Mid-East – Feministe

Freedom of expression should not be undermined

Obviously. And that should extend to mocking religion, even cruelly. And violence is not an acceptable response, even to someone maligning your God. But unfettered freedom of speech is not an entrenched value everywhere in the world (although I wish it were). And when we’re talking about swaths of relatively powerless people who have spent the past few decades facing hostility and violence from the United States and from their own leaders, rioting as the only way of demonstrating widespread frustration and discontent becomes somewhat… not understandable in the way that means “acceptable,” but understandable in the “capable of being understood” way. Because even if the better option was a cool, collected conversation, no one is sitting at the other side of that table. Which again isn’t a justification — the rioting is wrongheaded and horrible and I would even say silly in response to such an asinine, juvenile video — it’s just an observation. As is this: When there are already fires blazing, maybe don’t throw gasoline on them just to prove that you can.

On Being A Good Lebanese Girl

Or a good Greek girl. Or a good Indian girl. Or a good Mexican girl. Or a good any-ethnicity-that-has-ever-been-shoved-down-your-throat-ever girl.

I want you to meet Charlie. Charlie and I met each other just a little over a year ago—but I can’t believe it’s only been that short. He was holding an appletini and talking about fashion. I was drinking a Brooklyn Lager and talking about politics.

“I mostly write about the Middle East—it’s a little bit personal because my family is from there”

“Oh my god, me too. Where from?”

“Lebanon”

“Me too!”

That night, we talked about everything. We talked about fashion in Beirut. We talked about drag queen names—he said he would be, “Anya Knees.” We talked about Lebanon. I made him tell me stories about living there. We talked about our music. We talked about our culture. We talked about our families. We talked about our mothers. We talked about our traditions. We talked about that we were both Greek Orthodox. We talked about our recipes and our food—we talked a lot about food.

Our first date, just the two of us was a Middle Eastern restaurant in the East Village called Moustache. We only fell more in love.

Charlie is a self-proclaimed “Good Lebanese Girl.” He was born in Beirut—and came to the United States in 2006, when the country was rocked with instability as the Israeli Defense Force bombed the southern part of the country. His family went to California, where they opened a Lebanese restaurant that he worked at—later, he moved to New York City to study fashion design.

Once a month, Charlie drags me out to “Habibi Night”—a night of music and dancing for gay Arabs—or as he calls them, “gayrabs”—living in New York City. We dance. We celebrate. We get in conversations about our backgrounds with strangers and exchange stories.

On other nights, we’ve stayed in—cooking food and talking about our opinions on religion, traditionalism and how it’s affected our families and everyone else around us. We’ve talked about the differences of being Lebanese-American and being American, and how when we meet another one of our bretheren we feel more at home. Some of these conversations have taken place in his tiny studio apartment, underneath his gigantic Lebanese flag. Other times they have happened at other friends’ apartments, typically while wearing blonde wigs.

Recently, Charlie decided to move back to Lebanon—his parents had moved back there, and Charlie was both looking for a change and responding to a longing that he had felt since he left. I was nervous about him—he isn’t out to his family, and he was moving home to a country where homosexuality is illegal. Last time he was in Lebanon, he was younger and hadn’t come out yet—and despite the fact that it is painted as the progressive country of the Middle East because women can wear mini skirts, there are still many arcane laws and customs.

For our last dinner before his departure, we met at Moustache for old times sake. He looked stylish and fabulous as always—reading the Arabic written on the walls out loud to me. Equal parts gay and Lebanese, embracing and never compromising all elements of his identity. I couldn’t help worrying about him—as the country of our origins once again flirts with instability, all I wanted to do was hold him close.

But the time came to say goodbye. As I walked home, missing him since the moment we parted ways, I thought about our friendship, our heritage and our identities. Neither of us are exactly the ideal good Lebanese girl. I moved far away from my family, am twenty-one years old and don’t have a child with another one on the way and no intention of making this happen for a while. I am outspoken on a variety of topics, curse like a sailor and am most likely inadvertently offensive. I have no embroidery skills. Charlie is gay, a connoisseur of fine drag queens and fashion, is not and will never date a woman. However, when we are together, we talk about our heritage. We talk about our families, we talk about how politics shaped our lives—and brought us together to New York City, only to discuss the layers of history of another place that we identify with. We talk about how our identity has changed how we articulate our passions—fashion and politics. We dance. We celebrate our culture. We imagine meeting again in Lebanon.

