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Turkish prime minister disses Arab world: Muslim leaders’ response to Gaza suffering ‘pitiful.’
He made the remarks when asked to compare the attitude of other Muslim countries to Turkey’s vehement outbursts against Israel over its devastating war on Gaza last year and its ongoing blockade of the impoverished enclave.
“The governments have failed to display the reactions that the world’s Muslims expected from them. And this has been a pitiful aspect of the matter,” Erdogan told reporters.
An excellent diary at dkos by an Arab American (non muslim) about collective blame.
Arab environmental activism gets going in Copenhagen.
A nice feature article that profiles several Arab activists participating in the protests.
Three days before the U.N. climate talks kicked off in Copenhagen, Tarak Tayara was told he was accepted as an official observer at the negotiations. The 28-year-old hopped on the next flight out of Lebanon and landed the next day in Denmark, ready for two weeks of protesting climate change as world leaders attempt to reach a global climate treaty. While thousands of youth have gained official status by the U.N. to watch the negotiations at the Bella Center in Copenhagen, only a tiny fraction of these young activists, like Tayara, hail from Arab countries.
….Tayara is in Copenhagen with a group called IndyAct, short for the League for Independent Activists. The group formed in Lebanon after one of the worst environmental disasters in Lebanese history. In 2006, more than 10,000 tons of fuel spilled in the Mediterranean as a result of fighting between Hezbollah and Israel. Based in Beirut, the IndyAct head office attracts activists from across the Arab world.
Tayara is wearing a shirt with the words, “Arabs against oil,” a message intended to challenge stereotypes about Arabs.
The source of all problems in the Arab world: Regimes or people?
Bloggers who cover the Arab world – both Arabs and non-Arabs – are talking about UK reporter Brian Whittaker’s new book, “What’s Really Wrong With the Middle East.” The provocative thesis of his book, writes The Arabist blogger, “is that there is too much focus on how bad the Arab regimes are not enough of Arab societies’ problems: patriarchy, intolerance, misogyny, etc.”
Whittaker writes about his book:
My purpose in writing the book was to present an alternative view of the “Arab problem”. One that would challenge the neocons’ preoccupation with “regime change” and their tendency to equate freedom with free elections (but little else). And one that would also challenge the popular Arab notion that all the region’s problems are the fault of foreign powers.
It is on this latter point that the book steps into what, for many Arabs, is very sensitive territory. Blame foreigners, even the regimes if you like, but the people are – and must remain – blameless.
Rob (formerly of The Arab Shack, now with a new blog) says it boils down to society’s relation to the individual:
…in societies where there is overwhelming pressure to conform and stay inside the box, the individual’s creative capabilities are wasted. When you take away the creative dimension, you get stagnation.
The Angry Arab (As’ad AbuKhalil) accuses him of racism. Whittaker responds,:
There is nothing racist or illegitimate about pointing to the flaws in a society and discussing how they might be addressed, as I do in the book. That is very different from presenting them as an immutable part of the national character, hard-wired into people’s genes.
A different emphasis in this news story about the UN report on education in the Arab world than the one I linked earlier.
Arab states could face political and social instability if they under invest in the education of their young, expanding populations, a regional education report said on Wednesday.
A lack of political will rather than insufficient resources are at the root of the region’s inadequate education systems, with governments spending on security rather than education in a bid to control their people.
….The correlation between education and economic growth in the Arab world is weak, the report said. Abdullatif said money was not the issue but rather a fear of the possible results of any educational reforms.
UN: Arab world rife with illiteracy and lacks innovation.
U.N. report finds one third of Arabs illiterate and only $10 per person spent on scientific research.
The level of education, research and innovation in the Arab world is appalling, a new United Nations report has claimed.
The report, produced as part of a partnership between the United Nations Development Program and the United Arab Emirates-based Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation, found that despite the efforts of scientists and researchers throughout the region, the Arab world makes up only 1.1% of global scientific publishing and the low level of investment into research has led to relatively low levels of innovation throughout the Arab world.
Examining a number of aspects of “the current Arab knowledge landscape,” the report expressed “grave concerns over the state of education in the Arab world,” with over one third of the adult population unable to read or write and major educational discrepancies between males and females.
The report found that despite 20% of national budgets in the Arab world being spent on education over the past 40 years, the average Arab individual reads very little compared to other societies and around 60 million Arabs are illiterate, two thirds of them women.
When future historians write about the seemingly inevitable conflict in Iraq between Arabs and Kurds, this sort of news report will form part of the evidence for build up in ethnic tensions:
Iraq’s Oil Ministry, which deems deals the largely autonomous Kurdish region signs with foreign oil firms illegal, had already threatened to blacklist Sinopec, China’s biggest oil refiner, for acquiring Addax Petroleum Corp.
Hussein Ibish blasts Irshad Manji for being an ‘anti-Arab racist’:
[...]
