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Ed Webb

The Uncounted - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...asualties-iraq-airstrikes.html

shared by Ed Webb on 19 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Our own reporting, conducted over 18 months, shows that the air war has been significantly less precise than the coalition claims. Between April 2016 and June 2017, we visited the sites of nearly 150 airstrikes across northern Iraq, not long after ISIS was evicted from them. We toured the wreckage; we interviewed hundreds of witnesses, survivors, family members, intelligence informants and local officials; we photographed bomb fragments, scoured local news sources, identified ISIS targets in the vicinity and mapped the destruction through satellite imagery. We also visited the American air base in Qatar where the coalition directs the air campaign. There, we were given access to the main operations floor and interviewed senior commanders, intelligence officials, legal advisers and civilian-casualty assessment experts. We provided their analysts with the coordinates and date ranges of every airstrike — 103 in all — in three ISIS-controlled areas and examined their responses. The result is the first systematic, ground-based sample of airstrikes in Iraq since this latest military action began in 2014.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 19 Nov 17
       
      This is what excellent (and expensive) investigative reporting looks like. Essential in democracies that this kind of work be done to hold governments to account.
  • one in five of the coalition strikes we identified resulted in civilian death, a rate more than 31 times that acknowledged by the coalition
  • a consistent failure by the coalition to investigate claims properly or to keep records that make it possible to investigate the claims at all
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  • the result simply of flawed or outdated intelligence that conflated civilians with combatants
  • “In the middle of the night,” he wrote, “coalition airplanes targeted two houses occupied by innocent civilians. Is this technology? This barbarian attack cost me the lives of my wife, daughter, brother and nephew.”
  • two direct hits. “O.K., this is my house, and this is Mohannad’s house,” he recalled. “One rocket here, and one rocket there. It was not a mistake.”
  • in 2003, the United States invaded. One night just a few months afterward, the Americans showed up at the Woods and took over a huge abandoned military barracks across the street from Basim’s property. The next morning, they started cutting down trees. “They said, ‘This is for our security,’ ” Basim recalled. “I said, ‘Your security doesn’t mean destruction of the forest.’ ” Walls of concrete and concertina wire started to appear amid the pine and chinar stands.
  • When the Americans withdrew in 2011, Basim felt as if almost everyone he knew harbored grievances toward the occupation.
  • “Radical Islamists grew as a result of this war, and many ideas grew out of this war which we have never seen or heard before,”
  • During the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, war planners began to focus more seriously on condolence payments, seeing them as a way to improve relations with locals and forestall revenge attacks. Soon, American forces were disbursing thousands of dollars yearly to civilians who suffered losses because of combat operations, for everything from property damage to the death of a family member.
  • In 2003, an activist from Northern California named Marla Ruzicka showed up in Baghdad determined to overhaul the system. She founded Civic, now known as the Center for Civilians in Conflict, and collected evidence of civilians killed in American military operations. She discovered not only that there were many more than expected but also that the assistance efforts for survivors were remarkably haphazard and arbitrary. Civic championed the cause in Washington and found an ally in Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont. In 2005, Ruzicka was killed by a suicide blast in Baghdad, but her efforts culminated in legislation that established a fund to provide Iraqi victims of American combat operations with nonmonetary assistance — medical care, home reconstruction — that served, in practice, as compensation.
  • not a single person in Iraq or Syria has received a condolence payment for a civilian death since the war began in 2014. “There really isn’t a process,” a senior Central Command official told us. “It’s not that anyone is against it; it just hasn’t been done, so it’s almost an aspirational requirement.”
  • While assisting civilian victims is no longer a military priority, some authorities appear to remain concerned about retaliation. About a year after the strike on Basim’s house, his cousin Hussain Al-Rizzo, a systems-engineering professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, received a visit from an F.B.I. agent. The agent, he said, asked if the deaths of his relatives in an American airstrike made him in his “heart of hearts sympathize with the bad guys.” Hussain, who has lived in the United States since 1987, was stunned by the question. He said no.
  • Because there was no established mechanism for Iraqi victims to meet American officials, his appointment was at the American Citizen Services section. He pressed against the window and showed the consular officer his dossier. One page contained satellite imagery of the Razzo houses, and others contained before-and-after photos of the destruction. Between them were photos of each victim: Mayada sipping tea, Tuqa in the back yard, Najib in a black-and-white self-portrait and a head shot of Mohannad, an engineering professor, his academic credentials filling the rest of the page. The most important issue, Basim had written, was that his family was now “looked at as members of ISIS” by the Iraqi authorities. This threatened to be a problem, especially after the city’s liberation. The consular officer, who spoke to us on the condition of anonymity, was moved. “I have people coming in every day that lie to me, that come with these sob stories,” the officer remembered telling him, “but I believe you.”
  • when Basim’s case was referred to a military attorney, the attorney replied, “There’s no way to prove that the U.S. was involved.”
  • we wrote to the coalition ourselves, explaining that we were reporters working on an article about Basim. We provided details about his family and his efforts to reach someone in authority and included a link to the YouTube video the coalition posted immediately after the strike. A public-affairs officer responded, “There is nothing in the historical log for 20 SEP 2015,” the date the coalition had assigned to the strike video. Not long after, the video disappeared from the coalition’s YouTube channel. We responded by providing the GPS coordinates of Basim’s home, his emails to the State Department and an archived link to the YouTube video, which unlike the videos on the Pentagon’s website allow for comments underneath — including those that Basim’s family members left nearly a year before.
  • Over the coming weeks, one by one, the coalition began removing all the airstrike videos from YouTube.
  • An alarm blares occasional high-temperature alerts, but the buildings themselves are kept so frigid that aviators sometimes wear extra socks as mittens
