Filed under: Literary
The Secret Life of Saeed
One day a Jewish boy who had sat down unnoticed beside me surprised me with the question, “In what language are you speaking, uncle?”
“In Arabic.”
“With whom?”
“With the fish.”
“Do the fish understand only Arabic?”
“Yes, the old fish, the ones that were here when the Arabs were.”
“And the young fish, do they understand Hebrew?”
“They understand Hebrew, Arabic, and all languages. The seas are wide and flow together. They have no borders and have room for enough for all fish.”
“Wow!”
The boy’s father called him and he hurried away. I heard them speaking and smiled back at them. The child seemed to think I was King Soloman, and I saw them gesturing in my direction. His father smiled and they came over toward me. The child clearly felt great respect for me and insisted on staying beside me for a while. I gave him a little fish. He talked to it but it did not respond. I told him, “It’s still too young.” He threw it back in so that it could grown and learn how to speak.
Muslims!
Can we maybe stop now?
Also, read this article on Saadawi.
Filed under: Historical | Tags: episodes in middle east history, israel/palestine, zionist highlights
“Yet, as Ben-Gurion’s Palmach battalions in the winter of 1947 were poised to pounce on fields they had not tilled and orchards they had not planted and towns and villages they had not built or lived in, the Zionists, by accepting the 1947 UN partition according to their own lights, also wrapped themselves in the sanctimonious garb of moral superiority as adherents, in a posture of self-defense, to the impartial will of the international community. By the same token, the Palestinians, who since 1897 had stood in dread of occupation and displacement by an alien people, for whom partition was the negation of their elemental birthright to the territorial integrity of their ancestral homeland, and who were now at the receiving end of a more predatory partition plan than Peel’s ten years earlier, were dubbed the aggressors for not meekly submitting to the dismemberment of their country.”
Walid Khalidi – “Revisiting the UNGA Partition Resolution”
And where are AUC students but at the heart of the matter, so that Ayman Nour’s lecture attracted more students than our protest on Monday, and we are the future that will go on to rape this country. The anti-ideological is always susceptible to absorption by liberal representation, and is too easily subsumed as the non-political: the problem with Monday’s protest was not poor organization, and neither is the wider student body awaiting individually tailored motives. The problem begins with the assumption that “authorities” need only be investigated, penalized or resisted on account of their practice. That they (and others) symbolize everything that is wrong with this university and the education it pretends to offer us, is not an intelligible possibility, because the political imaginary that the university has shoved down our throats all semester (and long before) precludes the notion that the wider student body has any particular vested interest in the current climate.
Their consciousness only reveals itself when they are threatened. Since its move to the New Campus, this historical asylum for the elite has asked us to participate in a bizarre performance of “liberal arts education” in an increasingly violent ideological prison and a monument to the security-corporate complex that is New Cairo. Those that previously campaigned for a suspension of classes in reaction to the rumored attacks on students, are not merely worried about their physical safety but rather, the security of their very lifestyle. Like those that lambasted us on Monday, these reactions are a poetic testament: so numbing and reassuring is the AUC New Resort that any symptom of contact with “Old” Cairo necessitates a militant, defensive backlash.
What is at stake here is not only campus freedoms, but the wider implications of a dark and repressive privatization for the integrity and meaning of our education, of the university. No mathematical proof will market “resistance” to the enemy. The object, then, of a protest on this walled-in ghetto of a campus, must not only be the removal of administrators who cement the complex we are resisting, but must also be to do battle with the far more sinister web of pro-regime elements both inside and outside the classroom.
Class War and AUC – Sarah Hawass
“The clash of civilizations would have been easy for the West to win if it had simply pitted the ideas and institutions of the 21st century against those of the seventh. No such luck. In the new mash of civilizations, our most dangerous foes are the Islamists who understand how to post fatwas on Facebook, email the holy Quran, and tweet the call to jihad.”
George Gilder’s global best-seller Wealth and Poverty made the moral case for capitalism. Now Gilder makes the case for Israel, portraying a conflict of barbarism and envy against civilization and creativity.
Gilder reveals Israel as a leader of human civilization, technological progress, and scientific advance. Tiny Israel stands behind only the United States in its contributions to the hi-tech economy. Israel has become the world’s paramount example of the blessings of freedom.
Hatred of Israel, like anti-Semitism through history, arises from resentment of Jewish success. Rooted in a Marxist zero-sum-game theory of economics, this vision has fueled the anti-Semitic rantings of Hitler, Arafat, Osama, and history’s other notorious haters.
Faced with a contest between murderous regimes sustained by envy and Nazi ideology, and a free, prosperous, and capitalist Israel — whose side are you on?
The Israel Test (was he trying to pick a stupid name for his book?)
Filed under: Literary | Tags: cinematic images, israel/palestine, zionists gonna zionate
Elia Suleiman's "Chronicle of a Disappearance"
Land Day
Far too tired to make any coherent comments or even paste in some Darwish or something.
Thirty years of tyranny and corruption were enough for the regime to stretch its arms out in all directions, and so the fall of its head is no longer enough. Rather, it has become necessary for the revolution to continue in order to remove those arms and complete the cycle of the revolution by tearing down the former regime, and building a new one. It was upon this principle that the people of the rebellion worked toward establishing the revolution’s bases and roots everywhere, and Committees for the Defense of the Revolution popped up in various neighborhoods, cities and provinces. Workers strove to establish unions and committees in labor sites. These roots and missions are no less important than the heroic struggle fought by the masses from January 25th to February 11th to topple Mubarak. For if the Egyptian Revolution leaves the body of the regime in the provinces, cities, and official establishments, it will sprout a thousand new heads, so as to hijack the revolution.