We call our families everyday. We discuss and obsess over our heritage. We piece together our stories. We are proud. Our heritage and culture matters to us.

We are the perfect good Lebanese girls.

My Views On National Security As A Seventh Grader, and How it Took A Social Movement to Make Me Proud to Be An American

America.

Baby, it’s complicated.

But like all complicated relationships, underneath it all, I love you.

It wasn’t always like this. We’ve been on quite a journey.

It started when I was eleven—my first week of Middle School. I heard my mother on the phone with my father in the other room.

“Oh my god. That’s terrible. Ok, ok, ok”

She came to get me to tell me that someone had crashed two planes into the World Trade Center. You might recall the event that I am talking about.

We didn’t know who had done it, or why or where. We were just watching it replay on the TV, again and again in complete shock and horror. I had no idea what the World Trade Center, or even New York City really was in the first place. I was eleven.

I just knew that it was horrible.

Everyone was talking about it. Everyone knew someone who knew someone who had a narrow escape. I can’t imagine what it was like to be in New York and to know someone who had not had a narrow escape.

One month later, I was watching the news with my family (I was a weird eleven year old), and the news broke that the United States had begun to bomb Afghanistan.

In my Middle School classroom, we shared news stories every morning—as eleven year olds, we were pretty tapped into things. A boy raised his hand and I assumed he would bring up that we were bombing Afghanistan, so I put my hand down.

“Barry Bonds got his 500th home run this weekend!”

I raised my hand tentatively. The teacher called on me.

“I think we started bombing Afghanistan this weekend.”

~*~*~

It’s one year later, and now we’re in a different social studies classroom. We were still bombing Afghanistan—but this time we were bombing Iraq, too. We were having a debate in my social studies classroom about whether or not this was right (remember, I grew up in the Bay Area).

Those who were for invading Iraq sat on one side of the room, those who were against it sat on the other. Gradually, more and more went and sat on the pro side of the room, seventh graders spewing out the ideology of Fox News that in order to have peace, we needed to have war.

I tried to see things from their perspective, trying desperately to turn needing war for peace into logic. Remember, I was a weird, emerging hyper-politicized twelve- year old who needed friends in Middle School.

Soon, I was the only one on the anti-war side of the room.

Was I crazy?

~*~*~

I was politically dissident. I was the only dark haired ethnic girl in a room full of blondes. I had yet to discover eyebrow tweezing, so even my forehead seemed like it was paying homage to Saddam Hussein.

I was un-American.

Luckily in high school I found some fellow social outcasts to befriend. I also found a socialist self-proclaimed comparative politics teacher to inappropriately fall in love with from a distance, a wonderful English teacher who introduced me to George Orwell and a drama teacher who remains a dear friend to this day who was not afraid to vent his political opinions—despite the school guidelines expressly prohibiting that.

~*~*~

I moved to New York City for college—and got out of my tiny town in California. The wars that started when I was mid puberty, had only escalated and I was very much a woman. They grew a lot more than my boobs ever did.

But Barack Obama won the election!

Everything was supposed to change. The troops would come home. We would have healthcare. The world wouldn’t hate us anymore.

I was proud to be an American for the first time—ever.

~*~*~

It has been eleven years since I raised my hand and told my class that we were bombing Afghanistan. We still are. Supposedly, we have withdrawn from Iraq—but we have decimated the country, and the destruction from the chronic diseases—both physical and psychological—has yet to take its toll. I’m not proud to be part of a country that has this global legacy.
However, last year something happened—Americans rose up.

Now, I have many mixed feelings and emotions about the Occupy movement—something I will probably have to save for another blog post where I do not divulge my entire perspective on national security circa 7th grade—but it did something magical. It criticized America—but with love and desire to reclaim America from a corrupt government and a corrupt culture. It criticizes corporate personhood, and the culture that endorses it, demands accountability for the banks that catapulted us into a financial crisis, and brought together dangerous people with revolutionary ideas.

