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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.
  • 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
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  • 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.
  • 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
  • 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
Erin Gold

Memo From Cairo - Egypt Ponders Failed Drive for Unesco - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...29egypt.html

Unesco Egypt anti-Semitism

shared by Erin Gold on 05 Oct 09 - Cached
  • after Egypt’s culture minister, Farouk Hosny, failed in his bid to lead the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Egyptian newspapers and government officials presented the defeat as a sign of Western prejudice against Islam and the Arab world,
  • For days after Egypt’s culture minister, Farouk Hosny, failed in his bid to lead the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Egyptian newspapers and government officials presented the defeat as a sign of Western prejudice against Islam and the Arab world, the product of an international Jewish conspiracy.
  • “America, Europe and the Jewish lobby brought down Farouk Hosni,” read a headline
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  • Mr. Hosny himself helped stoke those sentiments, saying, “There was a group of the world’s Jews who had a major influence in the elections who were a serious threat to Egypt taking this position.”
  • All of Egypt, indeed all of the Arab world, was talking with one voice of outrage and insult.
  • While no one here would argue that Israel and its supporters played no role in Mr. Hosny’s defeat to a Bulgarian diplomat, many people said that his failure was at least as much a sign of Egypt’s long, slow slide as the center of Arab culture, thought and influence. They said the defeat might represent a rejection of Muslims and Arabs, but perhaps more importantly a rejection of their authoritarian leaders.
  • Mr. Hosny, a favorite of President Hosni Mubarak, was roundly despised by many members of the nation’s cultural elite
  • pan-Arab daily newspaper Al Quds Al Arabi wrote that Mr. Hosny’s loss “comes as yet another confirmation of the Arab world’s — and Egypt’s in particular — backslide on the international arena,
  • considering the charges of anti-Semitism that derailed his candidacy, he has never been known as a strong opponent of normalizing ties with Israel.
  • Throughout his candidacy, Mr. Hosny struggled to mute the charges of anti-Semitism, efforts that caused many people in Egypt to wince as they watched a stalwart of the state apologize, to Israel no less. And they winced again, when he blamed a Jewish-Zionist conspiracy for his loss.
  • “The moment he lost he came back and started saying some of the most foul anti-Semitic statements against the Jews, confirming what the West had said about him.”
  • Mr. Hosny lost his bid for Unesco, but tried to turn that into a victory at home, returning as a victim, and for the state-run media a hero.
  • When it comes to domestic politics, she said, Egyptian officials often try to present themselves as anti-Israeli, even while serving as a mediator between Israel and the Palestinians.
  • Writing in the English-language Daily News, the chief editor, Rania al-Malky, suggested that Mr. Hosny might have done as well as he did because he was Arab and Muslim, not because he was qualified. His defeat, she wrote, should not surprise anyone.
  • she wrote, “you must admit that the Egyptian administration did not deserve to win this bid. How can a 22-year minister of a country where culture, education, health and science have regressed to the Dark Ages become the head of Unesco?”
Ed Webb

So Why Did I Defend Paul Bowles? | by Hisham Aidi | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...o-why-did-i-defend-paul-bowles

Morocco literature colonialism race racism music heritage culture US USA history Berbers Amazigh authoritarianism religion politics

