Queering the Dinosaur Nation

a Dear John Letter to blogger

2009-08-17T19:19:00.002-04:00

Dear Blogger (and the millions who have followed us),

We have found someone better: http://qtdn.wordpress.com/

Take care,

QDN

the unforgiven II

2009-08-05T21:21:00.006-04:00

a definitely middle eastern script

here is some critical analysis:

laura flanders is dumb. I base this involved observation on one thing she says in the very first minute of the video below, which pretty much renders the entire discussion pointless. also based on that one thing, I do not sympathize with anyone who is offended by anything of this sort (including myself), nor do I agree with people who say sacha baron cohen's performance is somehow analytical and "only for smart people to understand." once again a single fuck up is sufficient in order for me to lose all hope in humanity (for the day).

http://lauraflanders.firedoglake.com/2009/07/17/bruno-panel/

although richard kim does say one thing that is worth thinking about; that these movies are not critiquing homophobia or racism or whatever but tolerance.

My favorite art of the year

2009-05-27T15:16:00.002-04:00

Honors papers need mixtape style covers.

Drink a Sake on Suzuki

2009-05-15T22:14:00.004-04:00

This:

Victor Serge’s personality and life were typical in an extreme way, almost improbably so. From the middle of the last century onwards the Russian revolutionary movement produced a great many men who spent a considerable part of their lives as exiles abroad, as deportees in Siberia, as prison-inmates. Their ideas and personalities differed in many ways, but one thing they had in common: to be true to themselves was for most of them an obligation. They despised those personal advantages which are gained by accommodation to the existing order.

[...]

Of course, profound historical understanding and real revolutionary activity are impossible within the terms of bureaucratism or romanticism. One of the main hypocrisies of Stalinism was the creation of a system in which bureaucrats posed as revolutionary romantics, and employed romantics, who for their part posed as theorists. (The ideological amalgam of Stalinism combined the vulgarized Marxism of the German Social Democrats with the romanticism of the Russian narodniki.) Serge’s diametrical antiposition to this hypocrisy makes him—in a certain social and anthropological sense—the “anti-stalinist” par excellence. The monstrosity of Stalinism—and at the same time its positive historical significance in a certain period—lay in its formally conservative nature: Stalinist “centrism”—as opposed to Trotskyist “leftism” and Bukharinist “rightism”—was concerned with the conservation of Party and Power; principles and human beings were regarded as of secondary importance. Serge’s outlook was just the opposite. His absolute, emotional opposition to Stalinism produced an understanding which was most remarkable as a corrective (it was certainly not in itself sufficient to provide a historical interpretation).

X

this,
=
How I'm writing my Chechnya essay.

new Zizek, old Lenin

2009-05-13T20:40:00.003-04:00

For some reason Zizek's essay in NLR feels dated.

The footnotes,

[1] V. I. Lenin, ‘Notes of a Publicist’, published posthumously in Pravda, 16 April 1924; Collected Works, vol. 33, Moscow 1966, pp. 204–7.

[2] Samuel Beckett, ‘Worstward Ho’, Nohow On, London 1992, p. 101.

[3] Lenin, ‘Eleventh Congress of the RCP(B)’, Collected Works, vol. 33, pp. 281–3.

[4] Sándor Márai, Memoir of Hungary: 1944–1948, Budapest 1996.

[5] Moshe Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle [1968], Ann Arbor, MI 2005. pp. 131–2.

[6] Quoted in Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, Appendix 1, pp. 146–7.

[7] Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, p. 84.

[8] Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, p. 133.

[9] Lenin, ‘Better Fewer, But Better’, Collected Works, vol. 33, p. 495.

[10] Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, p. 125.

[11] Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, p. 124.

[12] Alain Badiou, The Meaning of Sarkozy, London and New York 2008, p. 115.

David Simon Murders Everything

2009-05-08T22:36:00.003-04:00

The Wire's creator recently got the chance to eviscerate his enemies in front of the United States Congress. Not surprisingly, the casualties from Simon's testimony include just about everyone and everything.

The internet:

it leeches that reporting from mainstream news publications, whereupon aggregating websites and bloggers contribute little more than repetition, commentary and froth. Meanwhile, readers acquire news from aggregators and abandon its point of origin, namely the newspapers themselves. In short, the parasite is slowly killing the host.

Capitalism:

Second, Wall Street and free market logic, having been a destructive force in journalism over the last few decades, is now not suddenly the answer.

Citizens:

Indeed, the very phrase “citizen journalist” strikes my ear as Orwellian. A neighbor who is a good listener and cares about people is a good neighbor; he is not in any sense a citizen social worker, just as a neighbor with a garden hose and good intentions is not a citizen firefighter. To say so is a heedless insult to trained social workers and firefighters.

Himself:

Well, so much for new media. But what about old media? Well, anyone listening carefully may have noted that—I’m sorry. Cut that part. Anyone listening carefully may have noted that I was brought out of my reporting position in 1995.

Winning:

They had arrived from somewhere else, and they—if they won a prize or two, they would be moving on to bigger and better opportunities within the chain[...]The self-gratification in my profession does not come, you see, from covering a city and covering it well, from explaining an increasingly complex and interconnected world to citizens, from holding basic institutions accountable. It comes from someone handing you a plaque and taking your picture.

I'm sure that after hearing all of this all present members of Congress packed their bags and killed themselves in despair.

back like cooked crack

2009-04-25T01:21:00.001-04:00

of course Zizek is on Twitter. what did you think it was gonna be?

in other worrisome news, we might be running out of ready-to-wear zizek iconography on the web and might have to resort to our own labor in the near future. damn it.

the roof vamoose, like a magic show

2009-04-21T20:21:00.004-04:00

Illusions

Clipse & Kanye West: "Kind of Like a Big Deal"

so cool you might have to zip your jacket up

2009-04-19T19:17:00.002-04:00

n+1: He's always billed as "Slavoj Zizek, Philosopher and Psychoanalyst." That made me wonder, is he really a psychoanalyst in the sense that I could be his patient?

AT: Absolutely not. And he's never successfully gone through analysis. He tells this story about how he lied his way through a few sessions with Jacques-Alain Miller, Lacan's son-in-law. He would invent dreams, tell Miller he was having sexual fantasies that he was making up.

and I still don't know if I want to see Examined Life or not

Carnegie Corp of NY's Scholarships Promote Sharia Law, Islam

2009-04-19T13:02:00.002-04:00

This is an actual headline that appeared on Campus Watch. The title links to an article from something called Creeping Sharia. This is the type of thing that appears on Campus Watch all the time and no one seems to care, but I think its important that we stop for a second and think about how ridiculous it is. Money quote,

Two other topics funded: "What's Missing When We Say Shari'a" and "Islamic Law and Legal Change". Get the idea?

Remember when there was a concern that Campus Watch was the beginning of a serious attempt to run critical scholars out of business? It's great to see that now its purpose has been reduced to reposting articles from slightly crazier blogs. Also, the image which perfectly matches the message of the Campus Watch/Creeping Sharia article is from the website of the "Whites only" British National Party.

ati alan ortadogu'yu gecmis sen hala komplodasin pc'desin

2009-04-06T11:59:00.003-04:00

from Visa for top Netenyahu aide in question

U.S. officials are also likely to find Arad, a long-time Netanyahu loyalist, difficult to deal with, apart from his intelligence past. Like Netanyahu, he opposed Israel's pullout from Gaza and as recently as last month suggested that he was against any territorial compromise with Palestinians, telling one television interviewer, "We want to relieve ourselves of the burden of Palestinian populations, not the territories."

...

For all of his academic and professional accomplishments, however, Arad showed remarkably poor judgment in his meeting with Franklin at the cafeteria in the Pentagon "on or about February 20, 2004," (...) In that meeting, according to the indictment, Arad ("...a person previously associated with an intelligence agency of Foreign Nation A") and Franklin discussed "...a Middle Eastern country's nuclear program."

In 2003-04, Lawrence Franklin had been the Iran specialist in the Department of Defense Policy Division headed by Undersecretary Douglas Feith, himself a long-time Likud supporter. Franklin worked in a unit called the Office of Special Plans (OSP), which was tasked, among other things, to make the case that Iraq posed a major - and soon-to-be-nuclear - threat to the U.S.

As that case fell apart in the aftermath of the 2003 U.S. invasion, Israel began warning about Iran's alleged nuclear-weapons programme, which was apparently the subject of Arad's tete-a-tete with Franklin, who was under covert surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Reading a Crappy Book on the Subway

2009-04-06T10:07:00.016-04:00

Today, on my way out to work I was browsing my bookshelf for something to read on the subway. I needed something literary, since reading anything theoretical/academic at that hour is a proven way of putting me to sleep, and I decided to give a shot to Reading Lolita in Tehran, purchased not by me - thank Allah.

I say that because right now I am on page 16, and somewhere around page 10 I started contemplating whether I have to actually finish this book to be able to opine on how self-congratulatory, blah and almost carelessly malicious it is, all at the same time. While I am tempted to think that Oberlin trained me well, this is so blatantly a pile of orientalist bullshit (so much that it excuses employing the otherwise exhausted o-word) that its lack of sincerity should be clear to all, save for white book club ladies and Christopher Hitchens.

You and the people you write about say "Islamic Republic of Iran" every time you refer to your country, really?

Here's the extreme Hamid Dabashi critique:
Native Informers and the Making of American Empire

Here's the idiotic Christopher Hitchens critique:
The Captive Mind Now (I want to believe the whole essay is an exercise in sarcasm, but it might not be)

Here's the one I tend to agree with, mostly because Dabashi's anger is very similar to Finkelstein's too careful study of "Of Time Immemorial"; the book is dishonest alright, but it is also so horrible as literary work that the anger is not worth it:
Pawn of the neocons?

Note that in life reaching total happiness is impossible and thus the last article too manages to fuck up in its last sentence. Which makes me go full circle and end up with Dabashi.

Lastly, for our following immersed in academia:
Reading Nafisi in the West: Authenticity, Orientalism, and "Liberating" Iranian Women

Hamish: New York Times Bestseller don't mean shit.

For the record

2009-04-02T16:46:00.003-04:00

I said that I want you all to know that my pariticpation was at the invitation of the University of San Francisco and that I strictly adhere to the boycott of Israel and I call on them all to boycott Israel at all levels. I told them that I met I(armed) Israelis first under occuapation in South Lebanon in 1982, and I resolved then that I would meet them only on my terms. I explained to them that I am strict against terrorists and terrorism: that I am opposed to any deal or negotiations with Al-Qa`idah or with Bin Laden and accordingly, I am opposed to any deal or compromise with the state that pioneered the practice of terrorism in the region.

-As'ad AbuKhalil

I thought we had an international court now..

2009-03-29T16:36:00.002-04:00

Spanish judge accuses six top Bush officials of torture

from the article:

If Garzón decided to go further and issued arrest warrants against the six, it would mean they would risk detention and extradition if they travelled outside the US. It would also present President Barack Obama with a serious dilemma. He would have either to open proceedings against the accused or tackle an extradition request from Spain.

This is what we call "sahalarımızda görmek istediğimiz hareketler" in Turkish. But it only makes Spain look good. This investigation could easily fall under ICC's jurisdiction, either via nationalities of the victims, detention centers in Poland and Romania, both of which are parties, or through a security council resolution if the Obama administration had the courage to hold itself up to the same standards they don't miss any opportunity to preach for others. Are the American courts "unable or unwilling" to try their own criminals? Well so are the Sudanese. But we have an international criminal court for those. Inspiring.

Thats the Point of Selling Crack

2009-03-27T22:32:00.006-04:00

Mos Def reciting MF Doom.

find five differences between israel and turkey*

2009-03-23T16:36:00.012-04:00

IHD 2008 Turkiye Insan Haklari Raporu/Turkey's 2008 Human Rights Report

I am currently on page 50 of 696. It's a fascinating read, gets better by the page**.

On page 49, I came across the incident I talked about
here. Or rather, I was talking shit about the reporting of the incident and the lack of clarity in terms of what's what and who's who. There are only so many W questions a reporter needs to answer, it shouldn't take a human rights report to do the job.

