Rooftop Poem from Iran

Great poem by an Iranian woman from a rooftop while Allahu-Akbar sound in the distance. Quite haunting.

Sonia Sotomayor and the Hearing Committee

The Capitol Hill hearing room these days looks a lot like a scene from the beginning Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix in which Harry Potter is on trial at the Ministry of Magic for using magic outside of school. But instead of Harry Potter, sitting under the spotlight of scrutinizing eyes is Judge Sonia Sotomayor (and of course we must remember that she isn’t on stand at a criminal trial but at a hearing confirmation).

But it is difficult to ignore the large forces playing out in Capitol Hill that at times evoke an image of stubborn bureaucrats blocking Potter’s noble mission to overcome a growing evil threat. What’s at play is a tradition of a club that had long belonged to a group of “wise old” white men who interpreted the Constitutions according to their experiences, observations and prejudices against the experience, observations and biases of a “wise old Latina woman” who will potentially uphold the highest law of the land.

For the past three days, some of the Senators at the hearing have been beating the dead horse of what exactly Sotomayor meant with her “wise Latina woman” comment; almost as much as Rowling’s Ministry characters whose only argument to Harry using magic outside of school was: but it’s illegal. One has to wonder, then, if these bureaucrats are not attacking the person under scrutiny as much as they are defending themselves against an inevitable truth: perhaps they are wrong.

Although there is no one Republican stance against Sotomayor, the bipartisan politics in the hearing have been difficult to hide. And it is plain to see that the Republicans are concerned that a Latina woman who gained “empathy” from the President of the United States will not judge based on objectivity, but from personal sympathies, and that deep down inside, she really does believe and practice by affirmative action. They are afraid that her poor background as a child, her color, her race, her name will inevitably tar her rulings.

And yet, these Senators must at least think, or it must have crossed their mind, that the white, male, privileged backgrounds that belonged to most Supreme Court justices has also shaped how they have ruled in the past. The Constitution is not interpreted objectively, nor was it written objectively. It is only with diversity in opinions in a courtroom can a group of justices strive to an unbiased ruling, because sometimes even a wise white man will not come to the same conclusion as another wise white man. But these Republicans have not acknowledged this. As CNN (wow!) has been reporting, it is no secret that Republicans are afraid of liberal politics reaching the Supreme Court.

Perhaps because they realize they don’t have a case against the judge that these men have interrogated Sotomayor on abortion, harped on the 2nd amendment, and ultimately returned to her wise Latina comment. (“But I was being attacked by dementors!”cries Harry. “It doesn’t matter! Using magic outside of school is illegal!”)

Watching Senator Sessions grill Sotomayor over and over, the fantasy fanatic in me eagerly waits and wants Sotomayor to stop, look at him straight in the face, and admit, “Yes, I’m Obama’s woman through and through.” (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince reference if you didn’t catch it). It’s the triumph of good over evil! Hoorah!

At the end of his trial, charges against Harry Potter are dropped because they live in dangerous times and the law should have exceptions to allow one to defend one’s self. In reality, it is terrifying to think that the law can become flexible and molded to one’s preferences. We have seen the dangers to this when the Bush administration used fear to justify counter-terrorism efforts that challenged American civil rights and universal human rights.

That is why I was happy that Republican-turned-Democrat Senator Specter and Senator Al Franken challenged Sotomayor on judicial activism, on separation of powers, and the lack of judiciary accountability (which it perhaps needed given the 2000 elections). No, this is not a fantasy, and we live in a world where we don’t know who the good and bad forces are. The most we can do is tend to the weaknesses in our system. It’s not a bad idea to start in the place that upholds the law of the land.

Woman as Citizen

About two weeks ago, President Nicolas Sarkozy banned the burqa from French society, which - let's face it - was a long time coming. France has always struggled to grant rights for ethnic minorities without compromising France's sense of civil society and equality, and for Sarkozy, the burqa challenges these values: "The burqa is not a religious sign, it is a sign of the subjugation, of the submission of women."

As a woman and Muslim who doesn't agree with the burqa (read: burqa, different from niqab or hijab), I agree with Sarkozy's assessment of the problem. But in this case, his solution limits the freedom of a citizen under the very state system that is supposed to protect her rights.

