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Ed Webb

Turkish police 'seize Islamic State coin-makers' | Middle East Eye - 0 views

www.middleeasteye.net/...c-state-coin-makers-1871252304

ISIS Turkey Syria sovereignty currency currencies crime

shared by Ed Webb on 08 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Turkish police have arrested six foreign nationals and seized material allegedly used by Islamic State (IS) militants to produce coins for the group
  • the coins produced are used as currency in IS-controlled areas
  • IS announced last year that it would start producing its own currency in an effort to "emancipate itself from the satanic global economic system".
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  • based on the original dinar coins used during the Caliphate of Uthman in 634 CE, was set to include seven minted coins: two gold, three silver and two copper. One gold dinar would be worth about $139
Ed Webb

Cultural heritage and violence in the Middle East | openDemocracy - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...ge-and-violence-in-middle-east

culture heritage archaeology genocide Syria Turkey Armenians sectarianism

shared by Ed Webb on 21 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • According to reports of the activist Facebook group Le patrimoine archéologique syrien en danger, all six UNESCO World Heritage sites in Syria have been damaged, major museum collections at Homs and Hama have been looted, and dozens of ancient tells have been obliterated by shelling. In Iraq, recent media stories recount ISIS fighters’ use of antiquities to raise revenues. So-called blood antiquities function as cash-cows, fetching high prices from unscrupulous collectors and netting a handsome cut for ISIS. As devastating as this news is, Syria and Iraq are simply additional chapters in the long-running story wherein conflict is characterised by a two-fold assault on humanity: human bodies themselves as well as the objects and sites that people create and infuse with cultural meaning.
  • So-called blood antiquities function as cash-cows, fetching high prices from unscrupulous collectors and netting a handsome cut for ISIS.
  • The destruction of human communities is incomplete without cultural violence. This was the conclusion of lawyer and human rights advocate Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-born jurist who coined the term “genocide” and fought successfully for its recognition by international legal bodies as a crime. In Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944), he argued: By ‘genocide’ we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group…[It signifies] a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. (Lemkin 1944: 80) Among the “essential foundations” of the life of human societies, Lemkin argued, were cultural sites, objects, and practices. The Holocaust galvanised his human rights work, but it was the tragic case of Turkish Armenians during the beginning decades of the twentieth century that served as the basis for Lemkin’s theory of genocide.
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  • Also significant in this context was the systematic replacement of Armenian place names (on streets, buildings, neighbourhoods, towns, and villages) with Turkish names. The erasure of Armenians from collective memory was completed during the Turkish Republic; in their history textbooks, Turkish children hear nothing about Armenian culture or learn simply that they were enemies of the Turks.
  • the Turkish state and its governments have systematically removed all markers of the Armenians’ civilisation
  • Current scholarly discussion on the Armenian genocide, however, focuses almost exclusively on the human destruction, not taking into consideration the systematic annihilation of Armenian sites and monuments that has taken place since then
  • This is cultural death, and it is especially dangerous because it legitimates the denial of diversity by authoritarian states and their societies.
  • Historical records document previous erasures of peoples and their culture: the Native Americans and First Nations of north America; the Mayas and Aztecs of Mesoamerica; and the Roman destruction of Carthage (north Africa), which some scholars point to as the earliest recorded organised genocide.
  • the harrowing plight of Syrian journalist Ali Mahmoud Othman, co-founder of Le patrimoine archéologique syrien en danger. Othman was arrested by government forces in March 2012 and has not been heard of since his televised “confession” in May 2012
  • Recurring Internet images of ISIS fighters beheading western men obscure the equally outrageous and horrific acts of sexual violence against women, torture of children, and destruction of homes, markets, churches, Shi’a mosques, and ancient monuments. All of this constitutes the challenging environment in which cultural activists must do their work.
  • Lemkin’s teachings still have something to say to us today: without monuments and cultural objects, social groups are atomised into disaffected, soulless individuals
Ed Webb

