Muftah

C’est déjà mercredi, et je me suis dit que tu avais envie d’un article t’expliquant que Chomsky est un idiot utile de Bachar Assad et qu’il a « trahit le peuple syrien » : How Noam Chomsky Betrayed the Syrian People
▻http://muftah.org/noam-chomsky-syria

Though Chomsky and the wider left might not appreciate this, the part they are playing in Syria’s counter-revolution is discrediting leftism. In this way, their actions are comparable to those “socialists” who destroyed the left for generations because of a blind loyalty to the nightmare of Stalinism.

Sadly, the conservative, orientalist, and incoherent stance on Syria expressed by Chomsky and his supporters is symptomatic of a leftism that has no reason to exist beyond the narrow parameters of its own subculture.

Palestinian Youth Are Being Systematically Terrorized by #Israel
▻http://muftah.org/israeli-violence-traumatizes-and-antagonizes-palestinian-youth

Policies, like this, criminalize attempts to resist #occupation, and justify the widespread #incarceration of children. Locking up a child terrorizes all her family members, effectively paralyzing them from taking further action against the occupation of their homeland. Parents and siblings are unlikely to protest against Israel’s actions in the OPT, while a loved one’s whereabouts and wellbeing are unknown. It is a horrifyingly clever strategy that decimates Palestinian society by tearing apart individual families. A report from Healing Across the Divides notes: “Palestinians have expressed serious concern about the future consequences of these shattered parental bonds. Parents face difficulties in protecting their children from sights of destruction, violence, and abuse.”

[...]

Contrary to Israel’s strategy, the ever-increasing criminalization of young Palestinians leaves lasting scars, physical and psychological, that will remind youth of their lifelong subordination under military occupation, and likely encourage more resistance.

Every witness to a brutal arrest is damaged; every child who loses a sibling is frightened and heartbroken. When young people are told every day that their lives are insignificant, it should be unsurprising when they seek to take control of their lives, in the form of #resistance to the occupation that has oppressed them for so long.

#Israël #enfants #Palestine

How Palestine’s Security Sector Facilitates the Israeli Occupation
▻http://muftah.org/how-palestines-security-sector-facilitates-the-israeli-occupation

http://muftah.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/pa-security-services.jpg

Not designed for domestic consumption, the rare public comments from the PA’s intelligence chief had two purposes: to shore up financial support for the security sector from international donors, and signal the PA’s active involvement in protecting Israel’s security interests in the West Bank.

#collabos #Palestine #modérés

Why I Refuse to Celebrate Saudi National Day
▻http://muftah.org/refuse-celebrate-saudi-national-day

http://muftah.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/saudi-national-day.jpg

Many Saudis pride themselves on not having been colonized by Europeans. While this is technically true, they have been colonized by one of their own. When various European powers went around colonizing, oppressing and slaughtering local populations, they justified their inhumane actions by describing their victims as savage and uncivilized heathens. By dehumanizing local populations they perceived to be different from them, they were able to believe in their mission as a righteous one. King Abdul Aziz, by contrast, killed people who spoke his language, shared many of his own cultural practices, and adhered to the same Islamic faith. In my view, this makes him a much more brutal conqueror than any outsider could ever be.

Sur Muftah, article pas inintéressant sur l’intérêt renouvelé et parfois problématique de certains médias pour les accords de Sykes-Picot. Pour l’auteur, révélateur d’un #orientalisme et d’une obsession #ethno-politique, si @nidal m’autorise à parler ainsi (car cela m’a rappelé un vieil article sur Loubnan ya Loubnan).

The Debates on Sykes-Picot Reveal How Racism about People in the Middle East Is Alive and Well

▻http://muftah.org/the-debates-on-sykes-picot-reveal-how-racism-about-people-in-the-middle-east

Since 2011, Western media has taken a sudden interest in the Sykes-Picot Agreement in a flurry of commentary about the fragility of arbitrarily imposed colonial borders in the Middle East. Everyone from Noam Chomsky to Glenn Beck has presented their take on the issue, but the basic message has been the same: Sykes-Picot, which lives on in the Middle East, is now “failing,” “disintegrating,” “coming undone,” and “unravelling.”

