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Ed Webb

Arabic literature and the African other - 0 views

africasacountry.com/...k-and-write-about-black-people

Arabic literature Arabs racism race analysis opinion Africa

shared by Ed Webb on 13 Oct 19 - Cached
  • In 1992, Mazrui had a proposal: “The French once examined their special relationship to Africa and came up with the concept EURAFRICA as a basis of special cooperation. We in turn should examine the even older special relationship between Africa and the Arab World and call it AFRABIA.”
  • The project of “Afrabia,” as I interpret, would allow Africans to revisit a long history of the Islamic empire in Africa, its intersecting points with colonial projects subcontracted to Arab and South-Asian masters, as well as a shared history of decolonial struggles and anti-capitalist ambitions. For Arabs, it would mean a much-needed and long-overdue revision of their history, as well as of language and artistic expression that deal with Africa, blackness, and Afro-Arabs in reactionary, racist, and apolitical terms
  • Arabs, like their western teachers, when discussing anti-black racism and black issues, seem fixated on skin color, ideals of beauty, and visual representations; in a sense they express their own racial anxiety. It is as if anti-black racism has no history, trajectory, or realities beyond the stigma assigned to it, or the rhetoric surrounding it.
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  • When I use the term “Afro-Arab,” it is just my American lingua, not an actual term that Arab thinkers are trying to adopt or even consider. It is the kind of term you find in US academia but not in Arabic letters or political discussions. Even on the e-margins, young East and North Africans have been embracing their Africanness in opposition to Arabness, often citing Arab racism and exclusionary politics as reasons to depart from that historical bond.
  • I noticed how often Arab writers, including those North and East African, seem at ease when othering Africa—the bordered continent is harder for them to grasp than an imaginary “Arab World” made up by the French, and later appropriated by Arab nationalism. Moreover, the wildly inaccurate treatment of black experiences and cultures as one sum; from Zanzibar and Lagos to Havana and Detroit.
  • the Arab-Afro encounter seems more connected to the Americas and France, than to Africa itself
  • translations, references, and intertextual conversations, even by black Arabs, look toward Aime Césaire, Frantz Fanon, as well as African-American literature, and the civil rights era.
  • From one panel title “Black writer, White reader,” in a nod to Fanon, it was clear how the Arab fixation on black skin functions as an erasure of race, therefore assuming Arab is White
  • Arab writers, in the aftermath of the Iraq war and its apolitical introduction of identity politics into the region, have found an opportunity in writing about these groups which could get them translated and serve as primary literature for western academics and NGOs alike. Their white translators whisper to me “oh my god, this shit is racist” sometimes mediating in the process to clean up the language
Michael Fisher

Al Jazeera English - Americas - US to boycott UN racism conference - 0 views

english.aljazeera.net/...200922855014421433.html

United Nations United States Obama Administration Israel Canada

shared by Michael Fisher on 03 Mar 09 - No Cached
  • Michael Fisher on 03 Mar 09
     
    The United States, Canada and Israel will not send representatives to the United Nations racism conferene in Geneva. They say that the draft resolution was not acceptable.
Ed Webb