IHD: 30 Eylül'de Balıkesir'in Ayvalık Ilçesi'nin Altınova Beldesi'nde Murat Aygün, husumetli olduğu Oğuz Dörtkardes'le (23) “yüksek sesle müzik dinlediği” için baslayan tartısmanın kavgaya dönmesinin ardından, Dörtkardes ve yanındakilerin üzerine kamyonetini sürdü. Aracın altında sürüklenen Dörtkardes ile Ezer Kırcalı (31) adlı iki kisi öldü, 6 kisi yaralandı. Olayı duyanlar ise Murat Aksu'nun Kürt olmasını bahane ederek Altınova'da oturan Kürtlerin evlerini ve isyerlerini tahrip etti, bir ev ve minibüs atese verildi. Çıkan olaylarda 36 ev ve isyerinin hasar gördü. Güvenlik güçleri önlem aldığı Altınova'ya gelen Balıkesir Valisi Selahattin Hatipoğlu ise kalabalığı sakinlestirmeye çalısarak Kürtlerin evlerinin ve isyerlerinin tahrip edilmesinin anlayısla karsıladıklarını açıkladı. Saldırılar esnasında gruba herhangi bir müdahalede bulunmayan güvenlik güçleri 37 kisiyi gözaltına aldı ve aralarında Murat Aygün'ün de bulunduğu 10 kisi tutuklandı. Öte yandan Balıkesir Valiliği, bölgeye inceleme yapmak için bir heyet gönderen Demokratik Toplum Partisi'ne, heyetin “halkı kıskırtabilecekleri” gerekçesiyle izin vermedi.

some other things I learned from this report:
-legal institutions think The Republic of Turkey has so much extra time and money that they start a process for investigating Ocalan's 28 lawyers for addressing him "many times" using the word 'Sayin' in their faxes, which for all practical purposes means "Mr."
-following the above, investigation was started for 40 PKK member inmates in Adiyaman's high security prison who filed a petition saying "we call Ocalan 'Sayin' and hereby give ourselves in".
-within that investigation the Kurdish inmates gave their depositions in Kurdish. following this a second investigation was started about them.
-it kinda goes on likes this for 50 pages. I am bored.

*try harder
**no access to those who only speak a little Spanish

2009-03-16T16:18:00.002-04:00

Hardliner Avigdor Lieberman set to become Israel's foreign minister

Let me make a prediction: This fascist is going to help Palestinians in the long run, involuntarily of course.

2009-02-24T02:35:00.002-05:00

I spoke too soon about Dershowitz. Here's to a day without bullies.

The Brooklyn of the Middle East

2009-02-19T16:28:00.006-05:00

Honestly, I'd rather be friends with the mountains.

Christopher Hitchens finds himself in Beirut this week. Yeah, I know, but it gets even better. The first report about what Hitch's Lawrence of Arabia type mission was that he provided decisively less gully* than some SSNP members. From AngryArab:

At the invitation of Hariri-Saudi group, Hitchens is visiting Lebanon. A source sent me this: "I dont know if you find this as news worthy or not, but Christopher Hitchens is currently in Beirut sponsored by the same group that owns that crap NOW Lebanon. He got in a few nights ago and surprisingly went out drinking. On his way out of the bar he saw an SSNP poster and wrote on it "Fuck the SSNP". There just happened to be some SSNP thugs near by--most likely asking people for their ID, and most likely to no avail--and saw him write on the poster and kicked his ass. He is still walking with a limp."

Theres lots of intellectuals who QDN would support the slapping up of**. Hitchens isn't one of them. Still, you think afterbeing waterboarded a few fists wouldn't be a problem for him. Then again, like some of Hitchens' other experiences this slapping may not have even happened. AngryArab again,

After spending two days in Lebanon, Christopher Hitchens now poses as an expert on Lebanese developments. I wonder if he will claim that he interviewed (the dead) Abu Nidal, as he once did in the 1980s.

A report on some of the less emasculating experiences Hitchens had in Beirut can be found here

* I know you don't know what this means.
** They know who they are.

oh Dersh...

2009-02-14T03:52:00.005-05:00

I know that the recent accomplishment of our comrades at Hampshire's SJP deserves its own post, but rest assured that I will be congratulating them in person.

This all has been very moving and inspiring to follow. Meanwhile here's something funny from SJP's website:

Alan Dershowitz has just called SJP members and has threatened to start an international campaign to divest from Hampshire College.

Read the comments too.

Happy Valentine's Day Dersh!

sömürgeci yengeç*

2009-02-09T14:36:00.004-05:00

And here we thought acting on your xenophobia was a habit of the backwards peoples from non-EU countries.

Indian immigrant set on fire in Italy

A homeless Indian immigrant has been beaten up and set on fire near Rome. The victim, who has been admitted to hospital with serious burns, was sleeping at the train station in the town of Nettuno when he was attacked by three young men. They beat him brutally and set him on fire using petrol. A police official said the attack was apparently not motivated by xenophobia. The three had been drinking and using drugs, and wanted to make "a powerful gesture".

Both opposition leader Walter Veltroni and Foreign Minister Franco Frattini have strongly condemned the attack. Italian migrant organisations have announced they will hold an anti-racism demonstration on Monday.

*lyrics from Ceza song Kim Neden Öldü, which I thought of upon stumbling on this story.

New History

2009-01-26T11:09:00.003-05:00

What Uri Dromi says about Hamas is pure and poisonous Israeli propaganda (This Hamas hallucination, 23 January). In every respect his article is almost the exact opposite of the truth. Dromi claims that: "The Orwellian mindset of the organisation is as much a barrier to peace as the rockets it fires." But it is the newspeak of Israeli propagandists like Dromi that is truly Orwellian.

Over the last four weeks the powerful Israeli propaganda machine has been churning out lie after lie about Hamas in order to excuse its own inexcusable onslaught. Israel stopped journalists going into Gaza, preventing any independent reporting on the war crimes its forces were committing. Truth is usually the first casualty in war. Gaza was not even a war in the conventional sense of the word; it was one-sided carnage.

Here are some of the facts Dromi ignores or wilfully misrepresents. First, Hamas is the democratically elected government of the Palestinian people, not the corrupt regime led by Mahmoud Abbas. Second, Hamas spokesmen have repeatedly declared their readiness for a long-term ceasefire. Khalid Mish'al recently did so on these pages (Comment, 6 January). Third, Hamas has a solid record of observing ceasefires, while Israel has a consistent record of sabotaging them. Fourth, even during the ceasefire Israel did not lift its economic blockade of the 1.5 million inhabitants of Gaza, a form of collective punishment forbidden by international law. Fifth, the offensive unleashed in Gaza was illegal, immoral and unnecessary. If all Israel wanted was to stop rocket attacks from Gaza, all it had to do was to observe the ceasefire brokered by Egypt in June 2008.
Professor Avi Shlaim
Oxford

Two things. 1) Its very encouraging to see how outspoken Avi Shlaim has become since the assault on Gaza started. 2) It used to take decades for Israeli propaganda to be debunked. Even though Walid Khalidi proved in 1960 that there were no "Arab Radio Broadcasts" only in the 1980's when the Israeli archives on 1948 were opened to scholars did it become mainstream to speak of the expulsion of the Palestinians. Now what happened in 1948 is correctly seen as an Ethnic Cleansing. Today Israel's lies are so transparently contrived and in contradiction with common sense that everything that their spokespeople say is almost immediately disproved. I actually think that their propaganda efforts are even less successful than their military ones.

LSE

2009-01-25T13:25:00.004-05:00

To the Students of the LSE

These are very dark days for the long-suffering Palestinians. Israel's savage assault on the defenceless people of Gaza pushed them to the verge of a humanitarian catastrophe. The one-sided carnage has temporarily stopped but the economic blockade, the oppression, and the occupation continue. Only sustained international pressure, including trade sanctions and an arms embargo, can put an end to Israel's criminal conduct.
But there is no leadership worthy of the name. Our government is morally bankrupt. It is pusillanimous and feeble and completely out of touch with public opinion. If there was ever a time for direct action, this is the time. And if there was ever an issue that called for a firm moral stand, Gaza is that issue.
I salute you on the brave and altruistic stand that you have taken on behalf of the people of Gaza. I admire your courage and your commitment.
You have my unqualified sympathy and support in your struggle for justice for the Palestinian people.

Avi Shlaim, Oxford

Posted on the LSE 'Occupation Group' blog

Waltz with us

2009-01-25T13:01:00.002-05:00

At Sabra and Chatila the first journalist to find out about the massacre was an Israeli and he desperately tried to get it stopped. This would not happen today because Israeli journalists, along with all foreign journalists, were banned from entering Gaza before the Israeli bombardment started. This has made it far easier for the government to sell the official line about what a great success the operation has been.

Patrick Cockburn, Counterpunch.

EJH

2009-01-24T20:02:00.002-05:00

Like the war in Lebanon in 2006, Gaza has darkened the outlook for the future of Israel. It has also darkened the outlook for the nine million Jews who live in the diaspora. Let me not beat about the bush: criticism of Israel does not imply anti-semitism, but the actions of the government of Israel occasion shame among Jews and, more than anything else, they give rise to anti-semitism today. Since 1945 the Jews, inside and outside Israel, have enormously benefited from the bad conscience of a Western world that had refused Jewish immigration in the 1930s before committing or failing to resist genocide. How much of that bad conscience, which virtually eliminated anti-semitism in the West for sixty years and produced a golden era for its diaspora, is left today?

This is in the responses compiled by LRB.

Mao, Mao, Mao!

2009-01-24T19:31:00.005-05:00

Finkelstein:

The fundamental motives behind the latest Israeli attack on Gaza lie elsewhere: (1) in the need to restore Israel's "deterrence capacity," and (2) in the threat posed by a new Palestinian "peace offensive."

Israel's "larger concern" in the current offensive, New York Times Middle East correspondent Ethan Bronner reported, quoting Israeli sources, was to "re-establish Israeli deterrence," because "its enemies are less afraid of it than they once were, or should be."[5] Preserving its deterrence capacity has always loomed large in Israeli strategic doctrine. Indeed, it was the main impetus behind Israel's first-strike against Egypt in June 1967 that resulted in Israel's occupation of Gaza (and the West Bank). To justify the onslaught on Gaza, Israeli historian Benny Morris wrote that "[m]any Israelis feel that the walls...are closing in...much as they felt in early June 1967."[6] Ordinary Israelis no doubt felt threatened in June 1967, but -- as Morris surely knows -- the Israeli leadership experienced no such trepidation.
[...]
The expulsion of the Israeli occupying army by Hezbollah in May 2000 posed a major new challenge to Israel's deterrence capacity. The fact that Israel suffered a humiliating defeat, one celebrated throughout the Arab world, made another war well-nigh inevitable. Israel almost immediately began planning for the next round, and in summer 2006 found a pretext when Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers (several others were killed in the firefight) and demanded in exchange the release of Lebanese prisoners held by Israel. Although Israel unleashed the fury of its air force and geared up for a ground invasion, it suffered yet another ignominious defeat.
[...]
After the 2006 Lebanon war Israel was itching to take on Hezbollah again, but did not yet have a military option against it.

Its stuff like this that makes the injunction to 'Love Israel' or to see the Israeli state as the manifestation of some "Birthright' of mine either laughable or offensive. What's lovable here? What 'rights' does anyone think I want to lay claim to? Between 1982 and 2006 Israel lost two wars against what is arguably one of the best guerrilla armies in history. It has no real interests in Lebanon and no strategic reason to perpetuate its conflicts with Hezbollah and Syria. Arguably it could decisively end these conflict by entering into a peace agreement with Syria that would require it to relinquish the Golan Heights. But this is unacceptable to the people of the "the only democracy in the Middle East" and their leaders so the war must go on. If you start from such a batshit crazy position you can only really go to crazier and crazier places. So when you get embarrassed by a well trained, experienced, and armed guerrilla army you fret about your lack of 'deterrence capability' (remember its not at all clear what is being deterred at this point, other than a peace agreement based on international law) so then you conspire to kill a large amount of defenseless people so as to restore this magical deterrence.

I'm sure Hassan Nasrallah is pissing himself in fear now that Israel has seized back its 'deterrence'.

