New blog

I've moved my blog to Wordpress!

Check out:
http://rozinali.wordpress.com/
for more of my musings on the Middle East, South Asia, U.S. Foreign Policy, etc. And please bear with me as I slowly build the blog.

I haven't decided if I'm going to continue to write here, but I may come back to it for personal reflections. Thanks for reading!

Action, reaction and race

For the past year, I've been thinking about how we perceive and talk about race and racism under Obama's presidency. Well, more than a year. I explored the issue in an article I wrote for The Daily Star in Beirut, where I asked Lebanese from around the city what they thought of this African-American candidate.

Although gathering opinions on the world's perception of Obama was enlightening, it wasn't quite the amorphous hurdle I was grasping to understand. Like most others in the States, I'm more curious about how we, as individuals and as a society, think of, react to, and mold the idea of race. Of course, it's more than an idea. Race is a reality that is deeply confused with and embedded with a violent and contentious political history, class disparity, stigmas, and now a confused and often unreadable "black" president. And like most others in the States, I'm clawing my way through the hubbub for an answer.

I don't think we've become particularly enlightened about race, or come to a higher understanding of it. But I do think that politicians, the media, and fringes of our society have become obsessed with it in an almost damaging way.

The Shirley Sherrod mess is only evidence of this. Granted, the accusations that led to Sherrod's firing from her job came from a questionable and unethical source (I'm being nice to Breitbart here with my choice of words), but the fact that it was her views on race that caused her to be fired should raise some eyebrows. Five years ago, Sherrod would probably not have made it in the news for her opinions (even if she had incendiary ones), let alone have been fired for them. Now, a heavily edited video attempting to claim racism causes a scandal lasting days.

Racism is important to acknowledge, and anyone who perpetuates it in violent and negative ways should be held accountable. But the sensationalist manner in which topics of race and racism have overtaken this country is counterproductive, and it masks the actual human and civil rights violations our country perpetuates. What does it say about our society that we are willing to act upon and react to a comments on race with such expediency, and yet have been largely silent (in terms of action) regarding the contentious Wikileaks video on Iraq, reports of use of torture in Guantanamo Bay, and the obscene waste in financial and human resources on ineffective U.S. counter-terrorism institutions. Why has not anyone been held accountable for such atrocities?

Ultimately, this discrepancy in "promoting social justice" leads to one rather alarming question: why are we really obsessed with race?

Matters of politics and prose

Some high school students taking the Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition test are protesting the College Board's decision to include a statement regarding exile by Edward Said. They take offense at Said being described as a "Palestinian American", when other authors' nationalities were not indicated. According to these students, the mention of Said's background is political and anti-Israel, and they won't stand for it.

They feel so strongly, that they haven't gone to the College Board with their complaint, but instead have formed a Facebook Group to impress upon the Board how many people agree with them.

The Said quote in question reads: “Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and its native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.”

I couldn't find the group page on Facebook, and I'm not sure if it was eventually taken down. I really hope so, for the sake of the high school seniors who started it. If speaking the term "Palestine" in the American education system is considered anti-Israel, then we are operating with a huge blind spot that refuses to acknowledge the reality of Israel's past and present. Props to the College Board for taking initiative and challenging high school students with questions and prompts that aren't "safe topics." I hope it, too, doesn't cave to the ludicrous victimization card pro-Israelis in the U.S. overplay.

But really, such protest speaks a lot to how one-sided discourse regarding the situation has limited our ability to critically think about state-hood, nation, homeland, and especially, exile. Ironically enough, exile is a language that both Israelis and Palestinians can understand. Actually, it's one that people around the world can relate to, one that has inspired brilliant, tragic and beautiful poetry.

Does the nationality of these writers matter? Of course it does. Nationhood is that very thing that has shaped them as poets and activists, and it's the one thing they cannot attain. To ignore that is to wipe out an entire people - once again - from the pages of history.