White masks in Tunisia - Africa is a Country - 0 views

africasacountry.com/...white-masks-in-tunisia

Tunisia race racism activism film

shared by Ed Webb on 25 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Despite the emphasis on the Islamic coda that prohibits discrimination against fellow black Muslims and Act 21 of the national constitution which emphasizes that all Tunisians are “equal before the law without any discrimination,” racism against its black citizens permeates the social, institutional, and political strata of Tunisia.
  • “the level of interaction between Sub-Saharan in general and the Tunisian population is negligible.”
  • Maha Abdelahmid, co-founder of l’Association de défense des droits des Noirs (ADAM or the Tunisian League for the Defence of the Rights of Blacks) states that birth certificates delivered to black Tunisians who are born in Djerba (in the south east of Tunisia, known for its large black community) still carry the title “freed slaves.”
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  • excellent film by Nada Issa, “Tunisia’s Dirty Secret,” captures this prevailing sense of ordinary negrophobia
  • Tunisians see themselves as whites. Whether in literature, in media, in movies, or on television, the image of the white Tunisian who communicates in eloquent French is the ideal standard against which the stereotype of the Tunisian subject is defined and performed. Affet Mosbah, a black Tunisian, poignantly asked in her influential testimony on “Being Black in Tunisia”: “Aren’t we ourselves Africans? What is the meaning of this self-exclusion by this verb?” The lack of visibility of black Tunisians in the media is the most obvious as there is no black actors or black TV hosts. The few times there were references made in national newspapers about black Tunisians or sub-Saharan immigrants, they were focused on clandestine migration.
  • While linkages between BLM and the Arab Spring are often made, those who participated in the Arab Spring did not tackle racism in their own countries. In its wake, the degrading reality for black Tunisians and sub-Saharan immigrants remains unchanged. While the exact number of racially aggravated offenses remains impossible to identify due to institutional denial of these crimes, strong evidence from increasingly vocal civil rights organizations reveal that these attacks have been on the rise in Tunisia since the 2011 revolution.
Ed Webb

NEIL MACKAY'S BIG READ: 'Scotland didn't have empire done to it, Scotland did empire to... - 0 views

