In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Tag: Mid-East

I knew they were going to make it about Lara Logan’s looks

(For more on the “they”, please see Jill’s post below. Trigger warning, etc.)

Because that’s what happens when you’re a female foreign journalist in the Middle East. Get hurt? Well, you shouldn’t have been a female foreign journalist in the Middle East, and certainly not a BLOND one! In the immortal words of Eddie Izzard “those are the rules… that I just made up!”

Of course, they made it about Scary Muslims as well. Because the assault Lara Logan suffered in Cairo had all the right ingredients for a nice round of Bash the Muslim. Debbie Schlussel (who gets rape threats herself, but can’t seem to connect the dots and understand that this means that sexual assault is nothing to gloat about, JESUS CHRIST) went on her usual rant about “animals” and such, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

So there’s Lara Logan and there’s narrative that she has used her looks to get ahead, and now she’s gotten punished, and hey maybe she was a crap journalist all along and we just didn’t realize it because she’s hot (of course, if Logan had not been conventionally attractive, then people would just make jokes about how she shouldn’t be on TV in the first place), and what the hell was she thinking – didn’t she realize that her looks were a liability in such an Uncivilized Place, and what’s up with these networks giving these little ladies such important, dangerous jobs…. and on and on and on the vomit stream continues. People want to blame Lara Logan, because it’s the easy way out. They want to construct an illusion that a journalist who was just doing her job had any control over the actions of the people who assaulted her to begin with.

I can’t imagine the horror Lara Logan went through, but I know all too well how such victim-blaming narratives play out. When I spoke about dealing with daily sexual harassment in Jordan, the most common response was, “Well, what can you expect?” It’s a neat trick, because the men around me were simultaneously reduced to Uncontrollable Animals and absolved of responsibility in the matter. It meant that my stories could be co-opted, used as Just Another Reason Why We Should Bomb the Muslims to Hell – or else used as an excuse to vilify the Slutty McSluts of the Western world, who made shows like “Sex & the City” popular (I SWEAR TO GOD, THAT SHOW HAS ALREADY BEEN BROUGHT UP IN RELATION TO LOGAN’S CASE, AND EVERY TIME SOMEONE DOES THIS, I EDGE CLOSER AND CLOSER TO JUST RIPPING OFF THEIR ARMS AND THEN BEATING THEM TO DEATH WITH THEM) and then get all uppity when people abroad get funny ideas about them.

The narrative in such cases also conveniently obscures just how pervasive sexual assault truly is, how it’s just about everyone’s damn problem, and, in this case, how Logan was probably not the only one who was attacked.

Logan’s case horrifies and terrifies me, because it hits so close to home. I’m not like Logan – I don’t have her experience, I wouldn’t go to war zones like she has done (I’ve dealt with enough violence in my life, so it’s not my journalistic cup of tea) – but when news of this broke, an American colleague actually went as far as write me and basically say, “Gee, this could’ve been you! Aren’t you glad you left the Scary Middle East? Haven’t I TOLD you that it’s not for women like you?”

Oh God, man, screw you.

YES.

Good news this morning: Mubarak has stepped down.

Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president, has resigned from his post, handing over power to the armed forces.

Omar Suleiman, the vice-president, announced in a televised address that the president was “waiving” his office, and had handed over authority to the Supreme Council of the armed forces.

Suleiman’s short statement was received with a roar of approval and by celebratory chanting and flag-waving from a crowd of hundreds of thousands in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, as well by pro-democracy campaigners who attended protests across the country on Friday.

The crowd in Tahrir chanted “We have brought down the regime”, while many were seen crying, cheering and embracing one another.

“Tonight, after all of these weeks of frustration, of violence, of intimidation … today the people of Egypt undoubtedly [feel they] have been heard, not only by the president, but by people all around the world,” our correspondent at Tahrir Square reported, following the announcement.

Pro-democracy activists in the Egyptian capital had marched on the presidential palace and state television buildings on Friday, the 18th consecutive day of protests.

Quotations

Nicholas Kristof isn’t necessarily my favorite person to turn to in times of major human rights crises, but:

Mr. Mubarak has disgraced the twilight of his presidency. His government appears to have unleashed a brutal crackdown — hunting down human rights activists, journalists and, of course, demonstrators themselves, all while trying to block citizens from Tahrir Square. As I arrived near the square in the morning, I encountered a line of Mr. Mubarak’s goons carrying wooden clubs with nails embedded in them. That did not seem an opportune place to step out of a taxi, so I found a back way in.