  • Most of the civilian deaths acknowledged by the coalition emerge from this internal reporting process. Often, though, watchdogs or journalists bring allegations to the coalition, or officials learn about potential civilian deaths through social media. The coalition ultimately rejects a vast majority of such external reports. It will try to match the incident to a strike in its logs to determine whether it was indeed its aircraft that struck the location in question (the Iraqi Air Force also carries out strikes). If so, it then scours its drone footage, pilot videos, internal records and, when they believe it is warranted, social media and other open-source information for corroborating evidence. Each month, the coalition releases a report listing those allegations deemed credible, dismissing most of them on the grounds that coalition aircraft did not strike in the vicinity or that the reporter failed to provide sufficiently precise information about the time and place of the episode.
  • They speak of every one of the acknowledged deaths as tragic but utterly unavoidable. “We’re not happy with it, and we’re never going to be happy with it,” said Thomas, the Central Command spokesman. “But we’re pretty confident we do the best we can to try to limit these things.”
  • Airwars, a nonprofit based in London that monitors news reports, accounts by nongovernmental organizations, social-media posts and the coalition’s own public statements. Airwars tries to triangulate these sources and grade each allegation from “fair” to “disputed.” As of October, it estimates that up to 3,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed in coalition airstrikes — six times as many as the coalition has stated in its public summaries. But Chris Woods, the organization’s director, told us that Airwars itself “may be significantly underreporting deaths in Iraq,” because the local reporting there is weaker than in other countries that Airwars monitors.
  • the coalition, the institution best placed to investigate civilian death claims, does not itself routinely dispatch investigators on the ground, citing access and security concerns, meaning there has not been such a rigorous ground investigation of this air war — or any American-led air campaign — since Human Rights Watch analyzed the civilian toll of the NATO bombing in Kosovo, a conflict that ended in 1999
  • we selected three areas in Nineveh Province, traveling to the location of every airstrike that took place during ISIS control in each — 103 sites in all. These areas encompassed the range of ISIS-controlled settlements in size and population makeup: downtown Shura, a small provincial town that was largely abandoned during periods of heavy fighting; downtown Qaiyara, a suburban municipality; and Aden, a densely packed city neighborhood in eastern Mosul. The sample would arguably provide a conservative estimate of the civilian toll: It did not include western Mosul, which may have suffered the highest number of civilian deaths in the entire war. Nor did it include any strikes conducted after December 2016, when a rule change allowed more ground commanders to call in strikes, possibly contributing to a sharp increase in the death toll.
  • In addition to interviewing hundreds of witnesses, we dug through the debris for bomb fragments, tracked down videos of airstrikes in the area and studied before-and-after satellite imagery. We also obtained and analyzed more than 100 coordinate sets for suspected ISIS sites passed on by intelligence informants. We then mapped each neighborhood door to door, identifying houses where ISIS members were known to have lived and locating ISIS facilities that could be considered legitimate targets. We scoured the wreckage of each strike for materials suggesting an ISIS presence, like weapons, literature and decomposed remains of fighters. We verified every allegation with local administrators, security forces or health officials
  • During the two years that ISIS ruled downtown Qaiyara, an area of about one square mile, there were 40 airstrikes, 13 of which killed 43 civilians — 19 men, eight women and 16 children, ages 14 or younger. In the same period, according to the Iraqi federal police, ISIS executed 18 civilians in downtown Qaiyara
  • in about half of the strikes that killed civilians, we could find no discernible ISIS target nearby
  • By the time the information made its way to the coalition and it decided to act, the mortar had been moved. Such intelligence failures suggest that not all civilian casualties are unavoidable tragedies; some deaths could be prevented if the coalition recognizes its past failures and changes its operating assumptions accordingly. But in the course of our investigation, we found that it seldom did either.
  • On the evening of April 20, 2015, aircraft bombed the station, causing a tremendous explosion that engulfed the street. Muthana Ahmed Tuaama, a university student, told us his brother rushed into the blaze to rescue the wounded, when a second blast shook the facility. “I found my brother at the end of the street,” he said. “I carried him.” Body parts littered the alleyway. “You see those puddles of water,” he said. “It was just like that, but full of blood.” We determined that at least 18 civilians died in this one attack and that many more were grievously wounded. News of the strike was picked up by local bloggers, national Iraqi outlets and ISIS propaganda channels and was submitted as an allegation to the coalition by Airwars. Months later, the coalition announced the results of its investigation, stating that there was “insufficient evidence to find that civilians were harmed in this strike.” Yet even a cursory internet search offers significant evidence that civilians were harmed: We found disturbingly graphic videos of the strike’s aftermath on YouTube, showing blood-soaked toddlers and children with their legs ripped off.
  • Human rights organizations have repeatedly found discrepancies between the dates or locations of strikes and those recorded in the logs. In one instance, the coalition deemed an allegation regarding a strike in the Al-Thani neighborhood of Tabqa, Syria, on Dec. 20, 2016, as “not credible,” explaining that the nearest airstrike was more than a kilometer away. After Human Rights Watch dispatched researchers to the ground and discovered evidence to the contrary, the coalition acknowledged the strike as its own
  • The most common justification the coalition gives when denying civilian casualty allegations is that it has no record of carrying out a strike at the time or area in question. If incomplete accounts like these are standard practice, it calls into question the coalition’s ability to determine whether any strike is its own. Still, even using the most conservative rubric and selecting only those 30 airstrikes the Air Force analysts classified as “probable” coalition airstrikes, we found at least 21 civilians had been killed in six strikes. Expanding to the 65 strikes that fell within 600 meters — for example, the strikes on the home of Inas Hamadi in Qaiyara and the electrical substation in Aden — pushed that figure to at least 54 killed in 15 strikes. No matter which threshold we used, though, the results from our sample were consistent: One of every five airstrikes killed a civilian
  • “We deeply regret this unintentional loss of life in an attempt to defeat Da’esh,” Scrocca wrote, using another term for ISIS. “We are prepared to offer you a monetary expression of our sympathy and regret for this unfortunate incident.” He invited Basim to come to Erbil to discuss the matter. Basim was the first person to receive such an offer, in Iraq or Syria, during the entire anti-ISIS war.
  • “This situation of war,” he continued, “big corporations are behind it.” This is where the real power lay, not with individual Americans. He’d come to believe that his family, along with all Iraqis, had been caught in the grinder of grand forces like oil and empire, and that the only refuge lay in something even grander: faith. He had rediscovered his religion. “There was some bond that grew between me and my God. I thanked him for keeping my son alive. I thanked him that my operation was successful. Now I can walk.”
Ed Webb

