The Best of the Literary Internet

Read novelist Lana Bastašić’s blazing response to yet another act of literary censorship. ‹ Literary Hub
►https://lithub.com/read-novelist-lana-bastasics-blazing-response-to-yet-another-act-of-literary

https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Lana-Bastastic-e1709921517674.png

Journalism as a Front of War: On American Media and the Ideology of the Status Quo ‹ Literary Hub
▻https://lithub.com/journalism-as-a-front-of-war-on-american-media-and-the-ideology-of-the-statu

https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Untitled-design-2.jpg

[…] in the west, we will primarily consider how journalism is, first and foremost, a literary act of war—because everything in the west has been forged in, and is maintained, by war. The United Kingdom was created, and in many ways is upheld despite its decline, through extractive colonialism. This is also true of several of the countries in Europe (which are also not coincidentally among the few nations of the earth opposing a ceasefire in Gaza). Meanwhile, the United States was birthed in—and, if you ask many Native Americans, still defined by—settler colonialism.

As they help to uphold their societies’ hegemony over other nations, the news media of the west reflects these origins and ongoing realities.

And whether it is covering bombs and battlefields abroad or reporting on school districts, city council meetings, police, or gender domestically, journalism in the United States is especially steeped in warfront framing—because public discourse, culture, and language in America are literally referred to as wars.

#guerres #MSM

Read novelist Lana Bastašić’s blazing response to yet another act of literary censorship. ‹ Literary Hub
►https://lithub.com/read-novelist-lana-bastasics-blazing-response-to-yet-another-act-of-literary

https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Lana-Bastastic.png

It is my political and human opinion that children should not be slaughtered and that German cultural institutions should know better when it comes to genocide.

–Lana Bastašić

#Allemagne #censure

In the Shadow of the Holocaust | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/in-the-shadow-of-the-holocaust

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/65724f66dc0a9d29707b2176/16:9/w_1280,c_limit/Gessen-Holocaust-Weekend-Essay.jpg

Just three years after the Holocaust, Arendt was comparing a Jewish Israeli party to the Nazi Party, an act that today would be a clear violation of the I.H.R.A.’s definition of antisemitism.

#instrumentalisation #sionisme

Poet and scholar Refaat Alareer has been killed by an Israeli airstrike. ‹ Literary Hub
▻https://lithub.com/poet-and-scholar-refaat-alareer-has-been-killed-by-an-israeli-airstrike

https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Refaat-Alareer.jpg

The Palestinian poet, writer, literature professor, and activist Dr. Refaat Alareer was killed today in a targeted Israeli airstrike that also killed his brother, his sister, and four of her children. He is survived by his wife, Nusayba, and their children.

Dr. Alareer was a beloved professor of literature and creative writing at the Islamic University of Gaza, where he taught since 2007.

He was the co-editor of Gaza Unsilenced (2015) and the editor of Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine (2014). In his contribution to the 2022 collection Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire, titled “Gaza Asks: When Shall this Pass?”, Refaat writes:

It shall pass, I keep hoping. It shall pass, I keep saying. Sometimes I mean it. Sometimes I don’t. And as Gaza keeps gasping for life, we struggle for it to pass, we have no choice but to fight back and to tell her stories. For Palestine.

Dr. Alareer was also one of the founders of We Are Not Numbers, a nonprofit organization launched in Gaza after Israel’s 2014 attack and dedicated to creating “a new generation of Palestinian writers and thinkers who can bring together a profound change to the Palestinian cause.”

Through his popular Twitter account, “Refaat in Gaza,” Dr. Alareer vehemently condemned the ongoing atrocities committed against his people by Israeli forces, as well as the successive U.S. administrations that enabled them. (...)

“““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““"
son dernier poème sur Twitter : ►https://twitter.com/itranslate123/status/1719701312990830934
If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself—
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up
above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale

▻https://seenthis.net/messages/1030671

„Die Räume werden enger“
▻https://taz.de/Kundgebung-zum-Gaza-Konflikt/!5972270

Aber nicht nur das: Viele der Reden sprechen von dem Gefühl, immer stärker von der deutschen Mehrheitsgesellschaft und Politik „gesilencet“ zu werden. Mehrmals kommt die Situation des migrantischen Neuköllner Kulturzentrums Oyoun zur Sprache: Dessen Förderung aus dem Landeshaushalt wird nicht nur von der CDU-Kulturverwaltung, sondern auch von den Grünen in Frage gestellt, weil es dem Verein „Jüdische Stimme für gerechten Frieden in Nahost“ Räume zur Verfügung stellt. „Die Räume für Verständigung werden immer enger“, sagt der Redner Ferat Koçak. Das Oyoun sei „ein Ort, wo das Diskutieren noch möglich ist – weil anderswo Angst davor herrscht“, so der Linken-Abgeordnete.