www.heraldscotland.com/...pt-fighting-decolonise-history

UK Britain history museum heritage Egypt orientalism empire

shared by Ed Webb on 04 May 22 - No Cached
  • Glasgow’s Dr Campbell Price is British TV’s go-to guy when it comes to ancient Egypt. But the study is riddled with racism and he wants to drag the world of mummies into the 21st century … and he doesn’t care if you call him ‘woke’.
  • Price is at the forefront of the fight to ‘decolonise’ the study of Ancient Egypt and drag it into the 21st century. He wants the discipline to confront its history of racism and empire, and he’s not shy about apportioning a fair amount of blame on Scotland and its own role in Britain’s colonial adventures.
  • the study of Ancient Egypt was founded by colonialists from Britain and France in the early 1800s and it still hasn’t shaken off the baggage of the past. There’s a lingering sense that Egyptians are considered unable or incapable of studying their own history without the assistance of white, western academics who are really the people best suited to the discipline. The whiff of racism and a “white saviour narrative” still hangs in the air, he feels.
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  • “There’s this conceit,” he says, “that archaeologists - gung-ho western, bearded, white, elite, cis-gendered, ostensibly heterosexual - go to Egypt and ‘discover’ Ancient Egypt because the people, ordinary Egyptians, are too stupid.” He adds: “Ancient Egypt was never ‘lost’.”
  • The “standard colonial narrative”, he says, portrays Egypt as “brilliant - a proto-British empire”. Egyptologists used terms like ‘empire’ and ‘viceroy’ to describe the government of the Pharaohs. Students were taught that “the Ancient Egyptians had a ‘Viceroy of Nubia’ - where the hell is the term ‘viceroy’ coming from?” Price asks. “It’s from the British experience of empire”. This explains why many British academics put Egypt on a pedestal as the greatest of all ancient civilisations.
  • in the imperial age when Britons were travelling to India they would go through the Suez Canal. “You might take a few days and go and visit Egypt. So it’s colonial high noon,”
  • British archaeologist Howard Carter led the dig that opened Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 - an event which turbo-charged interest in Egyptology and had a huge cultural impact on world, even leading to the creation of movies like The Mummy starring Boris Karloff in 1932. “Some early exhibitions quite literally feel like the spoils of empire,” says Price. “In some cases, it’s literally the spoils - like the Rosetta Stone which was seized from the French.”
  • Price is chair of the board of trustees with the Egypt Exploration Society (EES) - an organisation, he says, which is “doing a lot of work of self-criticism, self-reflection and self-critique”. The EES, which was established in 1882 at the height of empire and just prior to the British invasion, is now “attempting to unpack colonialism in Egypt”.
  • “the British and French cooked up a system” called ‘finds-division’ or ‘partage’. “Notionally,” he says, “the best 50% of things that come out of the ground go to the National Collection in Cairo, but then up to 50% of what is thought to be ‘surplus to requirements’ or duplicate can leave with archaeologists. So that’s how Manchester has 18,000 objects from Egypt and Sudan - mostly through finds-division.
  • It was legal between the 1880s and 1970s, but it was at a time when mostly the Egyptian government was controlled by the British and French, and the Egyptian government had to repay the massive debt of building the Suez Canal.
  • “some people will tell you, some well known Egyptologists, that you should burn copies of ‘A Thousand Miles Up the Nile’ because it contains racist material. But the society is actually working on a critical re-edition, where there’s a new introduction to put the book in context. I firmly believe, and the trustees firmly believe, you can’t just bury the past. You’ve got to try and face it and constructively critique it. I’m not arguing for cancelling anyone. I’m not arguing for trying to ignore it. I’m saying ‘let’s have a conversation’.”
  • Unlike many nations which had art looted by western powers, Egypt “isn’t particularly interested” in the repatriation debate except when it comes to “a few very exceptional objects like Nefertiti’s Bust and the Rosetta Stone”. Price adds: “Repatriation can sometimes be a bit of an echo chamber for western [people]. It doesn’t necessarily relate always to the concerns of indigenous groups, or people who live in places like Egypt.”
  • There’s a funny attitude, where Scots kind of distance themselves and say, ‘oh well, you know, we were colonised first. The English came in, and we’re the victims’. Based on my work on the history of colonialism in Egypt, Scottish people are more than well-represented. They are disproportionately represented in the cogs of the imperial project with Scottish diplomats, engineers and soldiers … There’s a sense that empire was ‘done to’ Scotland, when in fact Scotland ‘did’ empire to other people … We put this stuff on the English and say it was the English … Scots appear surprisingly commonly in the imperial machinery in Egypt.
  • Price has little time for the use of the word ‘woke’ as an insult, as to him it simply means trying to do the right thing professionally. He adds that he feels “fortunate” that Manchester Museum, where he works, is also having the same “conversations” about confronting the legacy of the past.
  • British egyptology is “more open” to change, Price says than most other western nations with a history of the discipline. “We’re on the winning side of the argument. The tide has turned. You cannot pretend you can enjoy your secluded cocktail terrace in the middle of Cairo and not expect to hear critical evaluation of colonial experiences.”
  • Most of the workers who built the pyramids weren’t slaves - they were paid for their efforts, he points out. The slave stories of the Bible, though, lead to “another form of colonialism - Orientalism”, which depicts the rulers of the east as either exotic and mysterious or brutal and cruel. The notion of “the Oriental despot comes from the Bible: Pharaoh as a despot … The way in the Bible, that the pharaoh is cast as a baddie, reverberates”.
  • Price is also incensed by the current pseudo-science trend for conspiracy theories claiming that aliens built the pyramids - the type of unfounded material aired on over-the-top documentaries like ‘Ancient Aliens’. “It’s racist,” he says, “very racist.” He notes that there’s a hashtag on Twitter called ‘CancelAncientAliens’. The wild alien theory is “based on the assumption that ancient people were too stupid to have [built the pyramids] themselves and so it had to be some outside force. So to be clear in the interests of global parity and justice: the ancient Egyptians were an African people who built absolutely stunning monuments. Get over it.”
  • There is no simple answer, or history - and I think we insult museum audiences if we assume they want an overly simplified story. ‘Ancient Egypt’ is undoubtedly one of the most popular parts of a museum. By asking questions about how colonialism formed our idea of what ‘Ancient Egypt’ was, not just how it got to be in cities like Glasgow and Manchester, I think we can begin to address questions of global inequality.
  • “Egypt more than Greece, Rome or other parts of the world, has existed as both ‘Oriental other’ and ‘western ancestor’ - that is why the colonial dialogue is so intense - and Egyptology is, in a sense, the exemplary ‘colonial discipline’, just as the British Consul Lord Cromer [consul-general in Egypt from 1883] said Egypt should be the exemplary colony.
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.”
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  • 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