"The Battle of Algiers" at 50: From 1960s Radicalism to the Classrooms of West Point - ... - 0 views

lareviewofbooks.org/...dicalism-classrooms-west-point

Algeria film terrorism torture insurgency COIN military colonialism

shared by Ed Webb on 01 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • The Battle of Algiers continues to be taught and analyzed in military classrooms and government think tanks. To understand why a film that celebrates the overthrow of a colonial regime also appeals to those charged with containing insurgencies, I reached out to a group of military educators and security analysts who have either taught or lectured on the film.
  • in the early 1960s, the tactics used by the two sides were translated into a systematic theory of modern warfare that continues to influence military strategists
  • a few core ideas: insurgencies are hard to manage; to control them requires a combination of vigorous intelligence-gathering and a viable political response. And to defeat an armed uprising requires, above all, winning the “war of values and ideas.”
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  • Organized by SOLIC (the division of Special Operations/Low Intensity Conflict), the principal civilian advisor to the Secretary of Defense, the screening’s purpose was to cast doubt on the over-confident nation-building rhetoric of the neoconservatives in the Bush administration. The flier publicizing the screening warned that you can “win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas.” It gestured to disconcerting similarities between Algeria and events beginning to unfold in Iraq: “Children shoot soldiers at point-blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar?” Barely three months after Bush declared “mission accomplished” in Iraq, SOLIC was presenting a different scenario shaped by the tenets of counterinsurgency
  • After the film’s high-profile screenings at the Pentagon and the Council on Foreign Relations, it was rereleased by the Criterion Collection in a special three-disc edition. The bonus materials included a conversation with Richard A. Clarke, former chief counterterrorism advisor on the National Security Council and an outspoken critic of the Bush administration, and Michael Sheehan, who led SOLIC from 2011 to 2013 and who currently holds a distinguished Chair at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point — one of the Professional Military Education institutions where The Battle of Algiers is regularly taught. Both Clarke and Sheehan use the film to make the case that defeating an insurgency requires winning the “war of values and ideas.” With one eye trained on Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, they emphasize that having recourse to practices such as torture inevitably undermines any attempt at a political solution.
  • All of the defense professionals whom I spoke with tied their interest in the film to their advocacy of counterinsurgency strategies that emphasize political solutions and reject tactics such as torture
  • the inescapable lesson of The Battle of Algiers is that if you act as the French did in Algeria, you’re going to lose
  • To hold that it’s better to win people over with values and ideas rather than by force is good in principle, but it assumes that there are social and political principles that could unite all parties. This seems highly questionable in a situation such as Iraq, where the objectives of the US presence have been far less straightforward than those of the French in Algeria, and where “insurgency” has become increasingly protean.
  • The film seems to be taught in military colleges as a mirror of history, while history is approached as a reservoir of examples from which lessons can be drawn. Ben Nickels, an associate professor at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies at the National Defense University, observed that this approach is somewhat symptomatic of the field of military history as a whole. Over the last 30 years, military history has all but vanished from the academic mainstream, flourishing only in professional military education, where it has been sheltered from historiographical practices that focus on primary documents as contingent representations.
  • important to acknowledge the selective, largely symbolic ways in which it frames the war. Consider, for example, its famous treatment of the issue of torture. Though the film examines torture as a moral and political problem, it nonetheless approaches it in the same way that counterinsurgency theory does — as a form of muscular interrogation whose purpose is to obtain actionable intelligence. Yet as Raphaëlle Branche, the leading authority on the question, has shown, torture was used in Algeria not only to extract information but also — as in Latin America and more recently Iraq — as a mode of psychological warfare. Practiced on women as well as men, and often taking the form of rape, it became, above all, a way of inflicting humiliation.
  • In one of the film’s most famous scenes, women who are about to set off bombs in the European quarter are shown unveiling and changing their appearance in order to look more French. In reality, the women responsible for setting bombs were mostly students who already dressed in European style. Though the film shows them acting under the tutelage of Saadi Yacef, they were often better educated than their male colleagues. Since gender remains a focal point of American foreign policy in the Middle East, it’s important to recognize that depictions of Muslim societies frequently distort or oversimplify the nature of their gender relations.
  • A half century after the film’s making, the film inspires more left-wing nostalgia than genuine revolutionary fervor
Ed Webb