It brought together the types of people who sat alone on the anti-war side of the room in their Middle School classrooms.

I realized that I wasn’t crazy that whole time.

So, today we celebrate a revolution. We celebrate proclaiming our independence from a country whose values we felt were aristocratic, exclusionary and claustrophobic. We celebrate the bravery and imagination to chart our own course as a people and create, rather than adhere to our future. I hope that we the people can reclaim our independence—and what it means to be American, away from how our politicians have defined it through destructive foreign policy and exclusionary immigration decisions that happen behind closed doors in Washington, DC.

I hope that we, the American people who will reclaim our independence are on the frontier of creating a new country, shaped by our unique identities and voices that is more economically and socially just, and a much better neighbor to our fellow citizens of the world.

When I look around at the dedicated, hard-working, creative and loving Americans who are coming together and doing everything in their power to make that happen, the weight I felt that I didn’t belong for so many years is lifted and I feel proud to be an American.

I’m gonna go drink beer now.

Hello! Thanks for Having Me.

Hi There!

For those who don’t know me already, I’m Anna–or perhaps my nom du tweet, @agoodcuppa.

I am a writer (no way, the guest blogger is a writer!), a social justice activist and rabbel rouser, and an unapologetic feminist with a bleeding heart.

I hail from the Bay Area in California. My mother is Lebanese and Greek, and my father is French-Canadian. I consider myself an ethnic mix of “questionably Brown” largely informed by being just Arab-American enough in post-9/11 America. I’m very Pro-Palestine, and have taken a long, painstaking journey to express this in a way that distinctly separates Judaism from Israeli-ness from Zionism and recognizes that Israel has been established as a state, and a solution must account for these effects. I have absolutely no idea what that solution will be–besides that it must include an end to the military occupation of Palestine. I hope–and have faith–that this solution will arrive in my lifetime.

I’m a loud-mouthed woman with a lot of opinions. I’m a millennial and a recent graduate. More of us need to be given a voice to express who we really are (hint, its not GIRLS), and how we are trying to negotiate this brave new economy.

Appropriately enough, I now live in New York City.

Content-wise I’m all over the place–and will probably write a lot about the Middle East, a little about Brooklyn and everywhere in between. In addition to writing, I’m an artist with a recent obsession with infographics–if you are lucky, my blog will include an occasional visual element. Get excited–my last infographic included a cartoon riot cop, described as equal parts adorable and terrifying!

A little word about comments–I will try my best to moderate, but am a busy lady and probably don’t have time to antagonize over your bull shit. So if you really have a problem with me, save it for a hardcore face to face barfight. I’m in.

So, welcome to my brain–I hope you enjoy your stay! Please, comment away on what you would like to see discussed! Big thanks to Jill for inviting me and Sally for suggesting me.

Peace for women is world peace

The 2011 Nobel Peace Prize today was awarded to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee, and Tawakkul Karman “for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work.” These women are three of now 15 women to have won the award in its 110-year history and the first to win for work centered largely around the female 50 percent of the world population.

A brief note (so brief as not to do these women justice): Johnson Sirleaf is the president of Liberia and the first woman ever to be elected president of an African nation. Gbowee has brought women together across ethnic and religious lines under Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace. Karman is a longtime Yemeni activist and chair of human rights group Women Journalists Without Chains; at the time the award was announced, she was sitting in her protest tent in the middle of Sanaa, as she has been for the past eight months.

In acknowledging these three women, the Nobel committee also acknowledges something that seems to escape a lot of notice in global activism: Advancing women’s issues is advancing world peace–not because freedom and democracy in Liberia and Yemen benefit men as well as women, but because half the world is made up of women. Women’s concerns are global concerns. Johnson Sirleaf, Gbowee, Karman, and the women who take risks to support their causes aren’t significant because they support women but because they take action to promote peace through avenues and populations that many other activists and leaders have neglected. And as I am far from qualified to speak about any of this, I’ll give over to Leymah Gbowee instead.