I also think that if this were Paris in 1967 Tzip Livni would be trying to give us copies of the little red book.

the point of going to protests, writing letters, debating, boycotting

2009-01-19T18:59:00.001-05:00

Great article from Ali Abunimah, as usual:

Israel's "military deterrent" has now been repeatedly discredited as a means to force Palestinians and other Arabs to accept Zionist supremacy as inevitable and permanent. Now, the other pillar of Israeli power -- Western support and complicity -- is starting to crack. We must do all we can to push it over.

your henhouse could be next

2009-01-19T06:41:00.003-05:00

Hamas did this to him

Here is an article proving just how successful IDF's Operation Cast Lead has been:

Despite ceasefire declared by Israel, Sunday sees Palestinian gunmen fire at least 15 rockets, three mortar shells from Gaza. Rockets land in Sderot, Kiryat Gat, Ashkelon, Ashdod and western Negev kibbutzim. Man moderately injured, Woman lightly wounded by shrapnel, several people suffers shock, building damaged. One rocket hits henhouse, killing dozens of chickens

that's right. the chicken of Ashkelon are in grave danger, their just plight obviously being ignored, and here are the anti-Zionist pundits crying over 400 Palestinian children dead. Not to mention people 'in shock.' By those standards I should be classified as a victim and compensated for my Israel-induced bulimia.

something about this time is indeed different

2009-01-16T18:24:00.001-05:00

Three simple proposals

1. Get rid of the illusion that Israel is "useful" to the West.
2. Allow non-Jews to speak their mind about Israel
3. The practical initiatives are summed up in three letters : BDS- Boycott, disinvestment, sanctions

what's the use?

2009-01-15T09:05:00.003-05:00

Of Sowing and Harvests: Subcomandante Marcos' Speech on Gaza

Maybe our thinking is very simple, and we're lacking the nuances and annotations that are always so necessary in analyses, but to the Zapatistas it looks like there's a professional army murdering a defenseless population.

Who from below and to the left can remain silent?

Is it useful to say something? Do our cries stop even one bomb? Does our word save the life of even one Palestinian?

We think that yes, it is useful. Maybe we don't stop a bomb and our word won't turn into an armored shield so that that 5.56 mm or 9 mm caliber bullet with the letters "IMI" or "Israeli Military Industry" etched into the base of the cartridge won't hit the chest of a girl or boy, but perhaps our word can manage to join forces with others in Mexico and the world and perhaps first it's heard as a murmur, then out loud, and then a scream that they hear in Gaza.

We don't know about you, but we Zapatistas from the EZLN, we know how important it is, in the middle of destruction and death, to hear some words of encouragement.
I don't know how to explain it, but it turns out that yes, words from afar might not stop a bomb, but it's as if a crack were opened in the black room of death and a tiny ray of light slips in.

it was about time I used my transcribing skills

2009-01-15T06:48:00.006-05:00

I just watched the press conference in Tel Aviv by Ban Ki-Moon and Livni. Here are the major points:

Ban Ki Moon for the UN: I come here with a mission. rocket attacks are horrible, we have always condemned them and still do. Israelis have to be secure. We understand Israel. We're also kind of sad about the bombardment of the UN compound a few hours ago, but I just talked to Barak about it and he said it was a mistake so I was like ok. Oh and there is this thing called a humanitarian crisis, and we are so very thankful to Israel for setting up a humanitarian center, they are so great. Thanks.

Livni for Israel: How many times do I have to say that we do not give a flying fuck about any of this? Oh also, this is not about Palestinians versus Israel, but about the free world versus the bad people, and this means that we are on the same side with the UN, the West and the legitimate Palestinian government of Abbas. Hamas does not share the same values we share here in the free world*. The humanitarian crisis is also important, but not so much. We just won't allow a situation where our citizens can't go to school in comfort, so yeah. We will continue to bomb the shit out of Gaza until the very end because that's what they deserve.

Watch the video if you don't believe me.
*This one is a direct quote. I think she means values like freedom of press, freedom of speech, freedom to elect representatives, human rights, children's rights, ET CETERA.

it's an unfair world

2009-01-14T17:58:00.007-05:00

let's see here. these people are lying, the Red Cross is lying, the kids surviving the massacre are lying, the UN is lying, Al Jazeera is lying, this person made this story up, Human Rights Watch is lying, fuck, even this person from Haaretzis lying. they are ALL lying anti-Semites, including this one, no matter how much he denies it.

and all of those pictures of dead babies were done on the latest Adobe Photoshop by Hamas militants sitting in their Mac labs, like this one here:

lies just don't stop, because the whole world is against Israel. this dude I listened to today on Al Jazeera, who said that his 3 year old daughter's favorite game is to lie still on a blanket pretending to be killed and ask her siblings to carry her, was lying as well. very clever story though, I must say.

settler shoots palestinian who threw rocks at his car

2009-01-14T08:02:00.003-05:00

http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1055208.html

West Bankers should be thankful it wasn't 10 Palestinians per usual calculations.

Of course, neither this particular story, nor others of Palestinians in the West Bank shot and killed by the Israeli police forces, beaten, arrested and detained in hundreds, intimidated, evacuated from their homes, and caged with checkpoints are reported by any of the major news networks.

examplary journalists, human beings

2009-01-13T18:52:00.006-05:00

... or just people doing their jobs. except it shouldn't take much to come off as a symbol of dignity when interviewing Mark Regev thanks to what he represents.

BBC: regarding the bombing of the UN school

Alex Thomson: regarding the Zeitun massacre and the Red Cross not being allowed in

Al Jazeera, with guest appearance by the major woman who is apparently put on TV all the time because she is a woman and that's supposed to be sympathetic. she is especially fuzzy in this one: regarding the use of white phophorus

I got to see one of these live on Al Jazeera regarding the Zeitun massacre, in which Mark Regev first said nothing of that sort happened, and later had to change that to "I actually don't know" because the journalist did his job. Since this seems to be his standard conduct, and since he is the official spokesman, the question naturally comes to mind, what the fuck do you know?

and just in case somebody thinks this is somehow a random or novel occurance, here the blatant lies making even the CNN look good, from 2006: Israeli spokeswoman apologizes for bombing the shit out of civilian centers while still trying to justify it, promises investigation

I will confess to not being able to watch any of these videos till the very end, especially the last one, because it literally makes me want to throw up. as in my dinner wants to get out. I kid you not.

(regarding the STILL going on youtube ban, dear Turkish state, sana bişey derdim ama hadi neyse)

greek balls

2009-01-13T17:41:00.001-05:00

US cancels Israel arms shipment over Greek objections

"I think the Greek government had some issue with the offloading of some of that shipment in their country and so we are finding alternative means of getting that entire shipment to its proper destination in Israel," spokesman Geoff Morrell told a news conference.

Oh I know, how about Egypt?

QDN co-founder, beautiful person, our light of hope within this darkness turns 21

2009-01-12T08:50:00.007-05:00

Happy birthday. The rest of us here at QDN wish you a year better than the last one. May you remain as awesome to the end of your time.

Subjectivity

2009-01-11T13:08:00.002-05:00

From a recent article in MERIP.

football is life, Kanoute is the man

2009-01-09T19:10:00.005-05:00

Kanoute after scoring for Sevilla against Deportivo. He got a yellow card and a 3000 euro fine.

Jewish women occupy Israeli Embassy in Toronto

2009-01-07T13:45:00.002-05:00

Below is their press release that got circulated. As I make this post they have already been arrested.

Toronto: Wednesday January 8, 2009 Time: 10:25 am

A diverse group of Jewish Canadian women are currently occupying the Israeli consulate at 180 Bloor Street West in Toronto. This action is in protest against the on-going Israeli assault on the people of Gaza.

The group is carrying out this occupation in solidarity with the 1.5 million people of Gaza and to ensure that Jewish voices against the massacre in Gaza are being heard. They are demanding that Israel end its military assault and lift the 18-month siege on the Gaza Strip to allow humanitarian aid into the territory.

Israel has been carrying out a full-scale military assault on the Gaza Strip since December 27, 2008. At least 660 people have been killed and 3000 injured in the air strikes and in the ground invasion that began on January 3, 2009. Israel has ignored international calls for a ceasefire and is refusing to allow food, adequate medical supplies and other necessities of life into the Gaza Strip.

Protesters are outraged at Israel′s latest assault on the Palestinian people and by the Canadian government′s refusal to condemn these massacres. They are deeply concerned that Canadians are hearing the views of pro-Israel groups who are being represented as the only voice of Jewish Canadians. The protesters have occupied the consulate to send a clear statement that many Jewish-Canadians do not support Israel′s violence and apartheid policies. They are joining with people of conscience all across the world who are demanding an end to Israeli aggression and justice for the Palestinian people.

The group includes: Judy Rebick, professor; Judith Deutsch, psychoanalyst and president of Science for Peace; B.H. Yael, filmmaker; Smadar Carmon, an Canadian Israeli peace activist and others.

Spokespersons for the group will be outside the Israeli consulate.

For more information contact:
Dr. Miriam Garfinkle
Phone: 416-731-6605

Cathy Gulkin
Phone: 416-697-0768
Email: cgulkin@rogers.com

Judy Rebick
Phone: 647-388-1053

pigs on the wing

2009-01-06T07:46:00.003-05:00

The truce was broken on November 4th. How many more times does this need to be said before criminals like livni and barak can appear before the world and lie with their bold faces on?

spirit of QDN well and alive out in academia

2009-01-05T10:25:00.003-05:00

from the listserv of sociologists I am on:

Ex post facto sociological musings deconstructing particular slices of the past can hardly bring us to the peaceful constructivism necessary for a more desirable future.

wise words

2009-01-05T10:09:00.002-05:00

"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends," uttered by Martin Luther King, quoted by Cynthia McKinney, aimed at Barack Obama, but surely not just that.

from the latest BBC story

2009-01-05T06:23:00.000-05:00

"Palestinian medical sources say the death toll stands at more than 500, with some 2,500 people wounded. These figures cannot be independently verified. Five Israelis have been killed in Palestinian militant rocket attacks since the start of the Israeli incursion, which is now in its 10th day.

Ehud Barak said the offensive would continue until "peace and tranquility" was secured for Israeli civilians."

I don't know what to say.

Queering The Nation

2009-01-04T15:09:00.005-05:00

It's good to see that this guy is on our side

From a NYT story on yesterday's Times Square protest

if you hear something say everything

2009-01-03T07:22:00.001-05:00

and one dude abides
http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/01/02/family.grounded/index.html

all peoples are equal, but some have PR Directorates to make their war look prettier

2009-01-03T04:01:00.005-05:00

A little from the story of PR success from The Jewish Community Online. Sounds to me like they didn't just decide to get up and go one day when the rocket attacks became overwhelming:

The international media were directed to a press centre set up by the Foreign Ministry in Sderot itself so that foreign reporters would spend as much time as possible in the main civilian area affected by Hamas rockets. When the IDF was represented on the international TV networks, it was by Major Avital Leibovich to project a feminine and softer image.

Ministers have been ordered by the Cabinet Secretary not to give interviews without authorisation so as not to repeat the PR disaster of a year ago, when Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai threatened the Palestinians with a “holocaust”.

For the first time, sufficient numbers of spokespeople in a range of languages were appointed and briefed in advance. Mr Pazner gave close to 100 interviews in the first three days of the operation, in English, French, Spanish and Italian.

In his view, the toughest and most hostile questioning was “definitely by the Spanish interviewers, and also the French, especially the Canadian French”.

Israeli diplomats and spokespeople working with the British media have said that so far “most of the hostility has been in the print media, especially in The Guardian and The Independent. The electronic media, including also the BBC, have made more of an effort to seem even-handed.

“The coverage is definitely less hostile to Israel than what we saw during the Second Lebanon War two-and-a-half years ago.”

Both the Prime Minister’s Office and the Foreign Ministry ran monitoring services to view foreign media coverage and pass the results back to press officers to enable them to address the claims being put forward by reporters and Palestinian interviewees.

---

Here is what you won't find in the mainstream media: photos from Gaza

---

BBC does stuff to please us, deny accusations above
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7809371.stm

the media needs to stop blatantly lying

2009-01-01T03:05:00.002-05:00

At least the Guardian has stopped feeding into the false causality and fooling people by repeating that Hamas has broken the truce and Israel is answering the latest rocket attacks. If one more person reiterates this point to me I will smack them in the face.

City Gates

2008-12-31T21:36:00.004-05:00

"And she told him unbelievable things, she said that everyone, that the dead were everyone, and that this thing killing the children we know no reason for, this thing that kills will kill everyone." -Elias Khoury

"In nearly 25 years of involvement with Gaza and Palestinians, I have not had to confront the horrific image of burned children – until today.