The Arab and Muslim Evolution of 'Deviance' in Homosexuality - New Lines Magazine - 0 views

newlinesmag.com/...n-of-deviance-in-homosexuality

MENA ArabWorld authoritarianism repression language Arabic discourse LGBT LGBTQ LGBTQIA

shared by Ed Webb on 27 Jun 22 - Cached
  • before the 20th century, Arabs and Muslims never used shudhudh jinsi to describe homosexuality. For more than a millennium, many learned elites, including religious scholars, linguists and poets, discussed all kinds of sexual relations, including what they called “liwat” and “sihaq” (which refer to male and female sexual acts respectively), that were close to our modern understanding of homosexuality, without using terms like deviant, abnormal or unnatural
  • When it was first introduced in Arabic in the early 20th century, shudhudh did not exclusively mean homosexuality. Instead, it was more of a scientific and medical category and included a wide range of sexual activities deemed “deviant,” like masturbation, sadism, masochism, fetishism, etc. And contrary to what opponents of homosexuality often claim, mithlyah is not a recent translation of homosexuality that aimed to replace the term shudhudh and normalize homosexuality. Rather, it was the original term that earlier Arab translators chose for homosexuality, coined at the same time as the term shudhudh and within the same movement of translating modern European psychological and sexologist literature. It then took more than three decades for shudhudh to become a synonym of homosexuality and the favorite term in the anti-homosexuality Arab discourse.
  • (The Quran uses different words when referring to the condemned deeds of Lut’s people: “fahisha,” or obscenity, and “khaba’ith,” or lewdness. Both terms encompass acts beyond same-sex sexual relations, such as highway robbery and dealing in unspecified dishonorable or shameful acts in their assembly.)
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  • not only that pre-modern Arab-Islamic thought never used shudhudh in reference to homosexuality; it also had no term for the concept of homosexuality as understood today
  • In his book “Desiring Arabs,” Columbia University professor of modern Arab thought Joseph Massad shows how modern Arab Nahda intellectuals adopted a variety of strategies to explain away certain aspects of their culture that did not fit with Victorian notions of what is shameful and appropriate
  • Emerging 19th-century fields such as psychology, psychiatry and sexology focused on identifying sexual abnormality and its boundaries. In the process, however, these fields also played a role in reinforcing the familiar. Unlike pre-modern moralists and anatomists who thought that a weak moral will or a biological malfunction in the genitals caused sexual “perversions,” the main argument advanced by these specialists was that functional diseases of sexual instinct caused sexual deviance. At the core of this argument is the claim that there is something called sexual instinct, that it is naturally linked to its object — the opposite sex — and its purpose is reproduction. It also presumes that this instinct emerges in the human body during puberty and slowly decays thereafter.
  • Ten years after El Saadawi’s transformation of the shudhudh phenomenon from a psychological to a social one, Egyptian author and journalist Muhammed Jalal Kushk represented the second transformation, when he claimed that homosexuality is basically a civilizational issue
  • Kushk uses the premise of “sex as virtue” to declare that most sexual desires and activities are not abnormal or deviant. He rejects prohibition of masturbation, anal intercourse between males and females, oral sex and other behaviors.Yet the only activity that he insists on keeping as shudhudh is homosexuality. This is not because he thinks there is something inherent in the sexual activity itself that renders it to be shudhudh but because he considers homosexuality to be a moral indicator of civilizational decline
  • For him, homosexuality represents the extreme expression of individualism and thus the extreme form of rejection of what he considers an imperative moral responsibility to one’s civilization and future generations. In this way, Kushk explains the growing visibility and recognition of homosexuality in the West as a sign of the beginning of the West’s decline.
  • the narrow meaning of shudhudh to exclusively mean homosexuality occurred only in the last third of the 20th century. It was also during this time that the term started to be used in a derogatory manner. The exact moment of this change is unknown but happened amid a rise in Islamist movements in the region starting from the 1970s and the global anti-homosexuality discourse associated with the spread of the AIDS pandemic.
  • The final transformation of the term shudhudh occurred in the past decade and it involved the fact of its becoming the central notion in an anti-homosexuality discourse that has become dominant and officially supported
  • Among the ways that Arab states substitute their lack of democratic legitimacy is by assuming moral authority. In the past five decades, this moral authority was exercised through regulating religion and subjugating Arab women. This is why gender and religious issues were among the hottest controversial topics in this period. But recently, and in reaction to the Arab Spring, the new authoritarian Arab regimes have changed how they treat both religion and women. If you are an Arab dictator and want moral legitimacy, but you do not want to derive it from Islam or gender, what is the most convenient source that fits your new secular conservative agenda? Arguably, the answer is adopting anti-homosexuality and, to a lesser degree, anti-atheism discourse.
Ed Webb