These criticisms are not simply reflections of the past; they also tell us much about the present. This mythologizing of Sykes-Picot reveals a worldview in which the incompatibility of certain ethnic and religious groups is blamed for the region’s current instability, while Western interventions in the Middle East over the last few decades are conveniently ignored. In this way, they reveal that cultural essentialism about the Middle East region is still alive and well in the West.

[...]

Why Sykes-Picot Matters

Today, many narratives about Sykes-Picot leave a distinct aftertaste of primordialism and essentialism. As the argument often goes, regional conflict arises because the Sykes-Picot borders do not correspond to the sectarian, ethnic, or tribal divisions on the ground. The underlying assumption in this argument is that a set of “real” borders actually exists somewhere, but are contradicted by those on our maps. The implication of this argument is that non-Western peoples, whether because of religion, ethnicity, tribal practices, or other markers of identity, are simply incapable of building a lasting nation-state which can transcend more primordial loyalties.

[...]

Few have bothered to ask what people who live within a supposedly “Sykes-Picot Order” think about all this. If we consider mainstream Arab media to be the voice of popular opinion, it seems general sentiment is in favor of keeping the current borders. The Kurds, of course, have long struggled to achieve a state of their own, but there is no comparably overwhelming support among Sunnis of the Middle East for a Sunnistan, or among the Shi’a for a Shiastan.

MEK in the European ParliamentThe Well-Funded Exile Group’s Desperate Attempts to Sabotage Diplomacy on Iran
▻http://muftah.org/mek-iran-eu-sabotage

Exploiting local political sensitivities in Europe, the MEK has chosen a different tactic to advocate for government overthrow. To European audiences, the MEK has emphasized Iran’s human rights issues, such as the high number of executions in the country, as well as issues to do with women rights and infringements on religious liberty. In mid-April, MEK operative Firouz Mahvi, a member of NCRI’s so-called “Foreign Affairs Committee” and a fixture at the Brussels-based European Parliament (EP), sent an e-mail to parliamentarians (MEPs) calling on them to adopt an urgent resolution on capital punishment in Iran. The proposed resolution would have almost certainly led to the cancellation of a scheduled visit by members of the Majles, the Iranian parliament, to Brussels. In fact, this very thing happened last month: following the adoption of a different resolution on Iran critical of its human rights record, the Majles delegation cancelled a planned trip in protest. The trip was rescheduled for this week.

PALESTINIENS DE SYRIE: LE REGIME SYRIEN EST RESPONSABLE DE LA CRISE A YARMOUK. PARLONS - EN!

"Together, both pro-regime and mainstream media outlets have ignored the experiences of Palestinians who do not support the regime (though for different reasons), effectively concealing the truth behind the suffering under which Yarmouk’s population lives today.

To understand the crisis in Yarmouk it is critical to understand how the Syrian regime has created divisions between Syria’s Palestinian population, and how those divisions led to the present humanitarian situation in Yarmouk."

▻http://muftah.org/syrian-regime-responsible-crisis-yarmouk-one-talking

Did “American Sniper” Play a Role in the Chapel Hill Shootings?
▻http://muftah.org/american-sniper-play-role-chapel-hill-shootings

In late January 2015, the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), the largest Arab American civil rights organization in the United States, sent a letter to Bradley Cooper, the star of American Sniper, and Clint Eastwood, the movie’s director, informing them about the film’s role in increasing anti-Muslim sentiment. While ADC requested a public statement from the two men condemning the threats fueled by their film, they have yet to respond to the request.

And, while there is no proof the film played any part in the Chapel Hill Shootings, we must remember that Islamophobia, like many other forms of bigotry, feeds off a social and cultural environment that accepts and reinforces those views.

King Abdullah Was Not A Reformer. Here’s 10 People in the Gulf Who Are.
▻http://muftah.org/king-abdullah-reformer-heres-10-people

King Abdullah Was Not A Reformer. Here’s 10 People in the Gulf Who Are.

(Au passage, dans l’anglais « people » il y a une majorité de femmes !)

