Sunday, November 8, 2009

Links via Diigo (weekly)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted by Brown Folks at 12:30 AM 0 comments
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Saturday, November 7, 2009

Diigo

We're testing out an account with Diigo that will automatically post bookmarked links to our blog. If you happen to see a bunch of blank or deleted posts come up through your RSS feed or Google Reader, we're sorry - bear with us!
Posted by Hoda at 9:27 PM 0 comments
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Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Nouri Gana, "Arab Despise Thyself"

(Note: article originally found here.)

On my flight back from Philadelphia to Detroit, after having participated in the 122nd MLA Annual Convention, I sat next to a young man whom I overheard speaking Arabic in his cell phone. I said “salam” in Arabic, and the young man was surprised and astonished: “how did you know I am Arab?” he impatiently asked, clearly disappointed to be found but viscerally eager to put me to task for it. I said I just overheard you speaking Arabic in your cell phone. Well, then, he said, “for your information, I am not Arab, I am American.” “That’s fine,” I said, “but you speak Arabic, no?” I deliberately asked the question in Arabic with an accent that is neither Tunisian (as mine normally is) nor fluently Palestinian (however I have tried to sound like one), and I followed it up with an English translation.

The young man looked at me with a smirk and said that he cannot possibly be Arab because he was born in the United States and his father was also born in the United States. He went on to add, however, that he considers himself American first and Palestinian second, that is, American Palestinian, but definitely not Arab. Obviously, whether Palestinians are Arabs or not is not for me to decide, but I wanted to leave a fringe of doubt about my knowledge of Palestine or about how Palestinians (or few of them at least) prefer to define themselves.

So, I went on to my next question, and I asked, “Why don’t you call yourself ‘Palestinian American’ then?” He said, “No, I am American first and then Palestinian.” “Well, I said, that’s fine, but how did you know that I myself am Arab?” It was not the swiftness of his response that shocked me but the tone of his voice, snobbish, intransigent, and ultimately condescending. “Yes, he said, you are!” It was perhaps the first time that someone so confidently and unequivocally determined and judged my racial identity at one and the same time. Not that I prefer the fluidities of postmodern identities and their sometimes overwrought and annoying slippages, flaunted narcissisms and paranoid self-consciousnesses, but that I have always casually adhered to a measure of identity without having ever closed it off to whatever might interpellate, enrich or expand it. I therefore cannot imagine myself contradicting someone identifying me as Arab (even though fewer and fewer would identify me as Tunisian and fewer still would identify me as Canadian), yet what this young man seemed to be implying by categorically adjudicating about my Arabness is that, unlike him, who is self-consciously American Palestinian, I cannot be redeemed or delivered from my Arabness since I wore it on my face and cannot possibly go “face-off.” So, I am trapped! I wear my face and my face marks me as Arab. He however seemed to enjoy wearing a different one, and that’s partly why he was devastated when I confronted him with a forgotten one that happens to be an Arab face. Otherwise, our decent but, I must admit, very disturbing conversation would probably have not taken place.

Even though I have no problem with the way people construct narratives of their own identities, I was quite surprised and shaken by this young man’s absolute disidentification with his “Arabness” (and to a lesser extent, “Palestinianness”) and wondered whether he would really be identified as such by mainstream America. Since when have self-professed multiculturalist societies ceased to identify individuals and peoples separately from where they descend or come from? More importantly, how come that this whole media-authored paranoia against Arabs in the United States has insinuated itself in the minds and hearts of a growing portion of Arabs who are born and raised in the United States in such a way that it compelled them to censor their ownmost Arabness? Gone are the times when to be Arab meant to be articulate and to speak with impeccable clarity, and not synonymous with being sentenced to hang in the everyday news like a parasitical fly at your lunch table.

I do not mind accepting whatever narrative identity this young man put forward, only if it were that simple! What I suspect is that what I witnessed is just another example of a pervasive wave of Arabs born in the United States, Britain, France or in Canada who speak Arabic (some of them don’t but they can still have the “luxury” of Arabic names) and relate to a national identity (Palestine, Algeria, Lebanon, etc.) but who insist that they are not Arabs. What I suspect, in other words, is not whether the likes of this young man is comfortable with his Americanness but whether or not he is not disavowing his Arabness, however near or distant it might be. Obviously, this is not something that should be of any concern to me if I did not note the young man’s disappointment, confusion and surprise when I spoke to him in Arabic and implied that he was Arab.