Mona Eltahawy's take on Sarkozy's position was surprising - she agreed with him. "The best way to support Muslim women would be to say we oppose both racist Islamophobes and the burqa. We’ve been silent on too many things out of fear we’ll arm the right wing," she writes in an op-ed. She continues to say that the burqa is not Islamic, cleverly pointing out that it causes veiled women to get caught up in a perverted logic through which they perceive themselves as "candy."

Yet as much as I want to agree with Eltahawy, I am hesitant to agree that the best solution is to allow a democratic state to force its citizens to dress in a certain way. How would France, then, compare to Egypt that does not allow covered women to serve in the government or on national TV?

Another country that tried to impose dress rules upon its citizens was Pakistan, when Jinnah pronounced the national dress on the country's citizens. That was 70 years ago. Turn to any newspaper these days and notice how identity crisis remains one of Pakistan's worst problems.

When it comes to covering, we've been beating a dead horse with two arguments: ban the burqa and be considered intolerant and Islamophobes; or keep the burqa and struggle with the limitations a man subjugates on a Muslim woman by keeping her covered. This discussion has been almost parallel to the debate of Muslims' rights in western societies after 9/11. But hardly has the conversation really turned towards a woman's relation to the state.

This is exactly the discussion that Sarkozy's ban poses and the one we're not having. As a citizen, a Muslim woman should have the same rights as any other citizen living in that country - that is, after all, what the equality of law allows them. Which means that like other citizens, she should be able to dress as she pleases. But in this debate, either Islam in the name of man imposes rules on a woman, or the state does.

Perhaps it comes down to the fact that I'm old-fashioned but I still think there is something to be said of old-school development tactics - that is, empowering women through education and free thought so ultimately they decide what rights to fight for. This should be a woman's movement after all, and it will succeed, even if it's in the coming generations that we bear witness to this success.

Elie Wiesel's speech

Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel delivered this speech on Friday, June 5, at the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany. He spoke with no notes.

As I came here today it was actually a way of coming and visit my father's grave -- but he had no grave. His grave is somewhere in the sky. This has become in those years the largest cemetery of the Jewish people.

The day he died was one of the darkest in my life. He became sick, weak, and I was there. I was there when he suffered. I was there when he asked for help, for water. I was there to receive his last words. But I was not there when he called for me, although we were in the same block; he on the upper bed and I on the lower bed. He called my name, and I was too afraid to move. All of us were. And then he died. I was there, but I was not there.

And I thought one day I will come back and speak to him, and tell him of the world that has become mine. I speak to him of times in which memory has become a sacred duty of all people of good will -- in America, where I live, or in Europe or in Germany, where you, Chancellor Merkel, are a leader with great courage and moral aspirations.

What can I tell him that the world has learned? I am not so sure. Mr. President, we have such high hopes for you because you, with your moral vision of history, will be able and compelled to change this world into a better place, where people will stop waging war -- every war is absurd and meaningless; where people will stop hating one another; where people will hate the otherness of the other rather than respect it.

But the world hasn't learned. When I was liberated in 1945, April 11, by the American army, somehow many of us were convinced that at least one lesson will have been learned -- that never again will there be war; that hatred is not an option, that racism is stupid; and the will to conquer other people's minds or territories or aspirations, that will is meaningless.

I was so hopeful. Paradoxically, I was so hopeful then. Many of us were, although we had the right to give up on humanity, to give up on culture, to give up on education, to give up on the possibility of living one's life with dignity in a world that has no place for dignity.

We rejected that possibility and we said, no, we must continue believing in a future, because the world has learned. But again, the world hasn't. Had the world learned, there would have been no Cambodia and no Rwanda and no Darfur and no Bosnia.

Will the world ever learn? I think that is why Buchenwald is so important -- as important, of course, but differently as Auschwitz. It's important because here the large -- the big camp was a kind of international community. People came there from all horizons -- political, economic, culture. The first globalization essay, experiment, were made in Buchenwald. And all that was meant to diminish the humanity of human beings.

