Memories & Dreams

I saw the Lord with the Eye of the heart. . .

2011-03-19T00:25:00.001-04:00

. . . So I said, Who art thou? He answered: Thou (Famous Sufi Proverb)

(**Please note: I wrote this for a class, which should be fairly obvious upon reading it. However, I thought since many of my friends know very little about Islam, you might appreciate a perspective on it. Enjoy!)

Opening a dialogue on evolutionary notions of religious authority invites a variety of curious and didactic inquiries into some of the most basic and similarly complex beliefs and practices of theology. Inevitably, conversations regarding hermeneutics will aspire to contribute in re-contextualizing events, texts, beliefs and practices, as the growing body of religious orthodoxy and orthopraxis is cultivated in ever intricate and expanding ways. The task of this particular paper is to fashion a sketch of the Shi’a concepts of the office of the Imamate in contrast to Sunni understandings of leadership and human responsibility. Pertinent questions arise regarding how and what religious authority is (in contemporary and historical lenses), why it is important to define religious authority, and finally issues related to interpretive power of scripture, sacred texts and/or transmissions.

Apropos to the aforementioned questions, I would like to address a few obvious points concerning the problematic nature of historical research, especially when addressing highly politicized and often misunderstood subject areas of sectarian identification. I affirm that using sectarian terminology to illustrate multifarious practices and beliefs is a result of the necessary mechanics needed to ascribe definitions to phenomena. At the same time, sectarian identification is, even in its strongest sense, an exceedingly tenuous qualification because identity is often not static. Identity can and does change over time, and in accordance to location (for example agrarian versus urban environments, and/or Mediterranean culture versus living South West Asian culture). Identity may also change in collective and individual ways in the circumstance of religious conversion, governance transition or class or intellectual mobility, etc. Additionally, “historical knowledge” tends to be largely the product of those who have generated it, and is imbued with relationships to power. From our particular historical moment, it is easy to identify past prejudicial and essentialized notions of sectarian identity, and trace how these have been manipulated. Gathering ideas on why certain processes were emphasized over others may assist in establishing an understanding of how sectarian identities are born and evolve. I shall begin by briefly flexing the tacit historical narrative that have contributed to Islam’s development of religious authority.

We began this course on Islamic civilization with a reading of Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations in contrast to Karen Wigen and Martin Lewis’ Myth of Continents. The overarching point of engaging these opposing readings was to notice how orientalist categorizations of East and West have been largely inaccurate. Wagen and Lewis reiterate Robert Young’s contention that, “if there is a single project shared by contemporary radical social theorists, it might be that of deconstructing ‘the concept, the authority, and the assumed primacy of the category of the West.’” I give this example to illustrate that Islamic or Muslim definitions of religious authority are connected to previous historical notions, especially in reference to the Abrahamic tradition that Muhammad ascribed his new revelations unto. At the same time there are specifically unique qualities to the variety of religious authority that developed in Islam.

Hodgson places Islam in the post-Axial age with the emergence of many other proto-monotheistic religions. Hodgson concerns himself with explaining the interconnectedness and cross-pollination transpiring between Arab tribes of the Arabian Peninsula and the varied communities and regions Oikoumene . He also claims that in addition to Islam’s influence politically by Arab nomadism, its religious roots share many commonalities with that of rabbinical Judaism and Christianity, and is yet another branch of the Confessional Religions. Hence, Islam is understood as an heir to the religious and political ideologies of preceding societies in and outside of the Arabian Peninsula through which Islam emerges. Thus, Islam was similar apropos to what developed as the intellectual history of “Western” religion and politics.
“These peoples, among whom Islam was to develop, were increasingly linked together, even apart from wider contacts across the Oikoumene. At first they were the foremost example of the development of a cosmopolitan regional high culture . . .to this extent, they formed a single multinational civilization which can most conveniently be called Cuneiform…The cosmopolitanism of the future Irano-Semetic cultural tradition was being launched.”

Sunni and Shi’a conceptualizations of Muhammad’s life are generally similar, but it is at the death of Muhammad that the narrative of succession becomes hotly contested. The early Islamic community splits at the moment of the death of Muhammad over who would lead the ummah. Some members of the ummah, in accordance with centuries of like practice understood succession (religious or not) to be largely dynastic. Thus, at the death of Muhammad, religious authority would be passed down “genetically” through his bloodline, making Ali not only the obvious successor, but the only possible one. Those who followed dynastic ideals of religious authority would have cited Muhammad’s own lineage, and the primacy of his monotheistic bloodline which originated with Abraham that predicted his gift of prophecy. Others in the early Muslim community, citing equally established practices from tribal or Bedouin culture claimed that the community elders who were companions of Muhammad should collectively appoint his successor. The disagreement explains why my earlier inquiries concerning what religious authority is and why it is important are vital to understanding how religious authority was developed.

Lastly, a brief note on my third inquiry. According to historical Wael Hallaq the Rashidun or “rightly guided Caliphs” possessed the power to interpret and exercise revealed Quranic scripture (or at least transmissions), and thus law on these same bases, to the extent that Muhammad had the ability to reveal this law. The intricacies of how the Rashidun’s religious authority contrasts with Muhammad’s is fairly unclear by way of the readings provided, and yet the readings infer little evidence to counter the assertion that the Rashidun’s authority was in any way profoundly less. The wars of Riddah were meant to undergird and condense the power of the Caliphate as it brought communities who rescinded their allegiance after the death of the Prophet back into the Islamic Empire. Thus, while the Caliphate had the power to interpret Qur’anic transmissions, it is important to pay attention to the events surrounding much of the earlier Caliphate especially if what it meant to be a Muslim was still largely undetermined by other than swearing allegiance to (another) new empire.

Traditionally, Shi’a histories of the Caliphate tell that the ummah was corrupted by an illegitimate usurpation of Muhammad’s rightful successors (Ali), thus Abu Bakr, Umar and Uthman are not recognized as a part of the Caliphate. In Shi’a Islam the first legitimate Caliph (and subsequently the first Imam) was Ali, and proper succession would follow his progeny. Sunni Islam uniformly condones all four Caliphs (what is usually assumed when referencing the Rashidun) as legitimate successors. At a popular level, however, this is an admission that half of Uthman’s Caliphate and ostensibly from the ascendancy of Muawiyyah the Caliphate became both dynastic and self-serving, illegitimating its “sacred” authority.

The Shi’a:

Religious authority in Shi’a Islam has predominated around dynastic succession from its earliest inception. For Shi’as Ali was the first Caliph, and ruled in the way of Muhammad, over both spiritual and temporal matters. Ali is also understood as Shi’a’s first Imam, initiating and officiating religious authority in the Shi’a conceptualization. The office of the Imamate in Shi’aism is the precise interpretation of religious authority that distinguishes it from Sunnism. An Imam, in contemporary Sunni Islam, is understood as the prayer leader of a mosque. In Shi’aism the Imamah is chosen by G-d, and has inate spriritual knowledge (al-Ma’arifah) passed down through bloodlines, spiritual guidance (al-Ruhiyyah) and interpretive power (al-Waliyyah). It is traditionally believed by Shi’as that those who possess al-Waliyyat are infallible (‘ismah). Furthermore, there is a notion in the evolution of Shi’a “doctrine” that reason tells that human beings must be given a guide to lead them to the right path (since Islam teaches that there is no compulsion in religion) and thus it is a condition of G-d’s grace (latif , pl. lutif) that human beings are granted a spiritual leader. Those entrusted with the office of the Imamate are made leaders of al-Din wa al-Dawla (religion and the state), and possess certain attributes that are the marks of their leadership. As I have outlined these marks include infallibility, leadership or superiority (afdalliyyah) in all matters of life as an example to the ummah, and appointed by G-d. Iranian, Shi’a scholar Sayyid Rizvi published a book called Imamate The Vicegerency of the Prophet[s] where he outlines the particulars of the mark of infallibility that might be helpful to reference when I later contrast this role with Sunnism. He says,

“An Imam is the ruler and head of the ummah and the ummah should follow him unreservedly in every matter. . the Imam is the defender of the Divine Law and this work cannot be entrusted to fallible hands nor can any such person maintain it properly. For this very reason, infallibility has been admitted to be an indispensable condition to prophethood; and the considerations which make it essential in the case of a prophet make it so in the case of an Imam and caliph as well.” (Beginning of Part II, The Shi’a Point of View)

Thus, Ali and his two sons Hassan and Hussein are revered in a similar way as saints, and are mourned as martyrs. My grandmother, Iran Zafar, who is a stone-carrying Ithna Ashari, always cites my early visit to the holy cities of Najef and Karbala (the sites of the tombs of Ali and Hussein) as the reason for my protection while in war zones. Which is to say that followers in the Shi’a tradition believe figures like Ali and Hussein hold spiritual and temporal power even through physical death. Additionally, spiritual asceticism as performed especially by women, in visitation of shrines, is a very common practice for Shi’as. There also tends to be a particular historical narrative associated with Ali’s venerated status, and clues from his early relationship with Muhammad that provide the evidence for his rightful succession. For example it is often told that Ali was the first person to say the Shahadah thus becoming the first Muslim, and other stories that attempted to illustrate Ali’s special status even amongst Muhammad’s closest companions.

Following the death of Ali, his followers looked to guidance from his sons, Hassan and Hussein. Hussein is traditionally understood as the second Imam following his father. From there descendents of Ali and Hassan and Hussein are considered Imams. Hodgson notes,
“Thus there was always in existence a true imam . . . It was the responsibility of every Muslim to find him and abide by his rulings . . . Such a notion of the imamate made possible a continuing dissident body of people attached to a continuing line of imams regardless of the fate of particular political movements. It also encouraged a systematic development of special religious ideals which could gain acceptance among such dissident bodies without competing for the attention of all Muslims generally.” (The Venture of Islam, pg. 260)

What the presence of the Imam in Shi’a Islam explifies is the idea that humanity needs continued spiritual guidance in addition to that provided by the Qur’an and hadiths, a concept that is usually rejected by Sunnism, which teaches that all revelation ended and was sealed by Muhammad. If one of Sunni inclination wants guidance he or she will look to the Qur’an, to the scholars or to the ways of the Prophet Muhammad (hadith). In Shi’a Islam the ability to interpret Qur’an is mostly the sacred task of the Imam, and cannot be done by those who are not infallible and do not have direct contact with G-d or share the bloodline of the Prophet. In this way interpretation of scripture is understood as protected from the misguidance, manipulation or abuse of those not “authorized” by G-d to interpret. There are obvious and problematic issues related to this belief based on its exclusionary framework whereas one can never, even if he (or she) is exceptionally learned, attain interpretive power status based on the circumstance of his/her birth. It also reveals that Shi’as traditionally emphasize an entirely different schema related to spiritual authority that includes blood relations, and the passing down of esoteric knowledge to almost exclusively male heirs.

Within Shia’ism there are several sects that follow one or another Imam including the Kharijites, Ismailis, and Zaidis. The Ismailis differ from (what later becomes) the Ithna Asharis originally in which heir they decided to follow as Imamah after the death of the sixth Imam. Ismailis are sometimes referred to as Sevener Shi’a. Ismaili sects are usually contrasted with Ithna Asharis because of their emphasis on political activism verses how some might describe Ithna Asharis as politically quietist. Although Ithna Asharis are the dominant Shi’a group today, historically the Ismailis were once dominant, and were the only ruling Shi’a government (during the Fatimid Empire in Egypt) before Iran’s 1979 Revolution. What is interesting here is that although Shi’a Islam emphasizes leadership that is both spiritual and temporal, in contrast to Sunnism, there are very few historical instances of governing Shi’a as compared to Sunnis.

The last aspect I will mention about Shi’aism is that doctrine is understood as an open process that continues to occur and may be reinterpreted. Thus, religious authority continues to be an open narrative.

The Sunni:

After Muhammad’s death, the four Caliphs Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali comprised the leadership of the majority of the ummah. Following the battle between Muawiyyah and Ali the Caliphate was transferred to Damascus and was led in mainly temporal matters by the Ummayid rulers, and the office of the Caliph was passed down through the bloodline of Muawiyyah. Religious authority which had once been the sole duty of the Caliph survived only superficial legitimacy in the time of the Umayyids. Thus religious authority grew to be ever more decentralized. Hallaq describes the diffuse religious environment of this early periods as belonging to those who could interpret “Islamic” ethics from memorized sections of the Qur’an. He explains that much of known “Islamic knowledge” of the periods between the death of Muhammad and the 8th century were passed down mainly through oral histories told by storytellers (qussas), and/or legal interpretation of appointed judges of the provincial states who worked in collaboration with tribal leaders. Hallaq describes these state appointees as proto-qadis (judges), and mentions that their qualifications were rather tenuous, many who were not yet literate. Hallaq goes on to explain that the wars of Riddah brought many communities into the expanding Islamic Empire, however these new “Muslims” probably had very little understanding (or in some cases care) of what it meant to be a Muslim. The second generation of Muslims after the wars of Riddah were raised in an environment that was increasingly influenced by the growing body of hadith transmissions, “Islamic stories” as told by the qussas, and respected learned men like the proto-qadis. As historian Richard Bulliet explains about this period, “oral transmission expanded geometrically, and within three or four generations many men in every community knew something of the Prophet’s words . . .[wealth] played no part in defining the local Muslim community. The main factor . . .by the end of the tenth century was scholarship.” Thus, as Hallaq has mentioned the subsequence generation forged the learned elite.

“At this early period, the Qur’an’s injunctions, combined with the public policies of the new order, represented the sole modification to the customary laws prevailing among the Peninsular Arabs, laws that contained indigenous tribal elements and, to a considerable extent, legal provisions that had been applied in the urban cultures of the Near East-including the cities of the Hejaz—for over a millennium.” (Hallaq, pg.32) “A large portion of pre-Islamic Arabian laws and customs remained applicable, and indeed survived into the legal culture that was being constructed.” (Pg. 33)

Unlike Shi’aism, religious authority in Sunnism does not wholly center on a specific religious appointee that shares the attributes or marks of the Shi’a Imam. Hallaq and Hodgson provide an in-detail account of the development of Sunni religious authority in the early period. Essentially, in the early period, the growing body of Sunni “scholarship” (hadiths and Qur’anic stories and transmissions) became unwieldy, and there was a movement to streamline the scholarship. Pious Muslims, who collected hadiths and used these to interpreted Qur’anic transmissions and stories, soon dotted the Islamic empire. Value for religious authority was emphasized in a variety of ways, but had some general notions which mainly centers around Qadis, and learnded Islamic men of an intellectual tradition. The development of texts, and growing number of those who had access to them, cosmopolitanism and the ever more urbanized and connected cities like Damascus, Medina, Nishapur and Baghdad led to the creation of a class of learned men who emphasized the great importance of scholarship for knowledge of G-d. These elites formed some of the founding legal, philosophic and theologic schools that led to the development the vast body of knowledge I mentioned previously. The religious authority that develops places a heavy emphasis on books and scholarship. Where in Shi’aism the close following of a Imam, visitation of holy sites, and bloodlines were heavy determinants of proximity or recognition of authority. Eventually, pious members of the (Sunni) scholarly elite moved towards centralizing hadith and Qur’nic transmissions, and examining isnad. The main influencers of centralizing and scrutinizing the hadith into one main accepted collection are Bukhari and Muslim (both of the 9th century). What eventuates is essentially orthodoxy, and an accepted institutionalized version of the Qur’an and hadith, which were still open to interpretation but were no longer amorphous and expanisive bodies. Scholarship continues to provide the basis for religious authority in Sunnism up till today.
In the beginning of this essay I emphasized the difficultly of essentializing sectarian identities, and I also attempted to lay out a way to look at religious authority as centering around specific processes. Although I have emphasized historical narratives, I would like to briefly point out some of these processes. The first inquiry I sought to notice was what religious authority is. I started with drawing this essay into the frame of my earlier paper as well as noting the Wagen reading as a way to place Islam into the same religio-historical frame as “Western” religious tradition centering around the Abrahamic tradition. I believe what eventuates as the established Islamic or Muslim religious authority shares many roots with this tradition including veneration of saints, the character of the holy man and his disciples, the emphasis on holy or sacred scriptures inspired by G-d, and the office of storyteller (qussas or griot). I pointed to the contested historical narrative between Sunnis and Shi’as that has been blamed for having caused the sectarian divide, and emphasized how this historical narrative may not be about a contested history but rather a contested idea (ideal) of religious authority. I also have pointed out that this authority had relationships to power, and though I did not have the space to follow through on this aspect, I still think it is a vital aspect to consider. I hope that I have achieved a cursory sketch of the contrast of religious authority in Sunni and Shi’a Islam.

Attuned to Tom and Jerry

2011-03-19T00:25:00.000-04:00

Last week, Umm Daoud, (her name means “Mother of Daoud”), met me and three friends at a bridge that crosses into her neighborhood. It was just after sundown; the streets were darkening as she guided us toward the narrow path which leads to her home. She and her five children live in a humble two room apartment in a crowded “low-rent” area of Amman.

As guests, my friends and I sat on a makeshift piece of furniture, an old door placed atop two crates and covered by a thin mat. She and her children sat on the floor. Apart from a television and a small table, the living room had no other furniture. The television remained “on” while Samil, her youngest son, seemed completely absorbed in a “Tom and Jerry” cartoon.

“Tom and Jerry” antics are a favorite in almost every home I visit here. Spanning multiple generations and regions, the duo’s popularity seems to reflect benign values. “Sometimes Tom wins and sometimes Jerry, and sometimes they both win, especially if they team up against an enemy,” a young Iraqi woman told me. “You love them both. It’s a bit like fights between brothers and sisters.”

Incalculably less benign are the “real life” chase scenes Umm Daoud’s family has endured. When I first met them, five months ago, Abu Daoud, the father, told me that he had been a prosperous goldsmith in Baghdad. “We had two houses and two cars,” said Umm Daoud. “Now, I have two brothers killed, and all this suffering, and no way to take care of my children.” Abu Daoud told us that two years ago, Daoud, his teenage eldest child, was kidnapped for ransom in Baghdad. Fearful for their son’s life and wanting to save him from torture, the family sold all that they had, gained his release, and swiftly escaped with him into Jordan.

Abu Daoud came to Amman and moved his family into their current home, hopeful that he might eventually find work. But for an “illegal” resident in Jordan, among hundreds of thousands of others who’ve fled Iraq, there was no work. He sought help from the few groups doling out rations of food and assistance with rent. Young boys would taunt him, calling him an old man and an “Iraqi terrorist”, while adults would threaten to report him to the
authorities as an “illegal” - but still he had to keep seeking work.
Three months ago, Abu Daoud learned that his cousin, in Iraq, had received a death threat. The cousin tried to flee Baghdad, but was unable to do so swiftly enough. When his body was found, it was chopped into pieces. This news further traumatized Abu Daoud. Engulfed by pain and misery, he became abusive toward his wife and children. Fights erupted between them. Two months ago, Abu Daoud disappeared. His wife believes he fled because he couldn’t bear facing them, each day, with his feelings of anxiety and guilt.

Umm Daoud’s eyes fill with smoldering fury as she spills out feelings of frustration, mistrust, and humiliation.

Neighbors in adjoining homes practice a very conservative form of Islam. Even though Umm Daoud is a Sabean, she fears being judged harshly by them and opts to cover her head whenever she leaves the house. When her husband left her, some of these neighbors said this was a punishment she deserved. She’d like to live elsewhere, beyond their threats and curses, but she can’t afford the rent anywhere else.

Two of the daughters are diabetic, needing weekly insulin injections, but Umm Daoud can afford neither the medicine nor the lab work to track their illness. Now, one of her daughter’s eyesight is failing. Untreated insulin can lead to full blindness. Umm Daoud has to hide all of this from her neighbors. They may be here for a long time, and if the neighbors find out that the girls are diabetic, she fears it could destroy their future. Would it be difficult to find suitors for them? I’m not sure. Looking at these beautiful young women, it seems unlikely, but blindness is a frightening condition, –who am I to guess? Umm Daoud herself needs medical attention for a kidney ailment, but her daughters’ untreated medical crisis takes up all her attention.

Caritas, a charity organization in Amman, offers free medical checkups for Iraqis, but no medications.

Through registering with the UNHCR, the family became eligible for a “salary” of 60 Jordanian Dinar per month. This barely covers rent. A light fixture in the room where they all sleep is broken, but they can’t afford to fix it, nor can they manage a simple plumbing job to repair a faucet that steadily, noisily leaks.

They are too terrified to invite a repair man into the home because the daughters are vulnerable and could be exploited. If a man took advantage of them, they would have no recourse for protection because anyone could accuse them of being illegal residents, causing them to be deported back to Iraq.

Umm Daoud has already been stung by the humiliation of being so vulnerable. Once, in Amman, a gang stole a sum of money from her. She reported it to the police. In the investigation, someone accused her of being a prostitute and the police department dropped the case.

One note of good news gladdened Umm Daoud and her daughters. Daoud, the older son, excels in soccer and recently qualified for an Iraqi team invited to compete in Seoul, South Korea. For Daoud, a victim of torture when he was kidnapped, playing soccer has been part of recovery. He’s in control on the field and the sport has been an important form of therapy. Numerous Iraqis in the “illegal” community pooled money for Daoud’s trip.

Toward the end of our visit, Daoud called from Seoul. The family was jubilant, except for little Samil, watching his Tom and Jerry cartoon with his back turned to the family. From where I sat, I could see his face. He showed no emotion whatsoever and never took his eyes off the TV screen. I remembered the playful ten-year old I’d first met, in January of 2007, a little boy whose eyes were alight and animated, who loved climbing onto his father’s lap. The family seems to understand his need to withdraw.

Before leaving, Noah Merrill, who, with his wife, Natalie, has worked hard to design a project called “Direct Aid Initiative,” (see www.electroniciraq.net), suggested that they could help cover some of the family’s medical expenses. He assured Umm Daoud that this would be an act of friendship, not charity. “Of course it’s not charity!” she said, flinging her hands upward in exasperation. “You already have our oil!” She cocked her head slightly, a smile on her face. “You are perhaps living well with our oil,” she said, as we all nodded our heads, “so this is not a charity.” Such humor, as if this whole nightmare of the war and its complications were just brothers and sisters fighting, and she could wryly forgive.

The UNHCR has appealed for $121 million dollars to assist Iraqis who’ve been displaced from their homes, 2.2 million of whom are internally displaced inside Iraq and close to two million more who have sought shelter in neighboring countries. UN documents appeal to people’s charitable instincts, but UN workers know full well just how politicized the discussions have become.

The U.S. could direct the amount of money spent on just six hours of the war in Iraq and fully meet the UNHCR request to assist millions of people who have barely survived this U.S. “war of choice.”

This week, the U.S. government will continue deliberating over how much money to earmark for particular defense expenditures. They will serve the insatiable demands of the largest lobby on Capitol Hill, the defense lobby, which is asking for a total of $648.8 billion dollars.

Even Senator Kennedy, one of the few Senators advocating measures to benefit Iraqi refugees, recommends allotting $100 million in the 2008 defense budget for a new General Electric fighter engine. (The Boston Globe recently reported that the Air Force said it didn’t even need the item.)

Democratic candidates claim they are interested in ending the Iraq war. They claim concern for Iraqi victims. I believe these claims. Yet by obediently funding the war machine, most of them play predictable, scripted roles in a dull and murderous war without end. The victors are always the same, the bloated and menacing producers of weapons, - General Dynamics, Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed, General Electric, - the fat cats whose menacing force always wins. The losers can watch their children become crippled, starved, maimed or dead. Period.

Yesterday, Umm Daoud and her daughters paid me a visit. Samil chose to stay behind. He didn’t want to miss an episode of Tom and Jerry.

Kathy Kelly (kathy@vcnv.org) is a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence (www.vcnv.org)

For whom is this African Burial Ground?

2011-03-19T00:24:00.001-04:00

Isn’t it funny how time passes, and those things that were once understood as threats to the civility of society, are now honored? I was buried, like so many of my fellow African slaves, in a mass grave. No words were spoken over my dead body. No songs were sung, calling my loved one’s heavy souls to solace, and ushering me to the seat of Heaven. Yet now, two hundred years after the soil has decomposed my body so much that I cannot be recognized, they want to remember me. But whom will they remember? These bones cannot speak to the children who have inherited the black skin that left me to die like a dog in this den of suffering. These bones cannot redeem the years of heartache, where my own body was stolen from me in slavery to serve the greed of a few.

How can I tell the stories of my lineage, before they were ever allowed to be born? Instead, I own a fate that is not mine, wrought with a suffering that cannot be described as anything less than the genocide of an entire people, stolen out of Africa. Together with a concoction of other “Africans” that have only become my brethren through the myopic eyes of a slave master, have I been heaved into a hole in the earth, they now call a “burial ground.”

I’ve become an ancestor in a forgotten war, and my grave, not my life, has been venerated and enshrined. Now little Black children may come to see from whence they came, but my dear readers, they will not see me. No. My life was long buried, the day the White man made his foot print in the soil of Africa. Start from there, and you will find the life of a man to give a proper burial. What you see before you in this grave, are just bones.

Dear Judge:

2011-03-19T00:24:00.000-04:00

I look forward confidently to the day when all who work for a living will be one with no thought to their separateness as Negroes, Jews, Italians or any other distinctions. This will be the day when we bring into full realization the American dream -- a dream yet unfulfilled.

I thank you for taking the time to read this letter. I feel it is important to the exercise of democracy that public servants, privileged with the everyday commission of practicing justice, to listen to those people on whose behalf you work and serve. I though it appropriate to quote from the late justice leader Martin Luther King Jr. as I see his voice and his work alive in many of those who have dedicated their lives to social justice and societal transformation. Although much of the nature of being a public servant does not allow one to take up the same sort of radical bend as did Dr. King, it is nonetheless important to continue to remind ourselves of the our potential and work and speak as though that potential may be realized. Having said that I must be frank with you about a recent decision you made concerning a young African American woman, Shaquanda Cotton, who you recently sent to jail for several years after she was convicted of assaulting a public servant. I must let you know that I feel your punishment for Ms. Cotton was not only excessive, but it also, in comparison to other sentences you have handed-down in the past, was a form of selective punishment. It does not appear that you have, in the past, had a reputation for severe punishments, so have endeavored to inquire, myself and obviously you, why this might be. Though it may be convenient for me to take up several different hypotheses as to why you might have done this, I cannot pretend that your decision was either clear or easy. What I am concerned about is the impact your decision has had upon the community and subsequently, the nation in which you serve. You must know that many people in our country have deemed your decision as not only as selective punishment, but also carries strong undertones of racism. To be perfectly frank, I believe systemic racial injustice permeates and perverts all sections of public justice in the United States and will continue to do so until this nation truly faces its awful legacy. At heart, however, I believe that generally people are good and cannot always understand that intentions of “doing what is right” or “good” is not the same as the impact that, that intention represents. I am afraid that the very nature of your profession assumes a need to realize that the exercise of justice must have the impact of fairness even if that means having to have a different interpretation of the law. In Ms. Cotton’s case I believe you made the wrong decision, and I hope that you reconsider this decision in light of the crime, but also in light of the impact of that decision upon the project of justice. May that be a beacon for us all to hope, as Dr. King has eloquently stated, that someday ‘the dream’ will be fulfilled.

In Giving Thanks

2011-03-19T00:15:00.001-04:00

(**Note: This story is a farce, based on some truths.)

My family has many last names. Last Thursday, just as my grandfather secured his last martini before we sat down for Thanksgiving dinner, one of my Aunt’s (Susie) turned to the other (Martha) to confer with her as to which family name we should use in giving thanks. Martha is the aunt notorious in the family for her feminist perspective, having refused to take her husband’s family name, and instead hyphenating her last name to reflect both her father and mother’s last names, Jean-O'Flagherty. Martha, however, could not decide which last name to use as though in past years my Grandfather’s name, Jean, was invoked in the time of thanks giving just before we dove into our mashed potatoes or guzzled down huge white pieces of turkey flesh. This year Thanksgiving was different. Gone were the days were Jean’s made up the majority of the blue-eyed, wide shouldered, sassy mouthed, lush, Irish-Catholics around the table. This Thanksgiving, the once boastful Jean majority dwindled to a skinny three, and the “foreign blood” fattened our table like the Thanksgiving dinner to our guts. As we filled up our wine glasses, fought over who would have to sit next to Grandpa, discussed which god-head we would call upon given the exceptionally mixed religious adherence of those present, and stole back the wishbone snatched from the kitchen-counter by my Cousin’s boxer, I noticed just how much I had to be thankful for. This Jean-Brigham-o'Flagherty-Stubbin-Gramsci-Boldwin-Heart-Badger-Mokhtareizadeh-Nitami Thanksgiving of Athiest-Sunni-Apathetic-Sufi-Catholic-Agnostic-Shia-Methodist-Jewish-Southern Baptists from Chicago, Savannah, Philadelphia, Marrakech, Madison, Camden, Baltimore, Denver, Asheville, and San Diego was my family.
We sat down to dinner at my Aunt’s huge, North Carolina maple wood table. Our placemats were red and green maple leave cutouts, and the table was sprinkled head to foot with miniature Pilgrim and Native American dolls. Two oversized orange candles sat in the center exuding light over the dimly lit dining room of my Aunt’s mountaintop Bed and Breakfast in western North Carolina. The dinner was served buffet style on the counter separating my Aunt’s enormous, peach colored gourmet kitchen (she’s a chef) from the greens and browns of the dining room that looks East across the top of the Smokey Mountains. The meal was organized and overseen by my Aunt and her cadre of kitchen-helpers, who are usually a mixed bag of the less talkative male members of the family. Each food item was carefully planned out according to the seasonal vegetables and make-up of the company. Although this was a Thanksgiving celebrated in the South, scarce were the traditional southern Thanksgiving foods like creamed corn or candied yams. Instead our meal was an attractive mix of strawberry-pomegranate salad, corn-bread stuffing, Italian loaf multigrain wheat bread, free-range organic turkey, low fat vegetarian gravy, and mashed potatoes made with vegan butter and sour cream. Drinks ranged from the typical bottle of nutty beer from my Uncle’s Cleveland-based microbrewery to red and white wines, vodka, Italian sodas and seltzer water. A clever mixed CD of music spanning the eclectic taste of our multigenerational family strummed out the lyrics of artists from Tupac to Elton John and Miles Davis, while barking dogs, witty cousins and drunk grandparents roughened the edges of our musical collage. The smell of turkey mixed with cool, woodsy mountain air filled my grandma’s lungs as she opened our meal perfectly with this passage by Robert Moskin, “Thanksgiving comes to us out of the prehistoric dimness, universal to all ages and all faiths. At whatever straws we must grasp, there is always a time for gratitude and new beginnings.”

Growing up together... just not as we imagined.

2011-02-23T17:42:00.000-05:00

This is a poem I wrote on the occassion of the passing of a friend's brother. It came across my eyes today, and thought I'd publish it here.

We were all here once,
beneath the shade of these oak trees. Together.
Where laughter drinks the nectar of ripened apples,
as they fall into hands outstretched.
We were climbing into ourselves,
growing up together.

We were all here once.
Passing between our eyes, the secrets of childhood.
Composing letters to our future selves..
Holding up eternity with our clasped hands,
evolving with the seasons.
Growing up together.

We were all here once.
The passages of journeys taken,
sown into us by generations before,
watching as we flew around the world,
searching for the sweet milk they left us,
Growing up together.

We were all here once.
When the world was still innocent.
When we could still clasp hands,
shake fists,
dance. without. regret.
When our minds met together at our tables,
and our words could still be spoken.
We were growing up together.

Once, not so long ago, we were all here.

I see you in all the little joys of my life:
the children that will be raised,
the dinners at our family's tables that shall still be had.
The seasons that will change,
The journeys still left to be discovered.

You are in the breath of all these moments, lingering.
Waiting to be born again,
Growing up together still,
just not as we imagined.

Photographs from Afghanistan

2010-12-17T08:15:00.002-05:00

Please visit my flickr page!

We Want You Out

2010-12-17T06:47:00.001-05:00

To all the leaders of our world, the leaders of the US-led coalition, the Afghan government, the 'Taliban/Al-Qaeda' and regional countries,

We are intolerably angry.

All our senses are hurting.

Our women, our men and yes shame on you, our children are grieving.

Your Afghan civilian-military strategy is a murderous stench we smell, see, hear and breathe.

President Obama, and all the elite players and people of the world, why?

America's 250-million-dollar annual communications budget just to scream propaganda on this war of perceptions, with its nauseating rhetoric mimicked by Osama and other warlords, is powerless before the silent wailing of every anaemic mother.

We will no longer be passive prey to your disrespectful systems of oligarchic, plutocratic war against the people.

Your systems feed the rich and powerful. They are glaringly un-equal, they do not listen, do not think and worst, they do not care.

We choose not to gluttonize with you. We choose not to be trained by you. We choose not to be pawned by you.

We henceforth refuse every weapon you kill us with, every dollar you bait us with and every lie you manipulate us with.

We are not beasts.

We are Afghans, Americans, Europeans, Asians and global citizens.

Yes, you have the false, self-appointed power to arrest us over expressing the public opinion of ordinary folk, students, farmers, shepherds, labourers, teachers, doctors . . . , people who now have nowhere to turn and nowhere to hide. ( Open Letter to our World Leaders )

This world public opinion against the Afghan war has been clearly expressed and is larger than any number of Wikileaks you seek to suppress. So, come arrest us all as we civilly disobey you. Come arrest us all. ( See excerpt below from Wikipedia's 'International public opinion on the war in Afghanistan' )

Yes, you have the army, police and apparatchik to smother us and to bribe those who are Pavlov-reflexed to money, but you cannot stop us from restoring our voice.

We refuse to prostitute our hearts and minds.

We refuse you.

Not you the human person, but you the greedy system of self-interested power.

Again and again here in Afghanistan, we have seen a hope for non-violence light up; every day we see a yearning for humane relationships, and because of this, love is how we now firmly take our stand.

We will listen to the People on December 19th, on the Global Day of Listening to Afghans and we invite every one of you to pick up your phone to call us, to share one another's pain, and to call our world to urgent reconciliation. We invite the world public opinion to overwhelm us! (email youthpeacevolunteers@gmail.com to arrange a call).

We wish to invite all the people of the world because when the powers are not listening to the people, listening becomes an act of love, it becomes a solidarity of non-violent resistance.

How can we do any less?

14-year-old Abdulai's father was killed by the 'Taliban' and so, like every other human being, he copes with sorrow, hate, fear and anger.

But, he wakes up to the chronic war days in his land sensing that 'something is very wrong with the world I'm caught up in', 'these elders of the world are not getting it…..'.

How does trillion-deficit killing, followed by the strategy of escalated killing and yet another review for more killing, work?

How does it make anyone safer?

How does it solve the incorruptible corruption, unequalled inequality and inviolate violence we face daily?

Your policies, skewed-ly 'diagnosed' and 'reviewed' in a cold clinical manner divorced from reality, have been deaf to the concerns and needs of the people, thus we endeavour to have a People's Afghanistan December Review, because that's what ordinary people can do.

We would try not to 'throw' our shoes at you. We would try to recognize the better side of all human beings and thus continue to serve our commoner's tea and bread to one and all. But we do ask, plead and demand that you stop your unsustainable, superpower militarism.

We want peace.

We want you out.

With singular sincerity,

Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers

Afghans for Peace

Notes :

"My people, the suppressed millions, are my heroes. They are the real source of any positive change in Afghanistan and their power is stronger than anything else. And anti-war protesters around the world, those who are standing against the destructive policies of world powers. There is a superpower in the world besides the US government -- world public opinion." Malalai Joya

Excerpts from Wikipedia:

International public opinion is largely opposed to the war in Afghanistan.

The 25-nation Pew Global Attitudes survey in June 2009 reported that majorities or pluralities in 18 out of 25 countries want U.S. and NATO to remove their military troops from Afghanistan as soon as possible.

Despite American calls for NATO allies to send more troops to Afghanistan, there was majority or plurality opposition to such action in every one of the NATO countries surveyed: Germany (63% opposition), France (62%), Poland (57%), Canada (55%), Britain (51%), Spain (50%), and Turkey (49%).

In Europe, poll after poll in France, Germany and even Britain show that the European public want their troops to be pulled out and less money spent on the war in Afghanistan

ABC News/BBC/ARD/Washington Post poll of 1,691 Afghan adults from Oct. 29-Nov. 13, 2010

Afghans indicated they were more pessimistic about the direction of their country, less confident about U.S.-led coalition troops providing security and more willing to negotiate with the Taliban than a year ago.

More than half of Afghans interviewed said U.S. and NATO forces should begin withdrawing from the country in mid-2011 or sooner.

"There are the occupation forces from the sky, dropping cluster bombs and depleted uranium, and on the ground there are the fundamentalist warlords and the Taliban, with their own guns. If I should die, and you should choose to carry on my work, you are welcome to visit my grave. Pour some water on it and shout three times. I want to hear your voice."

--Malalai Joya

Over Wo(my)n’s Dead Bodies: On Surviving ‘Liberation’

2010-12-14T10:19:00.003-05:00

It was a vivid autumn evening. Americans were still grieving from the stun of 9/11, and the only entity that dared punctuate the eerily quiet streets of New York were the lurid faces of the missing, plastered across a thousand white pages on everything that could still stand in lower Manhattan. It was under this tense and mournful atmosphere that first lady, Laura Bush, took to the airwaves. It would be the first solitary address of any president’s wife in U.S. history, and Mrs. Bush would use her airtime to bolster her husband’s military campaign, Operation Enduring Freedom. Just six weeks after the US invasion of Afghanistan, Mrs. Bush spoke with confidence and pride as she described the rejoicing felt across Afghanistan with the fall of the Taliban.  

Nearly a decade has passed since Mrs. Bush’s address. The military campaign Bush began in 2001 has become known as the War on Terror. Americans have long learned to swallow the irritating truth that the corporate media assisted the political elites of this country in financing its military aspirations by capitalizing on the deep grief of September 11th. And what of those fatuous geographical alignments of “evil” so prudently crafted in order to solidify American resolve for Iraq? Well, they’ve shifted to Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia. Global solicitude for the U.S. public has also shifted. Demonstrators worldwide who ardently vigiled with slogans declaring “we are all Americans,” now scowl with embarrassment over having been bamboozled into believing “Enduring Freedom” meant something other than torture, bombing and occupation.