Yet for Palestinians it is more than an image, it is a reality, and because of that I fear something profound has changed that will not easily be undone. For how, in the context of Gaza today, does one speak of reconciliation as a path to liberation, of sympathy as a source of understanding? Where does one find or even begin to create a common field of human undertaking (to borrow from the late, acclaimed Palestinian scholar, Edward Said) so essential to coexistence?

It is one thing to take an individual's land, his home, his livelihood, to denigrate his claims, or ignore his emotions. It is another to destroy his child. What happens to a society where renewal is denied and all possibility has ended?" -Sara Roy

the two terms of dissent

2008-12-31T07:43:00.002-05:00

A'sad Abukhalil edit: by Turkish poet Nevzat Çelik (my translation)

certainly we are not that many
we are not on that side with the many
we will be kurds in turkey
armenian among kurds
asyrrian among armenians
we’ll go be turkish in germany
surinamese in holland
algerian in france
azeri in iran
pitch black in america
surely native american among the black majority
in israel, palestinian
a cat against a dog
a bird against a cat
bugs and insects against the bird
referees will always root for the opposite team
and we’ll always end up with seven players
we will be the camellia among flowers
on the side of our lesser arm,
we will be on the left
this is the first term of dissent
and there will be few of us even on the left
because while reproducing this revolution
we will be swiftly lessening into the next
and this is the second term of dissent.

New School is Occupied!

2008-12-18T14:20:00.001-05:00

http://gothamist.com/2008/12/18/new_school.php

An Open Letter: Come Occupy a Building with Us...Now

Dear Friends,

We are writing to you from the inside of the New School Graduate
Faculty Building on 65 5th Ave. We are occupying it. Right now.
Literally.

Students of the New School University, along with our partners from
other universities and groups - like NYU, Hunter College, City College
of NY, CUNY Graduate Center, and Borough of Manhattan Community
College, have organically risen up to demand the resignation of
President Bob Kerrey, Executive Vice President James Murtha, and Board
Member/torturer Robert B. Millard (he multi-tasks). We have come
together to prevent our study spaces from being flattened by corporate
bulldozers, to have a say in who runs this school, to demand that the
money we spend on this institution be used to facilitate the creation
of a better society, not to build bigger buildings or invest in
companies that make war. We have come here not only to make demands,
but also to live them. Our presence makes it clear that this school is
ours, and yours, if you are with us.

The outside doors have been closed now, so we can't exactly invite you
in...sorry... We know you wanted a piece of the action, but we'll be
around for quite some time. Join us at 7 AM tomorrow when the doors
open again, or come now to stand outside with a sign in solidarity.
You are cordially invited to join us in any way you can. We are not
going anywhere. In the meantime, check out our Web site:
www.newschoolinexile.com. We have all night to make things
interesting, and the website will continue to be updated. Stay tuned
for the musical pieces, doctoral dissertations, and creative
finger-paintings that seem to be the natural result of 150 students
locked into a building together for a night.

We are here, making decisions collectively, doing teach-ins, listening
to music, studying, singing. We've got an upright bassist, guitarists
and vocalists (If anyone can volunteer a drum-set we'll be well on our
way...). We'll be here until this university changes, or until the
party gets boring (but it doesn't seem likely that will happen). We're
not going anywhere. We hope to see you soon, and if you really can't
wait a few hours - what the hell - occupy your own universities or
work spaces.

Come use your voice to declare loudly that this school and this world
are yours. Come use your mind to think up a better world. Come use
your body to create it, one all-nighter in the university cafeteria at
a time. Come stand in solidarity with the students, faculty, and staff
of this university. Come to write letters of support to the people of
the village of Thanh Phong whose parents were murdered by the current
President of the New School during his service in Vietnam. Come join
the struggle with the people of Iraq who are being tortured and killed
by a company funded by this university and represented on the New
School Board of Trustees. Come here to join the uprisings and
outpouring of passionate resistance currently taking place all over
this country, and all over the worlds - from factory workers in
Chicago to students in Greece. Come for yourself. Come for all of us.

In solidarity,

The New School in Exile

this will be straightforward

2008-12-05T06:48:00.003-05:00

we know officially love finkelstein. as in not just admire his work and integrity, but are all warm and squishy inside for him. because he is that awesome.

as I bid farewell to Radical Activist U

2008-12-04T00:21:00.009-05:00

since it is never late for a little nostalgia and often too early to start my next paper, I recently revisited this precious gem by Front Page.

I'm surprised women studies isn't in quotes, because free speech, comparative american studies and transgender are. To make the most out of this classic, I present you with this useful checklist.

Look around and check for each one of these that you frequently see:
-radical political and sexual indoctrination by the faculty and administration
-faculty and administrators helping students organize protests against their country
-sending 200 students or more to most major anti-war and anti-globalization protests across the nation
-a long history of hypocrisy on Middle Eastern policy (namely vitriolic anti-Israel teach-ins and education sessions led by Oberlin’s faculty, flyers advertising a week of pro-Palestinian propaganda by faculty and guest speakers on one hand and the president calling "zionism=racism" graffiti hurtful on the other)
-indulging in “hating whitey.”
-faculty approving an entire (emphasis mine) academic program called “Comparative American Studies” – which includes “queer studies” – the central focus of which will be how white males have oppressed all those of an alternate sex, race or sexual preference since before our country’s inception.
-orgies held on campus
-gay people. everywhere.
-a gay Muslim.
-queer activists who want to battle neo-conservative American leaders in a quest to prevent a new fascist American state. And then encourage students to have sex.

Now count your checks.

Depending on who you are, you can:
a) decide to apply to Oberlin
b) wish you attended Oberlin 10 years ago
c) realize you are not quite making the most of your RAU experience
d) congratulate yourself on not being a dumbfuck like the author of this article, or a Republican for that matter

also depending on who you are, I leave you with some good news or bad news. just think, what would Jean Pearce do?

speak with plain dialectics.

2008-11-20T21:13:00.007-05:00

Now that the library stocks the London Review of Books I finally feel like I go to a real school. Since i've been here they've had AIPAC's Near East Report newsletter and its Cuban counterpart, Gramma Internationale so I guess that after Obama won they pretty much had no choice but accept change.

A few points:
1. The LRB is ridiculously oversized. I had pretty much been able to forget this because I've become so used to reading it online but yesterday I felt like a total asshole, showoff carrying it up to the third floor. I can't believe I used to read this thing on the subway.
2. Compared to reading the LRB online, reading the magazine in print feels kind of like going through a revolution in reverse. Before I could start reading an article by Said about his encounter with Sartre. Then, after just a few more-or-less random choices I could wind up here:

Waking to find myself a touch genocidal, I would, I imagine, be uncertain how to proceed. An unprovoked attack on my target group with whatever weapon came to hand might take out a few of them, but also bring my venture to a premature end. Reflecting that few are lucky enough to be in a position to do the job themselves, I could either confine myself to advocacy, or else embark on the difficult and protracted business of getting into a position in which I could expect others to obey my orders.

3. I guess this is kind of self-evident, but I'll write it anyway. The LRB is New Left Review for quitters.

The first thing I did after finding the review was to read Elif Bautman's article titled On Complaining. . Yes, the article is now available online for free, but in the spirit of this post I won't link to it. Bautman's essay is a critique of a recently published Foucault, Althusser, and Derrida apologetic that seems especially dumb. I'm not going to put long quotes from the article here, although I initially wanted to, because I think that I have already done enough to spoil the fun of reading Bautman by telling you all the stuff I learned about Althusser from it.

I wasn't familiar with Bautman before reading "On Complaining." I did some research and found out a few things. 1) she has a website that is inappropriately awesome for someone not that well-known. Still, I like it, and I am happy that it exists. 2) through this website you can find out that she knew about the band Vampire Weekend before anybody else. Status aint Hood had some nice things to say about this band, so, as Status would say, 3) Bautman just finished a PHD in comparative lit. and i think I find its basic ideas intelligible. The first chapter is available for download from her website. 4) The LRB review was so scathing that I'm sure the author of the book under review will have to respond. My revolutionary subjectivity tells me that a mixtape with a cover that looks something like this

Real Talk.

2008-11-18T20:14:00.003-05:00

Yeah, it's kind of like this.

About 3 months ago I predicted on this blog that Slavoj Zizek would start taking shots at Noam Chomsky.*Anyone who knows how competitive the contest for the title of world's most revered public intellectual is could have seen this coming. And after seeing both Zizek! and Chomsky's own Zeitgeist films produced documentary Manufacturing Consent I was shaken once again by this epiphany. A day later, Zizek did the predictably dramatic, or REAL dramatic, thing and gave this piece of wisdom away for free on the LRB website

Noam Chomsky called for people to vote for Obama ‘without illusions’. I fully share Chomsky’s doubts about the real consequences of Obama’s victory: from a pragmatic perspective, it is quite possible that Obama will make only some minor improvements, turning out to be ‘Bush with a human face’. He will pursue the same basic policies in a more attractive way and thus effectively strengthen the US hegemony, damaged by the catastrophe of the Bush years.
There is nonetheless something deeply wrong with this reaction – a key dimension is missing from it. Obama’s victory is not just another shift in the eternal parliamentary struggle for a majority, with all the pragmatic calculations and manipulations that involves. It is a sign of something more.

Blam! Blam! Ether!!**

Zizek continues with this typically thoughtful and deeply contemplative judgement:

This is why an American friend of mine, a hardened leftist with no illusions, cried when the news came of Obama’s victory. Whatever our doubts, for that moment each of us was free and participating in the universal freedom of humanity.

I wonder how Chomsky is going to respond. I don't want to push this rap beef is like the London Review of Books analogy too far, but I suspect Chomsky is gonna drop a mixtape of a lectures in which he shoots back at Zizek REALly soon. The image on the cover will probably look something like this...

*Footage not found.
** Rap jargon you won't understand. Consult your Urban Dictionary.

not so much.

2008-11-04T19:11:00.005-05:00

Check this:

It's 7 pm EST and this just in from ABC News: "Despite the possibility of Barack Obama being the nation's first black president, the turnout of black voters as a percentage of the national vote was at 13 percent, just slightly higher than in 2004, according to early exit polls."

What is the point of this story when it's 3.30 pm on the West Coast, there are 3 states where polls are closed and the highest percentage of precints reported in any state is 12%? Yeah.

No point: like t.v.'s in the back-seat's headrest

2008-10-28T23:29:00.006-04:00

I promise that we will make it to this lecture.

QDN favorite, philosopher, political scientist, dialectician, and economist, Slavoj Zizek was recently published in the International Journal of Zizek Studies.

QDN congratulates Zizek on his unusual accomplishment making it into the peer reviewed section of the journal which bears his name. Especially since we often think of him as little more than an intellectual curiosity with the bad habit of using films to explain almost everything. Really, SZ, well done.

Unfortunately the fascists at "the provincial pamphlet of Hacizade mutterings" still won't take someone's submissions.

While officially, I think Zizek's presence in his own journal is due to the fact that no one is going to pay $40 for a defense of Lenin and Heidegger, during the first major recession of the 21st century, I genuinley look forward to proudly walking around with the contented feeling that someday I will read "Language, Violence and Non-Violence". I probably will not, however, read SZ's advice column in LRB on the financial crisis, titled, "Don't Just do Something, Talk." Thanks.

analyze this (PLEASE!)

2008-10-02T15:43:00.007-04:00

Turkish news reporting could be contributing its share to normalization and reconciliation with the country's Kurdish population by acknowledging certain facts first, except journalists seem to be insisting on continuing their idiotic tradition of writing news stories without feeling the need to calling involved parties by their relevant group/category identification, or pointing to the underlying causes of an event, conflict, mobilization, protest, whatever. It's almost like analysis is prohibited.

Case in point, respectable news source NTVMSNBC reports the clash in Altinova between Kurds and Turks, and the instant-pogrom that immediately followed. Except nowhere in the story this is mentioned.

It reads, "Tension in Altinova" (I would call an incident in which two people died and more were hospitalized by a name other than tension), but moving on.. Let's see what information we are given.

BALIKESİR - Balıkesir’in Ayvalık ilçesine bağlı Altınova beldesindeki olaylar, doğu kökenli bir grupla karşıt grup arasında “yüksek sesle müzik dinleme” tartışmasıyla başladı. Tartışma kısa sürede kavgaya dönüştü. Kavgayı duyan Murat Aygün, kamyonetini karşıt grubun üzerine sürdü.

