This makes me angry. Very angry.

Read it and weep:

“Yet, Pakistan is not without hope. In one corner of Pakistan, that hope comes from the sons and daughters of the mountains, yet uncontaminated by ‘civilization,’ firm in their faith, clear in their conviction, proud of their heritage, and ready to fight for their dignity. Though unschooled, they are clear-eyed as the eagle of the mountains. Their poverty steels their determination. They stood up against the Soviet marauders: and defeated them. Today, they are standing up again to reclaim their dignity and their lands from foreigners and native mercenaries.”

I hate to say this, but I really hope this man is killed by the Taliban. If not that, then at least he should be sacked from his position. This man who hates America so much is living and working in America! I now have a group of people I oppose even more strongly than Marxists, which I didn’t think was possible. This group is, of course, the parasites on Western civilization who despise those very people who make their careers and lives possible, and who support terrorists like the Taliban.

Here is Parvez Hoodbhoy’s response:

“But then these are not pleasant times. There is carnage in the streets. Blood flows down the gutters and body parts are strewn in bazaars and markets. Suicide bombers have also targeted mosques, funerals, and hospitals. The internet is filled with videos of Pakistan army soldiers being decapitated, pictures of separated heaps of limbs and heads of Shiites, and women writhing under the blows of heavy whips and chains.

The Taliban, mostly from the mountains of Waziristan and other tribal areas of Pakistan, are not particularly shy to broadcast such achievements. For example, their decapitation movies – culminating in heads being stuck upon poles and paraded around town – are watched for free by kids. On 15 February 2009, the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan announced a ban on all female education and, at last count, 362 schools have been blown up in Pakistan’s tribal areas.”

Of course I find Edward Said, anti-Americanism and far Leftiness in general very tiresome, but at least Hoodbhoy is not as bad as people like Alam. At least he’s non-violent, however wrong he may be.

A Saudi View of Orientalism
Islam and the West

Middle East Quarterly
Fall 2009, pp. 73-75

Mazin S. Motabbagani (or, in accurate transcription, al-Mutabaqani) is assistant professor of Orientalism at King Saud University in Riyadh, and head of the Occidental Studies Unit in the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies, also in Riyadh. Born a Jordanian by origin in 1950, he submitted his doctoral thesis in 1993 to the faculty of Islamic propagation at Riyadh’s Muhammad bin Saud Islamic University where he also taught. Motabbagani’s thesis, like most of his later academic work, focuses on Orientalism (al-istishraq), the study of Islam and the Muslim world by Western scholars. He has devoted no fewer than seven books and numerous articles to this topic.

Motabbagani’s position takes its cue from the work of Edward Said, treating all Western scholarship on the Muslim world as biased and unreliable. To Said’s leftism, however, Motabbagani adds a heavy dose of Wahhabi intolerance for anything that challenges a strict interpretation of Islam. As such, his article represents a genre of Middle Eastern writing that heavily distorts the West. We publish it to convey what that literature contains and to demonstrate the extent to which Middle Eastern Muslims have accepted Said’s views. Readers should be aware that the text contains many factual errors.

Thus, Motabbagani asserts that “the international Zionist movement applied its attention to these [Orientalist] studies, planting a number of its protégés and professors in order that the studies, conferences, and debates would all support the Zionist perspective,” a conspiracy theory that is not only false but one that ignores the predominantly anti-Zionist tilt of Middle East studies in the United States. Or he writes that “America’s need for [Oriental] studies only grew after the second Gulf war, or Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait in 1990,” which is about fifty years late. Other statements have no basis in fact: writing about “those who called for the monitoring of Middle East studies, evicting any Arab influence from these studies” is wrong and ignores the substantial numbers of Arab scholars working in the field at Western universities. The writer’s claim about an “assassination” of Ismail Faruqi and his wife is also wrong but fits his conspiracy theory about fighting Arab influence.

The following is excerpted from a paper by Motabbagani, originally published in 2003. Raymond Ibrahim translated from Arabic to English.

—The Editors

U.S. Middle East Studies

Motabbagani’s position takes its cue from the work of Edward Said, treating all Western scholarship on the Muslim world as biased and unreliable. To Said’s leftism, however, Motabbagani adds a heavy dose of Wahhabi intolerance for anything that challenges a strict interpretation of Islam.

The West’s concern for studying and knowing the world is very old, as represented by its schools, Orientalist institutions, and various research centers. And while the West has abandoned the name “Orientalism,” it has not done away with its goal, as Middle East—or “area” or “regional”—studies have appeared. These studies have received the care of the United States of America, especially after the withdrawal of the British Empire and America’s readiness to take its place in its sphere of influence. Thus, a number of U.S. governmental regulations supporting Middle East studies, or regional studies, appeared. Among other things, this is what caught the attention of a British governmental committee, led by Sir William Hayter (d. 1995), when it visited America to assess its educational programs.

The United States government continued fostering Middle East studies to the point that the Committee on Foreign Affairs in Senator Henry Jackson’s era increased the number of American and British professors offering degrees dealing with the region. This British Orientalist committee (it went on to become American later) invited Bernard Lewis in 1974; likewise, the U.S. Congress held a number of conferences in 1985 to study what is called “fundamentalism” in the Islamic world.

Edward Said and the Kuwait War

America’s need for such studies only grew after the second Gulf war, or Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait in 1990. Support for such studies grew, as did grants—some of which stipulated service in U.S. governmental departments, particularly intelligence. This provoked strong objections from many of the professors; yet, the American government financed these studies in a conditional manner.

In addition to the American government, the international Zionist movement applied its attention to these studies, planting a number of its protégés and professors in order that the studies, conferences, and debates would all support the Zionist perspective, so that Israel would continue receiving unconditional support. Likewise, some Arabs and Muslims undertook the creation of chairs for Arab and Islamic studies. Yet they did not succeed the way the Zionists did; in fact, some of these chairs produced results opposite of what was intended.

Then a number of Arab and Muslim professors rose to these studies and tried to influence them internally by portraying the Muslim issue in a neutral and honest manner so that the Orientalist approach, which so disfigured Islam and Muslims, would cease. This situation got to the point that some of the major professors were assassinated, such as Ismail Faruqi, and others. His point of view was such that it was impossible for disciplines and studies to be taught in a neutral manner in the United States.

Another thing happened regarding these studies, that is, the appearance of Edward Said and his famous book (Orientalism, 1978), as well as his notable zeal regarding the Palestinian issue. A number of changes occurred in these studies; moreover, these changes spread to related Middle East topics. Voices began appearing discussing the Palestinians as a real people evicted from their land and exposed to killing, imprisonment, and torture.

When communism fell, and the Soviet Union dissolved, and Eastern European governments came crashing down, and when it was announced that the Cold War had come to an end, there appeared in the West, particularly America, those who called on taking Islam as the new enemy in place of the former foe. Many of the top representatives of this view confided in a number of Orientalists—at their head, Bernard Lewis, via his famous U.S. Congressional hearing regarding the situation of the Arabs and Muslims vis-à-vis Western civilization. He later went on to publish this under the provocative journalistic title of “The Roots of Muslim Rage.” A number of journalists and Middle East experts, such as Chris [sic: Charles] Krauthammer, joined him.

Middle East Studies Post-9/11

The events of September 11, 2001, brought about great changes in Middle East studies—foremost among them the persistent accusation that Islam breeds terrorism. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was subjected to a major portion of this attack, due to its prominent place in the Islamic world. Specialists in Middle East studies increasingly came to adopt the policies of the neo-conservatives in the American government. These Middle East specialists came to provide the “intellectual cover” for American policies in the Arab and Islamic worlds, particularly, the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and other policies.

Nor did the matter rest with blaming Islam for terrorism; there appeared those who called for the monitoring of Middle East studies, evicting any Arab influence from these studies, Arab influence which had taken to speaking the truth in regards to the rights of Palestinians after decades of ignoring—indeed, oppressing—them. The claim was made that these studies had failed in predicting the realities of events, as in Martin Kramer’s book, Ivory Towers on Sand.

