16 posts tagged “middle east”

One of my projects in the last few weeks has been to read the Middle East and Islamic World Reader edited by Marvin Getterman and Stuart Shaar. It would be IMPOSSIBLE to discuss each and every primary source in this anthology (Just the question guide I created yesterday was seven pages). I could, I suppose make a brilliant attempt to solve the various conflicts in the Middle East myself. One idea I had was to take all the people who feel like they have been deprived of hearth and home in some Middle Eastern War in the last 2000 years and let them put up a homestead somewhere in the Green Mountain National Forest. Not that I have anything against the Green Mountain National Forest but ... if it can save the world a bloody nuke job, I am willing to make a sacrifice. I would love to have them solve their problems by themselves but, as Catbert says "It would be nice to eat candy and poop emeralds". It just seems like the Middle East cannot seem to escape its tribalism (can any of us?) Whether it expresses itself in religious forms, national forms, ethnic forms, or economic forms there is this fierce identification with tribe that assumes a limited supply of whatever it takes to survive and a commitment to solidarity.

One excerpt from a speech by Richard Falk comes to mind:

“America badly needs another kind of patriotism, what I will call cosmopolitan or worldly patriotism, a sense of country that blurs the boundaries between the self and others and that is aware that in an era of globalization, all of us have multiple identities based on nationality, race, religion, gender, age, and professional and vocational activities.  The physical boundaries of the state never were, and are less and less the source of meaning for our collective selves.  To adapt to a world of the Internet in the global market and media, we need to soften the exclusivity of our tribal attachments to a single national narrative.  We need to adjust to increasingly post-sovereignty world that is richly diverse and grossly uneven in wealth and influence, and we need to address the injustice is that this unevenness of wealth and power has produced over the centuries, and recognized the dangers of these widening disparities between rich and poor.  We cannot dispense with patriotism in such an emergent world, but what is needed are collective attachments that are not tightly tied to an outmoded and myopic national ethos.”

Richard A. Falk, “patriotism and dissent after 911, The Frederick Ewen Memorial Lecture, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, November 7, 2001. Found in the Middle East and Islamic World rRader, edited by Marvin Gettleman and Stuart Schaar.

My question is ... "WHY?" Why do we "need" to change the way we identify ourselves? Why do we need to "soften the exclusivity" of our various tribes? Why do we need to address the injustice that we regard as injustice only when we change the way we think about tribes? The following comes from something H.G. Wells wrote in the early part of WWI:

“Mars [the god of war] will sit like a giant above all human affairs for the next two decades, and thespeech of Mars is blunt and plain. He will say to us all:

‘Get your houses in order. If you squabble among yourselves, waste time, litigate, muddle, snatch profits and shirk obligations, I will certainly come down upon you again. I have taken all your men between eighteen and fifty, and killed and maimed such as I pleased; millions of them. I have wasted your substance contemptuously. Now, mark you, you have multitudes of male children between the ages of nine and nineteen running about among you. Delightful and beloved boys. And behind them come millions of delightful babies. Of these I have scarcely smashed and starved a paltry hundred thousand perhaps my way.

‘But go on muddling, each for himself and his parish and his family and none for all the world, go on in the old way, stick to your “rights”, stick to your “claims” each one of you, make no concessions and no sacrifices, obstruct the fresh harvest of live I have spared, all those millions that are now sweet children and dear little boys and youths, and I will squeeze it into red pulp in my hands. I will mix it with the mud of trenches and feast on it before your eyes, even more damnable than I have done with your grown-up sons and young men. And I have taken most of your superfluities already; next time I will take your barest necessities.” -  H.G. Wells, What Is Coming

But Americans by and large avoided that whole experience. We sent soldiers to Europe but its been sometime sinse we lived with War on our own turf. Maybe that is why we are still fans of it as a solution to global problems? And maybe that is why we are slow to move away from the sort of patriotic tribalism that has seeminly served us well.

Question for Comment: Do you find yourself agreeing with H.G. Wells and Richard Falk? Even if it means a reduction in the privileges that you enjoy as a member of a successful "tribe" in the world stage? Or is there something greater to be gained by thinking of ourselves as part of a human family?

