Drawing the Line: Palestinian BDS Picket Line Realigns the Entire Zionist Establishment
January 1st, 2012 § Leave a Comment
When oppression is successful, the oppressor gains control over his victim’s borders, erases them, and redraws them according to his whims. The victim’s narrative no longer exists, and as such, just telling their own story is an act of liberation. When Palestinians chose Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) as a form of telling their story (not just a form of action), they changed a continual paradigm of abuse which made their story insignificant, and were finally able to cut the cycle of abuse and silence. No longer do Palestinians need to react to Israel’s Hasbara line. They have reclaimed their narrative, and now the state of Israel is forced to react in accordance to it.
Re-Membering Toba Tek Singh: Looking for Manto
January 1st, 2012 § 4 Comments
by Huma Dar
Sa'adat Hasan Manto
In today’s edition of Dawn.com, Jan 1, 2012, the renowned and beloved feminist poet, Fahmida Riaz has an article, “Understanding Manto,“ about Urdu literature’s enfant terrible, Sa’adat Hasan Manto. This year will mark Manto’s birth centenary. Thank you, Fahmida Apa, for writing this moving tribute! Sad indeed is the day when Pakistan cannot or does not publish Manto’s work, uncensored, unedited. Despite justified indignation, knowing our “guardians of morality and piety,” it aches my heart to confess, I am not surprised.
Ironically, the “Indian pirated edition” – even if we overlook the immense ethical difficulties with the issue of piracy, and the direly-needed resources that were (and are) thus withheld from Manto and his family — is still no guarantee of accessing the “original, uncensored text.” Christine Everaert in her book, Tracing the Boundaries between Hindi and Urdu: Lost and Added in Translation (Brill, 2009) painstakingly records many elisions, omissions, and additions in just a few of Manto’s stories as they’re carried from their original Urdu to the [pirated] Hindi versions. Some of these transformations are, of course, to ease the transmission of the literary register in Urdu to Hindi; others to simply make things more palatable for Indian nationalism. (Please especially see the Chapter II of this book for many examples…)
Ten Good Things About a (Not So) Bad Year
January 1st, 2012 § Leave a Comment
by Medea Benjamin
I had the privilege of starting out last year witnessing, firsthand, the unfolding of the Egyptian revolution in Tahrir Square. I saw people who had been muzzled their entire lives, especially women, suddenly discovering their collective voice. Singing, chanting, demanding, creating. And that became the hallmark of entire year–people the world over becoming empowered and emboldened simply by watching each other. Courage, we learned in 2011, is contagious!
1. The Arab Spring protests were so astounding that even Time magazine recognized “The Protester” as Person of the Year. Sparked by Tunisian vendor Mohamed Bouazizi‘sself-immolation to cry out against police corruption in December 2010, the protests swept across the Middle East and North Africa—including Egypt,Libya, Bahrain, Syria, Yemen, Algeria, Iraq, and Jordan. So far, uprisings have toppled Tunesian President Ben Ali, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, and Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi–with more shake-ups sure to come. And women have been on the front lines of these protests, highlighted recently by the incredibly brave, unprecedented demo of 10,000 Egyptian women protesting military abuse.
Rumsfeld-Era Propaganda Program Whitewashed by Pentagon
December 31st, 2011 § Leave a Comment
by Cyril Mychalejko
This article first appeared at Toward Freedom.
A controversial public relations program run by former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s Pentagon was cleared of any wrong-doing by the agency’s inspector general in a report published last month. The program used dozens of retired military officers working as analysts on television and radio networks as “surrogates” armed by the Pentagon with “the facts” in order to educate the public about the Department of Defense’s operations and agenda.
At the same time, the report quoted participating analysts who believed that bullet points provided by Rumsfeld’s staff advanced a “political agenda,” that the program’s intent “was to move everyone’s mouth on TV as a sock puppet” and that the program was “a white-level psyop [psychological operations] program to the American people.” It also found a “preponderance of evidence” that one analyst was dismissed from the program for being critical of former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, while another analysts said a CNN official told him he was being dropped at the request of the White House.
Nevertheless, the inspector general exonerated the Pentagon, stating that it complied with Department of Defense (DoD) policies and regulations, including not using propaganda on the US public, while also claiming that retired military analysts, many of whom were affiliated with defense contractors, gained nothing financially or personally for the businesses they were affiliated with.
The investigation was requested by Congress after the New York Times published a story revealing the Pentagon’s public relations program, “Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand” (04/20/2008), which was subsequently awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. The article showed how these analysts, many of whom had ties to military contractors, were used to help sell the war in Iraq, to push other Bush Administration foreign policy “themes and messages” and to act as a rapid response team to counter criticisms in the media. One official Department of Defense talking points document released while the Bush Administration was still trying to sell the need for a war with Iraq to the public states, “We know that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction.”
