Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Saudi Cinemas

I didn't realize that Saudi Arabia has no movie theaters:
"On December 9, the history was created in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. After more than 30 years, a full-length film was accorded commercial, public screenings in Jeddah and Taif for a week.

"The screenings of the Saudi film Manahi had to be approved by Makkah Governor Prince Khalid Al Faisal who obliged, and Manahi, produced by the Rotana entertainment group that is controlled by Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, saw the light of day on the big screen.

"But with this screening, will movie theatres soon be a reality in the Saudi kingdom? Last year, the Shoura Council had debated a proposal to allow cinemas in the Kingdom, but while some members backed the proposal, others dismissed it as inappropriate in the homeland of Islam."

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Hamas Targets

Rami Almeghari's description of Gaza highlights how tough it is to separate military from government targets when the government is a militant organization:
"You cannot find any presence of the government here now. Most of the government buildings have been destroyed by Israeli warplanes. For example the whole compound of ministerial buildings in Gaza City -- including the ministries of finance, interior, education and others -- has been completely destroyed.

"These are not 'terrorist' or military sites. These were civilian buildings that served the population in civil matters. They had nothing to do with any military purposes as Israel always claims. Even the police stations they have been targeting over the past few days, were just civil police stations, guarding security of the people, dealing with traffic and so on. The people working in those police stations were just previously unemployed youths who took the opportunity to make a living and feed their families."

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Monday, December 29, 2008

Gaza Objectives

Ha'aretz seems to think Israel should have objectives other than just hitting hard:
"But understanding is no substitute for wisdom, and the inherent desire for retribution does not necessarily have to blind us to the view from the day after. The expression 'time for combat' still does not elucidate the goals of the assault. Does Israel seek to 'just' send Hamas a violent, horrifying message? Is the intention to destroy the organization's military and civilian infrastructure? Perhaps the goal is far-reaching to the point of removing Hamas from power in Gaza and transferring rule to the Palestinian Authority, headed by Mahmoud Abbas? How does Israel intend to realize these goals? The aerial assault on its own, as one may recall from the Lebanon War, cannot suffice. Does the IDF plan on deploying thousands of soldiers in the streets of Gaza? And what will the number of casualties be at this stage?"

The government says the goal is to create a "new security environment," which is rather vague. The IDF has two exit strategies:
"According to the first scenario, a third party, possibly Egypt, Turkey or even a European country, would volunteer to serve as a mediator between Israel and Hamas in an effort to attain a cease-fire between the two sides...

"Under the second scenario presented to the cabinet, the current fighting between Hamas and the IDF would create 'new understandings' between the two sides, under which Hamas would cease the rocket attacks against the South and Israel would stop its operations."

Both of those seem to indicate that "new security environment" simply means that Israel has demonstrated toughness. I suspect that both this operation and the Hamas resumption of Qassam fire which provoked it are aimed at trying to get some advantage in the new ceasefire.

(Crossposted to American Footprints)

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Sunday, December 28, 2008

A Lack of Commentary

I really have nothing substantial to say about what's happening right now in Gaza. Israel is attacking Gaza because Hamas was firing Qassam rockets at Israel. Hamas was firing rockets because Israel continues to occupy the West Bank and hold Gaza hostage for the return of Gilad Shalit and an end to the Qassam fire for which it is one of the reasons. This constant state of conflict suppresses my outrage most particular manifestations of it.

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Saturday, December 27, 2008

Israel Strikes Gaza

On December 19, Hamas ended its truce with Israel, which resulted in an intensification of rocket fire on Israel. Today, Israel retaliated, with scored reported dead in a major air campaign against Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip.

This does not occur in a political vacuum, as Israel's failure to adequately defend Sderot has been a major knock against the government, one both major coalition partners would like to remove before February's elections. On the Arab side, Abu Aardvark takes a look at the ramifications between the Arab states, as well as within Egypt.