The question is not whether people are free to identify, refashion and reinvent themselves the way they like, but whether it is psychosocially salubrious to do so if the propelling forces are nothing more than the propagandistic and media propagated paranoia against Arabs and Muslims. Is it healthy to self-identify oneself as triumphantly American or as part-time American Palestinian if such an identity is instituted by a privatized and naturalized denial or disavowal of one’s ownmost ethnic identity? This young man (25, he told me) works in the Arab world and is a budding diplomat and has the potential to become a major player in the agonizing process of bringing peace to the Palestinians, a besieged people whose political and cultural energies are perennially being taxed beyond human creativity, endurance and persistence. How can this young man who has internalized a paranoid perception of Arabness be able to understand his own people, let alone himself or the way other Americans, unlike him, see him?

I once asked a friend of mine why is it that a lot of Arab Americans (who are Muslims, born-Muslims or of Muslim descent) choose non-Arab names for their own children? She told me not to be “judgmental” since I “don’t know the traumata that young children with Arab names go through at American schools.” I obviously understood the point, even though I still don’t believe that one can correct a wrong by perpetuating it. So, by calling your child Ray or Isabelle, do you think, given the intensive profiling systems and the unquenchably crooked interest in people’s ethnicities, do you think you’re building a better future for your child or that you’re somewhat protecting him or her from the radar of ethnic profiling?

Whether an Arab can never become American, ought not or must never become American is not the point, but rather that education (at the school system level in particular) should confront children with difference early on in their lives and decolonize rather than colonize their impressionable minds. If all children’s names go by Ray or Isabelle, etc., when is a child going to be exposed to different names? Plus, the argument that children suffer discrimination at school, while evidentially true, should not encourage parents to opt for mainstream or culturally-friendly names for their kids. What if your sensitive and anti-imperialist child grows up one day and accuses you of treachery, of giving her a name that does not coincide with her cultural allegiances or affiliations? What if? How would you feel as a parent? You might indeed give your child a hard time by calling him, for instance, Mustafa, Ali, and especially Osama, but you might also give him and yourself the occasion to debunk prejudices and to generate a model Osama that might eventually redeem the name from its combustible connotations. Rather than asking whether there can be a different Osama, a different Saddam, are we suggesting that there cannot be a worse or better one? Are we just supposed to toe the line and let the Media continue stereotyping Arab culture? So what if I insist on calling my child Osama, what? Do you think we should let history determine our fates or determine the direction of history through our familial, local and grassroots struggles even with little and small-scale actions, as small as the decision upon the name of your next child?

The other part of this problematic of narrative identities is not that some people construct themselves differently or in whatever manner they want to, but that they do so in the belief that they attach superior values to their own selves by pursuing a certain narrative rather than another one. The young man I met on the plane identified me as Arab immediately, as if he were impatiently sentencing me for having myself (and mistakenly so, as he tried to convince me) identified him as Arab. Did Arabs descend so low that it is an insult to be called “Arab”? Oh, have I just realized this now after the hurly burly has been done and the war lost and won? No, not at all, I heard about it before but it is always news to me: why should I get accustomed to it? Why should I beg to be appeased? Why should one get used to this maligned posture of Arabness both inside and outside the Arab world and among Arabs themselves?

My problem with identity politics is the racist gesture that inaugurates and sustains it. For, this young man sees himself as American, even though he is also a part-time Palestinian who speaks Arabic and works in the Arab world. The very fact that he viscerally denies the qualification to be Arab or to be taken for or identified with one is expressive of a certain value system at work in the parts of the collective unconscious of later generations of Arab Americans. This value system does not apply to all Arab Americans since I have seen and heard many of them reclaim a distant Arabness and actively identify with one, but it is always disheartening to learn that the young and bright are unwilling to identify with what Edward Said once called a “lost cause” but are in fact reenacting the official stance vis-à-vis Arabness induced by the media and the legacy of cumulative defeats of Arabs in their decolonization struggles against the triptych—Zionism, American and European postcolonial colonialism. Is really the very experience of being Arab nowadays a lost cause, nothing but a source of despondency and anguish? Did we come to accept this fichue position? If we are politicized and vulnerable, should we not identify even more enthusiastically with our own vulnerability rather than vacate it for misguided appropriations of prestigious and safer American or European identities? And how on earth are we going to convince the world to identify with our “lost causes” from the Mashriq to the Maghrib if we cannot identify with the signatures of those causes, with Arabness? If Arabness and Arabs are two lost causes in one, can we not at least afford the dignity of sportsmanship and reckon with those losses and try to initiate narrative departures and reconfigurations rather than change camps altogether? Today, apart from Iraqis, Palestinians continue to be the most vulnerable living Arabs in the Arab world, being as it were exposed to the besieging military machine of their nuclear oppressor; is it not more dignifying for Arabs to identify with Palestinians rather than to disidentify with Arabness? Should not the world identify with Palestinian exposure and vulnerability as it had once identified with Jewish vulnerability? Should not each of us unilaterally disengage with identity politics and invest in identifications with victims of injustices wherever they are? We ought to find a way to become, at least until further notice, all Palestinians, all Arabs...
Posted by Hoda at 10:49 PM 0 comments
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Sunday, October 25, 2009

"I just don't like Muslims..."