[…]

Die Akademie der Künste – Breitz ist Mitglied – wollte das Symposium ursprünglich ausrichten, zog sich aber im Dezember 2022 mit der Begründung zurück, es sei „nicht der richtige Zeitpunkt“ für eine solche Veranstaltung. In die Bresche sprang die Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung (bpb). In diesem Dezember hätte „We Still Need to Talk“ im Berliner Futurium stattfinden sollen, aber zwei Wochen nach dem 7. Oktober sagte auch die bpb ab. Begründung: In der derzeitigen Situation sei es nicht möglich, „diese Debatte konstruktiv zu führen und zu moderieren, um das angestrebte Bildungsziel in einer sachlichen und respektvollen Weise zu erreichen“.

[…]

Zwei Stunden vor Beginn hat die Versammlungsbehörde den VeranstalterInnen mitgeteilt, dass der Platz vor dem Brandenburger Tor tabu sei.

[…]

Bei der Kundgebung dann, ein paar Meter weiter unter den Linden, kritisieren mehrere RednerInnen, dass sie regelmäßig aufgefordert werden, sich erst von den Taten der Hamas zu distanzieren, bevor sie irgendwelche Forderungen stellen dürfen. „Ekelhaft“ sei es, dass Deutsche das von ihr verlangten, sagt Candice Breitz, und die Journalistin Emily Dische-Becker findet, die vorgeschaltete Frage wirke auf sie wie die Aufforderung einer Website, den Button „Ich bin kein Roboter“ anzuklicken. Ferat Koçak fragt: „Haben wir gefordert, dass sich die Almans von den Querdenkern distanzieren? Haben wir nicht!“ Von der Hamas solle er sich aber ständig abgrenzen, „weil ich aussehe, wie ich aussehe. Dabei bin ich noch nicht mal Muslim.“

Interview with a Gatekeeper : Jacques Testard ‹ Literary Hub
▻https://lithub.com/interview-with-a-gatekeeper-jacques-testard

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Yep, comme éditeur, je me sens très proche de ce que dit Jacques Testard, le fondateur de Fitzcarraldo editions au Royaume Uni.

I suppose my original interest in editorial work specifically came from a misguided notion of the glamour involved in the job, the mythology around great publishers of yesteryear, and the intellectual nature of the job. I wouldn’t say I had an easy time becoming an editor—in the early days I never managed to get the jobs I was applying for and so I ended up doing it in this long, unusual and convoluted way, working my way in from the margins by starting up my own project with a friend in order to eventually get to do it for a living.

KA: You mean editing isn’t glamorous?

JT: Publishing is a fairly low-adrenaline job, particularly when you work for a small independent press. I spend a lot of time on my own, editing, but also doing everything else you need to do to keep a small press ticking. I’ve had a few glamorous moments—the pinnacle was the Nobel Prize dinner for Svetlana Alexievich in Stockholm—but I spend a lot more time carrying big bags of books to the post office than drinking martinis with famous authors. In fact, carrying books around is quite a big part of the job.

KA: I see Second-hand Time was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize, the UK’s most prestigious award for nonfiction. What has publishing Alexievich meant for Fitzcarraldo?

JT: A lot. It gave the company financial stability in our second year of operations—thanks to the rights sales we were able to slowly grow the company, going up initially to eight books a year, and now ten. It also gave Fitzcarraldo Editions a platform, a visibility which it might have taken a bit more time to achieve—that book was reviewed absolutely everywhere and critics and literary editors pay attention to what we publish as a result. It also gave us our first significant publishing success, from having to manage successive reprints to making contingency plans in the event of a prize-win, to organizing a ten-day tour for a Nobel Prize laureate. In that respect it’s given me the opportunity to learn more about my job as a publisher.