You spoke of humanity, Mr. President. Though unto us, in those times, it was human to be inhuman. And now the world has learned, I hope. And of course this hope includes so many of what now would be your vision for the future, Mr. President. A sense of security for Israel, a sense of security for its neighbors, to bring peace in that place. The time must come. It's enough -- enough to go to cemeteries, enough to weep for oceans. It's enough. There must come a moment -- a moment of bringing people together.

And therefore we say anyone who comes here should go back with that resolution. Memory must bring people together rather than set them apart. Memories here not to sow anger in our hearts, but on the contrary, a sense of solidarity that all those who need us. What else can we do except invoke that memory so that people everywhere who say the 21st century is a century of new beginnings, filled with promise and infinite hope, and at times profound gratitude to all those who believe in our task, which is to improve the human condition.

A great man, Camus, wrote at the end of his marvelous novel, The Plague: "After all," he said, "after the tragedy, never the rest...there is more in the human being to celebrate than to denigrate." Even that can be found as truth -- painful as it is -- in Buchenwald.

Thank you, Mr. President, for allowing me to come back to my father's grave, which is still in my heart.

Thoughts on Obama's speech in Cairo

Obama's speech to the "Muslim world" in Cairo this past week was nothing less than exhilarating, at least for those in the U.S. who have been waiting restlessly for more honest dialogue about main concerns that Muslim countries have with the U.S. Obviously criticisms have been raised in the media that Obama was (predictably) a bit too vague, a bit too ideological, a bit too contradictory. Perhaps, but Obama also spoke more directly about Israel-Palestine, misconceptions from both the U.S. and Muslim countries, and threat of U.S. imperialism than any other government leader.

Still, I am a bit curious about the decision to make a speech in Cairo. Does where a speech is given matter as much as what is said? It does in diplomatic circles - it presents a certain context, it sets a particular but unspoken background. And at times not so unspoken. Today, Obama spoke at the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany, to make a particular statement. Obama spoke in Turkey earlier this year for precisely a particular reason as well - as he said, because Turkey precariously teeters between Europe and the Middle East. And now, Egypt, which has been a center for Islamic progress for centuries.

And yet curiously enough, Obama has chosen to speak to the Muslim world in countries that are essentially in the periphery of the region the government, and I suspect the larger U.S., considers to be threatening and unstable. I bring this up because Obama not only dealt with issues concerning Islam, religion and humanity. He spoke of problems concerning political development, democracy, women's rights, and Israel-Palestine. Thus he was not speaking to the Muslim world, but to an unstable region.

To distinguish a Middle East identity - geographically or ideologically - is simplistic and exclusive. And yet, to state that Egypt and Turkey are in the periphery of this amalgmation of a region requires some sort of explanation of what this core is - for which I admit I have none (we might as well mix Afghanistan and Pakistan into the mix, further blurring geographic boundaries). But it is no secret that Turkey has actively tried to remove itself from a largely Middle Eastern identity; and Egypt is shunned by many states in the region precisely because of its close ties to the U.S. and Israel.

So what precisely has been the impact of Obama's speech in the Muslim world? What would the impact have been if he had delivered the speech in Palestine, or Pakistan, or Iraq? What are we dealing with here - states or religion? I'm afraid the solution is getting as murky as the problem.

Pearls Before Breakfast

This article is two years old but still incredible and fascinating. Thanks to Stobo for sending it. (Take time to watch the videos).

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html

Bilo

Bilo plodded back into the living room, his hacking cough announcing his arrival. One arm was carefully wrapped around a folder of dress sketches, dating from the 1960s to 2000. Just a handful remained now of the thousands of sketches he had burned before returning to Egypt.

After landing in Cairo in 1997, Nabil Jamal, lovingly known as Bilo, went straight to a small hotel in Zamelek and never left. The hotel was owned by a good friend, and living there at no cost, Bilo had no desire to look for his own house. Without any savings, Bilo resigned himself to spending his retirement in Cairo after decades in Paris and New York. His few sketches and pictures remained the only material evidence of his past lives, for even Egypt had changed under years of post-revolution.

“It was like I had walked out of a beautiful house and came back and found it all beaten up and tattered. The streets have gone dirty. Look at the traffic. We didn’t have 1/10 of the cars we have now,” Bilo said.