The state of Georgia doesn't have the best history when it comes to Muslims (let's not forget the Georgia judge who barred hejabi women from his courtroom, and had one arrested for refusing to take it off), but this is a whole other level of discrimination and hatred. People are outraged because Muslims want to expand a mosque...

Dar-e Abbas is a mosque that holds services in a small house in the city of Lilburn. Over the years the number of attendees has grown, and they want to expand and remodel the mosque as well as add a cemetery. To do this they must have the property re-zoned from "residential" to "commercial." I think it's best now to turn to the videos showing what (apparently) happens when a property is re-zoned. The first is here, and the second here, and there is also an accompanying article found here.

Although I think all three links speak for themselves, here are a few choice quotes.

From the first video:

"I'm prejudiced, and I don't want them [Muslims] here."

"I mean, they need to just take a chill pill, so to speak, and go through the political system."

"I have a problem with it being a cemetery."

"Mosque is alright, but if they want to put a cemetery, that's no good."

The reporter says he spoke to three people "who told [him] flat out they were racist" and so did not want the mosque expanded, and when he asked why they would not say so on camera, they replied that they were "afraid their house would be burned to the ground."

From the second video:

"It doesn't have anything about, nothing to do about, umm, them [Muslims]. This is about hurting our community, this is about hurting our kids."

From the article:

"I am prejudice [sic], I just don't like Muslims and I don't want them taking over our neighborhood," said one resident who lives near the mosque. He did not want to be identified for fear of retaliation.
"I don't want someone coming to my house and burning it down."

"I don't have a problem with it being a place of faith I have a problem with it being a cemetery."

I pull these comments out with reason; I want to show how ridiculous the claim is that people are upset about re-zoning. There are so many offensive comments that it's hard to hear and appreciate them all when watching the videos, but reading them like this forces you to really understand how foul they are. These comments are reflections of ignorant and frightening Islamophobic attitudes that have absolutely nothing to do with zoning issues.

Regarding the cemetery comments - for those who understand why people would be uncomfortable with a cemetery in their neighborhood (which is the usual response I've gotten from people who I've discussed this article with), let me point out that this mosque is not located in a "neighborhood." This house is not in a small subdivision, but rather on a very long highway with a 45 mph speed limit, which runs through two counties and four cities. Still not convinced? Google Maps "Street View" shows that Lawrenceville Highway is a five lane road in front of the mosque. Not exactly a cozy neighborhood street.

If you're already planning a response explaining to me how perhaps these comments really are just people upset about a plot of land being legally zoned as one thing rather than another, I want you to imagine this article being about a church. I want you to imagine a small church wanting to expand and add a cemetery, and I want you to imagine the Muslims in the neighborhood up in arms about it. I want you to imagine Muslims discussing how they "just don't like" Christians, how they're flat out prejudiced against them and unapologetic about it. I want you to imagine them saying how they were afraid that these Christians--these clearly fanatical, backwards, frightening Christians--would come burn down their homes if they found out who they were (because only a fanatical, backwards, frightening people could be capable of such a thing). I want you to imagine a Muslim man telling the camera that these Christians just need to take a "chill pill" and "go through the political system" (as if they weren't already doing so, as if applying for re-zoning isn't exactly that). I want you to imagine a middle-aged Muslim woman telling the camera "this is about hurting our community, this is about hurting our kids."

It's rather awful, isn't it? It's not even awful as much as it is silly. It all sounds pretty silly, because it doesn't make sense. The idea of Christians not abiding by "the political system" doesn't make sense. The idea of Christians as barbarians that are capable of burning down your home doesn't make sense. The image of church-going Christians is not what one imagines when thinking about entities that hurt the community and kids.

Muslims have been so demonized in the U.S. that these statements seem plausible. They don't cause the same sort of visceral reactions you'd find if this were a group of Muslims speaking about Christians, and that's frightening.

There's so much that is so wrong with this story. Maybe the next post should be dedicated to the "reporters" covering their events and their ridiculous tone and language... "Clash of cultures"? Flashing "ANGRY PROTESTS" across the screen while showing only the Muslims? Describing people as "racist" against Muslims?(!) I don't have the emotional energy to dissect these things now though. I just want to say that you should care about this. It's clear from the reporter's comment (and from everything else produced by mainstream U.S. culture) that "Muslim" is, for many, a raced category conflating multiple ethnicities, religions, and nationalities into one identity. If you're a minority in any way there is every possibility that the same kind of dangerous "Other"-ing logic that allows thoughts like these to flourish can be (and probably already is) used against you.
Posted by Tahereh at 9:46 PM 2 comments
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Tuesday, October 20, 2009

U.S.-sponsored terrorism in Iran

On Sunday, October 18, U.S.-backed Jundallah terrorists carried out a suicide bombing in the city of Sarbaz, in the Pishin region of Iran's Sistan & Baluchistan province, close to the Pakistani border. At least 42 people were killed and dozens injured, with prominent local figures and tribal leaders, both Sunni and Shi’a, among the victims.1 Jundallah is linked to al-Qa’ida and other terrorist groups, yet they enjoy direct support from the U.S.