Nor did the attacks on the Orient or Middle East studies cease with Kramer’s book; no, Daniel Pipes, Middle East specialist and founder of the Middle East Forum in Philadelphia, launched an Internet website [Campus Watch] dedicated to monitoring Middle East studies, encouraging those immersed in these studies to submit criticisms regarding professors in the field. Likewise, a Jewish organization calling itself “The David Project Center for [Jewish] Leadership,” appeared in Boston supporting Pipes’s project of monitoring and watching Middle East studies, as well as supporting the Israeli point of view regarding origins of the Islamic-Israeli struggle in Palestine. No[r]vell de Atkine and Daniel Pipes went on to coauthor a long article titled “Middle East Studies: What Went Wrong?” In this article, they discussed a number of issues regarding Middle East studies, as if they were presenting a courtroom defense for a number of Middle East studies researchers, at their head, Bernard Lewis, Fouad Ajami, Judith Tucker, and others while directing very sharp criticism at Edward Said, Yvonne Haddad, Joel Beinin, Rashid Khalidi, Joseph Massad, and others.

Among the most dangerous things the field of Middle East studies has been exposed to is the call of neoconservatives, or defenders of the good of the United States—as they call themselves—for a governmental council, approved by the U.S. Congress [Senate] and the House of Representatives, that would monitor Middle East studies in American universities receiving governmental support.

Due to all this, it has become urgent and pressing to investigate the position of Middle East studies in European and American universities, which, by definition, are among the most influential forces directing the external foreign policies of the American empire vis-à-vis the Islamic world, due to essential, and influential, factors in these studies, as well as the sources of pressure which these studies are exposed to.

http://www.meforum.org/2514/a-saudi-view-of-orientalism

Continuing my series on cinema and/as exorcism (see more here, here, and here), some thoughts on James Cameron’s Avatar, one of the worst Orientalist fantasies in recent memory (though I don’t want to waste many thoughts on such a facile and deluded piece of rubbish) …

Poster for Avatar showing Jake as both colonised and coloniser

I would give a synopsis of the plot, but I don’t need to if you’ve seen Dances with Wolves, Glory, Seven Years in Tibet, Blood Diamond, The Last Samurai, The Children of Huang Shi, or any other film where a white European character stumbles into a culture of noble but blinkered primitives and then proceeds to save them not only from his (and it is always his) fellow Europeans, but also from themselves.  In Avatar, the protagonist is an ex Marine named Jake, who is sent to a lush planet called Pandora to help run the Na’vi people (essentially three metre tall humanoids with better abs) off of their sacred land so a nameless company can harvest the minerals that lie beneath it. This is that same story, again, though done without any of the subversive gestures that distinguished the recent District 9, which shares a good few plot elements with all of these films but manages to be something other than the standard Orientalist bullshit.  From the opening generic tribal drumming, Avatar confirms every last sentence of Edward Said’s Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism.

Argument one: Avatar is the most astonishingly racist film since Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, perhaps worse even than 300.  The film’s noble savages, the Na’vi – many of whom, though they are computer generated motion captures of real actors, are played by non-white actors – are an amalgam of all the noble savage clichés dating back centuries.  They are in touch with nature.  They believe, in fact, that their planet, Pandora, is one he living organism (Pandora’s bookshops must sell a lot of James Lovelock).  They are violent but admirable.  They like to hold hands and dance.  They are sexually ambiguous. but still sexually appealing.  They are superstitious and reliant on magic and all sorts of often brutal rites of passage.  These may be noble savages in the film, but they are still savages and the film treats them as savages, as lesser people.

From the costume and character design, the Na’vi are evidently supposed to represent a smattering of oppressed indigenous peoples on Earth, from New Zealand Maori to the Navajo of the American southwest, but in blending all of these cultures into one, the film is guilty of doing exactly what it thinks it is condemning.  That each of the cultures that Cameron borrows from the create the Na’vi are vibrant and complete in their own right simply does not matter.  What matters is that they aren’t European and thus are an open resource to plunder when trying to define Europe over and against what it is not.  This is Orientalism par excellence.

In a final insult, the Na’vi’s beliefs about their planet being a living organism are given endorsement in the film only when these beliefs are proven scientifically.  This is the evolutionary narrative of history – out of darkness and into light, ironically, an idea that is deeply rooted in Christianity – in a nutshell.  The Na’vi religion is nothing more than primitive science, an accident of insight that needs European systems of valuation for its legitimacy.  This is, at the very best, a backhanded compliment and at worst an absolute repudiation of what the film intends.  Final thought: if the humans – as one of the generic corporate faces notes – have nothing to offer the Na’vi, then why does Jake, the sympathetic white human Marine, become the long-awaited saviour of the Na’vi?  Why tell the story from his standpoint at all?  Why not make Neytiri, the main Na’vi figure, the film’s centre?  Why not allow the Na’vi to fulfill their own prophecies?  Why not allow them to save themselves?  Why force them to end the film in a cold-hearted fashion, sending most of the humans home ‘to a dying world’?  Why not grant them the courage of their own ecological convictions and allow them to take a hand in saving the Earth?

Argument two: to say that Avatar is ideologically inconsistent is to make a molehill out of a mountain.  This is the perfect film for our times, when Barack Obama can make a speech defending a policy of perpetual war while accepting the Nobel Prize for Peace, when there is endlessly debate about climate change that touches on everything except the actual problems behind the crisis (the market is not the solution, people; it is the problem).  This is a film that appears to want to be an endorsement of peace but that ends in a fierce and very bloody battle for territory  and resources that the audience is supposed to  get behind.  In a similar fashion, Avatar makes every gesture possible towards valuing nature and the Na’vi are shown – over and over and over again – being ecologically minded and treating Pandora’s animal life with respect; however, in the film’s climactic orgy of violence, Pandora’s Gaia analogue sends all manner of creatures to their deaths in the name of preserving the Na’vi, who are thus obviously the most important creatures on the planet.

This is a major Hollywood studio film – and I do know that Cameron is actually Canadian – that is trying hard to say something genuine about ecology and capitalism but doesn’t know how to say anything that hasn’t been said for the last four or five hundred years.  Perhaps, more worryingly, it cannot, given that it is also one of the most expensive films ever made and it will need to recoup its costs largely in the international market, and thus cannot do anything but pander to the lowest worldwide common denominator.  This is a deeply confused film that reflects in every surface the convoluted and confused nature of our culture.  It is everything that it believes that it is not.  We deserve this film, though I wish I could say with any confidence that we deserve better.

Argument three: Avatar is the ultimate in Orientalist fantasy.  When Jake opens his eyes at the end of the film, having defeated the Europeans and sent them packing and having fully, literally become one of the Na’vi, he is living out the dreams of every white neo-pagan, Druid, or Wiccan out there who wants to truly recover a past that is, for the most part, a Romantic fantasy that has no roots in history.  Unlike Wikus in District 9, who also becomes an oppressed alien but takes up arms against the oppressors because he is a selfish git largely concerned with saving his own ass (a fact that the film is smart enough to admit), Jake is a classic Hollywood hero who is able to be both coloniser and colonised at once.   He is a coloniser without the need for guilt or any serious reflection on what he has done (he is instrumental in destroying the Na’vi’s village) but he is also colonised in that he can take part in a fantasy culture where everything is sunshine, simplicity, and sacredness.  Jake is liberal guilt made flesh.  In all of this, Cameron is  ideologically at least the equal of the great Orientalist novelists, from Rudyard Kipling to Joseph Conrad, though these two have the distinct advantage of having been able to actually write.

Zoe Saldana as Neytiri.

The film, on a technological level, is a game-changer, as they like to say.  As a narrative and as an example of the colonial gaze, there is nothing in Avatar that is any different, or any better, than eighteenth-century missionary and colonial writings about Egypt or India.  This does nothing to exorcise the demons of colonialism or imperialism; indeed, it is a wholehearted embrace of both of these things cloaked in the shell of a protest against them.

To be fair, I’ll throw in a few positives: everything in the film from the production design to the intricately imagined and convincingly rendered worlds, looks amazing (even in two dimensions, as we down here at the ends of the Earth still don’t have a 3-D theatre) and the climactic battle is a stunning achievement in editing, effects, and pacing.  Finally, Zoe Saldana as a nine-foot tall Smurf?  Still hot as all hell.