The whole thing starts with an argument between a group of Easterners and an opposite group about "listening to music too loudly." It escalates into a fight in no time. Murat Aygun, hearing about the fight, drives his truck into the opposite group.

If "Easterners" sounds vague, I don't know what "opposite group" is supposed to tell us. You and I assume that this is Turks and Kurds, and the music in question is only problematic because of that fact. We still don't know who the fuck Murat Aygün is. We are assuming he is an Easterner, since he aimed at the "opposite group." But any group is the opposite group simply by opposing. Headache. The nutgraph is over, but maybe they will tell us in a minute what this is all about.

Olayda 17 yaşındaki Oğuz Dörtkardeş, olay yerinde hayatını kaybetti. Ezel Kırca ise kaldırıldığı hastanede öldü. Olayda Ercan T., Murat K., Mustafa K., Enver G. ve H.T. yaralandı.

Kavga sırasında çevredeki işyerlerinin camları kırıldı, çok sayıda otomobil de zarar gördü.

Oğuz Dörtkardeş, 17, died on the scene. Ezel Kırca died in the hospital. 5 other people were injured. During the fight, windows of nearby stores were broken and many cars were damaged. And I rightfully expect better constructed sentences from NTVMASNBC. Anyways, still not very clear to me who did what. Are the Easterners a minority in the town? Whose stores were those? Which group do the injured belong to?

Gerginlik, ölen iki kişinin cenazelerinin kaldırılması sırasında da devam etti. Oğuz Dörtkardeş’in Küçükköy beldesindeki cenazesine 400 kişi katıldı. Ezel Kırca’nın Altınova’daki cenaze törenine katılan yaklaşık iki bin kişi ise yürüyüş yaptı.

Tensions continued during the funerals. 400 people attended OD's funeral, while the 2000 attendees of Ezel Kırca's funeral walked in protest. Saying what? WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE? Yours truly is getting frustrated at this point.

Gruptakiler daha sonra doğu kökenli kişilere ait ev ve işlerlerini taşladı. Gruba müdahale etmeyen jandarma ekipleri, binaları kalkanlarla korumaya çalıştı. Jandarma olayları yatıştırmak için 22 kişiyi gözaltına aldı. Böylece gözaltındaki kişi sayısı 37’ye yükseldi.

The groups later stoned houses and offices belonging to Easternes. The Gendarme, who did not interfere, tried to protect the buildings with shields. They later took 22 people under custody, which brings the total number of people under custody to 37. THE END.

The problem with this is evident when looking at reader comments. People have commented on the trivial nature of the origin of the fight (merely loud music, in this case) and that fight like these can erupt anywhere between anyone, and that they shouldn't be exaggerated. Except it's not just music, and it's not just anyone. And the choice here to avoid calling the incident by what it is, that is an inter-ethnic conflict, is a conscious one. By now Turkish journalists should have the balls to leave aside the term Easterner as a euphemism for Kurd.

For an example of a story that does not engage in similar idiotism, see Today's Zaman.

Everybody's a Baller, What the Fuck is it the Playoffs?

2008-09-17T23:44:00.004-04:00

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This didn't work out as well as I wanted. You should post more so we can avoid these types of problems.

Mimicry

2008-09-03T22:49:00.005-04:00

Surely there was something charming and even democratic about a nation's political leader taking tips from an unemployed travel writer and his flighty girlfriend about how to make his democracy look cool (as well as pretty), but, alarmingly, it also suggested that Saakashvili thought American-style PR would make his nation safe and strong.

it gets worse:

Misha was much more desirous of … restaurants. He was obsessed with their meaning and importance. The more restaurants he could build, the better. He didn't believe the Russians would attack a place that looked like Chicago.

From this

Quotable

2008-09-03T16:37:00.004-04:00

Abraham Foxman, the chairman of the ADL, who thinks you're an anti-Semite if you sneeze into a bagel, suddenly disagrees with his own organization

From Andrew Sullivan's blog

Predictably, this relates to some fuckery involving Palin and Jews for Jesuss.

Imagined Communities was really good

2008-08-26T16:33:00.004-04:00

In Imagined Communities, I tried to illuminate the nature of this change by comparing it to the difficulties we face when we are shown photographs of ourselves taken as babies. These are difficulties which only industrial memory, in the shape of photographs, produces. Our parents assure us that these babies are us, but we ourselves have no memory of being photographed, cannot imagine what it was like to be ourselves at one year old, and would not recognize ourselves without our parents’ assistance. What has happened in effect is that though there are countless traces of the past around us—monuments, temples, written records, tombs, artefacts, and so on—this past is increasingly inaccessible, external to us. At the same time, for all kinds of reasons, we feel we need it, if only as some sort of anchor. But this means that our relationship to the past is today far more political, ideological, contested, fragmentary, and even opportunistic than in ages gone by.

Do right by Benedict Anderson and read the whole article here

Don't be coy

2008-08-23T17:27:00.007-04:00

From Fred Halliday:

I very much like the famous mistranslations of the 20th century. I particularly like the first Chinese translation of the Communist Manifesto, which was done by Chinese students in Japan from Japanese in about 1910. And instead of saying “Workers of the world, unite—you’ve nothing to lose but your chains,” it said, “Scholars of the world, unite—you have nothing to lose but your shame”!

The shame is not doing the work. The shame is not listening to other people. The shame is not saying what you think. The shame is running after fashions of Left or Right. The shame is wasting your time in a kind of public, theatrical pugilism of the kind which too many of my British friends in the United States seem to have fallen into.

QDN Communique: QDN is not alligned in the Halliday-Ali Cold War.

If you enjoyed this quote please do Fred Halliday a favor and read the full interview here

Don't be coy with me you cocksucker! It's time for neo-con COMSTAT

2008-08-18T13:32:00.004-04:00

What the games been missing

I was reading Bill Kristol's op-ed about Rick Warren's fantasy novel readers forum in today's New York Times when I saw this..

Now I’m not entirely unbiased (!), so I don’t quite trust my initial judgment in such matters.

A parenthetical exclamation point (?)(!) Compounding an already lame, self-deprecating joke about 'bias'(!)(WTF) This neo-con shit has gone too far.

But it stops now. I called The Baltimore Police Department and got Deputy Police Commissioner William Rawls transfered to QDN where he will serve on a semi-permanent, acting basis. Deputy Rawls will responsible for leading neo-con COMSTAT, the only place in which neoconservatives will be held responsible to to the angst of a sexually repressed police officer facing mounting political pressure lower the murder rate in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Georgia, Somalia, Pakistan, Turkey, Kurdish Iraq, and Baltimore. As soon as Deputy Rawls' party bus arrives everyones' ass on the line (lol, no homo).

You don't have to be a Jew to join Jews Against Obama

2008-08-05T18:00:00.002-04:00

Gendering that mannequin must have been a bitch.

The title here is an invitation from a group called, Jews Against Obama

I willfully misconstrued the group's purpose though and signed us both up.

The picture is from an Israeli owned store on the LES. From the Likudist New York Sun,

The owner of the store, Doron Braunshtein, an Israeli immigrant who also goes by the alias "Apollo Braun," which is the name of his store, said he created the T-shirt and designed the display window.

He said he was once a supporter of Mr. Obama's, but was turned off by the senator's former pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and after learning Mr. Obama once visited Pakistan.

He said he the design of the display window was no accident, and that he wants the keffiyeh to become permanently associated with anti-Obama sentiment. The Levi book is meant as a warning, he said: "You open the door for Obama, you have no idea what can come your way."

Classy.

I Breeze Through, Bullshit, I Seize Through/ With The Slug Nose, V-8, Bullets just Squeeze Through

2008-07-26T20:39:00.008-04:00

The Coulter style is instantly recognisable; her visual image and appearance are carefully crafted. She dresses and is photographed in ways that emphasise her big-eyed, blonde femininity, yet overlays this background with sometimes shocking invective and the manner of the school headmistress-cum-dominatrix. She signals sexuality but not availability; she dominates without threatening (at least not straight men).

I guess all your complaining about Coulter wasn't in vain. Some fancy University Professors apparantly got the message and wrote this article from which the above quote is excerpted.

and you thought Fetullah Gulen worked hard

2008-07-18T11:52:00.001-04:00

http://www.twu.ca/divisions/hr/employee/documents/community-standards.pdf

The Turks stole my sanity

2008-07-10T10:32:00.001-04:00

Yeter ulan.

The Arabs stole my happiness

2008-07-06T17:59:00.004-04:00

take courage friends.

I owe a debt of gratitude to the enormously brave Joel B. Pollak for exposing the insidious Arabic textbook Al-Kitab. Pollak, a student at Harvard Law School and the president of the HLS alliance for Israel, exposed the Arabic threat in the editoral pages of the Washington Post. Specifically he shows how the books principle character Maha is a vehicle for the malaise of the Arab world in its journey into America. Pollack writes,

We are taught to speak our first Arabic sentences by expressing Maha's incurable angst. We learn in Chapter 1 that Maha is desperately lonely. In later chapters, we are told that she hates New York, has no boyfriend and resents her mother.

Soon we encounter her equally depressing relatives in Egypt -- such as her first cousin Khalid, whose mother died in a car accident and who was forced to study business administration after his father told him literature "has no future."

Like Maha, Khalid is loveless; his only romantic prospect ran away with a rich engineer. The family eventually intervenes with plans to marry the cousins off to each other. This makes everyone equally unhappy.

Then the story ends.

You can probably imagine how the little bit of this story that I learned changed my life. Although I only knew Maha as an NYU student whose father works at the U.N. her misery was patently obvious and dangerously contagious. Pollack writes of Moha that, "We may laugh, but there is something fundamentally wrong with this indoctrination into misery." I would respond that here Joel does not go far enough. Since being introduced to Maha I have been incapable of laughter. The idea at laughing at Maha never occurred to my totally decimated capacity for independent thought. I think some of the readers of this blog may have noticed my unfortunate proclivities towards the self pity and sorrow that I inherited from Maha.

Fortunately, Joel is a stronger man than myself. He was not "indoctrinated" by Al-Kitab and proudly fought back against its agenda. Case and point.

Alongside simple Arabic poems, students read about anti-Western heroes such as Gamal Abdel Nasser.

The DVD that comes with "Al-Kitaab" includes footage of Nasser's mass rallies in Cairo -- including slogans in Arabic and French such as "Brother Nations in Struggle, We Are By Your Side." These scenes of totalitarian rage are fondly described by the narrator as "dreams of his youth."

The accompanying lesson describes the highlights of Nasser's career, including the nationalization of the Suez Canal and the formation of the United Arab Republic. No mention is made of Egypt's defeat in the Six-Day War or of Nasser's brutal, repressive rule. In my class, we were asked to recite a passage about Nasser to practice our vocalization. (I refused.)

I only pray that no American students are inspired by Al-Kitab to repeat Nasser's follies and unite Egypt and Syria. But without the lessons of the 1967 war readily available to them I cannot be sure that they won't at least try.

gray areas of identity

2008-06-24T13:22:00.004-04:00

I’m not sure if this guy is worth anything to say about, even from a mortal student like me, but I couldn’t let this quote go:

Reacting to the comment by Firat (Dengir Mir Mehmet) of the AKP that “Kemalist revolutions have caused a trauma”, CHP leader Deniz Baykal said, “Does Turkey want to be a modern society, or a defiled version of the Khomeini regime, an Islamic Middle Eastern society? This is what she should decide.”

My initial reaction is a blank face. Seriously, Deniz Baykal? Really? Come on…

On the one hand, we’ve been over this. Everyone has; the media, students, academics, writers, politicians. On the other hand, that is precisely the reason why the thickness of this guy’s skull baffles me.