Jundallah has claimed responsibility for the attack, which was an attempt to sabotage an ongoing “Shiite-Sunni Tribes’ Solidarity Conference.” The province is primarily populated by Sunni Baluchis, who are a religious and ethnic minority in Iran. Baluchis have legitimate grievances with the Iranian state, but militants like Jundallah are using violence to oppose ethno-sectarian reconciliation and to destabilize Iran. Their opposition to reconciliation efforts may be motivated in part by their Salafi ideology, which considers the Shi’a to be apostates or non-Muslims. (For an discussion of how some Salafis have responded to the attacks, see the always excellent Views from the Occident).

Jundallah has been engaging in terrorist activity against Iran since its foundation in 2003. Its most recent attack before this one occurred on May 28, 2009; Jundallah set off a bomb in a Shi’a mosque in Zahedan, also in Sistan & Baluchestan, near the borders with Pakistan and Afghanistan. It killed at least 19 people and injured 60. They followed up by shooting up Ahmadinejad’s election office in Zahedan, injuring at least three. In total, 25 people were killed.

The deputy governor of the province, Jalal Sayah, accused the U.S. of being behind the May attacks, and Iranian officials have now accused the U.S., U.K., Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia of involvement in this latest attack.2 The first three have denied involvement and condemned terrorism; at the time of writing, I am unaware of any response from the Saudi government on the subject. The extent to which various foreign states were involved is debatable, but the fact that the U.S. provides direct support to Jundallah has been well documented.3 The U.S. began giving money and weapons to Jundallah as part of its “black ops” program for regime change in Iran, under George W. Bush. Barack Obama’s administration has chosen to continue this program. Furthermore, the U.S. does not recognize Jundallah as a terrorist organization. (Update: it seems that the U.S. is now attempting to cover its tracks. One can only hope that this represents a genuine change of strategy within the Obama adminstration).

Violent separatists are cheered on (and at times supported) by U.S. imperialists, when they operate in a country the U.S. opposes. For example, they condemn Kurdish separatism in Turkey (a close U.S. ally) while supporting it in Iraq. From 1972-1975, the U.S. cynically encouraged Iraqi Kurds to rise up against Saddam Hussein, only to abandon them after Saddam struck a deal with the U.S.-backed Shah of Iran.4 The Kurdish uprising was summarily crushed by the Iraqi state, which deported and massacred tens of thousands of Kurds, using money, intelligence, and even weapons directly supplied by the U.S. The U.S. repeated this tactic numerous times in Iraq over the years. It encouraged Iraqi Kurds and Shi’a to rise up again in 1991 and then abandoned them; subsequently, as many as 100,000 or more people were killed and many more displaced.5 It later helped arm Kurdish guerrillas, only to abandon them yet again in 1996.

U.S. support for ethnic separatism is not limited to Iraq, however. In addition to directly supporting Jundallah (which claims not to be separatist), it also supports Kurdish separatists and many other similar groups in Iran. Congresswoman Jane Harman (D-CA) suggested that the U.S. should promote ethnic division in Iran. (She later backtracked when criticized by the NIAC). Others have held a conference promoting this incredibly racist notion of “ein Volk, ein Reich” in Iran, and have drawn up maps of a new, thoroughly Balkanized Middle East including Iran partitioned along ethnic lines.

It boggles my mind to see that this kind of 19th-century European nationalist thinking--which played a crucial ideological role in so many disastrous wars throughout the 20th century, from the Balkan wars to World Wars I and II to the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, not to mention the colonial partitioning of much of Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere--is being revived. And it frustrates me deeply to see many of the Americans who railed against Bush’s support for terrorism remain silent about (or worse, defend) Obama as he continues his predecessor’s policies. Terrorism is a crime against humanity, whether perpetuated by Abdolmalek Rigi, Osama bin Ladin, George W. Bush, or Barack Obama.

Notes

1. For more, see Jundullah claims responsibility for terror attack and Iran presses Pakistan as terror attack kills 42 from Iran’s Press TV.

2. On the subject of blame, refer to Iran Blames U.S., Britain for Deadly Attack Against Revolutionary Guards and Iran Threats Follow Revolutionary Guards Attacks (RFE/RL), and Iran blames Pakistan for attack and Iran vows response to suicide blast (Al Jazeera).