-------

"In October 2000 the world was tuned in to the Sydney Olympics. In the hostel, on D-day we were all glued to the TV set eager for the opening ceremony to begin. Halfway into the event I realized that I couldn't see clearly anymore and my face felt wet. I was crying. No, it wasn't the fact that I clearly wished I was in Sydney or the splendour of the atmosphere or the spirit of the games, I tried hard to explain to those around me. Bu they couldn't understand, couldn't even begin to understand....how could they? They belong to a nation. They have never had to conceive of its loss, they have never had to cry for their country. They belonged and had a space of their own not only on the world map but also in the Olympic Games. Their countrymen could march proudly, confident of their nationality, in their national dress and with their national flag flying high. I was so happy for them."

-- Tenzin Tsundue, Tibetan freedom activist




"Bicentennial Poem #21,000,000"

I know
the boundaries of my nation lie
within myself
but when I see old movies
of the final liberation of Paris
with French tanks rumbling over land
that is their own again
and old French men weeping
hats over hearts
singing a triumphant national anthem.

My eyes fill up with muddy tears
that have no earth to fall upon.

-- Audre Lorde "Black Unicorn", a Caribbean-American writer and poet




"...as a writer or artist, even though I run no state and command no
power, I am entitled to feel that I am my brother's keeper and my
brother is the whole of mankind. And this is the relevance to me of
Peace, of freedom, of detente and the elimination of the nuclear menace.
But out of this vast brotherhood, the nearest to me and the dearest are
the insulted and the humiliated, the homeless and the disinherited, the
poor, the hungry and the sick at heart. And this is the relevance to me of
Palestine, of South Africa, of Namibia, of Chile, of my own people and
people like mine."
-- Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Pakistani poet, self-exiled in Beirut

Trial without rule of law?

As Omar Khadr's pre-trial hearings wear on, it's becoming increasingly obvious that law and conventional rules of war take a back seat to the U.S.'s do-as-we-please policy - and it’s met by only silence from the international community. 



Khadr, a Canadian citizen, is the 23-year old Guantanamo inmate who was taken into custody when he was 15 for allegedly killing a U.S. Special Forces medic in Afghanistan with a grenade. Khadr will be tried this summer under a military court, a relatively new and flawed system.

How new? Robert Gates signed off on the revised Manual for Military Commissions, which details the rules and procedures of a military trial, on Tuesday night. The manual was given to prosecution and defense lawyers hours before the hearings began, and the judge reportedly received it 15 minutes prior to the start of the hearing. [http://www.aclu.org/blog/human-rights-national-security/making-it-we-go-along]

But that’s just only one of the most incredible parts of this entire case. From his custody in 2002 to the current hearings, Khadr’s case has been fraught with instances of U.S. bending international rules of war and punishment in order to accommodate its own agenda.

In 2002, the U.S. ratified the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict, under which the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child told the U.S. to:

“Conduct investigations of accusations against detained children in a prompt and impartial manner, in accordance with minimum fair trial standards. The conduct of criminal proceedings against children within the military justice system should be avoided.”

The U.S. didn’t react to the recommendation. Khadr has been in custody since 2002, and despite efforts by his lawyers to dismiss charges against him, or at least grant him a civilian trial, he is looking at a military trial with prosecution aiming for a 25-40 year sentence.

But Guantanamo Bay Prison is enough of a slap in the face of international law. Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions prohibits torture of prisoners of war while they are in custody, but the base has become notorious for acts of torture against inmates. Khadr alleges that any statement he gave to interrogators was taken under similar circumstances in which he was sleep-deprived and received threats of rape. Khadr's interrogator, FBI Special Agent Robert Fuller, isn't denying that he heard rumors about torture in Guantanamo Bay in 2002.