Movie of the Day was Blood of My Brother, an insiders look into the fight for Sadr City. On the whole, it wa s afairly apolitical movie that just basically went into the mosques, the funerals, the night raids, the families, and the heart of the conflict and then let you as a viewer make up your mind. The American position obviously is that the elected government of Iraq was the legitimate government of Iraq and that Muqrada Al sadr's Mahdi militia was therefore A) unnecessary and B) dangerous. He clearly was both anti-American and anti-Israeli, and anti-coalition government. In the eyes of his followers, he clearly was the leader Allah wanted them to have and if an election was the means, that would be fine but I can't see any good coming from an Iraqi state that adopted a sectarian government controlled so entirely by one sect's "televangelist".

Muqtada Al Sadr is not Al Qaeda but from listening to him preach, it is hard not to see him coming out of the same batch of cookie dough. He believes in the need to forsake this world for the next and the need for Muslims to dissolve their national borders and unite into one unified Islamo-fascist state with black robed clerics listening to Allah for State policy. He would certainly not be good for Israel and in so far as he defines America as a disunifying force in Islam, he would be no friend. This video was enlightening in that regard.

Still, I couldn't help but watch these house raids looking for weapons without thinking about Lexington and Concord. Apparently Iraqi law allowed each family a machine gun but that's all. The only difference between what was going on in Sadr City and Lexington and Concord is that Iraq HAS a democratically elected government and the minutemen are following a deputized Ayatollah. Further, the minutemen, to my knowledge were not hiding their weapon's caches in their homes.

Unmistakably, innocent people are being hurt and kids are  getting the crap scared out of them in these house raids. I just have a hard time visualizing my hiding weapon stashes in my kids' bedroom. The thematic resemblance to the episodes of Battlestar Galactica that the boys and I have been watching is unmistakable though. These are not easy issues.  I don;t mind praying for Iraq's peace and saftey. I hope I can be forgiven for doubting that it would come in the form of a Muqtada al-Sadr government. Just calling it like I see it. don;t anyone shoot me.

Question for Comment: When you see large crowds of people chanting for a leader who they associate with the will of God (be it G.W. Bush or Muqtada al-Sadr, what reaction does it evoke in you?

Tonight's movie was The Beauty School of Kabul. I guess I don't have a lot to add to the movie. It is a way to meet women of Afghanistan and to think about the relationship between beauty and self-image and the relationship between one culture's ideas about beauty and relationships and another's. One sees, throughout the movie, how women can empower themselves and yet at the same time limit themselves. The most powerful weapon in the arsenal of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. And what people think they can have is not always exactly what they begin wanting. But to begin wanting to have something is a first step.

I ordered a copy for my collection of documentaries on the Middle East in the hopes that it will come in handy for upcoming courses I am teaching.

Motherland Afghanistan follows the efforts of an American-Afghan gynecologist as he returns to Afghanistan to apply his skills and knowledge to the service of Afghan women after the demise of the Taliban. After watching the movie, I ordered a copy for my Middle East collection in the hopes of including it in my class this summer among other things. Afghanistan just seems to me to be a place where a population simply cannot afford to grow. I can't see where they grow food. And  yet there are all these people there in absolute need of basic water, medical services, and education.

This movie takes you into the pain in people's faces. The anxiety in their hearts. It is hard, no impossible for me to imagine really. How does one love a woman so much that they wish to have children together with her, knowing that the childbirth process has such a high risk attached to it? How do you say to someone "I love you so much I want to send a copy of you into another generation" when the process by which that happens is a minefield ... and the world the child is born into is as well?  Movies like this leave me wondering,

Question for Comment: "Is the world my family? Or is my family my family?"

Among the numerous papers I got to hear and discuss at the 2008 ASMEA Conference in Washington were the following:

The Tribal Foundations of Middle Eastern Islamic Culture: By Philip Salzman:

Essentially, Salzman argues that Islamic  tribal Politics are based on security and on collective security arrangements.  It is essential to know who is on your group or NOT in your group. Thus patrimonial  lineage. The tribal system can be calibrated to threat. Balanced opposition. Families are aligned and can be organized at the level to meet the challenge. Honor is essential to make sure that no one betrays the group.

 

Outsiders are seen as fair game for predation. High obligation to the tribe, clan, family means low obligation to those outside … even the State.

War and Peace: Negotiating Meaning in Islam By Dr. Robert Barnage Jr.