shared by Ed Webb on 18 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • Long a sanctuary for Spanish and French writers, American writers began visiting Tangier in the late nineteenth century: Mark Twain on his way to Jerusalem in 1867, the painters Louis Comfort Tiffany in 1870 and Henry Ossawa Tanner in 1912, and Edith Wharton in 1917. In 1931, when Bowles first visited, the American artists living in Tangier were primarily black: Claude McKay, Anita Reynolds, Juice Wilson, Josephine Baker. These African-Americans came to Morocco from Paris, where they had formed a community after World War I, and as the Harlem Rennaissance spread to France. Upon arrival, Bowles began to socialize with both McKay and Anita Reynolds. Like the other Americans, he had also discovered North Africa through France. In high school, he had read Marcel Proust, Comte de Lautréamont, and André Gide—the latter’s accounts, in particular, of his travels and sexual trysts in Algeria and Tunisia had conjured North Africa in Bowles’s teenage imagination.
  • in December 1923, France, Spain, and the United Kingdom signed the Tangier Protocol in Paris, setting up a new administration and placing the city at the center of a 150-square mile International Zone overseen by a committee of nine Western powers. The city was henceforth governed by a court that included French, Spanish, and British judges, along with the mendoub, the Moroccan sultan’s representative. It is this international period, from 1923 to 1956, especially postwar, that has shaped the image of Tangier as a free port, a tax haven, and a place of international intrigue and excess.
  • His first novel, The Sheltering Sky, told the story of an American who flees the numbing modernity of New York and meanders through the Algerian desert, only to disintegrate psychologically. Published in the fall of 1949, it became a bestseller and made Bowles a household name. Three more novels and a handful of short stories set in Tangier followed.
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  • Bowles did not create the “myth of Tangier,” but he gave it a literary respectability and an American cast.
  • In the early 1950s, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Bryon Gysin, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and Susan Sontag all gravitated to this “portal to the unknown,” as one author christened Tangier. So did European writers like Genet, Juan Goytisolo, and Joe Orton, but Bowles’s influence was not limited to the literary community. In later decades, his recordings and promotion of Moroccan music would draw producers and recording artists from Patti Smith to the Rolling Stones.
  • Through the 1960s and 1970s, he focused instead on recording and translating from darija (Moroccan Arabic dialect) the oral histories of men he met in Tangier’s cafés. By the time of his death, in 1999, the idea of Tangier as a place for self-discovery had become received wisdom in the West and the Arab world, and Bowles was established as a giant of American letters despite decades of silence.
  • I gave him a copy of my thesis. He looked up from the title page: “‘Orientalism’?—that’s a bad word, isn’t it?” Faux-naïveté, I would learn, was part of his manner. He told me to come back the following day.
  • I was, he said, the first Moroccan researcher—a Tangier native, to boot—to defend him. He added his signature beneath my printed name. (A few weeks ago, I got goosebumps when I found the same copy that I gave him, albeit coffee-stained, in the archives at the University of Delaware’s Paul Bowles Collection.) Later, the thesis was included in a collection titled Writing Tangier (2004). I still see citations occasionally in student dissertations on Bowles noting that one Tanjawi, at least, did not regard him as an Orientalist.
  • Tangier’s collective memory is steeped in nostalgia and centered around the medina, the old city. The medina, the elders told us, was once the epicenter of the Islamic world: it was from the port where the medina meets the sea that Tariq ibn Ziyad had set sail and conquered Spain in 711. After the fall of Granada in 1492, it was to Tangier’s medina that the Jews and Moriscos fled, settling in its alleyways, preserving the mosaic of Islamic Spain
  • The economic misery and political repression of the 1980s and 1990s made it hard to believe that the medina was ever a free space. Most locals had never heard of these famous writers. I only heard of Bowles when, in 1988, a film crew began working in front of our family restaurant at the entrance to the Kasbah as Bernardo Bertolucci began filming The Sheltering Sky. As teenagers, we came to wonder what truths the books from the Interzone contained, and if Tangier had indeed been better-off under Western rule, as the nostalgists, local and foreign, seemed to imply
  • The narrative we learned at school was that the monarchy had liberated the north from colonial oppression. But what liberation did the regime (makhzen) bring? After independence, as a local intelligentsia began forming in Tangier, many came to see the American corpus of writings about 1950s Tangier as an invaluable record of a lost golden age.
  • I made a point of reading the American authors who had written about Tangier’s Interzone. Besides Bowles, I was intrigued by the Beats, especially the Columbia University alums—Kerouac, Ginsberg, Lucien Carr—students of Lionel Trilling and fans of Arthur Rimbaud who had somehow mapped Greenwich Village onto Tangier, turning the Boulevard Pasteur into a “North African Bleecker Street.” But even as a college sophomore, I realized that their writings were more about the straitjacket of McCarthyite America that they were running from, rather than about Morocco as such.
  • It was even gratifying to see that Tangier, like Berlin, had played a significant role in launching a gay literary movement—in some ways ahead of the West, in having its finger on the “prognostic pulse of the world,” as Burroughs called it. But what was startling was that, while these writers basked in the city’s pleasures, they—with the exception of the Bowleses—didn’t really like Tangier. The Beats had a casual disdain for the natives, invariably describing Moroccans as “rakish” or “raffish.” Capote found Tangier too alien, describing the men as “noisy heathens” and the women as “anonymous bundles of laundry.” He warned friends in New York about the “smell of the arabe.” Burroughs referred to the locals as a “bunch of Ay-rabs,” and in 1958 he pronounced: “Tanger [sic] is finished. The Arab dogs are among us.”
  • Paul Bowles traced the history of the medina from the early 1930s to independence. He chronicled how the sultan’s crackdown on Sufi practices (“the great puritanical purging”) in central Morocco inched northward.
  • Bowles’s defense of the Amazigh, or Berber, population was daringly transgressive. Morocco’s culture “is not predominantly Arabic, but Berber,” he insisted—in the face of Arab nationalists who acted as though they believed “Berbers have no culture at all,” as they tried to drag the country into the Arab League. “The general opinion is that the autochthonous population must at all costs be Arabized if it is to share in the benefits of independence,” he observed acidly. “No one seems to have conceived of the possibility of an independent Berber Morocco. In fact, to mention the Berbers at all qualifies one as a pro-French reactionary. At present, to become modern means to become Egyptian.”
  • Reading these words in my dorm room in wintry Pennsylvania in 1992 was both thrilling and frightening. We as Moroccans—especially those of us from the northern Berber region—grew up in a climate of fear, and I had never heard or read anyone publicly criticize Arab nationalism, or speak so openly of the Moroccan hinterland’s animus toward Fez, the city of the interior regarded as the seat of the regime. To hear this American writer openly excoriate the Moroccan ruling elite for its cruelty and skullduggery was exhilarating
  • Bowles prompted me to think beyond the binary of “Western” versus “Arab.”
  • Bowles, in the mid-1960s, had begun translating the memoirs and stories of down-and-out illiterate youth in Tangier. (While he could not read Arabic, Bowles did understand darija, the spoken dialect.) The most prominent of these were Larbi Layachi’s A Life Full of Holes (1966), about a petty thief and male prostitute and his experiences dodging police and servicing tourists (the book was made into a BBC film); Look and Move On (1967), the tales of Mohammed Mrabet, a hustler and golf caddie who worked for an American couple; and the best-known, Mohammed Choukri’s For Bread Alone (1972), an account of his migration from the Rif to Tangier, his life as a street kid in the International Zone, and his becoming a schoolteacher, which he recounted to Bowles in Spanish. These books were marketed in the West as “Moroccan literature,” and for many in the Anglophone world, this was their introduction to it.
  • The Ministry of Culture, which almost blocked his recording project in 1959, published a remarkable essay in 2009 on the tenth anniversary of his death defending Bowles against criticism from Moroccan nationalist intellectuals, underscoring how he presciently warned of the threats that modernization posed to Morocco’s cultural and physical landscape. Government mouthpieces such as Hespress run flattering pieces about “the American who loved Morocco.”
  • in effect erased an earlier literary tradition that had seen Moroccan writers published in French and Spanish since the 1930s, let alone the preceding centuries of poetry and other writing in Arabic
  • Laroui acted as an adviser to the king and was a strong proponent of Arabization. Tangierians saw his attack on Bowles as another attempt by the Arab nationalist elite to subdue the “sin city.” Ben Jelloun also had a complicated relationship to Tangier. The son of a merchant, a Fassi (a person from Fez) who settled in Tangier in the early 1960s, he had attended the French lycée and was seen as part of the new Francophone Fassi upper class—comprising the Alaoui, Alami, Ben Jelloun, Berrada, Omrani, and Tazi families—that had fanned out across the country as the French departed, assuming top government positions. Like Laroui, Ben Jelloun spoke neither of the two common local tongues of the north, Spanish and Tarifit (the Berber language). A paradox of Ben Jelloun’s work, in particular, was that it often featured the very tropes of mysticism, violence, and sexual deviancy he denounced in Bowles’s work. For his part, the American writer dismissed his Moroccan critics as “confirmed Marxists.”