Fast forward through the years of keeping a juvenile in a detention center that tortures inmates, to the military hearings this week. David Frakt, Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserve JAG Corps argued yesterday in Huffington Post that the revised manual for Military Commissions allows the government to broaden the scope of what is considered a war crime and who is considered an unlawful enemy combatant:

"Unfortunately, in enacting the Military Commissions Act of 2009, Congress did not strictly limit the jurisdiction of the military commissions to law of war violations and included non-war crimes like "Providing Material Support to Terrorism," a crime which even the Justice Department was forced to admit was not a traditional law of war offense. The Secretary of Defense, in publishing the new Manual for Military Commissions, has done Congress one better, attempting by regulation to broaden the scope of a real war crime to include conduct that does not violate the law of war in order to ensure convictions where they would otherwise be doubtful."

The U.S. doesn’t make it a secret of not always adhering to international norms of law. Under the section of Murder in Violation of the Law of War, the Manual claims: "an accused may be convicted in a military commission. . . if the commission finds that the accused engaged in conduct traditionally triable by military commission (e.g., spying; murder committed while the accused did not meet the requirements of privileged belligerency) even if such conduct does not violate the international law of war."

It should be clear by now that the U.S. will continue to follow its own standards of engagement in war and law. But why has the rest of the world decided that this is acceptable? Why hasn't the Canadian government stepped in to protect one of its citizens, especially one who was arrested when he was 15? After the U.S.’s decision to invade Iraq, despite UN’s opinion, and after 8 years of Guantanamo, the U.S. should not set the precedent of acceptable law for rules of engagement and prisoners of war. But for whatever reason, the international community has given the U.S. a moral green card, when it clearly doesn’t deserve one.

From Arizona to Afghanistan

Ta-Nehisi Coates published a couple of fantastic passages from Macbeth on his blog. Read his entire post if you get a chance:

Second Murderer

I am one, my liege,

Whom the vile blows and buffets of the world

Have so incensed that I am reckless what

I do to spite the world.

First Murderer

And I another

So weary with disasters, tugg'd with fortune,

That I would set my life on any chance,

To mend it, or be rid on't.

Flawed arguments, on repeat

Bret Stephens just reminded me there's a reason why I usually don't read opinion articles from mainstream media: they pretend to postulate theses against the Beltway conventional wisdom, but really only reiterate the ignorant crap that hinders productive conversation.

Today in the Wall Street Journal, Stephens writes the reason "they" [the Jihadists/Arabs/Muslims...which he conflates into one] really hate us [Americans] is because of scandalous temptresses such as Lady Gaga, and not the Israeli settlements on Palestinian property. I'm serious.

His source is Sayyid Qutb, the radical Islamist Egyptian thinker whose written philosophies in the 1950s influence the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Qaeda. Stephens sites from Qutb's relatively less popular essay "The America I have seen," which was written after his stay in conservative Greeley, Colorado, and most likely as a response to a changing and "modernizing" Egypt (points that Stephens forgets to mention):

"The American girl," he noted, "knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs and she shows all this and does not hide it." Nor did he approve of Jazz—"this music the savage bushmen created to satisfy their primitive desires"—or of American films, or clothes, or haircuts, or food. It was all, in his eyes, equally wretched.

...

Bear in mind, too, that the America Qutb found so offensive had yet to discover Elvis, Playboy, the pill, women's lib, acid tabs, gay rights, Studio 54, Jersey Shore and, of course, Lady Gaga. In other words, even in some dystopic hypothetical world in which hyper-conservatives were to seize power in the U.S. and turn the cultural clock back to 1948, America would still remain a swamp of degeneracy in the eyes of Qutb's latter-day disciples.

This, then, is the core complaint that the Islamists from Waziristan to Tehran to Gaza have lodged against the West. It explains why jihadists remain aggrieved even after the U.S. addressed their previous casus belli by removing troops from Saudi Arabia, and why they will continue to remain aggrieved long after we've decamped from Iraq, Afghanistan and even the Persian Gulf. As for Israel, its offenses are literally inextricable: as a democracy, as a Jewish homeland, as a country in which liberalism in all its forms, including cultural, prevails.