 

Huntington's argument is that Islam has a self-perception of predetermined superiority and present inferiority and that this creates instability. There are those who insist that Islam is categorically a religion of peace. Others that it is categorically a religion of w ar. Al-Zawahari puts non-fighting Muslims outside the fold of Islam. How is this possible? Should one take a strict constructionalists position?   Is Islam what it was at the beginning? Barnage mentions the Report on Islamophobia that may be worth looking into? http://europa.meccahosting.com/~a0002ba3/Islamophobia-report.htm

General S.K. Malik's The Quranic Concept of War and Today's Jihadism by LTC Joseph C. Myers Army Advisor to the Commandant Air Command and Staff College

 

This paper was conceived by someone who wanted to study the military campaigns of Muhammad and the Koranic Conept of War. Essentially, the study of Malik's book, published in 1979, is a study of what the presenter argues is a classic text in islamic "threat docrtrine". he says The Quranic Concept of War is a central text in the cannon of jihad studies.  It is mandatory reading in the Pakistani army.  "It is like Clausewitz for Muslims."

See Meyer's article HERE.

Malik writes:

“In war our main objective is the opponent’s heart or soul, our main weapon of offence against this objective is the strength of our own souls, and to launch such an attack, we have to keep terror away from our own hearts… Terror struck into the hearts of the enemies is not only a means, it is the end itself. Once a condition of terror into the opponent’s heart is obtained, hardly anything is left to be achieved. It is the point where the means and the end meet and merge. Terror is not a means of imposing decision on the enemy; it is the decision we wish to impose on him.” (p. 59)

"It (terror) can be instilled only if the opponent's faith is destroyed...To instill terror into the hearts of the enemy, it is essential, in the ultimate analysis, to dislocate his Faith" (p.60)

SEE HERE for article.

Legal Terrorism in the Name of Islamic justice: the Case of Iran by mark Jones and Hamid Kusha

These presenters argued that iran justifies internal terrorism on religious grounds. To expedite the appearance of the hidden Imam, the iranian state gives its leaders the power to create an Islamicly "perfect state" . Thus, the state has power to apply force to the populace to elicit behavior calculated to bring about the "millenium". Islamic "justice" is thus of a religious nature. The Constitution is a religious document. Articles 2, 4, and 5 in the Iranian Constitution are crucial and would probably exist in an Iraqi Constitution under Iranian Shiite influence.

Reading Tehran in Washington: The Problems of Defining the fundamentalist Regime in Iran by Dr. Ofira Selitar

Dr. Selitar talks about the complexities of Irans power structure ... a structure that she says not even holders of power in iran totally understand. "Weber says legitimacy is based on three different things. One is sentimental. Another is based on exchange. We get something for what we give and if we don’t, we revolt. The third thing is the perception of threat." 

"We never know who is in charge totally." Dr. Selitar said.  Many powerholders can continue to buy their power in Iran. In iran there is an army and there are revolutionary guards and within them are th eAl Quds and then there is an internal police and there is the social police, making women abide by the law. One never knows who is in control.

Economic Justice in the Middle East by Dr. Patrick Clawson

Dr. Clawson outlines the statistical data that suggests that Middle Eastern economies have stagnated. He argues that political issues prevail in the Middle East over economics. "Economics is for donkeys" the Ayatollah Khomeini once said. The goal of achieving economic justice - Nassarism - socialism, etc has not served middle Eastern economies in a global market. Many Israelis and Palestinians COULD benefit from collaboration for example but don't because they do not want to see their political opponents profiting in any way.

These were just some of the many papers. Some of them were written and presented with passion. Others seemed almost like formalities for resume padding. Life in higher academics I guess.

Question for Comment: who would you rather be taught by? Someone with lots of experience and education or someone who can think about what experiences they have had?

Tonight's movie was THE KITE RUNNER, a universal tale in an Afghan beard. I would love to watch a movie like this and maybe the movie ATONEMENT, a movie with a similar theme of a person seeking redemption for a previous ethical lapse.

Kite Runner was Champlain's Community Book Program selection a few years ago and it was a pleasure to revisit it in in visual form. Obviously, a few things were left out but this may well have been made up for as a result of the visual experience of Kabul.

Watched another Frontline documentary on the part that Dick Cheney played in the push to war.