[The message I hope to send is t]hat the other 50 percent of the world–the women of the world–that their skills, talents, and intelligence should be utilized. And I think this message is a resounding agreement to all of our advocacies over the years. That truly women have a place, truly women have a face, and truly the world has not been functioning well without the input, in every sphere, of women.

It’s Ramadan. How ’bout those Muslim feminists?

In honor of Ramadan (which began this week), and the fact that I have but a little time left with the lovely folks of Feministe, I thought I would aim once again for the overlap in my life’s Venn Diagram.

To your right! The circle labelled “reads a lot of books.” To your left! The circle labelled “academic and professional obsession with matters Middle Eastern.” Up above! The circle labelled “thinks a lot about women’s issues.”

Boom! Right there in the middle, where you would find the book I blogged about on Tuesday, Teta, Mother and Me, you will also find this: Paradise Beneath Her Feet: How Women Are Transforming the Middle East, by Isobel Coleman, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Affairs (which I first reviewed when it came out in 2009).

The public discourse among non-Muslims regarding the Muslim community tends to be shaped by stereotypes, possibly most powerfully when the conversation turns to Muslim women — they are hounded, we tend to think, and quite possibly cowering. The very real problems with which Muslim women grapple appear rooted in the nature of the religion, and, we assume, are thus powerfully immune to real change.

By way of counterargument, Paradise Beneath Her Feet presents an engrossing, seemingly counter-intuitive take on the question of women’s advancement in the Muslim world, showing that Islamic feminists are successfully arguing – from within the texts and traditions of their faith – that gross gender inequality flies in the face not just of the spirit of Islam, but also its laws.

Opening with a global examination of the dilatory consequences of gender discrimination – higher infant mortality, lower incomes, even lower agricultural output – Coleman then takes an exhaustive look at the “gender jihad” under way across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Indonesia (an indication, in fact, of the inaccuracy of the title — this is not so much “how women are transforming the Middle East” as it is “how women are transforming the Muslim world”). Over the years, the shape of the effort has changed, as Muslim feminists learn from the mistakes of the 20th century — efforts to impose change from above (anti-veiling laws, for instance) are now understood to have “sow[ed] the seeds for decades worth of Islamic backlash,” ultimately setting women back as they struggle to move forward.

Today, Coleman argues, those engaged in the jihad for Muslim women’s rights are trying to work “with the culture, rather than against it,” frequently succeeding where few thought it possible, as they attempt to build “a legitimate Islamic alternative to the current repressive system.” Her findings reflect the countless interviews she’s conducted, with activists who’ve been fighting for decades alongside those born in the meantime, as well as years of comprehensive research. She doesn’t attempt to paint a rosy picture — the challenges are real, and they are immense — but Coleman does present a convincing argument that Muslim feminists have the potential to shape the future of Islam.

********************

A few links for anyone looking for more on Islam:

1. The BBC has great background information on Islam (and all kinds of things, really!) on their website, covering all the bases in brief articles — here’s the one about veiling (hijab).

2. Muslims respond to extremism – a brief compendium that I put together, with links to more information if you want to go deeper.

3. A Gallup poll finds that Muslim Americans “are by far the least likely among all religious groups to justify targeting civilians, whether done by the military or by ‘an individual person or a small group of persons’.”

4. A short list of Muslim American heroes that I compiled in response to the wave of Islamophobia that has swept the US in recent years.

5. To learn more about Ramadan, click on the links at the top of the post. They’ll bring you to the BBC & a great, brief video by The Guardian (check out the Indonesian drummers!).

Teta, Mother and Me: Three Generations of Arab Women

I’ve had the Feministe audience at the back of my mind (even when working on material that hasn’t seemed an easy fit for a blog devoted to discussions of feminism) since starting my guest gig here last week — which is to say, even when I wrote my Israel/Palestine-I-was-on-Russian-TV! post, as well as yesterday’s “Norway and terrorism as a daily event.” My professional life has only rarely overlapped with my advocacy for women, and sometimes it’s hard to hit both sweet spots.

But last night, I suddenly remembered a lovely book I reviewed a few years back, one which fits really nicely into the overlap in the Venn Diagram of my life: Teta, Mother and Me: Three Generations of Arab Women, by Jean Said Makdisi.