Not sure what to tackle first. Let's start with geography. Stephens is absurd in assuming that Qutb, who encouraged Sharia Law, shaped Jihadists' ideology across the Middle East, when the role of religion and politics developed quite differently and distinctly from Gaza to Saudi Arabia to Iran. If Stephens needs any reminding (sad that he would), Iran is a Shia state - with an Islamic government, yes, but one that is quite distinct from a state with Sharia Law. Shia and Sunni political ideology has manifested throughout history, which is why constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran is unprecedented - not Sharia, but an experiment.

A quick note about his timeline: it's incredible that Stephens believes there was no push for "modernism" or any influence of American and/or foreign culture in the Middle East before Elvis or birth control pills. The 1950s and 1960s was a vulnerable and formative period in Middle East history. Not only were countries and socieities struggling to balance modernism with religion, but also a new nation-state system with forces of monarchy and foreign governments that were willing to "buy" out ME states for their support in the Cold War. It wasn't the American temptress that citizens were worried about, but their ownership of land and identity being stripped away from them.

Flawed history: Stephens must be zoned into an obscure news source, because in the real world, the U.S. has in fact NOT left Iraq, Afghanistan or the Persian Gulf. And if not militarily, then it certainly holds influence in countries monetarily and through the CIA. The U.S. presence in the Middle East hasn't been doubted for the past 50 years.

What's disgusting of all, is that by claiming that Jihadists are obsessed with the "American temptress" image, Stephens dismisses the legitimate arguments of those Jihadists, Muslims, Palestinians, and others, who do find fault in Israel's settlement activity. Just because Jihadists use a simplistic "down with Americanization" argument does not mean that Israel's hostile tactics are not a legitimate concern. The fact that Biden's and Patraeus' remarks were in fact met with hostility means that the settlement issue is not readily accepted in conventional wisdom as a reason why "they hate us" - as Stephens states. [As a side note, using the "modernism" argument to theorize "why they hate us" was used 9 years ago and thrown out as flawed over the course of several years...not only is there nothing original in this article, but the argument is incredibly archaic]

Just a final point, trying to use the Israel/ME issue to censor Lady Gaga because she makes you uncomfortable is pathetic. Here, 1st amendment rights should ring a bell. Besides, I'm not even sure if Qutb would actually call her the "American temptress." Hell, even Americans can't figure her out. Btw, Bret Stephens: have you even seen Arab music videos? Next time you insinuate that there is no sexuality or seduction in the Middle East, you may want to look one up on Youtube.

The only thing that makes me feel slightly better about WSJ having printed this worthless article is the hope that they were following the new media business model: clickability.

When accountability is a sham

On November 19, 2005, a group of Marines was attacked in Haditha, Iraq by a roadside bomb that killed one soldier. The squad leader, Sgt. Wuterich, started shooting at Iraqis fleeing the scene. His team followed suit. By the end of the episode, 24 Iraqi civilians - including women and children - were dead. Wuterich later claimed that he believed his squad was in danger and does not regret shooting at the Iraqis.

The "Haditha massacre" became a humiliating blotch for the U.S. military during the Iraq War. But five years and a long court process later, it may not amount to much of anything. A military judge tomorrow may clear Wuterich - the only defendant left - of the charges against him.

Let me just simplify how this ruling speaks to me: the U.S. is willing to try terrorist suspects in military tribunals, and are willing to allow them to undergo torture and the death penalty for possible ties to Al Qaeda, but are not willing to apply the rule of justice to cases of U.S. soldiers unfairly killing Iraqi civilians.

Is this because American civilians are more valuable than Iraqi civilians? In a war, unjustified killings of civilians on either side is considered a crime. Not only is Iraq in war, but the U.S. is as well. Sadly ironic is that while Iraqis get the battleground, Americans get to maneuver the "rules of war," which apparently allows them to kill Iraqi civilians, and illegally imprison suspects for years.

I've heard the argument that in a war, there is no justice. I find it weak, and frankly disgusting. If the U.S. plans on ending this war soon, it needs to return back to a state of normalcy, which requires that criminals be held accountable for their actions. U.S. troops are already leaving Iraq, but where is the rule of law?