3. For more sources on U.S. support for Jundallah, start with the relevant Wikipedia article. In particular, see ABC News Exclusive: The Secret War Against Iran, U.S. escalating covert operations against Iran: report (Reuters), Preparing the Battlefield: The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran (New Yorker), Seymour Hersh: US Training Jundullah and MEK for Bombing Preparation (Iran Coverage), and Rigi’s brother exposes US ties with Jundullah (Press TV).

4. I say “cynically” because, as this article points out, the U.S. was fully aware of the fact that it was taking advantage of the Kurds and had no intention of allowing them to be successful.

5. For more on this, see William Blum’s Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions since World War II (partially readable online).
Posted by Alexander at 1:56 AM 12 comments
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Friday, October 9, 2009

Lawrence Joseph, "Sand Nigger"

In the house in Detroit
in a room of shadows
when grandma reads her Arabic newspaper
it is difficult for me to follow her
word by word from right to left
and I do not understand
why she smiles about the Jews
who won't do business in Beirut
"because the Lebanese
are more Jew than Jew,"
or whether to believe her
that if I pray
to the holy card of Our Lady of Lebanon
I will share the miracle.
Lebanon is everywhere
in the house: in the kitchen
of steaming pots, leg of lamb
in the oven, plates of kousa,
hushwee rolled in cabbage,
dishes of olives, tomatoes, onions,
roasted chicken, and sweets;
at the card table in the sunroom
where grandpa teaches me
to wish the dice across the backgammon board
to the number I want;
Lebanon of mountains and sea,
of pine and almond trees,
of cedars in the service
of Solomon, Lebanon
of Babylonians, Phoenicians, Arabs, Turks
and Byzantines, of the one-eyed
monk, saint Maron,
in whose rite I am baptized;
Lebanon of my mother
warning my father not to let
the children hear,
of my brother who hears
and from whose silence
I know there is something
I will never know; Lebanon
of grandpa giving me my first coin
secretly, secretly
holding my face in his hands,
kissing me and promising me
the whole world.
My father's vocal chords bleed;
he shouts too much
at his brother, his partner,
in the grocery store that fails.
I hide money in my drawer, I have
the talent to make myself heard.
I am admonished to learn,
never to dirty my hands
with sawdust and meat.
At dinner, a cousin
describes his niece's head
severed with bullets, in Beirut,
in civil war. "More than
an eye for an eye," he demands,
breaks down, and cries.
My uncle tells me to recognize
my duty, to use my mind,
to bargain, to succeed.
He turns the diamond ring
on his finger, asks if
I know what asbestosis is,
"the lungs become like this,"
he says, holding up a fist;
he is proud to practice
law which "distributes
money to compensate flesh."
outside the house my practice
is not to respond to remarks
about my nose or the color of my skin.
"Sand nigger," I'm called,
and the name fits: I am
the light-skinned nigger
with black eyes and the look
difficult to figure--a look
of indifference, a look to kill--
a Levantine nigger
in the city on the strait
between the great lakes Erie and St. Clair
which has a reputation
for violence, an enthusiastically
bad-tempered sand nigger
who waves his hands, nice enough
to pass, Lebanese enough
to be against his brother,
with his brother against his cousin,
with cousin and brother
against the stranger.
Posted by Hoda at 11:20 PM 0 comments
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Obama's Nobel Peace Prize

Perhaps someone can clarify for me: did Obama win the Nobel Peace Prize for escalating the war in Afghanistan, or increasing the number of U.S. bombs dropped on Pakistan, or continuing the illegal occupation of Iraq (despite his sweet-sounding lies about leaving Iraq), or for giving nearly $3 billion in military aid to Israel? Maybe for continuing to support dictatorships throughout the world, from Saudi Arabia to Egypt to Jordan and elsewhere?

The Nobel Prize Committee has awarded many Peace Prizes to warmongers and war criminals in the past, such as Henry Kissinger, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Shimon Peres, Menachem Begin, and Anwar Sadat, so I shouldn't be surprised, but this Obamamania is getting out of control.

"He got the peace prize, and we got the problem." -Malcolm X (on Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1964 Nobel Peace Prize)
Posted by Alexander at 9:45 PM 0 comments
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Tuesday, October 6, 2009

October 6: a celebation of Egyptian military chauvinism

While the Egyptian military establishment marks today as the 36th anniversary of the so-called "victory" of the Yom Kippur War, I am thinking of my Palestinian brothers and sisters suffering in Gaza at the hands of both Israel and its collaborators in Ramallah, Cairo, Riyadh, and Amman.