  • The Moroccan reaction against Bowles began to take form in the early 1970s. His earliest critics were the philosopher Abdallah Laroui and Ben Jelloun, who both chided the American writer for promoting an image of the country as a land of primitivism, drugs, and unlimited sex. Laroui also lambasted the Moroccan bourgeoisie for buying into and reproducing Bowles’s “folkloric” portrayal of their country. Ben Jelloun, writing in 1972, accused the American of belittling the nation’s literary patrimony.
  • I myself was part of this trend—defending Bowles against the Arab nationalists who were trying to tear him down and impose their political preferences on us. In his final interviews, when asked if he was an “Orientalist,” Bowles would often cite me, noting that a Tangier-born scholar now in America had judged him not to be.
  • “Paul Bowles loves Morocco, but does not really like Moroccans.” Choukri had some powerful evidence on his side. Over the decades, Bowles had made countless derogatory remarks, speaking of Moroccans as “childlike,” “purely predatory,” and “essentially barbarous.” He claimed also that Muslims aimed for world domination through “the sword and the bomb.”
  • He was sympathetic to the Amazigh, whom he saw as the original inhabitants of North Africa, a fiercely independent people only “partially Islamicized.” This affection nevertheless rested on some unsettling ideas about racial hierarchy. Bowles was profoundly influenced by the “Hamitic hypothesis,” a late nineteenth-century anthropological theory that saw almost everything of value in Africa as imported by the Hamites, a branch of the Caucasian race, who were held as superior to the Negroid peoples. Berbers, whatever their actual skin tone—even the typically dark-skinned Tuareg—were for Bowles essentially a white “Mediterranean race.”
  • In Bowles’s idiosyncratic hierarchy, it was Berber music that encapsulated Morocco’s true African identity—and this cultural essence was threatened by the Arabs and their music. The recently released Music of Morocco collection reflects this bias, giving credence to Choukri’s claim that Bowles deliberately misrepresented local culture to reflect his personal vision of Morocco.
  • I began to realize that Bowles’s fondness for the Berbers and his animus toward Arabs was, in many ways, a reflection of French colonial policy. Although he was well aware of the violence of French imperialism, he enjoyed its amenities—“the old, easygoing, openly colonial life of Morocco”—and as early as the 1950s, Bowles began to lament the loss of “colonial Tangier.” Above all, he believed in the International Zone, seeing its “anarchy” and “freedom from bureaucratic intervention” as an extraordinary political experiment. But these liberties, which is what drew many of the Beats, were the privileges of Europeans and Americans—ones generally not enjoyed by the city’s Muslim and Jewish natives.
  • In 1972, Tahar Ben Jelloun publicly accused Bowles (and the Beats) of exploiting illiterate, vulnerable youths in Tangier not just artistically but sexually. Choukri in 1997 would echo this charge, claiming Bowles suffered from a sexual illness. These allegations became more commonly heard once Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Bowles’s correspondence in 1994, although he expressed some reluctance about its release. The volume included letters in which he described the boys he slept with, in one letter even bragging about how cheap sex was in Algeria. “Where in this country [America] can I have thirty-five or forty people, and never risk seeing any of them again? Yet, in Algeria, it actually was the mean rate.” (In the correspondence, he reminisced about how he “never had sexual relationships without paying,” and viewed paying for sex as a form of “ownership.”)
  • Although the letters simply lent credence to rumors long circulating in Tangier, Choukri and other Tanjawi writers were still shocked by them. The literary reaction in Morocco fed into a larger effort there by human rights activists campaigning against sex tourism and child prostitution. Whereas Bowles had always seemed more judicious and reputable than the Beats—in contrast, say, to Burroughs’s open bragging about buying “pre-pubescent gooks” and Ginsberg’s boasting about “paying young boys” for sex—it became increasingly difficult to defend him. For a man who had called Moroccans “purely predatory,” his own behavior now appeared in rather grotesque relief.
  • The more time I spent at the Schomburg Library uptown, the more I discovered an alternative American literature about Tangier. I stumbled upon Claude McKay’s memoir A Long Way from Home about his time in Tangier in the late 1920s, where he completed his novel Banjo; the actress Anita Reynold’s diary about life in the Interzone in the 1930s; Josephine Baker’s papers, where she talks about filming Princess Tam Tam (1935) in the International Zone, and jazz recordings produced by African-American musicians living in Tangier. Although they had their own dreams about a “Mother Africa,” the African-American writers did not see Tangier as a brothel, or its residents as primitives who needed to be contained or civilized. Most wrote and produced art in solidarity with the disenfranchised local population, connecting the civil rights struggle to North Africa’s anticolonial movements.
  • In 1998, armed with this newfound knowledge, and as a conscious revision of my earlier guiding, I began giving walking tours of “Black Tangier.” We would would meet at Cinema Mauritania, the theater where Josephine Baker had performed many times, up until her last show there in 1970. She had lived in the International Zone, then joined the French Liberation forces during the war, and later had an affair with the vice-caliph of Spanish Morocco. On the first floor of the Mauritania, pianist Randy Weston had once operated African Rhythms, a music spot that drew the likes of Max Roach and Ahmed Jamal. Then we’d walk down to the Fat Black Pussycat café where the poet Ted Joans, one of few black writers in the Beat movement, played trumpet and “blew” jazz poems.
  • Next, we’d hit Galerie Delacroix, where Joans once hosted a four-hour tribute to his mentor Langston Hughes, and had the late poet’s verse read in Arabic, English, French, and Spanish. (In 1927, Hughes had visited Tangier and written a lovely poem about travel and unrequited longing, “I Thought It was Tangiers I Wanted.”) Then we’d walk to the majestic Teatro Cervantes built in 1913, where Weston had organized the first pan-African jazz festival in Morocco in June 1972 (revived in 2002), which brought Dexter Gordon, Odetta, Billy Harper, and Pucho and the Latin Soul Brothers to the city. Our last stop was the Hotel Chellah, where, as local legend had it, the Martinican anticolonial thinker Frantz Fanon stayed overnight on July 3, 1959, following a car crash on the Morocco–Algeria border rumored to be the handiwork of La Main Rouge, the paramilitary group run by French intelligence to assassinate leading supporters of Algerian independence. Fanon was flown to Rome the following day on a Moroccan passport.
  • Paul Bowles and King Hassan II died in 1999, a few months apart. The novelist and the tyrant who had towered over Tangier for generations had more in common than either would have admitted—and that in part explains the reverence Bowles still enjoys in official Morocco
  • both shared a disdain for leftist, Third-Worldist politics. Both hated pan-Arabism, and loved Berber culture as long as it was “folkloric” and apolitical. They each thought Moroccans were congenitally ill-suited for democracy.
  • both Bowles and the monarch celebrated a “primitive,” mystical, unlettered, unfree Morocco, sharing a special appetite for the intoxicating rhythms of the Berbers. No wonder King Hassan II, who expelled numerous critics—from Arab intellectuals to French journalists and American professors—never bothered Bowles.
  • as long as America was seen as a political friend, Bowles was viewed favorably. Not surprisingly, after the Gulf war of 1990 and the release of Bertolucci’s film of The Sheltering Sky that same year, more articles started to appear across the Middle East critiquing Bowles’s representations of Morocco, accusing him of racism and Orientalism
  • The Morocco that Bowles dubbed a “land of magic” is one the Ministry of Tourism sells to the West
  • his emphasis on Morocco’s “African” essence suits the country’s recent geopolitical turn and reentry into the Africa Union
  • for all his misgivings about Western modernity, he thought Morocco as an African country would be better off attaching itself to the West. This is now the position of a significant segment of Morocco’s ruling elite.
  • That the regime celebrates Berber folklore and the oeuvre of a novelist who wanted an “independent Berber republic” even as it imprisons Berber activists across the country is evidence for many of the regime’s fraudulence and bad faith. In this respect, Bowles’s continuing eminence suggests how little has changed in the kingdom since the colonial era, with an authoritarian regime and repressive social order remaining largely intact.
  • As for Bowles’s work, I had come to realize that it reflected poorly on Morocco and America. Yes, he had brought attention to the suppression of Berber history and made invaluable musical recordings, but decolonization was supposed to dismantle colonial representations, and instead, the Moroccan regime was validating and institutionalizing Bowles’s depictions of Morocco
  • today, a new generation of Moroccan writers—among them secularists, Berber activists, music critics, and pan-Africanists—are claiming Bowles as an ally. And that is why I found myself writing about Bowles once more.
Ed Webb