KA: What’s behind the name Fitzcarraldo?

JT: The name of the press, which comes from the Werner Herzog film about the man who wants to build an opera house in the jungle, is a not very subtle metaphor on the stupidity of setting up a publishing house—it’s like dragging a 320-ton steamboat over a muddy hill in the Amazon jungle.

KA: Are you saying publishing is a madman’s dream?

JT: Kind of. I guess the suggestion is that publishing is so difficult and financially precarious that to set out to publish the kinds of books that we do is akin to dragging a 320-tonne steamboat up a hill. It’s possible, but it’s going to be extremely difficult.

KA: How can publishing be more sustainable than a madman’s dream?

JT: I have a somewhat naïve and idealistic conception of the role of a publishing house. I want Fitzcarraldo Editions to be the kind of publishing house that publishes authors, rather than books. For example, if I publish your debut book and it sells 500 copies, I will publish the second one anyway, and so on and so forth. The hope is that author and publishing house can grow—and prosper—together. I suppose here it’s important to point out that Fitzcarraldo Editions is a limited company, a profit-making company—perhaps a profit-desiring company is more accurate at this stage.

The idea is to build a publishing house that is sustainable over a long time and to make it work in the old tradition of publishing. The traditional publishing model is, put in very simple terms, that you publish X number of books a year and that you have one book that sells more than everything else and props the rest of the list up.

KA: What do you feel your role is as an editor?

JT: The main thing is to bring texts from manuscript stage to publication. Sometimes that involves very little work, and just going through the motions of production—when you’re publishing a book you’ve acquired from an American publishing house, for example. But most of the time I do actually have to edit things, for structure or style or both.

I am both editor and publisher, so my role goes a bit beyond that of the editor at a bigger publishing house. As all editors I have a responsibility to the authors I’m publishing, to publish their books as well as I can, and to do the best by them and their work. That means producing a nice book, with a flawless text, that we’re both happy with, and making sure it gets out to as many people as possible and try to sell as many copies as possible. Then, I also feel very strongly that unlike many publishers—particularly corporate publishers—I have a responsibility to stick by authors. Whenever I take on a new author I say to them that if the first book doesn’t work I will still want to do the next one. The idea is that we grow as publisher and author side by side. If it’s a young writer and they sell 500 copies that’s fine, we’ll just plan the next book and carry on publishing together and build their career little by little. I think that’s really important, to build a relationship of trust with authors and to make them feel like we’re in it together for the long haul. In French publishing there is a term for this —‘une politique d’auteur,’ which translates roughly (and badly) as an author-focused policy.

#Edition #Fitzcarraldo

How the Culture of the University Covers Up Abuse

My task in Complaint! is relatively simple. I listen to, and learn from, those who make complaints about abuses of power within universities. Many of the stories I share in the book are about institutional violence, that is, the violence directed by the institution toward those who complain about violence within the institution. Those who try to complain are often warned about the costs of complaint or threatened with retaliation for complaining. We might assume warning and threats are used by management as top-down bullying tactics. They are. But many complaints are stopped not by senior managers or administrators but by colleagues, sometimes acting on behalf of colleagues or in order to protect colleagues.

▻https://lithub.com/how-the-culture-of-the-university-covers-up-abuse
#impunité #silence #complicité #collègues #harcèlement #abus #université #facs #violence_institutionnelle

ping @_kg_

–—

ajouté à la métaliste sur le #harcèlement_sexuel à l’université :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/863594
et plus précisément ici :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/863594#message863602

Meet the Three Women Who Changed the Face of War Reportage
▻https://lithub.com/meet-the-three-women-who-changed-the-face-of-war-reportage
Elizabeth Becker on the Groundbreaking Impact of Kate Webb, Catherine Leroy, and Frances FitzGerald
#photographie

Prince Was One of the Loneliest Souls I’ve Ever Met | Literary Hub
▻https://lithub.com/prince-was-one-of-the-loneliest-souls-ive-ever-met

https://lithub.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/a5546ceb3abbb5f5e69bb1f68ac5fa4a.jpg

Then, George Floyd was murdered. And I wished Prince could arise again, just to do battle with that Minnesota Nice flipside.