'A mass assassination factory': Inside Israel's calculated bombing of Gaza - 0 views

www.972mag.com/israel-calculated-bombing-gaza

war Israel Palestine israelpalestine bombing AI Hamas crimes warcrimes

shared by Ed Webb on 02 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • The Israeli army’s expanded authorization for bombing non-military targets, the loosening of constraints regarding expected civilian casualties, and the use of an artificial intelligence system to generate more potential targets than ever before, appear to have contributed to the destructive nature of the initial stages of Israel’s current war on the Gaza Strip, an investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call reveals
  • The investigation by +972 and Local Call is based on conversations with seven current and former members of Israel’s intelligence community — including military intelligence and air force personnel who were involved in Israeli operations in the besieged Strip — in addition to Palestinian testimonies, data, and documentation from the Gaza Strip, and official statements by the IDF Spokesperson and other Israeli state institutions.
  • The bombing of power targets, according to intelligence sources who had first-hand experience with its application in Gaza in the past, is mainly intended to harm Palestinian civil society: to “create a shock” that, among other things, will reverberate powerfully and “lead civilians to put pressure on Hamas,”
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  • the Israeli army has files on the vast majority of potential targets in Gaza — including homes — which stipulate the number of civilians who are likely to be killed in an attack on a particular target. This number is calculated and known in advance to the army’s intelligence units, who also know shortly before carrying out an attack roughly how many civilians are certain to be killed
  • “The numbers increased from dozens of civilian deaths [permitted] as collateral damage as part of an attack on a senior official in previous operations, to hundreds of civilian deaths as collateral damage,”
  • another reason for the large number of targets, and the extensive harm to civilian life in Gaza, is the widespread use of a system called “Habsora” (“The Gospel”), which is largely built on artificial intelligence and can “generate” targets almost automatically at a rate that far exceeds what was previously possible. This AI system, as described by a former intelligence officer, essentially facilitates a “mass assassination factory.”
  • “The emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy,” said IDF Spokesperson Daniel Hagari on Oct. 9.
  • “I remember thinking that it was like if [Palestinian militants] would bomb all the private residences of our families when [Israeli soldiers] go back to sleep at home on the weekend,” one source, who was critical of this practice, recalled.
  • there are “cases in which we shell based on a wide cellular pinpointing of where the target is, killing civilians. This is often done to save time, instead of doing a little more work to get a more accurate pinpointing,”
  • Over 300 families have lost 10 or more family members in Israeli bombings in the past two months — a number that is 15 times higher than the figure from what was previously Israel’s deadliest war on Gaza, in 2014
  • “There is a feeling that senior officials in the army are aware of their failure on October 7, and are busy with the question of how to provide the Israeli public with an image [of victory] that will salvage their reputation.”
  • the increasing use of AI-based systems like Habsora allows the army to carry out strikes on residential homes where a single Hamas member lives on a massive scale, even those who are junior Hamas operatives. Yet testimonies of Palestinians in Gaza suggest that since October 7, the army has also attacked many private residences where there was no known or apparent member of Hamas or any other militant group residing. Such strikes, sources confirmed to +972 and Local Call, can knowingly kill entire families in the process.
  • “Hamas is everywhere in Gaza; there is no building that does not have something of Hamas in it, so if you want to find a way to turn a high-rise into a target, you will be able to do so,”
  • at least until the current war, army protocols allowed for attacking power targets only when the buildings were empty of residents at the time of the strike. However, testimonies and videos from Gaza suggest that since October 7, some of these targets have been attacked without prior notice being given to their occupants, killing entire families as a result.
  • As documented by Al Mezan and numerous images coming out of Gaza, Israel bombed the Islamic University of Gaza, the Palestinian Bar Association, a UN building for an educational program for outstanding students, a building belonging to the Palestine Telecommunications Company, the Ministry of National Economy, the Ministry of Culture, roads, and dozens of high-rise buildings and homes — especially in Gaza’s northern neighborhoods.
  • there is ample evidence that, in many cases, none were military or political operatives belonging to Hamas or Islamic Jihad.
  • for the most part, when it comes to power targets, it is clear that the target doesn’t have military value that justifies an attack that would bring down the entire empty building in the middle of a city, with the help of six planes and bombs weighing several tons
  • Although it is unprecedented for the Israeli army to attack more than 1,000 power targets in five days, the idea of causing mass devastation to civilian areas for strategic purposes was formulated in previous military operations in Gaza, honed by the so-called “Dahiya Doctrine” from the Second Lebanon War of 2006.
  • “We are asked to look for high-rise buildings with half a floor that can be attributed to Hamas,” said one source who took part in previous Israeli offensives in Gaza. “Sometimes it is a militant group’s spokesperson’s office, or a point where operatives meet. I understood that the floor is an excuse that allows the army to cause a lot of destruction in Gaza. That is what they told us. “If they would tell the whole world that the [Islamic Jihad] offices on the 10th floor are not important as a target, but that its existence is a justification to bring down the entire high-rise with the aim of pressuring civilian families who live in it in order to put pressure on terrorist organizations, this would itself be seen as terrorism. So they do not say it,” the source added.
  • Previous operations have also shown how striking these targets is meant not only to harm Palestinian morale, but also to raise the morale inside Israel. Haaretz revealed that during Operation Guardian of the Walls in 2021, the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit conducted a psy-op against Israeli citizens in order to boost awareness of the IDF’s operations in Gaza and the damage they caused to Palestinians. Soldiers, who used fake social media accounts to conceal the campaign’s origin, uploaded images and clips of the army’s strikes in Gaza to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok in order to demonstrate the army’s prowess to the Israeli public.
  • since October 7, Israel has attacked high-rises with their residents still inside, or without having taken significant steps to evacuate them, leading to many civilian deaths.
  • evidence from Gaza suggests that some high-rises — which we assume to have been power targets — were toppled without prior warning. +972 and Local Call located at least two cases during the current war in which entire residential high-rises were bombed and collapsed without warning, and one case in which, according to the evidence, a high-rise building collapsed on civilians who were inside.
  • According to intelligence sources, Habsora generates, among other things, automatic recommendations for attacking private residences where people suspected of being Hamas or Islamic Jihad operatives live. Israel then carries out large-scale assassination operations through the heavy shelling of these residential homes.
  • the Habsora system enables the army to run a “mass assassination factory,” in which the “emphasis is on quantity and not on quality.” A human eye “will go over the targets before each attack, but it need not spend a lot of time on them.” Since Israel estimates that there are approximately 30,000 Hamas members in Gaza, and they are all marked for death, the number of potential targets is enormous.
  • A senior military official in charge of the target bank told the Jerusalem Post earlier this year that, thanks to the army’s AI systems, for the first time the military can generate new targets at a faster rate than it attacks. Another source said the drive to automatically generate large numbers of targets is a realization of the Dahiya Doctrine.
  • Five different sources confirmed that the number of civilians who may be killed in attacks on private residences is known in advance to Israeli intelligence, and appears clearly in the target file under the category of “collateral damage.” 
  • “That is a lot of houses. Hamas members who don’t really matter for anything live in homes across Gaza. So they mark the home and bomb the house and kill everyone there.”
  • On Oct. 22, the Israeli Air Force bombed the home of the Palestinian journalist Ahmed Alnaouq in the city of Deir al-Balah. Ahmed is a close friend and colleague of mine; four years ago, we founded a Hebrew Facebook page called “Across the Wall,” with the aim of bringing Palestinian voices from Gaza to the Israeli public. The strike on Oct. 22 collapsed blocks of concrete onto Ahmed’s entire family, killing his father, brothers, sisters, and all of their children, including babies. Only his 12-year-old niece, Malak, survived and remained in a critical condition, her body covered in burns. A few days later, Malak died. Twenty-one members of Ahmed’s family were killed in total, buried under their home. None of them were militants. The youngest was 2 years old; the oldest, his father, was 75. Ahmed, who is currently living in the UK, is now alone out of his entire family.
  • According to former Israeli intelligence officers, in many cases in which a private residence is bombed, the goal is the “assassination of Hamas or Jihad operatives,” and such targets are attacked when the operative enters the home. Intelligence researchers know if the operative’s family members or neighbors may also die in an attack, and they know how to calculate how many of them may die. Each of the sources said that these are private homes, where in the majority of cases, no military activity is carried out.
  • According to the doctrine — developed by former IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot, who is now a Knesset member and part of the current war cabinet — in a war against guerrilla groups such as Hamas or Hezbollah, Israel must use disproportionate and overwhelming force while targeting civilian and government infrastructure in order to establish deterrence and force the civilian population to pressure the groups to end their attacks. The concept of “power targets” seems to have emanated from this same logic.
  • The bombing of family homes where Hamas or Islamic Jihad operatives supposedly live likely became a more concerted IDF policy during Operation Protective Edge in 2014. Back then, 606 Palestinians — about a quarter of the civilian deaths during the 51 days of fighting — were members of families whose homes were bombed. A UN report defined it in 2015 as both a potential war crime and “a new pattern” of action that “led to the death of entire families.”
  • according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, by Nov. 29, Israel had killed 50 Palestinian journalists in Gaza, some of them in their homes with their families
  • The intelligence officers interviewed for this article said that the way Hamas designed the tunnel network in Gaza knowingly exploits the civilian population and infrastructure above ground. These claims were also the basis of the media campaign that Israel conducted vis-a-vis the attacks and raids on Al-Shifa Hospital and the tunnels that were discovered under it.
  • Hamas leaders “understand that Israeli harm to civilians gives them legitimacy in fighting.”
  • while it’s hard to imagine now, the idea of dropping a one-ton bomb aimed at killing a Hamas operative yet ending up killing an entire family as “collateral damage” was not always so readily accepted by large swathes of Israeli society. In 2002, for example, the Israeli Air Force bombed the home of Salah Mustafa Muhammad Shehade, then the head of the Al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ military wing. The bomb killed him, his wife Eman, his 14-year-old daughter Laila, and 14 other civilians, including 11 children. The killing caused a public uproar in both Israel and the world, and Israel was accused of committing war crimes.
  • Fifteen years after insisting that the army was taking pains to minimize civilian harm, Gallant, now Defense Minister, has clearly changed his tune. “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly,” he said after October 7.
Ed Webb