This is a beautiful memoir, written with great love and deep respect for the matriarchs who came before, as well as examining the author’s own life and choices. Born in 1940, Makdisi’s life has been shaped by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the very beginning (“my birth occurred at a particularly unromantic time: the anxiety of the war and the events in Palestine and Egypt weighed heavily on my parents”), but in going back two generations (“Teta” means “grandma”), she is able to sketch the lived reality of the Middle East’s contemporary tumult — not just the facts of dying empire (the Ottoman, as well as the British), competing nationalisms, and social unrest, but the impact of each on individual lives: What are the limits of ideology, how does it intersect with social development, and what is the role of memory?

Combining oral history with strict textual research, Makdisi does work here that we rarely see, providing cold hard facts alongside their emotional valence, often touching on events that have been largely forgotten though they continue to echo down through history — the massive famine which struck the formerly Ottoman lands, for instance, immediately following the destruction of World War I. The struggle in Israel/Palestine plays a big role, as does the Lebanese civil war, but so does the daily experience of a life in exile — the outcome of the violence no less importance than the violence itself.

Perhaps most unusual, however, is Makdisi’s willingness to take on tropes that have assumed the mantel of conventional wisdom when discussing women’s lives: “traditional” vs. “modern,” and what the discussion of the two might mean for the future — a conversation made particularly pressing by the advent of the “Arab Spring,” the revolutions currently roiling much of the Arab world*.

Over the largest fork in the road ahead… like a gigantic neon sign on a highway… flashes the dichotomy: “traditional” and “modern.” So pervasive is the discussion of this set of alternatives, so ubiquitous is it in all debates over women’s issues, and particularly Arab women’s issues, that its truth seems inevitable and absolute.

It is my growing conviction, however, that this dichotomy is not only misleading and confusing, if not downright false, but that is is also, and above all, divisive. It is, I am convinced, a red herring, flashing at us, making us chase down a road leading nowhere, missing, as we frantically sprint in the wrong direction, more subtle and truer directions….

What does it mean to be “traditional”? I am not at all sure. The word “tradition” is used much more than it is explained. There has simply not been enough scholarship, enough clearly thought-out discussion over this mysterious quantity as it relates to the Arab world for us to be able to answer this question clearly.

Over-used words and habitual labels, it turns out, are not always genuinely reflective of the lives they’re meant to describe.

Teta, Mother and Me is a lovingly written account, one which Western readers will find at turns to be warmly familiar, and entirely new, and it deserves to be widely read, by women and men, MidEast geeks and non-.

And finally, in the spirit of this blog, my own opinions, and indeed, Makdisi’s own writing, I will only now mention the fact with which I had to lead my original review of this book: Jean Said Makdisi is the sister of better-known scholar Edward Said. For my money, she’s the better writer.

******************

*Here are a few starting points for background on women in the Arab Spring:

1. An Arab Spring for Women, Juan Cole and Shahin Cole, The Nation, April 26: “The ‘Arab Spring’ has received copious attention in the American media, but one of its crucial elements has been largely overlooked: the striking role of women in the protests sweeping the Arab world. Despite inadequate media coverage of their role, women have been and often remain at the forefront of those protests.”
2. Women and the Arab Spring, Mary Hope Schwoebel, United States Institute for Peace, May 5: “Women’s participation in the Arab Spring has been significant, but it remains to be seen, however, if their participation will result in increased opportunities for women in the public sphere when the dust settles. USIP’s Mary Hope Schwoebel discusses the opportunities and challenges for women in the Arab Spring.”
3. The women of the Arab spring: from protesters to parliamentarians?, Natana J. Delong-Bas, Common Ground News Service, June 14: “In stark contrast to the image of Arab women in charge of nothing but their homes, these women are picketing outside supermarkets, staging sit-ins with their children, organising demonstrations, networking with each other, teaching workshops on the tactics of nonviolence, tearing down security fences and marching through checkpoints to connect with people on the other side.”
4. Women in the Arab Spring: The other side of the story, Elizabeth Flock, Washington Post BlogPost, June 21: “Much has been written about the women who have protested, organized, blogged and conducted hunger strikes throughout the Arab Spring…. But the other piece of the story is the anguish countless women have had to endure, in the form of rape, detention, or simply a lack of appreciation of their role in the protests.”
5. Arab Spring takes a chill turn for women, Sheera Frenkel, The Australian, August 1: ” ‘Before we were asking for normal rights – now we are trying to preserve the rights we already have,’ says Lina Ben Mhenni, a popular blogger in Tunisia. Sitting at a cafe on one of Tunis’s leafy boulevards, she draws stares at her pierced nose and black nail polish.”