Exploring the influence of Muslim culture on the West | Arts & Culture | Al Jazeera - 0 views

www.aljazeera.com/...ture-west-191012183507580.html

orientalism Europe MENA art Photography culture museum

shared by Ed Webb on 13 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Art from the Middle East is outgrowing its "Orientalist" straitjacket.
  • a major exhibition in London's British Museum called Inspired by the East, that explores the significant - yet often unacknowledged - influence of Eastern culture on the West
  • "People might forget that there has been an exchange between East and West for centuries, much longer than we think and while, of course, some of that has been warfare, a lot of it has been diplomatic relations and artistic exchange. "Looking at this through an artistic medium and showing how there has been this interest in the 'other' from both directions over the years shows that there has been an ongoing dialogue."
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  • Islamic influence in European design endures. "We still see Islamic arches and patterns incorporated into architecture and perhaps we see them so often they seem part of our currency and we have forgotten their sources - whereas in the 19th century they would have seemed far more unusual. "One of the things that is exciting about this exhibition is that it is highlighting that important contribution to art, culture, science and technology made by the Islamic world."
  • Orientalist scenes often evoked a tranquil, settled way of life that contrasted to the disruptive industrialisation in Europe and America.
  • The Islamic faith and figures at prayer became a marker of difference, and the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca was a recurrent theme - as was the harem, with which male European artists took considerable erotic licence.
  • Orientalism was a two-way process - and during the 19th and early 20th centuries Eastern artists began to embrace it in their own distinctive way.
  • "For many years, until very recently, in art historical circles the photography of the Middle East played a very minor role. There was absolutely no knowledge of this body of information. "Soon after the invention of the daguerreotype it was the French who went to Egypt to take photographs of Egyptian antiquity, and very soon there was a massive archive of photography of the region."
  • "It inevitably takes time for these academic ideas to filter into a wider 'popular' level of discourse, but I think it is happening and that exhibitions, like this one, are an important part of bringing these debates to wider and more varied audiences."
Ed Webb

The obliteration of Gaza's multi-civilizational treasures - 0 views

www.972mag.com/multi-civilizational-treasures

Gaza Palestine Israel israelpalestine war heritage archaeology identity warcrimes

shared by Ed Webb on 29 Mar 24 - Cached
  • Cultural heritage is an essential component of a nation’s identity and carries enormous symbolic meaning, as recognized and protected by countless international conventions, treaties, and bodies. Yet Israel’s pounding of Gaza, now in its fifth month, displays a callous disregard for these testaments to the thousands of years of Gaza’s rich cultural history — to such an extent that it could amount to cultural genocide.
  • while the loss of human life is the greatest tragedy in any war, Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s physical cultural heritage achieves much the same goal: the erasure of the Palestinian people. Indeed, many of those interviewed for this article believe this is precisely why these sites are being targeted
  • “It’s challenging for experts to keep track while being in a state of displacement themselves, being targeted, and continually moving from one place to another,” Taha explained. “We have lost more than 10 antiquities experts, including four archaeologists.”
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  • The Geneva-based Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has accused Israel of “clear intentional targeting of all historical structures in the Gaza Strip.” Gaza’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities stated similarly in a press release in late December: “The occupation is deliberately committing a massacre against historical and archaeological sites in Gaza City’s old town, assassinating history and the traces of civilizations that have passed through the Gaza Strip for thousands of years.”  Such destruction, whether targeted or not, is a violation of the 1954 Hague Convention, which seeks to protect cultural heritage during both peace and war
  • the ongoing destruction in Gaza is of a piece with Israel’s longstanding practices of erasure and appropriation. Eyad Salim, a historian and archaeological researcher from Jerusalem, listed several heritage sites that have been destroyed by Israeli forces since the Nakba of 1948.  “In the Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948, mosques, Islamic shrines, and heritage sites were either closed, destroyed, or converted into synagogues,” he said. “This is a long and extensive issue.”
  • “To implement its plan to build the ‘Jewish state,’ Israel faces identity, geographic, and demographic challenges,” he continued. “So it attributes [Palestinian] cities, villages, urban landmarks, fashion, food, handicrafts, and traditional industries to itself, promoting them in international fora and using them as part of its Judaizing project.” 
Ed Webb

Hamas Shifts From Rockets to Culture War - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...24gaza.html

gaza hamas israeliarab publicdiplomacy

shared by Ed Webb on 16 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Hamas has suspended its use of rockets and shifted focus to winning support at home and abroad through cultural initiatives and public relations.
  • The aim is to build what leaders here call a “culture of resistance,” the topic of a recent two-day conference. In recent days, a play has been staged, a movie premiered, an art exhibit mounted, a book of poems published and a television series begun, most of it state-sponsored and all focused on the plight of Palestinians in Gaza. There are plans for a documentary competition.
  • “We are not terrorists but resistance fighters, and we want to explain our reality to the outside world,” Osama Alisawi, the minister of culture, said during a break from the two-day conference.
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  • Because Israeli officials also believe that they must improve public relations and message management, the new focus on culture here sets up an intriguing battle for world opinion. Both sides argue that journalists show too much sympathy for the other.
  • After the show one recent evening, its writer, director and star, Said al-Bettar, said he wrote the scene that way to make the point that, “We were the victims of a big lie.” He added, “The people paid a heavy price and society is looking for someone to express its views clearly.” Mr. Bettar, who is not a follower of Hamas and is popular here, said the government had not interfered with his work or criticized it. Besides mocking the rockets, he has done something else rather subversive — his entire cast (apart from himself) is female, and women sing on stage, something that is frowned upon by religious Muslims.
Ed Webb

Mona Eltahawy - Egypt's Farouk Hosni: A Book Burner for UNESCO? - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2009091302248_pf.html

Egypt UNESCO censorship authoritarianism

shared by Ed Webb on 14 Sep 09 - Cached
  • What does a security crackdown resembling Saudi-style morality policing have to do with the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization? A lot, given that a serious contender for that UNESCO job is Farouk Hosni, Egypt's culture minister for the past 22 years. During his lengthy tenure, Hosni has alienated many Egyptians by suffocating cultural and intellectual freedom while giving a leg up to religious zealotry.
  • Hosni's supporters say that it's time for an Arab U.N. cultural chief. It may be. But with his record, Farouk Hosni doesn't deserve to head UNESCO. Those of us proud of our Arab heritage, full of artists who challenge and enlighten rather than restrict in efforts to "protect" our morals, know that Farouk Hosni is not the man to represent us.
Ed Webb