Syria Liable in Killing of Journalist Marie Colvin, Court Rules - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rie-colvin-court-judgment.html

Syria US USA UK Britain journalist journalists crime warcrimes

shared by Ed Webb on 01 Feb 19 - Cached
  • A federal court has held Syria’s government liable for the targeting and killing of an American journalist as she reported on the shelling of a rebellious area of Homs in 2012. The decision could help ease the way for war-crimes prosecutions arising from the Syria conflict.
  • awarded $302.5 million to relatives of the journalist, Marie Colvin. Of that sum, $300 million is punitive damages for what Judge Amy Berman Jackson, in her ruling, called “Syria’s longstanding policy of violence” that aimed “to intimidate journalists” and “suppress dissent.”
  • The large size of the award sends a message, he said, that “the rule of law is still a force to be reckoned with,” even amid a global trend toward authoritarianism and the killing of journalists like Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi Arabian slain in his country’s consulate in Istanbul.
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  • Syria did not respond in court to the lawsuit, and Mr. Assad has publicly blamed Ms. Colvin for her own death, saying she had been “working with terrorists.”
  • the first court decision drawing on a pool of smuggled Syrian government documents that are being used in criminal prosecutions of Syrian officials by courts in Germany, France and elsewhere.
  • While the standard of proof is higher in criminal cases, war crimes lawyers welcomed the success of the Colvin lawsuit as an indication that the archive contains convincing evidence.
  • The plaintiffs detailed, through government records and defectors’ and other witnesses’ accounts, how the Syrian government had made a policy of cracking down on journalists and their assistants; how security officials tracked Ms. Colvin through informants and intercepted communications; how Syrian forces killed Ms. Colvin, hours after her last broadcast from Homs, by shelling the makeshift media center where she was staying; and how officials celebrated her death.
  • Ms. Colvin, a Long Island native who was 56 when she was killed, was a star of the British press, known for dedication and pushing the limits of risk to tell the stories of civilians affected by war. She was less of a household name in the United States, but the court’s decision comes amid a wave of new attention to her life and death.She was played by Rosamund Pike in the recent feature film “A Private War,” and was the subject of a biography by a fellow journalist, Lindsey Hilsum, and a documentary by Paul Conroy, the photojournalist who was her longtime reporting partner. He was seriously wounded in the attack that killed Ms. Colvin and Remi Ochlik, a French photojournalist.
Ed Webb

Reporting on Iran's unrest and crackdown from afar - The Washington Post - 2 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...nalist-mahsa-amini-radio-farda

Iran media protests journalism journalists BBC socialmedia disinformation IRGC

shared by Ed Webb on 28 Nov 22 - Cached
  • With foreign press virtually absent inside Iran — where authorities are arresting local journalists, restricting internet access and allegedly spreading misinformation online — distant correspondents such as Esfandiari face a deluge of challenges in getting accurate news about Iran to the rest of the world.
  • “These people are really risking everything to send us videos of the protests,” Esfandiari said. “And they come speak to us because they trust us, and they know the state media are never going to give them a platform.”
  • Western news organizations have been almost entirely shut out of the country by state restrictions and security concerns. Meanwhile, the government has arrested more than 60 Iranian journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Niloofar Hamedi and Elahe Mohammadi, among the reporters who helped break the story of Amini’s death, were charged with acting as CIA spies, an offense punishable by the death penalty.
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  • “We never have seen it before like this,” said Jiyar Gol, a Kurdish Iranian journalist for the BBC reporting the story from London. “They really want the world to know about what is going on. People don’t fear anymore.”
  • the dangerous climate makes it difficult for journalists to capture the scope of the government crackdowns, and it makes them unable to independently verify figures such as death tolls, having to rely on human rights organizations for much information
  • Social media has played a crucial yet complex role. The primary method for people inside Iran to get information out, it has also enabled the spread of false information.
  • it was the Revolutionary Guard deliberately spreading those videos
  • at Radio Farda — part of the U.S.-funded but independently run Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — Esfandiari and her colleagues contacted prisoners and their families and could find no one with knowledge of such an escape. She traced the detail back to an Iranian government-aligned news agency known for false reports, then saw a quote in a more reputable news service from a prison official denying the incident.“You have to read between the lines” of official statements
  • Some phony social media accounts pose as critics of the government to promote false news. People sympathetic to the protests “start to reshare that [content] in the heat of the moment,” he said. “The end result is a chaotic situation, with all the disinformation and misinformation mixed together, and it could be very dangerous, because some people inside Iran risk their lives based off of this.”
  • there are also “honest mistakes and rumors” that get circulated, said Radio Farda director Kambiz Fattahi. Newsweek erroneously reported earlier this month that 15,000 protesters had been sentenced to death. Fact-checkers later traced the number to an activist news agency’s estimate of the number of protest arrests, conflated with the news that Iranian lawmakers were pushing a “no leniency” policy toward those detained that could include the death penalty. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted the false information, then later deleted it, which in turn became fodder for Iranian state media to accuse Canada of spreading lies
  • Iranian journalists working outside the country have been subject to hacking and phishing attempts. In Britain, police have warned of “credible” threats of kidnapping or killing, and the BBC has filed a complaint with the United Nations, saying Iran has been harassing its journalists and their families
Ed Webb