(Crossposted to American Footprints)

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Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Bruce Rutherford

Congratulations to Colgate University's Bruce Rutherford, who not only just received tenure, but has a new book, Egypt after Mubarak: Liberalism, Islam, and Democracy in the Arab World. Here's the blurb:
"Egypt's autocratic regime is being weakened by economic crises, growing political opposition, and the pressures of globalization. Observers now wonder which way Egypt will go when the country's aging president, Husni Mubarak, passes from the scene: will it embrace Western-style liberalism and democracy? Or will it become an Islamic theocracy similar to Iran? Egypt after Mubarak demonstrates that both secular and Islamist opponents of the regime are navigating a middle path that may result in a uniquely Islamic form of liberalism and, perhaps, democracy.

"Bruce Rutherford examines the political and ideological battles that drive Egyptian politics and shape the prospects for democracy throughout the region. He argues that secularists and Islamists are converging around a reform agenda that supports key elements of liberalism, including constraints on state power, the rule of law, and protection of some civil and political rights. But will this deepening liberalism lead to democracy? And what can the United States do to see that it does? In answering these questions, Rutherford shows that Egypt's reformers are reluctant to expand the public's role in politics. This suggests that, while liberalism is likely to progress steadily in the future, democracy's advance will be slow and uneven.

"Essential reading on a subject of global importance, Egypt after Mubarak draws upon in-depth interviews with Egyptian judges, lawyers, Islamic activists, politicians, and businesspeople. It also utilizes major court rulings, political documents of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the writings of Egypt's leading contemporary Islamic thinkers."

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Saturday, December 13, 2008

Kyrgyz Censorship

President Kurmanbek Bakiyev has increased censorship throughout Kyrgyzstan:
"In the past few weeks the Kyrgyz government has been blocking transmission of Radio Free Europe (Azattyk) and BBC radio, both of which have a broadcast range covering the entire country. The ban comes at a time of a worsening energy crisis, rampant inflation, mobilization by opposition movements, and general public disaffection with President Kurmanbek Bakiyev’s government. Today, all broadcasts throughout the country must go through the government-controlled Kyrgyz TV and Radio Corporation (KTR).

"A Kyrgyz NGO, the Coalition for Democracy and a Civil Society, has expressed its concern over the government’s censorship, arguing that this is an attempt to cut the Kyrgyz public off from independent media (www.akipress.kg, December 9). According to the NGO, after censoring local media, the government moved to shut off access to international news outlets, which has a great impact on mostly rural inhabitants."

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Thursday, December 11, 2008

Iceland Notes, Part I

By the time I get a chance to do my traditional write-ups of my Iceland trip, it will have faded too much from my mind. As a result, I'm just posting some brief notes.

First, the first two days of my trip were really windy. The first day, this was because a storm had recently passed through the country; the second, because I was travelling along the south coast, and the northerlies off the mountains and glaciers were brutal. The third day, when I went up by Borgarnes and Reykholt, was much calmer.

Most of the sites I visited were geology-oriented. Iceland is being formed by volcanic action on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and has at least two live volcanoes and many earthquakes every day. Of the latter, only those which reach at least 3.5 on the Richter Scale are reported on the news, which has them as part of the weather forecast.

Because public transportation can be chancy in the winter, I signed up for organized tours on each of my three full days. The first day was the common Golden Circle tour, which hits Thingvellir National Park, Gulfoss, and Geysir. I didn't get to see much of the first, as conditions were too treacherous, but that is where the North American and European plates are pulling apart, and is filled with deep crevices continually being formed by seismic action. Everything was iced over and slippery, and particularly with winds gusts which reached as high as 60 m/s at higher elevations and 20 m/s at sea level, meaning where we were they were borderline hurricane-force, you can understand why, when we got back on the bus, the guide asked if everyone was all right. Normally you walk for about half an hour down a steep path and across the plain where the Althing began meeting in 930 CE, but the path was totally iced over, and we had to call it off.

Gulfoss is Iceland's largest waterfall. Iceland has lots of those due to its many glacial rivers, and when I get my pictures uploaded to Flickr, you'll be able to see the variety of their scenic forms. We couldn't go behind any of them because icicles had formed where we would walk, and there was a danger of them breaking. Geysir has given its name to geysers everywhere, as there are a number of active ones there. The most active erupts from a boiling pool every 4-6 minutes. On the third day, I saw a boiling river near Reykholt that provides many of the communities of west central Iceland with their hot water.