So did many, many others. At Tahrir Square’s field hospital (a mosque in normal times), 150 doctors have volunteered their services, despite the risk to themselves. Maged, a 64-year-old doctor who relies upon a cane to walk, told me that he hadn’t been previously involved in the protests, but that when he heard about the government’s assault on peaceful pro-democracy protesters, something snapped.

So early Thursday morning, he prepared a will and then drove 125 miles to Tahrir Square to volunteer to treat the injured. “I don’t care if I don’t go back,” he told me. “I decided I had to be part of this.”

“If I die,” he added, “this is for my country.”

He knows how to get those anecdotes. And, damn. It’s beautiful, these small scenes, in the face of such ugliness and oppression.

being a mother isnt always a choice, not yet.

so, when i was in the west bank back in the summer of 2006, israel was bombing lebanon, and i realized i might be pregnant. my partner was in the states at the time, so i had to rely on a couple of friends to help me procure a home pregnancy test in israel since we couldnt find one in the west bank. as we were sitting in the park in jerusalem at night, eating cake, and hiding from the guards, one of my friends explained that she would most likely not be able to have kids. i nodded my head. and then she went on a small rant about how immoral it was to have kids, and be a breeder.
whoa. that word, breeder, was like a smack in the face. i wont go deep into the racial implications of that word, but as bfp pointed out earlier this week, black women in the states have historically been forced to be pregnant and to produce offspring, but not to be a mother. being able to not choose to bear a child can be a privilege. and so can being allowed to be a mother.
later that night when i was finally home, i saw the two pink lines appear on the plastic wand. and my suspicions were confirmed, i was ‘with child’.

i was pro choice before i became pregnant, but it was being pregnant for ten months that made me proclaim, loudly, to anyone who would listen: i am so pro-abortion because no one, and i mean no one, should have to be pregnant if they dont want to! anyone who thinks that adoption is an alternative to an abortion is nuts, it totally ignores that you have to be fucking pregnant for a fucking year first.

i know that giving birth, and/or being a mother is not always a choice. in a lot of the world a safe abortion is not necessarily available. here in egypt, is in a lot of the world, abortion is outlawed. and even in countries where abortion is legal, it can be out of the price range for the majority of women. in a lot of countries, an abortion is not feasible for a woman because of the red tape that she needs to go through. or the distance that the nearest clinic is. or if her family or partner discover that she has had an abortion she will be turned out of her house with no resources, no money, no job, no safety net, nothing. or she will be beaten. or the only type of abortion available are so dangerous to the woman’s health that she risks her very life in having one.

in the eastern congo, rape is used as a primary weapon of war. and women are kidnapped and raped for months until they become pregnant, then they are set free in the mountainous jungle. abortion is illegal in this country. and i talked with methodist christian ladies who were working day and night to be able to provide the morning after pill for every woman they can in their region. the work they do is but a drop in the bucket. they never have enough supplies.

maybe its because i grew up around girls in the states who didnt have a choice to become a mother. they had sex. they got pregnant by accident. and then they were stuck, threatened, beatened with no resources to be able to get to a clinic, that i dont assume that a woman chose to give birth; simply because she cares for her child. nor do i know what kind of internal choices she has made to be able to love a child.

i do know that it took everything inside of me to not start crying and never stop when i sat in rooms full of congolese rape survivors nursing their children. i know that they told me that their children were a gift, and i believed them.

this is why i work hard to do what i do. why i created the lilith plan. provide alternatives to clinical abortions that are not always available and can be traumatizing even if available. i research plants, herbs, flowers for their abortifacient qualities. i study acupressure texts. i build del-ems. i make the information available through any means i can find. cause a lot of women, women that we see everyday with their children never had the choice whether or not to become pregnant or be a mother. they walk by us, not screaming their life stories at us. and we judge them, not even with the little facts about them that we have, but with the stories and narratives that we make up about them in our heads.

i saw the lilith plan in a vision one night as i was meditating. and am slowly working to make it a reality.

a force more powerful

“We may not currently have the might of the Israeli army and the power of traditions confine us in certain roles, however, we know that one woman standing behind another in a line of solidarity is a force more powerful than both.”
–kefah, speaking in at-tuwani village, west bank, palestine

i am going to start with kefah. kefah will be on a speaking tour in italy this fall.