“Are you kidding me, or are you kidding yourself?” is the appropriate chicken translation I believe. It’s not just him, obviously. Actually it’s not him at all. When exactly did our modernization project go sour? When did it become this black and white dichotomy (By the way, thank you, Sam, for making this word forever funny) of us and them, the modern and the backwards. Trouble is we are not modern, nor will we ever be, the way we want to be. Nor is it the greatest thing to be modern, to put it crudely. This so-called identity crisis, this self-hate and inferiority complex of one turned contempt for the other is eating us alive. It’s contagious, malicious, so seemingly normal, so humane and ordinary – to be caught in this perceived hierarchy of the best and the worse. To conquer Vienna all over again every time we beat a European team, and for me to speak in “we” still…

I wasn’t even born there. And I prefer Syria to Bulgaria. But it wasn’t always like this, and this preference is largely the product of my own contempt – of the stupidity, of the blindness and the stubbornness of these people. Not because they are the only ones with these qualities, but they are the ones with the resources; with the money, the education, the ability to get a peak at the world. Instead you sip your wine and indulge in newly found capitalist pleasures, and talk of modernity. Modernity is so yesterday, to borrow a phrase from Eric Cartman. But this self-torturous frenzy about our place in the hierarchy of civilizations, of nations is making everyone sick. And I think more and more people are getting fed up with it. Because even when we were “at the gates of Vienna”, we were there as an Eastern empire; the Muslim, the oriental, the mysterious and the feared. We were Islamic, and Middle Eastern. It’s actually a good thing, if only you loosen up a little bit. Even this ex-Soviet of yours is pretending to be a part of it.

Poor Deniz Baykal. I suddenly feel bad for him (wait for it…

Ok, it has passed).

I'm still going nuts and making Ottoman slap-on-the-EU jokes if we beat Germany tomorrow. I AM from Turkey.

A salute to Jacques Berque

2008-06-03T10:10:00.001-04:00

I imagine a poet
in Beirut, sister to Anatolia, friend of Athens,
a poet who stands with his friend Jacques Berque at the gate of the sea
leaning on his cane
imagining that his voice is a tambourine,
that the tambourine is broken in his throat,
that his throat is a fire named God.

I imagine a poet
into whose innards history rains,
into his words and between his feet,
and who rains blood that some carry as if a banner made of sky.

Goddess of doubt, you who were born in the lap of our mother the sea,
why do you not announce this poet and his friend?

Say what you do not see,
what turns time on its back,
what holds the wind standing on tiptoe,
what pours the ashes of silence on the flames of speech
improvised by the world's prose.

Announce also the inflamed eyelashes
the severed hands
the withered days
and whether the lantern is a throat or a head
and how we can distinguish today between an insect and a flower?

And say is there a means now
to colonize the clouds
and say
how this Mediterranean still needs
to re-emerge from the childhood of the alphabet.

Alphabet, how brave they are these cicadas that inhabit your
harvest,
how ferocious these angels that lie in the beds of your forgetfulness!

René Char
where is the storm then,
and why is poetry still an ally of the waves
and why has the sky left nothing of our history
except statues whose genitals have been lopped?

The poet leaning on his stick
standing at the gate of the sea, with his friend

Jacques Breque
whispers to his friend, or perhaps to the waves:
‘If there is a sky, it is migration'
and his friend replies, also whispering,
‘No
the miracle is not above
it is soil sleeping among the underclothes of the grass.'

What time is it now? I don't know.

Except that the spidery arms of the clock spin. Two flies circle
and buzz above, or three.

Poet, write a poem, and describe the scene
adding the wall upon which you were hung and the curtain
half torn under the lamp and the black window.

Do not forget to allude to Modernism so that you may be counted
among the pioneers, but before that, don't forget to describe the
scene
the old shoe resting alone under the clock as if
waiting for his owner's return, and beware of the big issues:

Poetry
must capture - not the things - but their crumbs.

And let you words rise to their covenant.

Owah!

The moon has fallen sad asleep
on his chair covered with clouds.
And the poet leaning on his stick accompanied
by his friend Jacques Berque
counted the moths that drowned in the clamour of flames
on that night,
the flames of candles lit
by children by the sea
who spend the night with foam
hunting the waves.

And evening in Beirut
was pining like a beggar soliciting in space
brought down to his knees
resting on his cheek on Ulysses' cheek.

Do we think we are still alive by the shore of the Mediterranean,
have we become herders of the stars?

A rose carries the whole of night in her sleeves
leans on Beirut's chest
and gives her waist to the air's forearm
while life embraces her hatchlings
placing her feet on the staircase of the future.

Is this really the world?

Shall I grieve? Shall I hope?

I prefer to sing.

-Adonis

A sad state of affairs - Milli Görüş and Zionism, with random pass at Bedri Baykam

2008-05-12T06:44:00.008-04:00

Ever wonder where the authentic Islamists really are? Since securing the votes of all of the 820.299 (that's 2%) old school electorate (that are called milli görüşçüler, as in adherents of the milli görüş/national vision ideology) in 2007, they have been pretty much bitching about two things: the AKP and Zionists. Incidentally, this website they run, called "The AKP Reality", came in pretty handy before the elections to explain why AK Parti was the only viable option. Basically, they are wrong about everything, which makes Erdoğan look like the best thing that ever happened to Turkey. It kinda still rules:

http://www.akpgercegi.com/

My absolute favorite thing about it is that virtually every ground they criticize AK Parti on overlaps with Cumhuriyet's line, from foreign investment to "bowing to America's imperial mission". The difference is that these guys drink their dark Turkish tea and fall asleep around 10 pm when Bedri Baykam is enjoying his late dinner with a glass of red wine, and that Cumhuriyet people are shitscared of them. Meaning, while the Kemalists hate AKP for lifting the ban on the headscarf, these dudes hate them for not getting rid of it completely. It's so hard to please people.

They also like to play with indecent and too liberal newspaper ads, as Radikal reported today:

This is the original picture for the ad, made for Mother's Day (which I personally forgot by the way, did you remember?)

This is the version deemed more appropriate by the Milli Görüş newspaper:

I'm not gonna go into the legal repercussions of playing with an ad paid for by one of the largest Turkish corporations, and the shitty job they did with Photoshop. The point here is that these people exist. They are quite retarded and impossible to talk to (well, all ultra-religious people are, even though I don't want to offend anyone. Actually, I don't mind offending any fundamentalists on either side), albeit not more than the secularism-worshippers in my opinion. (Representatives of Arcelik who avidly follow our blog should not for one second think that I buy their "modern Turkish woman who can afford to wear nice-modern-short sleeved clothes because Arcelik makes housework easier for her" capitalist bullshit. Mothers in Turkey do look more like in the second picture. But that's not our point.) Fuckeries like the example above do a great deal to aggravate the already tender emotional and mental state of the regular/moderate (oh yeah, most people are. weird..) Turkish citizen who is now even scared to look towards Iran on a map. And frankly, long skirts make one's mom look fat and old.

The other interestingbutsad fact is that Milli Görüş seems to be the only ideological front that gives a fuck about Palestine. It's often obviously anti-Semitic (Jews run the world kinda thing), Muslim solidarity oriented (rather than caring for human suffering in general) and sometimes ill-informed, but frankly, and ironically, they are the only ones to say it like it is.

Another First from the AKP: Murderer Shimon Peres Talks for Peace in the Turkish Parliament

More on this article and why it's ironic later. I'm about to faint.

Springtime for Hitler

2008-05-11T22:39:00.004-04:00

'Sharon was a terrific prime minister. First of all as a human being. He's a sweetheart. I would phone him and he would get back to me in five minutes."
This is a quote from Haim Saban the namesake of the Saban Centre of Middle Eastern Studies at the very well respected Brookings Institute.

Saban is a major part of America's "pro-Israel" lobby. Characteristic of those in his line of work Mr. Saban has is at best semi-literate in politics and struggles throughout his interview to prove that he has anything other than a reflexively anti-Arab position on the conflict. For example at this point he traces his alliance with the part of the Israeli government that wants to forcibly send Adrieh and her family on air conditioned buses to Gaza with his deep understanding of political Islam:

"When there is a terrorist attack, I am [Yisrael Beiteinu party chair Avigdor] Lieberman. Sometimes to the right of Lieberman. For two days I really love Lieberman. But afterward I come back to reality. Look, I don't see a solution today. People are saying hudna [truce]. I don't know what kind of hudna. Or tahadiya [cease-fire], shmahadiya. A cease-fire within a tahadiya within a hudna. Leave it, it's all stuff and nonsense. And the facts on the ground are the facts on the ground. When your enemy believes in a faith that is rooted in religion, it runs very deep. In this situation I don't know how to mediate between one nation and the other."

Saban's real expertise is exploiting the fears of American Jews that there is another holocaust somewhere in the future. This fear is probably the greatest source of Jewish identity in America, more salient than Israel or religion, and of course a great mobilizer. It's hard to find the words that can express disdain for people that turn memory of a horror such as the holocaust into a phantasmagoria in order permit Israel's service to imperialism and crimes against humanity

"The Iranians are serious. They mean business. Ahmadinejad is not a madman. And every Jew who feels himself to be a Jew lives under the shadow of the Holocaust. That is something that does not leave us. The Holocaust never leaves us. So we are treating Ahmadinejad's declarations like those of Hitler in the 1930s."

You too?

"Yes, of course. When I see Ahmadinejad, I see Hitler. They speak the same language. His motivation is also clear: the return of the Mahdi is a supreme goal. And for a religious person of deep self-persuasion, that supreme goal is worth the liquidation of five and a half million Jews. We cannot allow ourselves that. Nuclear weapons in the hands of a religious leadership that is convinced that the annihilation of Israel will bring about the emergence of a new Muslim caliphate? Israel cannot allow that. This is no game. It's truly an existential danger."

Of course Saban has not been marginalized or discredited for such idiocy. The article explains that he was very close to the Clinton administration. Nor has Middle Eastern studies at Brookings been discredited for taking the money and name of someone whose agenda is not much more than murderous racism and blind deference to the most chauvinistic elements of a foreign state. The main export of which is not AIM and computer technology, but murderous racism and apologetics for murderous racism. There is at least some a priori evidence that Saban's money has corrupted Brookings and I'm sure there is more beneath the surface. Walt & Mearshimer wrote in their LRB 'lobby' essay

Take the Brookings Institution. For many years, its senior expert on the Middle East was William Quandt, a former NSC official with a well-deserved reputation for even-handedness. Today, Brookings’s coverage is conducted through the Saban Center for Middle East Studies, which is financed by Haim Saban, an Israeli-American businessman and ardent Zionist. The centre’s director is the ubiquitous Martin Indyk. What was once a non-partisan policy institute is now part of the pro-Israel chorus.

Indyk is an a sort of Eichamann character who is as unthinking as he is boring and evil. He probably deserves his own post. At the LRB hosted debate on the 'lobby' thesis he audaciously explained his own career as refutation of W&M's work. It is difficult for Indyk not to even claim that he is part of the lobby. W&M again,

During the Clinton administration, Middle Eastern policy was largely shaped by officials with close ties to Israel or to prominent pro-Israel organisations; among them, Martin Indyk, the former deputy director of research at AIPAC and co-founder of the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP); Dennis Ross, who joined WINEP after leaving government in 2001; and Aaron Miller, who has lived in Israel and often visits the country. These men were among Clinton’s closest advisers at the Camp David summit in July 2000. Although all three supported the Oslo peace process and favoured the creation of a Palestinian state, they did so only within the limits of what would be acceptable to Israel. The American delegation took its cues from Ehud Barak, co-ordinated its negotiating positions with Israel in advance, and did not offer independent proposals. Not surprisingly, Palestinian negotiators complained that they were ‘negotiating with two Israeli teams – one displaying an Israeli flag, and one an American flag’.

The Kemalist Elite: Democracy and its Discontents

2008-05-07T22:18:00.004-04:00

Does this constitute cheating?

When I started writing this article in January it had a slightly more optimistic tone. On February 9, 2008, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), consistent with the promises that got them elected by a landslide last August, passed a constitutional change to the law that banned headscarves in universities, despite a great deal of outrage from the secularist-Kemalist front, including the oppositional Republican People’s Party, the Constitutional Court, the Council of Higher Institutions, and -of course- the Turkish Army. What followed was so ugly that even the liberal intellectuals who criticized the AKP for moving too hastily with the amendment were speechless. Public debate created new binaries explaining public space in the possessive terms of “ours” and “theirs.” Student groups in almost all the leading universities immediately formed groups and declared: We don’t want people wearing the türban (the term used to distinguish the traditional headscarf from the one perceived as a political symbol) in our schools.” Schools, courts, government offices were claimed as the property of secularists, who, within an unofficial coalition described above, have been ruling the country since its founding in 1923.