The typical white liberal assumes that non-white people have more “culture” than white people, and may express “envy” as an attempted compliment. Given that white liberals feel that they are denied access to the non-white culture which they “envy”, it is likely that their “envy” is directed at the imagined culture of non-whites, rather than culture (or loss of culture due to white cultural imperialism) as experienced by non-white people.

One example of the white-imagined culture of people of colour is the Oriental Riff, or rather, the Orientalist Riff:

This riff (click on the above image to play the sound file) appears in orientalist American and British pop songs like “Kung Fu Fighting” (1974) and “Turning Japanese” (1980). However, the “proto-cliché” or rhythmic pattern of “da-da-da-da, da da, da da, daaah!” originated in the 1800s, and has since been ubiquitous in pop culture to signify (and other) Asian culture or Asian people. Martin Nilsson has dedicated an entire website to the history of this rhythmic pattern, The Musical Cliché Figure Signifying The Far East: Whence, Wherefore, Whither?, and defines what he calls the “the Far East Proto-Cliché” as the following:

In other words, the “proto-cliché” is a riff with the rhythm of “da-da-da-da, da da, da da, daaah!” with varying tones, where the first four notes have identical tones, and the bracketed first six notes are obligatory. Additionally, “the instrumentation and general context should be meant to suggest the Orient in order for this pattern to actually be the Far East Proto-Cliché”. Nilsson’s website tracks this “proto-cliché” and provides ninety-seven examples of it from 1847 to 2001.

The painful irony of white people envying Asian people for our “culture” is that what white people perceive as cultural unattainability is actually our perceived cultural otherness. The otherness-disguised-as-unattainability evoked by the ubiquitous “proto-cliché” is a white construction of Asian identity, and this white construction of Asian identity is what they envy and already own without realizing it.

The “proto-cliché” and the most offensive instantiation of it—the Orientalist Riff itself—are used to dehumanize Asians. Kai Chang describes the Orientalist Riff as Musical Yellowface and writes:

Having grown up in a music-loving household filled with both Chinese and Western classical music, this little melody has always annoyed me. It’s basically what white folks play every time Orientalism is invoked in a TV show, movie, or pop song. It’s so prevalent that I honestly suspect that many white folks unconsciously hear this ditty when they see me walk into the room.

Funny thing is, it’s neither Chinese nor even representative of Chinese music. It’s a white supremacist construction whose artistic purpose is to caricaturize, mock, and dehumanize Asians.

Racialicious commenter Elton writes (17 Dec 2009):

Just yesterday, I was at Walmart, shopping for Christmas, when a kid walking by gave me a suspicious look and, as he walked away, sang what I call the “Chinese Stereotype Melody.” I have no idea where it came from, but Asian Americans probably know what I’m talking about. It goes something like, “da-da-da-da duh duh, duh duh, da” and has been used in countless shows and movies (often accompanied by fake martial arts, a gong sound, bowing, fake Chinese words, and just all around mockery of Chinese people, and, by extension, all Asians).

[...]

Anyway, even though this melody probably had the original intention of cheap laughs for people who think Orientalizing, exoticizing, and marginalizing people who are perceived to be perpetual foreigners is funny and entertaining and safe because they’ve never had to confront their own racism, it has the effect, over generations, of making millions of people victims of taunting, bullying, concentration camps, anti-immigration laws, colonization, fetishizing, rape, terror, torture, and socioeconomic inequality. We call this racism.

“It’s just a stupid melody,” you might be saying to yourself. “It’s just a stupid gesture.” And you would be right–it is stupid. It’s something that I would have hoped to leave on the playground 20 years ago. But the persistence of mockery of Asians, particularly the extent to which it’s accepted as innocuous, represents a growing trend that racism against Asians is not only acceptable, but doesn’t even exist.

Not only is the Orientalist Riff racist, but the similarly racist and orientalist “proto-cliché” is a long-standing tradition in the music culture of white-majority societies, even older than classic music genres that defined American music. A blogger puts the ditty into historical perspective:

The thing’s been around longer than jazz, longer than rock, and depending on how you measure these things, longer than the blues, which is where jazz and rock came from. It’s older than the Chinese Exclusion Act. It’s been around at least since 1847, in a melody in The Grand Chinese Spectacle of Aladdin or The Wonderful Lamp.

[...]

It really kicks into first gear, though, in the 1880s, which is about when the blues properly started up (which is where pentatonic scales started taking over Western music), and when… let’s call it “social tensions” began building up, as expressed in the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Clearly, the Orientalist Riff and the equally-orientalist “proto-cliché” originated from historical, anti-Asian sentiment in white-majority countries. Yet even today, the “proto-cliché” (or the riff itself) is being perpetuated in television and film, as if the rhythmic pattern is a natural representation of Asian culture instead of the obvious manifestation of white racism that it is. For example, in Karl Lagerfeld’s Paris-Shanghai: A Fantasy (2009), which debuted just this month (December), the “proto-cliché” appears in the second video (part 2) at about 6:06.

To expand on Nilsson’s fascinating research, I will be saving to Delicious instances I find of the “proto-cliché” (which includes the Orientalist Riff itself) and tagging them with the tag protocliche. If you find other contemporary examples of it and you use Delicious, please tag them with “protocliche” as well. If you are not a Delicious user, you can post links to “proto-cliché” examples in the comments of this post.

Bismilah al rahmán y rahim

El libro La Torre Elevada, Al Qaeda y los orígenes del 11-S, del escritor y periodista norteamericano Lawrence Wright, va por el camino inevitable de convertirse en  el estudio de referencia sobre el acontecimiento más importante de la historia reciente desde la caída del Muro de Berlín, los atentados del 11 de Septiembre de 2001 que derribaron las Torres Gemelas en Nueva York. Y ante una fatalidad de ese calibre, poco puedo hacer desde un blog para impedirlo. Pero los límites y las consecuencias de esta canonización son evidentes. Se va a dar por bueno, una vez más, el punto de vista del americano que quiere entender lo mínimo y reconfortarse con su propio sistema, el Imperio,  para no cuestionar, un poco más allá del discurso oficial, cómo pudo suceder lo que pasó en su país hace ya más de ocho años.

No quiero decir con esto que el libro sea una burda retahíla de ideas flojas complacientes con el imperialismo del periodo Clinton-Bush-Obama, ni que no tenga méritos suficientes que justifiquen la ingente labor del autor, de sus colaboradores, así como de los editores y de los traductores al castellano, mis amigos Carlos Sardiña y Yolanda Fontal, que han hecho un gran trabajo para que la lectura sea fluida. Ni quiero tampoco dar a entender que haya otra versión válida sobre qué pasó, cómo y por qué, que difiera de forma sustancial con la que ha propuesto L. Wright. Pero sí me alarmo, sí me preocupa que esta canonización (recuerdo que el libro ha recibido el prestigioso Premio Pulitzer de periodismo, y ha sido descrito como “el mejor libro que se ha escrito sobre Bin Laden y el 11-S“, como señala significativamente en su reseña en Babelia de El País José María Irujo) lleve aparejada una asimilación de sus planteamientos por parte de los que queremos mantener, pese a la enorme presión mediática, una independencia de criterio con respecto a la visión americana sobre Al Qaeda, y sobre todo, sobre el islam hoy en el mundo islámico, en los países con población mayoritariamente musulmana.

