Baithak World Apr 13: Egypt vs. Zimbabwe, Nuala O'Faolin, Samar, Nabka, Yale-Abu Dhabi, Mary Jo Salter, Khaled Khalifa, Gaza, War Plans, Cancer, RealN

Some people have been amusing themselves by drawing parallels between Egypt's local elections and the recent municipal elections in France. In the French poll Sarkozy's party lost and the results were seen as a clear indication that the public was running out of patience with their president's policies and style of government. This is a far cry from what happened in Egypt. In Egypt we cannot compare ourselves with France. We cannot even compare ourselves with Pakistan, Zimbabwe or Kenya Is it too much to hope that our ruling elite -- the same elite that closely follows the meetings of the European parliament and feel incensed when Egypt is accused of human rights abuses -- might actually start mimicking what other nations have been doing? Is it possible that they might tray their hand at conducting a fair election? You'd think that they would be more than happy to encourage the nation to participate in politics since that is the only way political and social conditions in Egypt will be improved. How else can we credibly fight corruption and poverty? How else can we improve public services, end discrimination against women and Copts and stamp out violence in all its shapes and forms? But this is the last thing on the minds of our leaders. For them the status quo is the only way to go. Egypt vs Zimbabwe By Salama A Salama

Nuala O'Faolain, the Irish author, feminist campaigner and daughter of one of Ireland's most famous writers of the 20th century, revealed yesterday that she is dying from cancer in the brain, lungs and liver. O'Faolain said she was returning from a fitness class in New York City six weeks ago when she lost all power on her right side. Just over 12 hours later she was informed in a New York accident and emergency department that there were tumours in her brain and she was unlikely to get better. Until she discovered her illness, O'Faolain had been doing regular commentaries on RTE radio on the US presidential primaries. In a brutally frank interview with RTE presenter Marian Finucane, the 67-year-old writer said a doctor in the hospital had told her in a very casual manner that she had two brain tumours. 'I thought that it would be me and the world, but the world turned its back on me. The world said to me: "That's enough of you now." We are not going to give you any treats at the end, even adoring nature.' 'I was amazed how quickly my whole life turned black'

This summer's issue of SAMAR is timely not only for commemorating our fifteenth anniversary, but also rather appropriately the 150^th anniversary of the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion, India's first war of united and organized resistance against British colonialism. SAMAR was born out of a response to the Babri Masjid demolition at Ayodhya in 1992 when a group of young South Asian activists recognized the need to unite and resist a prevailing Hindu right wind blowing both within the subcontinent and throughout the Diaspora. Over the past few years, we have seen similar gales of fundamentalism blowing in with Christian and Islamic dogma, and the oppressive ways these forces play out on the world stage and in our communities. Both anniversaries represent efforts to unite a diverse range of progressive South Asian voices against oppression—Be it against the British, the BJP, the Taliban or a morality-obsessed Bush regime. In our latest issue of SAMAR, we explore three examples—in India, in Pakistan and in England—of struggles, resistance and extremism. In "Freedom of Speechlessness," anthropology doctoral student Kausalya relates the "saffronization" of censorship in India through the recent arrest of a university art student whose paintings were deemed anti-Hindu by BJP officials. Hamad Sindhi explores the public discourse around gender politics in Pakistan in "The Oppressed Truth," a commentary on the Shahzina Tariq and Shamial Raj case now awaiting appeal by the Supreme Court of Pakistan. In "Londonistan Recalled," Brendan LaRoque critiques commentary writer Christopher Hitchens for refusing to take in British racisms and colonial legacies when trying to understand the growing Muslim community in England. SAMAR Celebrates Fifteen Years

On the Palestinian Nabka and more

for those interested in history:

The fundaments of Zionism were laid down by Moses Hess....one of Germany’s earliest renowned socialists and Karl Marx’s mentor....considered by Zionists as the first Zionist and wrote the book “Rome and Jerusalem” (1862). In the book Hess emphasises the Jewish “race” as superior and chosen...Theodor Hertzl is usually considered to be Zionism’s founder. Later on, he referred to Hess’s book as the one that says everything worth saying about Zionism. Hertzl presented a plan for the colonisation of Palestine in his book “The Jewish State” (1896), which was affirmed at the first Zionist congress in 1897.