Egyptian Chronicles: #WeWillSpeak : Egyptian Tweeps speak up about Twitter Middle East ... - 0 views

egyptianchronicles.blogspot.com/...-egyptian-tweeps-speak-up.html

censorship Egypt twitter UAE Dubai socialmedia activists

shared by Ed Webb on 22 Oct 19 - Cached
  • Hundreds of Egyptian tweeps began on Monday a new campaign on Twitter against Twitter MENA policies after a wide suspension of opposition and activists’ accounts in the popular social media network. The Egyptian tweeps launched  #WeWillSpeak” and #هنتكلم hashtags to reach out for Twitter in the United States.
  • several opposition and political activists' accounts were either permanently or temporarily suspended allegedly for violating Twitter policies
  • Twitter MENA is paying attention only to the bad language of the tweeps including activists opposing the government only in that crackdown.
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  • right-wing Arab fascists and ISIS accounts as well as spammers are left untouched
  • There are Pro-regime supporters who got several accounts and are involved in actions like harassment, trolling and spamming as well as spreading hate and racism on the same level of right-wing figures in the West. They are left untouched I reported dozens of accounts spreading lies, hatred and racism against Syrians and Sudanese people but there were not closed down.
  • Needless to say, the fact that Twitter MENA is currently in Dubai made many Tweeps not only in Egypt but in other countries wonder if the Emirati government has got some kind of deal with Twitter to target dissident voice in the Arab world.
  • Already there are calls to force Twitter to transfer its Twitter MENA Headquarter form the United Arab Emirates to Tunisia as the cradle of the Arab Spring enjoys more freedom of speech.
  • Twitter has been the alternative forum for people to let their voices heard especially when mainstream media fails to do its job. Unfortunately, it has been hacked internationally and not only in the Middle East by political and social powers that are actually against freedom of speech in the first place. Yet some people believe it is worth to fight for including those Egyptian tweeps.
Ed Webb

'Where Tunisia Leads, Britain Follows' - Byline Times - 0 views

bylinetimes.com/...-tunisia-leads-britain-follows

Tunisia UK Britain media analysis opinion migration racism xenophobia

shared by Ed Webb on 10 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • Fuelled by populist politics, a nationalistic press and the apparent desire to confront complex problems with ‘red meat’ and increased nationalism, Tunisia’s President has steered his country on a dark course.
  • rather than address the core problems facing Tunisia, its President – buoyed by a supportive media – has embarked on a populist witch-hunt of his political opponents and now one of the country’s most vulnerable groups. 
  • As the UK Government focuses its efforts on pushing through an immigration bill that it itself admits has only a 50% chance of meeting international legal thresholds, there are parallels between both sets of leaderships. Like Tunisia’s President, Rishi Sunak Government is attempting to use populist nationalism and the wilful demonising of migrants as cover for its own gross economic mismanagement and flailing popularity.
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  • many acknowledge their fresh of support for the President since his crackdown.  Asked about the 21,000 or so black migrants residing in Tunisia, no one here is racist, they say – they simply want to distinguish between those who are here legally and illegally. It sounds reasonable enough. In fact, it could probably pass for small talk at a Conservative Party fundraiser. However, at least in Tunisia, that reasonableness fades when pressed. “They’re selling cocaine, they’re selling their wives and their girlfriends to each other,” Bassem, a fruit and vegetable wholesaler, told me. “They’re even buying boats and taking still more migrants to Europe.” In this part of Ariana, every Tunisian has a lurid tale, always experienced at one remove, which they reel off as ‘proof’ of the criminality of the country’s black migrant population.
  • To date, none of these stories are troubling Tunisia’s mainstream media, which appears more focused on defending Tunisia’s national image and parroting the President’s attack lines than delivering facts to a public growing increasingly hostile to the unwarranted international condemnation it feels itself subject to.
  • the UK’s established media has spent the past week fixated on the employment terms of a BBC sports commentator than scrutinising a law that stands to make the lives of tens of thousands of people immeasurably worse.
  • Just as the UK media is yet to truly reckon with the financial impact of Brexit on the country’s poorest, so the Tunisian media is unwilling to fully address the consequences of the suspension of the World Bank partnership and the increasing uncertainty surrounding a sorely needed IMF bail-out. 
Ed Webb