Egypt sentences six to death in espionage case - AJE News - 0 views

www.aljazeera.com/...nage-case-160507101207579.html

Egypt journalists jazeera rights espionage court judiciary

shared by Ed Webb on 09 May 16 - No Cached
  • An Egyptian court on Saturday sentenced six people to death, including two Al Jazeera journalists, who were accused of leaking state secrets to Qatar.
  • The defendants include Ibrahim Helal, former director of news at Al Jazeera's Arabic channel. He is not in Egypt and was tried in absentia. Another, also tried in absentia, is Jordanian citizen Alaa Omar Mohamed Sablan, identified by the prosecution as an Al Jazeera journalist. Asmaa Mohamed al-Khatib, identified as a reporter with the pro-Brotherhood Rassd news outlet, was also sentenced to death in absentia. Al Jazeera has long denounced Egypt's treatment of its journalists with the hashtag #journalismisnotacrime.
Ed Webb

Western media and depictions of death and injury to 'others' | Racism | Al Jazeera - 0 views

www.aljazeera.com/...th-injury-190122105451654.html

media journalism journalists NYT opinion analysis Africa MENA power orientalism

shared by Ed Webb on 15 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • not necessary for a newspaper to run images of the dead and injured in a manner that seemed blatantly disrespectful and dehumanising
  • Part of the issue people had with the editorial response was that it seemed to imply that the images were published because the attack in Nairobi was a "special" isolated incident, one that required especially gruesome images to depict "the truth" of what happened. 
  • Kenyans were neither fooled nor placated. Many others in the Global South agreed, as they, too, had experienced - many times over - how powerful news organisations from the geopolitical West present what happens in their communities and countries in two-dimensional ways, often with little regard for how their words and images would affect those who were depicted
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  • a long tradition of exploiting the most painful, brutal moments of those in geopolitical locations that the West continues to regard in a condescending, paternalistic manner - particularly those in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Others  shared examples of The New York Times' past reports on atrocities and terror attacks in the West, which did not include any gruesome images, to disprove the editors' claim that they would "show reality…wherever in the world" in a similar fashion.
  • Kenyans compared The New York Times' coverage of this story - without photos of dead, white, American bodies - to its coverage of the attack in Nairobi and pointed out the newspaper's hypocrisy
  • In response to the charges that Kenyans are engaging in "anti-democratic" behaviour, many pointed out that such lectures on media freedom smack of a smug, "First World" brand of racist superiority. It is a defensive reaction that also allows powerful, privileged news organisations and their foreign correspondents to deflect attention from legitimate criticism of their practices by focusing on "irrational" "mob reactions"
  • "freedom of the press really needs to be distinguished from the foreign press…do[ing] whatever they like. One is about critiquing state excesses and advancing democracy. The other is not necessarily that." 
  • there is ample evidence showing that mainstream media in the US routinely treats black victims of violence differently, that "black people's lives are valued less than whites' in the US". Given that context, she argued, "#RiversideAttack photos are not an isolated incidence. They continue a long tradition of presenting white grief as important and black grief as irrelevant." 
  • Sentilles argued that this discrepancy - and "the very fact of visual access to the dead" from regions that we have historically positioned as "other" - creates and maintains a hierarchy. It encourages those in the geopolitical West to objectify the victims of terror and disaster in "other" lands as lesser beings who do not require the same level of dignity with which we would approach our own. Those others' lives in those far-away locations are less valued, their deaths less impactful, and thus less respect needs to be shown around their deaths. Moreover, "publishing some images while suppressing others sends the message that the visible bodies are somehow less consequential than the bodies granted the privilege of privacy."
  • it remains important that foreign journalists operating in Africa remember to examine and critique their positionality as they report on events in countries into which they have just "parachuted". Members of the foreign press should know that, as representatives of powerful news organisations, they have enormous power to influence the ways in which those in the "West" view "Africa" and "Africans". However, their reports often lack this necessary self-awareness and critique. Instead, their work reflects the lineages of power that come with Western news institutions and the fact of being in a "Western" body (which, no doubt, also depends on how a particular reporter is read as a "racialised" and gendered body) in a particular setting and context.
  • Most Western media outlets' reports on Africa continue to offer their readers predictable, contemporary versions of deeply problematic colonial images of "Africa" that allows them to safely imagine themselves as "civilised", and "Africans" as…well, you know the rest
  • Africans are no longer staying silent
Ed Webb

Iranian woman's death galvanises critics of 'morality police' - Al-Monitor: Independent... - 3 views

www.al-monitor.com/...anises-critics-morality-police

Iran women violence media socialmedia Kurds minority religion politics

shared by Ed Webb on 19 Sep 22 - Cached
  • As Iran reels from a woman's death after her arrest by its "morality police", the Sunday front page of financial newspaper Asia declared: "Dear Mahsa, your name will become a symbol."
  • growing criticism in recent months over its excessive use of force
  • President Ebrahim Raisi, an ultra-conservative former judiciary chief who came to power last year, has ordered an inquiry into Amini's death.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Originally from the northwestern Kurdistan province, Amini was on a visit with her family to the capital Tehran when she was detained on Tuesday.
  • In her hometown of Saghez, where her body was laid to rest on Saturday, some residents hurled stones at the governor's office and chanted slogans against the authorities
  • The day after her funeral, nearly all Iranian press dedicated their front pages to her story on Sunday.
  • Filmmakers, artists, athletes, and political and religious figures have taken to social media to express their anger against the morality police, both inside and outside the country.
  • Grand Ayatollah Assadollah Bayat Zanjani, a cleric seen as close to the reformists, denounced what he said was "illegitimate" and "illegal" actions behind "this regrettable incident"."The Koran clearly forbids the use of force" to enforce religious and moral values, he said.
  • Two-time Oscar-winning film director Asghar Farhadi said that "Mahsa now is more alive than we are" because "we are silent in the face of such boundless cruelty. We are complicit in this crime."
  • "The hair of our girls is covered with a shroud," several footballers on Iran's national team wrote in a joint story they shared on Instagram.
Ed Webb

Tehran strikes Kurdish opponents in Iraq as protests over Mahsa Amini's death convulse ... - 0 views

www.al-monitor.com/...er-mahsa-aminis-death-convulse

Iran Iraq military Kurds protests PKK separatism

shared by Ed Webb on 30 Sep 22 - No Cached
  • Iran unleashed a wave of missiles and drones on the headquarters of three separate Iranian Kurdish opposition groups based in Iraqi Kurdistan today, killing at least nine people and wounding 32 others, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) of Iraq’s Ministry of Health said, adding that it expected the death toll to rise.
  • An estimated 10 million Kurds, mainly Sunnis, who make up around a tenth of Iran’s population have long been denied political and cultural rights. At least 1,500 Kurdish activists were arrested in the last days’ tumult. The Kurdish majority areas in the country’s northwest, alongside Balochistan in the southwest, are among the least developed. The demonstrations over Amini’s murder first erupted in Tehran but rapidly spread to Iranian Kurdistan.
  • Persian demonstrators are chanting “Kurdistan is the eyes and the light of Iran,” Mohtadi noted. “The Kurds, instead of being perceived as the usual suspects, are now hailed as being at the vanguard of popular protests. It’s unprecedented,”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Iraq’s Foreign Ministry and the KRG condemned Iran over its actions, as did the United States, Germany, the UK and the United Nations. “Attacks on opposition group’s through the Islamic Republic of Iran’s missiles, under any pretext, is an incorrect stance that promotes a misleading interpretation of the course of events,” the KRG stated in an oblique reference to Iran’s efforts to scapegoat the Iranian Kurds for the mass protests inside its own borders.
  • Lawk Ghafuri, a KRG spokesman, told Al-Monitor that media reports suggesting that Iran had also targeted the PKK’s Iranian branch known as The Party for Free Life in Kurdistan, or PJAK, had come under any Iranian fire were inaccurate. The party is mostly shunned by other Iranian Kurdish groups because of its links to the PKK, which is designated as a terrorist group by the United States and the European Union but has broader global reach than any other Kurdish group in the world. At least 12 Kurdish prisoners were executed in Iran in June alone, according to the Paris-based Kurdish Human Rights Network — one of them over alleged connections to the PKK.
  • The regime is under mounting pressure. They fear for many reasons that Kurdistan could be a point of departure for the liberation for the rest of Iran,” said Asso Hassan Zadeh, an Iranian Kurdish analyst and former deputy leader of the KDPI. “We have more connections with the rest of the world than other parts of Iran, and the role played by the Kurds in the current protests helps explain the reaction,”
Ed Webb