Comenzaré diciendo que el libro se lee bien, aunque no soy aficionado a este tipo de libros de periodismo, que tienen un defecto provocado por el trabajo en equipo. Mencionaré las reiteraciones incesantes, las multiplicadas anécdotas sin ninguna importancia, la necesidad de “amenizar la lectura” con un relato paralelo sobre el responsable del FBI encargado de perseguir a Bin Laden, John O’Neill, cuyas aventuras extramatrimoniales me parecen absolutamente irrelavantes y que solamente se justifican por un criterio pseudoliterario que en mi opinión añade paja innecesaria a un libro ya de por sí extenso. Pero no me centraré en esos defectos, sino en uno mucho mayor, mucho más grave y mucho más americano. La visión simplista y pobre del islam, del islam político, el islamismo, y por ende, del caldo de cultivo en el que se prepara el monstruo creado por Osama Bin Laden y Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Me apresuro inmediatamente para precisar que sí consigue el autor demostrar que los dos líderes de Al Qaeda, todavía en paradero desconocido, son dos enfermos mentales peligrosos, chapuceros, narcisistas, mediocres y crueles, y que, sin embargo, por una serie de circunstancias históricas bien explicadas, consiguieron organizar y financiar el mayor atentado terrorista conocido hasta la fecha. Entre dichas circunstancias, es de rigor conceder al autor que sí ha detallado con veracidad la absurda rivalidad entre servicios secretos estadounidenses, principalmente la CIA y el FBI, que facilitaron la estancia en territorio de los EEUU de varios miembros de Al Qaeda que ya estaban fichados y que ejecutarían los atentados. En ese sentido, se puede apreciar que el libro es un complemento bastante útil para conocer esa dimensión del acontecimiento, puesto que sin dichas rivalidades Al Qaeda nunca hubiera podido conseguir su megalómano plan  terrorista. También es una virtud del libro esbozar una cronología que se remonte al islamismo político de Sayyid Qutb, y que se detenga suficientemente en el atentado contra el World Trade Center de 1993.

Pero creo que ahí se acaban los méritos. El recorrido que va de Sayyid Qutb hasta Bin Laden, pasando por el islamismo violento de al-Yihad en Egipto y los campamentos de muyahidines árabes en Pakistán para luchar contra la ocupación soviética de Afganistán, y más tarde contra la Alianza del Norte de Ahmed Sha Massud, está planteado con demasiadas prisas, me parece, o con una confusión en la que el autor parece impregnarse del “cacao mental” de los personajes, hasta el punto de que no se aprecia en toda su intensidad ni la escalada represiva contra el islamismo en Egipto, ni la destrucción orquestada de Argelia por parte de los salafíes y del Ejército argelino, ni la desintegración del nacionalismo laico en los países árabes y sobre todo en el territorio palestino bajo ocupación israelí. El autor da por bueno un aparente desinterés del mentor de Osama Bin Laden, Abdullah Al Azzam, por la causa palestina, y lo resuelve  más tarde reproduciendo el antisemitismo primario de Al Qaeda, cuando en realidad, en esos años noventa, el desastre de los acuerdos de Oslo supone el mayor aliciente para el reclutamiento internacional de yihadistas.

No era una fatalidad conceder esa baza al sionismo. En una obra colectiva editada por Gilles Kepel, Al-Qaida dans le texte (PUF, 2005), aparentemente no empleada por el equipo de documentación de L. Wright,  o en el excelente ensayo de Mohammed Arkoun y Joseph Maïla, De Manhattan à Bagdad, Au-delà du bien et du Mal (Desclée de Brouwer, 2003), por poner solamente dos ejemplos, sí se profundiza en la conjunción de factores como el desposeimiento y la deshumanización de los palestinos por parte de Israel, o la modernidad espectacular y el uso terrorista de las TIC en sociedades castradas por clases dirigentes lacayas de Occidente, o el componente antropológico de la ecuación entre violencia y lo sagrado, para plantear una génesis de Al Qaeda que, sin complaciencias ni angelizaciones, tampoco la resuma sin contextualizaciones, y sobre todo sin simplificaciones interesadas. Del mismo modo, tampoco aprovecha el autor su conociemiento del ambiente muy acaudalado de la familia Bin Laden para ofrecer, por lo menos tangencialmente, una lectura marxista del acontecimiento, señalando cómo, una vez más, se trata de una “guerra de ricos” que sufren los pobres esencialmente .

Pienso en ese sentido en el luminoso escrito del profesor de la órbita situacionista Anselm Jappe, “El choque de las barbaries” (Le “choc” des barbaries. Des milliardaires à barbe contre des milliardaires sans barbe”), publicado al final del 2001, o en el artículo, tampoco citado por L. Wright, de Jean Baudrillard,  publicado en Le Monde en noviembre de 2001, “El espíritu del terrorismo” (“L’esprit du terrorisme“), que, enlazando brillantemente con su reflexión sobre la primera Guerra del Golfo “inexistente”, plantea en toda su intensidad el carácter particular del acontecimiento como agenciamiento ciego y espectacular del desorden.

Para acabar, es necesario añadir que ciertas expresiones de Lawrence Wright son claramente desafortunadas. Pienso en las típicas frases orientalistas que ven a Arabia como ese territorio que no ha cambiado un ápice en 2000 años, sus ganas de seguirle el juego a Bin Laden en su comparación reiterada entre el recorrido de exilio de Bin Laden en Sudán y Afganistán y la Hégira de Mahoma o Muhámmad (s.a.s), comparación desafortunada si se reproduce tal cual, sin el mínimo trabajo de deconstrucción del planteamiento salafí. Para ellos, el estudio de la historia sobra, por descontado, ya que no pretenden estos barbudos demostrar sus conocimientos en historia, en antropología o en sociología. Pero un autor occidental no puede reproducir el imaginario demencial de los fundamentalistas en un libro de divulgación, a menos que pretenda o no le importe sumarse a los atajos deshonestos de Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, César Vidal, Robert Redeker, André Glucksmann y otros islamófobos declarados. Es un hecho evidente que tanto los ideólogos del choque de civilizaciones, sionistas cristianos o ateos, y los salafíes qaidistas, coinciden en su simplificación vertiginosa de la historia fundacional del islam, pero eso no es sino la prueba del interés de ambas partes por precipitarnos a todos en una conflagración en la que se midan ambas barbaries, ambas ignorancias, ambas miserias morales.

Thomas Coryat, Odcombian Leg-Stretcher

This morning I returned to Uncle, for a look at Postcolonial criticism, and again it struck me, how strange to be learning about this from within the East, in contrast to when I came across this subject in my Australian university degree. And this topic is always of interest to me, because I’m never quite sure where I fit. The oppressive colonizer? (But look at me, I’m Asian!) The oppressed colonized? (But listen to me, I’m a Westerner!)

We discussed the way “Orientalism” was less the “East” and more an imagination of the “East” in the minds of the “West”, and I wondered out loud, if similar things weren’t going on today. There only ever seems to be a handful of storylines about Uncle that pop in the Western media (internet censorship, human rights record, economic rise) and in my short three months here I can assure there are plenty of other, very compelling things to look at in this country. (Have a look at this discussion to look at what is possibly driving the “Western media bias”.)

Perhaps, again, our representation of Uncle says just as much about us, or our relationship to them, as it does about them.

Similarly, it’s interesting to look at an “Eastern” response when a certain, handsome young writer grants an interview with a famous, Western publication. (Or, more accurately, that link is to a Western response to an Eastern response to an Eastern writer being portrayed by a Western title … confused yet?)

What are we looking at here? Subtle racism? Cultural misunderstandings? And from which side? Was Han Han really pandering to the West by granting this interview – and a West that refuses to even try to understand the East? Or aren’t these golden opportunities to show a different side to Uncle – something every country should be attempting to do, in the spirit of internationalism, rather than in support of some kind of ongoing Western hegemony?

These questions aren’t going away anytime soon and constantly pop up, because let’s face it, words matter. Just take a look at the PRC’s quick dumping of the catchy phrase “China’s peaceful rise” in 2004 when, alarmingly, the Western media came to emphasise the ‘rise’ part, much more than the ‘peaceful’ side.

Now the Party are having to put out global ad campaigns in order to downplay fears about Uncle’s dominance on the world stage. Particularly during a time when Western capitalists countries are in a time of identity crises, leading to articles like these, and movies like this.

Lastly, do you think I should dump the code words, and just call a spade a spade?

The Swiss government’s ban on Mosque minarets says a lot to me.  Along with the propaganda campaign (pictured above), I feel there is no other way to put it:  this is Islamophobia — shameless, ugly, unapologetic, and in-your-face.  Either fear makes the imagination run wild or minarets are really missiles in disguise.

It is clear the Orientalist imagery in the posters intend to arouse fear that, somehow, Switzerland is not very far from becoming “Islamized,” a term which is equated with “Talibanization,” i.e. militants roaming the streets, women forced to wear burqas, and implementation of a radical ideology.  In respect to minarets, it apparently did not take a long time for the Swiss government to violate its so-called “policy of neutrality” and choose to jump on the Islamophobia bandwagon.  Out of the 150 Mosques in the country, only 4 actually have minarets and only 2 were planned for construction.  I guess some Jack Bauer-wannabe “saw it coming” – “it” being “Islamization” and, um, the “end of Western civilization” as we know it!  All because of 4 (potentially 6) minarets.