October 6 is nothing more than a national myth imposed from above by an authoritarian government, used to cover up the unpopular pro-Israel stance of the equally unpopular Egyptian regime. "But don't you remember the Great Victory of 1973?," the regime's loyalists and media mouthpieces ask. "We built bridges out of dust to win back Sinai! At least we're not like Syria, who still hasn't gotten her land back!" I don't have any kind words for any Arab government, pro-US/Israel or not, but at least Syria never signed a peace treaty with a rogue state (unlike the traitor Anwar al-Sadat), subsidized gas to said rogue state at below-market prices, or willingly participated in the strangling of Gaza under the bogus notion of 'national sovereignty'. Sovereignty?! What kind of sovereignty says that Egypt can't open the Rafah border crossing to send in food and medical aid because it violates the Camp David Accords? This is no longer tacit complicity: this is full and outright collaboration.

"We sacrificed enough for the Palestinians!," the regime said during the onslaught last winter. "Why should we do anything else for them?" Undeniably, Egyptian participation in the Arab-Israeli wars caused huge economic and social strains on Egyptian society since 1952... but it was never so much for the Palestinians as much as it was for Egyptian regional supremacy. As far as Egypt's past and present political leaders are concerned, the Palestinians are only rhetorical chess pieces in their desire for political and military hegemony.

If those excuses aren't hollow enough, the regime also tried to divorce Egyptian popular identification with Palestine through xenophobia: "The Palestinians just want to invade our country and steal our food! We're a poor country, and we have no room for them as it is!" If there is any proof that a Palestinian conspiracy caused food prices to raise last year because of the Egyptian government's decision to slash subsidies, let's see it. Mubarak, like his precedessor Sadat, has done everything to suppress poor and working-class Egyptians, as well as allow state-provided social services to deteriorate. This is the sly tactic of the Egyptian regime: hijacking the Palestinian issue as empty rhetoric to justify suppressing its own citizens, while cultivating an anti-Palestinian reactionary attitude among ordinary Egyptians who would otherwise be sympathetic.

Today, my mind is on those who are caught between the pressures of US/Israeli imperialism and their regional stooges, Egyptian and Palestinian alike. The struggle for a democratic Egypt is intrinsically tied to the struggle for a free Palestine, and no amount of decorations on the old dictator's military jacket prove his commitment to either.




Note: Edited on 10/7/09 with a few links.
Posted by Hoda at 9:42 PM 0 comments
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Monday, October 5, 2009

On being a light-skinned Arab

I.

People from the Northern United States are arrogant and in denial about their racism. "We're not like the South," they say. "We never lynched black people, and we never had Jim Crow laws. We're can't be racist!" Really? How were the suburbs created? What about the lynch mobs that came after anyone brown-skinned after the Iranian hostage crisis and 9/11? What about the pseudo-intellectual, racist trash the New York Times regularly publishes about Muslims, aimed at the so-called educated classes in this country? Just because you aren't an in-your-face, Glenn Beck-discipled, confederate flag-waving redneck (and by the way, there are plenty of those in the North) doesn't mean you can't be a racist as well. Beneath its facade of cultural tolerance, the toxicity of Northern racism is its clandestine process of uprooting, whitening, and fostering self-hatred among people of color.

II.

When I was a freshman in high school, a Sindhi classmate referred to me as "brown". She probably meant it as something positive, a way of saying we probably share similar experiences. I didn't care; I was offended. In my mind at the time, the only thing worse than being called Arab was being likened to Indian. That was the lowest of the low... after all, I was white!

***

"Don't worry mom," the white guy I dated assured his mother. "She's not an Arab. She's not one of those sand niggers."

As much as I tried to whitewash myself, I knew I couldn't deny the obvious. "Hey, uhh.." I'm out of articulate words. Something about those words didn't sound right, but what else could I do? Showing my offense would mean admitting I am not really a white person, but actually one of those sand niggers.

"But you're not, right? Didn't you tell me you were Irish and Italian? And, Turkish or something because of your name, right?"

Had my skin been a little darker, I'm not sure if I would have been able to get away with that. I timidly mumble something about my parents being from Egypt. Of course, I stopped short of admitting that both my parents are Arabs, because that would just be too self-incriminating for my whitewashed 15-year old self.

"Oh, well you're not like them."

III.

"Oh, that's your daughter?"

Yes, I'm her daughter. I'm sorry you don't believe we're related because her skin is darker than mine -- and before you ask, no, I am not adopted, nor is my father white.

My mother has been a victim of colorism her entire life. She's learned to move past it, but there are still days when she looks in the mirror and laments, "Why do I have to be so dark and ugly?" Sometimes she'll hint it in less subtle ways, like how I must ensure my future children's skin won't be too dark so they can fit in in this country.

Even when I thought I was white, I never liked hearing these comments. Nobody wants to be put up on a pedestal like that.