Of all the stories conjured up in order to facilitate mass compliance and participation in the War on Terror, none has been as politically potent as Mrs. Bush’s initial November appeal. Her call dared all decent people of the world to join the US and its allies in freeing the women of Afghanistan from the “brutal terrorism” of Islamic fundamentalism. Almost ten years later this explanation continues to oblige the US government’s ‘feminist’ agenda in South Asia. Even Time Magazine weighed in with its July 2010 headline, What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan. Notice the punctuation, and picture a melancholic young Afghan woman, wrapped in a purple veil, her black hair framing her warm brown skin, her nose (according the article inside) savagely cut off by the Taliban.

Unfortunately for the young woman, and the millions like her in Afghanistan, the War on Terror has spiraled into a war of terror. And even those of us who smelled the dire stench of imperialism before a single boot fell to the ground in Afghanistan are nevertheless perplexed by why the war perpetuates.

“Moral arguments do not work,” a former professor of mine stated emphatically when I posed the question to him of how we were going to end the wars. “I don’t know,” he said, followed by a long, penetrating silence then, “perhaps you, my dear, should write.” He slipped away to call for another drink, and I dared myself not to feel semantically ill equipped to stop the hemorrhaging of innocent people caught in the cross hairs of a world gone mad on war.

Brushing aside my insecurities, I am resolved to address the contention that this war is a necessary step in liberating the women of Afghanistan. Despite Laura Bush’s optimism, I don’t believe the War on Terror has made anyone safer, not least the women of Afghanistan.

I contest Mrs. Bush’s assertion by taking notice of the dynamics of modern Afghanistan that make her premise entirely problematic. You see, firstly I am unconvinced that the majority of Afghans have much access to sources of international news. A recent poll conducted by the International Council on Security and Development found that nearly 92% of men (women were not polled) in Qandahar and Helmand provinces knew nothing of the September 11th attacks. Further, they reported that nearly 40% of all those surveyed believe the war is being waged to “destroy Islam” and others, Afghanistan itself. If after ten years a majority of Afghans from the most war-torn areas remain unaware of the US’s principle argument for the war, I cannot accept that the 2001 invasion held significant political meaning for the majority of Afghan women.

Beyond this, Afghanistan is a country where the majority of its citizens, nearly 78% according to a 2008 UNICEF report, live in the provinces. This also means that a majority of Afghanis have extremely limited access to civil infrastructure like electricity, running water, roads or means for transportation. Poverty rates are amongst the highest in the world, and literacy amongst the lowest. In the case of women, statistics show that only 12.6% are literate, most of them residing in Kabul and Herat. Several surveys do demonstrate an increase in enrollment of girls in secondary schools in Kabul compared to ten years ago. They also find that provinces not involved in the heaviest fighting report improvements for women when it comes to freedom of movement outside the home. Still, many claim that these changes are only cosmetic, and that conditions for women have either stayed the same as they were under the Taliban, or have worsened as a direct result of insecurities caused by war.

This past November, twenty-nine non-government organizations in Afghanistan submitted a briefing to the NATO Heads of Government Summit at Lisbon. The briefing entitled Nowhere to Turn described the conditions under which most Afghans were living and described the security situation within the country as “rapidly deteriorating.” The report also chronicles three concerns the NGOs deem major factors causing insecurity: a marked increase in night-raids conducted by US Special Operations Forces, a failed counterinsurgency campaign that looks increasingly unable to prevent a transpiring civil war, and widely circulated accounts of the US going around the Karzai government and financing and arming any opposition group claiming to be fighting the Taliban.

Thus, in a situation where living is far from assured, liberation is unthinkable.

Laura Bush’s contention that Afghan women have benefited from the ‘liberation’ brought to them by the US military is problematic because it isn’t backed up by conditions “on the ground” in Afghanistan. But there are several other more insidious issues raised by the U.S. governmental and mainstream media propagation of this notion, The narrative about ‘freeing’ Afghan women only became politically expedient when the aim of capturing Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda proved harder to do than anticipated. So the Bush Administration asked Laura to polish off that erstwhile story of the savage East in need of an altruistic West, and they cleverly reinvented orientalism in the guise of “the woman question.” Though emotionally manipulative and strongly lacking in historical credibility (the US financed militia groups throughout the 1970’s and 80’s when it was more advantageous to beat the Soviets than to rally for women) the narrative has become one of the most widely used justifications for continued occupation. Whilst there is no novelty in inculcating historical amnesia at politically opportune occasions, neither are these narratives about ‘East’ and ‘West’ impervious.

As we approach a decade of war in Afghanistan we must confront not only the material conditions that make structural improvements in Afghanistan unlikely, but also those narratives that allow continued support for the status quo. For me this confrontation is best expressed in the crucial debates about strategies for resistance.

Many post-colonial theorists contend that discursive change must be a precondition for structural transformation. In other words a process of decolonization necessitates not only the transformation of the political and economic apparatus of colonialism, but also its legitimizing narratives. I see this issue of freeing the women in Afghanistan through war as nothing more than a narrative used to legitimize the apparatus of imperialism, and unfortunately it is not only the political elites who are recycling this story.

There was a great and sobering opportunity, following the September 11 attacks, for all those “meaning makers” (journalists, academics, artists, etc.) to seriously contend with the ideology of American exceptionalism that has kept much of the US public naïve about the injurious role US foreign policy has played in the world. Instead public discourse was concentrated on otiose queries like, “why do they hate us?” And determined that the principle issue between ‘the West’ and ‘the Rest’ were civilizational in nature – i.e. Samuel Huntingdon’s foolish “clash of civilizations” theory. Thus, it is no surprise that many people were persuaded that the U.S. must help the abject Muslim women in need of liberation. Notice the refusal by many leftists to critically reflect on the perils of bestowing cultural icons (e.g., the veiled Muslim woman) on serpentine historical and political realities.

Rather than seeking to ‘save’ the women of Afghanistan, with the superiority it implies and violence it affects, solidarity activists can critically engage by making a concerted effort to recognize their own responsibility to address the injustices that forcefully shape the world in which we live. Critical engagement also involves struggling to understand and manage cultural differences. Anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod specifies actions we can take , “What does freedom mean if we accept the fundamental premise that humans are social beings, always raised in certain social and historical contexts…that shape their desires and understanding of the world… I do not know how many feminists who felt good about saving Afghan women from the Taliban are also asking for a global redistribution of wealth or contemplating sacrificing their own consumption radically so that [other] women could have some chance of having what I do believe should be a universal human right – the right to freedom from the structural violence of global inequality and from the ravages of war, the everyday right to having enough to eat, having homes for their families…have the strength and security to work out, within their communities and with whatever alliances they want, how to live a good life, which might very well include changing the ways those communities are organized.”

For me the issue of what constitutes ‘freedom’ or ‘liberation’ is something subject to historical context, and must be understood in the light of capacities and desires specific to the community in which one lives. If we wish to ‘liberate’ Afghan women from disembodiment and violence, what vision of life after liberation are we asking them to be liberated to? Nowhere on the planet have we yet been able to significantly challenge the andocentric social system of patriarchy that is at the heart of disparate power relations between the genders. Not in Afghanistan, and not here at home.

War and occupation have been the defining features between our society and Afghanistan. This unfortunate reality can also be the impetus for a commonality of purpose between our societies – either we all work to end the war or none of us will survive to benefit from liberation.

Shell chun Sáile

2010-12-02T23:39:00.001-05:00

I. Irish Political History (re)Visited

If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organization of a socialist republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She will rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.[1] James Connolly

On the 7th of January 1922, twenty-six counties in Ireland (Éire) became self-ruling. After nearly eight hundred years of foreign reign, Irish sovereignty appeared on the horizon. In 1921 Michael Collins, then Minister of Finance under the first Dáil Éireann 1919 (An Chéad Dáil), and at the behest of the Executive Council of Sinn Féin under Éamon de Valera, was sent as a plenipotentiary to England to negotiate a treaty for the creation of the first independent Irish State. Yet, the Anglo-Irish Treaty (An Conradh Angla-Éireannach) signed in London on the 6th of December 1921 fell far short of the expectations many in Ireland had for the new Republic. While the treaty was successful in establishing an autonomous Irish Free State (Saorstát Éireann), it partitioned the island into six northern counties and twenty-six southern counties. The northern counties would remain under British occupation, and ultimately British rule, while the southern counties would continue to be ruled by the parliamentary democracy Dáil Éireann. The treaty also prescribed Ireland as a British dominion whose elected representatives were required to swear an oath to the British Monarchy. In addition, a Governor General or ‘Representative of the Crown’ would remain in Ireland. The second session of Dáil Éireann (the Dáil) ratified the Anglo-Irish Treaty on the 7th of January 1922 following one month of intense debate. Only a slim majority won ratification, and the endorsement of the agreement Collins negotiated produced great unease within the Dáil and larger society. The split became the impetus of the Irish Civil War of 1922 and 1923.

With the failure of Connolly and the Easter Rising of 1916 to actualize a Socialist Republic and end British rule in Ireland, nationalist constituencies including labor unions, para-military groups and other elements of civil society were left to construct an Irish State under the economic and social systems of capitalism and Catholicism. The treaty Collins negotiated, and the dispute over whether or not Dáil Éireann should have ratified it, has long defined traditional narratives on the period. What popular memory of the period has not sufficiently dealt with are the sorts of queries Connolly alludes to in his article for Shan Van Vocht. Though elements of Republican opposition to the treaty were substantiated by the treaty’s failure to establish an independent thirty-two county Republic completely separate from Britain, deeper resistance came from those who opposed capitalism and the supremacy of the Church. As the 1880’s Fenian slogan went, “we take our religion from Rome and our politics from home.”[2] The Irish Civil War marked a period of brutality within Irish society, and left lasting divisions including the creation of two of Ireland’s principal political parties, Fianna Fáil (An Páirtí Poblachtánach) originally anti-treaty republicans, and Fine Gael, pro-treaty ‘Free Staters’.

Post-colonialism is understood as an intellectual discourse that supports a variety of theories found in literature, political science, philosophy, and film. Postcolonial studies are generally understood as reactionary to colonialism, they are literally that which has been preceded by colonization. Though postcolonial theory shares the historical reality of colonialism, there is quiet a spectrum of discourses that define its practical uses and applications. Emory University’s Postcolonial Studies Department explains that:

The formation of the colony through various mechanisms of control and the various stages in the development of anti-colonial nationalism interest many scholars in the field. By extension, sometimes temporal considerations give way to spatial ones, in that the cultural productions and social formation of the colony long before colonization are used to better understand the experience of colonization. Moreover, the ‘postcolonial’ sometimes includes . . . independent colonies that now contend with ‘neocolonial’ forms of subjugation through expanding capitalism and globalization.[3]

Consequently, the milieu of postcolonial studies is rich with cultural illustrations that help to demystify the material and intellectual inequalities colonial societies perpetuated. Many postcolonial theorists identify that a process of decolonization necessitates the transformation of the political apparatus of colonialism and its legitimizing narratives. Postcolonial theorist and activist Ben Okri, in his provocative 1998 book, A Way of Being Free[4], asserts that discursive change must be a precondition for structural transformation. Okri contends that the practice of Eurocentrism as reflected in entities like the Enlightenment Canon need to be radically redefined. Okri surmised this could commence with an introduction of historically marginalized populations such as women and people of color. However, Okri supposed that the introduction of marginalized groups would be but a primary action, and that postcolonial theorists would have to critically engage ‘strategies for resistance’ if imperial thinking and practices were to be conciliated. Okri saw a need to “interrogate the use and function of the concept of resistance within post-colonial studies,” in order to “foreground analysis of how discourse, narrative and language inform material relations of exploitation.”[5]

The Irish experience of colonialism is in many ways similar to other experiences of Franz Fanon or Ben Okri, but also differs in some of its present realities. In relation to Irish history and Ireland’s long struggle for independence from Britain, much has been written about the function of resistance. Eóin Flannery’s Ireland and Post-Colonial Studies: Theory, Discourse, Utopia interestingly tasks itself with catechizing a critical genealogy of different aspects of postcolonial studies in Ireland, and address the position of postcolonial theory in contouring existing Irish culture. Flannery’s chapters addressing modern-day examples center on the historiographical debate surrounding the dialectic between nationalism and colonialism, reified during the Troubles. If there was an axial point of orientation regarding Irish narrative interrogations of resistance, perhaps this dialectic is imperative.

Attempted by academics and activists alike, the issue of Irish nationalism is politically discordant in historical accounts of 19th and 20th century Ireland. In May 2007 Andrew Flood, an IT Specialist at the University College Dublin and ‘grassroots’ historian, was tasked with writing an article on Irish Nationalism for the online journal Anarkismo. His article was meant to be an accessible interrogation of the dialectic between nationalism and socialism, with reference to Ireland’s colonial past. Utilizing research Flood conducted in relation to James Connolly’s writing, his article Ireland – Nationalism, Socialism and Partition[6], addresses what Flood coins the “mythology of [Irish] nationalism”. The article exemplified the sort of writing Okri provokes. Flood asserts,

The great central theme of Irish nationalism is 800 years of oppression by a foreign crown and a rebellion in every generation against that crown. In reality, much of those 800 years is really the story of civil war within Ireland and foreign intervention on one or the other side. Or Irish involvement in British civil wars, which in turn spilled over onto this island . . .In Ireland as elsewhere the imagining of a unified Irish nation was a project of the capitalist period, really only getting underway in the last decades of the 18th century. It was initially a project of a mostly protestant leadership drawn largely from the more privileged classes and radicalized not by the imaginings of a return to a Celtic Ireland but rather by internationalism, in particular the radical republicanism that had seen the French and American revolutions. Independence for Ireland was presented not so much as an end in itself but rather as a way of opening up a political space free of the reactionary British monarchy, a space in which a democratic republican experiment could then be staged.[7]

Flood’s composite idea of Irish nationalism is derived from his analysis of class structures in Ireland and England, which he claims influenced the events that led to the Anglo-Irish treaty and official partition. Flood’s reinterpretation of popular history, though rooted in less often remembered and even less often re-told streams of Irish history, opens a space for critical reflection. Flood gestures towards a revisionist history of Irish politics. Accordingly, Flood’s analysis desires to reinterpret the assumed views, evidence, motivations and decision-making processes that constitute popular memory of the struggle for independence. Flood’s recalls the popular narrative of “Irish rebellion in every generation against [the] crown,” which is the frame many conceive as the impulsion for the nationalist struggle. Yet, Flood performs a ‘historical intervention’ into this popular notion where he states, “In Ireland as elsewhere the imagining of a unified Irish nation was a project of the capitalist period.” Flood problematizes popular memory on Irish nationalism by interpreting the nationalist struggle of the 19th century as one that served the institutions of British capitalism, rather than a revolutionary resistance to, and full independence from, its colonial master. This historical revisionism is vital to historiographers involved in postcolonial theory. Flood has thusly, “foreground analysis of how discourse, narrative and language inform material relations of exploitation.”

The debate Flood’s thesis initiates, and its basis in postcolonial theory, acts as a strategy for resistance and contestation to the popular narratives that legitimate colonial apparatuses, including material structures like capitalism. Flood’s work views Collins’ signing of the Anglo-Irish treaty as a strategic decision to escape a far more ‘problematic’ political situation for the Irish nationalists who, like Collins, desired a place in the global capitalist system. Republican opposition to the treaty, most pronouncedly in Munster and Connaught provinces desired an independent and united Ireland by means of a complete socialist revolution. Flood’s didactic writing is of pivotal importance to the activists, academics and artists concerned with social justice. The ‘democratic republican experiment’ conceived of as movement for resistance, became a function of power. The ‘ideal’ of liberation that underwrote the struggle against colonialism became untenable for those who believed as Fanon,

The ideal of liberation enacts the values of humanism in the form of economic and political relationships within post-colonial states and between post-colonial peoples and the colonial powers . . .unless national consciousness at its moment of success changes into a social consciousness the future will not hold liberation but an extension of imperialism.[8]

II. Contested Spaces

The history of Irish independence as I have presented it reveals my own politics. Whilst acknowledging my particular prejudices I aspire to solicit popular memory to attend to those sites in the collective memory of Ireland where spaces of contestation and struggle survive. The community of Rossport[9], Co. Mayo is one such space. This community survives as the stage for one of the most significant social justice conflicts in contemporary Irish history; it is a community in struggle. Rossport is the arena where, Royal Dutch Shell (Shell), the world’s largest multinational corporation and most prolific oil producer in Europe[10] has secured a contract with the Irish State to exploit the Corrib gas reservoir on the Irish continental shelf. Rossport is also the locality where indigenous people and their activist allies have waged an almost decade long struggle against State and corporate powers endeavoring to irrevocably change the landscape of their community.

Since the Corrib project was initiated many local Erris residents have resisted it, and others supported it. The project has divided the community, where many of those who are now against the project describe themselves as initially supportive until this support turned to disillusionment as more information regarding the health, safety and environmental impacts of the project were revealed. When locals attempted to present their concerns to representatives of the State, they found official generally unresponsive. Thus, dissent among local for the Corrib project gained momentum over the early years of 2000. In 2005 after already battling Shell and the State for several years, five local protestors, known as the Rossport 5, were jailed when they refused to adhere to compulsory acquisition orders granted to Shell by the State for access to the protestor’s lands. This act of dissent served as the impetus for a national campaign against the Corrib project. This campaign, dubbed Shell to Sea, has become the central movement in Ireland to reclaim popular rights to Ireland’s natural resources. The narrowest aim of the campaign would see Shell shift its proposal to process Corrib gas from an on-land facility in Bellanaboy, to an offshore station at sea. Thus, the notion - Shell to sea. In its widest function the campaign is a forum for addressing economic, human rights and environmental issues that are relevant to the whole of Ireland.

Now in its fifth year, the Shell to Sea campaign has broadened these aims to include issues related to, but extended from, the specific concerns related to the project. Irish Times Social Affairs Correspondent Carl O’Brien authored an article in July 2009 that strives to summarize the broad components of the current campaign. O’Brien says,

In Essence, the Corrib gas controversy resembles a complex and emotional morality tale that speaks of our elemental attachment to the land. But it’s also a very modern struggle between our unyielding hunger for energy and the need to protect the environment.[11]

The issues O’Brien elicits make the possibility a resolution to the Corrib dispute formidable, and explain why the project remains a polemic. The anterior issue O’Brien addresses, “elemental attachment to the land,” continue to symbolize struggle in Ireland, especially where the subject of ownership and tenure of land remains unresolved. Sparse energy resources the causatum of environmental degradation, engender debates in Ireland and the world over. In addition to the issues O’Brien’s relates, many Shell to Sea campaigners would probably add concerns for human rights, safety and health. These are the core matters in the Corrib dispute, and the basis for the Shell to Sea campaign’s insistence that the project receive from the critical reflection and cautious action it warrants.

Yet, save O’Brien piece, accounts of the dispute by the Irish State, Shell and the media though not identical, offer a greatly simplified and somewhat contradictory description of from that of the Shell to Sea campaigners. Perhaps the starkest example of this dissonance is exemplified in a recent TV3 exposé[12]. Paul Williams, Irish journalist and member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, is the host of this exposé. Williams presents the Corrib dilemma as one where the local population, who are in Williams’ words ‘Republican sympathizers’ virulently opposed to ‘economic progress’, violently clashes with State forces including police. Williams’ account endeavors to impart to its viewers that the protestors of the Corrib project have an almost xenophobic attitude to economic advancement whose mainstays ‘capitalism’ and ‘development’, Williams concludes, are the very ideas that pulled Ireland out of its great economic depressions of the past. In reference to two activists Williams identifies as the “ringleaders”, he describes one, Niall Harnett, a “full-time eco warrior” and the other, Maura Harrington, a “diva” and “pin-up girl of every sect of the Republican movement.” Williams asserts the Shell to Sea campaign attracts “every shade of red and green,” while championing the Corrib project as “transforming north Mayo by giving workers good money to spend.” Williams concludes his documentary with the assertion that if the “vociferous eco-warriors” triumph Ireland will loose billions of desperately needed cash.

Perceptibly, Williams’ production neglects multiple complexities, and though it is not entirely inaccurate it is strategically misleading. At its best Williams’ documentary is instructive as a window on the Corrib dispute found in other media accounts and popular discourses. Williams’ identification of economic development as the primary consideration in the Corrib project for all involved in accurate. Both the Irish State as well as the protestor’s claims the other is responsible for squandering valuable resources. The disagreement and precipitant for contestation between the campaign and the State lies principally with two opposing prospectives related to economic theory. The campaigners might describe the ‘economic progress’ of the State’s Corrib project myopic, while the State would see the acumen of the campaigners either utopic or vacuous. This is not to infer that the complexity of the dispute is due to its polemical character. The difficulty of the debate has to do with systematic power relations, and the ways in which these systems support unjust material structures that are oppressive and undemocratic. The space the Corrib dispute offers has been one where assumptions from many sides of the disagreement can be aired, yet this is incomplete. What lacks for all parties involved is a way forward.

The purpose of this essay is not to reiterate the various points of view engaged in the Corrib controversy, as there exist resources dedicated to that project. What is of interest to me are queries that are somewhat more germane, and engender perspectives of epistemological bearing. Presentation of the ‘facts’ of the dispute has yet to result in genuine or constructive dialogue, and therefore it is incumbent on those who desire a resolution to the Corrib controversy to cultivate alternatives. I am not proposing an elimination of the facts of the dispute. Rather, I wish to contour those assertions by examining the function of underlying issues, the ideological frameworks and cultural assumptions, which profoundly effect resolution and reconciliation.

To facilitate these questions I perceive a need to reconceptualize the Corrib dispute. To do this I wish to borrow from notions in ethnographic and postcolonial literature, and most specifically from Adrian Peace’s work The West of Ireland: A Sense of Place, a Place of Senses[13]. I wish to define the Corrib controversy not as a polemic, inferring a dichotomous spectrum, but as a ‘space of contestation’. Ethnographers Low and Lawrence-Zuniiga define contested spaces as,

Those locations where conflicts in the form of opposition, confrontation, subversion and/ or resistance engage actors whose social positions are defined by differential control of resources and access to power.[14]

Peace proposes that,

Contested Spaces can bring to the fore the tacit cultural understandings and unexamined ideological frameworks which, precisely by virtue of their being tacit and unexamined, are integral to the routine flow of everyday life.[15]

The ‘routine flow of everyday life’ in Peace’s conception is a space where significant political queries remain unexamined. The geographical territory of Rossport, along with the political embodiment of the campaign are the ‘spaces’ of dissent I conceive of as ‘contested’ for the purpose of this essay. I envisage of this space as the location where ongoing political questions find expression in tangible realities and disrupt the ‘flow of everyday life’. This contested space is the terrain that ‘occupies’, ‘inherits’, ‘rents’ and ‘sustains’ political discourses reflected in State actors and anti-Corrib activists. I endeavor to outline the ways in which the State’s s self-generated ‘legitimizing narratives’ act as cultural currency to sustain material inequalities performed by the State against its citizenry. I offer that the dissent initiated by the Shell to Sea campaign is a space for the debate of politically soluble subjects.

The Parameters:

At present, the Corrib gas dispute is a highly charged and politically divisive issue in Irish politics. For this reason I wish to be candid about my intentions for writing this essay. I hope that my admission of personal bias may also contextualize why I have chosen to look at the Corrib dispute in the ways I state above. Admittedly, there are numerous limitations to this essay, and ideas that can be further explored or better articulated. Topics of further inquiry could include a comparative study of other nations with human rights related issues connected to the Shell corporation, especially Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa and Pakistan. I am also curious as to whether the high rates if Nigerian immigration to Ireland is in any way connected to the ongoing Shell-related catastrophe in the Niger Delta? And if so, what ways the movement for rights for immigrants in Ireland are intersectionally related to the Shell to Sea campaign.

I also wish to stress that my essay has not attempted to achieve ‘objectivity’, rather is decidedly the contrary. Against intuition, I generally assume that the more personally involved one is in a subject manner the more possibilities exist for innovative questioning and diligent research. Additionally, I deem it neither appropriate nor responsible to assume neutrality – objectivity’s cousin, where the intellectual subject matter under observation is at the same time the lived experience of a community in struggle. It is my strong belief that neutrality is ungovernable where injustice is pervasive. The function of writing as process of education, especially for institutions where the ‘problem of peace’ is central to its ethos, must in my opinion find a way to respect justice while having the courage to speak the truth. For these reasons I do not hold that academic examination is synonymous with objectivity, nor is intellectual inquiry means and end. Rather the my persuasion finds its best resonance in what Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed wishes to teach about the function and meaning of education where he explains,

Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.[16]

The Aim:

I admittedly have not devoted many lines of this essay to the presentation Shell’s ‘side’ of the dispute. I have not done this for two major reasons. The first concerns a conceptual issue. Generally, discourse on social justice issues can get trapped in rigid categorizations that oversimplify the issues and under appreciate the transformative ability of communities and individuals in struggle. Awareness of categorical distinctions, e.g. Shell to Sea activists v. the Irish State, is only constructive as a means to understand the complexities and richness of the human relations beneath them. Giving names to things is not a prologue to understanding a situation/phenomenon; rather understanding the contested nature of the names involved in a situation is – in a sense – the situation itself. Where I utilize categories in this essay I do so for purposes of making sense out of the Corrib dispute in intellectual terms, and do not presuppose my categorizations reflect the complexity of real people or situations. My second reason relates to my assumption that accounts legitimizing the project are the ‘master narratives’ that prevail in media and popular discourse on the Corrib dispute. These ‘legitimizing narratives’ are not only authored in writing and discussion, but are sealed in State action or silence especially where there is protest to the Corrib project. The master narratives include State decisions to do with direct force against protestors, or legal decisions where judges consistently find in favour of the State.

Assuming master narratives a propos social inequality have their foundations in colonial structures and imperialist practices, my essay wishes to take issue with the cultural apparatus that gives legitimacy to material inequalities. I therefore wish to amplify the proposition that there is an inextricable link between material poverty and cultural violence that does not preclude postcolonial states from replicating the practices of their colonial masters. For this reason the concept of resistance that is given expression in ‘contested spaces’ provides a primary framework for the project of postcolonialism and social justice. I do this in hopes of discovering a resistance-as-transformation opportunity in the service of the idea post-colonial theorist Paul Gilroy initiates,

If we follow Fanon’s example and work toward creative possibilities that are too easily dismissed as utopian, our moral and political compass might profitably be reset by acts of imagination and invention that are adequate to the depth of postcolonial predicament [Fanon] described.[17]

Frantz Fanon and Edward Said, two well-regarded post-colonial theorists, have stated that the process of decolonization requires a radical restructuring of global relationships. They emphasize the need for a ‘new humanism’ that relies on an “altered set of relationships among people . . .on a discourse of human dignity and interdependence.”[18] For the purposes of this paper I wish to appeal to the possibility that a process of critical education, and direct engagement in struggle might be generative of the “altered state of relationships” a ‘new humanism’ hopes to insight.

John Berger has taught, “Never again will a single story be told as though it's the only one.’ There can never be a single story. There are only ways of seeing.” I present my ‘way of seeing’ both as a limitation, but also as a possibility for re-orientating the political compass that has defined previous accounts of the Corrib dispute. I conceive of the community in Rossport as a ‘contested space of struggle’ yielding issues as O’Brien has pointed out of ‘elemental attachment to the land’ and ‘a hunger for energy’ in battle with protection of the environment. I offer then, that the resolution of the Corrib dispute, conceived of as processes for education rather than antagonisms, may generate creative and critical answers, and transform the dichotomies that create neutralities and impede change. The form of my engagement in the ‘spaces of contestation’ is to cultivate critical engagement concepts put into practiced daily by way of the Corrib gas dispute. Most succinctly, I wish to ask whether the actors in the Corrib dispute represent themselves/the campaign, or do they engender social justice discourses long a part of Irish politics and identity? I argue that the conflict over Irish resources in the Corrib gas project is most vivid in those sites where the geographical and ideological spaces come into contact.

III. Corrib at the Centre of Europe?

Under the rule of the "free market" ideology, we have gone through two decades of an energy crisis without an effective energy policy. Because of an easy and thoughtless reliance on imported oil, we have no adequate policy for the conservation of gasoline and other petroleum products. We have no adequate policy for the development or use of other, less harmful forms of energy. We have no adequate system of public transportation.[19] - Wendell Barry

Amongst the myriad of specific issues the Corrib gas dispute elicits: energy, land, environment, resources, ecology, democracy, power, ownership, economics, and a reading of history. However, the complexity of the Corrib dispute should not be conflated with a description of the dispute as ‘impossible’ to resolve. Assuming the specific concerns of community members and campaigners are negotiated between the State and Shell; the campaign serves a further purpose. This further purpose is alluded to in my previous sections, but could be more fully elaborated on. In extension of the discussion I have opened concerning this idea of ‘contested spaces’, I wish to draw together some general considerations on the political function of the public sphere as a form of critical education (theory) and engagement (practice). I hope this insight will further explain the function of contested spaces and its capacity to deconstruct master narratives.

Erris is a sparsely populated, rural, Gaeltacht area in the northwest corner of County Mayo. The economy of the area is mainly sustained by agriculture and fishing[20]. While the Celtic Tiger saw an exponential growth of the Irish economy, much of the western coast of Ireland remained unexploited. The reasons for this vary. Adrian Peace cites a 1996 study done by Carles Salazar[21] that explains,

“The Irish state has long struggled to develop the West, its most problematic periphery, on capitalist lines similar to the rest of the country. Since 1974 when Ireland joined the Common Market (now E.U.), a succession of programs has been foisted on the West's rural communities in order to restructure its small farm system and diversify the regional economy.”[22]

The particular E.U. programs that Salazar addresses are related to the ‘common market’ system that eventually became the European Economic Community (EEC). The EEC was established after the Treaty of Rome in 1957. The original treaty envisaged combining the economies of France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Later amendments to the treaty brought in more nation-states, including Ireland in 1974. With the eventual creation of the European Union, the EEC was adopted as one of the ‘three pillars’ of the European Community (EC), which also include common legislative policies when it comes to broad ranging issues such as citizenship, the environment, asylum, social and immigration policies amongst others. The Customs Union is the trade bloc area of the EC comprising a free trade area and common external tariff amongst participant countries. The stated goal of the Customs Union is to create stronger cultural and economic ties, as well as economic ‘efficiency’ across the EC. The creation of the Customs Union is seen as Europe’s way of challenging the supremacy of the North American Free Trade Agreement that has made the United States’ economy the largest and strongest in the world.

The creation of the Customs Union and the European Economic Area has generated mixed economic effects that are engendered in the tensions between what is economically good for the ‘local’ opposed to what is economically good for the E.U. Much literature on common market economic schemes refers to the ‘short-term consequences’ to sectors of any member state’s national economy as a result of international competition. Some critics of the continued economic integration of the E.U. charge that the ‘short-term consequences’ of the common market economy are on the whole negative effects on local economies. The negative effects are in part caused by competition, which creates a decrease in cash flow. In addition to a decrease in income, conceptual motivations including ecological and environmental concerns, sustainability and community are crucial concerns. As are the security-related issues of great concentrations of wealth at exclusive and elite levels of society. The questions raised by local communities and anti-capitalism activists who see E.U. economic policies as benefiting multinational corporations and the larger economies of the E.U., is beyond the scope of this paper. However, the issue continues to be raised where national governments have to contend with economic difficulties on the domestic level.

A vital aspect of the Irish integration into the E.U. will include continued foreign investment and stronger intrastate economic ties. Some claim that this will also serve to further stratify Irish society. The global economic recession has unfortunately created a more pronounced crises for Irish financial institutions currently tasked with generating solutions to Ireland’s financial difficulties.

Existing thinking, policies measures currently being debated, have proposed solutions akin to the creation of a National Assets Management Agency to ‘buy back’ toxic assets accrued during periods of inflated property speculation. Nevertheless, the delicate balance between E.U. economic policies as benefiting or detrimental to the Irish State continues to foster debate as Ireland goes into a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. Though not the original intent of the idea of Europe as a ‘peace project’, Ireland’s most significant political parties speak of integration into Europe as a ‘necessity’ for economic sustainability and ‘peace’. In the words of Labour party leader Eamon Gilmore, “We campaigned vigorously for a yes vote because we believed the treaty was an important step forward in creating a progressive and democratic social Europe.”[23]

What are the ‘democratic’ and ‘social’ programs and policies a vote ‘Yes’ to the Lisbon treaty would initiate? How do these further the idea of Europe as a peace project? These contextual questions must be considered where arguments that treaties like Lisbon will serve to further integrate the diverse cultures of Europe, and be of benefit to member states like Ireland. On the whole the Lisbon treaty is most potent as a means for the E.U. to make decisions more proficiently on the basis of representative population distribution. However, this process serves the further purpose of the E.U. not as a peace project, but as a neoliberal capitalist project. The neoliberal capitalist project was not, as I have stated in my previous paragraph, the intention of those who saw the formation of the E.U. as peace project coming out of the second World War. However, in its current manifestation the further cogency of the E.U. is intended to combine the prowess of member states. This would serve the purpose of increasing the political and economic power of the E.U., making it a major political player on the world stage.

The question of whether or not Ireland should integrate with Europe is related to the Corrib dispute in a number of ways. On a macro level, Irish integration into the E.U., if the current aim of the E.U. is to compete with the United States on a global economic level, will mean that Ireland will have to find ways, as Peace has stated, of developing its “peripheral areas on capitalist lines similar to the rest of the country.” This will most certainly require significant changes to the landscape and ways of life for many communities in Ireland, and the community of Rossport is one such example. Integration into capitalist economies is rather abstract. Connolly’s warning that opens this paper, addresses the necessity for Ireland to be rid of British economic institutions if it wishes to attain independence from its colonial master. However, of the various ‘democratic experiments’ that were being fought over during the Irish Civil War, Collins’ ‘free staters’ prevailed. This experiment, as Flood has pointed out, was a project of the capitalist era, and thus the principal economy of the new Irish State would continue under British capitalist institutions. The problem is that present realities reveal that popular memory has not understood the direct link between the ‘colonial economy’ of British oppression, and the current ideology of capitalism. As I state at the onset, a process of decolonization necessitates the transformation of the political apparatus of colonialism and its legitimizing narratives. The colonial economy was built on slavery, and slavery was determined by ethnicity. The central fact of slavery: exploitation, material deprivation and most pronouncedly the left of another’s labor are the ways in which modern capital is accrued. In South Africa where this reality is most vivid, the Apartheid system violently maintained an extreme stratification of society, where an economically secure White minority held power over an economically deprived Black majority. With the ‘fall’ of Apartheid this racist reality was to be demolished. However, it is apparent that the narratives that legitimized the colonial economy were not thoroughly examined or challenged by the new governance of the African National Conference. Thus, in South Africa today though the faces of economic success and representative governance have change for an elite few ‘native’ South Africans, the majority continues to endure the same economic disparities they endured under the colonial system of Apartheid. Rossport is in many ways Ireland’s pioneering project for incorporation of ‘peripheral’ sites into an integrating system of capitalism. If Ireland chooses to ratify the Lisbon treaty and become ever more involved in the capitalist project of the E.U., then areas such as Rossport will be where the greatest ‘growing pains’ will occur. Rossport is also a space where those who hold alternative ideas on economic practices, especially capitalism, have the greatest ability to ‘interfere’ and challenge the current system. For these reasons the dispute on Corrib gas is at the center of significant ongoing political concerns.

IV. Corrib as the ‘Democratic Public Sphere

Critical pedagogist Henry Giroux has said that critical education is central to a democratic public life.[24] Much recent scholarship has been devoted to the paralysis of the public due to the inability or unwillingness of the media to pose challenging questions to those in power, stir debate, or exercise the conscience or intellect of the public. Yet, these remain the most essential components of the creation of a skeptical, critical civil society. The opportunity created by ‘contested spaces’ can be understood in an academic way as the most idealized version of critical theorist Jurgen Habermas’ ‘democratic public sphere’[25]. Habermas’ sphere is the place “where people could organize against arbitrary and oppressive forms of social and public power.”[26] Ideal, because Habermas’ theory has been rightly criticized for its simplification of power relations and omission of people of color, women, and non-propertied individuals. Still the goals of dialogue, consensus building, debate, and independent thinking which guide the vision of the ‘democratic public sphere’ have not lost any of their importance to the promotion good citizenship14. In a globalizing world where an emphasis on consumerism (because of the practice of capitalism) is politically more significant than citizenship as the ideal form of civil engagement15 these elements of the democratic process must remain at the head. Whilst the objective of invigorating a critically conscious, praxis-based citizenship lies outside the stated aspirations of the Shell to Sea campaign, its existence gestures towards this example.

The European Union (E.U.), envisions itself as a living and breathing personification of a peace process and pluralist society whose character is promoted by its stances on diversity—racial/ethnic, religious, gender, and economic. Yet, the notion of tolerance at the heart of this pluralist discourse should not be equated with the kind of radical democratic project that focuses on dialogue and building empathy for other individuals, especially those viewed and/or treated as ‘other’. Pluralism, a hallmark of neoliberalism’s view on socio-political institutions, allows for cultural differences, but often makes no effort to intervene in the practices of domination and the power struggles that erupt between groups with unequally distributed resources and opportunities. Neoliberals see free market policy, labeled the common market in Europe, as a panacea for all social and political inequities.[27] Legitimating cultural difference but not inequality, promoting the false idea that all expression is permissible, and spreading a hyperbolic gospel of equal access and opportunity are ostensibly the measures taken by the E.U. behalf of its diverse members. Yet the E.U. fails to acknowledge the workings of power within their states, just as the Irish state fails to acknowledge the imbalance of power between local dissent and the world’s largest multinational corporation. They neglect to consider seriously, or work to change, the ways power relationships severely: break down the potential for what Habermas calls face-to-face “communicative action,” repress freedom of speech and of assembly while creating unspoken rules of what constitutes permissible discourse; limit access to and mobility within civil society.