Ben Gurion, one of the Party members and Israel´s founder, came to Palestine at the beginning of the twentieth century. He considered himself a Bolshevik and was in favour of the dictatorship of the proletariat in all countries, except Palestine where he favoured the dictatorship of Zionism. What, then, are the practical politics of Zionism?

The Zionist slogan ‘A land without people to a people without land’ has engineered the Jewish colonisation of Palestine for a hundred years or more. To realise its goal, a ‘Jewish State’, there is a need for a substantial majority of Jews, hence the ethnic cleansing of the people who originally lived there, a so-called lebensraum. Israel is, therefore, essentially a racist state. Jewish superiority is maintained by a system of apartheid, inherent in laws, administration and religion. To this day, Israel lacks a constitution and official borders, entirely in keeping with Zionism’s demand for more land.

Of what was originally Palestine, 85 percent has been stolen or annexed, and the rest is occupied. In 1948, 800,000 Palestinians were driven off or fled the country, and are denied their right to return, a right laid down by the UN. The Palestinians call this the catastrophe - Al Nakba. The West Bank consists of walled-in enclaves which are controlled by hundreds of checkpoints and Gaza has become the largest open-air prison/ghetto in the world, blockaded and suffering starvation. About 10,000 Palestinians, many of them children, are in Israeli jails without trials or judgements. Israel’s dealings with the Palestinians amount to what is formally named genocide.By Lasse Wilhelmson in Stockholm

After more than a year of talks, Yale University has backed away from its plan for an arts institute in Abu Dhabi, involving Yale’s art, music, architecture and drama schools. The stumbling block, ultimately, was Abu Dhabi’s insistence that Yale offer degree programs at the institute, and Yale’s refusal to grant its degrees in Abu Dhabi. Yale’s art institute was to be part of Abu Dhabi’s development of Saadiyat Island as a cultural center, including outposts of the Louvre, the Guggenheim and other museums. “From the beginning, we were clear that degree programs were not what we were talking about,” said Linda K. Lorimer, secretary and vice president of Yale. “We were exploring exciting plans for programs that would be value-added for cultural development. But in the end, they wanted degrees. And at this point in time, we just don’t think we could mount a faculty of the same quality we have here, or attract students of the same caliber.” The collapse of the talks was first reported in The Yale Daily News on Friday. Yale Moves Away From Plans for Link With Abu Dhabi

Back in the 20th century, when such things seemed to matter, poets argued about the virtue of meter and rhyme. Occasionally the debate produced insights of lasting consequence, like Robert Frost’s snarky metaphor for free verse (“playing tennis with the net down”) and Charles Wright’s brilliant response: “the high wire act without the net.” But the debate was perpetuated more often by tribal loyalties than by artistic necessity. An argument that forecloses possibilities for art — that says X is good because Y is bad — can rarely be trusted.

Michael Malyszko

Mary Jo Salter - A PHONE CALL TO THE FUTURE

Mary Jo Salter came of age as a poet in the 1970s when two tribes, the Language poets and the New Formalists, were sparring. The Language poets (named after a magazine called Language) represented a new surge of experimental writing, while the New Formalists (with whom Salter was associated) wanted to resist the influence of modernism, re-energizing poetry’s relationship not only to traditional form but to narrative. Like Salter, many of the New Formalists modeled their work on a strategically narrowed version of Elizabeth Bishop, a poet who wrote both free and formal verse with homespun virtuosity. But while Bishop continues to be read, the polemics associated with both the New Formalism and Language poetry feel dated, part of the niggling history of taste rather than the grand history of art. Salter’s latest collection, “A Phone Call to the Future,” offers severely winnowed selections from her previous five books along with an ample collection of new poems. What she has omitted is as revealing as what remains. While her first book, “Henry Purcell in Japan,” is introduced here with a poised villanelle about King Lear’s daughters, it once began with a poem far more suggestive of Salter’s sensibility — a sensibility repulsed by gory images of the dead Jesus in a Catholic church, preferring to dwell in an aesthetic realm of pure spirit: “His wounds look fresh, but it’s not this sight / that shocks me so much as His man-made skin: / He’s waxen, slick as a mannequin.” Formalities By James Longenbach