There is already a lot of commentary about this throughout the internet/blogosphere.  Many, if not all, of the commentators agree that this ban is fuelled by fear.  Tariq Ramadan elaborated in his article:

Swiss Muslims have their share of responsibility but one must add that the political parties, in Europe as in Switzerland have become cowed, and shy from any courageous policies towards religious and cultural pluralism. It is as if the populists set the tone and the rest follow. They fail to assert that Islam is by now a Swiss and a European religion and that Muslim citizens are largely “integrated”… We cannot blame the populists alone – it is a wider failure, a lack of courage, a terrible and narrow-minded lack of trust in their new Muslim citizens.

Ramadan makes a point that I always try to echo whenever I engage in inter-faith and/or intercultural dialogue.  Islam is a universal religion; it is a Swiss religion, a European religion, an American religion, and so on.  Muslims are not limited to their religious identity, no matter how important it is in their daily lives; they have multiple identities like everyone else.  I’ve stated this so many times on my blog and I apologize to my regular readers who may be tired of reading this but I am a Muslim, I am an American, I am a Pakistani, I am a South Asian, I am a writer, I am a son, I am a brother, and the list goes on!

In my opinion, this is a new concept that all Western societies, not just Switzerland, have a difficult time understanding.  President Obama talks and even stated that Islam is an American religion, but words alone cannot change the realities.  Even though I highly doubt the United States would ban the building of minarets, Islamophobia is very present and it is growing.  Racial profiling, which Obama promised to end, still occurs and anti-Muslim hate crimes still persist.  CAIR recently released its annual report on civil rights concerning Muslim-Americans and it revealed that Islamophobic incidents are on the rise. The ban on minarets in Switzerland may not exist in other non-Muslim majority countries, but I believe it is analogous to the wider problem of Islamophobia that Western nations face.

In the discussion taking place about this subject, I’ve noticed that some non-Muslims have tried to deflate the issue by pointing out that Muslim majority countries like Saudi Arabia would not allow the building of Churches.  My reaction is: why mention Saudi Arabia when this is about Switzerland?  Simply because we are Muslims?  Muslims cannot be Swiss, American, British, French, Canadian, or Danish?  When people draw such comparisons, it serves one purpose: to discredit and negate the experiences of those who are facing discrimination.  Put it like this:  If a Muslim gets beat up in America and reports it as a hate crime, imagine the police officer saying, “well, hey, Christians are discriminated against in Muslim countries, so sorry, I can’t do anything for you!”  That is essentially what those arguments say.

It all makes me question why fear of Islam and Muslims perpetuates.  I strongly believe much of it is rooted in racism and xenophobia.  A 2008 Gallup Poll survey revealed that Muslim-Americans are “the most racially diverse religious group in the United States,” with White-Americans making up 28%, African-Americans 35%, Asian-Americans 18%, and other races 18%.  However, Muslims are typically thought to be ethnically, racially, and culturally different than the dominant culture in Western societies. Christianity and Judaism, like Islam, both originated in the Middle-East, but they are generally not perceived as “foreign” or “alien” (even though Jesus and the other Prophets, peace be upon them all, were Middle-Easterners).  No one stigmatizes a White Christian because White Christians  “look like everyone else,” i.e. the dominant culture.  Muslims, on the other hand, tend to look “different” — they speak, dress, worship, and live “differently,” therefore fear and suspicion is “justified.”

Mosques?  Aren’t those things only found in the Middle-East?  Islam an American/European religion?  How can that be?  Isn’t Islam an Arab religion and aren’t Muslims anti-Western?  Such stereotypes exist in the minds of too many people, including professors, authors, business owners, store managers, politicians, and so on.  The more Muslims are treated like “cultural outsiders,” the more challenging it is to feel accepted.  Muslims are already integrated in Western societies, the problem is that we are not acknowledged, recognized, and in many cases, such as in Switzerland, we are not granted our religious rights.

Jonathan Freedland wrote a powerful commentary about the Swiss ban from a Jewish perspective.  He writes:

It’s a crude reaction but it’s the first one I had on hearing that the Swiss had voted to ban the building of minarets on mosques – the same reaction I have to the increasingly-frequent stories like it: how would I feel if this were not about them, but us? How, in other words, would I react if this latest attack were not on Muslims but on Jews?… With horror, of course… What passionate secularists and atheists need to understand is that what seems to outsiders like a religious affiliation is, for many millions, only partly about faith. It’s often partly, even largely, about identity. How can I be so sure that’s true of Muslims? Because I know it’s true of Jews.

Hatred, racism, and/or prejudice against an entire group of people is the most dangerous when it is acceptable.  The Islamophobic ads posted in the streets of Switzerland eerily recall days of Nazi propaganda used against Jews and the ban on minarets represents the complicity and fading consciousness of the government — and perhaps the world.

Bismilah al rahmán y rahim

Yo no soy un experto , por ser experto en el islam, no soy un experto, digo, de los movimientos apocalípticos. El sionismo, que merece una atención especial por lo que supone de teoría de una acción colonialista, puede ser el centro del debate, o al menos un enfoque a partir del cual establecer una frontera, el antisionismo.

La guerra de Afganistán, el ginocidio específico (violencia asesina contra las mujeres), la deuda de los países pobres, tdos y cada uno de los temas políticos que podamos intentar desmenuzar en nuestro contexto están enturbiados por el pecado de un antisemitismo europeo, hoy reformulado en islamofobia. Ni Obama (Obamás, decía Búfalo)  ni la Alianza de Civilizaciones pueden parar un cuestionamiento radical de los conceptos de terrorismo, seguridad, derechos humanos, ONG’s, humanitario, catástrofe, urgencia, acción, ayuda.

El lamentable secuestro que condeno rotundamente de los tres cooperantes españoles y catalanes de la ONG de Barcelona en Mauritania demuestra desgraciadamente un fenómeno absolutamente singular y gravísimo. Poco sabían los medios de comunicación españoles sobre la realidad del secuestro, pero todos decidieron publicar en letras mayúsculas el nombre de la organización terrorista Al Qaeda. Un secuestro no es ya un secuestro como ha sido el de Aminatu Haidar por Marruecos, con el beneplácito de las aduanas españolas y el apoyo inicial de Moratinos, no, el secuestro de los cooperantes españoles y catalanes es un duelo abierto contra el Anticristo (para Jónathan F. Moriche).

The decision is stupid, disgraceful and racist. I have expressed my views on it in an earlier post called Welcome To The Islamic Republic of Switzerland Or Do You Want Your Burqa In Black Or Blue?

Today Jon Stewart of The Daily Show just calls it as it is:

I would like to thank gracious God for the First Amendment. Freedom of speech, religion, of the press, and to assemble.

Some disturbing news from that neutral country of Switzerland.

First, Sunday, a ban was passed throughout all cantons, by majority vote, that would disallow minarets to be placed on top of mosques.  Where are the fighters of religious freedom on this issue?

And even scarier, the campaign posters have large racial overtones, affirming my commentary on BLACK FRIDAY.

And now, emboldened by Sunday’s vote, another Swiss political party is promoting a ban on
the separate cemeteries that Jews and Muslims currently have.

Xenophobia. Hysteria. Racism. Orientalism. Anti-semitism. All driving forces in public policy debates in Switzerland.

I sense history repeating itself.

HT:Polycarp

This is a color study I did last night.  I did several versions and this one was the best of the batch.  I will still make changes to it – primarily in the bottom panel.

UPDATE: A recent article in The Boston Review, titled God, The Army & PTSD by Tara McKelvey raises a number of important questions about the increasing use of Christian religious/spiritual material at military institutions, including the pop-psych mumbo-jumbo of Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life by Pastor Rick Warren, to treat soldiers suffering from PTSD and other psychiatric problems. For example, it points out that:

When a 2006 Government Accountability Office report raised questions about whether soldiers were getting the psychiatric help they needed, an assistant secretary of defense disputed the report’s findings, pointing to the fact that soldiers were being referred to chaplains. During this time contracts for veterans’ services were increasingly parceled out to leaders of faith-based organizations rather than to secular ones, even though veterans’ advocates opposed any bias toward faith-based treatment and argued that replacing empirically proven, nonsectarian programs with faith-based ones was a mistake.