Qantara.de - "The Dialogue between the Cultures Is My Life's Work" - 0 views

www.qantara.de/...i.html

Islam Judaism Morocco dialog dialogue mediterranean euromed

shared by Ed Webb on 19 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • It never occurred to me that we would once again find ourselves discussing theories that consider a clash of civilisations and a conflict of the religions as a given. For example, my own culture as an Arab Moroccan of the Jewish faith is not a culture of confrontation or of rejection of others. On the contrary, I consider it a culture of openness and intellectual encounter.
  • The tragedy in Palestine is real, but not because it is a conflict between Islam and Judaism. It is much more true to say that political problems are at the root of this conflict, and political solutions should be used to resolve it. Those who use the rhetoric of conflict and the clash of civilisations and religions to distract us from the real causes are ultimately the ones who bear responsibility for the current situation.
  • one must not forget that it is not much more than 60 years since the world suffered under the barbarity of National Socialism. At that time, Morocco was the only country among its neighbours to send out a message of respect, human dignity and solidarity.I have not forgotten history; it is still very alive in me. When Muslims and Jews suffered under the Spanish inquisition 500 years ago, they stood side by side, resisting these atrocities. This shows that Judaism and Islam are indeed capable of fruitful cooperation.
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  • I would like to point out that I was elected president of the Anna Lindh Foundation as the candidate of the Arab League. It was the first time in the history of the Arab League that an Arab Jew was selected to represent the league in an international institution.
Michael Fisher

Tuning Out the Taliban - Video Library - The New York Times - 0 views

video.nytimes.com/...tuning-out-the-taliban.html

popular culture world music Pakistan Taliban video

shared by Michael Fisher on 12 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Michael Fisher on 12 Nov 09
     
    A Pakastani contends that the Taliban does not have a huge impact on Pakistan, rather the U.S. is guilty of having the biggest effect to its current situation. A response to this would make a great blog post, as it explores many underlying issues (politics, pop-culture, identity, etc...).
  • Michael Fisher on 12 Nov 09
     
    A Pakastani contends that the Taliban does not have a huge impact on Pakistan, rather the U.S. is guilty of having the biggest effect to its current situation. A response to this would make a great blog post, as it explores many underlying issues (politics, pop-culture, identity, etc...).
Ed Webb

Rouhani wins over Qom, for now - Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East - 0 views

www.al-monitor.com/...ear-talks-cultural-policy.html

Iran religion politics nukes diplomacy

shared by Ed Webb on 17 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • In the president's second trip to Qom, he sought the clergy’s support for the nuclear negotiations and his economic policies. The trip was noteworthy because Rouhani had to change his plans to visit Khorasan Shomali province. The people of Qom — the majority of whom voted for Rouhani in the presidential election — took to the streets and welcomed Rouhani upon his arrival. Rouhani appeared on stage and succeeded in drawing people’s support. During a public speech, he described himself and his administration as the “children of seminary” and ensured residents and senior clerics that he wouldn’t do anything in opposition to Islam and the interests of Iran. Rouhani then met with grand ayatollahs and senior clerics during meetings scheduled by his Chief of Staff Mohammad Nahavandian and his cultural adviser Hessameddin Ashena. Rouhani’s opponents and hard-liners didn’t stand idly by during his visit. They tried to tarnish the president’s image by spreading rumors that he had given money to workers to attend his welcoming ceremony. They also distributed night letters — or covert leaflets — against him.
  • Rouhani had successful meetings with grand ayatollahs, all of whom supported his policies and approved of his performance in the nuclear talks. Seemingly, they were also pleased with the Rouhani administration's cultural policies, given that we have not heard any condemnations of the Ministry of Culture from senior clerics since Rouhani's return to Tehran. Grand Ayatollah Vahid Khorasani’s compliments of Rouhani were the highlight of the trip. Khorasani, who rarely talks politics and is highly influential in Qom, told Rouhani, “You're one of the best presidents and are faced with overwhelming problems.”
  • Nouri Hamedani said, “The Iranian nuclear negotiators are pious, revolutionary and hardworking.” Likewise, Makarem Shirazi expressed his hope for reaching a conclusion in the nuclear talks
Ed Webb

Cultural Clash Fuels Muslims Raging at Film - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-fueled-by-culture-divide.html

Arabs Muslims culture politics US USA diplomacy gwot Egypt Tunisia Libya Yemen

shared by Ed Webb on 17 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • Ed Webb on 17 Sep 12
     
    For discussion on 9/17
Ed Webb

Is Turkey Renaming Istanbul Constantinople? | Foreign Policy - 1 views

www.foreignpolicy.com/...naming_istanbul_constantinople

Turkey Kurds politics names language identity nationalism

shared by Ed Webb on 03 Oct 09 - No Cached
  • The Turkish government wants to end the PKK's terrorist campaign without splitting off a Kurdish state -- and sees extending cultural rights and linguistic freedoms as the way to do it. But what will it take to reconcile the Turks and the Kurds?
  • Turkish journalists expect the government to allow public servants and politicians to speak Kurdish, end restrictions on Kurdish media, give some form of amnesty to all but the highest ranking PKK members, and possibly even revise the Constitution to allow Kurds to be full Turkish citizens without giving up their Kurdish identity. (Those Kurds who are proud to call themselves Turks have always been accepted and often risen high in the ranks of politics and pop culture) 
  • Realizing at last that the fight will never be won through purely military means, Turkey's leading general now supports greater cultural freedom for Kurds and wants to make it easier for PKK members to surrender. The National Security Council, traditionally a vehicle for the military to "advise" the government on political issues, also gave its blessing to the initiative.
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  • As the chief of staff of the president of Iraqi Kurdistan told the International Crisis Group, "If the Shiites choose Iran, and the Sunnis choose the Arab world, then the Kurds will have to ally themselves with Turkey."
  • anonymous on 04 Oct 09
     
    This would make Harold Pinter happy...
Ed Webb

Liberal Peace is dead? Not so fast | openDemocracy - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...eral-peace-is-dead-not-so-fast

Afghanistan DP democracy liberal liberal peace peace Islam nationbuilding

shared by Ed Webb on 27 Nov 09 - Cached
  • But the main problem with the functional search for hybridity and exoticizing `indigenous' and `traditional' practices is that it relies on  essentializing the Afghan culture.  The international community swings from one extreme of trying to redo every institution to uncritically embracing all that is  ‘traditional’.
  • The abandonment of liberal peace seems to be an exit strategy for the international community. But this is making a grand exit while blaming Afghans as a convenience: the government for corruption, Afghan culture for being fundamentally illiberal, or Afghans’ vision of order and loyalty, for being fragmented. By implication, the modern state which expects to command the full loyalty of its own citizens, becomes too distant from what the Afghans deserve, and culture is essentialised as anti-modern and static.  This is to place blame in the wrong place and to ignore any kind of internal dialogue and dynamic that is taking place in Afghanistan.
  • Most respondents in our Sciences Po research argued that genuine Islam, where rights and freedoms were limited automatically through   akhlag (morality) and iman (faith), was far superior both to the liberal peace model, based on individualism, and to the notion of a traditional peace, based on hierarchy and authority.  Yet, it seems that understanding religion as a source for principles of social organization is a step too far for the secularized, rational west which automatically associates the adjective “Islamic” with extremism and fundamentalism.  This is sadly a missed opportunity.
Ed Webb