I wish Dick Cheney would watch it and respond so that I could say that I had listened to both sides of the story.The argument is that Cheney, Rumsfeild, Wolfowitz, Pearl, etc. set up their own intelligence agency and suppressed the CIA intelligence by putting pressure on George Tennant. 

It is interesting that Dick Cheney is the one that gets the workover and not Bush in this 2006 version of the Iraq War. What is so interesting is that most of the material is ALSO in the Frontline documentary, BUSH'S WAR put out two years later. In short you can pick either video and watch either man, Bush or Cheney get blamed for the Iraq War. In 2004, Frontline put out the documentary Rumsfeld's War. In 2010, maybe it will be Condi Rices?

None are friendly to Condi Rice or Don Rumsfeld who will need to have a movie made to redeem them from eternal blame for Iraq if it winds up a total mess indefinitely. I just find it fascinating that Frontline has used the exact same movie to go after EITHER Cheney OR Bush or Rumsfeld. Its like medication that will work for either pain relief OR headaches or high blood pressure being packaged as medication for each.

Question for Comment: Who do YOU blame for the Iraq War (if anybody). 

The following quotes come from the 1995 introduction to Edward Said's book, written 15 years earlier, Covering Islam. I think they reflect the mission of Edward Said to defend Islam, Palestinians, and Arabs in general from ignorant stereotyping.

“Malicious generalizations about Islam have become the last acceptable form of denigration of foreign culture in the West; what is said about the Muslim mind, or character, or religion, or culture as a whole cannot now be said in mainstream discussion about Africans, Jews, other Orientals, or Asians.” P. xii

“A massive United Nations effort at humanitarian relief in Bosnia was a novelty, given that everywhere else Muslims were seen and treated as aggressors for whom the best treatment was abusive talk, threats, sanctions, quarantines, and, on occasion, airstrikes.” P. xiv

“Islam” defines a relatively small proportion of what actually takes place in the Islamic world, which numbers a billion people, and includes dozens of countries, societies, traditions, languages, and, of course, an infinite number of different experiences.  It is simply false to try to trace all of this back to something called Islam, no matter how vociferously polemical Orientalists, many active in the United States, Britain, and Israel -- insisted that Islam regulates Islamic societies from top to bottom, that dar al Islam is a single, coherent entity, that church and state are really one in Islam, and so forth.” P. xvi

“The deliberately created associations between Islam and fundamentalism ensure that the average reader comes to see Islam and fundamentalism as essentially the same thing.” P. xvi

“in short, fundamentalism equals Islam equals everything we must now fight against, as we did with communism during the Cold War.” P. xix

“I am not saying that Muslims have not attacked and injured Israelis and Westerners in the name of Islam.  But I am saying that much of what one reads and sees in the media about Islam represents the aggression as coming from Islam because that is what “Islam is”. Local and concrete circumstances are thus obliterated.  In other words, covering Islam is a one-sided activity that obscures what “we” do, and highlights instead what Muslims and Arabs by their very flawed nature are.” P. xxii

“At the very least, one should say that in the contest between the Islamists and the overwhelming majority of Muslims, the former have by and large lost the battle.” P. xxvii

The world, it seems is always interested in simplifying things ... and thus conflating things. The content of what one learns is being driven by the need for efficiency in learning. There is too much to learn and therefore we do not feel we can afford the luxury of accuracy or complexity. And thus expediency drives the curriculum. I think maybe the world needs to slow down and rebuild its knowledge base ... one member of one sub-community at a time.

Question for Comment: What is a group that you think you know? Who do you actually know from that group?

Tonights movie was Gunner Palace. It is not my place really to critically analyze a movie made in a place and time that I have not been present for. It captures soldiers lives like the soldiers in it capture Iraqi insurgents (I suppose). It seems to tell its tale well, neither hiding nor romanticizing the personalities and work being done by U.S. and Iraqi soldiers in Iraq.