All trouble, real or imagined, “with Islam” in Manji’s account boils down to one central negative influence: the Arabs. Everything is their fault. Manji has virtually nothing positive to say about not only the Arabs in general or their culture (about which she seems blissfully ignorant) and almost nothing positive to say about any individual Arab either.
I haven’t read Manji’s book (better things to do with my time), but based on the passages Ibish cites, it really does look like an ignorant rant against Arabs. While it is true that with a little more understanding we can see how numerous cultures influenced what we broadly refer to ‘Islam’ (as a religious tradition, history, etc), she seems to have gone far too much in the other direction in stating there was almost no Arab influence, or whatever influence there was has been corrupting. This very notion is silly for any number of reasons, starting with the simple fact that Arabic is the lingua franca of Islamic religious tradition.
Her obsession with ‘desert Arabs’, based on Ibish’s citations, is stupid and an example of crude anti-Arab depictions. Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad — all Arab cities — are or were centres of learning and crucially cities in which institutions can develop, goods can be traded, and ideas can be exchanged, i.e. not empty deserts full of primitive savages.
Arabisk: The first-ever competition to select the best Arab blog. By Arab, they mean blogs written in the Arab region and in the Arabic language.
The contest is being organized by Kalima Press and its owner Mohammad El Sahli, who desceibes himself as the first Arab full-time blogger.
The competition focuses in its first year on specialized blogs, that is, blogs that focus on a certain subject or related subjects. And hence there will be prizes for the specialized blogs and one prize for the best general or personal blog.
The competition has two main rules. The first one is that the content has to be authentic and not copied or extracted from somewhere else even if the blog owner is licensed to use it. The second rule is that the content has to be compliant with the Islamic rules and the society’s traditions.
The rest of the linked story is mostly the many, many complaints that have been posted about the contest, everything from blogs nominated that explicitly reject “customs and traditions” to complaints that there were no Egyptian blogs selected, even though one-third of the Arab blogosphere is Egyptian.
Zionist Hasbara activists are marketing the production of the first all Israeli/all Jewish porno film. Why?
Richard Silverstein tells all:
Make no mistake, this is not a one-off promotion by an odd-ball Jewish gay pornographer. This is part of an orchestrated hasbara campaign spearheaded by groups like Stand With Us, who promoted Israel during the latter’s Gay Pride Festival as a natural ally of gays around the world. The angle for SWU (and there always IS an angle with groups like this) is to trumpet the alleged homophobia of Palestinian/Arab society compared to the alleged freedom and tolerance of “western” Israel towards a gay lifestyle. Never mind that Israel is less tolerant of gays than the average western country. That matters little for the hasbaraniks of SWU.
via John, an editorial about Arab attitudes towards China and the West. In a nutshell, they’re wrong about both.
Tarek Fatah got hot and bothered because someone’s Facebook status on July 1 was “Happy Genocide Day Canada.” (what got me hot and bothered was the galling lack of punctuation.)
i probably had better things to do with my time than respond, but —- ok, who am i kidding. it was Canada Day. i had nothing else to do.
So, to extrapolate from Fatah’s article, to be Canadian is to refuse to acknowledge that Canada is deeply invested in oppressive policies at home and abroad. Yet there are many of us who, for a variety of reasons, claim ownership of Canada, and who, as a result, feel it is ethically incumbent on us that we recognise and resist the oppressions that Fatah totally elides in his post. In other words, it is because we are residents and/or citizens of Canadian that we are opposed to mindless displays of nationalism. Home is not for us the hollow utopia that Fatah has constructed, but a deeply contested space. Thus, at the same time that we resist oppressions that marginalise us, we resist oppressions carried out against others in our names by the Canadian government. This too is a practice of citizenship, but perhaps one more self-aware than what Fatah prefers.
Ealier, Aziz asked why we care so much more about Iranian protesters than Egyptian protesters. Here are few more articles exploring around that topic.
Arab [Egyptian] activists watch Iran with wonder, awe.
But watching tens of thousands of Iranians take to the streets of Tehran this month, the 27-year-old pro-democracy activist has grown disillusioned. In 10 days, he said, the Iranians have achieved far more than his movement has ever accomplished in Egypt.
Arab world: The sounds of silence on Iran.
This must be especially difficult for political Islamic organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, which congratulated Ahmadinejad on his “victory” and yet whose generational disagreements and divisions mirror those in Iran: A young generation of Muslim brothers and sisters has over the past few years challenged the Brotherhood’s aging leadership on issues such as prohibiting female and Christian leaders.
That aging leadership gave the young Muslims the very undemocratic choice of shutting up or leaving.