Israel, Mired in Ideological Battles, Fights on Cultural Fronts - The New York Times - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...fights-on-cultural-fronts.html

Israel culture identity identities ideology politics Zionism censorship propaganda education media

shared by Ed Webb on 30 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Miri Regev, the divisive and conservative minister of culture and sport, who wants to deny state money to institutions that do not express “loyalty” to the state, including those that show disrespect for the flag, incite racism or violence, or subvert Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.
  • For one well-known poet, Meir Wieseltier, the law “brings us closer to the rise of fascism and exposes its true face.” But Isi Leibler argued in The Jerusalem Post that the government is “not obliged to subsidize the demonization of the nation” and should instead support “the inculcation of love of Israel.”
  • such conflicts, over what cultural works the state should promote for schoolchildren to read or for citizens to see and hear, is part of a political drama in which the politicians of a new generation are jockeying for position as leader of the so-called nationalist camp
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  • The Israel they represent is more religious and less beholden to the values and inheritances of the old, Europeanized elite and its dwindling left
  • This month, the left-leaning daily Haaretz highlighted internal discussions in the ministry about what artistic works might be considered “politically undesirable” for high-school students. Among the criteria, the newspaper said, were whether artists would perform in West Bank settlements and declare loyalty to the state and to the national anthem, something that is particularly problematic for Israel’s Arab citizens.Internal discussions are not policy, but even this report drew stinging responses, with Oded Kotler, a prominent Israeli actor and director, comparing Israel to the Soviet Union and telling Israel Radio, “There’s a real culture war underway here, but the war from that side of the political map is a harbinger of zealotry, darkness and coercion.”Mr. Kotler infuriated the government and the political right last summer when he compared its supporters to “cud-chewing cattle.” That was in response to Ms. Regev’s effort to freeze state funding for an Arab theater in Haifa because of a play about a Palestinian prisoner who murders an Israeli soldier. The production, “Parallel Time,” had enraged the right and Mr. Bennett banned school trips to see it.
  • Mr. Bennett, for his part, overruled ministry experts to ban from high-school reading lists a novel about a romance between an Israeli woman and a Palestinian man, apparently out of fear that it promotes assimilation. The romance takes place abroad; the pair splits up when they return home, to Israel and the West Bank. Mr. Bennett said the novel, “Borderlife,” by Dorit Rabinyan, disparaged the Israeli military, and the head of his ministerial committee said it “could incite hatred and cause emotional storms” in classrooms.The debate about the book actually increased its sales, something Ms. Rabinyan credited in an interview to “the strength of Israeli democracy.”
  • The novel begins with the Israeli woman, who is Sephardic, coming under suspicion of terrorism in New York over her “Arab” appearance and because she writes from right to left. “This is the bond that connects her to the Palestinian,” Ms. Rabinyan explained. “I don’t consider my Israeliness to be hegemonic.”
Ed Webb