If the ‘democratic public sphere’ of within Ireland put into practice the open dialogue, communicative action, and social mobility proposed by Habermas’ theory, then it may perceive ‘contested spaces’ like that in Rossport as the most crucial sites for the practice of citizenship and democracy. Instead, Rossport has been characterized as the opposite, as a community in existential crisis over the veracity of progress. Their supporter, those who make up the national campaign, are labeled Republican sympathizers of the more radical periphery of Sinn Fein, or ‘eco-warriors’ who act as unreasonably about the environment as religious fundamentalist do about moral discourse. Admittedly, these activists can also be lazy about their criticisms of capitalism, the state and media, while academics ‘excuse’ themselves from the responsibility of political excursions in real-life debates. Though none of the ‘sides’ of the Corrib dispute necessarily advocates silencing the other, the reality of power relations as Habermas describes, severely limits the ability for dissent to create an appropriate space for genuine dialogue and resolution.

Chapter Two:

I. A History of Irish Oil and Gas

Nothing is politically right which is morally wrong. Daniel O’Connell

Daniel O’Connell (Dónal Ó Conaill), the prominent Irish political activist and Lord Mayor of Dublin in the early 19th century, first established the Alliance and Dublin Consumer’s Gas Company in 1845. This gas company was among the oldest and most established of the numerous private sectors, city-based gas companies that littered Ireland until the 1970’s. In 1976 the Irish Gas Board (Bord Gáis), Ireland’s first major statutory company, was established as a consequence of the Gas Act. In 1973 Marathon secured a contract with the Fianna Fáil government to exploit the gas at Kinsale head, and in 1976 Bord Gáis served as the principle client of the Kinsale gas site. The Kinsale head site was the result of extensive corporate exploration carried out throughout the 1960’s. In the years that followed the Kinsale gas deal, numerous legislation was passed concerning hydrocarbon sites, although the published findings on the research pointed to very few leads.

The year 1973 was a difficult year for corporations in the oil and gas business. In October of that year the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Companies (OAPEC) declared an embargo on oil. The embargo was in protest of the United States’ support of Israel, through arms and resources to the Israeli military, during the October War (also known as the Ramadan War and Yom Kippur War). The October war was meant as a response to the 1967 Arab-Israeli war in which nearly 300, 000 Palestinians were displaced, and Israel gained control of the West Bank and Gaza strip previously annexed by Jordan and Egypt respectively. The 1973 ‘oil crisis’ inaugurated by the OAPEC states, tied the commencement of the embargo to the achievement of US foreign policy efforts in the October war. In March 1974, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, was able to negotiate an Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai that satisfied the OAPEC states and ended the oil embargo. Yet the capability of the OAPEC states to use their leverage and enforce a boycott of oil against their largest customer, the United States, set new standards in the relationship between the US and the Organization for Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) of which OAPEC was a part. Perceptibly, 1973 oil prices experienced extraordinary inflation contributing to a stock market crash in year that followed, and political and economics reverberations into today.

In that same year the twentieth Session of Dáil Éireann elected a National Coalition government, predominantly comprised of members of Fine Gael and the Labour Party, and headed by Taoiseach Liam Cosgrove. Under the 1973 National Coalition, the Labour Party received seven ministerial posts. One of Labour’s posts, Minister for Industry and Commerce, went to Teachta Dála (TD) for Dublin County North and former lecture for University College Dublin, Justin Keating. Keating was also elected to the European Parliament in 1973 where he served until the fall of the National Coalition government to Fianna Fáil in 1977. In 1975, under Keating’s tenure a new model for Ireland’s oil and gas industry was developed. Highly influenced by the approach Norway took to its hydrocarbon resources, and in light of the difficulties the oil crisis created for sustainability to non-producing states, Keating drafted new terms for offshore exploration. These terms became known as the Keating Principles[28]. These principles included:

A provision for the State to acquire a 50% maximum stake in any commercial find, production royalties of between 8% and 16% and production bonuses on significant finds. The standard corporation tax of 50% was also applied while the terms sought to commit companies to a programme that required them to drill at least one exploratory well within three years and surrender 50% of the original licensed area they were granted within four years. Under the terms the State would gain a ‘carried interest’ by taking a share of the project after a discovery and thus would not have to bear the costs of exploration.[29]

Keating principals and their specific practices were designed not only to bring in monetary assets for the state, but would provide oil security to Ireland for decades into the future – an impressive move amidst the oil predicament of the time. With an ongoing oil embargo, four hundred percent inflation in oil prices, long lines and rationing of gas throughout Ireland there were clear indications that the State needed to establish and maintain a well-formulated strategy for Irish oil security. Unhappy with Marathon’s deal on Kinsale head, Keating moved to press ahead with his new plan. Unfortunately, Fianna Fáil, in a landslide victory against the Coalition government assumed office in 1977, and the landscape the Keating Principles anticipated for the future of Irish oil and gas was shattered.

Ireland in the 1970’s was awash in political turmoil. Although the Coalition government might have gained momentum in the wake of the Bloody Sunday massacre and the subsequent politicization of the island, they could not summon the political power to beat the economic reform platform of Fianna Fáil. Among the reasons for Fianna Fáil’s large majority in the general elections, issues such as Ian Paisley’s general strike in the north led by the United Unionist Action Council and the ‘Tullymander’-ing of parliamentary constituencies were significant.

First elected as Teachta Dála (TD) for Cork in 1948, Jack Lynch assumed office as Taoiseach to Dáil Éireann in 1977, and replaced Keating with Limerick born Dessie O’Malley. The late 1970’s were a pivotal period for Irish energy needs, which were crippled under new demands and growth for electricity. During the period between 1973 – 1978, Ireland’s demand for electricity increased by 10.5%, with estimates that forecasted an average energy demand increase of 8% annually through 1980.[30] Electricity generation in the 1970’s in Ireland was utterly dependent on oil, and the Kinsale gas reserves promised a 50% reduction in reliance on outside sources. Still Kinsale was not expected to handle the increase on demand over the long term. Recalling the oil embargo of the early 70’s as well as political unrest throughout oil producing regions, Ireland, a newly a member of Europe was very concerned with energy sustainability and economic growth. Nevertheless, Ireland saw a second oil shortage in the late 1970’s, and as O’Malley explains, Ireland was in trouble:

Because of the shortage of oil, because of our very high dependence on it and because of our inability to switch quickly to other things we were, needless to say, in a very difficult situation.[31]

In his time in office Dessie O’Malley’s established the state-owned Irish National Petroleum Company (INPC). However, in the Articles of Association O’Malley relinquished all control of oil exploration and exploitation form the INPC, ensuring that private, multination companies would have to be brought in to perform these functions. In 2000 the INPC was bought by multinational TOSCO Corp, who in turn in owned by the Phillips Company of Conocco-Phillips, a well-known oil giant. Irish Public Enterprise Minister in 2001, Mary O’Rourke, said of the sale, “INPC is a small player in a large multinational market. The board of INPC has advised me that the future lies within a large petroleum corporation.”[32]

Richard Spring was elected to Dáil Éireann in the general election of 1981 for the constituency of Kerry after the Coalition government of Labour and Fine Gael were reelected. During their tenure the project of Irish oil and gas was static. The early 1980’s saw no independent exploration tests initiated, and the mid-80’s observed a little less than one hundred wells dug with nominal results. Towards the end of the 80’s oil companies who had performed the exploration and digging of wells pushed the Irish government to renegotiate the legislation passed concerning taxes, royalties and licensing. These companies had convinced members of the government that re-negotiation of the contracting terms established in 1973 would activate Irish oil and gas. With no state-sponsored or independent evidence to rely on, Richard Spring, then Minister for Energy under Garret Fitzgerald, moved to alter Keating’s principles to attract more corporate interest. Spring conceded terms in favor of the big oil companies. The terms Spring re-negotiated only applied to findings where there were “less than seventy five million barrels” estimated – nearly all of the projected fields at the time. Spring also abolished State rights to marginal fields, created a sliding scale plan for state participation for the remaining fields, and greatly reduced Irish royalty rates.

In 1987 Fianna Fáil came back into power under Charles Haughey. The economics recovery plans of the Irish State had thus far failed miserably, and Ireland experienced mass emigration and great financial difficulties. In this year Ray Burke who seriously altered Irish oil and gas-terms forever replaced Richard Spring as Energy Minister. In a political time of heightened economic woes the Irish State initiated many reforms to its State policies regarding multinational investment. These reforms would later lead to the economic boom of the Celtic Tiger, however, at the time officials were desperate to pull the country out of its deep recession. Oil companies who were part of the Irish Offshore Operators Association (IOOA) lobbied hard for further amendments to the 1975 and 1987 oil terms. Under Burke new oil terms were established that were unrecognizable from Keating’s principles. Burke’s acquiescence kept in place Spring’s new terms, but also permitted the oil companies to write all of their exploration costs over the previous twenty-five years off from tax.[33] The reforms Burke had cooperated with the IOOA for were fully supported by then Minister of Finance Bertie Ahern who said in a debate in the Oireachtas in October 1987 that there was, “intense pressure on oil companies exploration and budgets,” and that this move would give Ireland a “competitive position in attracting oil and gas exploration.”[34] He goes on to say,

In the area of oil exploration, it is quite clear that it is too muddled, too complex, too protective, too timid, too cautious and, in effect, useless, because courage is not being taken in one’s hands with the idea of getting the oil, the gas, out of the ground, and improving the intensity of the search.[35]

In the years following the 1987 ‘oil-deal’ procured by the IOOA, exploration continued yet declined by forty-one percent[36]. After a decade of humbling returns no parties were surprise at the lack of enthusiasm for exploration. Interestingly, however, just as a marked decline in exploration characterized the possible future of Irish oil, new findings drove success-rates up exponentially. A decade of alterations to the Keating principles meant that the new found success for Irish oil would not have the economic benefits to the Irish people that he had envisioned in his principles.

Just two years before the November collapse of the Coalition government between Fianna Fáil and Labour, then Minister of Finance Bertie Ahern, further set into motion a challenge to the Keating principles that essentially abolished any Irish ownership of economic benefit from Irish oil and gas. In 1992 Ahern eliminated state involvement and royalties in Irish oil and gas, extended licensing agreements from three to sixteen years, and established that Irish oil and gas would be sold competitively on the market. Ahern also decreased the corporation tax from fifty-percent as instituted by Keating, to half.

II. The Corrib Dispute, the Environment and Eco-Warriors

We are the Sons of the Indians who sold Manhattan. We want to change the deal.[37] -Tariki Abdallah

Climbing up the green hills of North West County Mayo, towards Glengad a great feeling of the immense beauty of the natural world is overwhelms you. The blue belts of waves off Broadhaven bay play against the sky, often grey with storm clouds. The winding roads that twist across bog lands and farms, around spring green hills dotted with grazing sheep and cows. This is not the eager Ireland of sedentary, city life. In a way, it is the Ireland of a time long ago, when agriculture was the livelihood that kept houses warm and bread on the table. Yet life presses forward, as it always will, and the Ireland of small farms and insular communities, though not entirely a thing of the past, is slowly transforming.

Shell to Sea (Shell chun Sáile) is the name of the campaign that began in 2005 in resistance to the proposed Corrib gas project. Although there was significant opposition to the Corrib project as early as 2000, mainly from the local Rossport community, the issue gained national attention when five local Mayo people were arrested and held indefinitely. The five activist became known nationally as the ‘Rossport 5’, and campaign groups sprung up across Ireland in Dublin, Cork, Belfast, Rossport, and Galway. The campaign later expanded its mandate from support of the Rossport 5 to include other major issues with the project proposal.

In previous sections of my essay I have attempted to reflect some of the more theoretical questions the Shell to Sea campaign initiates. These theoretical questions are tied to very corporeal concerns that make up the main demands of the Shell to Sea campaign. In my introduction I offer that the Shell to Sea campaign has three core concerns, the environment, health and safety. In the following sections I describe in detail the essence of these concerns beginning with the environment and then moving onto the health and safety. I end the section with the specific concerns taken up by the national campaign.

Climate Change and Peak Oil:

In the Corrib gas dispute there is a great spectrum of views concerning the environmental and ecological impact and consequences involved. Of these issues, two particular concerns, climate change and peak oil, have become central. It is over these main issues that many environmentalists not local to Co. Mayo or Ireland have joined the Shell to Sea campaign. As a way to present some of the broad-ranging discourse of the campaign, I wish to being by briefly outlining the issues of climate change and peak oil. Sketching a general outline of these macro issues involved in the Corrib gas dispute, may assist in contextualizing the underlying notions for environmental protection and sustainability. These issues along with health and safety concerns underline the urgency for debate on the project.

Almost every party involve in the Corrib gas dispute can agree that Ireland, like the rest of the world, has energy needs. The difficulty comes from disagreement on how these energy needs should be addressed. Many people who pay attention to issues related to the environment, ecology and the natural world have pointed to the issues of peak oil and climate change as the most crucial concerns facing all life forms on the planet. For more than one hundred years environmental economists have tried to change the way natural resources are treated in an economic terms. This includes a basic idea that the planet’s biotic, non-renewable resources such as minerals and petroleum should be regarded as capital rather than expenditure as there is only a limited amount of these resources. For many environmental activists the fact that there is only a finite amount of biotic, non-renewable resources on the planet, and that we have been consuming them as if they are unlimited, means we are engaged in an unsustainable process that needs to be challenged and changed. However, the reality of human energy needs and their exponential growth continues to create a divide between what humans desire and what the planet can sustain.

Hydrocarbon is an organic compound consisting of carbon and hydrogen. Hydrocarbon deposits made from the decomposition of organic matter and whose main function is combustion, currently serve as the most major form of energy. Petroleum is extracted hydrocarbon in liquid form, whereas natural gas is the same only in gaseous form. Hydrocarbons are also referred to as fossil fuels and have economic significance as they produce plastics, solvents, waxes, petroleum, gas and paraffin. Frequently, extraction of these fossil fuels is expensive and environmentally damaging. Though, the specifics of extraction are interesting and necessary queries, they lay beyond the scope of this research. However, for the purpose of discussing the multitude of reasons the Corrib gas projected is being disputed it’s vital to recognize the environmental impact of carbon fuel extraction.

The earth receives all of its energy from the nuclear reactions in the sun. The Sun’s energy is difficult to efficiently capture and turn into a useful form. Most of the energy of the sun is absorbed by the oceans and atmosphere as heat, or reflected back into space. Although a small fraction of the Sun’s energy absorbed by the Earth over the last billion or so years is trapped in the form of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels’ function as combustive materials makes the process of energy extraction, in comparison to other forms, somewhat effortless. The organic nature of fossil fuels (biotic, non-renewable resources) makes them useful in the process of sun-energy transformation to human consumable energy. For example, petrochemicals whose use in chemical products such as detergents, paints, medicines and synthetic fibers as well as fertilizers are crucial to the industrial world. Additionally, fossil fuels maintain their general composition in the earth’s atmospheric conditions making them easy to exploit and transport.

Nevertheless human exponential need of these non-renewable resources means that they will undeniably expire or reach a ‘peak’ of production. A theory debated since the 1970’s, peak oil, argues that when human consumption of oil reaches a rate at which we are unable to extract any more oil from the earth – the ‘peak’ of ‘oil’ extraction – will reach its maximum and thus start to drop. At present, the rate at which we use oil is close to the rate at which we extract it, and ‘peak oil’ will coincide with human consumption at higher rates than production. Scientific data provided by sources like the University of Pennsylvania’s Risk Management and Decision Processes Center conclude that though the exact timing of the ‘peak oil’ prediction is still unknown and disputed many still claims it will happen within a generation. Reaching a sharp peak of production beyond the point of efficient extraction of more oil production will decline. Since general practice for fossil fuel extraction has utilized a model of expenditure when it comes to the economic attitudes towards these resources, capitalism comprehends the idea of ‘efficient extraction’ as the means to create profit from the extraction. Once the profitability of these sites is no longer tenable they are abandoned. Moreover, there is currently no ability for humans to accelerate the process of organic decomposition within the earth in order to regenerate the fossil fuels. Thus, the expendiary manner in which capitalism deals with these resources does not adequately or responsibly recognizes their profound and crucial role on the planet. Peak oil and climate change are the most crucial issues environmental activists involved in the Corrib dispute are concerned with. Environmental activists the world over claim that carbon extraction and over-production is the main cause for global warming, and global warming is the key dynamic in the creation of climate change. At its current rate global warming is going to be accelerated beyond capacity for human survival if carbon fuels continue to burn at their present pace past 2025.

The issues of climate change and peak oil, again, are related to human energy needs. Whereas many are pessimistic about human ingenuity and ability to slow or stop these global phenomena, there persists adequate reason to continue to ask serious questions and offer serious debate about how to move forward. The human need for energy means that those concerned over these issues have applied themselves to a variety of ways of facing them. Some have looked at the way in which humans extract resources from the world for human use, and how these structures might be altered or changed so that they may be more sustainable. Processes like growing food, extracting carbon fuels, mining, and logging amongst others take a toll on the ecology of specific places, which contributes degradation on a global environmental scale. Since there is a general census that humans are limited to the resources available on earth the entirety of human energy needs will have to be supplied by what can be utilized on the globe.

Environmental concerns related to the Corrib Project:

Generally, Carbon fuel extraction has negative effects on the environment. These effects have consequences on air, water and marine life. The specific processes of hydrocarbon extraction result in thousands of tons of carbon emissions into the air my way of flaring and cold venting. The elevated vertical stake from a gas refinery or oil well emits burning unwanted flammable gas and liquids because of pressure produced by the relief valves. The flaring is gas that has been converted into carbon, heat and water. Though flaring is primarily the result of over-pressure due to unplanned upset, it is a very common occurrence in natural gas wells. The emissions associated with cold venting and flaring contribute to the production of greenhouse gasses. Greenhouse gasses emissions happen when gasses trap heat into the atmosphere. Greenhouse gasses are produced both naturally and by human activity, but it is the human activity gasses including methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), carbon dioxide (CO2) and fluorinated gases that are the principle contributors to climate change. The Corrib gas refinery in Bellanaboy will primarily produce carbon dioxide emission associated with burning fossil fuels. Current environmental theory and international protocols, including the Kyoto Treaty, have called for the drastic reduction in carbon emissions for the purpose of reversing the greenhouse effect and curbing climate change.

Water systems:

The proposed location of the refinery in Bellanaboy including the nine kilometers, cross-land pipeline may also affect the water systems. Carrowmore Lake in Erris, is a part of an ecological network of protected areas under the E.U. Habitats Directive placed on Member States known as Natura 2000[38]. Natura 2000 is an initiative designed to create special areas of conservation (SAC) in order to protect Europe’s threatened habitats and species.[39] The Corrib refinery, a gas processing plant, is currently within the fresh water catchments area of northwest Co. Mayo and the Carrowmore Lake, Erris’ main water supply. If the Corrib project as is currently proposed goes ahead, the lake and catchments system will be on the receiving end of carbon emissions produced by the processing of the gas. The procedures related to gas processing also create the need for on-site, harmful chemicals, which will create additional risks to the region’s water table. Effluent, or water pollution, which are the outflows from sewage treatment facilities, gas refineries and other industrial facilities create wastewater full of chemical and heavy metals and is generally harmful to the ecology of a natural community. Accordingly, the Corrib refinery will produce this wastewater into Broadhaven Bay, five hundred kilometers from a Special Area of Marine Conservation.

Broadhaven Bay is the habitat where the Corrib pipeline will traverse before meeting its landfall site. An Duchas, Ireland’s State Heritage Agency, has name the bay as a internationally important site for bird populations, including the Brent Geese. The bay is also home to protected cetacean populations like dolphins and whales, and is a haven other forms of wildlife. The bay is semi-enclosed, which is partially account for its circular tidal patters and particular algae formations. Additionally, the habitats surrounding the bay include costal grasslands, sand dunes, and bog land. If the Corrib project goes ahead with its current plans, wastewater from the refinery that will include chemicals and heavy metals such as arsenic, mercury, phosphorus and magnesium will flow into the bay. The nature of the bay exacerbates the risks this sort of pollution poses to the marine life and ecology, and threatens present and future ecosystems of the area.

Health and Safety and the ‘Experimental’ Pipeline:

Perhaps the greatest issue for concern is that of the health and safety of communities in close geographical proximity to Shell landfall site, pipeline and refinery. The concerns centre on a refinery, already built in the Bellanboy area, as well as an across-land pipeline. This pipeline commences from the gas Corrib reservoir eighty-three kilometres to the landfall site in Glengad, and then travels nine kilometres across land to the refinery site at Bellanaboy. Issues regarding the characteristics of the negotiation between Shell and the Irish State also need to be re-examined and ultimately renegotiated. This included all current exploration and commercial licensing. For this reason I believe it is necessary to present an account of the issues involved from the perspective of the campaign, while being assured that the perspectives of Shell, the Irish State in all of its capitulations and their supporters in the media will adequately present ‘another side’ through its court decisions, news articles, jailing of protestors, avoidance of decision-making, granting of injunctions against members of the Rossport community, and continued support of Shell’s ongoing work at the landfall and refinery sites.

Since 2000 the communities most effected by the Corrib Gas project, along with environmental and community activists from Ireland, the UK and beyond have contested the project. The contestation of the project eventually led to protests and direct confrontations by activists against the state and corporation. This has led to great delays in the project now in its 10th year of operation. Though the community of activists contesting the project hold a variety of opinions about the ultimate goals of the campaign, many explain that the main purpose is to stop the State and Shell from “building and operating a potentially devastating onshore gas refinery and high pressure pipeline in [a] remote and environmentally sensitive region.”[40]

The issue of health and safety is what makes up the backbone of the Shell to Sea campaign. The issue of health and safety has mainly to do with what many campaigners and NGO reports have described as the ‘experimental’ and dangerous engineering of the proposed[41] pipeline due to the size and pressure planned. The proposal, according to the testimony of principal pipeline engineer for Shell UK Limited John Purvis, at the An Bord Pleanála oral hearings in May 2009 is for 9.2 kilometres of onshore pipeline to cross between the landfall site at Glengad to the refinery site at Bellananboy, both in Co. Mayo. The Centre for Public Inquiry has reported that the planned pipeline will operate at “exotically high pressures” that can “seriously increase the likelihood of pipe failure.”[42] The report goes on to state that, “there is no historical data that can be used to evaluate this proposed system”[43] in reference to the Quantified Risk Assessment (QRA) completed on the project stating the QRA was “inappropriate for this highly unique, first of its kind pipeline.”[44] Additionally the report notes that the anticipated route of the pipeline as concerns the onshore section from the landfall site to the refinery is “unacceptable because of its close proximity to people and dwellings.”[45] The report explains that concerns regarding the thickness of the piping, and the possibility of leak and/or “uniquely large rupture impact zone with high fatalities” are concerns well-founded due to the “expected high pressures and the destructive potential of reactive gases.”[46] The report concludes its section discussing the pipeline by explaining that reporters feel “there are too many unknowns . . .especially in the areas of gas pressure and gas composition” to make a confident assessment on safety. CPI reporters assert that “maximum pipeline pressure . . .should be easily defined,” but “has not been clearly demonstrated or documented – a grave deficiency.”[47] The report maintains that Shell Corporation descriptions of the pipeline meeting the “highest international standards”[48] are “meaningless as no standard adequately addresses the numerous issues associated with this unique proposal.”[49]

The reasons for the campaign and CPI report’s stress on the engineering of the pipeline is because the pipeline not only constitutes the greatest health and safety threat to the local people and dwellings in close proximity, but also because the emphasis for much of the campaign centers on the question of where the oil is most securely refined. Though attitudes within the campaign differ on this aspect of the Corrib gas proposal, most acknowledge that the onshore pipeline proposal, at an immediate level, constitutes a severe threat to people, property and the ecology of the local community. Many campaigners as well as the CPI report have described the proposed routing analyses of the onshore pipeline as insufficient to the high risks it represents, while the conclusions made by Shell assessors as to the difficulties of situating the refinery at sea have been inflated.

Concerns of the National Campaign:

I'm not an environmentalist. I'm an Earth warrior.[50] -Darryl Cherney

The national Shell to Sea campaign is interested in the economics and politics of the Shell to Sea campaign, which have consequences on the whole of Irish society. They include concerns about resources of Ireland belonging to the people of Ireland, and what economic benefits are available to Ireland, especially at a time of recession. The national campaign claims that the average tax on oil and gas profits in Europe between 55 – 79% on average, and that Ireland has the lowest rate, just 25% in Europe and the industrialized world. This discrepancy is amongst the chief concerns of the campaign, which sees the Corrib project proposal in terms of the economic benefit to average Irish citizens, completely bankrupt.

The main focus of the national campaign is to provide solidarity to the local sites of struggle, and also to feature the elements of the Corrib campaign that need to be addressed by mobilizing large constituencies of the Irish public. Mainly this has meant that the national campaign have raised the issue of the ‘gas giveaway’, or the economic component of the Corrib proposal. The national campaign is chiefly concerned over the need of rights of ownership of the Irish citizenry to the natural resources of Ireland. In the service of these rights, national campaigners judge that the natural resources (if extracted) should be designated as money that belongs to the citizens of Ireland not to a multinational corporation. National campaigners assess that as it stands, Irish citizens have no rights to the oil or gas exploited in their waters, no rights to research conducted over the last two decades on oil and gas exploration on the Irish continental shelf, and no rights of ownership to the real estate constructed for the project. These realities compounded by the economic fact that the Irish tax payer will fully fund the research, exploitation and properties with no rights to own them is the crucial component of the national campaign. Additionally, with no royalties being paid to the State, the corporations involved in the project have no legal obligation to sell the gas from the Corrib field to Bord Gáis. Rather Ireland will need to bid for the Corrib gas on the international market.

CHAPTER THREE:
I. Lingering Questions:

We, the indigenous people, are entitled to retain our quality of life and environment against threat from remote, faceless shareholders whose sole concern is profit and self-interest . . .We have literally spent years trying to pin down precisely how these defects in the legislation are used to facilitate the short-cuts, evasions and surreptitious intentions of developers and we find that the failure to require competent authorities and protective agencies to consult with each other in a proactive way is at the root of these defects.”[51] –Imelda Moran

Behind the material issues that frame the corpus of the Shell to Sea campaign lie great differences related to cultural assumptions and ideologies. These differences can be imagined as opposing perspectives on the world. This is not to define the Corrib dispute as simply a ‘difference of opinion’. Rather, what is at stake in the dispute - and the resolution – is nothing short of, as Martin Luther King Jr. has said, “a radical revolution of values.”[52] King explained that the revolution of values would come to fruition with critical engagement of the triplets of American pathology: racism, militarism, and materialism. Thus, to understand militarism we must understand the war of the rich against the poor; to analyze foreign policy we must understand racism; and to appreciate that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”[53] To name these three as ultimately expressions of the same pathology meant that resistance to them would have to comprehend the ways in which they were intersectional. The intersectionality of issues related to the Corrib dispute is the feature that commissions invention and imagination towards its resolution.

In the next sections of my essay I wish to address the issue of ownership. I have chosen this singular issue as it brings together many different yet related streams. In my naming the Corrib dispute a ‘space of contestation’ I conceptualize the issue of ownership as the most central component of that contestation. Further, the master narratives that legitimize the colonial economy, suggest that the natural resources of Ireland are not owned by the people of Ireland. Consequently, an exploration of the concept of ownership may not only dismantle the master narratives engaged by the State to justify its improper actions, it may also reveal possible concepts and actions to change this situation.

On Ownership and Liberation:

The problem of colonialism remains in many of the world’s postcolonial states, even where the visage of the nation may be more inclusive, and Ireland is not an exception. In the Corrib case there are clear ideological differences that frustrate resolution to the dispute. The notion that appealing to the State through reason by way of presenting clear evidence that the project needs to change for health, safety and environmental concerns has not yet produced much change. Thus, the most fundament theme of contestation in the dispute – who is going to own what we all have a part in creating? – remains. This reality reveals the centrality of ownership from social and economic relations to the affairs of the State. Identity, space, relations, and experience are all conditioned and informed by this single idea – ownership, and the history of Ireland appears to be an evolving answer to the question of ownership. Ownership is about the ties that bind and those that separate. Of all the issues relevant to oppression, ownership is arguably the most important and least understood.

Michael Walzer, Princeton professor and editor of journal Dissent has written,

Present division of wealth and power corresponds to some deeper reality of human life. Conservatives don’t want to say merely that the present division is what it ought to be, for that would invite a search for some distributive principle—as if it were possible to make a distribution. They want to say that whatever the division of wealth and power is, it naturally is, and that all efforts to change it, temporarily successful in proportion to their bloodiness, must be futile in the end. [54]

Fanon, Lorde, Connolly, O’Donnell and Flood, in opposition to Walzer’s narrative, have advocated a democratic, egalitarian radicalism. Political ideologies are rooted in commitments to various theories about ownership and wealth. However, it is not only activists and philosophers who wage this battle, but also by businesses in their daily operations. For example, in the case multinational corporations like Shell, the question of ownership is intentionally muddled and obscured in order to promote productivity and inequality, simultaneously. According to their website, Shell employees are referred to as ‘associates’, implying partnership. Yet, many companies who adhere to capitalism’s ideology use terms like these while at the same time providing ‘associates’ low levels of compensation. Frequently, the less a company has to pay its employees the higher the profits yielded by its owners. Contrastly, there are corporations who share ownership, distributing it broadly and generating more participative cultures, equitable relations, productivity, and profitability. Although ownership is most often understood through this relation it encompasses a variety of processes in our every day lives.

The notion of ownership in relation to ‘contested spaces’, the ‘demoractic public sphere’ and dismantling master narratives is significant. The national Shell to Sea campaign in solidarity with the local Rossport community has continuously pressed the Irish State and civil society groups to take ownership of the Corrib dispute. Ownership can mean a demand for rights to the economic wealth of a nation, but it can also mean an ownership of the political processes that have led to irresponsible policies. Ultimately, ownership over the Corrib dispute means that individuals at all levels of society must inquire: who owns the resources, and how shall they be best used for the good of the whole? This question can be answered in a variety of ways. In the following sections I will take up the question of ownership as it relates to the Corrib dispute in abstract and material ways. I will give an example of a ‘fairer’ distribution of resources despite the program being under the guise of capitalism, and offer it as an alternative to current policies of the Irish State.

The ‘nation-state’ system, “a political and geographical entity.”[55] From the perspective of the nation-state system the governing body of any given country legally owns the land and water areas within the territorial space of the nation. Under a capitalist system, the land and water areas are usually designated as commodities or “goods that are subject to ready exchange or exploitation within a market.”[56] Included in a nation-state’s commodities are other goods within the territorial boundaries of the country, these goods can include agricultural or mining products, articles of commerce that can be traded and transported. Where ‘possession’ is at question, the dictates of capitalism apply. Thus, a government can sell tracks of land that is ‘publicly owned’ to private individuals or corporations for personal or commercial use. Usually the system provides for private ownership to individuals or companies who wish to possess tracks of land either for personal or commercial use. However, in many nation-states the government retains the legal ability to repossess any privately owned land. Though the intention of this practice is not necessarily always negative, for example in cases where the government acquisitions land in the motivation of environmental preservation. Additionally, governments the world over including Ireland, have acquisitioned land for reasons of land-reform, where large tracks of land that were once owned by a single landlord are then divided among those who rent and work on the land. In Ireland the particular issues of land as a politio-economic question has had profound social consequences, e.g. the famine of 1845-47, and very little pronounced resolution in modern times. In his 1996 work Land, Politics and Nationalism: A Study of the Irish Land Question Phillip Bull states that he perceives there is a need to find a “new perspective on how the Irish land question relates to major political developments in the modern era.” To this end, Bull dedicates his book to sketching out the following idea:

Conflicting assumptions about the nature of land tenure relationships in Ireland were left unresolved to the point where the issues became so important in national life that it shaped the future of Irish nationalism and the shape of the society which emerged out of the nationalist struggle.[57]

In Ireland at present, capitalism is the dominant system for organizing ownership of land. Though in Ireland, like other nation-states, stipulations exist where the government can retain the legal ability to repossess privately owned land for ‘public use’ or ‘public good’. This practice is known as compulsory acquisition. Compulsory acquisition as it applies to the Corrib dispute relates many to the Gas Act of 1976, where in Section 32 it states:

Provided holder of consents wit the right to apply, in the case of transmission and distribution pipelines, to the CER and, in the case of upstream pipelines, to the Minister for an order to require compulsorily any land or right over land required for the purpose of pipeline construction. The second schedule to the 1976 Act set out the procedures involved in the acquisition. The 1976 Act also contains provisions that impose obligations on all persons proposing the construction of pipelines in regard to the submission of Environmental Impact Assessments.

Further, in relation to the Corrib dispute, the 1960 Act is also illustrative,

The Act provides that whenever the Minister is of the opinion that it is necessary for the efficient or convenient exploitation of petroleum to acquire any land or any ancillary right, the Minister with the consent of the Minister for Finance may by order compulsorily acquire, either permanently or temporarily, such land or such ancillary right.

In the Corrib dispute, land as a political question features centrally. Firstly, because the issue of compulsory acquisition was fundamental to the protest of the Rossport 5, but will also feature as the stage for the forthcoming battle around laying the on-land section of the pipeline. Secondly, compulsory acquisition of lands is of historical significance in Ireland where land was taken by force by the British government during Queen Elizabeth’s time and further exploited under Cromwell, leaving the majority of Irish people in dire poverty.[58] Though the context of compulsory acquisition in the case of the Irish State acquiring lands from private owners is ‘different’, there is a lingering rub created by historical injustices. Where capitalism remains the dominant ideology for economic land organization, the selling of ‘commodities’ will prevail as the greatest ‘public good’. In the case of the Corrib dispute, land has been acquired from private individuals for the purposes of building the Corrib project sites – including the landfall site, pipelines and refinery. The issues with compulsory acquisition in this case are many. In its compulsory acquisition of lands to build the Shell complexes, the Irish State is not compensated for the land it acquires for Shell. Instead, as I have stated in previous sections, Shell is able to write all of its costs off from tax. This means that while Shell might pay money up-front for expenditures, it will be fully reimbursed for these expenses by the Irish State. Essentially this means that the taxpayer will pay Shell, a private corporation, for land that at the time of sale was owned by the Irish State. In other words the tax payer will compensate Shell for Shell’s acquisition of the land in Erris, and will retain no legal rights to the land save the unlikely possibility the Irish State desires to repossess the land from Shell.

Bull ends his book by with this reflection:

The circumstances of the long conflict over land, of the consequent idealization of its possession, even in unsustainably small parcels, and of the rivalries generated by this between those whose interest in class and economic terms, whether at the bottom or the top, were essentially similar must have served to accentuate such a propensity. It was a conflict, which was central in the shaping of modern Ireland, and one which has substantially influenced the forms, the attitudes and the problems of that society long after cessation.[59]

The political question of land in the Corrib case is not fully encapsulated by the legalities and issues of ownership. As Bull has stated the politics of ownership reflect history’s influence on modern contexts. More germane to the discussion of ‘ownership’ is the question as to whether or not ‘land’ can be owned at all? In his work A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Jean Jacques Rousseau makes this point:

The first [person][60] who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought themselves of saying this is mine. . was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not anyone have saved [humanity], by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, ‘Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody."

Obvious disparities of power exist in the question over land ownership in the Corrib dispute, yet Rousseau’s observation engenders a further discussion about whether or not land can truly ever be owned. This insight problematizes claims to the land held by all parties in the Corrib dispute. It also instigates issues related to ownership of other natural resources, a key discussion point in the Shell to Sea campaign. The campaign claims that the resources that are being ‘given away’ to Shell belong to the Irish people. However, legislation passed in relation to the Corrib dispute appears to reject this idea for the purpose of facilitating a multinational, private corporation. After months of research into the reasons behind the extraordinary arrangement the oil companies secured with the Irish State only two possibilities appear likely. The first is that while in economic crisis a government will make huge concessions in order to introduce capital into an economy under a capitalist system. As quotes from ministers in previous sections of my dissertation assert, the necessity of ‘attracting’ big business required tax breaks and concessions that created a ‘tax haven’ in Ireland for oil and gas companies. From research into the dispute it does not seem apparent that Richard Spring or Dessie O’Malley changed the Keating principles to benefit the corporations in order to line their own pockets. Rather, accruing capital is an imperative principle in capitalist societies like Ireland. In this vein, a responsible assessment would not hold Shell entirely responsible for the Corrib dispute. Certainly the Shell Corporation works to accrue capital itself and looks for the ‘most efficient’ (meaning most cost effective) ways to do this. Additionally, the foundational question about ownership of resources is one query that must be addressed by the whole of society.

Holding the issue of natural resources ownership invited by environmentalists in tension with current realities of a system completely persuaded by the ideology that humans can and should own land and natural resources is illustrative. If we assume human ownership, then we come back to the previous query about whom should own land and resources, and how these resources are best utilized. Bull’s book assumes that this is a long-standing question with present day reverberations. There is a vast spectrum of thinking on this particular question, even within espoused capitalist nations and societies, and interestingly the U.S. is a good example. just as Keating had newly introduced his principles in Irish parliament, voters in Alaska approved a constitutional amendment to establish a permanent fund (trust) for its oil resources. The amendment stated,

At least 25 percent of all mineral lease rentals, royalties, royalty sales proceeds, federal mineral revenue-sharing payments and bonuses received by the state be placed in a permanent fund, the principal of which may only be used for income-producing investments.[61]

In addition to funding expenses accrued by the State; Alaska Statute 43.23 established a Permanent Fund Dividend Program[62] based on income that allocates investment dividends to every citizen of Alaska (a person with six-months or more residency in Alaska) regardless of age. In 2008 the average dividend from this trust received a little over $2000.

Perceptibly, the Alaskan Permanent Trust is somewhat unique, however similar programs exist in Europe and the Middle East. If the Keating Principles were not repealed they would have granted the Irish citizenry ownership over its natural resources, and provided a much more promising space for legislation in Ireland similar to Alaska. However, for Shell to Sea campaigners, the realty that the natural resources will not be owned or economically benefit the country continues to be a point of departure from the current Corrib proposal. The context of deep economic recession only adds potency to the activists call for re-negotiation.