Qatar's Soccer Stars Are Guinea Pigs in an Experiment to Erode Citizenship Rights - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...immigrant-players-not-citizens

Qatar citizenship ISIS opinion analysis politics labor migration migrants sport sports

shared by Ed Webb on 05 Jan 23 - Cached
  • Qatar has not simply spent money to import and train a soccer team: It has also redefined the very idea of citizenship. Like most states in the Persian Gulf, Qatar is a majority-foreigner country. There are only about 300,000 actual Qatari passport holders out of a population of nearly 3 million. Pathways to citizenship are notoriously exclusive, and only 50 new citizenships can be granted per year to those personally approved by the emir of Qatar himself. Yet 10 of the 26 players on Qatar’s national soccer team are naturalized citizens. To comply with FIFA regulations, the entire team consists of Qatari citizens. But these naturalized soccer players are not quite immigrant-origin  national heroes, in the vein of Zinedine Zidane or Zlatan Ibrahimovic. These immigrant players all carry “mission passports”—documents that confer citizenship for the purposes of sports competition
  • this type of citizenship comes with a built-in expiration date, making these immigrant players’ citizenships temporary as well as second class.
  • that Qatar has redefined the very nature of citizenship—without fanfare, controversy, and with the sole goal of appeasing FIFA nationality regulations—takes this story of temporary citizen soccer players beyond the realm of Gulf labor exploitation
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  • The Middle East and North Africa are becoming a kind of citizenship frontier: a region where certainty, permanence, and protection of citizenship is being uniquely and dangerously corroded. And Western countries are enabling this dynamic.
  • The creation of a new, opaquely defined but unambiguously lesser form of citizenship is not a symptom of exploitative labor conditions. It’s a symptom of a regional erosion of citizenship.
  • Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain all emerged as states containing substantial populations of bedoon—stateless residents who were not recognized as citizens and were, in some cases, denied even birth certificates.
  • Most significant of all are the post-1948 populations of Palestinians in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, millions of people who were eventually issued identity documents by several governments, such as subvariants of Syrian passports (Syrian travel documents for Palestinian refugees), which looked like and served as passports but faced adamant political insistence from all sides—save Jordan, which eventually largely naturalized Palestinians—that this documentation was not, in fact, citizenship.
  • Tibetans in exile have been granted pseudo-passports—but not citizenship—by India. Residents of American Samoa are “U.S. nationals” not possessing the full rights of citizenship. The disintegration of Yugoslavia left thousands of Roma people stateless. Issues of statelessness and ambiguous citizenship are universal in any part of the world which experiences crisis and conflict.
  • Since the 2010s, the Middle East is emerging as a kind of experimental zone where the erosion of citizenship rights can be trialed. While Qatari soccer players are temporary citizens naturalized with an expiration date—even if the details of when their passports expire is not public—Western countries are increasingly comfortable denaturalizing and revoking the citizenship of their own immigrant citizens of Middle Eastern origin when those citizens are accused of terrorist activity in the region.
  • some right-populist movements are claiming that Middle Eastern and North African immigrants are somehow not really American, Dutch, or British
  • The West looks the other way as Gulf states chip away at citizenship norms for expediency, and local governments don’t protest too much when Western governments strand their denaturalized ex-citizens in the region. Especially after the emergence of the Islamic State, with its large contingent of Western, immigrant-origin fighters, the revocation of citizenship became an appealing alternative to long and complicated criminal prosecutions.
  • Western institutions in the Middle East have led the way in demonstrating that the definition of citizenship can be changed to solve an embarrassing problem, be that one of your citizens swearing allegiance to the Islamic State or the fact that half your national soccer team is foreign
  • The erasure of citizenship rights in these cases can be tolerated by international legal regimes because they are considered exceptional. It’s just for some athletes. It’s just for terrorists. But it doesn’t stay that way: The model, once implemented, is attractive for other uses.
  • conditional citizenship, a term coined by the American author Laila Lalami to describe people who, through a web of big and small prejudices and bureaucratic procedures, have “rights the state finds expendable.”
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