one is more honorable than the other so much as one is trying to be honorable in a less controlling way. Iranian filmmaker Kambozia Partovi, lets the strength of Reyhan's cooking, quietness, and determination bring down the social conventions that would prefer to see her become the secluded second wife of a man she does not love.

He has the law on his side and he has the culture. But she has a talent and the wisdom to fight the battle on ground she can win on. At the heart of the ethical and cultural dilemas presented in this movie seems to be a fundamental debate between that aspect of Iranian culture that says to a man that it is dishonorable to fail to protect and care for the women of their family on the one hand, and the aspect of Iranian culture that says that there is honor in a person determining their own destiny and providing for their own family, even if that someone is a woman.

Reynah is faced with a numbe rof difficult decisions in this movie. She must decide the level of risk she is willing to take and the length to which she will go to maintain her independence and/or her children's health and well being. Some of her decisions are not easy and there are no simple answers. But over time we come to like her because on the whole, we regard the decisions that she makes to be made with a rather deep but silent wisdom.

All in all, I feel inspired. The filmaker has taken a few more inches of ground by finding a place on the border of tradition (the kitchen of a restaurant) and used it to make a point. And an excellent movie if you like cooking.

Separation. Its a scarey word. It runs deep in the human psyche. We fear it if we think it might happen. We can be intensely angry if it does. We can feel deep guilt if we are responsible for it. We can attempt insane things to overcome it. The movie Daughter of Kaltoum  is a movie that follows the story of separation and reconciliation and tells it in the barren landscapes of the Atlas Mountains in Northern Algeria. The landscape itself seems to almost reduce human habitation to the level of scorpions. Barren, desolate, unforgiving, waterless, almost dehumanizing. But not quite.

Daughter of Keltoum tells the story of a young Berber woman, returned from her life in Switzerland to the mountains where she was born  and given up for adoption. She is in a search for her mother. I am sure some would say an insane search. "I dreamt of killing you," she says to her when she finally finds her (sic), "when I only wanted to hug you." I can't say that it is an easy story to watch ... but when it is over, one is reminded that it is a rare person that understands the narrative of their own lives or of the lives of those who have failed us.

The Global Film Initiative has put together an excellent resource for using this movie in hisgh school classes. SEE HERE. Throughout the movie, one can see tremendous forces of family and ethnic destruction at work. Some are geographical. Some are economic. Some are cultural. Some are just the result of unrestrained evil. One finds inspiration in the way that people, even in their culture's and family's last gasps, are still struggling to retain contact and connection. But in the end, the focus of this study does leave. Reflecting the director's perception I suspect that at some point in time, someone in a family needs to face the reality that human society can withstand only so much. There has to be a day when even the love of a family has to surrender to that which it cannot overcome. Neither the Sahara nor the human need for water can simply be wished away. They are layers of meaning in that sentence for those with eyes to see.

Question for comment: Is there a morality or an ethics of quitting? When should one abandoned something? When should they hang on?  

 

To Die in Jerusalem is a story of two mothers. Two mothers that illustrate and exemplify two whole peoples. In the last half hour of the movie, a mother who’s daughter has been killed in a suicide attack speaks with the mother of the girl who committed it. I confess, it was almost like watching Sarah and Hagar reincarnated.

It was as if electricity was moving up out of the ground in one and meeting electricity coming down through a lightening bolt out of the other’s sky. And just as the very place where their hearts connected, the force of the energy exploded. As if to say, "Now that I know you are listening, I need to be able to tell my story of suffering so that it can neutralize and even negate yours.” I have a confession to make. I am no fan of suicide bombers in general and certainly not when they are children killing children. But I honestly felt like the Palestinian woman gave the better arguments and came across as less “stuck” even though it was her daughter who had committed the act that took the other’s life. She was simply saying, “understand the context in which young people like my daughter must make moral decisions” and the Israeli woman would respond “Why do you hate us?”   

I think it is fair to say that throughout history, circumstances have created in people anger and leaders have directed it. Someone holding a hose will not be able to do anything with it if there is no water pressure. But water pressure undirected cannot be blamed for what someone holding a hose can do. A suicide bombing is an act of desperate inexpressible anger. It seems obvious that Israelis need to understand that they play a part in the creation of that reservoir of anger. By the same token, takig a young seventeen year old girl’s anger and using it to blow up another girl her age indiscriminately is a concern that Palestinian leaders need to examine themselves about.

People need to understand that whole societies are creating the anger that portions of societies are using to create more. Hatred is something some people profit by and they will invest the principle as long as they are allowed to do so.

This was a hard movie for me to watch. This was not like many of the documentaries I have seen where individual citizens are simply seen offstage as world leaders argue. This was a movie about the ground floor and grass roots of animosity. It seems like the positions are or have been almost set in concrete now. Israelis seem to have decided that the responsibility for the happiness of refugees lies in the hands of surrounding Arab countries. If those refugees are unhappy, they believe the animosity should now be directed at the surrounding countries that will not take them in. Either because of their historical education or their religion, they believe that the Palestinian right to return to their homes in 1948 is subsumed and nullified.

Palestinians have concluded that justice demands their return to their lost homes and lost status as a people worthy of a dignified place among the nations. Like Serbians who wanted to be members of a Serbian State in 1914 or Kurds who want to be members of a Kurdish State in the modern world, they see no reason to inflict an apartheid status on themselves and agree to relocation. Armed with these positions, there is nowhere to go besides conflict it seems. If only land could be stacked up like a bunk bed.

Justice and understanding of another person’s history: I have always regarded these things as the pre-requisites to peace. But in cases where there are two notions of justice and two notions of history, the conflict is made worse by them and I wonder if a region wide self-induced amnesia is what is required.

I hope to bring some measure of mutual understanding to my Middle East courses this summer. A task to which I now turn.

Question for comment: Have you ever been in a situation where justice for you would have entailed an injustice for someone else? Is one morally obligated in any way to fight for one’s own justice? For another’s or for a split of the difference?

Under the Bombs is a war movie that covers the topic of war not by rolling the cameras during the war itself but by starting them when the war is over. This is a movie about people trying to pick the pieces of their lives up – It is about good people caught in the crossfire and the devastation subsequent to the actual violence.

Imagine a war in your back yard. Imagine trying to find your six year old child for two days. Imagine not knowing what you will find at the end of the search. There is little redemption to be had other than the clear conclusion at the movie’s end that there is no way to compensate someone for the loss of the ones they love. There is nothing one can do but to find someone who has lost someone themselves and offering to be to them what they have lost, hoping against hope that someone will do the same for you.

 This movie could never substitute for being there. It merely points the way."Who is my neighbor?" someone once asked Jesus. His answer was basically, "Who can you be a neighbor to?" This movie is a about that.

Question for Comment: Have you ever gotten involved in helping someone and discovered that their needs were going to entail more commitment than you bargained for? This movie is about that.