@sinehebdo

A Taxonomy of Nonfiction; Or the Pleasures of Precision | Literary Hub
▻https://lithub.com/a-taxonomy-of-nonfiction-or-the-pleasures-of-precision

https://lithub.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/web_Figure-1.jpg

As a reader, I don’t turn to nonfiction to hear, for example, that summer is hot. I turn to nonfiction to learn how hot, what kind of hot? Are we talking California autumn hot, which smells of eucalyptus and fire? Or Minnesota August hot, which smells of melted road tar and fish? Which summer is this, hot to what degree, how does this writer know, why should I believe them, why should I care, what can they tell me about the world?

Hopepunk and Solarpunk: On Climate Narratives That Go Beyond the Apocalypse | Literary Hub

▻https://lithub.com/hopepunk-and-solarpunk-on-climate-narratives-that-go-beyond-the-apocalypse

https://lithub.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/solarpunk.jpg

The narratives we construct, the stories we tell ourselves must acknowledge that, while there’s a scientific consensus that the atmosphere is warming due to our fossil fuel emissions, many aspects and extents of climate change remain uncertain. Writing non-apocalyptic climate change narratives can make room, intellectually and emotionally, for our failures to act sooner. Some things will be lost; much already has been.

I hear the following more often than I would like from some of my fellow educators: “My students can’t or won’t discuss climate change. They’re too privileged/preoccupied with their phones/just not interested.”

Of course these young people—these adolescents, these Gen Z college-goers—don’t want to discuss this with us. We are literally (literally) asking them to confront their own mortality.

Despite the incredible groundswell we are now witnessing around the youth-led climate movement—the school strikes, the UN protests, the anger and the vision of children and teenagers like Greta Thunberg—many of my students hear the words we have 18 months to tackle climate change or it will be too late and they think that in 18 months they are going to die. Maybe this thought is what inspires them to join the youth climate movements or Extinction Rebellion; or more crucially, maybe this is the thought that paralyzes them, anesthetizes them, and keeps them away and keeps them asleep.

#utopie #environnement #ville_écologique #urban_matter #narrations

#Rebecca_Solnit : « En patriarchie, personne ne vous entend crier. »
▻https://tradfem.wordpress.com/2019/07/16/en-patriarchie-personne-ne-vous-entend-crier-rebecca-solnit-10-ju

https://tradfem.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/illus-in-patriarchy_solnit.jpg

L’un de mes livres préférés quand j’étais jeune était « La Quête du roi Arthur » de T. H. White ; et l’un de ses thèmes centraux est la tentative du roi Arthur de remplacer un ethos de « la loi du plus fort » par quelque chose de plus juste.

La justice signifie que tout le monde est égal devant la loi – et l’égalité signifie à la fois que tout le monde a la même valeur devant la loi et que tout le monde est soumis à la loi. C’est un concept fondamental pour les États-Unis, mais la réalité est que la loi du plus fort n’a jamais cessé d’être la façon dont les choses fonctionnent vraiment, du moins en partie. Dans le roman de White, le « plus fort » renvoie principalement à la capacité de violence physique de la part des guerriers, des armées, des tribus et des royaumes ; mais à l’heure actuelle, ce qui importe réellement est la capacité des individus (et des entreprises et des nations) de commettre cette violence en toute impunité.

L’immense travail accompli par des journalistes d’investigation ces dernières années nous a permis de voir en pleine lumière le pouvoir de ces « forts », faisant de leurs mieux pour piétiner, faire taire, discréditer les moins puissants et leurs droits, et avec eux l’idée du droit comme une éthique indépendante du pouvoir. Le fait que ces hommes dirigent les médias, le gouvernement et le système financier en dit long sur le genre de systèmes qu’ils composent. Ces systèmes ont travaillé dur pour les protéger, encore et encore. En effet, la puissance des « forts » n’est pas en eux, mais dans l’ensemble des individus et des institutions qui les environnent. Il est donc essentiel d’examiner, au-delà des agresseurs individuels, les systèmes qui leur permettent de commettre des crimes en toute impunité.

Peut-être que l’une des raisons pour lesquelles le viol a si souvent été dépeint comme « un étranger surgissant des buissons » est pour nous faire imaginer des violeurs agissant seuls. Mais dans une multitude de cas, les violeurs ont de l’aide, au moment des faits et toute le reste de leur vie, et cette aide est généralement puissante, étendue et ancrée. C’est pourquoi nous parlons de culture du viol, et c’est pourquoi pour changer cela il faut changer la culture dans son ensemble.