On the second day, my glacier tour took me to Solheimajokull, a southern tongue of Myrdalsjokull, Iceland's fourth largest glacier. The extent of the glacier is marked with polls on an annual basis, and you can see that the retreat of the past few years is stunning. Incidentally, because Iceland is such a new volcanic island, all the beaches are made entirely of black basalt sand. Along the coast you also have crazy basalt formations with names that sound like something from Tolkein, such as the "Sea Stacks of Reynisdrangur" and the "Arch of Dyrholaey."

Food was not as expensive as I feared. Iceland is self-sustaining in meat and dairy products, and every spring has one million sheep. Most diners have huge pots of lamb soup, in which they do their biggest trade. Combo plates of sandwich, fries, and a drink ran between $5 and $7.50, depending on the exchange rate you were able to get. Foreign cuisines seem chancy. We stopped at a gas station diner in the village of Vik, where the menu includes shawarma; the picture looked nothing like it. What seemed a small Middle East-themed chain called "Habibi" listed shawarma on their menu "served with three cheeses and a purple onion sauce." One evening in Reykjavik I stopped in an Indian place that advertised "Traditional Indian Dinner" for around $10. I decided to order something else when I learned that evening's dinner special was schnitzel.

I was interested in Iceland's Viking Age, and so saw sites like Skalholt, the site of the first bishopric, and Snorri Sturluson's estate at Reykholt, which is now a center for the study of his work. Iceland, incidentally, never bothered with the clerical celibacy thing. The Reformation was official there when the last Catholic bishop was murdered with his two wons when they went to Skalholt on a pro-Catholic mission of which I can't remember the details. I can also recommend the Settlement Center at Borgarnes, which is near the grave of the father and son of Egill Skallagrimsson from Egill's Saga. Skallagrim's farm is also around there, though I forget exactly where. I was surprised to learn just how thinkly covered with vegetation Iceland used to be, before the onset of the Little Ice Age in the 13th century.

Tomorrow I'll try to post on Iceland in more recent times.

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Monday, December 08, 2008

Elizabeth Warnock Fernea (1927-2008)

Elizabeth Warnock Fernea has died:
"Elizabeth Warnock Fernea, a scholar of women's studies in the Middle East who delved into the subject as a newlywed in 1956 in Iraq and whose memoir about the experience, "Guests of the Sheik," was the first of several of her works that examined the role of women in the region, has died. She was 81.

"Fernea, who was a professor emeritus of comparative literature and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Texas, died Tuesday at a daughter's home in La Cañada Flintridge after a long illness, her family said.

"When she arrived in the remote Iraqi village then known as El Nahra, she was essentially there as the supportive spouse of Robert A. Fernea, a social anthropologist doing doctoral fieldwork. To accommodate his study, she lived as the local women did -- segregated from men and covering her head and body in public in a black robe known as an abayah...

"The experience inspired Fernea to devote much of the rest of her life to Middle Eastern studies."

Fernea's In Search of Islamic Feminism, while dated, is still one of the best introductions to its topic. In fact, my students have an essay on it due today.

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Saturday, December 06, 2008

Hebron and Jewish Terrorism

I haven't had time to follow all the details, but the situation in Hebron is beyond volatile. Daniel Levy summarizes events:
"The litany of settler actions over this week makes for particularly bleak reading on a Friday night. On the walls of home and in mosques in the West Bank villages of Yatma, Sanjil, Turmus Ayya, and Isawiyya, graffiti has been scrawled reading 'Mohammed the pig' and 'Death to the Arabs', elsewhere cemeteries have been desecrated, Palestinian homes set on fire, olive trees uprooted, tires punctured, and yesterday two Palestinians were shot and seriously wounded by settler fire. Israeli security forces overseeing the evacuation of the Hebron house and sometimes trying to bring order were stoned and assaulted by settlers, along with the customary hurling of choice abuse, notably the word 'Nazi'. According to the Israeli Yedioth Ahronot newspaper, Ethiopian IDF soldiers 'enjoyed' their own variation on the abuse theme, being told 'niggers don't expel Jews'."