Bryan Denton for The New York Times

PEOPLE still talk about what happened here in the 1980s as “the Events,” as if they were too awful to describe. The Syrian military’s bloody struggle with militant Islamists left at least 10,000 dead in the city of Hama, and produced a trauma the authorities do not like to hear discussed. So when Khaled Khalifa decided to write about it in his latest novel, “In Praise of Hatred,” he knew he was touching a taboo subject. The book, a Balzacian tale full of romance and murder that ranges from Afghanistan to Yemen to Syria, was promptly banned when it was first published here in 2006. Last month, the novel, republished in Beirut in 2007, became a finalist for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, a new award modeled on Britain’s Man Booker Prize. It is now being translated into English and other languages. “If I had won the Booker, the regime would have had a huge problem,” he said with a barrel-chested laugh. “I think the culture minister breathed a big sigh when I lost.” (The top prize went to an Egyptian novelist, Bahaa Taher, the éminence grise of Arab letters.) A bearish man with a boiling corona of steel-gray hair, Mr. Khalifa, 44, has a clownish humor that undercuts his large literary ambitions. He smoked, drank and plowed through a table full of appetizers during a late-night interview at Ninar, a Damascus restaurant popular with Syrian artists and intellectuals, his long answers interrupted by bursts of raucous laughter. A Bloody Era of Syria’s History Informs a Writer’s Banned Novel - By ROBERT F. WORTH

Khaled al-Sharqawi taking calls on radio. Credit:Mohammed Omer

GAZA CITY, Apr 12 (IPS) - "I am bleeding uncontrollably, I need an ambulance." That was not a call to emergency services, it was an appeal broadcast live on radio in Gaza City.

Who knows whether there will ever be an ambulance or not. But this way the ambulance services still hear the appeal broadcast on Al-Iman FM Radio Station, one of few independent radio stations in Gaza. And if the emergency services cannot help, someone else who hears the appeal might.

The ambulance dispatcher announces he cannot get the ambulance to the man. An Israeli bulldozer is blocking the road, and an Israeli tank on a hilltop has been firing at the ambulance, he says. Nobody can say if anyone else got to help the man. But at least his SOS could have been heard. MIDEAST: No Ambulance, Call the Radio By Mohammed Omer


"All of the Palestinians must be killed; men, women, infants, and even their beasts." This was the religious opinion issued one week ago by Rabbi Yisrael Rosen, director of the Tsomet Institute, a long-established religious institute attended by students and soldiers in the Israeli settlements of the West Bank. In an article published by numerous religious Israeli newspapers two weeks ago and run by the liberal Haaretz on 26 March, Rosen asserted that there is evidence in the Torah to justify this stand. Rosen, an authority able to issue religious opinions for Jews, wrote that Palestinians are like the nation of Amalekites that attacked the Israelite tribes on their way to Jerusalem after they had fled from Egypt under the leadership of Moses. He wrote that the Lord sent down in the Torah a ruling that allowed the Jews to kill the Amalekites, and that this ruling is known in Jewish jurisprudence. Rosen's article, which created a lot of noise in Israel, included the text of the ruling in the Torah: "Annihilate the Amalekites from the beginning to the end. Kill them and wrest them from their possessions. Show them no mercy. Kill continuously, one after the other. Leave no child, plant, or tree. Kill their beasts, from camels to donkeys." Rosen adds that the Amalekites are not a particular race or religion, but rather all those who hate the Jews for religious or national motives. Rosen goes as far as saying that the "Amalekites will remain as long as there are Jews. In every age Amalekites will surface from other races to attack the Jews, and thus the war against them must be global." He urges application of the "Amalekites ruling" and says that the Jews must undertake to implement it in all eras because it is a "divine commandment". Genocide announced Saleh Al-Naami,