Guardian Reader's Editor evades key questions in column on Joshua Treviño deb... - 0 views

electronicintifada.net/...-column-joshua-trevino-debacle

media newspapers hate racism Islamophobia israelpalestine opinion analysis

shared by Ed Webb on 28 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • Of course a newspaper should offer a broad range of views and host vigorous debate among people who disagree. The point that neither Elliott nor Guardian editors have addressed is where to draw the line. We live at a moment when open hate speech – especially in the United States – primarily directed against Muslims, is becoming normalized as part of the ‘marketplace of ideas.’
  • If all things being equal, Treviño’s long history of bigotry had been directed against Jews instead of Muslims, Arabs and Palestine solidarity activists, would The Guardian have offered him a column in the first place? If it had been revealed that Treviño wrote speeches for candidates suggesting that “civilization” was at war with Jewish rather than Muslim “barbarism,” how many would defend Treviño or the initial decision to hire him?
Ed Webb

In an attempt to challenge Islamophobia the Daily Show presents The Qu'osby Show - 3 views

mondoweiss.net/...-the-qu%e2%80%99osby-show.html

Islamophobia racism US USA media television TV funny dailyshow stewart

shared by Ed Webb on 19 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Ed Webb on 19 Feb 11
     
    So, this clearly isn't going to work. What will?
Ed Webb

The Associated Press: Republican shoots target with Fla. Dem's initials - 0 views

www.google.com/...Bc6fnDzz_zXJzhO392gKQD9B7TJN80

Florida hicks GOP guns wingnuts racism Arabs Arab-Americans USA politics

shared by Ed Webb on 14 Oct 09 - Cached
  • the use of targets that appeared to be gunmen with traditional Arab head scarves.
  • "That's our right," said Napolitano, president of the Southeast Broward Republican Club. "If we want to shoot at targets that look like that, we're going to go ahead and do that."
  • Many of the targets were basic silhouettes, though others were figures wearing traditional Arab head scarves, called kaffiyeh, and holding rocket-propelled grenades. Napolitano said the faces of those figures appeared to be white, though he understood why they would be assumed to be Arabs
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  • "I absolutely have no regrets. I don't care what the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee or any of them say — I know that they're offended by the simple fact that we're here and we won't go away and we won't be quiet,"
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 14 Oct 09
       
      Maybe they're offended because you're racist idiots?
  • Ed Webb on 14 Oct 09
     
    Why isn't the headline about them shooting targets designed to look like Arabs?
Ed Webb

Netanyahu campaign video: A victory for the Left means an ISIS invasion | +972 Magazine - 0 views

972mag.com/...102703

Israel media politics propaganda Netanyahu ISIS Palestine israelpalestine Hamas Fatah analysis election

shared by Ed Webb on 14 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • The video opens with bearded men traveling in a pickup truck, flying the black IS flag with its distinctive white calligraphy. The driver of the truck pulls up beside another car and honks for the other driver’s attention. The IS guy in the passenger seat leans out the window and asks him, in Hebrew with a comically exaggerated Arabic accent, “Hey bro, how do you get to Jerusalem?” The driver of the car shouts back (in Israeli Hebrew), “Take a left!” Then there’s the slogan, in red Hebrew letters emblazoned on a gray, bullet-marked background: “THE LEFT WILL SURRENDER TO TERROR.” One of the IS guys fires celebratory bullets skyward and the driver peels off, ostensibly in the direction of Jerusalem, as they all shout exultantly in Arabic, “Shukran, ya ward!” (“Thanks, bro!”). The camera pans briefly to the rear of the truck to focus on a popular Israeli bumper sticker that reads, “Anyone but Bibi.” The tagline: “It’s us, or them. Only the Likud. Only Netanyahu.” The snatch of Arabic rap lyrics is excerpted from a song by an Amman-based Palestinian group called Torabyeh: “I want to be buried in the same cemetery that my grandfather was buried in. And since my childhood I’ve been dreaming to be a soldier and as time passed I discovered who I want to belong to: Mahmoud Abbas, Fatah, Hamas or…Jabha …”
  • Netanyahu has for years been promoting his message about the threat to Israeli security posed by Islamic extremism, never missing an opportunity to list Hamas along with the Islamic State, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram and even Fatah, mixing them all up so that the average Israeli Jew reflexively associates Arabs and Islam with terror. Like all accomplished populists, he understands the power of repeating a mendacious slogan, and he is an expert at exploiting popular fears and racism.
  • The popular Israeli narrative is so reactionary and confused these days, that if one were to walk the streets asking average citizens if there was a difference between Fatah and Al Qaeda, most people would be hard-pressed to answer coherently. Go ahead and try to explain to an Israeli audience that Hamas is a small offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, that it is basically a technocratic political party, that it is extremely unpopular in Gaza and that it has nothing to do with expansionist jihadism. Try telling people that if Israel would lift the siege on Gaza, disgruntled Palestinians in Gaza would probably kick Hamas out of power immediately. Just try. The best you can hope for is that you’d be told that you’re a traitor who should go live in Gaza.
Ed Webb