i met kefah in the fall of 2004 under horrible circumstances. we were living in the southern west bank. and a couple of international friends had been walking with palestinian children passed an israeli settlement, when the israeli settlers jumped out of the woods and beat my two friends down. luckily, the kids weren’t physically hurt, but they were scared, very scared. but my two friends were taken to the hospital with a punctured lung, broken knee and arm, and psychological trauma. so i and a couple of other internationals who were living in palestine went to at tuwani and walked with the children the next day passed the settlement. and the day after that.
those kids were amazing. they faced death just so they could go to elementary school.
the israeli soldiers told us that if the settlers attacked us, they would not protect us. and we believed them since a lot of the soldiers were from neighboring israeli settlements.
at night we slept in the women’s museum, a palestinian women’s craft co-op started by kefah.
kefah is amazing. she is a wife, a mother to four sons, a self-avowed feminist, a leader in her village, a visionary, a business woman, a community organizer. when i think of revolutionary motherhood, i think of kefah.
and she has a great raunchy sense of humor.
kefah expanded for me what i understood motherhood to mean. well, actually not just kefah, a lot of palestinian women did that for me. women who daily confront israeli soldiers just so they can work in their fields, harvest plants, leave their house, go to the clinic, go to the neighboring town. women who do it with a babe riding on their shoulders. women who do it with little money and a lot of strength. women. who. do. it.
dont get me wrong, i dont romanticize living under an occupation. its not pretty. its too little food, and too many people dying. its your husband, your son, your father, your brother in jail and you trying to figure out how to get the money to get him out, if that is even allowed. its eid under curfew. its watching your house be demolished simply because it was standing and then rebuilding it just to watch it be demolished again. its your mosque, your school be demolished. apartment buildings being shelled. its never having enough. its living on the breath of survival. its life. and its painful.
revolution aint pretty and it doesnt come cheap.
but it was kefah that i became friends with. and kefah who i watched as she organized women while mothering young boys.
and it was kefah and her village, at tuwani, that i wanted to return to when i tried to return to palestine in the winter of 2009.

======

in late december of 2009 israel decided to bomb gaza. and bomb her and bomb her. my lil family and i traveled during the bombing. first to scotland to see our friends theresa and jim. and then we got on a plane in mid january and flew to tel aviv, israel. (you have to enter israel in order to enter the west bank). instead of allowing us to enter israel, the airport security put me, my partner, and my one year old daughter in israeli jail for three days. (and no, we dont know why they would not allow us to enter israel, israel is like that, we have some good guesses, but no hard facts…)
there is a lot i can say from those three days in jail. i can tell you that all the guards are hopped up on speed and uppers and live in a world of paranoia that wafts through the jail like cigarette smoke. i can tell you that they refused to give us diapers for aza so she had to piss on the floor for a day until the cleaning lady came in and told the guards to give us diapers or else. i can tell you that in the cell next to us was an eight month dutch nigerian pregnant lady with her husband who had their passports confiscated. and that through the vents aza and i heard the guards torturing him while they videotaped it.
and there are things i cannot tell you. i cannot tell you the sound of aza screaming because she was locked in a room for over twenty four hours, ill never forget it, but ill never be able to describe it either. i cannot tell you the soft look in aza’s eyes when the guard told me: i dont care what happens to your daughter, whatever happens to her is your fault. because you are in here.
even though i had spent the past couple of days trying to get the fuck out of there.
i can tell you how by the end of that experience, no matter how horrifying many of the guards had been, i was so grateful that i was not them. that i still walked with my humanity. that i still could feel compassion for them even if they could not afford to do so for me.
i can though tell you that what we experienced was normal. and whatever was abnormal about our experience in jail was due to the privilege we were extended as us citizens.
after three days they let us go and flew us to amsterdam.
the bombing of gaza ended while we were in jail. and obama was inaugurated a day after we got out. i can tell you that i wasnt feeling very much hope as i watched pieces of the inauguration celebration from our hotel room television set.
i was missing palestine deeply. i wanted kefah to meet aza.