Yet, despite these depressing and equally dumbfounding responses given by the country’s secular elite, the future looked bright enough. It is understandable that “powerful institutions do not forsake their positions willingly, and less tangibly, the culture which they have helped to create and which in turn reinforces and sustains their authority does not find expressions of resistance easily,” as Emma Sinclair-Webb writes in an article on the Turkish military and its influence. That the AKP got 47% of the vote in the elections which followed an “e-coup” (never heard of a military threatening the government on their official website on a Friday night? I’m happy for you) was precisely the expression of a resistance. It looked like the age of military coups was over (Turkey has had four in its relatively short history), the government was taking Turkey’s EU bid seriously for the first time in a long time, giving way to broader human and civic rights to marginalized groups, and a majority of people clearly demanded a militarization-free democracy.

But when I took a break from writing, the Chief Prosecutor of the Constitutional Court filed a law suit to shut down the AKP and ban its 74 members from politics, including Turkey’s prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and president Abdullah Gül, who can not be associated with any political parties since being elected. The prosecutor, who has been “collecting evidence for the last 4 years” claims that the AKP’s real agenda is to overthrow the secular regime and install an Islamic one. Now instead of pushing for the EU reforms, for women’s rights, for Kurdish language rights, instead of passing educational and environmental reforms, instead of investigating the recently uncovered scandal of Ergenekon (the Turkish “deep state” similar to the Gladio in Italy), the AKP has to prepare for this trial and concentrate on not being shut down. Great news for the country, don’t you think?

It is clear that the real issue at stake is not whether women can wear their headscarves to class or not. Islamists (the real, sharia-loving ones) of the male gender have been attending universities for a long time, and the country has yet to experience an Islamic revolution. The real issue at stake is power, as it usually is; political power, social/cultural influence, and most importantly, the power over economic resources. In the meantime, the general public is fed all sorts of propaganda that is causing an ever growing hysteria and paranoia that Turkey is going to be the next Iran. And more and more people are led to believe that a military coup and/or a political and economic crisis is a reasonable price to pay to prevent that. Let me illustrate my point.

I was my friend’s place in Istanbul when her mom caught me in the hallway, waving a caricature cut out from a newspaper at me, and saying “I heard you are on their side, too.” The caricature depicted four women in hijabs and their husband in common standing next to them. “Their side” was the side of the undercover reactionary Islamists. Not that she thought I was an Islamist, but in her –and thousands like her- mode of thinking, blind sighted Turkish liberals who are naive enough to look at the matter from a “universal right to education” perspective are the reactionaries’ “useful idiots.”

Well, what can you say to your friend’s mom? That she is hugely mistaken? No, not really. I was only 21 at the time and my culture does not look sympathetically upon youths who correct their elders’ political opinions. Whatever I wanted to say in response, I had to save to myself. So she kept going towards the kitchen while I kept walking backwards towards the opposite direction, and all the while she was bombarding me with numerous reasons why allowing “these” into universities would leave Turkey helpless in the hands of radical Islam: it would be an insult to Kemal Ataturk - “the poor guy fought so much for women’s liberation” - and how the headscarf is nothing but a humiliating symbol of female subordination, and how on earth could I support patriarchy. As I am trying to walk away from this incredibly awkward situation, muttering something along the lines of “but education should be a universal right” I am wondering if she really thinks I was going to have an epiphany right then and there in that corridor and agree with her. Frankly, I was not that upset, even though irritation with my country’s elite has become a fixture of my emotional state (can you tell?). I thought to myself, the people have spoken, the government was elected for a second time gaining the vote of 47% of the country, practicing Muslim women have been marginalized long enough, and whatever complaints this lady had, she would just have to get over them. The possibility that Turkey will produce an Islamist revolution is unthinkable and “white Turks” will eventually have to stop indulging in the paranoia that Turkey will become a “Middle Eastern” country.

The opposition’s fear that society is getting more pious – in a politicized way- might not be baseless. More and more young women are taking up the veil, despite the disadvantages it would bring them in the public sphere. I would argue that, for many women the veil has turned into a symbol of resistance. It is a reaction to super-imposed westernization by the country’s secular elite, that is found in policies, rhetoric, commercials and music videos that attempt to transmit “European” tastes and attitudes but clash with more traditional way of living and thinking.

The secular elite, however, fail to acknowledge these dynamics, and hysterically explain Turkey’s increasing public religiosity as a conspiracy fostered by misogynistic fundamentalists aiming to undermine everything Mustafa Kemal Ataturk accomplished. In the process they refuse to admit that women have any agency, firmly asserting that there is no way a woman would take up the veil out of her own will. They see the veil as a woman’s imprisonment in the darkness of patriarchy, as “the biggest humiliation,” as my friend’s mom says.

Many who support headscarf bans wish that religiosity and socio-economic status would once again become coterminous and that the country’s religiously observant would be returned to their natural position at the bottom of the economic ladder. Many openly express disgust when they see veiled women in “fashionable” clothing, driving luxurious cars or dining in upscale restaurants. But the trend is clearly on the rise as well is the propensity for Kemalist-elitist to misinterpret piety and proclaim the hypocrisy of veiled women to wear “so much” make-up, or worse, walk on the street hand-in-hand with their boyfriends. These are privileges that the Kemalists think only secularists are suited for as the modernized and the enlightened part of the society. Within the same logic, a veiled woman has no logical reason to want to attend university unless she is a subversive hoping to overthrow the state. The university stands for enlightenment; the veil stands for an evil blend of dogma and darkness.

A very large segment of the urban population today has moved to the city from rural areas. As in most developing capitalist countries, these communities are not integrated into the urban lifestyle itself, but rather get glimpses of it through the media, and in the public space. For these first and second-generation migrants a dual sense of distrust for the country’s elite as well as a feeling of displacement or normlessness leads them towards religious identity. However, 80 years of adamant secularism and the absence of earlier theocratic rule (even though the Ottoman sultans were also symbolic religious leaders of the Muslim world), together with Turkey’s relatively successful integration into a global network of cultural, political and economic affairs ensures that an Islamic revolution is not on its way.

The ascendancy of an Islamist party has revived the debate about Turkey’s identity. However, the favored line of the Kemalist elite is a predictable distortion. The choice that Turkey faces is not between secularism and theocracy but between authoritarianism and democracy. The AKP has so far respected the division of religion and state, but also allowed people an expanded freedom to express their own faith. It aims to give religious people a greater role in Turkey’s democratic institutions not to subvert them. Additionally, since 2002, the party has been a leading advocate of Turkey’s admission into the EU which would require the transfer of power from state institutions such as the military, the foreign ministry, the National Security Council, and the Constitutional Court (the final two were created after a military coup in order to curtail the power of civilian governments) to elected representatives.

Banning the AKP would hurt Turkey’s chances for admission into the European Union which only allows its members to forbid parties which advocate or commit acts violence—both of which the AKP does not do. The country does not have any alternative political formations that could conceivably take over the government if these 74 politicians in question are banned. A full economic and political crisis would ensure, possibly leading to far more serious repercussions considering the fragile relations with the still not accommodated Kurdish population and northern Iraq. If the military or another department of the Turkish state intervenes against the AKP in a coup, whether this coups involves tanks or not, Turkey will have a decisively abandoned democracy and become an authoritarian state frightened by the decisions and beliefs of its own people. A coup will always dramatically alter the trajectory of political Islam in Turkey. Now the country is headed towards a very tense time over this law suit. In the meantime, the struggle over power will continue.

1968

2008-05-06T00:50:00.002-04:00

This is the Al-Qaeda or the "base" of 1968 information. That's just my opinion, not an objective fact. Note, if you are wondering what constitutes and "objective fact" it is best to think about the types of things that CAMERA agents would feel inclined to write into a Wikipedia page. That Palestinians kill Israelis because they have been indoctrinated to do so is an objective fact. The suggestion that the Palestinians are responding to Israeli oppression and Ethnic Cleansing is terrorism.

The spectre of 1968 in the NLR. This article is actually titled "The Communist Hypothesis" and it offers some vague advice on how Communism can be made. That's a lie. It only reminds us that Communism can be made, once we figure out how. Impressive tautology.

From OpenDemocracy:

France
Germany
Vietnam
Mexico

Tariq Ali remembers 1968

You now know the comprehensive history of 1968 and are qualified to write at a doctoral thesis in any of the departments of the social sciences at The New School. Congratulations.

Morris Returns to break more eggs and make more omelettes

2008-05-03T21:04:00.004-04:00

David Remnick of the New Yorker has a review of Benny Morris' 1948 in the most recent issue of that magazine. Judging from Remnick's review and a few other published responses Morris' latest contribution is a re-thinking of pre-existing archival material and the author's own copious research rather than a response to new evidence on what happened in 1948. In Morris' case some re-thinking might be fruitful. In Image & Reality Finkelstein gave an unassailable internal review of Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem which showed in tedious detail how the author's conclusions were remarkably sympathetic to Israel in light of the obvious evidence of systematic and premeditated Ethnic Cleansing located in Plan Dalet, amongst other places. Judgement has always been Benny Morris' shortcoming since his scholar debut Birth in 1988. His famous "Born of War, not design" thesis never held up as Finkelstein demonstrated. Other authors have given their own useful correctives. Joel Benin has this to say

This formulation presents itself as a golden mean, with all the moral and philosophical legitimacy that accrues to such a position in the Western cultural tradition. There is absolutely no epistemological warrant for the claim that “the truth” of any matter lies midway between two opposing claims. But Morris’ appeal to this apparently reasonable, if fallacious, notion has contributed to positioning The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem as the standard work on the topic in Europe and North America. His later works have solidified his reputation as the voice of reason—and, for some, an embodiment of hope for a more liberal Israel that can come to terms with its past.

Beinin goes on to say that Morris' comments during the Second Intifada had shattered his reputation in polite circles. Yale press and David Remnick seem to disagree. But they are late to the party. After Israels 'Disengagement' from the Gaza Strip the NYT went to Morris for an op-ed and The New Republic has made Morris their Israel/Palestine book reviewer for the last few years. He has a recent review that I refuse to read after remembering how his crititique of the Walt/Mershimer LRB essay was completley inconsistent with his own work in Righteous Victims. There seems to be little reason for a University Press to put out 1948 or for Remnick to be so deferential towards Morris' scholarship in his review. What the reviewer sees as throughtful balance historical judgement is really just Morris' own contribution to Israeli propaganda. When addressing Morris' comments that Palestinians are "barbarians" who should be "put in cages" and that Islam is a religion that does not value human life to the same extent that he and his Westerner bretheren do Remnick writes that the Second Intifada had driven the historian to "the point of embitterment." Most would call Morris' thoughts bigoted and I cannot see why Remnick would not.

It is remarkable that Morris has managed to stay in the mainstream and manage to receive respectful reviews of his books while many of his peers have not been given the same entitlements. In the last few years the level of scholarly discussion on Israel/Palestine has been upgraded substantially by the regular offerings on the subject in the NYRB and LRB as well as a few noteworthy books such as Norman Finkelstein's Beyond Chutzpa, Sara Roy's Failing Peace, Ilan Pappe's The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, and Sa'di and Lughod\s Nakba. However, as far as a know none of these books have been reviewed in a popular or mainstream publication (Finkelstein and Lughod are on record voicing their dismay with this fact) and the content of the NYRB LRB has not penetrated a broad audience. Yet somehow Benny Morris remains a fascination for the cultural managers because he was once a proud member of the Israeli Left who turned to Right and because he can sell his own self-indulgnt fiction to to others that his work is 'balanced.' Do either of these claims have any merit? Morris' political biography is not all that clear. He refused to serve in combat duty during the first Intifada but as Ilan Pappe has pointed out he has always dismissed Palestinian sources out of contempt. In a rejoinder to a negative review Morris wrote one of his books Pappe had this to say,

Secondly, there was no Palestinian feminism or women's participation in the national struggle; nor were they organized. Morris does not only lack Arabic, he does not as a rule read or quote any work of Palestinian women — or for that matter other women's work or Palestinian male historians. 'There are no good Palestinian historians' he told a crowded hall sitting next to me and Edward Said in 1998. My knowledge and reading, and indeed working with feminist historians, is a 'factual' mistake.

I'll deal with Morris' alleged in "balance" in my next post.

But I will leave you with this NLR essay by Gabriel Pitterberg on "How the founding myths of Israel dictated conceptual removal of Palestinians, during and after physical removal. The invention of ‘retroactive transfer’ and ‘present absentees’ as the glacial euphemisms of ethnic cleansing." I haven't read it, but it might be useful for your research paper.

Peace.