Speaking of images of Arab night life, Muslimah Media Watch has a critique of the “Funky Arabs” video from Jad Choueiri:
My biggest problem with this music video is not the gratuitous amounts of flesh on show by the scantily clad women–which let’s face it, has become the norm in many similar Arabic music videos–but the political implications of Choueiri’s message. Because if not a parody, then the video is certainly a textbook case of cultural appropriation. Listening between the lines, you could well take home the message: the only way we can prove we are not evil is if we try to erase our identities and emulate selective (read: the most materialistic) aspects of Western culture.
Choueiri’s only concessions to Arab culture: bellydancing and shisha smoking, of course! Nothing else we have “over here” is worth anything anyway. The orientalist image is complete once an x-ray machine shows us that a woman is carrying on her person handcuffs, a mask, and a whip. Arabs are all hypersexual, doncha know?
Al Arabiya: Arab culture enters the Guinness World Records.
Arabs danced their way into the Guinness Book of World Records over the weekend and are now set on baking their way in with the biggest pasty dish in the world.
Some 4475 Lebanese Canadians danced their way into the record book by forming the longest Dabke chain ever assembled, an Arab dance, in the Montreal, Canada Saturday night while a Palestinian confectioner is set to bake the biggest pastry dish in the world.
One of the values of all of the stories coming out of the Gulf Arab states right now about sex therapy and sex issues are just the examples of the range of struggle that people live with that may make others feel less isolated in their misery and seek help/improvement:
In Saudi Arabia and other countries where the genders are rigorously separated, many men have their first sexual experiences with other men, which affects their attitudes toward sex in marriage, Ms. Lootah said.
“Many men who had anal sex with men before marriage want the same thing with their wives, because they don’t know anything else,” Ms. Lootah said. “This is one reason we need sex education in our schools.”….
She reels off stories from her practice in rapid fire: the Emirati military officer whose wife had an affair because he was away from home too much; the woman who thought fellatio was against Islam (not true at all, Ms. Lootah notes); the wife who discovered her husband dressing up as a woman and going out to gay bars. She seems bent on showing that there is a whole world of sexual confusion that would benefit from open discussion.
Al Arabiya’s general manager weighs in on Obama and the Arab world:
Usually, pleasing the Arabs is an unachievable aim, because they blame Washington nearly for everything, whether it interferes or stays away. Washington is blamed for the dictatorships if it deals with them, and if it topples them, it will be accused of wanting to impose its political culture. It is blamed for all the contradictions: poverty, ignorance, occupation, terrorism, oppression, the support for the extremists, the hunt down of the Islamists, and even for the divorce of wives. Practically, Washington is the devil who is blamed for everything evil.
The truth is that Obama is not required to please 300 million Arabs, to settle all the issues as there are 1,000 issues in the region, or to fight all the wars. Obama can reduce his project to one issue, the Arab-Israeli conflict.
New research into the Christianity community under Arab rule in Malta is to be published later this year.
Arab investors to build ‘Arab cities’ in Malaysia.
Malacca chief minister Mohamad Ali Rustam reportedly said the project, due for completion by 2012, will attract more Middle Eastern tourists and give locals a chance to experience Arabic culture.
Arab tourists spend on average 10 times more than other tourists, according to recent reports on Malaysian tourism that showed an increasing number of Muslim Middle Eastern tourists are seeking “halal tourism” in Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei while avoiding the U.S. and Europe because of post Sept. 11, 2001 stereotyping and racial profiling.
Chas Freeman truly understood the nature of US power. It is a great loss to the US that after appointment to the National Intelligence Council, he was the victim of “a sustained campaign against the appointment by right-wing leaders of the so-called “Israel Lobby” concerned about his past criticism of Israel’s relations with its Arab neighbours, and particularly its treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.”
Here’s Freeman on the US dollar:
The role of the dollar as a universal currency for reserve and trade settlement purposes is absolutely central to our international power and reach. (…) Furthermore, we have used the fact that the dollar is an extension of our sovereignty to impose unilateral sanctions all over the place and to manipulate the global banking sector to enforce our policies, even when those policies — say, with respect to Iran — are not supported by others. So we have a big stake in this, and when we get the dollar into trouble, as we have done, this is very, very fundamental.
An exhibition commemorating Muslim Albanians who rescued Jews during the Holocaust will open at the mixed Jewish-Arab town of Ramle, near Lod, on Tuesday, International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
As a means of educating the Arabic-speaking public about the atrocities of the Holocaust, along with countering Holocaust denial, Yad Vashem has recently launched a website and YouTube channel in Arabic. Link.
It’s antagonizing to see the Israelis attempting to “sensitize” Arabs to holocaust horrors while denying at the same time that they are inflicting them on the Palestinians.
Because only Arabs are barbaric enough to believe in revenge.
(Via Angry Arab.)
Intra-Arab cultural perspectives: A female Iraqi colleague says she was surprised that she had struggled to find work in the UAE; this is despite over 20 years experience in the industry (almost all of that in Iraq).
I found her ’surprise’ surprising.