Traduction (provisoire) : Errell Hannah
Version originale : ►https://lithub.com/in-patriarchy-no-one-can-hear-you-scream-rebecca-solnit-on-jeffrey-epstein-a

In Patriarchy No One Can Hear You Scream: Rebecca Solnit on Jeffrey Epstein and the Silencing Machine
►https://lithub.com/in-patriarchy-no-one-can-hear-you-scream-rebecca-solnit-on-jeffrey-epstein-a

Voici un excellent article sur la culture du viol qui montre en quoi le terme contribue à cacher les véritables causes du phénomène: Le viol n’est autre chose qu’une forme de l’exercice du pouvoir des puissants sur les faibles, l’expression individuelle des relations de classe Les feministes petites bourgeoises se trompent quand elles revendiquent un chagement de culture. Il faut changer le système qui constitue la base des immenses privilèges des riches, il faut abolir les riches et democratiser la propriété.

On s’occupera des violeurs en mème temps.

La culture n’est pas gratuite. Quand il n’y aura plus personne qui payera pour les infrastructures du viol, le problème sera réduit â une dimension qui permettra de l’éliminer au fur et à mesure. Tant que guerre et exploitation restent les bases de la société le viol et sa culture en seront un élément essentiel.

S’attaquer à la culture du viol sans s’attaquer au capitalisme est un exercice factice.

“Truth is whatever the powerful want it to be.” By Rebecca Solnit July 10, 2019

Maybe one of the reasons rape has so often been portrayed as “a stranger leaps out of the bushes” is so we’ll imagine rapists acting alone. But in so many cases rapists have help in the moment and forever after, and the help is often so powerful, broad, and deep—well, that’s why we call it rape culture, and that’s why changing it means changing the whole culture. Sometimes it’s the family, community, church, campus looking the other way; sometimes it’s the criminal justice system. If Jeffrey Epstein goes to jail for the new round of indictments—which only came about because one investigative journalist, Julie K. Brown of the Miami Herald, did an extraordinary job of digging up what had been buried in his case—a host of people who knew, laughed, looked the other way, allegedly helped him sexually abuse children for years will still be at large, and the circumstances that allow other Epsteins to attack other children will still exist.

In Patriarchy No One Can Hear You Scream: Rebecca Solnit on Jeffrey Epstein and the Silencing Machine
►https://lithub.com/in-patriarchy-no-one-can-hear-you-scream-rebecca-solnit-on-jeffrey-epstein-a

One of my favorite books when I was young was T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, and one of its central themes is the attempt of King Arthur to replace an ethos of “might is right” with something closer to justice. Justice means everyone is equal under the law—and equality means both that everyone has equal value under the law and that everyone is subject to the law. That’s been a foundational concept for the United States, but might is right has never ceased to be how things actually work at least some of the time. In White’s novel, might means in part the capacity for physical violence on the part of individual warriors, armies, tribes, and kingdoms, but the ability of individuals (and corporations and nations) to commit that violence with impunity is another kind of might that (...)

Fascism is Not an Idea to Be Debated, It’s a Set of Actions to Fight | Literary Hub
▻https://lithub.com/fascism-is-not-an-idea-to-be-debated-its-a-set-of-actions-to-fight

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“I still feel guilty and ashamed of my cowardice and naïve belief that if we only kept talking something might bring him back.”

In a kind of epiphany, I understood that the letter was written in a language I no longer recognized, not least because he was using a dialect and diction far closer to Gorski vijenac than to our past movie arguments. We were now so far apart that whatever I might say could never reach him, let alone convert him back into what I’d thought was the true and original version of my friend. I never responded to his letter, nor would I ever see him again, but he wrote a letter to my parents (who had been friends with his). There, he drew a little map representing the siege Gorazde, a town 60 miles from Sarajevo where he was deployed, proudly explaining to them that the Serbs did not care about the town as much as they wanted to capture the nearby ammo factory. My mother, who’d implored me not to end my friendship with Zoka for “politics,” wept over the letter, because the Zoka she knew was absent from it. I read it too. It was written not only by a stranger, but by an enemy.