Everyday is Holocaust Remembrance Day in Occupied Gaza

2008-05-02T01:50:00.005-04:00

From the Independent
Destitution and food insecurity among Gaza's 1.5 million residents has reached an unprecedentedly critical level, according to unpublished UN findings that they now need "urgent assistance" to avert a "serious food crisis" in the occupied Palestinian territories.
The report revealing that Gaza's population has already passed the internationally-agreed threshold at which it needs concerted measures to prevent a "deterioration in their nutrition" has been drafted on the eve of a donors' conference to discuss Palestinian political and economic prospects in London today.
Showing that Palestinians are having to spend a higher and higher share of their shrinking incomes on food, the findings are that the proportion of Gazan incomes now going on food is 66 per cent – significantly higher than the 61 per cent recorded for Somalia. Seventy per cent of Gazans are at a "deep poverty" income level of $1.20 (60p) per head per day or less.

From Haaretz

Normally, the sewage is pumped to prearranged sites for treatment, but the shortage of fuel in the Gaza Strip has caused disruptions in the supply of electricity. These shortages, lack of sufficient quantities of chemicals necessary for treating sewage, and spare parts, has led the Gaza officials to pump the waste into the sea. The report prepared by Office of the Coordinator for Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) raises concerns that the untreated sewage is carrying Escherichia coli (e. coli) bacteria into the sea which may affect those swimming in its waters.

A Palestinian Refugee Letter from Gaza (UNRWA)

Even before this siege of Gaza, we were suffering from a shortage of clean drinking water; however, the situation has become much worse. Now it is not only a question of the lack of clean water, it is also the chemicals that are being added to treat the water so that people can drink it. I’ve heard many warnings that we should boil our water. Since then I’ve noticed that the water we use for washing, cooking and showering smells, but I can’t not use it as I don’t have an alternative.

And from YNET

The United Nation's World Health Organization listed 32 cases since October last year in which Gaza residents, ranging from a 1-year-old child to a 77-year-old man, died because they could not obtain urgent medical treatment.

in the age of how-to s

2008-05-01T07:35:00.003-04:00

Yes, yes this is a manuel for campus divestment from Israel.

http://www.endtheoccupation.org/downloads/Divestment%20Guide%20.pdf

Nakba ideas (mostly from awesome Jews)

2008-05-01T07:05:00.004-04:00

From No Time to Celebrate/Jews Remember the Nakba:
Action Ideas

what you suggested-map on Wilder Bowl:
http://www.zochrot.org/index.php?id=522

we can have these stories of 48 in random places:
http://imeu.net/news/article001238.shtml

I like the idea of giant banners, but most of all very much wish we could do a projection on Mudd (technologywise we can, but I doubt we can get permission), and it would look like this:

for something much more doable:

(images from: http://questionisrael.blogspot.com/2007/05/new-england-commemorates-nakba.html)

here's my little May 1st gift to Sam

2008-05-01T01:18:00.012-04:00

In Five Lines

From mothers' lullabies
to the news story read by the anchorman
being able to overcome deceit at the heart, in the book, on the street,
to understand, my love, is such a bliss
to understand all that is proceeding and forthcoming.

Nazım Hikmet, 1946

I do have millions of pages to read, which means this is prime time for translation exercises. (Can I have my Eliot book back?). Nazım Hikmet is especially worth checking out today, I know you want to procrastinate on that paper. Anyways, happy May 1st to workers and others who care about their rights, and I wish my people as little pepper gas as possible on this beautiful day.

some animals are more equal than others

2008-04-30T16:03:00.005-04:00

birthright: a right or privilege that you are entitled to at birth; "free public education is the birthright of every American child" (Google Dictionary)

Take a look at that:
Sample Itinerary of Birthright trip

we'll deconstruct later what it means to "bake pita break and press olives the traditional way" on the first day of your free trip to a country that you have never seen before.

The restrictions on movement make the ban on fuel redundant

2008-04-30T14:00:00.005-04:00

People who dismiss the analogy between South African Apartheid and the Israeli occupation as unsupported, or weirder still bigoted, don't understand the extent of Israeli restrictions on movement in the W. Bank or their main purpose: to make sure settlers never have to live through the horror of seeing an Arab driving or walking without an Israeli soldier next to him/her.

From B'tselem

The government recently announced that at the end of March 2008, the army began removing 61 physical obstructions – dirt piles, boulders, and blocks – it had placed inside the West Bank. The obstructions were purportedly removed following Israel’s commitment, made in March to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, to reduce restrictions on Palestinian movement in the West Bank. However, B'Tselem’s investigation and investigations by other human rights organizations indicate that the government’s declaration was no more than sleight of hand.

Furthermore, at a number of places in the northern West Bank, obstructions that had previously been removed by the residents were moved back into place by army bulldozers. The army then took pictures of these obstructions before removing them the same day or the following day. Examples of this staging of removal follow.

In early February, the army placed three obstructions composed of boulders and dirt piles at the southern entrance to Bal’a, a town northeast of Tulkarm. On 5-7 March, in coordination with the army, the Bal’a municipality removed the obstructions and reopened the entrance. According to local residents, at the end of March, an Israeli bulldozer, guarded by soldiers, again placed an obstruction blocking the entrance. Residents wanting to ride along the road were delayed by the army, which filmed the vehicles waiting on either side of the physical obstruction. Immediately afterward, the bulldozer removed the obstruction, which the army also filmed. This obstruction is on the list of physical obstructions that the army contends were removed as part of its efforts to “ease” Palestinian movement.

This important press release from B'tselem on Israeli fuckery comes just after the World Bank had this to say

A report by the World Bank says the Palestinian economy will not grow this year, despite billions of dollars in international aid. The bank blamed the problem on Israeli restrictions on Palestinian movement and trade.

In December, international donors pledged more than $7 billion to beef up the Palestinian Authority and economy. The aim was to gradually cut government spending and revive the private sector, eventually making the Palestinians less dependent on foreign aid. But the World Bank warns that unless Israel changes its policies, this goal cannot be achieved.

This from a 2003 Amnesty International report on restrictions on movement in the W. Bank and Gaza

Trips of a few kilometres, where they are possible, take hours, following lengthy detours to avoid the areas surrounding Israeli settlements and settlers’ roads (known as "bypass roads"), which connect the settlements to each other and to Israel and which are prohibited to Palestinians. With the spread of settlements and bypass roads throughout the Occupied Territories, the prohibited areas have multiplied. Where the settlements are closest to Palestinian villages, movement in and out of these villages is even more restricted than elsewhere. In parts of the Gaza Strip, areas where Palestinians live surrounded by Israeli settlements have been declared closed military zones. These are only accessible, and only at specific times, to the residents, who are also often stopped from leaving or returning to their homes for days or even weeks.

In addition to the increased time, effort and cost involved, journeys are also not without risk. To enforce closures and curfews, Israeli soldiers routinely fire live ammunition, throw tear gas or sound bombs, beat and detain people, and confiscate vehicles and documents (IDs). Ordinary activities, such as going to work or to school, taking a baby for immunization, attending a funeral or a wedding, expose women and men, young and old, to such risks. Hence, many people limit their activities outside the home to what is absolutely essential.

Closures and curfews have prevented Palestinians from reaching their places of work and from distributing their products to internal and external markets, and have caused shortages. Factories and farms have been driven out of business by the losses incurred, dramatically increased transport costs and loss of export markets. As a result, unemployment has soared to over 50% and more than half of the Palestinian population is now living below the poverty line. With the sharp decline in the standard of living in the Occupied Territories, malnutrition and other illnesses have increased. Closures and curfews have prevented Palestinian children and youths from attending classes for prolonged periods, violating their right to education and undermining their future professional prospects.

And from much later in the report:
Mostly the restrictions on the movement of Palestinians within the Occupied Territories are enforced to keep Palestinians away from Israeli settlements and from the roads used by the settlers. Checkpoints, roadblocks and blockades are mostly situated near settlements and settlers’ roads (see chapter on Israeli settlements).

I'll add the links later.

-Sam

it is secretly academic, I promise

2008-04-29T21:39:00.001-04:00

Turks represent their country in Eindhoven

Fuel still illegal in Gaza

2008-04-29T20:10:00.006-04:00

People have also become more reliant on basic food products, and have severely reduced consumption of expensive goods like fresh meat.
"Now these people, reliant on these basics of life -- flour, sugar, oil, chickpeas and salt -- are even unable to cook them," Campbell said.
Some 90 percent of Gaza's bakeries run on cooking gas, and most in the southern Gaza Strip have shut down due to the lack of fuel.

EI on the still growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza

Debbie Almostar on DN!

DEBBIE ALMOSTAR: My last words are basically urging the American public to really develop a better understanding of the political agenda that is out there by people such as Daniel Pipes and rightwing groups who are going after prominent Muslim and Arab American leaders who are trying to make a difference in this country. It is so important to allow us to bridge the gaps and build bridges of understanding among people across this country and to, you know, continue in the healing process of developing a better country and a better world for all of humanity.

New Ed Herman article

On the other hand, the truly genuine case of ethnic cleansing, and one that has had global implications because of the Arab and Muslim resentment that it inspires, has been the steady Israeli expulsion of Palestinians from their lands in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem in order to allow Jewish settlements. The phrase "ethnic cleansing" is almost never applied to this case in the West. This despite the fact that it has been openly acknowledged by Israeli leaders for many years that the aim of these settlements is to displace Palestinians with Jews, and that in the process they have killed many thousands, demolished over 18,000 Palestinian homes since the occupation began in 1967

Antı-Zionism and orphanages now illegal in Palestine

2008-04-29T00:00:00.009-04:00

From IPS:

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=42151

The Israel Defence Forces issued orders Feb. 25 for the closure and confiscation by Apr. 7 of orphanages, schools and other facilities owned by the Islamic Charitable Society (ICS), claiming the foundation "masquerades as a charity organisation in order to cover its activities of increasing support of the Hamas terror network."

"The foundation in Hebron not only raises money for terrorism, it also recruits new terror operatives and disseminates the creed of anti-Zionism and jihad among the population," an IDF spokesman told IPS.

The article says the orphanage keeps 240 Palestinians.

In Solidarity

nationalism is sad

2008-04-28T05:31:00.002-04:00

and too repetitive

http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/26/readers-respond-to-grace-wang-and-chinese-nationalism/

I really need to go to sleep.

god doesn't seem to want to speak to us, and we are fine with that.

2008-04-28T03:01:00.003-04:00

Hello Hi,

While I've been waiting for an opportunity to say something about how everyone I know and their mothers have been getting nose jobs (and I've been burning with a -super well intentioned- desire to leave a note under their pictures saying "cute nose job" or something of the sort, like "yeni burnun çok yakışmış") we have exigent circumstances here. And that is called the Turkish Deep State. You know that everything is connected in post-structuralist structure-structure.

General wikipedia stuff:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladio
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_state
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taksim_Square_massacre

More on Ergenekon in English:

http://www.bianet.org/bianet/kategori/english/104456/the-gang-could-be-the-tip-of-the-iceberg
http://www.bianet.org/english/kategori/english/106563/dink-murder-trial-the-investigation-leaves-istanbul-but-the-trial-is-still-local
http://www.bianet.org/bianet/kategori/english/104465/how-far-will-ultra-nationalist-organisation-be-unmasked

what Felice Casson (the guy that Young Civilians invited over for a panel on the deep state) had to say:
http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/detaylar.do?load=detay&link=140315

In other news:
http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/detaylar.do?load=detay&link=140285
same story by Haaretz:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/978432.html

Zaman is quite pro-AKP in its ideological leaning, but there is really little room left to lean these days. Plus people really need to start offering English versions of their websites. HELLO? trying to educate each other here.

Communiqué #1-A call for Martyrs

2008-04-27T17:20:00.001-04:00

Comrades,
This is the first communiqué of the Queering the Dinosaur Nation (QDN) blog. Fear not. After generations of colonial brutality and exploitation by the postructuralist colonial structure-structure QDN is here to fight and even die for the independence of all types of dinosaurs.
Points of action
Finkelstein Interview:
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/17229
Perry Anderson on Cyprus
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n08/ande01_.html
Putin and Medvedev (not the hockey player)
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21353
Hamas
http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/conflicts/middle_east/hamas_talk_to_them

In Solidarity,
Sam

i did it.

2008-04-26T19:58:00.000-04:00

let's see the links.