IDF Shit List: Beirut
December 30th, 2011 § 1 Comment
Reading David Hirst’s Beware of Small States: Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East, I’ve come across a passage that highlights other manifestations of Israel’s “purity of arms” in Lebanon aside from the mass slaughter of civilians (Hirst cites 20,000 fatalities, primarily civilian, in the 1982 invasion alone).
The passage discusses the “mess [that] confronted 1,500 US Marines, when, returning to Lebanon along with the rest of the ‘multi-national’ force [in September 1982], they took up position at Beirut international airport”. The Multinational Force, which had in August been tasked with overseeing the withdrawal from the country of the PLO, had itself prematurely withdrawn and was now being redeployed following the massacre of several thousand civilians at Sabra and Shatila by Lebanese Phalangists overseen by the IDF.
Hirst describes the scene at the airport:
“[The Marines’] first task there had been to remove the stinking mounds of excrement that, as in so many other places in the country, adorned just about everything, floors, elevators, chairs, desks and drawers. The Marines got the message. This, they quickly understood, was a ‘house-warming present’ from the Israeli soldiers whose place they were taking; it was their way of venting their spleen on those ‘Arab-loving’ American allies of theirs, who had bought all that Arab ‘propaganda’ about Sabra and Shatila, the Beirut blitz, and the iniquity of a nation that had done such things. Less disgusting, but decidedly more dangerous, was their other gift: the countless cluster bomblets, golfball-sized, which they had strewn the length and breadth of the airport buildings”.
Click here to read PULSE co-editor Robin Yassin-Kassab’s review of Beware of Small States; click here to read his interview with Hirst for The Electronic Intifada.
The Ghost of Tom Joad
December 29th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
From the great 2009 film The People Speak: Bruce Springsteen sings “The Ghost of Tom Joad”, a song that was inspired by John Steinbeck’s masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath.
The Age of Unequals
December 29th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
One of Britain’s leading social epidemiologists, Richard Wilkinson, looks at what it means to live in a new age of inequality. Wilkinson is the co-author of the groundbreaking, international bestseller The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone.
Democracy lessons for Fidel Castro
December 27th, 2011 § 5 Comments
(Image from the Wolfsonian-FIU)
In Havana, Benito was tasked with surveillance duties at the Sans Souci night club and casino run by Trafficante, a close friend of pro-US Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Trafficante had inherited the position from his father, the Sicilian-born Santo Trafficante Sr, who had been appointed by organised crime icons, Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano, to oversee gambling and drug operations in the Cuban capital, which served as a storage facility for heroin en route from Europe to the US.
Benito’s responsibilities at the Sans Souci included sounding an alert if the wife of a casino patron or other relevant figure arrived at an inopportune moment. Prospects for job security were slashed with the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, however, and Benito returned to Florida to sell furniture while Trafficante enhanced his CV by becoming an accomplice of the CIA in the mission to assassinate Fidel Castro.
As journalists Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair note in their book Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press, anti-Castro plots concocted by the Agency ranged from “tr[ying] to devise a way to saturate the radio studio where Castro broadcast his speeches with an aerosol form of LSD and other ‘psychic energisers’” to sabotaging his appearance before the United Nations in New York in 1960 by “plac[ing] thallium salts in Castro’s shoes and on his night table in the hope that the poisons would make the leader’s beard fall off”.
Robot Wars
December 27th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Al Jazeera’s excellent Fault Lines return with an investigation into the use of unmanned military technologies.
Over the past decade, the US military has shifted the way it fights its wars, deploying more unmanned systems in the battlefield than ever before. Today there are more than 7,000 drones and 12,000 ground robots in use by all branches of the military.
These systems mean less American deaths. They also mean less political risk for the US when it takes acts of lethal force — often outside of official war zones.
But US lethal drone strikes in countries like Pakistan have brought up serious questions about the legal and political implications of using these systems.
Fault Lines looks at how these new weapons of choice are allowing the US to stretch the international laws of war and what it could mean when more and more autonomy is developed for these lethal machines.
Window To My City
December 25th, 2011 § 1 Comment
By Feroz Rather
Illustration by Showkat, a Srinagar-based painter and artist
By the River Jhelum, my window opens into the city of Srinagar at noon. It is a trellis window. Its wooden motifs are rhomboidal, our patient improvisations of what they were, many centuries ago, in Samarkand. Over the soldiers’ sand-bagged bunker and the tangles of wire, over the roof shingles of houseboats moored in the muddy water, it overlooks a road, dusty and strewn with stones, busy with life, the leisurely passage of buses.
The window fills with the clamor of the city centre, Lal Chowk, from the rear: honking of cars, shouts of bus conductors, of vendors selling lotus stems and water nuts, the jingle of bangles on the arms of women, hobnobbing of old men, whistles of the policemen on prowl. It listens in the songs of Habeh Khuton, sad and reminiscent of the color of saffron from Pamper from the corner where you find late poems of Azad, fresh copies of Curfewed Night, fake pieces of Bombay music.