======

a lot of people want to quibble over israel and palestine. they want to start with the right of israel to exist. they want to start dividing up land for a two state solution. they want it over with. done with. cause they are tired of it.
no body i have ever met is more tired of the occupation than palestinians. bone tired. they dont get a day off from genocide.
and that means they dont get a day away from struggle.
people ask me what do i think about hamas and their refusal to acknowledge israel’s right to exist.
ummm…i have a lot of critiques of hamas. a lot. but israel does not have a right to exist. no nation based on occupation and genocide does (and that most definitely includes my home country the us of a). and no one should require that the oppressed acknowledge the ‘right’ of the oppressor to abuse, violate, and murder. no real peace can be bought at such a price. (i do not believe in rewriting history and so israel does exist, whether or not it has a right to. and we have to deal with it as it exists. but damn, dont ask for the natives to thank the conquerors for their chains…)
and there are few places where this is better articulated than in palestinian hip hop.

so i will end with darg (da revolutionary arabian guys) team. a few amazing mc’s from gaza. they had been trying for months to be allowed to leave gaza and after the massacre on the mavi marmara a couple of months ago and in response israel opening the gazan borders, darg team was able to escape to switzerland where they are hanging out now, planning to come to the states in september and go on tour. if we can get the visas and the funds for them to do so.

“on December 27th 2008 Israel started it’s first strike on Gaza killing hundrends no thousands of lives for 23 days. DARG TEAM after the war recorded and filmed it’s first video clip ‘23 yoom”.
today, one year after the war and DARG TEAM steps in again but this time calling every one to participate and start rebuilding what the war left behind.”

rebuild by us

(it’s in arabic. i really can’t translate it.)

the question i hate the most when i write or speak about palestine is: but is there any hope? did you feel any hope when you were there?
what. the. fuck?
hope? fuck hope.
i saw mamas breastfeeding babies. and old men tending flocks of sheep in full defiance of the israeli military. i saw wild poppies covering a graveyard. and a boy etching graffiti on the apartheid wall. and a 12 year old girl in hijab and school uniform sing umm kulthum with a tenor that would make the stoic weep. i have seen a full bellied palestinian pregnant woman turn her back to an israeli soldier who had a gun pointed at her so she could talk on the cell phone to her four year old son and tell him that she would be home soon. and communities get together and remove the large earth mound road blocks that the israeli army puts down in the middle of highways to cut off transportation between neighboring cities. and grandmothers who will yell at soldiers and lock arms protecting their sons. thrown rocks off of mountains with seven year olds (who had a much better arm than me) and drank tea in front of the rubble that used to be my hosts bedroom.
hope? i have seen much more than hope.
i have seen life. and love. and revolution.

and someday i will see kefah again.

Outlaw Clothing: Burqas, Islamophobia and Women’s Rights

The ongoing quest of the French government to preserve their country’s “secular traditions” came to the fore once again Tuesday when the lower house of France’s parliament voted to ban women from wearing any face-covering veil, such as the infamous burqa or the less “extreme” niqab — a move obviously targeting French Muslim women, of which perhaps 1,900 wear a face-covering veil. France has the highest population of Muslims in Europe, comprising about 5 million of France’s population of 64 million people.

I’m sure you remember the “no hijabs in public schools” ban France passed in 2004 after almost a decade debating it, barring students from wearing a headscarf or any other piece of clothing that would indicate the religion of the student wearing it. To be fair, that does include Jewish yarmulkes and cross necklaces, however, the surrounding debate was particularly focused on the Muslim hijab. It just seems that since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, Western countries have been not-so-subtly putting their Islamophobia on display.

Of course, this is not to say that all Muslim women disagree with the banning of the burqa or niqab. Some Muslim feminists have spoken out in favor of the ban. I fully support the right of Muslim women to not be forced to wear face-covering veils. However, I think banning religious clothing at the governmental level is taking the issue in a scary direction. I believe in choices, and banning burqas and niqabs eliminates the ability of women who actually wear the veils of their own volition to continue to make the choice to wear them, however few the women may be that make that choice. The author of the Huffington Post article, Caryl Rivers, makes a lot of good points, but I really do believe that in order to truly gain equal rights for Muslim women in their culture it’s going to have to come from changing Muslim men’s “hearts and minds” and not changing Muslim women’s clothing.

In the Salon article linked above, Eqyptian feminist Mona Eltahawy states:

I support banning the burqa because I believe it equates piety with the disappearance of women. The closer you are to God, the less I see of you — and I find that idea extremely dangerous. It comes from an ideology that basically wants to hide women away. What really strikes me is that a lot of people say that they support a woman’s right to choose to wear a burqa because it’s her natural right. But I often tell them that what they’re doing is supporting an ideology that does not believe in a woman’s right to do anything. We’re talking about women who cannot travel alone, cannot drive, cannot even go into a hospital without a man with them. And yet there is basically one right that we are fighting for these women to have, and that is the right to cover their faces. To tell you the truth, I’m really outraged that people get into these huge fights and say that as a feminist you must support a women’s right to do this, because it’s basically the only kind of “right” that this ideology wants to give women. Otherwise they get nothing.