The economic policies ushered into Ireland in the 1980’s and 1990’s did stimulate the decade of the Celtic Tiger, however the deregulation and short-sightedness of these policies have been economically devastating as the years 2008 – 2009 exemplify. Yet, there is still a reluctance of the Irish State or the vast majority of civil society groups to adequately examine ideological frameworks that have economically devastated Ireland. The same sort of free market capitalism that served as the hegemonic ideology that destroyed Keating’s aspiration for a State oil company with the ability to research, exploit and have ownership of Irish oil and other natural resources. The short-sided policies of Spring and O’Malley means that even now there is no assurances that the future will see Irish resources owned by the Irish people. Unfortunately, there is no writing at the time these deals were underway in the 80’s and 90’s asking what the big oil companies would be contributing to Ireland’s economy? Instead it appears that most deals where secured mainly to keep multinational corporations in Ireland for reasons that remain somewhat ambiguous. Clearly citizens of Ireland do not have power – democratic or otherwise – over there own natural resources. The dissent the Shell to Sea campaign has attempted to gather around this unfortunate reality does not appear to be creating any great strides in political will.

II. Legitimizing Narratives

In Frantz Fanon’s 1952 work Black Skins, White Masks he explains the psychological consequences of colonial subjugation, or what he referred to as “divided self-perception of the Black Subject.” Fanon proposes that one of the most egregious transgressions of colonization is the assailment of the black subject’s consciousness through the imposition of ‘linguistic colonialism’. In the opening this his work Fanon describes what he means by ‘linguistic colonialism’ when he explains,

I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.

Thirty years later, well-known American feminist poet Audre Lorde would further describe Fanon’s critique by instructing, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Lorde and Fanon influenced by their own personal experiences of colonialism established nonviolent critiques of the colonial system through struggling to free themselves from the ‘colonized mind’. Although, the concept of the ‘colonized mind’ grew to have much more nuanced meanings than Fanon intended, the idea, especially as articulated in his work, The Wretched of the Earth, still holds a potent and persuasive place in contemporary post-colonial theory.

Although Ireland is a considered a postcolonial state, its failure to organize a social revolution alike to Connolly’s vision leaves lasting political difficulties and dissent. For this reason, Fanon’s description of the consequences of a ‘colonized mind’ remain compelling as a way to understand Ireland’s current predicament. As Jefferess argues, “Current problems are linked to the failure of the post-colonial state to fulfill the ideals of anti-colonial liberation movements.”[63] In my first chapter I have drawn the point that a process of decolonization necessitates the transformation of the political apparatus of colonialism and its legitimizing narratives. My inclusion of James Connolly’s warning that colonialism in Ireland will continue as long as there is not a social consciousness to challenge the narrative structures that maintain material inequality. I have tried to expose some of the reasons why the Corrib gas project has become a space of contestation, and what are a few of the underlying issues at stake, including the political questions about ownership of land and natural resources of a nation-state. The most well remembered idea of Franz Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks Perhaps the ‘divided self perception’ in the post-modern, post-structuralist era is one where national liberation movements have created conditions for self-rule, yet in that process have not attempted to re-map the economic plains that were the impetus for economic depravity in colonial states. These states are at once ‘independent’ while inextricably tied to former colonial structures.

The questions of poverty and wealth that colonial structure incite and postcolonial theory have tried to deconstruct have long been concerns of many of the world’s religious traditions. Since the Industrial Revolution, religious communities have begun to divide sharply over questions of social and economic justice. None have been more engaged in these issues than the proponents of Liberation Theology, whose roots are to be found in the prophetic tradition of missionaries and evangelists in Latin America whose anti-colonialist critique influenced religiously inspired protests and programs for economic justice for the dispossessed around the world. Gandhi and King’s “poor people’s campaigns,” liberation movements in Africa, the women’s movement, and contemporary protests for global equity are all manifestations of a widespread concern with oppression born of economic injustice.

In her work Public Power in the Age of Empire Arundhati Roy explains, “There is no discussion taking place in the world today that is more crucial than the debate about strategies of resistance.” Fanon attributed the distinctive feature of colonialism as racist ideology (racism). In Fanon’s discourse on strategies of resistance the particularly egregious consequence of the colonial state is the destruction of the “cultural legacy of the native peoples in the name of the racial superiority of the conquering civilization.”[64] Jefferess enhances discussions on resistance to be inclusive of the processes of decolonization as projects for liberation rather than mere political strategies in specific areas. Jefferess expounds on traditional definitions of resistance by placing the action within a principled process of decolonization as a specific goal, and as a more expansive practice that will necessarily include theoretical as well as pragmatic actions. Jefferess explains that resistance if understood merely as a function of power limits its scope and possibility for social transformation. The strategies for resistance in Jefferess’ theory will be of vital concern to the outcome of the decolonization process. As Jefferess describes,

“Liberation signifies something other than the creation of the post-colonial nation-sate. Revolution simply turning the tables does not constitute liberation. Resistance constitutes both the expression of an alternative and the means of affecting a revolution. Liberation will necessarily mean a change in the form of the activity of a society.”

Fanon wanted to transform the structures of inequality, and most especially the “narratives and values that legitimized colonial power.”[65]

III. Concluding Ideas

What deserves the name of love is an effort – over which one has no control yet at which one must not strain – which is slow, attentive on both sides – how does one win the attention of the subaltern without coercion and crisis? – mind-changing on both sides, at the possibility of an unascertainable ethical singularity that is not ever a sustainable condition. The necessary collective efforts are to change laws, relations of production, systems of education, and health care. But without the mind-changing one-on-one responsible contact, nothing will stick.[66]

At the heart of the Shell to Sea endeavor is a call to imagine the world in alternative ways. In order to do this the campaign had to initiate a space for contestation. Some have described this space as peripheral to the political and economic life of Irish society. Some have described this space as uptopic, irresponsible, even radical. The above passage from post-colonial theorist Gayatri Spivak address the central spirit behind the collective efforts to change society in fundamental ways; she calls this love. She also emphasizes the necessity to ‘change minds’ by way of human relationships, Habermas’ idea of ‘communicative action’ in practice. bell hooks has said we need educational spaces for listening to each to others views, critical spaces where we can legitimate other experiences. But how we can do this in the complicated contested space of the Corrib project remains difficult. Henry Giroux’s notion of “cultural recovery,” which includes, as Nick Couldry has written, recovering histories one has not heard before, including one’s own provides a useful departure point for creating such critical discourse. The need for mechanisms to facilitate the process of cultural recovery is especially pertinent to the discourse on the Corrib dispute, where the battle is as much about competing ideas about, and the silencing of, historical memory. Social theorist Seyla Benhabib’s urgent appeal to see individuals as “concrete others”—a central component of her vision of the democratic public sphere—would also be instructive, where popular discourse on the issue has failed to attempt to understand the real origins of the dispute. But how do we all parties in a place to reconcile these competing narratives, and become critically conscious of how, as David Takacs says, their positionality biases their epistemology?

I agree with Nick Couldry and others that the ultimate goal of creating a critical public sphere must be the development of citizenship. Tony Bennett’s injunction to critically and creatively question how cultural practices can be democratized through the actual policy governing institutions and spaces must also be attended to. For inasmuch as campaigns like Shell to Sea need to continue their struggle to promote critical dialogue on the ground, the Irish State and civil society groups must enact institutional reforms that truly demonstrate support for critical dialogue, oppositional practices, the expression of alternative experience and cultural dissent. A critical theory the complex ways power is wielded within the social geography of public discourse, through domination (discursive/material), cultural struggle (especially in its alternative forms), and an often tacit acceptance of a hegemonic neoliberal ideology is a necessary first step toward the development of critical citizens and a truly democratic public life on campus and beyond.

The Shell to Sea campaign will enter its fifth year of struggle in 2010. Many conclude that the nature of the campaign makes it difficult for incremental change. The terms agreed to by the Irish State would have to be completely overhauled, and Shell would have to agree to not only cease construction operations, which are now in their tenth year. If recent events in the dispute are indicative of the future relationship of the State to the Shell to Sea campaign, the State appears adamant that it will employ all possible forces in its power to complete the Corrib project. Given the balance of power relations between the State, Shell Corporation and the campaign, it is unlikely short of a major transformation in government; activists will be able to send Shell to sea. However, campaigners judge that they might, as one activist explained, “loose in such a way that we will be building opposition which might help us win the next battle.”[67]

Works Cited:

1. Baker, Susan. 1990. "The Evolution of the Irish Ecology Movement," in Green Politics. Edited by W. Riidig, pp. 47-81. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

2. Benhabib, Senya (1992) Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics. Cambridge: Polity.

3. Berry, W. (2003). The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry. New York: Shoemaker &Amp; Hoard.

4. Blog Archive, Lisbon Reform Treaty Labour Party. (n.d.). Retrieved September 14, 2009, from http://www.labour.ie/lisbonreformtreaty/blog/archive/2008/06/24/time-to-reflect-and-move-on/

5. Chomsky, N. (1999). Profit Over People. new york: Seven Stories, 1999.

6. Connolly, Frank. (2005) “The Great Corrib Gas Controversy”. Fiosru. The Centre of Public Inquiry, November. Vol 1, No. 2.

7. Connolly, J. (1948). Socialism and nationalism: A selection from the writings of James Connolly. At The Sign Of The Three Candles.

8. Dáil Éireann - Volume 267 - 17 July, 1973 - Written Answers. - Oil and Gas Exploration.. (n.d.). Retrieved September 14, 2009, from http://historical-debates.oireachtas.ie/D/0267/D.0267.197307170046.html

9. Environment - Nature & Biodiversity. (n.d.). Retrieved September 15, 2009, from http://ec.europa.eu/environment/nature/index_en.htm

10. Fanon, F. (2007). Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press.

11. Fanon, F. (2005). The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press.

12. Flood, A. (n.d.). Ireland - Nationalism, Socialism and Partition. Retrieved September 14, 2009, from http://www.anarkismo.net/article/5557

13. Freire, P. (2008). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group.

14. Gerry GreggÂ’s Corrib Gasfield Doc Â‘Paul Williams InvestigatesÂ’ | The Irish Film & Television Network. (n.d.). Retrieved September 14, 2009, from http://www.iftn.ie/?act1=record&only=1&aid=73&rid=4282166&tpl=archnewshome&force=1

15. Giroux, Henry A. (1992) Border Crossings: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Education. New York: Routledge.

16. Giroux, Henry A. (1996) “Is there a place for Cultural Studies in Colleges of Education?” in H. Giroux et al., Counternarratives: Cultural Studies and Critical Pedagogies in Postmodern Spaces. New York and London: Routledge.

17. Giroux, Henry A. (2002) “Neoliberalism, Corporate Culture, and the Promise of Higher Education: The University as a Democratic Public Sphere.” Harvard Educational Review 72, 4.

18. Giroux, Henry A. and McLaren, Peter L. (1989) “Introduction,” in Giroux and McLaren (eds), Critical Pedagogy, the State, and Cultural Struggle. Albany: SUNY Albany Press.

19. Going Nuclear | Veronica McDermott 2007 | . (n.d.). Retrieved September 14, 2009, from http://www.veronicamcdermott.com/sample.html

20. Group, T. G., & Group, T. G. (2001). The 2000 Import and Export Market for Gas Oils in Ireland (World Trade Report). New York City: Icon Group International.

21. Hamilton, Jacqueline., Tol., & Richard. (2007). The impact of climate change on tourism in Germany, the UK and Ireland: a simulation study. Regional Environmental Change, 7(3), 161-172.

22. Healy, T.M. (1881). Why There is an Irish Land Question, and Irish Land League. Briston Selected Pamphlets. University of Bristol Library.

23. Heinberg, R. (2005). The Party's Over: Oil, War And The Fate Of Industrial Societies. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers.

24. Hicks, B., & Nelder, C. (2008). Profit from the Peak: The End of Oil and the Greatest Investment Event of the Century (Angel Series). New York, NY: Wiley.

25. hooks, bell (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.

26. Jordan, D. E. (1994). Land and Popular Politics in Ireland: County Mayo from the Plantation to the Land War (Past and Present Publications). New York: Cambridge University Press.

27. Keller, Douglas. Habermas, the Public Sphere, and Democracy: A Critical Intervention. http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/habermas.htm

28. Keogh, Dermott. (2005). The Vatican, the Bishops and Irish Politics 1919-39. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Pg. 68.

29. King, M. L. (1986). Beyond Vietnam and Casualties of the war in Vietnam. Cambridge: Clergy And Laity Concerned.

30. Location. (n.d.). Fortune Global 500 2009: The World's Biggest Companies - Royal Dutch Shell - RDS.B. Retrieved September 14, 2009, from http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2009/snapshots/6388.html

31. Lorde, A. (1978). Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press Feminist Series). Freedom, California: Crossing Press.

32. Low, Setha, and Denise Lawrence-Ziuiiga. (2003). "Locating culture," The anthropology of space and place: Locating culture. Edited by Setha Low and Denise Lawrence- Zufiiga, pp. 1-47. Oxford: Blackwell.

33. O’Brien, Carl. (2009) What Next in a Land Divided. The Irish Times. www.IrishTimes.ie

34. Okri, B. (1998). A Way of Being Free. New York: Phoenix (An Imprint Of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd ).

35. Peace, Adrian. (2005). “A Sense of Place, a Place of Senses: Land and a Landscape in the West of Ireland”. Journal of Anthropological Research, Vol. 61, No. 4 (Winter), pp. 495-512. Published by: University of New Mexico

36. Peak Oil and Strategic Resource Wars. (2009, September 1). Futurist, The, 23 - 56.

37. Polychroniou, C., & Interview, t. r. (n.d.). t r u t h o u t | Henry Giroux: Rethinking the Promise of Critical Education. Retrieved September 14, 2009, from http://www.truthout.org/article/henry-giroux-rethinking-promise-critical-education

38. Salazar, Carlas. (1996). A Sentimental Economy: Commodity and Community in Rural Ireland. Providence: Berghahn Books. Pg, 67.

39. Salick, J., & Ross, N. (2009). Traditional peoples and climate change. Global Environmental Change, 19(2), 137-139.

40. Shell in Ireland - SHELL TO CEASE ONSHORE PIPELINE WORK. (n.d.). Retrieved September 15, 2009, from http://www.shell.com/home/content/ie-en/news_and_library/press_releases/archive/2005/sepil_20050718.html

41. Spivak, Gayatri. (1999). A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, Massachucetes: Harvard University Press. Pg. 383.

42. Takacs, David (2002) “Positionality, Epistemology, and Social Justice in the Classroom.” Social Justice 29, Pg. 4

43. Vitalis, R. (2009). America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier. New York: Verso.

44. What next in a land divided? - The Irish Times - Sat, Jul 11, 2009. (n.d.). Retrieved September 14, 2009, from http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2009/0711/1224250444849.html

45. Women, S. A. (n.d.). Postcolonial Studies @ Emory: Contents. Retrieved September 14, 2009, from http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Contents.html

46. (1986). Oil and Gas Prospects in Ireland. Stevenage: Instn. Of Chem. Enginrs..

[1] [1] Connolly, James. Socialism and Nationalism. Shan Van Vocht. January 1897. Pg. 124.

[2] Keogh, Dermott. The Vatican, the Bishops and Irish Politics 1919-39. Pg. 68

[3] http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Contents.html

[4] Okri, 1998. See Works Cited.

[5] Okri, 1998. Pg. 7

[6] Anarkismo.net: http://www.anarkismo.net/article/5557

[7] Anarkismo.net: http://www.anarkismo.net/article/5557

[8] Jeferess, 2008. Pg. 88. Quoting from Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Pg. 269.

[9] Rossport for the purposes of this paper will be inclusive of the areas of Rossport, Glengad, and Bellanaboy, Co. Mayo. Though the areas where the Shell landfall site, Solidarity Camp, pipeline and refinery are technically in the vicinity of Glengad and Bellanaboy, Rossport is how these areas are most often referred to in literature, media and public discourse.

[10] http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2009/snapshots/6388.html

[11] O’Brien, Carl. What Next in a Land Divided. The Irish Times, 11 July 2009.

[12] http://www.iftn.ie/?act1=record&only=1&aid=73&rid=4282166&tpl=archnewshome&force=1

[13] Peace, Adrian. The West of Ireland: A Sense of Place, A Place of Senses. Journal of Anthropological Research, Vol. 61, No. 4 (Winter, 2005), pp. 495-512. Published by: University of New Mexico.

[14] Peace, 2005. Pg. 495.

[15] Peace, 2005. Pg. 497.

[16] Freire, Paolo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Pg. 34.

[17] Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia, Pg. 53.

[18] Jefferess, David. Post-Colonial Resistance: Culture, Liberation and Transformation. 2008. Pg. 9

[19] Berry, Wendell. ‘Peaceableness Towards Enemies’. The Art of the Common Place. 2003.

[20] Needs a citation.

[21] Needs citation.

[22] Peace, 2008. Pg. 497

[23] http://www.labour.ie/lisbonreformtreaty/blog/archive/2008/06/24/time-to-reflect-and-move-on/

[24] Giroux, Henry. Rethinking the Promise of Critical Education Under an Obama Regime. http://www.truthout.org/article/henry-giroux-rethinking-promise-critical-education

[25] Keller, Douglas. Habermas, the Public Sphere, and Democracy: A Critical Intervention. http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/habermas.htm

[26] Ibid.

[27] Chomsky, Noam. Profit over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order. 1999. New York: Seven Stories Press.

[28] http://historical-debates.oireachtas.ie/D/0267/D.0267.197307170046.html

[29] CPI report, pg. 5

[30] http://www.veronicamcdermott.com/sample.html

[31] http://www.veronicamcdermott.com/sample.html

[32] http://www.allbusiness.com/retail-trade/food-stores/4470538-1.html

[33] Needs citation.

[34] www.oireachtas-debates.gov.ie

[35] Dail Eireann 28th of June 1985 www.oireachtas-debates.gov.ie

[36] Needs citation.

[37] Thorton, A.P. Imperialism in the Twentieth Century. Pg. 313.

[38] A map of locations in Ireland protected by Natura can be found here: http://ec.europa.eu/environment/nature/natura2000/db_gis/pdf/IEn2k_0802.pdf

[39] http://www.npws.ie/en/FAQs/Natura2000/

[40] From Outside Agitators: Voices from Across the Water. Reflections on Resistance in Rossport. Zine . Pg. 3

[41] The pipeline has yet to be built. A proposal of the pipeline by the Shell Corporation of the pipeline can be found here: http://www-static.shell.com/static/ie-en/downloads/about_shell/safety_brochure.pdf.

[42] CPI Report Pg. 5.

[43] Ibid.

[44] Ibid.

[45] Ibid.

[46] Ibid.

[47] Ibid.

[48] http://www.shell.com/home/content/ie-en/news_and_library/press_releases/archive/2005/sepil_20050718.html

[49] CPI Report Pg. 5.

[50] quoted in Smithsonian, April 1990.

[51] Moran, Imelda and Friends of Rossport. Submission to the Environmental Protection Agency, 2007.

[52] King, Martin Luther. From his speech, Beyond Vietnam.

[53] Ibid.

[54] Walzer, Michael. “In Defense of Equality,” Dissent. Vol 20, no. 4, Fall 1973.

[55] Crouche, Sheila. The Definition Dilemma. Pg. 85.

[56] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/commodity

[57] Bull, 1996. Pg. 4

[58] Healy, T.M. Why There is an Irish Land Question, and an Irish Land League. 1881. Pg. 59.

[59] Bull, 1996. Pg. 192.

[60] Changed from ‘man’ for gender inclusion.

[61] http://www.apfc.org/home/Content/permFund/aboutPermFund.cfm

[62] http://www.apfc.org/home/Content/alaska/dividendPrgrm.cfm

[63] Post-Colonial Resistance, Pg. 77

[64] Kebede, Messay. Journal on Black Studies, pg. 540. 2001

[65] Black Skins, White Masks

[66] Spivak, Gayatri. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Pg. 383.

[67] O’Carrol, Aileen. In a speech given at a Shell to Sea fundraiser, July 2009.

My Photos From the 2006 Israeli War on Lebanon

2010-09-28T11:41:00.002-04:00

Amy Goodman speaks about the ravages of war

2010-09-28T11:22:00.004-04:00

The Iranian Election a 'Legacy of Martyred Flowers'

2009-06-16T18:03:00.003-04:00

Legacy of martyred flowers committed me to life,
Legacy of martyred flowers,
Don’t you see?

Forough Farokhzad, Only the Sound Will Last

Since the close of polling late Friday, and the hasty confirmation of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s second term in office, protests have broken out across Iran. Many Iranians, who consider the landslide victory for Ahmadinejad a symbol of their country’s deeply corrupt political system, have endeavoured to force the government to nullify the results and hold another election. In what can only be considered a classic case of state-repression, police and Revolutionary Guards have soaked the streets in blood; shooting into crowds of peaceful protestors, arresting scores of demonstrators, and targeting constituencies known for their criticism of the government. Just yesterday, the Guardian conservatively reported that as many as twelve students from universities throughout the country lost their lives as they courageously and openly opposed state forces.

In a brash attempt to validate the legitimacy of the political structure in Iran, those in the Guardian Council and Ministry of Interior (its civic counterpart) confirmed Ahmadinejad’s ‘win’ and congratulated ‘democracy’. Ahmadinejad seized the opportunity to describe his ‘election’ as a ‘mandate from the people’, before the people unequivocally mandated a recount!

Media would have us believe that the crucial issue concerning the recent election ‘results’ in Iran centers on the question of whether or not the election was rigged. While general curiosity and speculation around this issue is a healthy aspect of the debate, it cannot moderate the far more profound lessons to be learned from the mass protests throughout the country.

Were the elections rigged? Probably. It is more than likely that the higher voter turn-out for this election came in favor of change. This was not true in the 9th Presidential Elections, four years ago, where an unknown, conservative, Tehrani mayor, Ahmadinejad, was ‘challenged’ by the highly controversial cleric-turned-businessman, Rafsanjani. The election was mostly boycotted or dismissed by many reformists minded voters, and the aspect of its ‘rigged results’ by way of the candidates having been hand-picked the Guardian Council (as is policy), was ignored in Western-language press.

This new eruption of protest over the still hotly contested election outcome has animated the already decades long debates within Iranian politics over civil and political rights, participation and inclusion. Just like many other countries, specific issues and rights in Iran are held like captives to particular names on the ballot. For example, a vote for Mousavi is a vote for greater freedoms for women. A vote for Ahmedinejad is a vote against the liberalization (privatization) of Iran’s economy. Though many Iranians remain sceptical of all the candidates ‘allowed’ to participate in this highly contestable and prodigious style of electoral engineering, elections are not entirely hollow, as the protests demonstrate. Iranians, like many of their counterparts in throughout the world, were made to choose between issues and candidates that did not necessarily represent the broad spectrum of their politics, concerns, or aspirations.

However, it is not the regiment outcome of Iranian elections that is at the heart of the protests, though this is certainly a concern. These protests, dissimilar to the swell of similar outpouring in the late 1990’s, are made up Iranians from many different backgrounds, and varied political, religious and social opinions. This is precisely the reason the executive levels of the Iranian government have, with its decades of training in repression of domestic discontent, met the protesters with the full force of state power.

Though the contestability of the elections is disputed, what protesters, Ahmadinejad and the Guardian Council seem to all recognize is that the immediate future of the Islamic Republic of Iran remains unsecure. The ‘democratic dilemma’ that the state has ensured through its dubious electoral processes is kindling increased opposition not just among the ‘parents of the Revolution’, but most pronouncedly in those twenty-somethings born after 1979 who represent the manifest ‘success’ of the Islamic Revolution. The government’s campaign to mold ‘model’ Islamic citizens has not only fashioned a profound crisis of loyalty to the religious ‘ideals of the revolution’, it has nurtured action that many have silently prayed for - as the public sphere, the last bastion of the religious elites grip on power, was shot open by their own guns Sunday.

This is not to make the mistake that Iran is moving towards, or desirous of, a secular revolution, it might very well be the opposite. However, the iron-clad grip on power that many of the religious elites have enjoyed since the Iran-Iraq war is gradually unravelling at all ends. Today, reformist-minded voters in and outside of Iran, who watched as their political aspirations were dashed time and again by during Khatami’s tenure, vigilantly braved the vast, violent and manipulative forces of the state and dared not be silent once again in the ballot box. Those who bravely opposed the regime objected to the misuse of religion for political ends – and so the protests continue.

In the thirty years since the fall of the Shah and the gradual instillation of an Islamic theocratic government in Iran, opposition movements have bravely attempted to reclaim spaces in the political landscape of the country. These movements have nurtured democratic ideals in an attempt to assert the human and political rights of the poor, ethnic minorities, and women amongst others. Over the past two years Iran’s women’s movement most manifestly known as the One Million Signatures Campaign has sought to amplify the disparities felt by women on every level of Iranian society. Prior to the Saturday protests, this campaign was the largest and most vocal dissident movement in Iran.

For those of us concerned over securing some notion of ‘the truth’ about what happened in Friday’s elections, or who continue to be confused over the myriad of political mud-slinging in the media over ‘what the protests are really about’, we can be assured no easy answers.

However, the far more unsettling queries this election has left the ‘us’ (those who are watching from afar), and the other ‘us’ (those who are an on the ground in Iran) with surely sustain questions about the reach of our solidarity, our courage to speak, and our interest in the welfair of those ideologically opposed to ‘us’.

Iran is a country struggling to sustain vast differences of opinion over political allegiances, social policies, and the fine lines that govern the ‘morals’ of their state system. Do not mistake the events currently taking place in Iran as a fight for democracy, or even a ‘ better representation’ of the will of the people. What is happening in Iran is a fight for a slightly fairer electoral process. If political pundits, Western-language journalists and solidarity activists wish to support Iranians in their fight for freedom, they should take notice of the few who have been executed and exiled, whose lives have committed the many you see in the streets today to life.

The Veil as a Symbol of Islam

2008-05-21T23:39:00.001-04:00

1. Is Islam a Religion Without Images?
2. The Power of Ambiguity
3. Contemporary Examples of Veiling
4. Short History of Veiling the Muslim Communities
5. The Veil of Representation: A Survey
6. Noticing ‘The Gaze’
7. The Economy of the Gaze: Marx, Mitchell and Schiller
8. Towards an Islamic Imagery: The Icon of the Veil
9. Veiling: The Personal is Political, Interviews
10. Works Cited

IS ISLAM A RELIGION WITHOUT IMAGES?
Over the course of a semester considering Islam and religious images, the question of Islam as a religion without images implies a far more incendiary query, mainly, is Islam a religion without art? The historically evident, if not intuitive, response to such an implication is of course, no. Islam is from its inception, and if nothing else, a cultural heritage steeped in rich artistic diversity and expression. Though, over the course of the semester we have considered the ways in which Islam has been written and conceived of polemically as a religion (and a people) without a visual culture. Thus, considerable time over the course of the semester went to recasting, reinterpreting and ultimately re-envisioning the narrative of visual religious imagery, symbol and iconography in Islam. It not difficult to describe how imagery is interpreted discursively through the ‘lens’ of Islam, but examples revealing the noticeable similarities Islam shares with other confessional faiths, especially those dominant in the West, is more instructive as to the manner in which art history has been theorized in the ‘West’ rather than how it is practiced in the ‘East’. Empty categorical assumptions aside, there is, more substantively, the question as to what a ‘new’ narrative of Islamic religious imagery could be, holding in tandem the imperative of considering what imagery in Muslim communities was historically.

In view of these questions in relation to our course, I am intrigued by the possibility of imagining what the contemporary images of Islam might be? Furthermore, how have these images been used by Muslim and non-Muslim communities to communicate, ritualize and confirm ideas and conceptions of what Islam is in the contemporary world. Thus, I felt that it was prudent to choose an area of focus that hadn’t yet been explored by our course. The Muslim veil or hijab, has only become an emblem of Islam in relatively recent history. Additionally, the hijab is really only a signifier of Islam in very specific contexts, for example, the United States post September 11, 2001. Thus, making a case for the possible iconicity of the veil within Islam spars with obvious issues related to the cultural appropriation of images for the sake of, in the U.S.’s case, geo-political motives. Additionally, I choose to look at the veil as a signifier of Islam precisely because I felt that there was reason to be critical of the association of Islam with the veil, the veil with women, and women’s status with an ideology-- Islam. While simultaneously recognizing that these sorts of associations are most likely connected to the images and representations that evolve into symbols and eventually icons. If iconography can be defined as, “the imagery or symbolism of a work of art, an artist, or a body of art” including the “pictorial material relating to or illustrating a subject” and subject matter, such as religion, then taking a closer look at how certain images get raised to the status of icons might provide many insights. I hope to use this paper to draw out precisely what these insights might be, and why they matter to a study on Islam and religious imagery.

An additional tension with choosing to explore the possibility of the hijab’s iconicity in Islam is a scarcity of resources defining what contemporary Islamic iconography includes. Literature on symbolism in Islam overwhelmingly sustains that Islam is a religion of vegetal, calligraphic and geometric art. Our course explored the possible reasons why the ‘traditional’ study of iconology might have contributed to a narrative detailing this ‘lack’ of Islamic religious symbolism. However, since the hijab in popular vernacular refers to a textile worn on the head for a variety of reasons, which may represent political, cultural and social ideologies, none of these definitions of what a hijab is, easily fit into discourses on iconography as traditionally defined in Christianity, Judaism or Islam. Thus, I recognize, most assertions a propos the hijab to Islamic iconography are speculative, or at best, daring!

W.J.T. Mitchell’s work Iconology attempts to get at three particular questions that are helpful frames to initiate a study on the iconicity of the hijab. The questions he raises are: What is an image? How do images and words differ? And, finally what is the relationship between images and ideologies? In my study I hope to use Mitchell’s first and third inquiries to help frame my discussion of the hijab as an image of Islam, and how its image is related to the development of ideologies around what the hijab is both within and outside of Muslim communities. I will look briefly at historical as well as contemporary veiling including, briefly, 19th and 20th century literature on veiling. Then, I would like to tease out the idea of “an economy of gazes” as a way to grasp the how the “variety of visual practices” forms engagement with images and ideologies in and outside of Muslim communities. I hope to conclude with a consideration of prevailing attitudes on the contemporary ‘culture’ of the hijab through some short interviews.

On a final note, as a part of the introduction to this paper, I would like to comment briefly on my terms. Thus far I have used the words ‘veiling’ and ‘hijab’ almost interchangeably. There are obvious differences between these two words that are of an etymological as well as functional nature. The word ‘veil’ comes from the Latin vēlum meaning “a sail” as well as “a head covering”. The verb form veler means “to cover” or “to conceal”. There is nothing in the etymology of the word from the Latin that refers to a religious practice or connotation associated with the word, although its contemporary usage generally insinuates a religious association with veiling.

Conversely, the word hijab comes from the Arabic trilateral root ‘h’, ‘j’, and ‘b’ meaning, “to separate” or “to screen”. In popular vernacular the hijab usually refers to the article of clothing fashioned from some type of cloth that is used to cover the hair, neck and shoulders of women. In scholarship on the Qur’an and Hadith, tafsir and shar‘ia, hijab refers to the idea of modesty, and ritual purity. The word hijab may sustain a variety of shifting meanings including as previously mentioned, a garment, but may also indicate a screen or curtain of some kind and thus more abstractly connotes ‘separation’. The latter meaning can be employed tangibly as a way to grasp the separation of the divine effulgence from the temporal world, and by extension the separation of what is halal (good) from what is haram (forbidden); noticing that what is haram suggests something that forbidden because it is sacred not because it is profane. I have endeavored to be specific when using the terms ‘veil’ and ‘hijab’ in the case of this paper; however, at times the distinction between the words makes little difference to the subject matter at hand. In these cases, one is to interpret my interchange as a stylistic matter rather than a definitional one.

THE POWER OF AMBIGUITY: CONTEMPORARY EXAMPLES OF VEILING
"The veil takes its meaning from situation, time and place, and therefore has no single fixed importance."

What is the veil? This question evokes a multitude of answers that can vary widely. The very nature of the veil is fluid, its contours silhouette the body, covering and concealing the ‘reality’ of what is underneath. It is precisely the ambiguity of the veil that assures its power. The contradictory roles that the veil sustains as ‘religious’ image, emblem give it practical as well as symbolic meaning. Some claim the veil is an artifact of cultural expression, while others assert it is the epitome of ideological control over women in authoritarian communities. Some claim the veil is the highest form of religious piety, and the symbol of a woman’s virtue. As others argue the veil is just a means to provide women the anonymity of their private lives in the sphere of public space. Still others see the veil as the very image within a society that provokes conversations about sexuality, as its presence elicits the kind of behaviors it presumably negates. Inquiry concerning what the veil is intuitively includes explanations that extend beyond the veil’s function as clothe meant to cover some parts of the hair and body. Therefore, the Muslim veil, the hijab, “as [a] religious/spiritual emblem is still assigned contradictory values” and “thus remains a matter of political and cultural urgency to reconceptualize the economy of multiple gazes that filter through, slide off and remake the veil.” It may help to understand the stimulus for this “economy of gazes” by describing the way the veil is conceptualized dialectically. The veil, mostly outside of Muslim communities, is generally identified as an emblem of Islam and its meaning is specific. Within Muslim communities, the veil may be broadly, if not somewhat loosely, associated with Islam, but the veil’s meaning is non-specific.
The hijab in contemporary history has generated many forms from the symbol of the principles of post-Revolutionary Iran, to the ornate artifact of social mobility, to the signifier of sexual modesty and religious piety. Genealogies of the veil hold cultural and stylistic variegation that denote the particular veil’s performative and traditional specificity. For example, in Iran, following the implementation of the “Islamic Republic’s” new legal authority, black, ankle-length chadors were graduated into society following laws passed in 1979 and 1980. The chador later became an emblematic image of Iran for ‘outsiders’, and for many Iranians an ardent symbol of the consequences legal and cultural consequences of the Revolution. In Egypt the ‘designer veil’ has served as a cultural marker for Egypt’s move towards globalization and nationalism, as a new aristocracy emerged following the collapse of Nasser-style socialism. In Philadelphia, full hijab clad women of mainly descent African American invoke the ‘hypericon’ (Mitchell, pg. 6) of religio-political organization of the Nation of Islam.

The hijab holds tightly to ambiguity whether as a cultural object of wonder in 19th century orientalist travel literature, or as a ritualistic practice of piety for a believing Muslim. The veil as a religious emblem, a signifier of Islam or as a “representation of Otherness,” continues to hold particular fascination in and outside the Muslim community. Reina Lewis says in her Preface to Veil, “Veiled women often have to counter patriarchal and Western, denigrating attitudes.” Thus as Faegheh Shirazi claims in her work The Veil Unveiled
"In the aftermath of 11 September, the veil has become synonymous with cultural and religious differences that have been presented to us repeatedly as unbridgeable, alien and terrifying. The fact that the veil and veiling have been a part of both Western and Eastern cultures for millennia, from the aristocratic women of ancient Greece to contemporary brides worldwide, has not diminished from their overwhelming association with Islam and an abstract, exoticized notion of the East.”

In reference to the specificity or non-specificity of veiling, contemporary theory and practice on the hijab and veiling present interesting questions for further thought. The veil outside of Muslim communities is recognized as a symbol of Islam imbued with religious iconicity, and sustaining specific markers of ‘difference’ and ‘otherness’ associated predominately along the lines of race and economic privileges. Inside contemporary Muslim communities, the hijab holds the status of a religious emblem imbued with abstract cultural iconicity that sustains a multiplicity of markers associated with ‘feminine otherness’ but also with ‘conservative values’ or ‘traditional significance’. None of these associations are static or true in all circumstances; rather they may identify qualitative differences in the way the hijab and veiling are perceived. Even more generally, the hijab is identified within and outside of Muslim communities dialectically in its practical and symbolic dimensions as something that is constraining, and at the same time, something that is liberating. Each categorical meaning I ascribed to veiling above embraces this dialectic. For example, the veil may be understood as indicative of male patriarchy and women’s oppression, and therefore constraining. However, for many women who wear the veil it is perceived as a choice of freedom from the constraints of being ‘fetishized’ or recognized only through physical beauty, thus the veil is a form of liberation. The ambiguity inherent in the dialectical role the veil embodies in practical and symbolic ways ensures its primacy as a symbol. What the veil symbolizes, and whether the veil’s symbolic significance can be described as iconic and for whom, remains to be seen.

SHORT HISTORY OF VEILING IN THE ISLAMIC SOCIETIES:
Veiling predates Islam. Thanks to Otto Schroeder’s translation of the Assyrian Legal Codes from the 13th century BCE in Wissenschaftliche Veroffentlichung der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft there is evidence of the codified social practices of ancient Mesopotamia. The Assyrian Legal Codes specify how and why who practices veiling, under what circumstance and. The Codes do not indicate any overt religious motivations for veiling, rather they specify who is to veil, generally along the lines of economic class. The codes outline that veiling is usually intended to designate the marital condition of a woman as an indication of her status of “ownership” by a male relative. Thus, prostitutes (or simply ‘unclean’ women) and slaves were forbidden from donning the veil while married women and elite members of society secured their social standing by it. Veiling is not particular to the geographical space of ancient Mesopotamia or the culmination of countries that make up the ancient Near East, it has historical precedents and proto-types that have shaped it cultural and religious meaning. There is not room in this study to do a comparative survey of the veil as used by different empires over various geographical spaces, thus it must suffice to at least mention that documentation on the function of the veil and its legal status may be found over centuries, and over vast geographical spaces including Persia, India, and Greece, as well as Byzantium Christian Europe.