As one commentator points out in the responses to this piece:

Major Hasan would have been familiar with the conditions described in this essay. As psychiatrist at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center for the last five years he would have both treated patients for PTSD and have been familiar with the preference for faith based treatments described in this article.

We hear from Major Hasan’s family that he complained about religious harassment during his tenure at Walter Reed but we do not know specifics. It is reasonable to believe that his patients suffering from PTSD might not have liked being treated by a Muslim and almost certainly heard specific opinions about Islam and Muslims from those patients. The inevitable investigation into Major Hasan’s career will reveal the dynamic of those patient interactions.

This is, again, about asking human questions about a human, criminal act so that we may know meaningful and actionable facts and truths about such heinous acts. I raised this point in the main essay (see below) some weeks ago. Searching for the psychology of ‘Muslims’, as the learned Tunku Varadarajan wants to do, or exploring the pages of a religious text, while erasing daily and ordinary social, political and lived reality of an individual is a false, and frankly, racist approach. It seems to be particularly reserved for anyone who can be labeled ‘Muslim’. That word – ‘Muslim’ has now come to take on the meaning of a special species – devoid of individuality and history and to be seen only as a mob, mass, collectivity, blob and spiritually programmed pathology.

∞

It did not take long for overtly racist explanations to be offered. Before facts come fantasy, and before truth comes tabloid opinions masquerading as insight. And it arrived not in some radical, fringe magazine but in the pages of the international magazine Forbes by one of their regular contributors. (I of course ignore the determined Islamophobia of outlets like Fox News.)

Tunku Varadarajan wrote a piece for Forbes magazine on 11th November 2009, title Going Muslim where he argued that:

“Going postal” is a piquant American phrase that describes the phenomenon of violent rage in which a worker–archetypically a postal worker–”snaps” and guns down his colleagues.

As the enormity of the actions of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan sinks in, we must ask whether we are confronting a new phenomenon of violent rage, one we might dub–disconcertingly–”Going Muslim.” This phrase would describe the turn of events where a seemingly integrated Muslim-American–a friendly donut vendor in New York, say, or an officer in the U.S. Army at Fort Hood–discards his apparent integration into American society and elects to vindicate his religion in an act of messianic violence against his fellow Americans. This would appear to be what happened in the case of Maj. Hasan.

Mr. Varadarajan is no clown – he is in fact a a professor at NYU’s Stern Business School and a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, and an executive editor for opinions at Forbes. Clearly a man of some learning and yet able to offer us this fine insight:

This is part of a larger–and too-hot-to-touch–American problem, which is the privileging of religion, and its frequent exemption from rules of normal discourse. Muslims may be more extreme because their religion is founded on bellicose conquest, a contempt for infidels and an obligation for piety that is more extensive than in other schemes.

Moving on to ask us a crucial question of whether:

But can the American swagger persist if many Americans come genuinely to view Muslims as Fifth Columnists? The integration compact depends on a broad trust that the immigrant’s desire to be American can happily co-exist with his other forms of racial/cultural/religious identity. Once that trust doesn’t exist, America faces a problem in need of urgent resolution.

∞

One doesn’t quite know where to begin to respond to what is without a doubt an overtly racist diatribe that takes the actions of an individual and paints it as that of a collectivity. That is after all the ideal description of racism: (noun) the belief that all members of a group posses characteristics or abilities (or pathologies) specific to that group. But then again, the learned professor is not alone in this and arrives as the inheritor of centuries of orientalist thought that can never quite reconcile itself to the individuality of the people it labels as Muslims. And he is not alone in America, or elsewhere.

But the learned professor raises specific points which I would like to examine perhaps a little more closely.

He says in this very article that ‘they’ [the Muslims] are more extreme because ‘their’ religion is …founded on bellicose conquest, a contempt for infidels and an obligation for piety that is more extensive than in other schemes.

Only sheer hubris combined with willful amnesia can allow this gentleman to offer us this explanation. Hubris as he sits as a citizen of a nation that is at this very moment in violent and repressive conquest of at least two once sovereign nations, and whose army has repeatedly insisted on a sheer contempt for the infidels it has found there and encouraged its soldiers to piety the likes of which can only make the foundations of our Republic weaker. The hundreds of thousands that have died since 2001 under the guns and arrogance of an overtly Christian/Evangelical administration that also led us to become instigators of war crimes, violators of international law and perpetrators of mass murder perhaps may not agree that it is Islam that is intrinsically programmed to encourage mass violence, conquest and/or piety.

(For those with short memories, see Micklethwait/Wooldridge’s The Right Nation, or Chris Hedges’ American Fascists or Michelle Goldberg’s Kingdom Coming or any number of others books on this issue)

I don’t think I have to elaborate on our occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, so I will move to the next point – Islam’s unique contempt for infidels and its piety. Really? Is it that unique? Lets see.

In a fabulous piece written by the relentless Jeff Sharlet for Harpers Magazine title “Jesus Killed Mohammed: The Crusade For A Christian Military”, he points out that:

When Barack Obama moved into the Oval Office in January, he inherited a military not just drained by a two-front war overseas but fighting a third battle on the home front, a subtle civil war over its own soul. On one side are the majority of military personnel, professionals who regardless of their faith or lack thereof simply want to get their jobs done; on the other is a small but powerful movement of Christian soldiers concentrated in the officer corps.

What men such as these have fomented is a quiet coup within the armed forces: not of generals encroaching on civilian rule but of religious authority displacing the military’s once staunchly secular code. Not a conspiracy but a cultural transformation, achieved gradually through promotions and prayer meetings, with personal faith replacing protocol according to the best intentions of commanders who conflate God with country. They see themselves not as subversives but as spiritual warriors—“ambassadors for Christ in uniform,” according to Officers’ Christian Fellowship; “government paid missionaries,” according to Campus Crusade’s Military Ministry.

This is perhaps one of the scariest pieces of journalism I have read, reminding us of the infiltration of Christian fundamentalist ideology infesting the armed forces and its consequences for our operations abroad. Perhaps the learned professor would do well to read his words, including:

Within the fundamentalist front in the officer corps, the best organized group is Officers’ Christian Fellowship, with 15,000 members active at 80 percent of military bases and an annual growth rate, in recent years, of 3 percent. Founded during World War II, OCF was for most of its history concerned mainly with the spiritual lives of those who sought it out, but since 9/11 it has moved in a more militant direction. According to the group’s current executive director, retired Air Force Lieutenant General Bruce L. Fister, the “global war on terror”—to which Obama has committed 17,000 new troops in Afghanistan—is “a spiritual battle of the highest magnitude.” As jihad has come to connote violence, so spiritual war has moved closer to actual conflict, “continually confronting an implacable, powerful foe who hates us and eagerly seeks to destroy us,” declares “The Source of Combat Readiness,” an OCF Scripture study prepared on the eve of the Iraq War.

As we look across to our Israeli allies, we ironically (or perhaps not) find in fact the same problem there! In a scathing piece written by Christopher Hitchens called An Army of Extremists for Slate Magazine, he pointed out that:

Recent reports of atrocities committed by Israeli soldiers in the course of the intervention in Gaza have described the incitement of conscripts and reservists by military rabbis who characterized the battle as a holy war for the expulsion of non-Jews from Jewish land. The secular Israeli academic Dany Zamir, who first brought the testimony of shocked Israeli soldiers to light, has been quoted as if the influence of such extremist clerical teachings was something new. This is not the case.