Egypt braced for 'day of revolution' protests | World news | The Guardian - 1 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...egypt-day-revolution-protests

Egypt internet politics twitter socialmedia Tunisia sidibouzid

shared by Ed Webb on 25 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Tomorrow's events, dubbed a "day of revolution against torture, corruption, poverty and unemployment" by protest leaders, were initiated by two dissident movements, both based online. One is dedicated to the memory of Khaled Said, an Alexandrian man beaten to death by police last year, while the other, "6 April", is a youth group named after the date of an uprising two years ago in the Nile delta town of El-Mahalla El-Kubra, in which three people were killed by police.
  • In a sign of how seriously the Mubarak regime is taking any challenge to its authority following the downfall of Tunisia's president Ben Ali, counter-protests are being organised under the banner of "Mubarak: Egypt's security". Organisers say they want to express their rejection of the "destruction of state institutions" by the opposition, raising fears of violent clashes on the ground."Regardless of how many people turn up, these protests will be highly significant," said Nabil Abdel Fattah, a political analyst at the semi-official Al-Ahram Research Centre. "Those confronting the regime on Tuesday will be the sons and daughters of virtual activism - a new generation that has finally found something around which they can unite and rally.They are the product of a government that has never offered them any ideological vision to believe in, and now they have themselves become a symbol of contemporary Egypt.
Ed Webb

Donald Trump's Media Attacks Should Be Viewed as Brilliant | Time.com - 0 views

time.com/...donald-trump-fake-news-attacks

media journalism epistemology facts opinion politics US USA Trump

shared by Ed Webb on 19 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • the central idea of journalism — the conviction, as my old boss Peter Kann once said, “that facts are facts; that they are ascertainable through honest, open-minded and diligent reporting; that truth is attainable by laying fact upon fact, much like the construction of a cathedral; and that truth is not merely in the eye of the beholder.”
  • the responsibility to separate truth from falsehood, which is never more important than when powerful people insist that falsehoods are truths, or that there is no such thing as truth to begin with
  • a period in which the executive branch of government is engaged in a systematic effort to create a climate of opinion against the news business
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Ideologically, the president is trying to depose so-called mainstream media in favor of the media he likes — Breitbart News and the rest. Another way of making this point is to say that he’s trying to substitute news for propaganda, information for boosterism.
  • “Many people say” is what’s known as an argumentum ad populum. If we were a nation of logicians, we would dismiss the argument as dumb.We are not a nation of logicians.
  • The president is responding to a claim of fact not by denying the fact, but by denying the claim that facts are supposed to have on an argument
  • This is a version of Thrasymachus’s argument in Plato’s Republic that justice is the advantage of the stronger and that injustice “if it is on a large enough scale, is stronger, freer, and more masterly than justice.”
  • Truth is what you can get away with.
  • The interesting conversation concerns how we come to accept those lies.
  • If a public figure tells a whopping lie once in his life, it’ll haunt him into his grave. If he lies morning, noon and night, it will become almost impossible to remember any one particular lie. Outrage will fall victim to its own ubiquity. It’s the same truth contained in Stalin’s famous remark that the death of one man is a tragedy but the death of a million is a statistic.
  • explanation becomes rationalization, which in turn becomes justification
  • Here’s a simple truth about a politics of dishonesty, insult and scandal: It’s entertaining. Politics as we’ve had it for most of my life has, with just a few exceptions, been distant and dull.
  • it’s exhilarating. Haven’t all of us noticed that everything feels speeded up, more vivid, more intense and consequential? One of the benefits of an alternative-facts administration is that fiction can take you anywhere.
  • we adopt new metrics of judgment, in which politics becomes more about perceptions than performance—of how a given action is perceived as being perceived. If a reporter for the New York Times says that Trump’s press conference probably plays well in Peoria, then that increases the chances that it will play well in Peoria.
  • Some people became desensitized by the never-ending assaults on what was once quaintly known as “human decency.” Others seemed to positively admire the comments as refreshing examples of personal authenticity and political incorrectness.
  • anxiety and anger are their own justifications these days
  • In his 1953 masterpiece, “The Captive Mind,” the Polish poet and dissident Czeslaw Milosz analyzed the psychological and intellectual pathways through which some of his former colleagues in Poland’s post-war Communist regime allowed themselves to be converted into ardent Stalinists. In none of the cases that Milosz analyzed was coercion the main reason for the conversion.They wanted to believe. They were willing to adapt. They thought they could do more good from the inside. They convinced themselves that their former principles didn’t fit with the march of history, or that to hold fast to one’s beliefs was a sign of priggishness and pig-headedness. They felt that to reject the new order of things was to relegate themselves to irrelevance and oblivion. They mocked their former friends who refused to join the new order as morally vain reactionaries. They convinced themselves that, brutal and capricious as Stalinism might be, it couldn’t possibly be worse than the exploitative capitalism of the West.
  • I fear we are witnessing a similar process unfold among many conservative intellectuals on the right. It has been stunning to watch a movement that once believed in the benefits of free trade and free enterprise merrily give itself over to a champion of protectionism whose economic instincts recall the corporatism of 1930s Italy or 1950s Argentina. It is no less stunning to watch people once mocked Obama for being too soft on Russia suddenly discover the virtues of Trump’s “pragmatism” on the subject.
  • George Orwell wrote, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”
  • Not to look around, or beyond, or away from the facts, but to look straight at them, to recognize and call them for what they are, nothing more or less. To see things as they are before we re-interpret them into what we’d like them to be. To believe in an epistemology that can distinguish between truth and falsity, facts and opinions, evidence and wishes. To defend habits of mind and institutions of society, above all a free press, which preserve that epistemology. To hold fast to a set of intellectual standards and moral convictions that won’t waver amid changes of political fashion or tides of unfavorable opinion. To speak the truth irrespective of what it means for our popularity or influence.
  • Ed Webb on 19 Feb 17
     