In the Qur’an the word referring specifically to an article of cloth that can cover the head is called the khimar. The word khimar more specifically references an article of clothing rather than a religious ideology for which the word hijab connotes. However, the specific meanings and implications of khimar are contested. Some interpretations of the word khimar specify that it refers only to the covering of the breasts of a woman for the “sake of modesty.” Other interpretations claim that the though the text only refers to the covering of the breasts, the implication of the term is clearly indicates that women using a cloth to cover their breasts should also their hair and shoulders. Imam Abu'l-Fida ibn Kathir (d.1373), the Medieval scholar of tafsir (exegesis) explained, “Khumur is the plural of khimar which means something that covers, and is what is used to cover the head.” The hijab is often described as an ideology related to religious notions of morality and modesty or a synchronic structure of a cultural norm.
The practice of veiling in the Mediterranean region in antiquity meant covering the body from head to foot for a variety of reasons. Yedida Stillman’s work Arab Dress explains the “total envelopment or being screened off, which in Jahili poetry is referred to by such terms as sitr, siif, and nasif, seems to have been mainly the prerogative of royal and noble women.” Hadith stories indicate that Muhammad’s wives wore hijab from marriage, however the use and prevalence of the hijab in early Islam remains largely undocumented, and its practice appears to have been an adoption of Byzantine Christian practices. Stillman claims that there are no records indicating when the hijab became a universal practice in Islam, but she asserts it likely developed over the first two centuries. Stillman also points out that in canonical hadith literature, veiling is not referred to solely as a practice of women, nor does veiling have a universal application practically in terms of what on the body is veiled. Stillman indicates, as mentioned above, that veiling in the Qur’an and hadith only specifically indicates the covering of the breasts. Stillman explains, “The evidence, therefore, from the traditional literature is not overwhelming one way or the other as to how ubiquitous, how hermetic in nature, or even how important a social and moral issues was veiling the early Islamic centuries.”

As the Islamic empire grows through the periods of the Ummayyads and Abbasids veiling never appears to take on a particularly universal practice. Stillman refers to Ummayad courtly art as representing women with veils of various styles and levels of covering. Stillman explains that most courtly paintings of women and illuminated manuscripts form the first several centuries neither mention nor depict the ‘average’ urban or village women veiled. However, during the Abbasid period veiling became the norm for urban and rural women, and certain cities, for examples Jurjan and Sarakhs, were renowned for their exquisite hijabs of a variety of styles. The veil does not appear to have any particular religious or even cultural meaning until the dawn of confessional religious practices, which associated veiling with ritualistic practices of shielding sacred objects from the (“sinful”) gaze human beings.

THE VEIL OF REPRESENTATION: A SURVEY
In the October 1928 issue of The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, one of the foremost English orientalists, Thomas Arnold, ‘teacher’ of famous Muslim philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, composed an article exploring the possibility of religious symbolism in Islam. Arnold’s article commences by reinforcing the view that Islam as “never encouraging the use of any kind of religious symbol.” Arnold claims that the lack of the phenomena of religious symbolism in Islam distinguishes it from other confessional faiths, and Muslim theologians have been averse to developing an iconography and thus an Islamic symbolism is unlikely to develop. Arnold then discursively writes, “Throughout the whole of Muhammadan art there is no other representation for which even such a superficial claim to be a religious symbol can be made out as has been put forth for the crescent.” Arnold is referring to the crescent symbol displayed as dynastic emblem of the Ottoman empire, which Arnold asserts was ‘stolen’ from the Byzantines before the dawn of Islam in the 7th century CE. Although Arnold may be correct in his offering of the historical roots of the symbol of the crescent, he provides no evidence of Muslim scholars of theology that assert the crescent as a icon or even a signifier of Islam, and thus the claim he is making as to its religious significance is only speculative. More importantly, however, Arnold represents a common ideology concerning Islam, symbolism and representational art, which has been and continues to be pervasive in writing about Islamic iconophilia and conversely iconoclasm.

In relation to the symbol of the veil there are numerous examples 19th century American and European literature that presume the ideological and behavior function of the veil. Though not all the literature refers directly the Muslim practice of veiling, it is useful to understand how the veil works as a linguistic symbolism, and how these notions might later influence different ideologies on the veil and the Muslim practice of veiling. For example, in Kate Flint’s article Blood, Bodies and ‘The Lifted Veil’ on George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil (c.1859) Flint describes Eliot’s objective in titling her novel as such is to mean that "to lift the veil is to peep at the forbidden, to access taboo knowledge; to occupy, by connotation, a masculine position." Flint describes Eliot’s terminology about “lifting the veil” as metaphor for “dramatization of the folly of pursuing [women] on the grounds that she represents a mysterious Other.”

In Gabeba Baderoon’s article, What Does Islam want? The New Geography of News she writes about how contemporary media has discursively characterized Islam to the detriment of some of the larger issues presented by the events of September 11th. Baderoon describes the way in which U.S. media used the status of women in Afghanistan to justify the U.S. invasion and war with Afghanistan in 2003. Baderoon touches briefly on the “image of the veil” historically in relationship to women’s agency, including the ways in which those outside Muslim communities have condemned portrayed the hijab and condemned it to being associated with a meaning that it doesn’t necessarily have within Islam. Baderoon writes,
“Since the 16th century Eastern women have been represented in colonial literature and art as mysterious and knowing, yet importantly, also convertible and assimilable…The project availability of Easter women drove a strong Orientalist fantasy: the desire of the European colonizer to enlighten the Islamic world, and to deliver its women from oppression.”

Within the realm of orientalist travel literature on Islam, literature on the veil, and media aggrandizing of the U.S. government’s plight to save the women of the 3rd world, there are is also literature that include taxonomies of ‘indigenous dress’ and what the dress symbolizes about the larger culture of its inception. One particularly fascinating article by published by the MIT Press in 1982 is by Chems Nadir is called Masks and Non-Masks in Islam. Nadir writes,
“"In contrast to masks which flaunt only a disguised reality, the veil offers its smooth mirror-like surface where, in human form, images of the holy face are reflected. The veil is an inner contemplation, which closes out the world's viewpoint. Its intention is neither to undermine nor to misrepresent reality but refused the vanity and the obtrusiveness of the phenomenological presence. The symbolic gesture of Oedipus left him sightless but liberated form horror; similarly, the veil allows for a tranquil inner blindness, a most felicitous state for the mystic to await the voice of light."

In succession with a study of 19th and 20th European and American literature on veiling, and especially in relation to travel literature concerning Muslim communities, one should also contend with the work of anthropologists in relation to ethnographic studies on the same sort of topics. In Nadia Wassef’s article On Selective Consumerism she outlines recent limitations in anthropological studies explaining,
“"Returning to my second question: why the obsession with the veil? Taken as a symbol of women's oppression in Muslim societies, the veil has also been conceptualized as a strategy of resistance and liberation, rather than an emblem of submission...The veil becomes a strategic trade-off, one that is not reducible to Muslim ideology alone.”

Wassef’s work is interesting because she takes a look at ethnographic studies that border on travel literature, about Islamic feminism and women in Egypt. These brief examples from a survey of literature, ethnography and media articles relate prevailing attitudes about the hijab and veiling as representations of otherness. It is difficult to put into tension orientalists like Arnold who claim there is no Islamic symbolism, with examples from Nadir and Baderoon whose diametrically different points of view in Islam do nothing if not point out the almost voracious interest of those outside the Muslim community to uphold the multiple and varied meanings and symbolism of the hijab.

Contemporary writers on Islamic art, iconography and architecture have endeavored to revive what could be described as an ahistorical, kitsch and essentialized rut of discourses on ‘Islamic iconoclasm’ by revisiting the history of religious polemics, and by recasting archaic definitions of art. For example Gulru Necipoglu in her work, Geometry and Ornament in Islamic Architecture, conducts a survey of 19th and 20th century European literature on geometric Arabesque. In her study Necipoglu contends that much of European literature ascribed the meaning of geometric ornament as the ‘decorative’ arts determined by the climate and ‘racial character’ of particular ethnicities in the ‘Near East’. Necipoglu asserts that it is precisely this 19th century literature that is responsible for establishing the ‘Western’ idea that the spiritual essence of Arab art was embodied in the arabesque, with its three types of interlaced variants: vegetal, calligraphic and geometric. Finally, she concludes that the representations of ‘Islamic art’ and ‘arabesque’ in Europe turned paintings of documented buildings depicted with ‘natives’ into objects for the ethno-graphic ‘gaze.’ The contemporary scholars interested in a new narrative about Islamic symbolism and iconography have had to contend with a large corpus of literature content with this gaze. However, Lewis contention that there exists “an economy of gazes” broadens the possible lenses through which contemporary individuals may observe the vast world of Islamic art, symbolism, representation and visual culture.

NOTICING ‘THE GAZE’
Over a quarter century ago, University of Chicago professor Peter Mitchell composed Iconology a new “field of study without a name—a hybrid, combining art history, art criticism, psychology of perception, aesthetics, and philosophy of art,” as a way to “further generalize the interpretive ambitions of iconology by asking it to consider the idea of the image as such.”
Mitchell explores the relationships between text and images, and what he describes as the polemical attitudes towards images in relationship to the domination of words as the higher form of ‘knowledge’. Mitchell wants to develop his ‘new’ theory on images by reviewing the works of modern theorists including Nelson Goodman, Erwin Panofsky and Karl Marx and building upon their insights. Mitchell uses Panofsky’s work, mainly from Studies in Iconology, where Panofsky notices ‘levels’ (what he calls strata) of human perception of images and the ‘struggle’ to find meaning and sometimes, in the case of Renaissance art, a notion of the divine. Panofsky demarcates the corpus of art-historical thought by ascribing words and descriptions to the process of seeing and finding meaning in what ones sees. Panofsky distinguishes these levels n the following ways: first, one must notice the immediate reality of what an image presents. Panofsky uses Leonard da Vinci’s The Last Supper as way to illustrate, by probing da Vinci’s viewers to notice that the picture is at first a table with people sitting around three sides. Then, Panofsky asks one to notice the cultural, religious and ultimately iconographic knowledge that contextualizes the piece of art in the mind of the viewer, being careful to observe that this sort of knowledge is particular to both the intention of the artist and the understanding of the viewer. In David Morgan’s The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice he uses the example of Harry Anderson’s 1968 painting God’s Two Books to underscore how images can “fit into [a] paradigm…as a form of text” so that images work as referents to cultural contexts. In the painting a women sits beside a copy of the Christian bible and looks out into a garden where, presumably the face of Jesus is reflected in the trees. The context of the painting appeals to a specific cultural and religious context, and works to illustrate Panofsky’s point in so far as one must be familiar with the ideology of Christian Protestantism in order to intuit the intention of the painting for its author and his audience. Lastly, Panofsky invites a viewer to notice the historical moment intrinsic to the artist’s intuitive choices on depiction. Panofsky intends to have his readers notice the sorts of pertinent questions that the art historian inquires when seeking ‘the meaning’ inherent in all works of art.

Panofsky’s study intends to generalize about the interaction of image and perception, contours the dialectical relationship Mitchell sets up in his study. Panofsky aspires to notice the difference between iconography as a historical study of symbols contrasted with an iconology, which Mitchell correlates with his aim to invent an interdisciplinary field of study on the image in relationship to other forms of interpreting ‘reality’. Mitchell’s insight, and thus his inclusion of the other writers mentioned above, aspires to go beyond merely the appreciation of art objects, but to put questions about their efficacy into the context of “systems of power and cannons of value.” Mitchell contends, “the history of [Western] culture is in part the story of a protracted struggle for dominance between pictorial and linguistic signs, each claiming for itself certain proprietary rights on a nature to that only it has access." Like Necipoglu, Mitchell intends to reexamine the protracted assumptions that have created an ‘idol of ideology’ in the ‘West’ which have contributed to writing Islamic symbolism out of the canon of religious iconography. Morgan’s work becomes instructive in relationship to Mitchell’s in terms of popular interactions with images in so much as Morgan’s work sheds light on the relationship of gender to images. Morgan’s asserts that orientalists reappropriated images to reinforce essentialized notions of the ‘Orient’ and ‘Orientals’.

THE ECONOMY OF THE GAZE: MARX, MITCHELL & SCHILLER
Approaching the possibility of understanding the veil as an emblem of Islam means taking an intimate look at this “economy of gazes” that Lewis addresses. In David Morgan’s introduction to The Sacred Gaze he sketches the ways in which the contemporary world approaches the practice of seeing. To recognize the ways in which human beings see, may assist in comprehending how images, especially such religiously and politically charged images as the hijab, shape human interaction with the landscape of images presented in a visual culture. Morgan describes seeing as “more than its product,” rather he writes it is an “apparatus of assumptions and inclinations, habits, and routines, historical associations and cultural practices.” Morgan points out that there is a specificity to the ways humans interact with and respond to images that informs the potential supremacy of these images within a visual culture and world. Lewis’ “economy of gazes” recognizes the diversity and interplay of a “system of human activities related to production, distribution, exchange and consumption.” The etymology of the word economy from the Greek word οικονομία meant “one who manages a household.” Thus, the “economy of gazes” refers to the practice of visual exchange between the one who is doing the seeing and the thing that is being seen.

The “economy of gazes” represented by an idea of economy that is as local and intimate as the economy of the household, initiates a question about the aesthetic consciousness of the viewer. How does the union between the viewer and what is viewed describe and influence the consciousness of the viewer? This inquiry goes to the heart of human evolutionary "growing" that develops a sophisticated cognitive linguistic consciousness while maintaining a relatively "primitive" cognitive aesthetic language. German philosopher Friedrich von Schiller in his work On the Aesthetic Education of Man offered a way to understand the poverty of a human cognitive aesthetic language. Schiller explains that humans "rational faculty had to cast off, so to speak, the chains of imagination, its childlike limitations, and consequently the wholeness of man's being in order to progress cognitively." Furthermore, in Leonard Wessel’s The Aesthetics of Living Form in Schiller and Marx explains, "by reason Schiller understands . . .[human] ability to transform [the] environment technologically by means of the known laws of nations into organs of human subjectivity."

In grasping what is meant by an “economy of gazes” it is important one recognize both the reality of the human condition of the poverty of aesthetic consciousness as well as the ways in which the human beings understand themselves in relation to an economy in order to grasp how one gazes. Mitchell endeavors to elaborate on Marxian metaphors about aesthetics. Marx’s work on the interplay of human beings and production, further builds on not only Schiller’s historiography, but also further explores the how aesthetics plays a role in the human conception of self, which is inextricably related to this “economy of gazes.” Marx was not convinced, like Schiller, that the human “perfected self” originated with an acceptance of the “infinitude of phenomena” related to a human relationship with the super natural. Marx wanted to consider the creative power of the “perfected self” through the means of human interaction with the natural world, and the highest strata of self-consciousness was a critical engagement with the temporal world. Marx wanted to impart the collectivity of human life by means of illustrating how humans interact through economic cooperation. Marx imparts that human beings (individuals) collectively produce under “the conditions of division of labor and economic cooperation. Not only is the productive power of the individual increased by means of cooperation, but the creation of a new power, namely, the collective power of masses." He goes on, "When the laborer cooperates systematically with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species." Thus individuals through their labor are responsible for creating a "social essence" which in turn creates a "common life" which is the essential nature of the individual. Marx says, "The essence of [the human being] is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its actuality is the ensemble of social relationships." Marx called this the “species-life” where “subjectivism and objectivism, spiritualism and materialism, activity and passivity lose their opposition and thus their existence as anti-theses only in the social situation . . .communism is the genuine resolution of the conflict between existence and essence, objectification and self-affirmation, freedom and necessity, individual and species.”
The economy of gazes thus comprises two distinct objectives that may or may not have been intended by Lewis, but that I would like to help re-define by my exploration into Marxism. The first is to notice that a gaze is a way to notice how a visual culture interacts not only with an object, but also with itself in relation to that culture. Marx is able to complicate the idea of the individual in relation to her work (production) but also in relation to how she gazes upon herself as a cultural product. Marx opens up a discussion of the ways of seeing as an aesthetic consciousness. Yet Jonathon Schroeder notes, “to gaze implies more than to look at - it signifies a psychological relationship of power, in which the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze.” This “economy of gazes” then notices the “relationship of power” that the gazer has in relation to the “means of production” of the cultural invention, religious artifact, or aesthetic consciousness being engaged. To understand this “economy of gazes” means to look critically at the relationships of power implicit in the economy of gazes. Thus far, I have considered the literature on the hijab as a way to not only understand what has shaped the cultural and religious gazes, but also how these exchanges have influenced what is being gazed upon, e.g. the veil. Though, the veil itself also has a gaze, which is transitive both over time and space, cultural contexts, and embodied realities. Thus, the veil incepts a sort of typology of gazes. Examples can include: the religious gaze, the feminist’s gaze, the Muslim gaze, the modern gaze, the gaze of globalization, the sacred gaze, the gaze of protest, the gaze of religious ideology, the gaze of devotion, the “matrixial” gaze, the normative gaze, etc. The gaze of the veiling participates in the economy of gazes that reflects the dynamic interplay of personal with the social.

TOWARDS AN ISLAMIC IMAGERY: THE ICON OF THE VEIL
What also grows from a cursory study of ‘the gaze’ is its cultural product, if you will, the symbol. In Marshal Hodgson’s work on Islam and Images he writes, “The use of symbols springs from the human condition--from the perception of vital and cosmic correspondences, which was perhaps at its most seminal in archaic mankind.” Hodgson, like many of his contemporaries, describes the spectrum of examples of Islamic symbolism as sparse. Hodgson, in relation to a possible symbolism in Islam refers to three examples from Medieval Islamic societies: the classical Persian garden, Arabic poetry and the Qur’an. Hodgson describes the lack of symbolism in Islamic societies as a “displacement” of imagery, and explicates upon what he calls a different “emphasis” in Islamicate communities that channels the need for symbolism in a corollary yet alternative way in comparison to Christianity and Judaism.
If an icon can be described as an “image, picture, or representation; it is a sign or likeness that stands for an object by signifying or representing it, or by analogy, as in semiotics; by extension, icon is also used, particularly in modern culture, in the general sense of symbol.” Mitchell argues that “images ‘proper’ are not stable, static, or permanent in any metaphysical sense; they are not perceived in the same way by viewers any more than are dream images; and they are not exclusively visual in any important way, but involve multisensory apprehension and interpretation.” Building upon Mitchell’s (re)definition of the image one can attempt to fashion a contemporary relationship of the hijab as icon as in the sense that it fulfils this definition of icon, and also because it is representative of an interpretive ideology. The ideology itself may be transitive, however so is the nature of visual culture and of icons across time. Furthermore, if Islam does have a culture of imagery that “channels the need for symbolism” in a “distinct” yet corollary way from other confessional religions, then the image of the hijab fulfils the performative, ritual and utilitarian and symbolic functions of its ‘ulterior emphasis’. In Suzanne Brenner’s Reconstructing Self and Society: Javanese Muslim Women and ‘the Veil’ she relates the new meanings behind the veil in contemporary society when she describes that “in Java the growing trend among women towards wearing Islamic clothing challenges local traditions as well as Western models of modernity. . . Veiling represents a historical consciousness and a process of subjective transformation that is tied to a larger processes of social change in Indonesia." The hijab has been used as a source to resist colonialism, exoticizing the East, and as a way to rail against the forces of imperialism. The veil as an icon serves also a means of resistance. Frantz Fanon writes that women in Algeria wore the veil as a means to resist an occupier that was working to ‘unveil’ Algeria. Perhaps these are not the traditional associations one makes when relating to an icon, but the veil has certainly been used to symbolize discourses over a wide variety of issues pertaining to art, literature, visual culture, religious reformism, protest and media. If there were a modern iconic image for Islam the hijab certainly could be a contender!

INTERVIEWS: THE PERSONAL AS POLITICAL
Throughout my study of the possible iconicity of the hijab I have sought to impart possible explanations as to the symbolism of the hijab, its historical roots, its social and political meaning including criticism. If it is fair to conclude that the hijab is symbol of Islam, and that symbols are representations of ideas, concepts, or other abstractions, then an investigation of the cultural, religious and political mark of the hijab as it is practiced in a community may also give insights to human interaction with icons, art and images. The insights the following interviews are indicative of prevailing attitudes of the hijab in both within and outside of ‘Muslim’ communities. However, they also point to a spectrum of issues that are “represented” in the symbol of the hijab, which include issues related to economic disparities, human and political rights, education, sexism and the varied legacies of colonialist expansion. The interviewees come from the Middle East and United States, are between the ages of 19 and 35, and have varying levels of interaction with and understanding of the hijab in Islam or its historical roots. All of my interviewees assured me they had much “more” knowledge of the hijab’s political rather than religious meaning. For the reasons related to mostly to space I decided to include only two of the interviews.

Arman Rezaei Khouzani is a 23-year-old graduate student in electrical engineering at Penn. He is from Khouzani, a small village outside Esfahan in Iran. Khouzani describes himself as “left” of the reformist movement in Iran, a “non-sectarian” socialist, and an atheist. He is quick to point out that his Iranian identity card describes him as a Muslim by virtue of the fact that his parent’s identity cards say Muslims, though only his Mother would describe herself as such. The following is from my interview with him:
Farah: What is an icon?
Arman: A symbol. For example the American flag is an icon in the United States.

Farah: What is the hijab?
Arman: A covering for some parts of the body. It is a severe thing for women. It’s a part of a sort of religious up bringing, but I also think its an ideological almost habitual behavior. It’s an obvious way of expressing ones ideology, but most of the time it’s just an inherited ideology. The hijab is also a veil, and a harness.

Farah: A harness?
Arman: Yes. The harness of imposed male power on women, on the feminine. The hijab harnesses the feminine source of innovation and imagination in society. The veil is meant to cover beauty, and beauty is something very important in society.

Farah: Why is beauty important in society?
Arman: Beauty is a softening factor in the society, and I feel that softness is a danger to patriarchy. So they, like the Mullahs and other religious leaders who are also the political leaders in Iran, feel they need to harness and cover that softness and beauty. They replace it with harshness and toughness, which are the “symbols” of the male personality. Females embody softness and are more tender and fragile.

Farah: Do think that women are “softer”, or is this just a stereotype?
Arman: I don’t think that, that is a stereotype, it’s a fact. A women’s body is a symbol of her presences in society. What is intended by the veil is to cover and overshadow [women’s] presence – it’s about disembodying the feminine presence because beauty is dangerous.

Farah: What is dangerous about beauty?
Arman: The system of male dominance is based on factors that don’t fall under thing that could be described as beautiful. For example, peace is more beautiful than war, but peace is feminine, war is masculine. Societies often can benefit from war. So the veil is also a way to masculinize women, to take away the things in society that remind us of peace, softness, beauty – the things that would represent everything that is opposite of hostility and competitiveness. Also, one of the pillars in a male dominated society is possession. Ownership. Beauty is something people want to posses, and have ownership over. And like all things we posses we want to keep them secret and are able to share them when it is convenient to our status in society. The hijab works to cover the beauty of women, and as a sign that this woman has been ‘owned’ or is waiting to be ‘owned’ by a man, and the hijab helps men to feel that their possessions are not in danger. I think it’s also a sign of men conquering women, and thus conquering beauty something that is intangible, that’s why veils are encouraged.

Farah: What does the hijab mean in the U.S.?
Arman: In the U.S. the hijab is a way to segregate yourself, and it’s a way others segregate themselves from the rest of society. I think the hijab is a way to show the internal feeling of being segregated. There are many different communities of people in the U.S. and just as many forms of segregation like race, economic class. I think the hijab in the U.S. is a symptom of segregation.

Farah: What are images of the Hijab in the media?
Arman: In the U.S. or in Iran? Actually it doesn’t really matter. The public media in Iran, which never strays from what the government says, well at least the supreme leaders, they say we should respect women a lot and not fall into the selfishness and idolatry of glamorizing physical beauty because physical beauty is actually mundane and unworldly and will keep us blinded from [women’s] actual personality and “real” beauty. The hijab helps us men to act unselfishly, keeps women in their place not to fill their heads too much with their own beauty. Its confusing because they say the veil helps us to have the utmost respect for women while not respecting them enough to make their own choices.

Farah: How has that worked in Iran?
Arman: It’s what do they say in English? A self-fulfilling prophecy. People in Iran don’t rebel against the veil. Women in Iran timidly use any small rebellions with the veil as a way to express their other discontents with many things in society. Most people aren’t really “radical” because their way of expressing discontent and rebellion is to wear excessive make-up for example. The make-up isn’t meant as a feminist rebellion, it’s just about fashion and then the government and ruling classes uses that against real forms of protest. The government will say that relaxed veil laws lead to excessive make-up, which leads to an increase in sex workers. That might sound crazy but it is very prevalent in the ideology. It just gives the leaders fodder for furthering establishing that the veil is a symbol of virtue and all those things that lead to a virtuous society. But many wealthy families will continue to wear make-up and push veil laws because the more make-up you were and the looser you can wear your veil gives you status in the community, so the government and the supposed ‘progressives’ just reinforce each other.

Farah: Is the veil a form of iconoclasm?
Arman: Well, I’m not sure because I am not so sure I know what iconoclasm is exactly in a religious sense. But, what I think I am trying to say is that people, especially from the West, put the veil together with being religious, very religious. The veil is not very religious, it’s very conservative. Sure religious practices and conservatism may be correlated, but there are multitudes of interpretations about how to practice religion. Iconoclasm is about not worshipping an idol right? So, I think the veil actually reinforces idol worship even if its intention is the opposite.

Farah: Can you give me an example of what you mean, if not from a religious point of view, from a political point of view?
Arman: Sure. Well, I think I already covered this when I talked about how the veil has created rebellion, but the rebellion was with women wearing more make-up and paying more attention to how they look, what the new fashion is. The veil has reinforced external beauty in Iran, has made looking nice a way to rebel against the establishment. If I wasn’t to be so cynical about it I could say that women is iconoclastic a two, sort of opposite ways. The first is that the veil is meant to, in a very backwards sort of way, “help” men to see women as people and not objects of desire, as the “idols” of beauty. So in this way I think it is iconoclastic. The second way is that as long as women in Iran must wear the veil they will invent ways and interpretations of it that protest the mandatory nature of the law. It can be iconoclastic because men and women can, sort of reinvent the hijab, as a way to break the icons of patriarchy and male dominance that are pervasive. But this is only iconoclasm, I don’t know, linguistically speaking – its not an iconoclastic practice.

CONCLUSIONS:

“Not only have the sacred texts always been manipulated, but manipulation of them is a structural characteristic of the practice of power. Since all power from the seventh century on, was only legitimated by religion, political forces and economic interests push for the fabrication of false traditions...Delving into memory, slipping into the past, is an activity that these days is closely supervised…The sleeping past can animate the present. That is the virtue of memory...This book is not a work of history. History is always the group's language, the official narrative that is pressed between covers of gold and trotted out for ritual ceremonies of self congratulation."

What is the veil? I cannot say that I have any clearer understanding of what the veil is in the wee moments of this study. I think that the endeavor to try and find new narratives about art and culture is a process that pierces some of the very centers of power. The questions this journey elicits drive new notions of what the self is, and how the self interacts with its impressions of the world around it. Looking at the past, as Mersisi points out, is a way to “animate the present” but bodes very little about the landscapes of the future. What will become our understand of art, of culture, of symbolism, of religion, of each other—I can’t say; it’s a practice of the imagination in cruel relationship with the limitations of the present. Morgan concludes The Sacred Gaze by asking, “Can we understand such practices as devotion, pilgrimage, and prayer without considering the practice of seeing?” However, all of the scholars I have noted in this study may say, “We only see but through a veil.”

Iranian Cinema

2008-05-13T01:20:00.001-04:00

“Symbols and codes play a significant role in the way Iranian films express their ideas. Give examples of how some of these symbols are utilized throughout the movies.”
Throughout our course on contemporary Iranian cinema we have discussed the significance symbol, code and metaphor play in composing these films. We have discussed how the symbols provide the stylistic milieu many contemporary Iran-based filmmakers are forced to employ under restrictive guidelines set forth by the Ministry of Islamic Guidance. Thus, we have defined and described these symbols as encompassing a variety of forms including protest, analogy, and thematic issues related to ethnicity, gender and cross-cultural engagement. The symbols, codes and metaphors provide nuance to subjects and personalities involved in the films’ narratives, and assist in opening aspects stifled by prohibiting laws. Thus, even the narratives of the films acts as facilitator (or narrators) of the ideas the directors endeavor to illuminate. Once the importance of symbol in Iranian film is acknowledged there are gluts of possible avenues to traverse for further discussion.
In my previous paper I added a cautionary paragraph explaining that symbol, code and metaphor in Iranian cinema, like in innumerous other forms, bares a specific cultural and political perspective that informs the narratives that directors create. Thus a cursory understanding of Persian political, religious and cultural heritage (essentially its intellectual history) will provide the needed context from which those unfamiliar should engage. In my last paper I emphasized this point in detail, but I would like to retract how I framed it. Because of the plethora of Orientalist writing and scholarship and its influence in the United States, it becomes easier to categorize Iran, and in our case Iranian art forms, as something entirely different from our own history or historical expression. Claiming that Iranian and American intellectual histories initiate and develop from vastly different corpuses. Salam Cinema as well as The Hidden Half reveals that pop culture and pop politics have reverberations throughout many societies in the world, and inform what those societies produce and what discourses are predominant. What contrasts, therefore, are not the cultural products (discourses) themselves, but the perspectives held by individuals in relation to “other” cultures. I do not hope to present a case on how Iranian and American intellectual history is the same because it is not. However, I do hope to reorient my previous assertion, which posited how different these histories are in relation to each other, and acknowledge the numerous similarities that additionally exist.
Lastly, after noticing the uses of symbolism and their contextual impetuses, I should also like to discuss the importance of symbolism as an artistic instrument of the artists, especially the director. There are a variety of compelling reasons to notice symbols and codes in film; especially for reasons related to establishing the didactic quality of the film’s narrative. Symbolism and codes are artistic techniques that a capture a reality or a “truth” of a subject matter for artistic or political motives.
One of the most unforgettable uses of symbol in the films from the second half of our course happened in Tamineh Milani’s film The Hidden Half where she repeats the same (contemporarily composed) classical Iranian music whenever the main character interacts with her young lover Javid. The obvious symbolism of the music illustrates the romantic relationship between the two, although Milani is not able to (or does not choose to) include a scene confirming this relationship. In our previous film, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s The May Lady, we also see this socially forbidden subject matter of (heterosexual) sexual relations outside marriage engaged. In our course readings on Milani’s film, we hear from Rosemarie Scullian in her work entitled Feminizing National Memory, where she succinctly explains Milani’s most obvious and dominant theme, “The Hidden Half [takes] up the taboo subject matter: the violent internal repression to which leftist, liberal and secular nationalist forces were subjected by religious entities during and following the Islamic Revolution of 1979.” The Hidden Half opens with a government official interviewing a faceless (symbolically the women is entirely covered by a black chador so that the audience is unable to see even her face reminding me of the passage used in class from Nacficy’s Veiled Voices and Vision explaining, “Veiling is the armature of modesty.” ) woman who we are led to believe is being held as a political prisoner, explains to the government official, how she came to be on death row. At the end of the film we are made to realize that this faceless woman is not, but could have been, the film’s main character, Fereshteh. Fereshteh, who becomes a docile, middle class, Iranian housewife, as well as this woman, symbolize the contrasting fates of many leftist revolutionaries in post-’79 Iran. Scullion explains Milani’s possible motivations, “The Hidden Half, [steps] into the wholly uncharted terrain of writing a cinematic history and forming a counter-cultural national memory of the political repression that had enabled the consolidation of the clerical regime’s autocratic powers in the years immediately following the Islamic Revolution.”
What the two “opposing” women also represent, as I mentioned earlier, are the incredibly contrasting fates of two remarkably alike women. What contrasts, from the vantage point of the government official (whom, I should mention is middle-age Fereshteh’s husband) is what each of these women politically symbolize. The contrast of the two women’s political roles, appear to be an issue Milani is hoping to address through the film’s narrative. What I mean is that the faceless women gets disembodied precisely because of her actions towards societal embodiment. While middle age Fereshteh and her life, even in its more intimate details, are revealed to the audience because she “compromises” herself to the societal norms of what a women should symbolize – as I stated, a politically apathetic yet familialy devoted wife and mother. Thus, the film’s title, The Hidden Half, appears to symbolize both what lies behind Fereshteh’s disembodiment as well as the collective amnesia surrounding who and what was involved in Iran’s “Islamic” Revolution.
The last aspect of Milani’s film that I will mention, since room is growing short, relates to the third frame I set out to notice in my introduction relating to how cross-cultural similarities. While I acknowledge with great humility the exceptionally difficult political position of women under Iran’s oppressive, gendered structure, and simultaneously encourage art forms that engage, through creative mediums, social discourses that hope to transform legislative and social prohibitions I believe “Western” obsession with this reality fuel further myopia. What I mean is that there is a tendency in the West to view and unfairly judge Iran exclusively through its less attractive social ills while forgetting that the “West” has experienced (and continues to) very similar histories of oppression both of women and others. In this sense, the state-sponsored political oppression of women should not be exceptional, yet the “West’s” interest and intense focus on women’s issues in Iran remains dominant. The Hidden Half thus uses several different symbols (and metaphors) to engage different themes related to women’s issues, historical memory, values (traditional, conservative and conventional), self-reflection, and cultural criticism.
The second film I would like to look at is Saman Moghadam’s Maxx. Maxx is a satirical political musical about cultural activists who invite Iranian scholars and artists living outside Iran to perform in a festival in hopes that they will attract ex-pats back to Iran. In a comedic turn of events Maxx, an Iranian-American musical performer (rapper) from an unknown nightclub in East Los Angeles receives an invitation to play his music before some of Iran’s most distinguished elite. Much of the remainder of the movie surrounds instances where Maxx commits social offenses while his hosts look on in horror.
Maxx engages many cultural and social issues that are of contemporary significance, and does so through highly satirical scenes. Satire is itself a form of symbolism, and Maxx is a brilliant example of the use of satire to reveal underlying issues. Some of the issues Moghadam explores relate to Iranian social mores pertaining to custom and comportment, the “brain-drain” phenomena, issues relating to censorship especially in the media, and cross-cultural issues especially relating to the “negative American influence” on popular music in Iran. Maxx is portrayed as an unintelligent, socially inept character that, in the end, is the only one of the main characters able to solve some of problematic relationships in the film. Additionally, those Iranian officials who had at the outset of the film where both angered and mortified by Maxx’s behavior grow to deeply appreciate his deep aptitude for human relationship.
As I mentioned above there are a plethora of symbols in this film, and especially exemplified by the role of many of the characters. Maxx, as I stated, symbolizes the Iranian-American Diaspora, Ms. Ghohari symbolizes both the political situation of Iranian women as well as the political establishment (as does her governmental supervisor), Ms. Ghohari’s son represents the teeming population of Persian young people disturbed with some of Iran’s prohibitive social laws, others represent the conservative religious classes and/or the frustrated intellectual elite. All of which serve to describe many contemporary issues surrounding Iran’s political and class situation, as well as its relationship with its Iranian-American counterparts. There is a heavy emphasis on the use of language, especially plays on words. I imagine this emphasis exemplifies many political realities, and is both a technique Moghadam employs as well as symbol. The relationship of symbolic language in Iranian film making, especially when attempting to convey issues generally forbidden, has many reverberations. Surely artists in other mediums including print mediums in Iran could relate to this symbolism.
Thus, symbolism enjoys an imperative and permeating place in Iranian films, especially in the post-Revolutionary period. The symbols are often emblematic of political, religious and cultural dialogues that are not overtly allowed in the public sphere. The symbols engage real contexts and real persons, often blurring the lens of objective reality, critiquing artistic norms in film or adding beauty to difficult or hopeless situations. Most importantly symbolism animates Iranian film in ways that would not be possible under current legislation, offering room and solace from the suffering of creativity and daring to realize the furthest spheres of imagination.

Ideas

2008-05-13T01:15:00.001-04:00

Ideas:

Understanding Nationalism vs. Race today

Civil Rights: Audre Lorde in dialogue with MLK Jr.

Understanding the Politics of Intersectional Oppression (This line of thinking is 30 years old now, what is new?)

War: Examining Public Policy Legislation towards Perpetual Warfare

Why racism is still the issue (New race consciousness narratives)

Alternative Justice – Current International Law practice & why it’s still important (maybe something about conspiracy law, and what happened to Sami Al-Arian, the Palestinian USF Prof. who is a political prisoner in US.)

War and Representation –

Asking New Questions: Problematizing the Terms

Divestment Activism on Campus: Responsible Endowments

the Political Spectrum – okay vote Obama, but don’t stop there!

Recovering from Liberalism: Challenges of “Developing” World People’s Movements

Why the “masters tools will never dismantle the masters house.” (This is my favorite. I want to talk about intersection of racism and class, why “brown/black” organizing is also missing the mark, and why there is a difference organizing between “workers” rights and “ownership”)

Liberating Theology (Egalitarian vs. Hierarchical, Fox and Hedgehog etc)

BOOKS:

Letters from Young Activists (GREAT book, loved it!)