Friendly Fascism: National Media Give David Duke a Face-Lift - FAIR - 0 views

fair.org/...ia-give-david-duke-a-face-lift

USA US media fascism politics extremism racism analysis history

shared by Ed Webb on 28 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Ed Webb on 28 Feb 16
     
    Useful reminder of the difficulty US media have in confronting the reality of extremist views and statements in candidates running for high office. The framing of electoral competition as a sport/race/game with two competitors who must be dealt with even-handedly forestalls critical or even accurate reporting.
Ed Webb

Egyptian satellite stops broadcasting Hezbollah-controlled TV station | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...ebanon-satellite-idUSKCN0X323N

Egypt Lebanon KSA Saudi hezbollah satellite TV television censorship

shared by Ed Webb on 08 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Egyptian satellite company NileSat has stopped broadcasting Hezbollah-controlled Lebanese television channel Al Manar, an official said on Wednesday, a move the Iranian-backed group condemned as part of a campaign by Gulf Arab states against it.
  • On Friday, the Saudi-owned television news channel Al Arabiya shut its offices in Lebanon. On the same day, protesters attacked the Beirut office of Saudi-owned newspaper Asharq al-Awsat in response to a cartoon published by the paper criticizing the Lebanese state.
  • Saudi Arabia has lavished aid on Egypt since its military overthrew an Islamist government in 2013, and while ties have been strained over the past year, Cairo has broadly followed Riyadh's lead on regional politics. NileSat stopped broadcasting Al Manar to subscribers late on Tuesday, although the channel can be received in Lebanon through other broadcast media.
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  • "The usual terms (of the company) prohibit the use of satellite media to broadcast programs which call for violence or racism or incite sectarianism."
  • "NileSat is trading in flimsy excuses and its claims of inciting discord do not fool anyone."
Ed Webb

Egypt tightens restrictions on media, social networks - 0 views

apnews.com/40f1133267485db356db1e58db985b

Egypt censorship internet media publishers journalists syndicate

shared by Ed Webb on 20 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • Egypt’s top media regulator on Tuesday put into effect tighter restrictions that allow the state to block websites and even social media accounts with over 5,000 followers if they are deemed a threat to national security.The move is the latest step by the government of President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi to suppress dissent. In recent years, Egypt has launched an unprecedented crackdown on reporters and the media, imprisoning dozens and occasionally expelling some foreign journalists.The new regulations, published in the official gazette late Monday, allow the Supreme Media Regulatory Council to block websites and accounts for “fake news,” and impose stiff penalties of up to 250,000 Egyptian pounds ($14,400), all without having to obtain a court order.
  • Mohamed Abdel-Hafiz, a board member of the journalists’ union, said the government is threatening journalists with “vaguely defined national security violations, as well as vaguely defined political, social or religious norms.”
  • a broad list of prohibited topics, including “anything inciting violating the law, public morals, racism, intolerance, violence, discrimination between citizens or hatred.”
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  • Since late 2017, some 500 websites including news outlets and rights groups have been blocked, according to a recent report by an Egyptian watchdog group, the Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression.
  • Egypt remains among the world’s worst jailers of journalists, behind China and Turkey, according to the press freedom group the Committee to Protect Journalists.
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