America’s intelligence services may try to work in secret, but they are increasingly being exposed to public scrutiny. After the 9/11 Commission chronicled their shortcomings in its best-selling 2004 report, the Bush administration and Congress backed sweeping reforms. But as accounts appear about fresh lapses, it doesn’t seem that much has changed. The surprising thing doesn’t seem to be when things go wrong, but when they go right. “The Commission,” by Philip Shenon, helps to show why this is the case. Though the 9/11 Commission might not seem like the stuff of high drama, Shenon, an investigative reporter at The New York Times, expertly quarries numerous documents and interviews to produce a mesmerizing account. He offers vivid portraits of everyone from Henry Kissinger to Samuel R. Berger, from George Tenet to Condoleezza Rice. Few reputations emerge unscathed. Most valuably, he details the incessant maneuvering that took place among the commissioners, the Bush White House, former Clinton administration officials and Congress to influence the final report. Ultimately, the commission was no more immune to partisan wrangling than the officials it was scrutinizing. (Shenon’s book has itself prompted the former 9/11 commissioners to issue a statement in February defending their executive director, Philip Zelikow.) The result was a document that, while valuable as a chronology of events, ended up assigning responsibility for the 9/11 catastrophe to no American official. A Lack of Intelligence - Jacob Heukbrunn

The age of “Atlantic man” is conventionally thought to be over. Some, like Parag Khanna, foresee the rise of a “second world” to challenge American hegemony. Others, notably Fareed Zakaria, are harbingers of a “post-American world.” The rapid economic rise of China (and India) suggests to many that the geopolitical center of gravity no longer lies somewhere between Washington and London. The embarrassments of the Anglo-American “special relationship” in Iraq have encouraged others (myself among them) to predict a decline of American empire. Philip Bobbitt, however, is homo atlanticus redux. A dapper Southerner, renowned almost as much for his sparkling literary allusions as for his acute thinking, he divides his time among Austin, Tex.; New York, where he teaches law at Columbia; and London, where he has lectured in war studies. His new book, “Terror and Consent,” is in many ways a manifesto for a new Atlanticism, not just a reassertion but a reinvention of the dominant role of the trans-Atlantic alliance. It will be read with pleasure by men of a certain age, class and education from Manhattan’s Upper East Side to London’s West End. War Plans - Niall Ferguson


I bet you know me I'm the friend who bought you a really funny birthday card, but when your big day came around I couldn't find it, so I whipped off an e-mail instead. Oh, and when you called, I meant to ask about your mom's knee surgery, but I started blabbing about how I got another freakin' parking ticket. Then I volunteered to bring homemade cookies to the team party and showed up with a box of generic vanilla wafers instead. In the cosmic accounting books, I'm minus one to just about everyone I know. So I would have understood if my August 2004 diagnosis of Stage III breast cancer failed to elicit waves of support. But all my pathetic and heartfelt apologies must have paid off, because there I was, floating in a sudden swell of kindness as I stared down a 7-centimeter tumor. At 36, I was the first runin for most of my friends with the turbocharged Hummer that is cancer. So I went easy on the ones who unintentionally made things worse -- like by asking if my two young daughters were now at increased risk. But for the sake of your friend who has cancer, or may have it someday, let me share some advice. (Names and details have been altered to disguise the identities of the loving and well-meaning, except in the case of my husband, whose name is Edward Lichty and who has already apologized for himself.) 5 Ways To Help A Friend With Cancer

The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees announced a new partnership with the search engine this week. The goal: To use Google's globe-mapping software to illustrate the plight of parts of the planet's population. Google Earth, a free, virtual-globe program from the search engine company, lets users zoom in on locations around the planet. Users can also use special programs known as layers, which organizations can build to incorporate video, text or other interactive features. Under an outreach program, Google has been populating its virtual globe with socially minded projects from such organizations as Greenpeace, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and UNICEF. Six such layers have been launched in the past two weeks. U.N. Teams With Google Earth To Track Refugees, Educate Public - By Mike Musgrove

Paul Jay presents RealNews

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