Egypt to pay for restoration of all synagogues - Yahoo! News - 0 views

news.yahoo.com/...lfbGlzdARzbGsDZWd5cHR0b3BheWZv

Egypt history heritage monument synagogues politics culture

shared by Ed Webb on 10 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Egypt will shoulder the costs of restoring the country's Jewish houses of worship said the culture minister Tuesday, two days after a historic synagogue in Cairo's ancient Jewish quarter was rededicated in a private ceremony. Farouk Hosny said in a statement that his ministry views Jewish sites as much a part of Egypt's culture as Muslim mosques or Coptic churches and the restorations would not require any foreign funding.
Ed Webb

Saudi Arabia's long history of destructive intervention in Yemen | Middle East Eye - 3 views

www.middleeasteye.net/...-intervention-yemen-1549856872

KSA Saudi Yemen analysis sectarianism military

shared by Ed Webb on 30 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • With its mosaic of religious communities countering the Wahhabi call, cultural, tribal and historical ties to Saudi realms on its border, deep historical memory of civilizational achievement, and strategic location, Yemen was perceived as both threat and target. Keeping it split among political entities was a policy priority.
  • Subsidies to northern tribes were often another feature of the relationship
  • During Ali Abdullah Saleh’s years in charge in Sanaa Saudi cultural influence developed through Salafi proselytization. While it would be incorrect to reduce Salafism in Yemen to a Saudi implant, the Saudi connection is crucial to the spread of radical Sunni ideology and practice
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  • Saudi Arabia funds the government as well as tribal leaders to secure support for Saudi policies and prevent the emergence of a non-tribal, non-sectarian democratic culture. Yet although Saleh worked hard at building a close relationship with Riyadh, he and other Yemenis were still treated with disdain by the Saudi princes, often denied meetings with the recently deceased Abdullah for receptions with his crown prince Sultan, who handled the “Yemen file”.
Ed Webb

Let Them Eat Heritage - 0 views

hyperallergic.com/...let-them-eat-heritage

architecture cities urbanspace post-conflict heritage aid assistance memory politics opinion Iraq Syria

shared by Ed Webb on 07 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • The UN has estimated that, in Mosul’s old city alone, nearly 6,000 houses were damaged or destroyed in the battle to retake the city. NPR reported in August — a year after Mosul had been retaken from ISIS — that the Iraqi government claimed it had no money for reconstruction, and that it was relying on private donations, of which it had received enough to rebuild 250 houses. In other words, some 95% of the residents of Mosul’s old city are on their own in rebuilding their homes and their lives. Basic infrastructure is badly lacking. Perhaps 40% of the old city still has no water, and electricity is unreliable. And the social structure of the entire city has changed so drastically that it is essentially unrecognizable to its own residents.
  • the focus of much media attention and international aid seems to be the important but often symbolic cultural heritage of the city. The UAE has pledged more than $50 million for a five-year reconstruction project for the mosque. The situation is especially puzzling given that the mosque and its minaret seem of greater importance to international media than to Moslawis themselves.
  • This scene of disturbing priorities in reconstruction and in media attention has replayed itself over and over again in Iraq and Syria over the last few years
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  • At their best, these heritage reconstruction efforts offer not just symbolic progress but jobs to local residents. The UAE projects that the reconstruction of the al-Nuri mosque will employ 1,000 Iraqi graduates. The World Monuments Fund is training Syrian refugees in Jordan to assist in heritage reconstruction efforts when they return home. But even then, these projects suggest a skewed set of priorities.
  • Who is this reconstruction for, and for what purpose?
  • Reconstruction efforts in Iraq and Syria have been a top-down process, as several architectural experts have warned. Their agendas are set not by the needs of communities so much as the interests of national governments. And it is in the interests of those governments — not only the Iraqi and Syrian governments themselves, but also Russia, the UAE, and others — to promote the restoration of cultural heritage. Heritage tourism is very lucrative. Heritage also allows governments to burnish their image and questionable legitimacy, to consolidate their power after civil wars, and to project a false sense of normalcy. And funding heritage allows other countries to pose as the saviors of civilization. There is much less symbolic value, or money, in practical things.
  • Culture is important, but it’s hard to enjoy it when you can’t find food to eat or a place to sleep … or a city to return home to.
  • “Rebuilding is easy. People can rebuild their city and go back to their lives. They just need some money.” Iraqis and Syrians know what they want to rebuild (notably, ruins like Palmyra do not top the list). Local architects are full of ideas of what they want their cities and towns and villages to look like in the future. We only need to start listening.
Ed Webb

Mapping the Journeys of Syria's Artists | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...the-journeys-of-syrias-artists

Syria art artists film media Germany France Lebanon refugees

shared by Ed Webb on 24 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Last year, wondering what it means to be a Syrian artist when Syria in many ways no longer exists, I began to map the journeys of a hundred artists from the country. As I discovered, a large portion of the older guard of artists has ended up in Paris, thanks to visas issued by the French Embassy in Beirut. Many of the younger generation headed for the creative haven of Berlin, where rent is relatively cheap. Only a scant few remained in the Middle East, which proved expensive or unwelcoming.
  • A few artists remain loyal to the Assad regime, which has long seen itself as a great patron of the arts. Some of the artists who were still in Syria asked not to be mapped, even anonymously, for fear that the regime would perceive them as disloyal and punish their families. A few took issue with the label “Syrian artist” altogether. “I don’t want to become part of the Syrian-refugee industry,” Sulafa Hijazi, a visual artist now living in Berlin, told me
  • the Syria Cultural Index, “an alternative map connecting the Syrian artistic community around the globe and showcasing their work to the world.”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • in Germany she found herself crippled with shame at leaving her family behind. She couldn’t sit in the grass without feeling such crushing grief that she had to go inside. Eventually, she went into denial. “You try to pretend that you don’t miss the country and you’re totally O.K. with the idea of not going back,” she said. In some ways, it has worked, but she has also found that leaving Syria has cost her some of her power as an artist. “I feel like I signed an unwritten contract where I gave up part of my skill in exchange for safety,”
  • With the war now entering its eighth year, Barakeh is unable to return to Syria. He has chosen to settle among his fellow-artists in Berlin, and is practicing what he calls “artivism.” Among the projects he is working on is the first Syrian Biennale, a mobile exhibition, currently in pre-production, that will follow the route of Syrian refugees from Lebanon to central Europe and Scandinavia
  • For Zeid, Lebanon was a terrifying experience. The child of Palestinian refugees, she had no passport. Her fear of being sent back to Syria manifested in intense anxiety. While Salman trekked to and from Aleppo to take pictures, Zeid began to have panic attacks. When she learned that Lebanese security forces were tracking her, she knew that she had to get out of the country or risk being deported. A friend told her that the French Consulate in Beirut was allowing artists to enter France as political refugees. She managed to secure safe passage for herself and Salman, and in April, 2014, they left for Paris
  • Living in Berlin among the younger generation of artists, Beik is now concerned with a different kind of revolution. The opening credits of “The Sun’s Incubator” read, “The future of cinematography belongs to a new race of young solitaries who will shoot films by putting their last pennies into it and not let themselves be taken in by the material routines of the trade.”
  • Kaprealian, whose family survived the 1915 Armenian genocide by fleeing to Syria, left the country in 2014, soon after finishing “Houses Without Doors.” He saw no reason to stay; as an artist, he said, he was out of ways to work. He crossed the Lebanese border and now lives in Beirut. “All of my friends are in Europe, in America, or Canada,” he said. “Some of them went on boats. Some of them walked for ten days through Ukraine and other countries.” He added, “All of us are angry.”
Ed Webb