My relationship with the war has always been marked by an intense sense that I failed to see what was coming, even though everything I needed to know was there, before my very eyes. While Zoka took active part in enacting the ideas I’d argued against, my agency did not go beyond putting light pressure on his fascist views by way of screaming. I have felt guilty, in other words, for doing little, for extending my dialogue with him (and a few other Serb nationalist friends) for far too long, even while his positions—all of them easy to trace back to base Serbian propaganda—were being actualized in a criminal and bloody operation. I was blinded, I suppose, by our friendship which had ended, I know now, well before our dialogue did. For all that, I still feel guilty and ashamed of my cowardice and naïve belief that if we only kept talking something might bring him back. I retroactively recognized that his hate and racism were always present and that there was no purpose or benefit to our continued conversation. I had long been screaming into a human void.

Whose Story (and Country) Is This? On the Myth of a “Real” America
▻https://lithub.com/rebecca-solnit-the-myth-of-real-america-just-wont-go-away

More Americans work in museums than work in coal, but coalminers are treated as sacred beings owed huge subsidies.

We are as a culture moving on to a future with more people and more voices and more possibilities. Some people are being left behind, not because the future is intolerant of them but because they are intolerant of this future.

#reasonsForOptimism #representation

Same As It Ever Was: Orientalism Forty Years Later
ON EDWARD SAID, OTHERING, AND THE DEPICTIONS OF ARABS IN AMERICA

January 23, 2018 By Philip Metres

| Literary Hub
▻https://lithub.com/same-as-it-ever-was-orientalism-forty-years-later

“Why do they have to show that? That—that—violence,” I said to my mom hours later, burying my face in my pillow, unable to sleep, my little body convulsing with this strange grief.

In the packed dark of our local theater, eleven years old, I’d been reeling, gripping the armrests in terror as Raiders of the Lost Ark flashed across the huge screen. The swashbuckling Indiana Jones had somehow escaped a trap-filled temple in Peru with the golden idol in hand, but his local guide hadn’t. The image of a wide-eyed brown-faced man with a spike piercing his forehead had seared itself in my mind, but now they were somehow in Cairo, and Indiana, having escaped a chase in the casbah, found himself face-to-face with a black-cloaked, scimitar-wielding Arab. Smiling, laughing even, the man flung and swung the comically large sword from hand-to-hand. World-weary, Indiana pulled out his pistol and blew him away. The crowd around me erupted in cheers. Was I supposed to laugh? Before I could react, we were off again, with our American hero, between local “savages” and Nazis, until in the fury of the opened ark, the bad guys’ faces literally melted off. Walking out of the theater, I did everything I could to hold back sobs.

Growing up Arab American in the 1980s, I couldn’t escape these depictions of Arabs as vile, cruel terrorists. I was confused why so many movies I watched featured a bloodthirsty Arab vanquished by white American heroes. It wasn’t just Raiders, of course, it was also the weird creatures of the Tatooine desert in Star Wars, the vicious Sand People, who seemed more than a little familiar. And later, The Black Stallion Returns (1983), and not too long after that, the runaway time-traveling hit, Back to the Future (1985). What were Libyans doing in Hill Valley California, and why did they have plutonium? It was such a non sequitur that we never asked what they were doing there. Of course, the movie wanted us to say, those wretched Libyans! And like the Egyptian sword-wielder who was really a white stuntman, a whole parade of terrorists played by Israeli actors in “arabface” were trotted out in movie after movie produced by the Israeli-led Cannon Films.

Later, when I read the work of Edward Said and Jack Shaheen, I learned that my experience—and these films—are not the exception. Shaheen’s Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (2001) looked at nearly 1,000 films and found only a dozen that depicted Arabs in a complex or positive way. Watching television, it was more of the same. I secretly loved the wrestler “The Iron Sheik,” who wore a keffiyah, robe, neat mustache, and played the heel. He was Iranian, actually, but he was as good as Arab to me (shout-out to my Iranian brothers and sisters). When he palled around with the Russian Nikolai Volkoff, I thought of the Russians as odd comrades. Of course, The Iron Sheik played the heel. Whenever the crowd began to jeer him—or anyone—I felt something churn in me. Some kind of fire ignited in my head. I was drawn to the one who was hated. Whether the person was black or brown or queer or just strange, I wanted to stand beside them.