Avi Issacharoff doesn't mince words:
"An innocent Palestinian family, numbering close to 20 people. All of them women and children, save for three men. Surrounding them are a few dozen masked Jews seeking to lynch them. A pogrom. This isn't a play on words or a double meaning. It is a pogrom in the worst sense of the word. First the masked men set fire to their laundry in the front yard and then they tried to set fire to one of the rooms in the house. The women cry for help, "Allahu Akhbar." Yet the neighbors are too scared to approach the house, frightened of the security guards from Kiryat Arba who have sealed off the home and who are cursing the journalists who wish to document the events unfolding there.

"The cries rain down, much like the hail of stones the masked men hurled at the Abu Sa'afan family in the house. A few seconds tick by before a group of journalists, long accustomed to witnessing these difficult moments, decide not to stand on the sidelines. They break into the home and save the lives of the people inside. The brain requires a minute or two to digest what is taking place. Women and children crying bitterly, their faces giving off an expression of horror, sensing their imminent deaths, begging the journalists to save their lives. Stones land on the roof of the home, the windows and the doors. Flames engulf the southern entrance to the home. The front yard is littered with stones thrown by the masked men. The windows are shattered and the children are frightened. All around, as if they were watching a rock concert, are hundreds of Jewish witnesses, observing the events with great interest, even offering suggestions to the Jewish wayward youth as to the most effective way to harm the family. And the police are not to be seen. Nor is the army."

The United States supports this in deed if not in words, as does Israel. Decades ago, David Ben Gurion asserted the state's control over the militant right by sinking the Altalena. The Israel of today needs to reclaim that victory by forcibly removing from the West Bank any Israeli implicated in anti-Palestinian incitement or violence. If it does not, the United States must insist on it, backed up by threats to withhold aid. Steve Clemons also has a common sense suggestion:
"The assassin of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Yigal Amir, has acquired star status among many extremist settlers and security authorities in Israel are worried about attempts to generate violence linked to the November 4th anniversary of Rabin's murder.

"This raises the question of why Israel and the United States don't work to classify factions of settler extremists -- organizing to propogate violence -- as terror organizations or terror-supporting individuals.

"Such classification of these groups and/or individuals would allow the freezing of their financial assets in the United States and would create penalties for those who aided and abetted in their violence. Some very wealthy Americans are financing some of the expansionist settler activity in occupied Palestinian territories -- and creating penalties for this assistance could be one way of squelching the violent dimensions of settler activity."

Unfortunately, I'm not holding my breath.

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Thursday, December 04, 2008

Labor's Woes

Gershom Gorenberg predicts the end of Israel's Labor Party:
"The revolution of creating a Jewish state will soon be something outside any living memory. The Labor Party -- for practical purposes the party of the founders -- is also on the verge of being no more than history. Children will struggle before tests to remember what it stood for. Actually, voters today aren't too sure either.

"Polls predict that when Israel holds elections on Feb. 10, Labor may fade to 10 seats in the 120-member Knesset. The real race is between Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing Likud and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni's centrist Kadima. There are proximate reasons for Labor's fadeout, including the party's reflexive return to the manifestly unpopular Ehud Barak as leader. The reflex hints at deeper problems: Barak is a kibbutz-born ex-general with no clear political positions, an embodiment of the old Labor aristocracy.

"Seen in a longer perspective, the conundrum of a movement that creates a state is how to reinvent itself afterward as a party that is relevant to the new reality. Labor hasn't succeeded. Arguably, its long, slow, failing struggle to survive has also stood in the way of creating a vibrant Israeli left."

Parties suffer through humiliating defeats all the time, and eventually come back. Likud, the frontrunner in many polls, currently has only 12 seats. If there's a danger for Labor, it comes from the new leftist block the Meretz people are thinking of forming.

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Monday, December 01, 2008

Iceland

I have returned from Iceland.

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