The Re-Imagining Marx Today

The Race Contract: The Political System of Racism (Amazing, but a little dense)

Articles:
April 4, 2007, A Time to Break the Silence—Again: A Reflection on the 40th Anniversary of King’s Riverside Speech by Ched Myers

Black Skins, White Masks

2008-05-13T01:11:00.000-04:00

One of the most fundamental yet insufficiently remembered doctrines ever taught by revered black leader Martin Luther King was the critical importance of nonviolence. His unequivocal stance towards black liberation through nonviolent civil disobedience did much to raise the consciousness of many people, even if his Christocentric message did not. The Civil Rights Movement came into full articulation during Martin Luther King’s time, yet had its genesis in several preceding historical moments that would later prove cumulative. Amidst the brewing pot of Harlem in the 1920’s and 30’s the Black Literary Renaissance had long been fostered through a strong oral tradition, and emerged as a social force that had reverberations for the African-Diaspora in urban centers throughout the world. The Harlem Renaissance’s artistic expressionism, aimed at dismantling dominant cultural narratives, was regarded as conventional methods of protest. Yet no literary form from this era was as compelling as poetry, and Countee Cullen amongst the most anthologized. In is his poem Incident Cullen uses traditional English poetic form to tell about an incident of racism from his childhood. Many have criticized Cullen claiming that his use of traditional form diminishes the power of the incident he describes in the poem. Cullen responded to this criticism by claiming that he was at first a poet, and the circumstance of his racial heritage was secondary to his identity as a writer. Looking through the lens of history and the development of African-American literary and political identities the often-cited criticism of Cullen’s style remains persuasive.
In 1981 poet Audre Lorde wrote famously, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Her absolutist tone isn’t intended as rigid, rather she is proposing a entirely different paradigm into which people of historically oppressed communities must understand their work. She is concerned with the methodology one uses to do their work, and gives opportunity for the creative imagination to toil in articulating the message. Well the message of Cullen’s Incident is potent. The sting of racism and its lasting effect on the mind of a young child is unfortunately extremely relatable. The simplicity of his meter appears to make sense given the assumed age of the narrator. What is most memorable about the poem is what it has to teach about the painful arbitrality of racism. However, the poetic form Cullen is employing is fixed in a historically English (and White) tradition. He utilizes the literary tools of English form to tell a story about his own subjugation by the descendents of that tradition culminating in a sense of his own internalized oppression or political schizophrenia.
In Frantz Fanon’s 1952 work Black Skins, White Masks he explains the psychological consequences of colonial subjugation, or what he referred to as “divided self-perception of the Black Subject.” Fanon proposes that one of the most egregious transgressions of colonization is the assailment of the black subject’s consciousness through linguistic colonialism. In his opening Fanon illustrates what he means this way, “I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.” The choice of form in Cullen’s poem assumes a very specific meter and syntax. For that reason the criticism offered of Cullen’s form is not that of the form itself, but of the assumption of white culture, and therefore “whiteness”, and its historical subjugation of “blackness” that is inherent in the use of that form upon the ears of the hearer. Those hearers were the descendents of those who had literally carried the weight of “white civilization” unto their deaths. As a result Cullen’s choice of form, even if he did not intend so, legitimates a specific literary heritage in a time where African-Americans and other historically oppressed communities of color, felt that it was essential (and sometimes to their survival) to honor their own literary tradition. Further to claim that Cullen’s form was merely some universal understanding of a writer is to assume that traditional English form is normative, and the use of “black” forms is other.

Clash or Continuity: Huntington, Hezbollah and the al-Saud

2008-04-22T11:14:00.001-04:00

Coming of age in post-September 11th America means hearing a great deal of political rhetoric about ‘Islam’ and ‘the West’. Much of this rhetoric centers on the moral incongruence of liberal democracy, often conflated as ‘Western values’, and fundamentalist Islam. In the wake of the so called ‘post 9/11 world’ a crop of U.S. policy makers have produced a corpus of political theory, which has sought to completely exclude Islam from the Western cannon, and extend essentialized perceptions of Arabs into the cultural argot of American main-stream media. No piece has had more influence on these policy makers than Samuel Huntington’s 1993 Foreign Affairs article, which coined the phrase ‘clash of civilizations’. In 2008 the ‘clash of civilizations’ is understood in political discourses as a sort of euphemism for ‘Islamic Jihadism’ versus ‘the West’. Huntington’s article argues that future international conflicts will be the result of contradictory civilizational discourses, and that the events and outcomes of September 11th are the clearest indication of this ‘civilizational clash’. Huntington’s theory assumes the world is comprised of well-articulated civilizational lines defined by religious adherence. Though, many who conclude that Huntington’s hypothesis is merely oversimplified make some dangerous assumptions. The first is that ‘the West’ acts and speaks with unanimity, a supposition that fails to recognize that there are indigenous actors and minority groups within ‘Western’ states who are often opposed to the military and geo-political policies of those states, which claim to represent them. The second assumption presumes that the terms ‘Islam’, ‘Muslim’, ‘Jihad’, etc. are monolithic, and neglects the debates within the Muslim Community about the meaning and political implications of these terms on state actors. The Middle East has served as a focal point in the race to understand the phenomena of ‘Islamic terrorism’, as well as the viability democracy in predominately Muslim states. In the cases of Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, religio-political discourses, instilled in colonial imposed borders, have codified varying forms of governance and political philosophies. If the international conflicts arising between the ‘West’ and ‘Islam’ are not best characterized as civilizational disputes, then perhaps they can be understood as the political tactics of citizens involved in a process of decolonization, nation building and identity.

In a new book by King’s College professor and anthropologist Madawi Al-Rasheed, she discusses the current state of politics in Saudi Arabia, paying close attention to the relationship between the authoritarian government of the al-Saud and Saudi Arabia’s religious establishment. What makes Al-Rasheed’s book unique to past works on Saudi’s political climate, is that she engages her material as an ethnographer, paying close attention to the nuanced meanings of terms like Wahhabi and Salafi. Al-Rasheed claims that ‘outsiders’, and especially the West, have oftentimes reified the terms Wahhabi and Salafi in their media and scholarship on Saudi Arabia with little understanding of the political, religious or historical implications of the terms. Al-Rasheed opens her work by explicating the roots of the Wahhabi religious revivalist movement (Wahhabiyya), which legitimized itself by characterizing other groups as bid‘a (corrupt), and institutionalizing Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s tafsir (exegesis) as the purest form of the shari‘a (law). Al-Rasheed also claims that within Saudi Arabia the term Wahhabiyya is employed hegemonically by government and religious elites to consolidate and maintain their grip on power. As Al-Rasheed states, “Wahhabiyya and the Al-Saud were accomplices in the salvation of Arabian society, then they must be obeyed, revered and sanctified.”

Al-Rasheed’s book hints at far-reaching implications about the formation of statehood and national identity, the process of decolonization, and the emergence of resistance movements. As a Saudi living abroad, Al-Rasheed engages her ethnographic study not only through scholarship, but she considers the role of global media campaigns, mass education and modern, innovative notions of tafsir. Al-Rasheed claims that these tools of modernity have opened spaces (if only virtual spaces) for a more robust dialogue that challenges the government and the traditional religious elites in Saudi Arabia. In these ways, Al-Rasheed’s book hopes to “capture the ongoing public debate” within a country that has no domestic spaces for unguarded dialogue.

Contrastly, the case of Lebanon offers a consociational governing system unique in the Arab world. Nicolas Noe’s Voice of Hezbollah: The Statements of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah presents the polemical speeches of Hezbollah’s current Secretary General. Noe’s introduction explains that Hezbollah, under the tutelage of Iran’s Shi‘a leaders, has emerged from its roots as an under-represented ‘Islamic’ resistance group within a deluge of civil-war era sectarian militias, to one of the foremost powerbrokers and political reformist parties in Lebanon today. Alternative versions to Noe’s history claim Hezbollah’s connection to Iran is only incidental, and credits Hezbollah’s rise to power as the direct result of being the sole militia to remain armed after the 1982 Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon.

The National Pact of 1943, Lebanon’s current power-sharing agreement, was reached between the zu‘ama (leaders) of the various confessional sects following the end of the French Mandate. The Lebanese consociational system is based on sectarian divisions, with each sect receiving a certain amount of representation in the Lebanese government. However, the viability and fairness of Lebanon’s confessional system is constantly in question, as decades of civil war, economic stagnation and regional instability continue to fragment already strained relationships. "Today, a weakened Lebanese government is once again facing a crisis of legitimacy as the deadlock, which began with the resignation of three opposition cabinet members in late 2006, continues."

In 1989, after nearly fifteen years of civil war, representatives from all major sects of Lebanon’s confessional system went to Ta‘if, Saudi Arabia in hopes to sign a ‘National Reconciliation Accord’. The Ta‘if Accords signaled a step towards the end of colonial control over the Middle East, by according more political power to the Muslim majority within Lebanon, who had been largely left out of the upper echelons of government by the National Pact. The Ta’if Accords also reasserted Lebanese authority in Southern Lebanon, which had been occupied by Israel for close to a decade. Saudi Arabia held the talks as a way to strengthen its role in the region, raise its international profile and flaunt its chummy relations with the U.S. It is clear by the example of this accord, both Saudi Arabia and Lebanon were engaged their own projects of self-determination, regional preeminence, and nation building.

The works of Noe, Nasrallah and Al-Rasheed provide intimate views on the internal and regional debates shaping much of the political climate of the contemporary Middle East. If U.S. policy makers are interested in opening an interpretive space pursuant to hypotheses about the future of international conflict between ‘the West’ and ‘the Middle East’, Nasrallah and Al-Rasheed have provided the political and cultural mapping that will garner more appropriate notions as to the nature of the disputes. Civilizational arguments like Huntington’s, though they have some intuitive merit, fail to recognize too many overwhelming issues starting with the fact that many of the actors in the 9/11 bombings were Western educated, college graduates. Though the rhetoric of a ‘clash of civilizations’ continues to provide the political justification for al-Qaeda’s clashes with ‘Western imperialists’, and ‘Western imperialists’ need to ‘rid the world of terror’ it is easy to see where these roles are failing to provide any justice or security for any ‘civilization’. Furthermore, and to the disappointment of U.S. policy-makers and Jihadis alike, the future of the Middle East for the time being, appears to belong to journalists in Qatar, dissident, London-based groups like MIRA and burgeoning political parties like Hezbollah. Perhaps the future Al-Rasheed sees for Saudi’s, “free citizens able to articulate, choose and live narratives of their own making” is the future for us all.

Democracy’s Martyrs: Hezbollah, al-Saud and the 'Great Satan'

2008-03-19T19:41:00.003-04:00

On the 16th of August 2006, the day after a trembling cease-fire was brokered between Lebanon and Israel, I finally made it to the fraught village of Bint Jbail in the South of Lebanon. I had spent the better part of the week prior attempting to reach Bint Jbail, but my efforts were frustrated by the LAF who refused to allow the cadre of Lebanese and international activists I was with to travel south of Dahhiyya during the war. Many in my group, designated Lebanon Solidarity, felt that Hariri supporters settled with the LAF for more than a little ‘baksheesh’ (tip) so that Hariri’s party might prevail as the only entity providing humanitarian assistance(other than Hezbollah) while the war waged on. Compelled by the disastrous humanitarian situation created by the war, Lebanon Solidarity took note from Hezbollah and worked to design actions to challenge Israel’s aggression against civilian populations. Unlike Hezbollah, Lebanon Solidarity engaged nonviolently, promising to use only the weapons of the pen, the photograph and the media to shame Israel on the international stage. Armed with a list of cities where massacres had taken place in the weeks prior, and acting as grass-roots journalists my friends and I endeavored to document the war crimes that had occurred against civilians. As we brought relief supplies to beleaguered villages south of the Litani River, we also hoped to gather evidence about why the war had occurred and who (outside Hezbollah and the IDF) were the main actors. While in the South, two young Lebanese students, both named Muhammad, acted as our guides, driving at break-neck speeds on mountain roads, and blasting what sounded like recordings of battle songs from the Crusades through their Bose stereo-speakers:

Me: “So Hezbollah has a choir? That’s hot!”
Muhammad (#1): “Ya Farah!”
Me: “Do you think I could stop and pick up a CD when we go back to Beirut?”
Muhammad (#2): “They have t-shirts and flags too. Actually, there is a Kabob restaurant in Shantiyya, next to Dahhiyya, that will give a free lahem (lamb) Kebob to any foreigner who comes there and says ‘Yalla! Yalla! Hassan Nasrallah!”
Me: “I’m a vegetarian.”

On the 21st of July 2006, as the fatigued hilltops of southern Lebanon were still blistering under heavy bombardment from the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), Condoleeza Rice, in her most noted speech since taking office as Secretary of State, waxed poetic:

“I have no interest in diplomacy for the sake of returning Lebanon and Israel to the status quo ante. I think it would be a mistake. What we're seeing here, in a sense, is the growing -- the birth pangs of a new Middle East and whatever we do we have to be certain that we're pushing forward to the new Middle East not going back to the old one.”

Back in Beirut, Hezbollah’s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah was taking notes:

The Bush Administration, in assembly with right-wing Christian ‘extremists’, has claimed that the problems of the 21st century stem from the ‘fundamentalist’ ideologies of political Islam. This variety of post 9/11 rhetoric, professed by both Democrats and Republicans, aims at curbing ‘radicalism’ through a ‘Global War on Terror’. In the reality of those most effected by war, the birth pangs ‘Madam Secretary’ refers to with pejorative ease could be imagined contrarily by a simple exchange of prepositions quipped the ‘Global War of Terror’. Typified by conservative ideologues, and pursued by the Bush Administration, the ferment of ‘Islamo-fascism’, political parties like Hezbollah and Hamas as well as nation-states like Iran and Syria, have garnered political significance in their highly publicized fracas with the West. Curiously however, the U.S. has turned a blind eye to states like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia (themselves seats of the most influential factions of political Islam) claiming they pose no immediate threat to the security of the United States. The U.S. claims that its particular form of government and political philosophy are universally applicable, and constitute the greatest hope for a world of sustainability and peace. There are innumerous interpretive schemes one could presuppose concerning the reasons why sectarian factions on all sides of the Middle East debacle pursue failed policies into perpetuity. Robert Vitalis, in his recent book America’s Kingdom works to “reverse-engineer” what he calls “the myth of American exceptionalism” by exposing one instance of American corporate malfeasance related to the imperialist patronage of ARAMCO in Saudi Arabia. Nicolas Noe’s Voice of Hezbollah exposes a similar critique of U.S. policy through the transforming identity of Lebanese political party leader Hassan Nasrallah. What is compelling to notice is how these variegated conceptual frameworks play themselves out on the world’s stage, and generate contested narratives that are claiming their own dead as Democracy’s martyrs.

The Bush administration claims that fundamentalist Islam poses a threat to the security of the U.S. as well as the growing international system of liberal Democracy. The Administration claims that fundamentalist Islam, like other international threats before it (i.e. communism, socialism, etc.) seeks to destroy the political progress made by liberal democracies through the means of terror (a sort of neo-guerilla movement of suicide bombings), and an ideology that is not only anti-American, but anti-Western and retrogressive. The international relations policy of the current U.S. administration (and was the same under Clinton) does not allow for negotiations with governments, organizations and political parties the U.S. defines as ‘supporters of terror’. Which is why it is unlikely one will discover Voice of Hezbollah among the bathroom material on tours of the White House. However, like any average professor could advise in an Intro Political Science course (and even rivals like Finkelstein and Dershowitz could agree on this) both President Bush and his right-hand woman Condoleezza Rice, are doing themselves (and the rest of the U.S. public) a great disservice. The first rule in fighting a war you expect to win is to know your enemy. Through the lens of anthropology, King’s College professor Madawi Al-Rasheed compels an ahistorical, often kitsch and essentialized rut of political discourses to the fore by proposing the archaeology of one of Saudi Arabia’s most hegemonic religio-political movements, Wahhabism (Wahhabiyya). In her study Al-Rasheed invigorates questions that challenge the foreign policy architects of the Bush Administration, while she also provides a conceptual framework on Wahhabiyya that problematizes the traditional classification schemes that political science often perpetrates, particularly when engaged in ‘area studies’. Al-Rasheed explains that orientalist intellectual fawning has largely been content with writing about Saudi and the Wahabiyya in clichés that serve the master narratives of colonial (or if you are American, ‘expansionist’) states. Al-Rasheed’s book intends to disrupt the master narrative by providing the hegemonic discourse of Wahhabiyya, why it developed in the way that it did and exactly how the discourse has bred its own contestation.

Al-Rasheed’s proposal is simple; she would like to trace the origins of Wahhabiyya from its birth in the 18th century through the divisive climate of today’s media-crazed world, gathering explanations for the hegemony of Wahhabiyya under the patronage of Western imperialists, the political prowess of the al-Saud, and the religious revivalism of Najd-based sheiks. However her work, Contesting the Saudi State provides more than a mere road map to the heart of religio-political discourses in modern Saudi Arabia. Al-Rasheed fashions a conceptual framework that problematizes some of the traditional political and religious terminology habituated through media, governments and irresponsible intellectuals. Contesting the Saudi State unequivocally frustrates inclinations to draw social and political meaning through the superficiality of naming. The methodology Al-Rasheed presents in her episodic approach generates an interpretive climate eager to expose the political fragmentation and nuance that lead to “consent and contestation” in the formation of the modern Saudi state. In this way, discourses that claim both primacy and legitimacy, whether they are about American-style democracy, Hezbollah’s Islamicized Lebanon, or Saudi’s Wahhabist majority, lose their potency as tools of political propaganda.

Nicholas Noe is the editor of Voice of Hezbollah a book of speeches by infamous ‘Party of G-d’ leader Hassan Nasrallah. After considering the methodology of Al-Rasheed’s work, the actors and issues Nasrallah presents are illuminated by the complexity of the confessional system under which Lebanon makes sense of its majority minority population. The political flip-flopping Hezbollah perpetrates in Lebanon isn’t unique to its political transformation since it began the1980’s, but is endemic to the sort of politicking engendered in consociationalism. Al-Rasheed’s work explicates on the contestation that occurs within states, that assist in creating situations like the one currently transpiring in Lebanon, where Hezbollah party members are calling for a unity government while vigorously accusing members of other Lebanese political parties (those who happen to disagree with Hezbollah’s tactics) as collaborators with the ‘Great Satan’ (the U.S.) and ‘Little Satan’ (Israel) of the West.

If Al-Rasheed had been in Washington on July 21, 2006 (and were she a war-correspondent journalist) she would certainly have asked Ms. Rice if she truly believed that Hezbollah were really interested and politically invested in a strategy of: a) global domination, and b) if the ‘pangs’ of U.S. policy in Iraq were not birthing liberal democracy but babies of radicalism? Ms. Rice, like any half descent politician, must have studied her Republican predecessors, and in particular Dwight D. Eisenhowser whose January 1961 farewell speech, undoubtably noting French and British strategies of the late 1880’s and 1890’s, prophesized America’s future as a military industrial complex. The ‘ante’ the U.S. government secured while Israel and Lebanon slaughtered each other came in a multi-million dollar package for U.S. based war-profiteering companies who flew the Israeli flag all summer while Ms. Rice refused to call off the fighting in the name of growth. In which case the martyrs of democracy may not be dying in the shantytowns of Southern Lebanon, but may instead die a slow death of obesity gorged by an economic system even liberal democracy cannot overwhelm.

An Ode to Islam

2008-03-06T00:57:00.000-05:00

Upon Ali's pillow drew odes from farmers of the Oikumene, who opened silence.
Curious fingers dug and sought the seeds of heaven;
they whose omens split open silence.

Jesus calls Joseph, through color of time,
To coat Potiphar's rhyme,
draw G-d's dream to deign and thread open dawn's silence.

His majesty, the Medhi slumped, bored with waiting.
"My progeny!" Quipped Ibn Abbas, "who is to herald open heaven's silence?"

The whirling dervish, that punch drunken lover!
Tale spinner under wool cover,
Shari'a she does not, the Prophet's prayerful plot,
wishfully interpret open silence.

Today we have Islam's infidel;
they who say he's jihad's Occupation, and Leila's (ba man ast) infidelity.
She whose Intifada espouses no (open) lovers,
and he who built Majnun's settlements (though ilk of monoclonal caste)
- demand, a time to break the silence!

Sa’edi’s Novel Prophet

2008-03-05T22:09:00.003-05:00

Iran, like many other societies of the world, has a rich and complex oral tradition. Literary documents spanning millennia have preserved these oral traditions through the medium of writing as far back as court documents of the Achaemenid Empires in the 7th century BCE. Although resources like these are scarce, there remains in modernity an abundance of sources on the rich tradition of story telling, literature and oration, written in both Pharsi and Arabic, from Iran as early as the 8th century. The Iranian short story feels most compelling as a genre commencing from this oral tradition, and if not the creative intellectual progeny of Iran's oral tradition it is certainly a close relative to the ancient practice. In the case of Ghulamhusyn Sa'idi's The Game Is Up there are echoes of narrative style that parallel parable-like techniques often employed in the tradition of oral storytelling. At the same time Sa'edi's story contains themes, characters and situations that appeal to a modern, political allegorical reading which may also shed light on themes of social critical realism and protest that dominated many political discourses within Iran in the years between the 1953 coup and the 1979 Revolution.

In 1951, while Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was still Shah of Iran, a leading parliamentarian, Mohammad Mossadeq, was elected as Iran’s first Prime Minister. Mossadeq is popularly remembered as Iran’s glimpse of democracy after generations of monarchic rule. When Mossadeq was overthrown in a coup d’etat in 1953, sponsored by two of most powerful colonial governments in the Middle East, his short-lived governance proved to be extremely influential not only as it related to politics, but also other intellectual discourses in Iran. The modernization that was ushered in with the reign of Mohammad Pahlavi’s father Reza Shah also generated variegated intellectual reverberations inside Iran with the writings of, for example Mohammad-Ali Foroughi and Sadegh Hedayat, amongst others. By the time of Mossadeq Iranian intellectuals such as Jalal Ali Ahmad and Simin Danishivar were generating highly critical writings, including short stories, of protest to Western hegemony and the culture of imperialism. These intellectual figures and their peers continued to influence literature, politics and aesthetics throughout the period following the reinstallation of the Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and even through the ‘Islamic’ Revolution of 1979. The period between 1950 and 1980 engendered discourses of social critique and protest that continue to be highly influential until today.

Gholamhossein Sa'edi is a Tabrizi born Azeri-Iranian writer, dramatist, editor and political activist who often wrote under the pen name of Gowhar Morad. He is from the generation of writers following Ahmad and Danishvar who wrote and protested during the tumultuous eras of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s. He was a prolific writer of fiction, and mostly short stories, however his magazine Alefba is probably his most widely regarded and most remembered contribution to literature.

It is in the period of the early 1970’s that Sa’edi wrote and set’s his short story “The Game Is Up.” Although the story is clearly recorded as a written text (or tumar in Pharsi) there are elements of the story that adhere to what is generally regarded as an oral-formulaic style. This style’s antecedents in oral literature, model performance approaches, character and plot constructions as well as allegorical notions that help to illustrate the influences of the oral tradition on written stories. For example, a short story is generally (not exclusively) regarded as fictional narrative prose where the story’s broad sketch is prompted and completed swiftly. In the oral tradition there is usually a teller and an audience. In the case of the short story the use of allegory allows for the audience to have some stake in the creation and meaning of the story. Although most stories in the oral tradition are told in the style of improvisational art form, there are mechanisms an author may employ in the composition of her narrative that may imbue elements of improvisational style.

The Game Is Up opens abruptly. Sa’edi appears to call his audience into his story by opening with conversational style prose and hurling his audience into the middle of the action of the story. Sa’edi commences the action of the plot with stark imagery concerning the story’s setting, a shantytown of homes built from cans and other garbage along a polluted outskirt of Iran’s capital city. Perhaps it is imprudent to assume the author holds political motivations regarding his choice of setting, as an impoverished area has just as much narrative appeal as any other place, the intellectual discourses within Iran, especially in the periods leading up the 1970’s, were dominated by Marxist-Socialist and ‘2nd World’ theory. If Sa’edi’s story is meant to be read as social criticism, and even protest, the setting provides ample room from which to draw ideas on the possible kernels of protest Sa’edi is engaging through his story. For example, the narrator of the story, who is also one of the main characters along with his friend Hasani, uses the first few paragraphs of the story to describe not only the manner in which the huts were constructed one after the other, but also refers to the garbage pits from where he and Hasani collect superfluous items to either keep or sell. Around the garbage pits and on the far side of the shantytown there are large pits, some covered and other uncovered, where many of the adults of the village work. The proximity of the pits to the homes mirrors many similar neighborhoods in a post-industrial urban environment, where impoverished families are pushed to live close to the most polluted parts of the city. This particular point may be a part of the political allegory Sa’edi is pressing his readers to pay attention to, as well as his protest.

Sa’edi then introduces his readers to the main catalyst behind the action of the plot, Hasani’s father, who the narrator describes as a man whose overbearing temper is regularly exercised against Hasani in the form of daily beatings. Research into this particular short story of Sa’edi came back with less than conclusive results (actually I couldn’t find anything on it) thus illusions that may be haggard towards sketching Sa’edi’s particular political rhetoric as it involves Hasani’s relationship to his father may be at best tenuous. However, there are several clues provided in a cursory knowledge of the politics of the pre-Revolutionary era that point to the appalling conditions and economic disparity of the poor in Iranian society. These conditions are often blamed on the inability for even incremental legislative change under the dictatorial Pahlavi regime, as well as the dire economic situation created because of poor financial management and high military spending. The illustration Sa’edi draws of a despotic father who’s constantly and arbitrary beating his son mirrors the sentiments of many of the lower classes in Iranian society under the Shah.

The social and financial policies of the Shah also bred opposition, and have been pointed to as motivations behind the variegated social movements that led to the 1979 Revolution. Sa’edi’s story enters the scope of this history imbued with clandestine irony, as although the story was published in 1973, the faked-death of Hasani in the story, and the religious fervor that inspired and overtook the revolution led to the certain death of Hasani as well as the hope of a generation of Iranian intellectuals and activists like Sa’edi.

Another aspect that one notices in a close reading of Sa’edi’s work is that there seems to be a real emphasis in his narrative style on the movement of the plot through the dialogue between Hasani and the narrator. In many ways the plot follows the dialectical conversation between these two young boys, and disagreements between the two boys are resolved (sometimes well and sometime not so well) through a process of dialogue around opposing assertions. This form of method has, if it is indeed being employed by Sa’edi, has reverberations not only to ancient practices of Socratic method (which was undoubtedly influential in the evolution of oral formulaic theory), but also to Marxist-Hegelian dialectics that inspired social realism and protest.

Sa’edi concludes his story with a dual myopia. The crowd of people that had come to mourn the death of Hasani appears to be engaged in hollow religious rituals and rehearsed representations of mourning. They are so involved in these behaviors that they are unable to hear and believe the narrator’s news of Hasani falling back into a pit. At the same time Hasani, the brave little boy whose plan to relieve himself of the suffering he endures daily, cannot save himself from the other obstacles presented by life, so focused is he on relieving his current (temporary) state.

The realism and social critique, as well as protest and political allegory present in Sa’edi story appear as unresolved conflicts within a context that grows vastly more complicated as the plot builds. As a member of Sa’edi’s audience, the open-ended nature of social realism is appropriate, yet is at the same time deeply disturbing. The consequences of the Islamitization of the Iranian Revolution, and the current state of the political regime and discourses in Iran are equally disturbing. The only solace Sa’edi provides in the thorny state of unresolved conflicts on top of deep historical injustices emerges not as a solace one might expect. In the end Hasani dies a needless death. Yet the questions Sa’edi nudges urge his audience to problematize the questions they are asking themselves, including narratives communities of historical injustice (like the poor) perpetuate about their own exceptionalism. Hasani is not made Sa’edi’s hero, but perhaps he can still be saved.

Building Mountains from Saudi Sands - A Book Review

2008-02-12T22:10:00.004-05:00

In 2002, just as Washington was firing up the media machine, and cranking out newspapers full of headlines about why the U.S. public should consent to another war against Saddam, activists from all around the world were out in the streets shouting, “No blood for oil!” University of Pennsylvania political science professor Bob Vitalis had long been composing his thoughts, adding to the cacophony of voices which President Bush, with jesting temerity, designated a ‘focus group’. Today with over 75% of the U.S. public decidedly against Bush and the war in Iraq, pundits mire the political discourse with mud slinging “I told you so’s!” If they had asked Bob Vitalis or any other political scientist with expertise on the modern Middle East for advice, the pedal pushers in Washington may have gotten a battle of the bands, but at least we would all be listening to something fresher than John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero.” In traditional, yet readable, political science prose America’s Kingdom takes us through the histories of U.S.- Saudi relations, multi-national firms, organized labor and the struggles against what Vitalis refers to as the ‘racial wage’. America’s Kingdom hopes to “reverse-engineer” the myth of American exceptionalism by exposing one instance of American corporate malfeasance and then posing the question, “what is this an instance of?”

America’s Kingdom builds its indictment of exceptionalism from a process of identifying some central yet particularly potent strands of exceptionalist theory. In his introduction, “Captive Narratives” Vitalis identifies these strands in three succinct and related arguments. The first critique Vitalis asserts concerns the nature of exceptionalist histories, stressing that opportunist arguments often conflate the specificities of difference with the characteristics of exceptional circumstances. Exceptionalist theory thus contends that there are no universal threads linking, for example, the history of ARAMCO’s oil enterprise in Saudi Arabia to the history of the Panama Canal Zone. Vitalis exerts a lot of effort to demonstrate why this sort of exceptionalist theory is not only unpersuasive, but irresponsible. America’s Kingdom is devoted to exposing the particulars around ARAMCO’s own exceptionalist history (readily available on eBay in Wallace Stegner’s Discovery!), and linking this history to other examples of colonial states and exploitative business practices. Vitalis provides two examples, one relating to states and the other to firm-labor relations, that were particularly compelling and worth mentioning here. The first example concerns one of Vitalis’ main characters, Tariki Abdallah, an exiled Saudi oil geologist who said, “We are the Sons of the Indians who sold Manhattan. We want to change the deal.” Vitalis wants his American readers to relate U.S. expansionism to European style colonialism, and thus compares the devastating effects of Jim-Crow style segregation in ARAMCO working camps to proverbial colonialist dealings detailed throughout modern Middle East history. The other two arguments which Vitalis’ credits to historian David Rogers, are concerned with the way U.S. history has been written about in the academe, and how recent trends toward alternative histories have helped to re-envision U.S. history in vastly more complicated ways.

What is at stake in Vitalis’ book for the activists of the American anti-war movement (after all Vitalis claims his book is about America not Saudi) is the reengineering of its own political delusions; commencing with the narratives about blood for oil, and how the policies that reign under “Bush & Co.” come to us via the ‘exceptional’ political progeny of the Reagan years. Vitalis’ work is also about the need to build populist politics focused on redistribution, ownership and inclusion that can build transnational alliances and expose Jim-Crow style segregation policies from Mississippi to Dhahram. America’s Kingdom credits a turn in exceptionist rhetoric with thanks to the labor of Black theorists (in Vitalis’ case W.E.B. Du Bois). What America’s Kingdom does is lay out the socio-political reality of race on which class hierarchies are contingent in the racialized state. Since racism is so vital to the continuance of the modern socio-political system, white beneficiaries with liberal politics may deconstruct this radically impoverished system, but they do not have to imagine a model for collective self-actualization. This is precisely my critique of Vitalis’ work. Those of us whose identities are not beneficiaries of a hierarchical system based on race must push for intellectuals like Vitalis to do more than expose the central reality of modern hierarchy. We must demand that racism is not taught merely as a tactic used by transnational firms to bust unions, but as a working political system that is the fundamental feature of the global economy in a globalized world.

What Vitalis recommends in America’s Kingdom is not that we throw out our parent’s old Lennon records. Rather, he suggests our efforts for solidarity be fashionably savvy. In other words, Vitalis might have us watch last season’s finale of American Idol where Green Day performs a remix of Lennon’s classic, which inspired millions of American’s not only to purchase Instant Karma, but also to contribute to the efforts to save Darfur. Like the CD, Vitalis’ book nudges us to take our solidarity efforts further than superficial gestures, and to re-examine the intersecting lines of race and class that have helped put blinders on our collective notions of American exceptionalist history. America’s Kingdom would like us activists to realize finally, that the policies of the Bush years were drawn in the 1990’s (under Clinton) not the early 80’s, and that “it is still not too late” to take off the rosy colored glasses.

2007-04-23T16:21:00.000-04:00

Just wanted to comment in case anyone was confused about the last entry. I wrote a long essay about some recent thoughts I was having only to realize that when I posted it it was lost forever into the internet abyss. Which I then thought was kind of deep, but I wanted just to comment and say that it wasn't meant to be all existential. Love, Farah Marie

Ahmed al-Haj

2007-01-21T13:00:00.001-05:00

Well, last night I went to see Ahmed AlHaj a well known Iraqi peace activist and classically trained oud player originally from Baghdad and more recently from New Mexico. His music brought me to tears as he talked about love and loss. The piece that especially touched me was called Baghdad II and was about the Baghdad he returned to after since fleeing in 1991, after the war in 2003. He talked about how much it had changed from a place of ancient beauty to a place of mourning and utter inconceivable violence. . . he says now he could probably write Baghdad III. His mourning is one I feel deeply, especially in light of Bush's decision to send in more troops. And I wonder what it is that thinking people are to do in light of such huge miscalculations of justice and peace? It is difficult to imagine that anyone no matter what there political affiliation can think that this policy is the key to quelling the violence. It is so out of touch, I feel, with what so many people are asking for and advising. I urge you all to do whatever you can to end this madness - even if it is something small, make your voice heard.

The Most Contemporary Human Problem

2006-11-26T20:05:00.000-05:00

Hi Friends:

This is a piece I wrote recently for an application to this program I am interested in. I thought I'd share it as it is also what I have been recently thinking about. . . any thoughts?

W.E.B. Du Bois in his 1903 work The Souls of Black Folk described, “The problem of the 20^th century is the problem of the color line.” The potency of Du Bois’ prose is understood wholly even in its subtly. The ferocious spirit he engages is nothing less then prophetic. The call disarms our normative notions of human tribulation: war, poverty, hunger, oppression and injustice as it asserts a far less obvious and much more intimate human problem.

In today’s globalized world the scope of Du Bois’ ‘problem’ widens, yet its nature is essentially unchanged. Geoffrey O’Connor, an environmental journalist, made a documentary in the 1990’s linking interviews with indigenous peoples in the Amazonian Basin to western environmental campaigns aimed at saving the Brazilian Rain Forest. His documentary, Amazon Journal: Dispatches from a Vanishing Frontier illustrates what he learned over eight years in the Brazilian Amazon. What I find most compelling concerning O’Connor’s documentary is the way in which it provokes discussions on racism, global economy, tokenization, and intentionality by ‘complicating the questions’.

O’Connor and Du Bois confront simplistic explanations of human mechanism by anchoring themselves in the characteristics of the prophetic tradition: critique and hope. Du Bois’ writing exquisitely resists and dismantles the dominant consciousness, while energizing hope in the possibility of social transformation.

Chicago based anti-sanctions campaign, Voices in the Wilderness, began a statement about why they were chosing to remain in Iraq despite the 2003 Shock and Awe bombing by declaring, “Where you stand determines what you see, and how you live.” Similarly, choosing the most urgent contemporary human problem is a reflection of who we are and where we come from. In other words, it is largely a question of perspective.

Determining what is the most urgent contemporary human problem is, in my opinion, as arduous as solving that problem. What is far more compelling is how students may use historical moments as a lens to invite robust questions about who we are, where we come from, and to whom we are responsible. A professor of mine once asked me to write a history of Lebanese-Israeli relations that no one would contest. The process of forming such a narrative was probably the most challenging and rewarding of my intellectual life. I was asked to perform the impossible and the process stretched my soul. That is the very kind of cultivating process I long to have more of in my academic, intellectual life.

However, in my experience, academia, 'for all of its rituals of collegiality, generates very little intimacy and collaborative work'. I believe the Friends World Program (WFP) is different because it is interested in intimate, collaborative learning environments. WFP appears to be interested in ‘complicating the questions’. WFP takes seriously the proposition of the Voices members, and posits that praxis and environment is essential to a critical, inclusive learning process. For these reasons I believe a Friends World education will be an invaluable community where I may both glean and meaningfully contribute. It is the kind of community where the prophetic tradition is most alive.

Academia Alternatives

2006-10-29T23:48:00.000-05:00

Hi Friends!

So I am in a particularly introspective mood. I just spent the day with my good friend Kathy who I love dearly and who loves me too! We both belong to a group called Voices for Creative Nonviolence. Instead of studying for my midterm next week in Theories of Social Research I had a long conversation with Kathy about life, "the movement", struggles, hopes etc.

Speaking with Kathy always gives me energy, imagination and hope - truly. It also reminds me of the long time struggle I have had with whether or not to finish my degree. For those who don't know me I go to a large, private, urban university in Philadelphia. Because of both the community movement I am in, the work I have done (and learned from) at Word and World, and the circles I have spent my time in over the years more or less active with Voices - I have built myself into such a place that I constantly feel limited, bored, frustrated. . . by going to school. Which is somewhat suprising because I love to read, write, learn new things and stretch myself.

I just feel that academia generates very little active, intimate, collaborative work. There are countless law schools with numerous international law departments and yet so little work taking that learning outside the comfortable halls it is taught in. Can academic labor be doing transformative, interesting, expanding, deepening work helping movements of social change think more critically and creatively? And can these movements inspire academia to practice their work in such a way that it may be relevant to the lives of the poor, confront the state, disarm the narratives of racism, sexism, homophobia that we daily swallow?

An idea (and perhaps concrete example of what I mean) one of my professors ALWAYS talks about is not equating the market with capitalism - asking instead how we can resist the latter while thinking creatively about the former.

At my school there are brilliant, sensitive, aware students whose lives of privilege and comfort have (along with huge loan bills to pay back) led them to imagine a future with a huge, global private corporations where all their curious and imaginative energy will be poured back into the "military industrial congressional complex" that is devastating the planet. And that breaks my heart. There is one young man in my Palestine-Israel class who is especially outspoken, organized, thorough and brilliant - getting his degree in International relations who has concentrated on the Middle East and when I asked him what we was going to do after graduation he told me he was thinking of working for a company that sells information to the CIA. AH! Many students in my language courses are studying farsi and arabic not because they are beautiful, ancient, and relevant - but because they can get a good job in the defense industry.

Since going to Penn three years ago I have never seen a single class under the Peace Science category. . .

I am ever more convinced that if we are interested in (and I think this is basic) security and survival of ourselves and our planet we will need to do lots of education. I am all for education. But I think that it will have to be done differently - priorities will have to be readjusted and risks taken. We are so fortunate that we can take risks in our country with very little redress - if you block the federal building the worse punishment you may get is a week in prison, you won't face a death squad.

I feel like there are a lot of things I am saying here:
1. We need to rethink pedagogical practices at the University.
2. The University needs to think more about how academic labor may be more intimate, active and collaborative.
3. Doing education differently might help us also to be inspired to take more risks with our lives, social relationships, bank accounts etc.
4. We need to think critically and creatively about our relationships to brothers and sisters in our world whose lives are deeply affected by our accumulation of wealth and precious nonrenewable resources.
5. Loving and caring for our children demands that we also care for their futures. I know lots of parents who wouldn't think twice about spending loads of money on their children's lessons, schooling, clothing etc. But rarely connect that love to parents outside their national borders and to how their lifestyle is creating a very unstable, scary world into which their children will be growing up. (Okay so this point wasn't really a part of what I was saying earlier).