    Helpful in thinking about how people adapt to authoritarian regimes and societies, or don't
Ed Webb

Channel 4 cancels Islam documentary screening after presenter threatened - Telegraph - 1 views

www.telegraph.co.uk/...fter-presenter-threatened.html

UK media Islam blasphemy censorship television history TV

shared by Ed Webb on 11 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • Ed Webb on 11 Sep 12
     
    His book was panned by knowledgeable critics, so it may be that his film was garbage. On the other hand, death threats are never justified over expression.
Ed Webb

Syria uprising, Twitter, and social-media revolution fatigue. - Slate Magazine - 0 views

www.slate.com/...media_revolution_fatigue_.html

Syria Egypt revolutions Twitter socialmedia

shared by Ed Webb on 06 Mar 12 - Cached
  • As we can see from these estimates below, the volume of Syria-related tweets (as a percentage of overall tweets) appears considerably lower than the volume related to the uprisings in Egypt and Iran. The estimates were constructed using multiple published Web sources reporting on number of tweets for the observed events as well as total Twitter traffic over time, including Twitter's blog, Customer Insight Group, Mashable, the Sysomos blog, and a dataset acquired via Twapperkeeper.
  • The Iranian protests in 2009 marked the first time that social media let us witness this kind of protest in a closed society from the citizens' point of view. The world watched, transfixed, as the death of protester Neda Agha-Soltan was caught on video. Now, these kinds of horrifying images have become alarmingly common.
  • The revolution in Egypt was relatively short, fast, and explosive. The Syrian uprising, by contrast, has been going on for 11 long months. Certain moments have refocused the world's attention, such as the siege of Homs in early February or the deaths of journalists Anthony Shadid, Marie Colvin, and Rémi Ochlik. Otherwise, much of the Syrian uprising has tragically resembled, as NPR's Andy Carvin puts it, "the proverbial boiling of the frog." While Carvin and others have been devotedly tweeting about Syria, he acknowledges that the length of the uprising might deter some news coverage. "I could imagine editors saying, what's the new angle here?" he says.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • social media and mainstream media tend to be mutually reinforcing, so the dearth of one affects the other
  • for the average observer, the Syrian uprising lacks a clear and consistent narrative. The Assad regime's brutal repression is plain to see, but other aspects of the 11-month uprising are less clear. Some ask: Who exactly is the opposition, and what do the majority of Syrians actually want? Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation says that this confusion and lack of context spreads to the Twittersphere. With some exceptions, the Syrian tweeps who "are tweeting in English are not tweeting in the same way as Egyptians. They are not providing accuracy and context, nor is it really specific or retweetable."
  • there is no clear or easy solution to Syria's suffering
Ed Webb

Israel's army and schools work hand in hand, say teachers - 0 views

www.middleeasteye.net/...nd-hand-say-teachers-201601890

Israel military schools teachers education politics propagdanda IDF nationalism racism history memory

shared by Ed Webb on 27 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • officers from a military intelligence unit called Telem design much of the Arabic language curriculum
  • “The military are part and parcel of the education system. The goal of Arabic teaching is to educate the children to be useful components in the military system, to train them to become intelligence officers.”
  • “Militarism is in every aspect of our society, so it is not surprising it is prominent in schools too,” said Amit Shilo, an activist with New Profile, an organisation opposed to the influence of the army on Israeli public life.“We are taught violence is the first and best solution to every problem, and that it is the way to solve our conflict with our neighbours.”
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • many fear that the situation will only get worse under the new education minister, Naftali Bennett, who heads Jewish Home, the settler movement’s far-right party
  • Nearly 300 schools have been encouraged to join an IDF-education ministry programme called “Path of Values”, whose official goal is to “strengthen the ties and cooperation between schools and the army”.
  • Mendel said Arabic was taught “without sentiment”, an aim established in the state’s earliest years.“The fear was that, if students had a good relationship with the language and saw Arabs as potential friends, they might cross over to the other side and they would be of no use to the Israeli security system. That was the reason the field of Arabic studies was made free of Arabs.”
  • Each school is now graded annually by the education ministry not only on its academic excellence but also on the draft rate among pupils and the percentages qualifying for elite units, especially in combat or intelligence roles.
  • Zeev Dagani, head teacher of a leading Tel Aviv school who opted out of the programme at its launch in 2010, faced death threats and was called before a parliamentary committee to explain his actions.
  • Adam Verete, a Jewish philosophy teacher at a school in Tivon, near Haifa, was sacked last year after he hosted a class debate on whether the IDF could justifiably claim to be the world’s most moral army.
  • Revital, an Arabic language teacher, said the army’s lesson plans were popular with pupils. “I don’t approve of them, but the students like them. They celebrate and laugh when they kill the terrorists.”Revital said she had been disciplined for speaking her mind in class and was now much more cautious.“You end up hesitating before saying anything that isn’t what everyone else is saying. I find myself hesitating a lot more than I did 20 years ago. There is a lot more fascism and racism around in the wider society,” she said.
  • “You have to watch yourself because the pupils are getting more nationalistic, more religious all the time. The society, the media and the education system are all moving to the right.”A 2010 survey found that 56 per cent of Jewish pupils believed their fellow Palestinian citizens should be stripped of the vote, and 21 per cent thought it was legitimate to call out “Death to the Arabs”.
Ed Webb

The Death of Journalism? (or journalism in the era of open) | eaves.ca - 0 views

eaves.ca/...journalism-in-an-open-era

newspapers journalism future blogging

shared by Ed Webb on 21 Mar 09 - Cached
  • are we seeing the death of Journalism? I for one, hope so, as it will mean a more profound change may be upon us.
  • What if it is the underlying structure and values of not just the news institutions but also the entities they normally cover that are eroding? What if the value of objectivity and the faith in any opaque structures are dying?
  • Such a transformation, a reshaping of credibility from objectivity to transparency, would have profound implications for every organization – corporate, non-profit and governmental – in our society.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • it is simply becoming harder and harder to keep secrets
  • Those who share information and invite criticism and analysis may be better positioned to survive crises and challenges than those who don’t.
  • in a transparent landscape where huge amounts of information about most organizations is being generated and shared the critical role of the journalist will be that of mystery solving – figuring out how to analyze, synthesize and discover the mystery within the vast quantity of information.
  • this is precisely what many blogs – alone or as part of an emergent network – already do. They take large complex stories, break them down and, by linking back and forth to one another, create a collective analysis that slowly allows the mystery to be decoded.
  • What we will still need in the future is Quality storytelling
Ed Webb

Gay Rights - Change.org: Is the Iraqi Government Executing LGBT People? - 0 views

gayrights.change.org/...vernment_executing_lgbt_people

Iraq rights sexuality repression LGBT

shared by Ed Webb on 03 Apr 09 - Cached
  • approximately 128 individuals have been arrested and sentenced to death for nothing more than being LGBT. And according to Iraqi-LGBT, executions are scheduled this week to start in "batches of 20."
  • Since the U.S. invasion, the death penalty in Iraq has soared to levels that not even Texas approaches.
  • If the Iraq government hopes to become part of the family of nations, it must respect the rights of all segements of its population, including all homosexual persons (who do not choose their sexual orientation).  To merit international respect, the government must behave justly and refrain from persecuting LGBT persons.   The world is watching Iraq as it develops into a true democracy that respects human rights. Posted by Stephen Harris
Ed Webb