Norway and terrorism as a daily event.

In the West, we seem to have at least a double standard when it comes to violence and mayhem.

When violence and mayhem involves People Who Look Like Us (“us” in this case generally translating to: ethnically European/white, not-poor, citizens of a Western-style democracy) — we experience society-wide woe. When it involves People Who Don’t Look Like Us? Often, not so much.

We see this in the semi-annual “OMG heroin has reached the suburbs” stories, we see it in the stories of missing mothers or schoolyard shootings that take place somewhere outside our inner cities or meth-riddled mountains — and I think we saw it again in the wake of the terrorist attack in Norway.

I am not, in any way, suggesting a sliding scale of pain. Pain is pain, loss is loss — if your child, partner, friend, parent, loved one was killed, in Oslo, on her way home from work, or in some random Columbine-like horror, your grief is no less because your skin is pale or your bank account full.

But as someone who follows the news out of the Middle East and Southwest Asia, as someone who once-upon-a-time covered terrorism’s aftermath as a reporter, as someone who has seen up close and personal the damage that bombs can do, I couldn’t help but feel the vast difference between America’s response to the terrorism in Norway, and our response that with which the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan live on a nearly daily basis.

Part of this is, of course, because in Norway, the line between good and evil was clear, shining and bright. One terrorist, 77 innocents. We know, in a heartbeat, how to direct our horror and revulsion, and to whom to offer our prayers and support.

This is not the case in the Af-Pak region. First of all, the West isn’t even sure of its own role anymore, if it ever was. Are we good guys or bad guys? When children are killed as our soldiers aim for the Taliban — who are we? Should we even be there? Are we imperialists, or did we fail to go after the Taliban hard enough in the first place?

But beyond the complexities of the war and a porous border — Western soldiers are not the ones purposely blowing people up in the middle of busy cities. Surely the people doing that are the bad guys, right? But what if their fight is just? And wait — who gets to decide what “just” means? Throw in the endlessly complex cultural and political realities of the two societies, the fact that Westerners tend to expect Muslims to be violent (though Muslims might disagree) — we throw up our hands. Another 27 dead. Another 22. An 8 year old boy. Those people.

One need only scroll through the Twitter feed of Foreign Policy’s Af-Pak Channel to see that a good deal more than 77 Afghans and Pakistanis were killed in the month of July alone, not on a battlefield, but while trying to live their lives. Hell, nearly 100 were killed in the Pakistani city of Karachi in the first week of July.

Some of these were combatants. Some were violent misogynists. Some were trying to go to the market. Some were children. Some of the “innocents” probably deserved to die, and some of the fighters had probably been involved in trying to bring peace. The lines are neither clear, nor shining, nor bright.

But I do know this: Dead is dead. The tears of a Pakistani mother are no less excruciating than those of a Norwegian father. The pain in these faces is as human and as raw as the pain in these.

I don’t have any grand conclusion to draw or act of advocacy to recommend. I know that no human being can carry all the world’s pain without buckling under the weight, and if a geek like me can’t always keep all the warring parties straight in Af-Pak, I surely don’t expect anyone else to manage it.

I just think that as we mourn the losses in Oslo, as we send our prayers and our white light and our best wishes to our Norwegian sisters and brothers, it matters that we also remember those for whom the Norway attacks look horrifyingly familiar. We need to find a way to manage to bear witness to the humanity of those living and dying in Afghanistan and Pakistan, too. As the holy month of Ramadan begins, perhaps we owe the living and the dead at least that much.