The Cairo that Bilo remembered was of dressing the Queen and actresses. Nightly parties, ballets, and the English theater company were regular rituals, and at the Opera House, he would stand alongside his friends when the national anthem played to honor King Farouk’s entrance.
Bilo pulled out a carefully preserved black and white photograph, as if presenting evidence. A young group of seven smiled back in the midst of a party, and in front sat an Arab James Dean, fully aware of his good looks. The face across from me had now turned wrinkled and spotted, hoisting up thick glasses.

The hostess’s husband, Bilo told me nonchalantly, had disappeared suddenly. Ahmed Kamal had been politically active, and had spoken against Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser. He left his house in Al-Maadi one day in 1956 and never returned.

But Bilo had grown impatient with the conversation. After all, the topic at hand was the Cairo of his youth, filled with theater, parties, and…

“Finola O’Shannon!” he said the name with excitement and careful enunciation as he discovered a photograph.

He spent every night in the club with the actress while she was visiting Cairo. The last time he saw her was when he had surprised her in London after leaving Egypt in 1963. She died from cancer a few years later.

Finola was one of Bilo’s two loves. Both brief, and both lost. “The one girl I wanted to marry was so much in love with me that she said ‘I’ll marry you when your father gets your money back.’ That’s what her love was like.” His bitter tone lingered in the silence as he glanced away from me.

Bilo’s father had come to Egypt in 1923 from Palestine, where he had met Bilo’s Lebanese mother. Although living in Egypt, he had refused to sell the land in Palestine that he owned with his two brothers. When Israel was formed in 1948, the Jamal brothers lost all their properties.
It was the only time that Bilo’s father’s history intertwined with his own. Otherwise, he never questioned his father about Palestine, and his father never spoke of it.

War had shaped Bilo’s entire life: wars that were personal and never spoken of, wars that raged outside his front door, and wars that were seemingly far, but that still left damage in their wake.

During World War II, Bilo’s father closed down his travel agency since his only client was a German company. “And the Germans that came in came without a visa,” Bilo said with a laugh. “They came in with their guns and their tanks and their airplanes. They came into Alexandria, because there were a lot of Egyptians who were very Nazi and they had pictures of Hitler in their apartments. In fact, even the King was pro-Hitler.”

But it would not be long before the King himself was ousted from power. King Farouk’s downfall, the revolution and subsequent Nasserism, while changing Egypt, had changed the course of Bilo’s life as well. There was no more royalty to dress. “All the millionaires were trying to sell their stuff to live on, especially the royal family. [Nasser] was giving them pennies to live on.”

Unemployment took Bilo to London where his friends found him work, then to a chance job as a fashion designer in Paris for 17 years, and finally to New York City for 16 years until he no longer had a job or money. He returned to Cairo after having spent his savings over the years on cashmere sweaters, Parisian theater and travels with friends. And when he came back, he found Cairo worse than it had been after the revolution. There was no money left, no jobs for the youth, and no way to get out.

From the hotel in Zamelek now, Bilo hears the call to prayer five times a day. “I think they’ve come to a point where they are desperate,” he said quietly. “They think by praying, they are going to go straight upstairs. They pray and pray and pray…”

Was he not religious, having grown up in a devout Christian household and living in a country where every hour was a reminder of God? “I don’t go to church, but I have to pray every single night,” Bilo said. “I pray for the souls of my parents, and mostly for the friends that passed away, and some of them passed away pretty young.”

His remaining friends visit him at the hotel as they pass through Egypt, bringing him beer that inevitably offend the Muslim receptionist, or shirts that he refuses to wear for lack of good fashion sense. His weeks are booked with dinners with relatives of once good friends - prominent families in Zamelek, younger generations of the Sadat family and former royalty who now reside in Alexandria. But he returns, always, to his room at the hotel to watch the world affairs that once bored him. Egypt. Lebanon. Gaza.

As he stood up, he looked down at his swollen feet peeking from his black sweat pants. “This is the only thing I inherited from my father,” he said with a quiet laugh. “I refused to take insulin until 6 years ago. Now I can hardly walk. Look at me. I walk like a penguin.” He waited for no answer as he plodded down the hallway to his room.