All this to say that I feel I have received a wonderful education outside my University and feel I am in existential crisis about whether to quit and continue to find ways to learn that are life-giving or suck it up, get the degree and get out?

Farah Marie

Declaring Peace

2006-10-06T16:21:00.000-04:00

This is a picture of me being taken away to the clink during last week's Declaration of Peace (DOP: www.DeclarationOfPeace.org) events in D.C.

The particular action I, along with 12 other women and 13 men, participated in was directed at the various committees, especially committees related to deciding on the funding going to the Iraq war, demanding that they stop the funding that is leading to (as the picture clearly illustrates) the death of thousands of Iraqi people and many soldiers.

Here & There

2006-10-01T14:23:00.000-04:00

So last night I spoke at an Iftar for the Muslim Student Association and Penn Arab Society (PAS) who were raising money for UNICEF in Lebanon. There were perhaps 200 people there. I shared stories while a Lebanese American friend of mine, Sara, who spent the last year in Beirut described the situation before the war. The whole event raised approximately $1200. Later the VP of PAS asked me to join the group and I explained to him that I would love to but I was not Arab. Another friend piped in that it was okay I as I was "Arab by ignorance" meaning most people think Iranians are Arab, and sometimes, like in my Father's case, this really tics them off because they are very proud of their heritage as Persians. Anyhow, needless to say I am now an honorary member of the Penn Arab Society.

Last week I joined the Declaration of Peace (www.declarationofpeace.org) in D.C., some friends of mine are the organizers, and I joined an action on the 27th where we staged a funeral procession carrying coffins of soldiers and Iraqis who have died and demanded that congress act to stop funding this ridiculous war. Those of us that choose to risk arrest staged a die-in in front of the Rayburn buildings entrance and were hauled off to the clink. Thirteen men and thirteen women risked arrest and many wonderful people supported. I was really glad I took the two days off from school for the events.

It felt very healing to be a part of the DOP. For various reasons I felt a good amount of fear this time being arrested, and when I started feeling overwhelmed with the fear I focused on this mother I met in Cana and the story she told me about her six year old son and the experience of losing him to the war. Maybe it seems strange but remembering and focusing on her story and that of Zaineb helped to centre me and calm me althought he story itself is very unsettling. I felt centred because the spirit of why I was participating in the event was very present. Also because I participated in the event with my friend and (he might not know it) mentor Bill Wylie-Kellerman, one of the most gifted, gentle and generous men I have ever known. While I was laying under the white shroud I was thinking about him and how he recently lost his dear wife Jeannie, who I hardly knew but deeply respect, and that helped me to focus on the sacredness of life and how important it is to continue to work to protect that sacredness, to live in that mystery and wrap ourselves into the joy and sorrow of living. I have participated in a few protests and risked arrest a good number of times but this time I really lived into the event more deeply than ever before.

. . . Not-so-brief interruption from our friend Shauna from the streets. She used to be by our house all the time but is less so now. . . I think its because she's cleaning up a little, hasn't been doing as many drugs as she used to do but is still occasionally out here to get high. She came in for something cold to drink and a new t-shirt and when we walked back into the kitchen she asked if she could wash her hands which turned into an impromptu shower in the kitchen sink! I was more humored than upset and she left happily clean with a large jar of blue moon soda.

So balancing school and all the other activities I am involved in is going okay. I got back my first philosophy paper and had a big fat NP on it - that means "not pass" which is very upsetting to me as I worked hard on the paper and have gotten great grades on previous philosophy papers. I can't be sure as to the precise reason why I failed the paper other than the fact that I used the last paragraph of the the 2 pages we were allotted to talk about how I think its possible that we live in a simulation if you consider advertising, corporate media and outrageous governments. I think the other aspect is that I have a natural aversion to following the "rules" or "norms" or "structure" of just about anything, and sometimes if you posses this natural aversion it can be difficult to put that aside even for something as easy as writing a two page Philosophy paper.

Its difficult for me to appreciate the "intellectual journey" without understanding contexts and practical applications. For example, Descartes' Meditations, classical Phil 101 text right?

Well I want to know why he is writing the Meditations, is it revolutionary or maintaining a master narrative?

What was going on in his life that made him need to doubt everything? Was he dumped by a lover? I read his daughter died in that time which makes me think that his meditations must have been influenced by this event.

I feel that loving or appreciating a text means locating that text into its history. I don't like intellectual gymnastics unless they impact life in some way, assist us to grow deeper or stretch our creative capacity.

I hate the snobery of intellectual discourse, playing the who can reference more dead white men than the other sort of stuff. Maybe I am just ignorant and naive, don't get me wrong I can appreciate the need for intellectual exercise, but if it doesn't give me tools for life or deconstruct "the empire within" or help me to experience beauty in some way. . .I guess I just have an aversion to it. I think that is why W&W exists - its journey oriented. We aren't about hording intellectual property to impress other intellectuals, we are interested in doing school differently creating models of hope and social transformation within the structure. Ah, does anyone here what I am trying to say?

So, we shall see how the old Philosophy class goes and if my TA will work with me, or I with him for that matter.

Farah Marie

It Used to be Called Mother's Day for Peace

2006-09-22T17:49:00.000-04:00

I know I am either almost a year early or a few months too late, but I was reading something online today and it touched my heart. I wanted to share it with you. This is a passage from Julia Ward Howe's Mother's Day Proclamation of 1870 - the origional meaning of Mother's Day was not about consumerism - chocolates and flowers and jewelry - it was political, it was about peace:

Arise then...women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!

Say firmly:
"We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender to those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

From the voice of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: "Disarm! Disarm!

The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe our dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.

As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
At the sumons of war,
let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace...
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God--

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
that a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
may be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

Neutrality, does it exist?

2006-09-13T10:29:00.000-04:00

Not sure what to make of being "back". In some ways it's hardly an issue since I was only gone for three weeks. In other ways I know my life will never be the same again, like this huge wave hit me and I'm still trying to catch my breath at the surface. . . I haven't caught it yet.

I was really hoping to go to some meaningful discussions on the anniversary of September 11th, but my University had little to offer as far as productive, robust conversation which was disappointing and perhaps expected. I did attend a poetry recital (?) at the Kelly Writer's house that was rather moving, but there was no discussion afterward and so I sat there after having felt this huge range of emotions with very little outlet to make them come alive in my life.

I have to read some Descartes for one of my courses this semester - and he's doubting everything and trying to justify his conclusions about how we get knowledge and what certain knowledge is and how it is not connected to sensory knowledge. . . And I wonder how I am supposed to interact with that sort of paradigm given my recent experience which is all sensory, but the reality of it, the certainty of the terror I and other felt while bombs were dropping or even afterwards - is that not certain knowledge? Perhaps the terror is not real because it is not human - its a myopic and treacherous manifestation of human fear. Perhaps what was more real was all the instances of human kindness, resilience, and love. I still wonder how I can fit my experiences in Lebanon into Descartes' world view? Any ideas? (farah@vcnv.org)

Speaking of, my friend Dan from Voices in Chicago, recently reminded me of something Paolo Freire said about the education process after I was complaining about one of my professors who seemed to take a "neutral" stance on the Palestinian-Israel conflict. Dan told me to remind my professor that there is no middle way: either an education process helps people in their empowerment or the education process helps maintain the status quo. No education process can be neutral and, likewise, no participatory process can be neutral.

I feel very much the same way about Lebanon. A thoughtful even responable discussion is terminated when one brings up a debate on whether or not there was a "proportional response" or how Israel NEEDED to defend itself because of lessons learned after the holocaust - when the ideas and discussion go in that direction it is possible that the entire conversation will get confused and most of the time hardly recovers.

The truth (an idea we all hope to possess yet how many hope to live it?) is not relative. The truth exists, surely in very different forms, but the nature of truth proceeds.

A given - Where you stand determines what you see, and we must wrestle with this reality, however the total devastation of Lebanon is very real, and was not a reasonable or proportionate response to the taking of 2 Israeli soldiers no matter whose compass is measuring. Israel's response is even more difficult to believe when one considers the constant incursions into Lebanon Israel regularly participates in either through brute force (soldiers landing in Lebanon) or through their unmanned surveillance Plane constantly taking pictures of what is happening in the South.

The other aspect of the the discussion is how close we are to seeing similiar warfare in the U.S.

Large banners hung on demolished buildings reading, "Made in the U.S.A.". We are not planting seeds of forgiveness and reconciliation in the middle east nor democracy. The response we receive from seeing images like that above are of righteous indignation, and because they exist and are part of the consciousness in Lebanon we need to be actively participating in relating to that in a way that may reverse the rage, dutifully, humbly, thoughtfully.

However, many instead either by apathy or ignorance go on living their lives as if they have no relationship to what is going on, and what is going on is the murder of the innocent. Except we have our hands all over it because we sponsor that murder. That's what many in the Middle East experience as "the truth" and we determine to ask ourselves "why do they hate us?" or decide that all the anger can be explained by labeling all groups Islamic fascists or terrorists or what have you and then these people whose identity we do not know go untouched - we do not try to interact with their reality because we decide its so different than our own or that their reality is bent on our destruction. All of this is nonsense but its powerful because it allows us to live our lives fearful and unaware.

Homecoming

2006-09-05T10:49:00.000-04:00

Hi Friends:

Well, I made it safely (!) back home. . . though I can not say that for a lot of those I met in Lebanon. I am slowly making the transition to being in a place of calm abundance. I came back last Friday and immediately left for the ALC (Atlantic Life Community) retreat in Voluntown, CT. I love the community in Voluntown, both its members and the space itself. I was also able to see some good friends I had not seen in a while, I am specifically thinking of Kate and Steve who used to work with us at Word and World. They have been taking care of Kate's Father who is in hospice - they are some of the most insightful, depthful individuals I know and it is my great pleasure to have them as friends.

My life very different from when I left for Lebanon. There is an urgency in me for peace that I haven't previously felt at such a depth. . . how we belong to one another and how precious life is. I know I must be saying some things that might be typical for one coming back from my experience, but these feelings are very real for me and similar experiences have led me to do the work that I do now with Camden House, Word and World and Voices. We do belong to one another and realizing who we are as "children of God" is also an acknowledgement of our relationships to one another - there are no strangers in this world family. And I believe the more and more we come to realize this interbeing, interdependence the more and more we will be moved to resist the forces of death in our world.

I would like to conclude this brief post with some words from one of my mentors in the movement, Bell Hooks, "[at the end of the journey] we all learned about joy in struggle, about connections betwen theory and practice. We learned that the movement from talk to action is often a perilous journey. Yet like all great adventures, it positively transforms us. We become more fully ourselves at the journey's end-made whole. Parker Palmer speaks of moving through fear as we begin to learn new ideas, new ways of seeing the world, as we confront differences with no need to annhilate them, confessing: 'I am fearful. I have fear. But I don't need to be my fear as I speak to you. I can approach you from a different place in me-a place of hope, a place of fellow feeling, of journeying together in a mystery that I know we share.' Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose setey instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, reveling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community."

A Resistance to War

2006-08-31T13:40:00.000-04:00

August 22nd, 2006
by Ramzi Kysia

Last week, I made my first trip to South Lebanon since the war began. Having traveled a fifth of the world, and been present during “wars” in Iraq, Palestine, and New York – I can honestly say that I have never seen such complete devastation in my entire life. The only thing that even comes close are the pictures I’ve seen from World War II. Much of South Lebanon simply lies in ruin.
In the South, Israeli warplanes occasionally break the sound barrier, rattling people as they fly off on God knows what missions. Israeli drones constantly fly overhead. The low, insistent hum of their engines serves as a continual reminder that Lebanon is not yet safe.
Bombed out gas stations and the twisted, blackened remains of what once were cars line the roads. The roads themselves are a wreck, pockmarked with craters and covered by fallen bridges, in places completely impassable. There are miles of roads lined with chalk-colored vegetation, so covered are they from the dust of destroyed buildings that you can see no green whatsoever. Almost every single city and village throughout South Lebanon has significant war damage. Almost every single one. The dead are still being pulled from the rubble.
In Qantara, a village of some three hundred and fifty families, twenty-five homes are destroyed, and another fifty seriously damaged. A man passes out pictures of his fifteen year old son in barely controlled panic. He hasn’t seen the boy for nearly a month.
In Sriefa, three entire blocks of homes are smashed to ground. Other buildings and shops throughout the town are bombed and destroyed. Women walk the streets, sobbing.
In Sultanya, dozens of homes are destroyed. The local hospital lies bombed and gutted by fire. The house I stayed at in the village has three unexploded cluster bombs in its garden.
Bint Jbeil, a city of over eighty thousand people, is completely shattered. Much of the city is simply rubble, but even what’s left standing is damaged. The entire back wall of the three-story primary school is just gone. The city center is barely passable to cars, so cratered are the roads. I literally did not see a single building in all of Bint Jbeil without serious damage. Not one. Not a one.
In Siddiqine, block after block of residential neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble. From over three-hundred multi-story homes and buildings, nothing larger than a breadbasket remains. I met a man wandering through the wreckage who gave a short, sardonic laugh when he found out I was an American. “Here is the democracy,” he said, pointing at the ruins, “here is the freedom.” Then his eyes teared up, as he told me that he couldn’t even figure out where his house used to stand.
This wasn’t a war against Hezbollah, with some collateral damage on the side. This was a war against the basic structures necessary to sustain civilians in South Lebanon. This was a war against the basic structures of human life.
But there are Lebanese who will not let that happen.
During the war, a coalition of Lebanese educators, engineers, architects, merchants, health care workers, NGO workers, students, and others, came together under banner of Civil Resistance - the Arabic phrase for non-violent direct action. Our founding statement of purpose began with the words, “We, the people of Lebanon, call upon the local and international community to join a campaign of civil resistance to Israel’s war against our country and our people. We declare Lebanon an open country for civil resistance.”
During the war we organized a fifty-two car convoy to take needed relief supplies from Beirut to the South, disregarding the Israeli ban on traveling in our own country. We were stopped by internal, Lebanese politics – something we are going to make sure does not happen again. Today, Lebanon is united in resistance to war.
Today, we are organizing a nation-wide petition demanding that the Lebanese government expel Jeffery Feldman, the U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon, as a threat to peace.
Today, we are organizing to provide direct assistance to communities in need throughout South Lebanon.
In just the past, few days we’ve organized solidarity missions to Qantara and Selaa. In Selaa, short hours before the ceasefire took effect, Israel destroyed thirty-five homes, killing at least eight people, and shutting off running water to the entire community.
We organized a mission to Selaa, building connections with civic leaders in the village. With donated funds from across Lebanon, we purchased a suction pump and water storage tanks for the villagers. We distributed food, donated clothes, children’s toys, and sanitary supplies. We located a doctor willing to come to the village to provide free medical exams, and helped fill needed prescriptions. Since the phone lines are down in the village, we contacted the Lebanese Army on their behalf to request assistance in removing unexploded bombs from the area.
As time goes on, we will maintain and deepen our ties to Selaa, Qantara, and other villages we are able to help, shifting from providing direct relief to other work, such as restoring schools and organizing cultural events. We will not give up.
We are not alone. Samidoun, another grassroots Lebanese coalition, is assisting three, other villages in South Lebanon. As we do our work in the South, we hear of other such coalitions, other such campaigns.
Abid Na’im lost his sixty-five year old father in the bombing of Selaa. There was barely enough left of the remains to bury but, despite his grief, Abid summed up the spirit of Lebanon today when he told us, “It’s impossible to beat the people. You can destroy the stones, you can destroy the homes – but you can’t destroy the people.”

Short Update

2006-08-23T10:35:00.000-04:00

Since arriving on the 11th of August in Beirut I have been busy in grassroots efforts to both bring relief to those whose lives have been shattered by this war as well as work with local Lebanese folks interested in civil resistance. International solidarity, especially of Americans, has been key in making the vital links between those of us from the country who funds and build arms and those of us who suffer under their terror. The link created between us is not very unlike the work I do at home with my community and with the educational and social transformation initiatives I have been a part of as a member of Word and World.

Having a presence here in Lebanon has only served to heighten my awareness of the great work of building relationships with one another in which we find creative initiatives and alternatives to the systems that perpetuate poverty and militarism. I am grateful to have had an opportunity to be in a "circle of witness" throughout the last several years that shaped and formed my faithful commitment to justice. With that being said I can only offer my experience here as a lens into which more people may understand this conflict and our place in it. I don’t pretend to be an expert in any way and so I hope that what I may offer can be useful. Apologies for my inexperience aside, what I have seen here has shaken me to the very core.

The day that Kathy and I arrived in Beirut the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) had dropped leaflets all over central Beirut warning that bombings might occur even in the centre of town where the government buildings and universities (like the well known, American University of Beirut) reside - which are not in any way strongholds of the Hezbollah resistance. For me this was proof that this war was not only about "rooting out terrorism" but perhaps Israel had multiply motivations.

The other point that dropping leaflets in downtown Beirut proved was that Israel believed it could get away with bombing people and places that traditionally would be "off-limits"; in other words international law (which my country has adopted as their law but very seldomly abides by) which was designed to protect civilians and civilian infrastructure does not apply in this war or at least Israel could break this law, commit war crimes and get away with it. We saw other examples of this gross abuse of power in Southern Lebanon when we heard of United Nations convoys attempting to bring aid or to safely transfer refugees from harm in the South were bombed, killing UN aid workers and Lebanese civilians - many "legitimate" news agencies covered such stories if you would like more "proof" this example visit the New York Times, Washington Post, Al Jazeera etc.

What the example helps to provide is a lens into which we all might get an idea of the measure of this war upon those that do not have any power: the impoverish, mostly Shiite Arabs of Southern Lebanon. These are the very people who bore the brunt of this war (and several others in the past) and whose lives have been devastated. Last week, Kathy Kelly, Ramzi Kysia, Michael Birmingham and I visited several villages in the South of Lebanon. We were given a list of places where massacres of civilians has taken place. We wanted to visit these places to mourn with the dead, learn what we could about how this war had affected the lives of the survivors and get an idea of what the impact of the war had been upon the people, land and infrastructure of Southern Lebanon. Of all the villages we drove through (not even just the places we stopped in) not one was sparred from bombing.

Not one.

What we did notice in town after town was that the majority of places bombed were homes, schools, petrol stations, and small corner stores or shops. International law, and more specifically the Geneva Conventions, provides the standards for international law for humanitarian concerns. The Fourth Convention sets the standards of how a military is to deal with civilian populations in times of war. Israel ratified the four Conventions in 1951, the United States in 1955 - neither of which held any reservations or declarations upon signing the treaty that would absent them from the provisions provided for civilians in a time of war, therefore they have full responsibility not only to uphold the law, but we as citizens of these countries have a responsibility to hold our governments accountable to the laws which they have adopted and swore to protect.

It isn't a new story that these countries have not and will not abide but such laws, but if we refuse to hold them accountable and our governments refuse to adhere to these sorts of laws than the more pertinent question may be why we have such laws at all? And what would become of our world if these laws did not restrict the arms of greed and power?

----

Visiting villages in the South was useful for me to understand better how Hezbollah operates in Lebanon. In my response to my friend Jeremy I tried to help provide a lens into which we may reshape how we view Hezbollah - not to be fair to them, but to help us to understand that not all "terror" groups are the same or operate similarly to those we hear most often in the news about. Today in the New York Times there is an article about how aid is being given out in Lebanon and how many aid organizations are having trouble giving aid that doesn't pass through the hands of Hezbollah. When Michael and I visited Sanayeh Park before the ceasefire we met Hassan Fattah, one of the journalists who wrote this story in the NY Times, and he seemed like a descent enough guy so here's the link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/23/world/middleeast/23lebanon.html?hp&ex=1156392000&amp;en=b62857e857a7b28a&ei=5094&partner=homepage

When our group of Voices visited Bint Jbail we met an engineering professor, originally from Bint Jbail, but now living and working in Beirut who told us "there is no difference between the people of the South and Hezbollah they are the same."

Although in a technical sense this is not exactly true, the more important understand that his statement provides is the fact that Hezbollah works as a resistance movement, not as a terrorist cell for Shiites in the South. Hezbollah doesn't travel to other countries, training suicide bombers to kill indiscriminately - it believes it works to provide basic needs and defense to all Lebanese people, especially groups in the South. Interestingly enough, Hezbollah has asked for the unity of all groups in Lebanon to "defend our homeland and rebuild" which immediately points to Hezbollah's, at least politically, intolerance of sectarian division. Kathy. Michael and I noticed this one evening walking back to our hostel from long hours of meeting with the group we have joined here. We noticed that Hezbollah seems to be in favor of defending anyone who is Lebanese, from the most conservative, anti-western, southern Shiite to the leftist, secular, bar-hoping yuppie. Reporters staying in our hostel visited the school Hezbollah has taken as an office in Dahiyeh to provide relief to folks whose houses and property has been destroyed, and they told us that anyone who has some sort of proof that their residence was destroyed may visit this school and receive the promised $12,000 in cash Hezbollah is providing for relief. The journalists watched as stacks of hundred dollar bills were handed out to families with the promise that the rebuilding of their houses will also be provided in the weeks ahead. After hearing stories of the difficulty of folks to receive money from the government after Hurricane Katrina, Hezbollah certainly seems to be providing the means to restore broken lives in more effective ways than our own country even if it was a main actor in causing the conflict to begin with.

Tomorrow I hope to visit Eit eh Shab, a town on the border between Lebanon and Israel where our small group of Lebanese young people hope to help villagers set up generators and water pumps. I hope to have some more reports to post soon.

A quick (and yet inadequate) Thank You to all of you who provided money and means for my travel here. Visiting villages in the South, and talking with families there has given me the opportunity to provide small amounts of relief to different individuals trying to put their lives, homes and businesses back together - your donations have helped a few families greatly and soon I hope to have a report (with pictures) of individuals your labor has helped.

Love and prayers for peace,
Farah Marie

UNIFIL 5000 bombs a day
153,000 bombs in 43 days
10% are cluster bomb munifitions
15,000 cluster bombs packets - each carries 88
300,000 bombs lying around the south

Short Update

2006-08-23T05:33:00.000-04:00

Since arriving on the 11th of August in Beirut I have been busy in grassroots efforts to both bring relief to those whose lives have been shattered by this war as well as work with local Lebanese folks interested in civil resistance. International solidarity, especially of Americans, has been key in making the vital links between those of us from the country who funds and build arms and those of us who suffer under their terror. The link created between us is not very unlike the work I do at home with my community and with the educational and social transformation initiatives I have been a part of as a member of Word and World.

Having a presence here in Lebanon has only served to heighten my awareness of the great work of building relationships with one another in which we find creative initiatives and alternatives to the systems that perpetuate poverty and militarism. I am grateful to have had an opportunity to be in a "circle of witness" throughout the last several years that shaped and formed my faithful commitment to justice. With that being said I can only offer my experience here as a lens into which more people may understand this conflict and our place in it. I don’t pretend to be an expert in any way and so I hope that what I may offer can be useful. Apologies for my inexperience aside, what I have seen here has shaken me to the very core.

The day that Kathy and I arrived in Beirut the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) had dropped leaflets all over central Beirut warning that bombings might occur even in the centre of town where the government buildings and universities (like the well known, American University of Beirut) reside - which are not in any way strongholds of the Hezbollah resistance. For me this was proof that this war was not only about "rooting out terrorism" but perhaps Israel had multiply motivations.

The other point that dropping leaflets in downtown Beirut proved was that Israel believed it could get away with bombing people and places that traditionally would be "off-limits"; in other words international law (which my country has adopted as their law but very seldomly abides by) which was designed to protect civilians and civilian infrastructure does not apply in this war or at least Israel could break this law, commit war crimes and get away with it. We saw other examples of this gross abuse of power in Southern Lebanon when we heard of United Nations convoys attempting to bring aid or to safely transfer refugees from harm in the South were bombed, killing UN aid workers and Lebanese civilians - many "legitimate" news agencies covered such stories if you would like more "proof" this example visit the New York Times, Washington Post, Al Jazeera etc.

What the example helps to provide is a lens into which we all might get an idea of the measure of this war upon those that do not have any power: the impoverish, mostly Shiite Arabs of Southern Lebanon. These are the very people who bore the brunt of this war (and several others in the past) and whose lives have been devastated. Last week, Kathy Kelly, Ramzi Kysia, Michael Birmingham and I visited several villages in the South of Lebanon. We were given a list of places where massacres of civilians has taken place. We wanted to visit these places to mourn with the dead, learn what we could about how this war had affected the lives of the survivors and get an idea of what the impact of the war had been upon the people, land and infrastructure of Southern Lebanon. Of all the villages we drove through (not even just the places we stopped in) not one was sparred from bombing.

Not one.

What we did notice in town after town was that the majority of places bombed were homes, schools, petrol stations, and small corner stores or shops. International law, and more specifically the Geneva Conventions, provides the standards for international law for humanitarian concerns. The Fourth Convention sets the standards of how a military is to deal with civilian populations in times of war. Israel ratified the four Conventions in 1951, the United States in 1955 - neither of which held any reservations or declarations upon signing the treaty that would absent them from the provisions provided for civilians in a time of war, therefore they have full responsibility not only to uphold the law, but we as citizens of these countries have a responsibility to hold our governments accountable to the laws which they have adopted and swore to protect.

It isn't a new story that these countries have not and will not abide but such laws, but if we refuse to hold them accountable and our governments refuse to adhere to these sorts of laws than the more pertinent question may be why we have such laws at all? And what would become of our world if these laws did not restrict the arms of greed and power?

----

Visiting villages in the South was useful for me to understand better how Hezbollah operates in Lebanon. In my response to my friend Jeremy I tried to help provide a lens into which we may reshape how we view Hezbollah - not to be fair to them, but to help us to understand that not all "terror" groups are the same or operate similarly to those we hear most often in the news about. Today in the New York Times there is an article about how aid is being given out in Lebanon and how many aid organizations are having trouble giving aid that doesn't pass through the hands of Hezbollah. When Michael and I visited Sanayeh Park before the ceasefire we met Hassan Fattah, one of the journalists who wrote this story in the NY Times, and he seemed like a descent enough guy so here's the link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/23/world/middleeast/23lebanon.html?hp&ex=1156392000&en=b62857e857a7b28a&ei=5094&partner=homepage

When our group of Voices visited Bint Jbail we met an engineering professor, originally from Bint Jbail, but now living and working in Beirut who told us "there is no difference between the people of the South and Hezbollah they are the same."

Although in a technical sense this is not exactly true, the more important understand that his statement provides is the fact that Hezbollah works as a resistance movement, not as a terrorist cell for Shiites in the South. Hezbollah doesn't travel to other countries, training suicide bombers to kill indiscriminately - it believes it works to provide basic needs and defense to all Lebanese people, especially groups in the South. Interestingly enough, Hezbollah has asked for the unity of all groups in Lebanon to "defend our homeland and rebuild" which immediately points to Hezbollah's, at least politically, intolerance of sectarian division. Kathy. Michael and I noticed this one evening walking back to our hostel from long hours of meeting with the group we have joined here. We noticed that Hezbollah seems to be in favor of defending anyone who is Lebanese, from the most conservative, anti-western, southern Shiite to the leftist, secular, bar-hoping yuppie. Reporters staying in our hostel visited the school Hezbollah has taken as an office in Dahiyeh to provide relief to folks whose houses and property has been destroyed, and they told us that anyone who has some sort of proof that their residence was destroyed may visit this school and receive the promised $12,000 in cash Hezbollah is providing for relief. The journalists watched as stacks of hundred dollar bills were handed out to families with the promise that the rebuilding of their houses will also be provided in the weeks ahead. After hearing stories of the difficulty of folks to receive money from the government after Hurricane Katrina, Hezbollah certainly seems to be providing the means to restore broken lives in more effective ways than our own country even if it was a main actor in causing the conflict to begin with.

Tomorrow I hope to visit Eit eh Shab, a town on the border between Lebanon and Israel where our small group of Lebanese young people hope to help villagers set up generators and water pumps. I hope to have some more reports to post soon.

A quick (and yet inadequate) Thank You to all of you who provided money and means for my travel here. Visiting villages in the South, and talking with families there has given me the opportunity to provide small amounts of relief to different individuals trying to put their lives, homes and businesses back together - your donations have helped a few families greatly and soon I hope to have a report (with pictures) of individuals your labor has helped.

Love and prayers for peace,
Farah Marie

UNIFIL 5000 bombs a day
153,000 bombs in 43 days
10% are cluster bomb munifitions
15,000 cluster bombs packets - each carries 88
300,000 bombs lying around the south

An open Dialogue Between Friends

2006-08-22T08:55:00.000-04:00

Jer and I are friends from way back. Our mutual friend Nancy pointed out to me that we were both in this area of the world doing peace work. I read his blog, he read mine and we spoke the truth we know. Here is our dialogue:

ps. Please go to the www.VCNV.org website to see some of my pics, and click on the title of this post to visit Jer's blog and read about the war from a peace pilgrim in Northern Israel.

JEREMY WROTE

Farah is one of my favorite people in the world. We used to work/live in philidelphia and worked to fix the world together (we still do).We marched together at several peace gatherings. Interestingly, She is in Lebanon helping the folks out there, and I have been in the North of Israel for the last month helping folks here, playing music and delivering food to people in shelters amidst the falling missiles. I've really apreciated her perspective, I hope you can apreciate mine.

---------

Hey Love,

Two quick prefaces;

1) I hate Political squabbling, I'd rather play guitar.
2) I Hate war and my yearning for peace has never been stronger in my life.

But in the name of Truth finding, I'll share my perspective.I was sitting on a porch, playing guitar, and some people started throwing explosive missiles at me.

The people who threw the missiles at me got the missiles and learned how to throw them at me from a place called Iran, who has a very popularly elected by the people for the people president, who openly proclaims;
"Israel must be wiped off the map,"

"There is no doubt that the new wave (of attacks) in Palestine will soon wipe off this disgraceful blot (Israel) from the face of the Islamic world."

"Holocaust was a myth"

(I was surprised when I looked over your blog to see a speech of his. He doesn't seem like a peace-maker)

So I ask myself, what should Israel have done? Let these people, who dream of our destruction, destroy me and this country? Is that peace? At what point do we start defending ourselves? How many Jews have to die before we're allowed to defend our right to exist? In WWII no one stood up for us until 6 million of my ancestors were reduced to human ash.

Conversely, the Israelis aren't trying to kill civilians, that's why they pirated radio stations and dropped tens of thousands of flyers in southern Lebanon warning civilians to leave town. And that's why the Govt sent in ground troops instead of more bigger bombings, to distinguish civilian from war-maker (Guerilla).

No one here dances in the streets and passes out candy when news of Lebanese civilian deaths come through the radio. Hizbolah aims at hospitals. On the Sabbath, they would aim at the old city where the Jews where gathered. I know this for a fact as I was there hiding in a shelter. The people shooting missiles at me were shooting them from civilian houses and even from mosques. That's why they were targeted.

You say this was a war over land, but Israel already gave Lebanon the land she wanted? Gaza was given and still missiles fall every day. The main agenda and platform of this current Israeli government was to hand over land... So why would an army attack a nation in the middle of handing over huge tracts of land? Whats the truth?

I personally believe the publicly elected president of Iran (and check signer of the missiles that were thrown at me) who brazenly proclaims he wants the total destruction of Israel.If Israel put down her weapons, she would instantly be destroyed. If Israel's enemies put down their weapons, there would be peace. No invasions, no anihalations.These are the truths I have found. I hope there is something big that I missed, and that there was some other way to stop these people from trying to kill us/me here.I love you and wish both of us peace and clarity and a day where we can sit on the stoop in West Pilladelphia and play some music without a nag in the back of our minds of our fellow humans plight on the other side of the globe, because it won't exist.

Love Jer (Fellow human planet walker)

MY RESPONSE

Hi Jer,

Thanks for your post.

I think our dialogue is helpful to me and to others seeking to know how to interact with and respond to human tragedies like this war. It is even very interesting that the cosmos had us both in this part of the world, yet seemingly miles away from one another.

I will continue this dialogue as I started it in a public way and hope it is useful and not hurtful to stay open and public about it.

On your first two points:

1) I agree, though I don’t really know how to play the guitar
2) Yes, yes yes – me too.

A little context on why I put up the letter by Iran’s President. I believe that the US government, certain members, desire to create "a new middle east" which includes setting up a puppet government in Iran. History teaches us that this has happened in the past, the most blatant case was when Eisenhower organized a coup in 1953 of democratically elected and very popular secular leader Mohammed Mosadeque – the coup’s premise was to stop the spread of communism. When I was doing an 18-day fast last year in front of the UN in Geneva asking for the basic economic human rights of Iraqis I spent an afternoon with Abdul Mosadeque (Mohammed Mosadeque’s grandson).

The result of the coup was US/UK-friendly yet hugely oppressive government of Reza Shah – I believe the Shah's "reign of terror" helped to sow seeds that led to the oppressive theocratic dictatorship of Khomeini in 1979 which ended all relationships between the US and Iran.

The current Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was NOT popularly elected because he hates Jews (in all honesty he wasn’t really popularly elected), but because of the growing economic disparities in Iran, the geopolitical and religious results of the Iraq war, and also thanks to the "influence" of certain hard-line militias like the Revolutionary Guard and the Basij. Iran as we all know is not a free society, speaking out against the government will get you put in jail or killed this is a working reality in the lives of Iranians living in Iran.

What is also true is that there are approximately 60,000 Iranian, Jews in Iran – they do suffer discrimination, but they are NOT being taken out into the streets of Tehran and executed. I believe this is an important point because it separates the argument or perhaps clarifies – opposition to the state of Israel does not equal hatred of Jews. Opposition to the ways Israel operates through military and economic intimidation does not equal for me a belief that it should not exist. I believe it has the right to exist and exist peacefully. Likewise I believe Lebanon and Palestine have the right to exist and exist peacefully.

I put the letter from the President of Iran to George Bush up mainly because I believe that many Americans do not have great access to a wide range of views in the media. I put it up to give folks who might read my blog another perspective. I think that if we want to understand an "enemy" than we have to know that enemy - I’d like to believe that people aren’t just naturally inclined to hatred but that they are conditioned in a myopic sense of reality and the result is hatred. I certainly do not agree with Ahmadinejad’s words about "wiping Israel off the map" or that the holocaust was a hoax, but if I had the opportunity to ask him why he thinks these things than I certainly would.

Similarly, I have found it useful to speak to members of Hezbollah about their views, aims and reasons for creating war against Israel. The man explained Hezbollah not as an anti-Jew, anti-Israel organization, but that it was created to defend the rights of Lebanese, particularily Muslims, in the South. Like you, many members of Hezbollah told me that if Israel put down its arms so would Hezbollah and everyone would live in peace. Please God may this be true some day.

-------------------------------------------

"The worst crimes were dared by a few, willed by more and tolerated by all." - Tacitus

With that said I want to say these few more things . . . you said,

"So I ask myself, what should Israel have done? Let these people, who dream of our destruction, destroy me and this country? Is that peace? At what point do we start defending ourselves? How many Jews have to die before we're allowed to defend our right to exist? In WWII no one stood up for us until 6 million of my ancestors were reduced to human ash.”"

Peace is contructed, not fought for.

In the "Six Day War" in the 1960's (1967?) Israel pretty much anniliated most of the armies of all its neighbors. Israel has enormous military strength backed-up by the US which has the largest military-industrial complex in the world – in fact a huge percentage of the US economy is based on weapons manufactoring and sales – billions of US tax dollars go to Israel’s build up of its military machine. Hezbollah, Syria and Iran in comparison, and just on a sort of rational level, could not destroy Israel militarily even if they wanted to – combined they don’t have half the strength of Israel's military machine.

The war Israel waged in Lebanon, although sold as a war against a terrorist organization called Hezbollah, was in form, a war against civilians, a war against poor Shia Muslims from the South.

I’d call what happened in this war, without reservation, ethnic cleansing.

Hezbollah opperates in Lebanon as more than just a guerilla militia and that militia is only about 500 – 600 fighters large. It also operates as a social welfare organization and political party. I am not saying Hezbollah is good because it reaches out to poor Lebanese folk, but what I am trying to point out is that a war against “Hezbollah” isn’t very cut and dry - its not like fighting an army –- the majority of Hezbollah is not a part of the militia, Hezbollah operates very differently from lets say Al Quaida. We can’t necessarily say all of Hezbollah and its supportors and sympathizers are terrorists or bent on destruction of the Jews – that is over simplified and simply not true.

Hezbollah fighters captured and later killed 2 Israeli soldiers. This was wrong, but this was not a massive war against Israel or the Jews. We all know what transpired as the war escalated – in northern Israel you saw nearly 40 people killed and loads had to in shelters to avoid being killed by thousands of missiles being fired at you by Hezbollah fighters.

Here in Lebanon, the coffee shop where I other Lebanses young folk were meeting in to discuss strategies to resist this war shook when 600-pound bombs were dropped a 15 minute car ride away from us - we conducted our meetings not knowing if we'd be the next victims of an errant or perhaps purposeful "bunker buster", the terror of this time for me was tangible I can not imagine what it must be like for the children.

Members of our group watched as Mothers pulled their children from the rubble of surprise attacks on apartment buildings in Southern Beirut that killed scores of civilians – in one of the Southern suburbs, Shyah, one suprise attack brought down three apartment buildings killing 48 people including many children.

In Soultineyeh the village I was staying in while visiting Southern Lebanon my friend and fellow traveler, Ramzi Kysia, asked for our driver to stop the car as he spotted something suspicious in the road. Five feet in front of us were two cluster bombs sitting in the middle of the road. Had Ramzi perhaps not been in war zones before (he was a part of the Iraq Peace Team with me) or had decided against stopping the car because he couldn’t quite make out the strange objects I may not be writing these words to you now - I believe he saved our lives. Later that evening, when we returned to the house where we were staying we found four more of such "unexploded ordinance" around the garden outside the house – these bombs were rush shipped over to Israel by the US to aid in its offensive. These sorts of weapons kill indiscriminately and 10% are designed to to explode on impact so that they might "serve" as land mines.