This Magazine: Libya: Is it me you're looking for? - 0 views

www.thismagazine.ca/...libyaisitme.php

popularculture Libya music generational age culture

shared by Ed Webb on 25 Mar 09 - Cached
  • a preview of Poplak’s upcoming The Sheikh’s Batmobile: In Pursuit of American Pop Culture in the Muslim World (Penguin, 2009).
  • I thus broached the fact that I was in the country on false pretences with no small amount of trepidation. My reasons for being there sounded silly when I said them out loud, so I wasn’t sure how I’d explain that I’d travelled to Libya to confirm the story of a music video reenactment that had occurred in the Tripoli medina. But told him I did, bracing myself for a blow that never came. It was, in fact, remarkably easy convincing my chiselled praetorian to forgo the usual itinerary for some investigative work. “So, you don’t want to go with the Germans on a walking tour of the ruins?” asked Eder. “No,” I said. “I sort of lied about that on the visa application form.” “You want to find out about this music video?” “Yes. That’s why I’m here.” Eder shook his head. “Man, people come here and ask the weirdest shit. But what you are asking—this is not to fuck little boys or such.” I agreed. Vigorously. “But I warn you,” he said, presaging the fact that working in Libya was the journalistic equivalent of sculpting quicksilver, “the tour group will only allow you so much freedom before you make people suspicious. And people here don’t like to give information. They’re afraid, and maybe they should be.”
  • Eder felt more allegiance to East coast hip hop than he did to Middle-Eastern Arab culture. American popular culture was his popular culture.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • The Tripolitan shore is, after all, where America’s centuries-long relationship with the Muslim world properly began. Operation El Dorado Canyon was but another in a long line of American military engagements with the variegated rulers of Libya, a legacy that dates back over 200 years. Within the DNA of those dusty, forgotten battles lies the code of enmity that continues unabated. But this concomitant history also hints at a lengthy cultural involvement— a mutual fascination that was tinged with both revulsion and wonder.
  • The stage darkens. Lights swing back and forth, illuminating the Hanna House. Then all goes quiet. An icon of the 1980s— onetime member of R’n’B supergroup the Commodores, 90 million solo records sold, over a dozen Top 10 singles on the Billboard charts—stalks up to the spotlight, a smile on his face, the velvety Mediterranean breeze fluttering his navy-blue shirt. He then belts out five of his most beloved hits in front of the enraptured guests, culminating in a rousing sing-along, accompanied by 40 angel-costumed children typical to this sort of proceeding, of the “We Are the World” anthem he co-wrote with Michael Jackson. “Hanna will be honoured tonight because of the fact that you’ve attached peace to her name,” Lionel Richie tells the crowd. “I love you Libya! I’ll be back.” Yes, but how did he come to be there in the first place?
  • The take-home message was that the man who wrote “Dancing on the Ceiling” was a greater nuncio for peace—or at least common ground—than any number of official envoys, roadmaps or summit meetings. But there was one item in the story that made me choke up, Beaches style. I played it again—just to make sure I hadn’t misheard. Then I made my way through the blustery autumnal day to the newsstand to purchase a copy of Gentlemen’s Quarterly. In print, the story hit me with a wallop I usually associate with passages from great literature (or first-edition comic books). Richie told GQ that when he visited the Tripoli medina, a contingent of Libyan children had massed around him, closed their eyes, made wavy gesticulations with their hands, and moaned “Hello.” This was not a séance, but rather a passable rendition of the “Hello” video clip (a staple on MTV in the station’s early years, and a landmark moment in the history of the music video), in which a gorgeous blind woman, who knows Richie only from his mellifluous voice, somehow sculpts a perfectly representative clay bust of his Jheri-curled visage. “What’s going on here? How do you know?” begged Lionel Richie of the Libyan children. “How do you know?” How did they know? Lionel Richie’s videos are prominent in the cultural memory of a generation of North Americans; a friend once described Richie’s “All Night Long” clip as “a profound piece of eschatological imagination.” Indeed, to a scion of the 1980s, the Richie oeuvre carries an almost oneiric weight. Like “All Night Long,” the “Hello” video was an indelible piece of my childhood, a kiln-fired shard of memory now flung into the quandary of the Muslim world.
  • popular culture as a binding force. Hundreds of millions of people in over a 100 countries know Lionel Richie’s music, and adore it. According to the GQ article, anti-Ba’athist residents of Baghdad had blasted “All Night Long” as the Shock ’n’ Awe™ commenced. “The only thing Shiite and Sunni now share, aside from their hatred of each other and their worship of Allah and his prophet, is their abiding love for Lionel Brockman Richie Jr.,” wrote Mr. Corsello.
  • Did hundreds of young Libyan children really have the “Hello” video downloaded onto their cognitive hard drives the same way a Westerner born of the 1980s did? In no way did I think that GQ or Lionel Richie had willfully fabricated these details. I just wondered if something had become garbled in the translation. I had to find out if that video reenactment had happened. Mr. Corsello put it perfectly: “We … have a strategic, even moral, obligation to know: What is the freakin’ deal with Lionel Richie?”
  • The Libyans I’d met so far were polite but reticent. “Such questions!” they’d remark, sounding like so many Peter Lorres in Casablanca. “Behind the questions, what do you hope to find, Mr. Richard? There is only darkness.” Indeed, it was impossible to get a peripheral sense of what was going on in Libya: I felt out of my depth, immersed in an ostensibly bright world that was defined by brutality. Securing an interview felt like pinning live butterfly specimens. I kept in mind the recent case of five Bulgarian nurses, sentenced to death on trumped-up charges of injecting the AIDS virus into poor Libyan children. They had been horribly mistreated; it took some filthy dealing on the part of European governments to secure their freedom. And I knew that any locals implicated in my quest could expect much worse.
  • maybe you think we’re backwards here
  • we spent our evenings haunting stores that sold bootleg DVDs of titles that had yet to be released stateside
  • in the vanguard of a new Libyan generation, surfing the demographic wave of a massive Middle Eastern birthrate, pulled west by the accident of his tribal affiliations, plugged in because of an unprecedented technological sea-change in how media were disseminated. And that put him as much at odds with the Libyan mainstream as I was.
  • One thing I was slowly learning in the Muslim world: There is no Muslim world. There is no monolithic, stand-alone Other.
  • Cultural critic Greil Marcus once described early rock and pop as “music that affirmed meaninglessness and in that affirmation contained every conceivable kind of meaning.” This stands as a testament to what popular culture does best: unite us in an indefinable, unrefined moment of merriment, sadness, sentiment, titillation. There are two great equalizers: Death and pop culture. That’s what Lionel Richie meant by his story. And that’s why his story meant so much.
  • Ed Webb on 25 Mar 09
     
    Essential reading.
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