Israel's Religiously Divided Society | Pew Research Center - 0 views

www.pewforum.org/...ls-religiously-divided-society

Israel israelpalestine religion Judaism Jews Muslims Christians Druze poll

shared by Ed Webb on 21 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • a major new survey by Pew Research Center also finds deep divisions in Israeli society – not only between Israeli Jews and the country’s Arab minority, but also among the religious subgroups that make up Israeli Jewry.
  • Nearly all Israeli Jews identify with one of four categories: Haredi (commonly translated as “ultra-Orthodox”), Dati (“religious”), Masorti (“traditional”) or Hiloni (“secular”)
  • secular Jews in Israel are more uncomfortable with the notion that a child of theirs might someday marry an ultra-Orthodox Jew than they are with the prospect of their child marrying a Christian
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • The vast majority of secular Jews say democratic principles should take precedence over religious law, while a similarly large share of ultra-Orthodox Jews say religious law should take priority.
  • When asked, “What is your present religion, if any?” virtually all Israeli Jews say they are Jewish – and almost none say they have no religion – even though roughly half describe themselves as secular and one-in-five do not believe in God.
  • Sephardim/Mizrahim are generally more religiously observant than Ashkenazim, and men are somewhat more likely than women to say halakha should take precedence over democratic principles. But in many respects, these demographic differences are dwarfed by the major gulfs seen among the four religious subgroups that make up Israeli Jewry.
  • Most non-Jewish residents of Israel are ethnically Arab and identify, religiously, as Muslims, Christians or Druze
  • Israeli Arabs generally do not think Israel can be a Jewish state and a democracy at the same time. This view is expressed by majorities of Muslims, Christians and Druze. And overwhelmingly, all three of these groups say that if there is a conflict between Jewish law and democracy, democracy should take precedence
  • Fully 58% of Muslims favor enshrining sharia as official law for Muslims in Israel, and 55% of Christians favor making the Bible the law of the land for Christians
  • Roughly eight-in-ten Israeli Arabs (79%) say there is a lot of discrimination in Israeli society against Muslims, who are by far the biggest of the religious minorities. On this issue, Jews take the opposite view; the vast majority (74%) say they do not see much discrimination against Muslims in Israel
  • Nearly half of Israeli Jews say Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel, including roughly one-in-five Jewish adults who strongly agree with this position
  • Israeli Arabs are highly skeptical about the sincerity of the Israeli government in seeking a peace agreement, while Israeli Jews are equally skeptical about the sincerity of Palestinian leaders. But there is plenty of distrust to go around: Fully 40% of Israeli Jews say their own government is not making a sincere effort toward peace, and an equal share of Israeli Arabs say the same about Palestinian leaders.
  • The vast majority of Jews (98%), Muslims (85%), Christians (86%) and Druze (83%) say all or most of their close friends belong to their own religious community
  • Israeli Jews overall are more religiously observant than U.S. Jews. Politically, American Jews are more optimistic about the possibility of a peaceful two-state solution and more negative about Jewish settlements in the West Bank than are Israeli Jews
  • Israel is no longer a predominantly immigrant society; at present, roughly three-quarters of Israeli adults are natives, and just one-quarter were born abroad. Yet with virtual unanimity, Israeli Jews of every kind – native-born and immigrant, young and old, secular and highly religious – agree that all Jews everywhere should have the right to make “aliyah,” or move to Israel and receive immediate citizenship.2 This overwhelming support for Jewish immigration may be linked, in part, to perceptions about anti-Semitism. Fully three-quarters of Israeli Jews (76%) think that anti-Semitism is both common and increasing around the world, and roughly nine-in-ten (91%) say that a Jewish state is necessary for the long-term survival of the Jewish people.
  • A solid majority of Haredim (62%) favor gender segregation on public transportation, such as buses and trains, used by members of the Haredi community. Among Hilonim, meanwhile, just 5% favor this policy. The vast majority of Hilonim (93%) are opposed to enforcing gender segregation on any public transport, even when it is used by Haredim
  • The survey asked Jews whether they strongly agree, agree, disagree or strongly disagree with the statement that “Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel.” Roughly half of Israeli Jews strongly agree (21%) or agree (27%), while a similar share disagree (29%) or strongly disagree (17%).3 Datiim are especially likely to favor the expulsion of Arabs. Roughly seven-in-ten (71%) say Arabs should be transferred. Hilonim lean in the other direction: Most (58%) disagree and say Arabs should not be expelled from Israel, including 25% who strongly disagree. But even among these self-described secular Israeli Jews, about one-third (36%) favor the expulsion of Arabs from the country
  • Seven-in-ten Haredim (70%) and roughly half of Datiim (52%) say being Jewish is mainly a matter of religion, while 3% of Haredim and 16% of Datiim say being Jewish is mainly a matter of ancestry and/or culture. Among Hilonim, by contrast, only 4% see being Jewish as primarily a matter of religion, while 83% say Jewish identity is mainly a matter of ancestry and/or culture. However, at least some members of all of these groups see their Jewish identity as bound up with both religion and ancestry/culture.
  • Arabs in Israel – especially Muslims – are more religiously observant than Jews as a whole. Fully two-thirds of Israeli Arabs say religion is very important in their lives, compared with just 30% of Jews. Israeli Muslims (68%), Christians (57%) and Druze (49%) all are more likely than Jews to say religion is very important to them, personally. In addition, more Arabs than Jews report that they pray daily and participate in weekly worship services.
  • Religious intermarriages cannot be performed in Israel (although civil marriages that take place in other countries are legally recognized in Israel).7 This is reflected in the rarity of marriages between members of different religious communities in the country. Nearly all Israelis in the survey who are married or living with a partner say their spouse or partner shares their religion. Relatively few married Muslim, Christian and Druze residents (1%) say their spouse has a different religion, and only 2% of married Jews say they have a spouse who belongs to a non-Jewish religion or is religiously unaffiliated.
  • About one-in-six Muslims say they have been questioned by security officials (17%), prevented from traveling (15%) or physically threatened or attacked (15%) because of their religion in the past 12 months, while 13% say they have suffered property damage. All told, 37% of Muslims say they have suffered at least one of these forms of discrimination because of their religious identity in the past year
  • While Muslims living in Israel, overall, are more religious than Israeli Jews, they are less religious than Muslims living in many other countries in the region. For example, about two-thirds of Muslims in Israel (68%) say religion is very important in their lives – higher than the comparable share of Lebanese Muslims (59%), but lower than the share of Muslims in Jordan (85%), the Palestinian territories (85%) and Iraq (82%) who say this.
Ed Webb