And should one have thought that this was simply a rare exception, he goes on to remind us that:

Possibly you remember Dr. Baruch Goldstein, the man who in February 1994 unslung his weapon and killed more than two dozen worshippers at the mosque in Hebron. He had been a physician in the Israeli army and had first attracted attention by saying that he would refuse to treat non-Jews on the Sabbath. …[I]n the March 22 New York Times about the preachments of the Israeli army’s latest chief rabbi, a West Bank settler named Avichai Rontzski who also holds the rank of brigadier general. He has “said that the main reason for a Jewish doctor to treat a non-Jew on the Sabbath … is to avoid exposing Diaspora Jews to hatred.” Those of us who follow these things recognize that statement as one of the leading indicators of a truly determined racist and fundamentalist. Yet it comes not this time in the garb of a homicidal lone-wolf nut bag but in the full uniform and accoutrement of a general and a high priest.

And we can even look outside of the ‘immediate’ military structure, and find piety and a religious zeal for conquest raising its ugly head. In an article written by Jeremy Scahill titled Blackwater Founder Implicated in Murder we learn that:

A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia.The two men claim that the company’s owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe,” and that Prince’s companies “encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life.”

In fact, the allegations read as follows:

To that end, Mr. Prince intentionally deployed to Iraq certain men who shared his vision of Christian supremacy, knowing and wanting these men to take every available opportunity to murder Iraqis. Many of these men used call signs based on the Knights of the Templar, the warriors who fought the Crusades.

Mr. Prince operated his companies in a manner that encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life. For example, Mr. Prince’s executives would openly speak about going over to Iraq to “lay Hajiis out on cardboard.” Going to Iraq to shoot and kill Iraqis was viewed as a sport or game. Mr. Prince’s employees openly and consistently used racist and derogatory terms for Iraqis and other Arabs, such as “ragheads” or “hajiis.”

Again, perhaps the learned professor would like to peruse this material if for no other reason than to understand that zealotry, piety, and a desire for conquest is never the exclusive purvey of any one spiritual delusion, but reflects the world views of practically all of them.

But in particular, at this moment in time and history, at this juncture of modernity, if there is a rapid, rapacious, powerful and in fact in execution spiritual movement of conquest and a drive for excessive piety, it is more so in the hands of some of the most powerful military nations in the world. And none of them can claim an Islamic collective mindset.

I will say something about the learned professor’s incredibly racist mistake in assuming that the shooter was an immigrant – as he says The integration compact depends on a broad trust that the immigrant’s desire to be American can happily co-exist with his other forms of racial/cultural/religious identity. But in fact Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan is as pure an American as they come; born, raised, educated and trained in the United States of America. He wasn’t an immigrant professor, he was an American.

And he was an American inside a deeply Christianized, racist military structure that has become comfortable speaking about and of the Arab world and Muslims in the most derogatory, demeaning and racist terms. It has become so because its wars are against a people it sees as a mass, a mob, a group, a collective – A-rabs, Muslims, ragheads, hajjis. The latter term is used openly and gleerfully in even such mainstream Hollywood films such as Stop-Loss. (I am sure there are more, but Hollywood is not something I watch with interest or regularity.)

The army has has become so because it is the war that it is fighting and it is here that we refuse to ask the hard question; how much of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s rage was against his fellow soldiers and the atmosphere at the base itself that allowed for a constant and unchecked language of hate and ridicule against an entire religion, people, culture and way of life? Were there, perhaps, white supremacists on the loose? Well, we will never know of course.

But I am sure that the learned professor doesn’t know either. What is dismaying is that he does not have the awareness to ask, but has instead chosen to give public vent to what can only be a deeply personal hatred against all Muslims claiming that it is only political correctness that is forcing America, and her Army, from taking the necessary, collective/racial profiling, actions that it should. He is angry that America suffers from a …privileging of religion, and its frequent exemption from rules of normal discourse.

Lets be clear, the learned professor is not complaining about America’s privileging of all religions, for after all it is not the insanity of the Christian Evangelicals that has bought him to this realization, but that the country is not collectively targeting Muslims! We have to remember that the same learned professor has been an outspoken advocate of racial profiling of Muslims in America,

But dear professor, viewing a crime as the act of an individual and not because of a pathology indigenous to an entire collectivity is less about being politically correct and more about being just and not being a racist. In fact, the determination to not reduce this to yet another all-too-easy Islam bashing exercise is a testament to America’s determination to return to the ways of the law and legality, and to move its society back to a point where it speaks not with generic hatred of an imaginary collectivity but with genuine desire to offer both justice and rights for individuals who commit crimes. It is one of the very set of values we always speak about and insist are what we are killing in places around the world for!

And it is a battle that we as American citizens have had to fight hard – to move past the infantile and retrograde desire to hate ‘all of them’ for the actions of a few, to lynch them for their color for example, and move towards the point where we can see individuals and individual responsibility and make them not only the recipients of retribution, but also the motivation for our respect for fundamental liberties and rights.

I do not know what led Maj. Hasan to do what he did. I can’t even begin to understand his motivations, and certainly not his actions. I remain dismayed to learn that he chose to justify his murders on the basis of his spiritual beliefs. Just as I have been dismayed to learn about Jewish extremists gloating about their murders on the basis of their beliefs, or Christian fanatics e.g. those in the US military I speak about earlier explaining their bloody rampages because of their ‘loving god’. Maybe he was just a mentally disturbed and ill person, as a recent NPR piece claims to have uncovered. Maybe he lost his way. I don’t know. I don’t claim to have an answer here.

My interest here is to question our learned professor. And wonder how we have arrived at a moment in time when such blatantly racist statements can make it to the pages of one of our most respected magazines, and then find hundreds who rush to defend his bigotry? Our continued insistence on seeing Muslims as a collective whole, tied at the psychological and moral level into one large blob, is quite flabbergasting and ultimately confusing.

Like a taint, a disease, a scar or a deformation, anyone, man, woman or child, even vaguely or deeply implicated by having been born, raised, educated, traveled to, interested in, curious about things Muslim has his entire identity and all its various other facets subsumed and erased by the label of being Muslim. And once that is established, the individual is safely dropped back into a mob, where only mob acts that are predictable and programmatic based on an formalized, systematized, idealized and perfectly synchronized response to instructions in text books or from the mouths of religious leaders can occur. LIke robots in a massive spiritual assembly line, anything that reeks of Islam can be expected to behave like a swarm, mindlessly following the dictates of their religious books, devoid of individuality, individual morality, judgment, discernment and comprehension.

I am diseased.

Bismilah al rahmán y rahim

Nuevas declaraciones de Tariq Ramadan de carácter homófobo, en el programa de radio “Générations citoyens“, y con además  la “obligatoriedad voluntaria”  del velo a partir de la “edad de razón”, es decir, “14, 15 años”.

Dejo la cuestión del velo, me lo tengo prohibido, me concentro solamente en la cuestión del discurso homófobo (en torno al minuto 30, y unos minutos después). En realidad, el mecanismo está muy rodado

1) presupuesto indiscutible: todas las religiones, “incluso el Dalai Lama” (bis), prohíben la homosexualidad, “incluso la condenan”.

2) inmediatamente: “ahora bien”, no se trata de pensar en castigar.

3) no se debe imponer al islam que acepte “el acto“.

Es un esquema feroz. Porque no se trata de que admitamos ingenuamente una aceptación de las personas de forma abstracta, sino  de defender el respeto incondicional a todas y todos en su integridad, en su identidad, que incluye su sexualidad, que es su dignidad.

Las religiones no dicen nada sobre la homosexualidad que no sean solamente sus lecturas patriarcales. Sus lecturas feministas demuestran fehacientemente que cualquier texto tiene una dialéctica entre lo unívoco y lo equívoco que se ejerce en cada una de sus secuencias léxicas, sintácticas y contextuales. El resto es manipulación que pretende mantener unos esquemas sobre la sexualidad aberrantes e hipócritas. Las menciones de Tariq Ramadan a los textos no son sinceras, puesto que ignora deliberadamente los comentarios que  cuestionan la supuesta homofobia , que desmienten la anulación de la vitalidad del Corán.

Para acabar, el programa degenera definitivamente entre bromas entre presentadores (hombre y mujer), Tariq Ramadan y el cantante de rap Médine, que además de ser de pésimo gusto, eran insoportablemente machistas. No soporto las “bromas de cama” de mujeres activas en la política, por muy de derechas que sean.