***

Egyptians often don't believe that I am one of them; it's the skin (though I'm sure if I veiled, no one would second guess me). Whenever I go back with my mother, they assume she's married to a foreigner. When I was there without either of my parents this summer, it was even more difficult. I'd get every guess in the world before I got Egyptian. I must be French, right? Oh, nevermind, turns out I am Arab. Tunisian? Lebanese? Is my father American?

It's a subtle way of saying, "You're not really from here."

IV.

I never understood why certain teachers hated me, why people do a double-take when they see whose face my name is associated with, or the curious glances people shoot when I am with my mother at the supermarket. My skin isn't pasty, but it's light enough to have me "pass" as an ethnic white. Still, there was something about my long nose and bushy eyebrows that didn't satisfy others when I pretended to be white.

My light skin has made me both a recipient of white privilege and anti-Arab racism. Most of the privilege I received was at the expense of experiencing racist sentiment, because the other party in question figured it was 'okay' to say these things around me.

This is Northern racism: you never realize it's racism until it's too late to confront.
Posted by Hoda at 1:58 AM 4 comments
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Ella Shohat, "Reflections by an Arab Jew"

Behind the cut is a great article by the brilliant Iraqi-Jewish-Israeli scholar, Ella Shohat. While I'm at it, I recommend checking out the documentary Forget Baghdad, which discusses the experiences of Iraqi Jewish exiles living in Israel (not by their own choices) and their reflections on home, identity, and language. Shohat, along with four former members of the Iraqi Communist Party, are interviewed. One interviewee, the writer Sami Michael, reminisced on the pressure to assimilate and suppress his native tongue for Hebrew. Yet, Arabic kept reappearing in his dreams: "It was the revenge of the Arabic language!"

The experiences of Arabs in Israel, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, are often left out of the standard Israel-Palestine discourse. The discrimination Mizrahi Jews face, like their Palestinian bretheren, is a testament to the racist nature of the state of Israel.




When issues of racial and colonial discourse are discussed in the U.S., people of Middle Eastern and North African origin are often excluded. This piece is written with the intent of opening up the multicultural debate, going beyond the U.S. census's simplistic categorization of Middle Eastern peoples as "whites."

It's also written with the intent of multiculturalizing American notions of Jewishness. My personal narrative questions the Eurocentric opposition of Arab and Jew, particularly the denial of Arab Jewish (Sephardic) voices both in the Middle Eastern and American contexts.

I am an Arab Jew. Or, more specifically, an Iraqi Israeli woman living, writing and teaching in the U.S. Most members of my family were born and raised in Baghdad, and now live in Iraq, Israel, the U.S., England, and Holland. When my grandmother first encountered Israeli society in the '50s, she was convinced that the people who looked, spoke and ate so differently--the European Jews--were actually European Christians. Jewishness for her generation was inextricably associated with Middle Easterness. My grandmother, who still lives in Israel and still communicates largely in Arabic, had to be taught to speak of "us" as Jews and "them" as Arabs. For Middle Easterners, the operating distinction had always been "Muslim," "Jew," and "Christian," not Arab versus Jew. The assumption was that "Arabness" referred to a common shared culture and language, albeit with religious differences.

Americans are often amazed to discover the existentially nauseating or charmingly exotic possibilities of such a syncretic identity. I recall a well-established colleague who despite my elaborate lessons on the history of Arab Jews, still had trouble understanding that I was not a tragic anomaly--for instance, the daughter of an Arab (Palestinian) and an Israeli (European Jew). Living in North America makes it even more difficult to communicate that we are Jews and yet entitled to our Middle Eastern difference. And that we are Arabs and yet entitled to our religious difference, like Arab Christians and Arab Muslims.

It was precisely the policing of cultural borders in Israel that led some of us to escape into the metropolises of syncretic identities. Yet, in an American context, we face again a hegemony that allows us to narrate a single Jewish memory, i.e., a European one. For those of us who don't hide our Middle Easterness under one Jewish "we," it becomes tougher and tougher to exist in an American context hostile to the very notion of Easterness.

As an Arab Jew, I am often obliged to explain the "mysteries" of this oxymoronic entity. That we have spoken Arabic, not Yiddish; that for millennia our cultural creativity, secular and religious, had been largely articulated in Arabic (Maimonides being one of the few intellectuals to "make it" into the consciousness of the West); and that even the most religious of our communities in the Middle East and North Africa never expressed themselves in Yiddish-accented Hebrew prayers, nor did they practice liturgical-gestural norms and sartorial codes favoring the dark colors of centuries-ago Poland. Middle Eastern women similarly never wore wigs; their hair covers, if worn, consisted of different variations on regional clothing (and in the wake of British and French imperialism, many wore Western-style clothes). If you go to our synagogues, even in New York, Montreal, Paris or London, you'll be amazed to hear the winding quarter tones of our music which the uninitiated might imagine to be coming from a mosque.