Italy Caused Chaos in Libya by Mismanaging Migration Policy - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...entiloni-mogherini-chaos-libya

Africa Europe Italy Libya migration sahel policy EU

shared by Ed Webb on 30 May 21 - No Cached
  • Over three days in May 2017, the Italian secret service—masquerading as a humanitarian nongovernmental organization—summoned to Rome two dozen delegates from the southern edge of the Sahara desert. The pretext was to promote a peace deal for their war-torn region; the real goal was to bring them on board with an Italian plan to curb migration.
  • the pitfalls of a foreign policy that conflates peace and development with migration control
  • The Tuareg, the Tebu, and the Awlad Suleiman—the groups represented at the summit—are the gatekeepers of the desert crossed by those hoping to reach the Libyan coast to embark on a sea journey to Europe.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • Migration, however, was never much of a concern for the inhabitants of the Sahara. For the most part, they move freely across borders, and their economies depend heavily on the transit of people and goods.
  • What was meant to be “A dialogue on peace, development, security and human rights in the trans-border regions of Libya, Chad, and Niger,” according to the government’s agenda, became a failed attempt to co-opt some of the poorest people on the planet in a fight against migration from which they had little to gain.
  • The interior ministers of the three countries attended the gathering, as well as one vice president of the GNA—hardly a typical NGO summit. The summit was ostensibly organized by the Ara Pacis Initiative, a group that claims to be an “international not for profit organization based in Rome, dedicated to the human dimension of peace.” Its peculiar inspiration, according to its website, is the altar of peace built in Rome by emperor Augustus. The founder and sole active member of Ara Pacis is Maria Nicoletta Gaida, an Italian American former actress with little background in the humanitarian sector
  • The mysterious man with the ponytail started off with an offer meant to capture the goodwill of his audience: “We will ask for Italy’s commitment to immediately establish cultural identity centers for the trans-border tribes,” he said. Italy would staff these centers with teachers “that will keep alive the history and the culture of these great people.” He also promised health clinics connected via webcam to Italian hospitals. “These are small things,” he said, “for the seed from which the plant grows is always small.”
  • “After peace,” he said, “comes security and development.” The delegates should “deal with the issue of immigration and terrorism through border control mechanisms based on the optimization of reception centers that already exist in your countries.”
  • “My minister is ready to support any of your requests,” he said at one point. In return, he asked for the tribes’ backing in curbing migration: That would “give him the strength to go to Europe and defeat our enemies,” he said, without clarifying who those enemies might be.
  • At roughly the same time as the meeting near Rome, the Italian intelligence services reportedly brokered a multimillion-euro payment to Libyan militias involved in trafficking to enlist them as a coast guard force, a claim that Italy denies.
  • The International Organization for Migration manages one key pillar of the EU’s migration policy in Libya, namely the so-called voluntary repatriation of stranded migrants.
  • these agencies have repeatedly proved useless when it comes to defending the human rights of migrants in Libya. Indeed, the Associated Press revealed last month that the EU’s humanitarian spending has often been diverted to militias and traffickers—sometimes with the knowledge of U.N. officials.
  • Sergio De Caprio, known by the public as Capitano Ultimo, became a legend in Italy after arresting the godfather of the Sicilian mafia Totò Riina in 1993. His exploits inspired novels and a TV series. In 2016 and 2017, he was transferred to the secret service. While his anti-mafia record is legendary, his foreign-policy credentials are unknown. His appointment affirmed the Italian government’s belief that migration is essentially a criminal problem, and that smuggling rings can be fought in the same way as mafia organizations.
  • “The social components of southern Libya are many more than just Awlad Suleiman, Tebu, and Tuaregs,” he argued. Moreover, he said, “their representatives know their identity and history well and are perfectly able to preserve their traditions.”
  • “Rather than cultural centers,” he said, “let’s open factories, so that the youth can have a hope, an alternative to joining criminal gangs.”
  • Although the south of the Sahara is rich in oil, gold, and uranium, local populations suffer abject poverty. The Saharan delegates laid out their priorities: Negotiating peace was their main aim—and supposedly the reason they had flown all the way to Rome. They saw Italy as having a European mandate to mediate peace in Libya by virtue of its old colonial ties. But still the war raged on
  • if a border force was what Europe really wanted, the tribes could welcome military equipment. The United Arab Emirates, the Tuareg leader reminded De Caprio, had lent their helicopters and pilots for border patrol after just one meeting, and this was already their fifth visit to Italy.
  • There is no accountability for Europe’s multibillion-euro spending spree on projects to curb migration. In vast regions such as southern Libya that are inaccessible to diplomatic missions, let alone humanitarian agencies, officials are able to pocket the money for themselves. Migration spending thus ends up fostering corruption, rather than development.
  • when the Libyans sought ambitious development projects they were offered handicraft workshops instead
  • Humanitarian catastrophe looms over the wider Sahara region as Islamist insurgencies in the bordering Sahel region displace 4.2 million people. The Libyan war has escalated into an international conflict
  • The parties in the Libyan conflict store weapons “in close proximity” to migrant detention centers, according to the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, so these become a target of the bombing
  • Italy and Europe’s credibility has been severely undermined by their single-minded pursuit of migration control when dealing with Libya and other African countries
  • At least 36,000 people have been returned to Libya as they attempted to leave the country since 2017 by a Libyan coast guard that Europe funded and equipped. Unsurprisingly, given the way they were recruited, coast guard officers have been found to be involved in such crimes as detaining and extorting ransoms from migrants, whipping shipwreck survivors, shooting migrants, sinking their dinghies, and ignoring distress calls
  • For several years the Community of Sant’Egidio, a Catholic organization of which Giro is a prominent member, had been mediating peace among the Saharan peoples. The association is involved in several conflict resolution initiatives around the world and has been credited with ending a bloody civil war in Mozambique in 1992.
  • Europe’s “migration obsession … a sickness that has infected all 28 EU countries
  • Mogherini’s tenure as EU foreign-policy chief will be remembered for its unprecedented callousness toward the plight of migrants and refugees; she now co-chairs a newly formed U.N. High-Level Panel on Internal Displacement
  • “Do you realize what it would mean if Libya fell into Turkish and Russian hands, at the expense of Europe? We would lose everything.” What would we lose? I asked him. “Everything! Control over migration, political control, economic control, the oil. … Eventually, we would lose it all.”
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