Early the next morning we visited Qana, we visited family members of the children that were killed in home hit around the 30th of July. While we were there we could hear the unmaned drone Israeli survalience plane over head constantly taking pictures of what is happening on the ground.

The Mother of one young boy that was killed, six-year-old Zeineb, told Kathy and I that she had seen the Israeli planes many times, and the Israeli planes can see her. The pilots of these planes fly close to the ground, not high up in the sky. Zeineb’s Mother explained that the pilots knew what they were attacking when they hit the Qana bomb shelter causing the internal organs of the small children sleeping inside to explode, killing them. There are many stories like this in villages all across Southern Lebanon. I believe you have heard many stories like this across Israel too. We will not learn to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.

"How many Jews have to die before we're allowed to defend our right to exist?"

Hezbollah (and lets just say all of Lebanon) is not an existential threat to Israel. Let’s not confuse ourselves and compare the slaughter of the Jews in the Holocaust as the same sort of threat or situation as what is happening here or we will loose touch with the reality of THIS situation and with our capacity and imaginative energy to find roads of peace –- poor Shia’s from the south of lebanon can not be punished for war crimes committed against Jews in WWII. Nor should a state created in the aftermath of such a gruesome, unjust, and horrific slaughter use similar means to impose its will. What may be best about understanding our past, by remembering, is that it offers us an unusual opportunity to choose something different - to look into the face of death and choose to put down our weapons and believe in the great redemptive power of our suffering, and not to perpetuate that suffering in anger and sectarian allegiance. Every human being deserves a home and a homeland not because we are Jews, Lebanese, Israelis, Muslims, Iranians, Christian, Zorastrian, Buddist, peace pilgrims or war mongers - if it were all up to me (and lots of living and dead wise folk) I'd give up this notion of who owns what piece of land on this earth "This we know: The earth does not belong to us. We belong to the earth" (Chief Seattle)

-----------------------------------------------

The remnants of this war’s wreckage, ash and dust, I wear as death’s vestiges, a reminder of what I have seen and heard. I will never forget, and I will never stop working for peace for us all . . .

-----------------------------------------------

Oh my name it is nothin'
My age it means less
The country I come fromIs called the Midwest
I's taught and brought up there
The laws to abide
And that land that I live in
Has God on its side.

Oh the history books tell it
They tell it so well
The cavalries charged
The Indians fell
The cavalries charged
The Indians died
Oh the country was young
With God on its side.

Oh the Spanish-AmericanWar had its day
And the Civil War too
Was soon laid away
And the names of the heroes
I's made to memorize
With guns in their hands
And God on their side.

Oh the First World War,
boysIt closed out its fate
The reason for fightingI never got straight
But I learned to accept it
Accept it with pride
For you don't count the dead
When God's on your side.

When the Second World WarCame to an end
We forgave the Germans
And we were friends
Though they murdered six million
In the ovens they fried
The Germans now too
Have God on their side.

I've learned to hate Russians
All through my whole life
If another war starts
It's them we must fight
To hate them and fear them
To run and to hide
And accept it all bravely
With God on my side.

But now we got weapons
Of the chemical dust
If fire them we're forced to
Then fire them we must
One push of the button
And a shot the world wide
And you never ask questions
When God's on your side.

In a many dark hour
I've been thinkin' about this
That Jesus Christ
Was betrayed by a kiss
But I can't think for you
You'll have to decide
Whether Judas Iscariot
Had God on his side.

So now as I'm leavin'
I'm weary as Hell
The confusion I'm feelin'
Ain't no tongue can tell
The words fill my head
And fall to the floor
If God's on our side
He'll stop the next war.

The Massacre at Qana

2006-08-20T10:19:00.000-04:00

by Kathy Kelly

Two days ago, driving toward the village of Qana, we saw men at work, creating neatly aligned rows of rectangular cement structures that would soon be ready for burials. On foot, we entered Qana, thinking we should at least identify the site where a massacre had taken place when, on July 30th, an Israeli bomb hit a building that sheltered children as they slept. It took five hours for ambulances to reach them. Statistics differ, but the most recent Human Rights Watch report estimated that twenty-three were killed.

Turning a corner, we saw men arranging white plastic chairs for guests who came to mourn with family members in the funeral tradition. The men sat in front of one home. Women were next door.

Farah and I approached four women sitting quietly and tearfully in a small outdoor patio. They invited us to sit with them. For much of the time, we sat silently. Each time a neighboring woman arrived, the women would stand and embrace one another tearfully. They have borne their pain for eighteen days, since 1:00 a.m. on July 30th when the bomb slammed into the building just across the road from where we sat, the building where their children slept. The funeral was delayed until it would be safe to bring families together and to construct the graves.

Umm Zayneb, the mother of six year old Zayneb, poured out a torrent of words, telling the details of what had happened to Zayneb and entrusting us with her views which we could only barely understand. Our translators were next door, sitting with the men. We could see that Umm Zayneb had suffered injuries. Under her veil, she wore a medical hood and a thick brace encircled her neck. She stiffly shifted her tall, slender body, unable to point across the street to what was once a building where frightened children had huddled together for shelter during the bombing. Surveillance planes must have known that children were in the building. Many times, in the daytime, Zaynab ran back and forth between the house and the shelter . Umm Zaynab said we must be able to see how close she was to her home. Yes, we could see. We listened to the drone of an unmanned surveillance plane still crisscrossing the skies above. Couldn’t they see? What kind of censorship would obscure this information?

“She liked to practice English,” Umm Zaynab told us, her words turning to sobs. “She was happy because she could say English words.” This sentence aroused a new flood of agony. The brace forced her to contain her shudders. She rocked diffidently, overwhelmed with grief.

Umm Zaynab asked one of the children to bring a stack of newspapers and magazines. “Here,” she said, carefully sorting through reports on the massacre at Qana. “This is Zaynab.” Photo after photo showed Zaynab held aloft, lifeless, by a strong, helmeted relief worker who shouted his shock and terrible awe. In another, Zainab lies next to Zahara. The force of the explosion seems to have destroyed the internal organs of the little girls, as they slept. Their bodies are not mutilated.

Next she placed in our hands a framed picture of Zaynab, a curly headed little girl with huge dark eyes posing seriously for the camera. One can only imagine her smile.

“Who are the terrorists?” Umm Zayneb whispered, slowly reaching over to point at Zayneb’s picture. Her eyes held mine as she answered her own question. I heard her say “Bush.” “She is saying that Zayneb and the children aren’t the terrorists,” Farah interjected, understanding more Arabic than me. “She says the real terrorists are the ones who kill children.”

Looking at the burnt and blackened hillsides throughout southern Lebanon, you can only imagine the cedar trees that only one month ago made these hills as green as the hills in Israel.

Cana. New Testament scriptures say that Jesus spent time here. Nearby is a small cave, reputed to mark the site of a wedding feast Jesus had attended. A story tells of Jesus’ mother, Mary, entreating the beloved son to show concern for newly arrived wedding guests. She identified them as people who weren’t being served. She didn’t want them to be excluded, left out. Who would listen to a widow’s concern? Her son must help. The tradition tells of a miracle, of water turned to wine.

Qana. Who will listen to bereaved mothers entreating the heavens for an end to the hellish, fiery explosions that slaughter their children. The facts tell of a massacre, the astonishing technological capacity to identify and then to exclude the children from life itself.

A banner hangs in Qana, addressed to Condoleeza Rice. “Rice, they will not see “our new Middle East.”

One Day in Beirut

2006-08-15T03:45:00.000-04:00

Close to Ceasefire

2006-08-13T17:56:00.000-04:00

Here in Beirut, explosions rocked the city during one ten minute stretch in the afternoon and again this evening. Periodic distant thuds assured us that the approach toward a cease fire would be fiery, deadly.

We told our Irish friend, Michael Birmingham, that the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina should help all of us understand how it's possible that profiteering and murderous forces would consider depopulating an area for mercenary gain. Michael is legend for being our most cynical companion, albeit our saint. "Come on," he said, "don't tell me you're serious."

Dan Berrigan's line came to mind, "Serious, serious says my blood in the falling."

Well. My blood isn't falling. I'm in a safe section of Beirut, reading about the rockets exploding in northern Israel and the audible bombs slamming into neighborhoods just a taxi drive away from where I sit.

Many people have theorized about why this war started and what are the ultimate goals. But there’s no doubt that ethnic cleansing has been enforced in southern Lebanon and in areas of Beirut where the Israeli Defense Forces dropped leaflets threatening people with death and destruction if they didn’t immediately leave their homes.

The most serious question persists: how to turn off this war?

Who wouldn't place intense hope, however naive, in a cease fire holding?

But there's more, much more, that should preoccupy U.S. people. U.S. taxpayers must acknowledge their contribution toward Israel's disproportionate and overwhelming capacity to afflict terror and horror on southern Lebanon and the suburbs of Beirut. When reading the statistics about carnage, contamination, displacement, --the unbearable numbers of wounded, the numbers maimed, the numbers buried, the numbers of orphans and widows and parents holding corpses of their children, -- statistics about Israel’s losses and Lebanon’s losses, --when we read these statistics we must remember that since the Bush administration, the U.S. has spent $9.4 billion helping Israel build its arsenal and military. The U.S. sent 600 pound bunker busters to Israel after the war began--and we're almost certain those bunker busters blasted underground in the Dahiya neighborhood today. The U.S. deliberately stalled prospects for a cease fire.

If equipping an area with weapons, including nuclear weapons, was a reliable way to ensure security, Israel and Palestine would be paradise by now. Has the U.S. policy toward Israel safeguarded homes and towns in northern Israel in this sorry saga of spiraling hatred?

Shouldn’t we all shudder and groan wondering what weapons will be used next as U.S. leaders accommodate themselves to ongoing, hideous warfare?

We watch many Lebanese families, displaced and disoriented, walking streets of downtown Beirut with unimaginable dignity, --the women covered, mothers and children walking hand in hand. As these people, forced to flee the simplicity of village life, walk along streets bursting with the modern fast life, I hope that their steps will slow all of us down. I hope that we can, just for moments, imagine walking hand in hand with them while thinking hard about how to turn off this war. The ancient command, envisioned in the Exodus narrative, "Let my people go," might mark all of our steps. We might displace ourselves from our absurdly “protected” comfort zones. We might long for leaders who will galvanize displaced people to free themselves from the reckless warmongers in our world who sacrifice children and stain our earth with their blood.

How desperately we need trustworthy advocates of unarmed conflict resolution, dare I say nonviolence, who can lead us, the willing and unwilling “displaced,” to a place wherein we reclaim our collective capacity to share resources, live simply, and put an end to war.

In Beirut Day Two

2006-08-13T10:12:00.000-04:00

Hello.

I apologize for my first post from Beirut, but yesterday was full of activity and orientation to life in Beirut. As I write this post 500 pound bunker buster bombs have fallen in Beirut. These are huge bombs and although they are far from the Al Hamra district where we are, the impact of them shook the building where we were having a meeting of the internationals who have joined with a young Lebanese group organizing around what to do in resistance to this war.

Kathy Kelly arrived on Friday evening after a very long journey from Amman, Jordan. Although the road in was long, we drove down the coast reminding us of the beauty of our world and reinforcing the absolute disaster of war.

The evening we arrived we were brought up to speed on the situation on the ground in Beirut, which is very different from the situation in the South. We are a lot safer in Beirut and live somewhat in a Beirut Bubble. Although as I write this I can hear bombs in the distance - they have been dropping for over two hours now they fall mostly in the Southern suburbs of the city.

Yesterday, we joined with many young Lebanese activists (some first time activists) in a civilian convoy headed into Tyre (the Arabic name for which is Sur). Over 200 Lebanese groups had endorsed the convoy and we had 52 cars full of folks ready to risk their lives to deliver aid to brothers and sisters in the South. Many of you have heard news reports recently about how Israel has been striking just about anything it can - including, recently, a UN convoy leaving the south with many refugees. Earlier in the fighting four UN workers were killed and the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan went on record claiming the Israeli's purposefully did this. I describe these incidences because if Israel may bomb even neutral parties trying to help the "widows and orphans" imagine what it has been doing in the poor shia parts of Southern Lebanon - who will act on behalf of these brothers and sisters? That is the very question that stirred the hearts of these young people yesterday who were prepared at great risk to themselves to bring this much needed aid to the South. However, as I described in my last post, we were stopped by the Lebanese police just 25 minutes South of Beirut. The reason we were stopped points to an underlying fear here over internal wrangling for who will be seen to have the most political influence after the war. Our group didn't represent any particular religion or political affiliation and therefore was not only unwanted by the Israeli's but viewed as a nuisance by political groups internal to Lebanon. This story is not unfamiliar to almost any context of society be it here in Beirut or for example in the aftermath of New Orleans.

So our group was forced to return to Beirut to regroup and figure out next steps. Last evening and today we have continued in discussion about how to respond as citizens representing many different religious and political backgrounds (I am just happy to be an observer to this process).

As far as my work independent of the strategies of the young Lebanese civil resistance group?

Today we met with sisters from the Daughters of Charity at their hospital in East Beirut. Our little makeshift Voices group is interested in making contacts in Beirut who may have access to children's medicines that we may carry (by foot) to the South to deliver to a group that has an established hospital or relief agency who have not been able to get materials south since the beginning of the war. We believe the need to be eyes and ears to what has happened and continues to happen in the South will be very important for several reasons, but we do not want to go empty handed. We continue to search for ways to either buy this medicine or receive it from a large agency.

There are many refugees in Beirut; estimates put the numbers near 500,000 living in schools, city parks, makeshift tents in alleyways, abandoned building, dorms etc. At night you can't find a street corner or doorway where they aren't a group of refugees trying to live, and everyday more come.

Yesterday we had a meeting on a street that follows the coast. A few weeks ago the Israeli's bombed an oil well area flooding the Mediterranean Sea near Beirut full of oil. The sand in our area was black, dead fish were everywhere - reminding me that the war also has a very dangerous and equally concerning environmental impact which may be hard to remedy for some time to come.

Well, that is the report from day two. I hope to have some time to write a proper message to you, but until then I a grateful for your continued prayer.

Peace to you all,
Farah Marie

In Beirut

2006-08-12T18:40:00.000-04:00

Dear Friends:

Hello.

It is so nice to have a moment to write to you. I feel I am reaching out across these many miles into the heart of all of you whose lives are about doing the difficult work of peace in this world. I feel very lucky to have this connection as almost all the power is out in Beirut now. It is well past midnight and today was very full.

But perhaps first a recap:

Well, I left early from Camden Wednesday morning having had to leave two days sooner than planned in order to travel with Kathy into Beirut for today's demonstration. It was also the only way to go to Beirut with others. I had to drive to Washington to pick up my Visa from the Syrian embassy as a mix up had me praying to get a Visa at all. The last time I had traveled to the embassy I was told I would receive a 72 hour transit Visa - not the most hopeful of news as you can imagine the difficultly of getting into Lebanon these days. Well, the embassy on the second try was quite kind to me and offered me the standard 3 month, double entry Visa calming my nerves quite a bit. That day I met Fr. Jack O'Hara a very old and dear family friend for lunch at a lovely Irish Pub in Arlington before meeting another friend, Kurt who at the very last minute agreed to take my car for the three weeks I'd be gone (thanks Kurt!)

I had a flight at 10 that evening from Dulles Airport to Paris where I met up with Kathy and we boarded another flight to Amman, Jordan. Jordan doesn't have the splendor of other places I have visited in the Middle East, but there is a very dear little hotel, the Al Monzer, across from the Abduli Bus station in the centre of Amman where almost all delegations of Voices have stayed on their way into Iraq. The best way I can describe it is a little like a Muslim run (catholic) worker house - where all kinds of folks find rest and hospitality. We stayed one night with our friend Cathy Breen from Maryhouse in NYC who has been working on behalf of Iraqi refugees in Amman for the past six or seven months - without a whole lot of result. We were also able to see old friends from the Iraq Peace Team, Anna Bachman and Nathan Musselman and here some of the work they have been courageously striving to do in and around Jordan and Iraq.

The very next morning Kathy and I left for Beirut via Damascus and up into the North of Syria then down to Tartus and through Tripoli finally landing in Beirut around 8 p.m. - just in time to dodge the curfew implemented by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) across all of Lebanon. The journey from Amman to Beirut should normally take maybe 4 or 5 hours, but it took us about 12. Going through the North of Syria and down the coast is the safest and now ONLY route into Lebanon. When we arrived we met with a large group of Lebanese young people and a few internationals about the following day's action. Beirut, in a way, reminds me of Geneva with a Middle Eastern, not-as-sterile twist. Both Kathy and I were amazed at the beauty of the drive into Beirut following the Medditeranean Coast.

After the meeting we met with the nice young couple we were staying with and then headed out to have dinner with our friend Michael from Ireland who spent two years in Iraq before, during and after the war. It was lovely to be all together again despite the grave circumstances.

This morning was the first action we came to be a part of here in Lebanon - a campaign of nonviolent civil resistance in the form of a convoy of 52 cars going South in order to deliver much needed aide to our brothers and sisters who are bearing the brunt of this awful war. Our convoy first had a press conference in Martyr's Square before leaving the city for the South. Unfortunately we were only 20 or 30 minutes outside the city when our convoy was stopped by the Lebanese Police and ordered back to Beirut. It is still unclear why this took places and I probably should hold thoughts on that for another time, but we tried for a long time to get through to no avail.

We returned to Beirut only to hear that the cities we planned to visit in the South were heavily bombarded today by the IDF, a risk we knew we were taking traveling in the convoy.

We arrived back in Beirut late in afternoon and had more meetings on what our next steps could be. Just one hour later, lights flickered and then the sounds of bombs began to pierce our conversation. I stood perfectly still trying to hear from which direction the bombs were coming and how far off they were from us. Fortunately we are staying a district that will probably not see any of the dailey bombardments many folks are experiencing in this country.

The last thing I will say is that the UN resolution isn't making a whole hec of a lot of difference in the cease-fire - in fact it has no teeth whatsoever and I believe we will continue to see the IDF pound Lebanon unless the Israeli parliment declares a ceasefire on Monday morning. Until then the IDF will try to do as much damage as possible to villages in the South of Lebanon.

I have been awake now for almost 24 hours and must get to bed for another long day tomorrow. I hope to write again soon.

Pray for peace!

Farah Marie

Amman, Jordan

2006-08-11T02:31:00.000-04:00

Dear Friends:

I just have a few short minutes before Kathy and I have to hop into a taxi for Damascus. We arrived in Jordan safely, thankfully we left before all the fuss in London - we traveled here via Paris.

Today we go to Lebanon via Damascus. We will have to go North up through Syria and then across the border and down the coast to Beirut, hopefully making it into the city by nightfall. There we will meet with our team and then tomorrow morning we will have a press conference in Martyr's Square before heading south.

Our safety is very much dependent on the media. (and of course we have God's protection).

I hope to write more once I reach Beirut.

Love,
Farah Marie

Jesus goes to Lebanon

2006-08-09T21:29:00.000-04:00

Dear Friends,

The gospel reading from today. May God be with us all:

Then Jesus went thence, and departed into the coasts of Tyre and Sidon.

22And, behold, a woman of Canaan came out of the same coasts, and cried unto him, saying, Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou son of David; my daughter is grievously vexed with a devil.

23But he answered her not a word. And his disciples came and besought him, saying, Send her away; for she crieth after us.

24But he answered and said, I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

25Then came she and worshipped him, saying, Lord, help me.

26But he answered and said, It is not meet to take the children's bread, and to cast it to dogs.

27And she said, Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters' table.

28Then Jesus answered and said unto her, O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt. And her daughter was made whole from that very hour.

29And Jesus departed from thence, and came nigh unto the sea of Galilee; and went up into a mountain, and sat down there.

Other Lands Have Dreams

2006-08-07T23:02:00.000-04:00

It should not be a surprise that nature is a force of healing and hope in our world, yet I find that I am so often astonished by its beauty and how that deeply nurtures my soul. Last weekend I had the opportunity, thanks to some new yet dear friends, to visit a little community in rural Connecticut. I was in East Lyme picking up a video camera for my trip and found that I was not so far away from the community of a friend I had made at this year’s Word and World School. Well, the evening before I was planning to come I called him up and asked if I could make a short visit (which became a longer visit) to his community as I had heard much of its healing, transformative power. I found exactly that in the trees, bees, people and pond of little Voluntown. After getting to know the neighborhood rather well I finally rode up the driveway of an old, gray farmhouse with huge windows set on 57 acres of gorgeous natural beauty. There I met two friends Danny and Harold who offered me the fruits of their labor in the fields – fresh and delicious veggies from their garden built into the foundation of an old barn. The rest of the day was a dream.

I was reminded of how delicate the circle of life is and how precious. How we cannot be “one issue” people, we are so very connected to each other and to the earth. I felt imbued by the beauty of the earth, the warmth of the lake, the smell of the forest, the piercing heat of the sun, the clouds of gray and purple, red and gold – how they filled the sky at dusk. Another friend, Paddy, just returned from several months doing the work of peace in Europe. Her heart was so full of stories, concerns, humorous jests, important critiques and interesting ideas . . . I felt humbled and grateful to meet all these friends of this little farm community. For one heading off to a place of deep impoverishment, oppression, war and injustice the reminder that the world can be a different place was a gift. The reminder was, as Tom Fox (presente) said beautifully, we might use of lives to evoke that of God in all we meet, these “sparks of the divine", may grow to great fires together.

Tonight at our little church we celebrated the 30th anniversary of the coming of Mother Theresa (presente) to Sacred Heart. We remembered her and that of what she taught the world through her life – that God would be found in the love of neighbor, and “if we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”

I am daily reminded of the magnitude of love, but the intensity of love cannot be measured as Momma T says, “it only gives”.

Indeed.

I have been profoundly moved by the generosity of spirit I have received in the last few days, and I know that my work is now to be a steward of that love and healing in our world. That when I touch the sick or dying, that it will not only be my own hands but all the hands of all the people who have touched my life with their love and generosity. I hope that the people of Lebanon will feel that love; that it may act as a force of healing and hope.

Many would peg me as an idealist. I am not ashamed of this. I have seen the ravages of war, I have experienced the great despairs of life and yet I hold onto the faith of my brothers and sisters who heard the calling in the Wilderness. In that calling they were beckoned to do the work of the Beloved Community – that dreadful love that Dorothy speaks of has transformed the world and given us hope. I go to Lebanon not just because I believe I can do some good there, but I want to do it for all of us. That we may continue to be vigilant in our love for the world and for our neighbor. So that we may be authors of a different story, not one of unending war and poverty and hunger and despair. We will have to be smart, strategic, creative – we will have to look for new voices, we will have to relinquish old paradigms, we will have to build new movements and we will have to look again at old traditions.

But somewhere in that work, in the grind and the gratitude, we will find sustenance and faith. I believe that.

This past Sunday was that terribly beautiful convergence of the 61st anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, as well as the liturgical day for the remembrance of the transfiguration of Jesus. At Brandywine’s annual vigil near the river we heard the sound of the bomb and listened to stories of loss and survival. We held candles and remembered the dead.

I thought of that challenge, “It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.”

So tonight I hold up that little light to the immense darkness, knowing that as I prepare for my journey I go with all of you – may our prayer for peace reign through our small efforts of love.

With deepest appreciation,
Farah Marie

This is my song, Oh God of all the nations,

A song of peace for lands afar and mine.

This is my home, the country where my heart is;

Here are my hopes, my dreams, my sacred shrine.

But other hearts in other lands are beating,

With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

My country's skies are bluer than the ocean,

And sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine.

But other lands have sunlight too and clover,

And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.

Oh hear my song, oh God of all the nations,

A song of peace for their land and for mine.

When nations rage, and fears erupt coercive,

The drumbeats sound, invoking pious cause.

My neighbors rise, their stalwart hearts they offer,

The gavels drop, suspending rights and laws.

While others wield their swords with blind devotion;

For peace I'll stand, my true and steadfast cause.

May truth and freedom come to every nation;

May peace abound where strife has raged so long;

That each may seek to love and build together,

A world united, righting every wrong;

A world united in its love for freedom,

Proclaiming peace together in one song.

Journey Through Syria

2006-08-06T13:37:00.000-04:00

Leave the matters written of in the first eleven chapters of the Old Testament out, and no recorded event has occurred in the world but Damascus was in existence to receive the news of it. Go back as far as you will into the vague past, there was always a Damascus. In the writings of every century for more than four thousand years, its name has been mentioned and its praises sung. To Damascus, years are only moments, decades are only flitting trifles of time.

"Be patterns, be examples in every country, place, or nation that you visit. . .so that your bearing and life might communicate with all people. Then you‚ shall happily walk across the earth to evoke that of God in everybody. So that you will be seen as a blessing in their eyes and you will receive a blessing from that of God within them."

From Mark Twain's "The Innocents Abroad"

There is an honoured old tradition that the immense gardens in which Damascus stand was the Garden of Eden...

. . .Damascus measures time not by daysand months and years, but by the empires she has seen rise and prosper. . .

and crumble to ruin.

She is a type of immortality.

She saw the foundation of Baalbeck, and Thebes and Ephesus laid

she saw these villages

grow into mighty cities,

and amaze the world with their grandeur -

She saw Greece rise,and flourish two thousand years,

Colonialism and Neocolonialism

2006-08-04T22:22:00.000-04:00

"Tree of Life"
Lattakia, Syria

I am sitting here with three books I have been lugging with me ever since I entertained the idea of traveling to Lebanon. They are: ‚ÄúNonviolent Soldier of Islam, The Badshah Khan: A Man to Match His Mountains‚Äù by Eknathn Easwaran; ‚ÄúColonialism and Neocolonialism‚Äù a compilation of the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Early on in my intellectual education I took a semester study course on colonialism in the Middle East as part of a freshman honors program at the Community College of Philadelphia (for those who may be confused I now attend the University of Pennsylvania). The course was designed to help us learn HOW to read, meaning not literally, but how to identify what an author is doing, how to understand an authors context and scholarship etc. Although the reading selection was interesting, the authors were not exactly who I would identify with in terms of their analysis of the Middle East save a few ‚Äì one being Jean-Paul Sartre and the other Camus (we read one book by a female Arab author all the rest were men and predominately while, Westerns).

Anyhow, I am very grateful for the course and for the introduction I received to some of Sartre‚Äôs writing about being human, and what racism and colonialism do to us both as oppressors and oppressed. Of course Sartre was no an island to himself and his works were influenced by or influenced other thinkers like Albert Memmi, Francois Lyotard and Frantz Fanon. The compilation ‚ÄúColonialism and Neocolonialism‚Äù is a critique of French policies in Algeria from the 50‚Äôs and 60‚Äôs, and helps to shape an idea of how a humanist, a person of conscious (not necessarily synonymous) might begin to think through their own role as an oppressor or as oppressed and sometimes how folks who experience oppression may practice that on others weaker than themselves.

I believe the work that Sartre does is interesting, and though I don‚Äôt necessarily come to the same conclusions (for example I am committed to nonviolence because of my particular faith in and understanding of God and the example of God‚Äôs justice we find in the story of Jesus) however, I thought I‚Äôd put up some interesting passages:

from COLONIALISM IS A SYSTEM

‚ÄúBut above all let us not bring politics into this. Politics is abstract: what is the use of voting if you are dying of hunger?‚Äù

‚ÄúNothing demonstrates better the increasing rigour of the colonial system: you begin by occupying the country, then you takes the land and exploit the former owners at starvation rates. Then with mechanization, this cheap labour is still too expensive; you finish up taking from the natives their right to work. All that is left for the Algerians to do, in their own land, at a time of great prosperity, is to die of starvation.‚Äù

‚ÄúWe, the people of mainland France, have only one lesson to draw from these facts: colonialism is in the process of destroying itself. But it still fouls the atmosphere. It is our shame; it mocks our laws or caricatures them. In infects us with its racism; as the Montpellier episode proved the other days, it obliges our young men to fight despite themselves and die for the Nazi principles that we fought against ten years ago; it attempts to defend itself by arousing fascism even here in France. Our role is to help it die. . . The reforms will come in their own good time: the Algerian people will make them. The only thing that we can and ought to attempt ‚Äì but it is the essential thing today ‚Äì is to fight alongside them to deliver both the Algerians and the French from colonial tyranny.‚Äù

by Sartre for Memmi‚Äôs: THE COLONIZER AND THE COLONIZED

‚ÄúColonialism denies human rights to people it has subjugated by violence, and whom it keeps in poverty and ignorance by force, therefore, as Marx would say, in a state of ‚Äòsubhumanity‚Äô. Racism is inscribed in the events themselves, in the institutions, in the nature of the exchanges and the production. The political and social status reinforce one another: since the natives are subhuman, the Declaration of Human Right does not apply to them; conversely, since they have no right, they are abandoned without protection to the inhuman forces of nature, to the ‚Äòiron laws‚Äô of economics. Racism is already there, carried by the praxis of colonialism, engendered at every instant by the colonial apparatus, sustained by those relationships of production which define two sorts of individuals: for some privilege and humanity are one and the same thing; they assert their humanity through the free exercise of their rights; for the others, the absence of right sanctions their poverty, their chronic hunger their ignorance, in short their subhumanity.‚Äù

from The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Now Therefore, The General Assembly proclaims This Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.

Article One
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act toward one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Article Two
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declarations without distinction of any kind such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.

Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

The Distance from Guernica to Lebanon

2006-07-31T19:41:00.000-04:00

The Holy Innocent. . . .

The Distance from Guernica to Lebanon

by Ramzi Kysia
July 17, 2006

As I write this, I can hear Israeli warplanes flying overhead, breaking the sound barrier and rattling all of our windows. In the distance there are explosions. I don‚Äôt know where the bombs are dropping, but it‚Äôs not close to me. I can‚Äôt hear the screaming of the survivors from where I sit.

Hezbollah and Hamas may possess the ability to kill dozens of Israeli civilians and terrorize countless others, but they are not an existential threat to Israel. As events on the ground have unmistakably demonstrated over this past month, today it is Israel that is a clear and present danger to the further existence of the Lebanese and Palestinian peoples. A danger, if not to their very lives - then certainly to the continuation of their nations.

This is the third, catastrophic attack I‚Äôve lived through. I was in New York City on September 11. I was in Baghdad during ‚ÄúShock and Awe.‚Äù It‚Äôs not something you ever get used to. That so much hatred can live in the world, so much indifference to human suffering‚Äî living under that hatred and indifference is almost as hard as living under the bombs.

As I write this, over two hundred Lebanese have been killed. Almost all of them were civilians.

I think of Guernica.

On April 26, 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, the German Air Force, siding with fascist dictator Francisco Franco, began a bombing campaign against the city of Guernica. Some 1,600 people were killed, and the city was reduced to rubble. Guernica is remembered as the first time air power was used against a civilian population with the intent of causing complete destruction.

When it happened, Guernica shocked the world. Today, we do not shock so easily. Lebanon is being sacrificed without so much as a casual protest.

Israel has bombed power plants, roads, and bridges all across Lebanon. Israel has bombed gas stations and fuel depots, grain silos, lighthouses, the seaports in Beirut, Tripoli, Jounieh and Tyre. Beirut‚Äôs airport is in flames. Beirut‚Äôs Shi‚Äôa suburbs have been almost completely demolished. Firefighters are pleading for help, because they do not have enough water to put out the blazes. (1)

I think of Guernica.

Israel has ordered all of the people living in Southern Lebanon to flee their homes and villages. Avi Dichter, Israel‚Äôs Minister of Internal Security, told us that ‚Äútens of thousands of Lebanese who will flee towards the north will create the right pressure on Hezbollah.‚Äù (2)

Two nights ago, eighteen people in the South were burned alive when Israel bombed their fleeing convoy with incendiary shells. Eleven of the dead were children under the age of twelve. Mahmoud Ghannam, the father of two of the killed children, broke down when he saw their bodies. He struck himself in the head repeatedly and cried, ‚Äúmy God, my God. I can‚Äôt make out the faces of my children. They are burnt black‚Ä¶ Which ones are my children?‚Äù (3)

A copy of Pablo Picasso‚Äôs famous painting of the annihilation of Guernica was hung outside the chambers of the UN Security Council, as a reminder of why the United Nations was created, and of what the Security Council is supposed to prevent. In 2003, the United States ordered the eleven foot painting covered, so as not to even subtly embarrass American diplomats pressing for a war against Iraq. (4)

We are supposed to forget what modern warfare means.

Living in Lebanon today, I cannot forget. I remember Guernica.

Today, Lebanon is being forced toward total ruin. If Israel‚Äôs intent is just to destroy Hezbollah, then why are they bombing Christian and Sunni neighborhoods and towns? Why did Israel wait until July 15 to bomb Hezbollah‚Äôs headquarters in Beirut, making sure to first bomb power plants, bridges and roads throughout the entire country? Israel‚Äôs clear intent is to trash this entire country, smash everything that makes Lebanon a modern nation, and demolish all of the work the Lebanese have done over the last fifteen years to rebuild their country.

As Lebanon is ravaged, U.S. President George Bush loudly and proudly asserts Israel‚Äôs right to ‚Äúself-defense.‚Äù (5)

As Lebanon is ravaged, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rica announces that Israel should continue bombing to ‚Äúreduce the threat‚Äù from Hezbollah. (6)

Do Arabs possess the right to defend themselves from Israel?

As Lebanon is laid to waste, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has secured himself newfound adulation within Israel. Everyone apparently loves a killer. (7)

As Lebanon is destroyed, Olmert has announced that he will refuse to meet with a UN delegation attempting to secure a cease-fire (8), George Bush has publicly refused to call for a cease-fire (9), and the United States is blocking other nations on the Security Council from calling for a cease-fire (10).

On ‚ÄúThis Week with George Stephanopoulos,‚Äù Condoleezza Rice not only defended Israel‚Äôs actions in Lebanon and U.S. policy in Iraq, but said ‚Äú[Mid-East] hostilities were not very well contained, as we found out on Sept. 11, and so the notion that somehow policies that finally confront extremism are actually causing extremism, I find grotesque.‚Äù

Grotesque. As if Lebanon or Iraq‚Äîor even Hamas or Hezbollah‚Äîhad anything whatsoever to do with September 11.

I remember what is grotesque. I remember Guernica.

When Westerners speak of ‚Äúsmashing the infrastructure of terror,‚Äù it is understand that they mean all of the Arab peoples themselves. Arabs are ‚Äúthe infrastructure of terror.‚Äù

Speaking against a cease-fire, Rice added, ‚ÄúWe have to go at the root cause. . It‚Äôs fine to have a cessation of violence. .But unless we go to the fundamentals here, we‚Äôre going to continue to have these spikes of violence in the Middle East as we have had for the past 30 years.‚Äù (11)

According to the Washington Post, going to these fundamentals means that Israel and the United States are going to prevent any cease-fire and continue bombing Lebanon for ‚Äúseveral weeks‚Äù in order to establish their version of peace in the region. (12)

Indeed. I remember Guernica. I understand the peace of the jackboot and whip.

Dare any American or Israeli ever again ask, ‚ÄúWhy do they hate us?‚Äù

The clear conviction being spoken by all of the politicians in Israel and America is that their absolute security is absolutely dependent on the complete insecurity of Arabs everywhere. And the clear lesson being taught to generations of children growing up in the rubble of what once was the shining jewel of the Middle East is simply this: their security can only be dependent on the future insecurity of America and Israel.

Former U.S. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich also took the opportunity to strongly defend this point of view. In an interview on Saturday, Gingrich said that Israel and America must be forceful because, ‚Äúwe need to have the militancy that says ‚ÄòWe‚Äôre not going to lose a city.‚Äô‚Äù

So, apparently, Lebanon is going to lose several.

Gingrich belittled the idea of negotiations or a possible ceasefire by saying, ‚Äúthis idea that we have this one-sided war where the other team gets to plan how to kill us and we get to talk, is nuts.‚Äù (13)

A hundred years ago President Teddy Roosevelt famously told Americans to ‚Äútalk softly and carry a big stick.‚Äù Today the spiritual, if not political, heirs to Generalissimo Franco are riding high in Tel Aviv and Washington D.C., and they‚Äôve gone one better than Roosevelt.

Today, they don‚Äôt talk at all.

Ramzi Kysia is an Arab-American essayist and peace activist. He spent a year in Iraq with Voices in the Wilderness. He is currently living in Lebanon, and working on a book about his experiences.

Sources

1. ‚ÄúIsraelis intensify bombardment of Lebanon‚Äôs civilian infrastructure,‚Äù Daily Star (17 July 2006)
2. ‚ÄúLebanese villagers ordered out,‚Äù AFP (17 July 2006)
3. ‚ÄúJets ‚Äòincinerate‚Äô fleeing family,‚Äù AFP (16 July 2006)
4. ‚ÄúThe Lessons of Guernica,‚Äù Toronto Star (9 February 2003)
5. ‚ÄúMideast flare-up follows Bush to Russia,‚Äù AP (14 July 2006)
6. ‚ÄúRice Says Israel May Need to Prolong Offensive,‚Äù New York Times (16 July 2006)
7. ‚ÄúWar Gives Israeli Leader Political Capital,‚Äù New York Times (16 July 2006)
8. ‚ÄúLebanon bows on border demand,‚Äù The Australian (17 July 2006)
9. ‚ÄúBush won‚Äôt pressure Israel for cease-fire,‚Äù AP (14 July 2006)
10. ‚ÄúLebanon: U.S. blocking call for cease-fire,‚Äù AP (15 July 2006)
11. ‚ÄúRice Defends Israel, Calls Criticisms of Bush Policy ‚ÄòGrotesque‚Äô,‚Äù ABC News Online (16 July 2006)
12. ‚ÄúStrikes Are Called Part of Broad Strategy,‚Äù Washington Post (16 July 2006)
13. ‚ÄúLet‚Äôs face it, it‚Äôs WWIII, Gingrich says,‚Äù Seattle Times (16 July 2006)