**************

If you want to learn more about Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the violence that has marked the history of both, here are two great books to get you started: Invisible History by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, and Pakistan: A Hard Country by Anatol Lieven (both of which I reviewed for the Dallas Morning News).

Palestine, the UN, Israel, the Oslo Accords – & me, on Russian TV.

UPDATE: I’ve added a link with some basic background on the conflict in the comments.

When I introduced myself earlier in the week, I said that I write a lot about Israel/Palestine, but that I also write about a lot of other stuff as well. Given the nature of this blog, I led with some of that other stuff. On Tuesday, though, I had a chance to appear on Russia Today, the Russian English-language news channel (I know – I didn’t know either) to discuss the latest goings on in Israel/Palestine — so here we go, leaping into my somewhat more regular gig.

To anyone wondering what my background in this is, I’ll say briefly: I lived in Tel Aviv for 14 years, and have studied, reported on and written about the topic for 25 years. I’ve been an advocate for a two-state solution since the 1980s, and my area of academic and professional expertise is the contemporary Middle East. More details can be found at the top of this post and you can get a good feeling for the approach I take, my personal attachment and personal heartbreak, in this post, and this one. Beyond that, there’s a lot of material to be found poking around here.

As it is my contention that one of the biggest problems in this conflict is the failure on the parts of so many people to genuinely listen to and respect the humanity of those on the other side, I’m going to ask that if you respond here — even if with great disagreement and passion — that you try to succeed where the diplomats have failed, and show genuine respect for each other.

So the other day, something of a stink was made about the fact that Israel is talking about “canceling” the Oslo Accords if the Palestinians insist on going to the UN in September to ask for recognition as a state.

Only it doesn’t really seem that Israel is necessarily considering such a move with any seriousness — they’re just kicking around a few reeaally stupid, self-defeatist, panicky ideas. You know, like they do.

Anyhoo, after appearing on Russia Today in May to discuss the visit of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Obama’s two speeches, I was asked back yesterday to talk about the new mess! And so, of course, I said yes. (Last time, I was worried I looked like a moron; this time, I’m more worried about looking like a cadaver. [LIGHTING! MAKEUP!] Whatevs. I manged to slip in the word “Jedi,” in a totally appropriate context, so I’m good).

After the jump you can see me on the teevee (and, I’m certain, you’ll notice that my focus and attention were really rather impressive, given all the stuff going on around me). After the clip (transcript at the bottom of the post), you’ll find a little compendium of links to the articles I scoured in a state of high tizz to make sure I sounded smart in the segment. Very little of it came into play in my 4+ minutes — for instance, I didn’t get a chance to mention that just this past Saturday, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said, and I quote, “Our first, second and third choice is to return to negotiations [over going to the UN]” — but hey! It’s all good. Smarter is better.

Syrian blogger Amina Abdallah kidnapped

Horrible news:

A blogger whose frank and witty thoughts on Syria’s uprising, politics and being a lesbian in the country shot her to prominence was last night seized by armed men in Damascus.

Amina Arraf, who blogged under the name Amina Abdallah, holds dual Syrian and American citizenship and is the author of the blog A Gay Girl in Damascus, which has drawn fans from Syria and across the world.

She was kidnapped last night as she and a friend were on their way to a meeting in Damascus. The kidnapping was reported on her blog by a cousin.

“Amina was seized by three men in their early 20s. According to the witness (who does not want her identity known), the men were armed,” wrote Rania Ismail.

“Amina hit one of them and told the friend to go find her father. One of the men then put his hand over Amina’s mouth and they hustled her into a red Dacia Logan with a window sticker of Basel Assad.”

Basel is the brother of president Bashar al-Assad, and was being groomed for the presidency until his death in a car crash in 1994.

The Syrian government is holding some 10,000 people prisoner in reaction to the protests that began this spring. The regime is one of the most brutal in the world, and many detainees have been tortured and/or killed. I’m not really sure what else to add, other than I hope Amina is ok, and I would encourage you all to spread the word and keep the spotlight on this kidnapping. Maybe some international pressure will help to secure her release.

Thanks, Lauren, for the link.