Now that the three cultural topographies that compose my ruptured and dislocated history--Iraq, Israel and the U.S.--have been involved in a war, it is crucial to say that we exist. Some of us refuse to dissolve so as to facilitate "neat" national and ethnic divisions. My anxiety and pain during the Scud attacks on Israel, where some of my family lives, did not cancel out my fear and anguish for the victims of the bombardment of Iraq, where I also have relatives.

War, however, is the friend of binarisms, leaving little place for complex identities. The Gulf War, for example, intensified a pressure already familiar to the Arab Jewish diaspora in the wake of the Israeli-Arab conflict: a pressure to choose between being a Jew and being an Arab. For our families, who have lived in Mesopotamia since at least the Babylonian exile, who have been Arabized for millennia, and who were abruptly dislodged to Israel 45 years ago, to be suddenly forced to assume a homogenous European Jewish identity based on experiences in Russia, Poland and Germany, was an exercise in self devastation. To be a European or American Jew has hardly been perceived as a contradiction, but to be an Arab Jew has been seen as a kind of logical paradox, even an ontological subversion. This binarism has led many Oriental Jews (our name in Israel referring to our common Asian and African countries of origin is Mizrahi or Mizrachi) to a profound and visceral schizophrenia, since for the first time in our history Arabness and Jewishness have been imposed as antonyms.

Intellectual discourse in the West highlights a Judeo-Christian tradition, yet rarely acknowledges the Judeo-Muslim culture of the Middle East, of North Africa, or of pre-Expulsion Spain (1492) and of the European parts of the Ottoman Empire. The Jewish experience in the Muslim world has often been portrayed as an unending nightmare of oppression and humiliation.

Although I in no way want to idealize that experience--there were occasional tensions, discriminations, even violence--on the whole, we lived quite comfortably within Muslim societies.

Our history simply cannot be discussed in European Jewish terminology. As Iraqi Jews, while retaining a communal identity, we were generally well integrated and indigenous to the country, forming an inseparable part of its social and cultural life. Thoroughly Arabized, we used Arabic even in hymns and religious ceremonies. The liberal and secular trends of the 20th century engendered an even stronger association of Iraqi Jews and Arab culture, which brought Jews into an extremely active arena in public and cultural life. Prominent Jewish writers, poets and scholars played a vital role in Arab culture, distinguishing themselves in Arabic speaking theater, in music, as singers, composers, and players of traditional instruments.

In Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Tunisia, Jews became members of legislatures, of municipal councils, of the judiciary, and even occupied high economic positions. (The finance minister of Iraq in the '40s was Ishak Sasson, and in Egypt, Jamas Sanua--higher positions, ironically, than those our community had generally achieved within the Jewish state until the 1990s!)

The same historical process that dispossessed Palestinians of their property, lands and national-political rights, was linked to the dispossession of Middle Eastern and North African Jews of their property, lands, and rootedness in Muslim countries. As refugees, or mass immigrants (depending on one's political perspective), we were forced to leave everything behind and give up our Iraqi passports. The same process also affected our uprootedness or ambiguous positioning within Israel itself, where we have been systematically discriminated against by institutions that deployed their energies and material to the consistent advantage of European Jews and to the consistent disadvantage of Oriental Jews. Even our physiognomies betray us, leading to internalized colonialism or physical misperception. Sephardic Oriental women often dye their dark hair blond, while the men have more than once been arrested or beaten when mistaken for Palestinians. What for Ashkenazi immigrants from Russian and Poland was a social aliya (literally "ascent") was for Oriental Sephardic Jews a yerida ("descent").

Stripped of our history, we have been forced by our no-exit situation to repress our collective nostalgia, at least within the public sphere. The pervasive notion of "one people" reunited in their ancient homeland actively disauthorizes any affectionate memory of life before Israel. We have never been allowed to mourn a trauma that the images of Iraq's destruction only intensified and crystallized for some of us. Our cultural creativity in Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic is hardly studied in Israeli schools, and it is becoming difficult to convince our children that we actually did exist there, and that some of us are still there in Iraq, Morocco, Yemen and Iran.

Western media much prefer the spectacle of the triumphant progress of Western technology to the survival of the peoples and cultures of the Middle East. The case of Arab Jews is just one of many elisions. From the outside, there is little sense of our community, and even less sense of the diversity of our political perspectives. Oriental-Sephardic peace movements, from the Black Panthers of the '70s to the new Keshet (a "Rainbow" coalition of Mizrahi groups in Israel) not only call for a just peace for Israelis and Palestinians, but also for the cultural, political, and economic integration of Israel/Palestine into the Middle East. And thus an end to the binarisms of war, an end to a simplistic charting of Middle Eastern identities.
Posted by Hoda at 12:45 AM 3 comments
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