I agree with her on basically every point she makes, yet I can’t reconcile my feelings about government-enforced bans on religious clothing. I just don’t think that simply legally preventing women from wearing burqas, niqabs, or hijabs is going to cause transformative change in Islamic culture. This is a crude analogy, but it seems like banning black women from relaxing their hair. Yes, black women would be unable to cowtow to the oppressive beauty standards forced on us by Western culture, but would their minds be freed as well? Would black men suddenly stop desiring women with long, straight hair? With the banning of burqas and niqabs, are sexist, oppressive Muslim men and the governments they run suddenly going to stop treating women like second-class citizens? I don’t see that happening. Western governments using women’s rights as an excuse to ban Muslim religious garments just smells like Islamophobia couched in “progressive” rhetoric. Some leaders in the U.K. have actually voiced their concern over the “growing threat of Islamism“.

So what can we expect this ban on face-covering veils to do for Muslim women’s rights in France? Eltahawy had this to say:

What I hope it will do is that it will create a situation where a woman can say to a man, look, you know that I have to go out and work so that we can continue to live here, and I can’t go out with my face covered, even though you want me to, because that’s what the law says. I hope the law gives women this kind of out. I have no idea if that’s actually going to happen or not.

I can’t get behind legislation like this when the only benefit for women would be that you get to tell your husband that you’re required by law to not wear the veil, and the many benefits for the government and Islamophobic French people include not having to be visually reminded there’s Muslims in their communities and also stopping the spread of “Islamism”. I don’t trust the women’s rights angle at all from Western governments when it comes to Islam. We continue to ally with countries that do much more than just expect women to cover themselves head to toe when in public — we’re in bed with countries that beat and jail women who have been gang raped and impregnated because the rape constituted the woman committing adultery. I personally don’t think her lack of burqa helped at all in that situation.

So I’m not exactly joining the cheerleading squad because France decided its Islamophobia was good for women’s rights. Of course I don’t want Muslim women to be forced to cover themselves head to toe. But I firmly believe true change in the Islamic world will never come via simply outlawing certain types of clothing, and I question the veracity of France’s reasons for doing so. The fact that they’re mentioning things like “defining and protecting French values” sounds eerily familiar and to me, is more of a nationalist concern than a concern for women’s rights.

There needs to be substantive change in Muslim men’s attitudes towards Muslim women rather than superficial change mandated by a government that seeks to erase those parts of immigrant populations they find distasteful.

Protesting integration in Israel

Ultra-Orthodox Jews protest the integration of a girls’ school because they don’t want their Ashkenazi daughters studying with Sephardim.

Tens of thousands of black-clad ultra-Orthodox Jews staged mass demonstrations on Thursday to protest a Supreme Court ruling forcing the integration of a religious girls’ school.

Protesters snarled traffic in Jerusalem and another large religious enclave, crowded onto balconies in city squares, and waved posters decrying the court’s decision and proclaiming the supremacy of religious law.

There were a few small scuffles, and a police officer emerged from one of them holding his eye, apparently slightly injured.

It was one of the largest protests in Jerusalem’s history, and a stark reminder of the ultra-Orthodox minority’s refusal to accept the authority of the state.

Also, the throngs of devout Jews showed to which extent the ultra-Orthodox live by their own rules, some of them archaic, while wielding disproportionate power in the modern state of Israel.

Parents of European, or Ashkenazi, descent at a girls’ school in the West Bank settlement of Emanuel don’t want their daughters to study with schoolgirls of Mideast and North African descent, known as Sephardim.

The Ashkenazi parents insist they aren’t racist, but want to keep the classrooms segregated, as they have been for years, arguing that the families of the Sephardi girls aren’t religious enough.

Of course it’s just about morals and religion, and not about bigotry. We’ve heard this line before, haven’t we?

And this quote is rather telling:

Esther Bark, 50, who has seven daughters, said the issue is keeping the girls away from the temptations of the modern world. ”To suddenly put them in an open-minded place is not good for them,” she said.

Tony Judt talks some sense.

He has a great article up about how many of the cliches we use when discussing Israel and Palestine are inaccurate and harmful to the peace process. He cuts through most of the usual platitudes (“It’s Israel’s fault” / “It’s Palestine’s fault”) in favor of a more nuanced and tough take. I’d excerpt, but the whole thing is just so good you should head over and read.