Here is the chart of U.S. casualties as of this month;

Year	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
2003	0	0	65	74	37	30	48	35	31	44	82	40
2004	47	20	52	135	80	42	54	66	80	64	137	72
2005	107	58	35	52	80	78	54	85	49	96	84	68
2006	62	55	31	76	69	61	43	65	72	106	70	112
2007	83	81	81	104	126	101	78	84	65	38	37	23
2008	40	29	15	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0

http://icasualties.org/oif/

The chart listing the Iraqi casualties in the same time period can be found below. I find myself compassionately confused by this war. I think some people compare the costs of it with an image of a costless alternative. Others do not feel the cost of it and can't see what we have lost ... what we might have done instead. as of this date, 84 soldiers have been killed in Iraq so far this year. According to the Officer down website, 28 police officers have been killed in the U.S. during the same stretch of time, down 185 from last year.  ( http://www.odmp.org/  )  Are either of these casualty lists worth it? Should we remove police officers from duty before they get hurt and American soldiers from Iraq before Iraqi soldiers take over? I will just ask the question. What is it for? Often the soldiers do not know.

	Period	Total
	Mar-08	442
	Feb-08	674
	Jan-08	554
	Dec-07	548
	Nov-07	560
	Oct-07	679
	Sep-07	848
	Aug-07	1,674
	Jul-07	1,690
	Jun-07	1,345
	May-07	1,980
	Apr-07	1,821
	Mar-07	2,977
	Feb-07	3,014
	Jan-07	1,802
	Dec-06	1,752
	Nov-06	1,864
	Oct-06	1,539
	Sep-06	3,539
	Aug-06	2,966
	Jul-06	1,280
	Jun-06	870
	May-06	1,119
	Apr-06	1,009
	Mar-06	1,092
	Feb-06	846
	Jan-06	779

Today's documentary was Death in Gaza, appropriately named because so many people die in Gaza, because the living so often must think of death in Gaza, and because the person who made the movie died in Gaza on the last night of filming there.

Its another sad piece of the puzzle.

HBO: What would you like for viewers to take away from this film?

SAIRA: These kids are not monsters. They are living in unacceptable conditions. Human beings are human beings the world over and the circumstances they live in have a profound impact upon their behavior. There is a cycle of violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where every killing creates a martyr, which creates more killing. Injustice breeds injustice.

HBO: Was there anything unexpected that you learned in course of making this film? What challenged your initial expectations?

SAIRA: Yes, a lot, because everything you read or see about this conflict in particular is sifted through a filter of politics. It is hard to get away from the concept that there are "goodies" and "baddies". We found kids who were being exploited by both sides in a conflict they did not understand.

http://www.hbo.com/docs/programs/death_in_gaza/interview.html

One day militants are talking about how perfect young boys are for scouts and grenade throwers. "They are just boys." The next day they are killed and they are martyrs. A boy is asked what it would feel like to be shot. He wonders why they would shoot him. He is just a boy. But he and his friend make bombs in their free time, throw rocks at the armored bulldozers, practice shooting at tanks, and plan their own martyrdoms.

If there were a line between children and soldiers and terrorists and freedom fighters and  heroes and exploited children, I am not sure where you would draw it.

Given that their goals cannot or will not be compromised, and cannot or will not be conceded by the Israelis ... and given that the animosity is institutionalized into the families, the social networks, the education system, the political system, the literature, and every friendship and memory ... I can't see a way out.  Not until people come to believe that the messiah would blow up the Temple Mount to save a Palestinian kid and Muhammad would blow up Al Quds to save an Israeli settler's life. Maybe a snowball's chance in hell, you say? 

This week in the global Module, we are discussing with Jordanian Students Abraham Lincoln's inaugural addresses.

'Physically speaking, we cannot separate. We can not remove our respective sections from each other, nor build an impassable wall between them. A husband and wife may be divorced, and go out of the presence, and beyond the reach of each other; but the different parts of our country cannot do this. They cannot but remain face to face; and intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must continue between them. Is it possible, then, to make that intercourse more advantageous or more satisfactory, after separation than before? Can aliens make treaties easier than friends can make laws? Can treaties be more faithfully enforced between aliens than laws can among friends? Suppose you go to war, you cannot fight always; and when, after much loss on both sides, and no gain on either, you cease fighting, the identical old questions, as to terms of intercourse, are again upon you.'"

600,000 some odd Americans died figuring out Lincoln was right.

Question for Comment: Would it be possible for god to make two Holy Lands for these two people ... so that one could have their Temple Mount to themselves and the other could have their Al Quds.  Would that be so difficult for a God that created the universe?