Picking The Favorite (detail)

The New Arrival

Inspection Of The New Arrivals

The Harem Dance

Picking The Favorite

click to enlarge

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s “The Snake Charmer” (1883)

Current Location: Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Young Boys and Snakes were all the rage in 19th Century India…

Tags: Snake Charmer, India, Mercenaries, Naked Boy, Huge Black Penis, Poisonous Black Penis, Once you go black you won’t poop right or weeks, Freak Show, White boy, art kicks ass by Bradley Werner, famous art, masterpieces, artists, painter,

Update: 30th November 2009

The vote to ban the minaret was passed. Switzerland, long pretending to be a liberal, democratic nation that respected the rights to the free practice of all faiths, has revealed its ugly underbelly. Amnesty International has already declared the country in violation of the right to the free practice of religion. Their statement was unequivocal:

“Contrary to the claims of the initiators of the referendum, a general prohibition of the construction of minarets would violate the right of Muslims in Switzerland to manifest their religion,” said Nicola Duckworth, Europe and Central Asia Programme Director at Amnesty International.

“A ban on the construction of minarets while, for example, allowing those of church spires would constitute discrimination on the basis of religion.”

And even if it wasn’t, it entire campaign reflects a loving immersion in the joys of bigotry, and ahistorical idiocy.

The campaign to ban the minaret fed off irrational and hideous fears of the bogeyman of Islam, and a deep-seated and seriously bigoted depiction of the faith, its history, its community and its ideals. Suffice it to remind the idiots in Switzerland, that their own Christian steeple traces its own history to the Islamic minaret. Our friends at Chapati Mystery kindly posted a piece written by the historian Richard J. H. Gottheil. called “The Origin and History of the Minaret” in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Mar., 1910): 152-4. where he points out that:

It seems to me, therefore, that a possible explanation of the sudden appearance of the campanile in Italy during the eighth and ninth centuries, would be that they are due to Mohammedan influence. Whether this influence came from Egypt, or from Syria and Mesopotamia, or even from the Maghreb, is a point upon which I should not like to insist. But this much does seem to follow from a study of history of the monuments, that the old idea of the Ziggurat or tower in some way connected with worship at a shrine has filtered down to us through the Mohammedan minaret and finds its expression to-day in our church steeple.

To say nothing to these illiterates that Islam and the Muslims have been an integral part and influence on Europe, and have had a presence there, since nearly 700 years. Europe’s ability to extricate itself from the horrors of the dark ages, and to pull itself onto the path of the enlightenment, could only have happened because of the deep-seated Islamic presence and influence on her culture, knowledge, society, intelligentsia, and politics. To say nothing about the introduction of decent hygiene!

Juan Cole penned an angry piece, title Bigotry Wins in Switzerland, in response to the Swiss-cheese-like thinking that led to this dark moment in European history. He reminds us that:

Switzerland is said to be 5 percent Muslim, and of course this proportion is a recent phenomenon there and so unsettling to some. But Islam is not new to Europe. Parts of what is now Spain were Muslim for 700 years, and much of the eastern stretches of what is now the European Union were ruled by Muslims for centuries and had significant Muslim populations. Cordoba and Sarajevo are not in Asia or Latin America. They are in Europe. And they are cities formed in the bosom of Muslim civilization.

For those of you looking for a more thorough examination of Europe’s real history, and the impact of Islamic heritage on her modernity and present, I would recommend Maria Rosa Menocal’s book  Ornament Of The World, and/or David Levering Lewis’ God’s Crucible: Islam & The Making Of Europe 570-1250 or even Jack Goody’s remarkable insights in works like Islam In Europe.

Switzerland is merely the beginning of this sordid episode. Europe’s hideous shift to the right will continue to make matters difficult for the region’s Muslim populations. Hence it becomes even more imperative that we know how to speak back – with history on our side and with the truths that can cut past the bigoted simplicities, delusions and paranoia being used to defend imagined and ahistorical ideas about Europe, her heritage and her culture. The false claims to a purely Judeo-Christian heritage are as meaningless as the claims to a purely Greco-Roman intellectual inheritance. I have written about this delusion in a previous post titled What A Tangled Web We Weave.

May the battle go to the most intelligent, cogent and coherent.

∞

The poster above has become the source of embarrassment and debate within Switzerland. Printed by the far-right Swiss People’s Party (SVP) it is part of their campaign to put a stop to the construction of mosques in the country, and raise their voices against the presence of ‘the other’. The poster depicts minarets in the shape of missiles, and of course, the ubiquitous burqa-clad woman who apparently represents Islam. As explained in a recent piece in Spiegel magazine called Why The Swiss Are Afraid Of Minarets the poster and campaign was the idea of …

…a German man who is behind the successful anti-minaret campaign. The 46-year-old from Hamburg moved to Switzerland after completing his university studies. He worked as a journalist for the conservative Schweizerzeit newspaper and later for the anti-Islam newspaper Bürger und Christ, or “Citizens and Christ,” in which he wrote tirades against a liberal society. “I’ve been able to be active with the SVP on referendum and election campaigns for years,”

Many cities in Switzerland have banned the poster.

But once again, I disagree with this decision. I think that all cities should allow this poster to be shown and distributed. It is the only way that we can reveal the hatred and racism that informs this campaign and confront it head on. But unless we bring these paranoia and delusions into the open, unless we create an environment where these hate-mongers and racists can be directly confronted and challenged, we will not eliminate this scourge from amongst us.

Banning it will only force it to where we cannot confront it, and remove it, and will empower the instigators of this campaign to continue to spread their hateful message but in more insidious and covert ways.

It is clearly obvious that the Swiss are intelligent enough to see the dangers of this campaign, and the racism that informs it. As the Spiegel piece points out:

The minaret initiative is so radical for a Western country that even some die-hard members of the far-right Swiss People’s Party (SVP) are uncomfortable about it. The former party president and current defense minister Ueli Maurer said he was “not totally happy” about it. It probably breaches the consitutional right to religious freedom and could do further damage to Switzerland’s international reputation which has already suffered in recent months from the UBS debacle in the US and accusations that Switzerland is a haven for tax evaders. The case could even provoke the same kind of violent reaction in Muslim countries as the publication of cartoons of the prophet Muhammad in Danish newspapers did four years ago.

There is in fact no point in a ‘violent’ reaction. This is a stupid campaign, by stupid men, and based on stupid assumptions and prejudices. They can be easily, and rather casually, challenged, undermined and eliminated.

There will always be extremists – the ones who are scared, and confused in the face of a changing world and a modernity that seems to be leaving them behind. Rewarding them with public censure only encourages their behavior because it offers them the victory of ‘victimhood’ and ‘martyrdom’. We should not do so.

Print the posters!

I suggest we all print them and hang them up in our homes if for no other reason than to remind us that our silence or our attempts to silence them will in fact be the reason for the ideas that inform this poster to become reality.

Print the posters.

SVP, please send me a copy!

You may also want to read Pankaj Mishra’s piece A Paranoid, Abhorrent Obsession and I quote the paragraph that obviously is an influence and an inspiration for my stand here:

It is a depressing spectacle – talented writers nibbling on cliches picked to the bone by tabloid hacks. But, as Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr pointed out, the “men of culture”, with their developed faculty of reasoning, tend to “give the hysterias of war and the imbecilities of national politics more plausible excuses than the average man is capable of inventing”. The “public conversation” about Islam…should not be avoided. Its terms have already been set low, and the bigger danger is that it will be dominated by an isolated and vain chattering class that, rattled by a changing world, seeks to reassure us by digging an unbridgeable trench around our minds and hearts.

Bismilah al rahmán y rahim

Ginebra ha sido asesinada por los suizos y las suizas, hijos e hijas de Guillermo Tell, que han votado con amplia mayoría a favor de una ley islamófoba y en contra de una iniciativa justa, promovida por el colectivo pacifista más representativo del legado idealista de la paz, en un tiempo asociado a la ciudad del borde del Lago Léman. “Catastrófico“, califica el resultado Tariq Ramadan. Yo pienso en mis amigos que siguen viviendo en aquella ciudad, musulmanes y ateos, quizás hasta cristianos y judíos, que deben estar abatidos, sentirse desolados ante unos resultados terribles y sorprendentes. Ha muerto su ciudad, asesinada en un sucio domingo fascista del siglo XXI, en nombre de la democracia. ¡Qué asco!