Academics Are Losing the War over the Middle East to the Thomas Friedmans of the World, Who Write All Too Clearly
▻http://muftah.org/academics-losing-war-middle-east-thomas-friedmans-world-write-clearly

Now, I’m certainly not the first person to make this point, but I wanted to do something to illustrate just how bad things have become. So I set out to write and publish a particularly jargon-laden, largely meaningless piece on Turkey’s 2013 Gezi Park protests — now the most over-analyzed event in Turkish politics for the second year running. Among other things, my article addressed the Gezification of Gezi, the Gezi-”Gezi” dichotomy, and the chrono-political referents that enabled other events to resist Gezification by escaping the inescapable inextricability of space through the discourse of space. I submitted the piece under a pseudonym to a well-known online journal that offers a forum for young scholars to write academically informed work on modern Middle East politics.

[…]

After a brief delay, and some consultation with the journal’s staff, an editor wrote back suggesting I expand my piece from 750 words to 2,000 – in order, he said, to better engage with the “very important and thought-provoking questions” I had raised.

Wahhabism Is Islam’s Greatest Threat
▻http://muftah.org/wahhabism-islams-greatest-threat

For all of its reformist puritanical zeal, Wahhabism would have been relegated to a mere footnote in history, if it were not for a literal pact signed with the future founders of Saudi Arabia. Indeed, over the last several decades, Saudi Arabia has systematically financed and globalized Wahhabi, literalist interpretations of Islamic texts.

Wahhabism’s globalization has had profound effects on the rise of radical interpretations of Islam, outside the realm of learned theological hermeneutics. It has fueled extremists from Sayyid Qutb to Osama bin Laden to ISIS, who have variously claimed the mantle of radical Islamic reform and engaged in an extremist takfirist war (a war against so-called apostates). This misguided and nefarious battle has, in turn, effectively bastardized the noble concept of greater jihad, as an inner struggle, and transformed it into a call for acts of terrorism.

Ramy Essam : on Revolutionary Stories, Struggles, & Guitar Strings
▻http://muftah.org/ramy-essam-revolutionary-stories-struggles-guitar-strings

Le « rebelle arabe » est encore un produit qui se vend bien ! (enfin, sur les campus US)

Earlier this month, the “Singer of the Revolution,” as he came to be known during Egypt’s eighteen-day uprising, which ousted former president Hosni Mubarak, concluded his first U.S. tour with a small but well-attended event at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Around forty audience members, most of whom were Egyptian (a fact that allowed Essam to speak comfortably in his native tongue), listened, laughed, and sang along as the up-and-coming rockstar belted out some old Tahrir Square favorites, as well as a few newer pieces.

Telling the Story of the Arab Spring: an Interactive Graffiti Map
▻http://muftah.org/telling-story-arab-spring-interactive-graffiti-map

Le site Muftah a maintenant une section Europe de l’Est.
▻http://muftah.org/eastern-europe-first-colletion

Palestine et féminisme, certains de ces textes ont déjà été postés ici, mais le premier vient d’être traduit en français :

Les hommes palestiniens peuvent-ils être des victimes ? Genrer la guerre d’Israël sur Gaza
Maya Mikdashi, Jadaliyya, le 23 juillet 2014
▻http://vincentfortune.over-blog.com

Israel’s War Against Gaza’s Women & Their Bodies
David Sheen, Muftah, le 23 juillet 2014
►http://muftah.org/israels-war-gazas-women-bodies

Mettre fin au sionisme : une question féministe
Nada Elia, Electronic Intifada, le 24 juillet 2014
►http://www.info-palestine.net/spip.php?article14770

Jewish Groups’ Whitewash of Israeli Racism Ensures It Will Fester (Must read) - Muftah
▻http://muftah.org/jewish-groups-whitewash-israeli-racism-ensures-will-fester

Israel’s War Against Gaza’s Women & Their Bodies
►http://muftah.org/israels-war-gazas-women-bodies

Promoting the Rape of Gaza and Its Women

On July 21, Israeli media reported that Dov Lior, Chief Rabbi of the West Bank settlement Kiryat Arba, issued a religious edict on the rules of engagement during wartime, which he sent to the country’s Defense Minister. The edict stated that according to Jewish religious law, it is permissible to bomb innocent Palestinian civilians and “to exterminate the enemy.”

While Lior is held in high regard, he is also associated with religious Zionism’s “conservative wing.” By contrast, David Stav, Chief Rabbi of the town of Shoham is considered to be a leader of religious Zionism’s “liberal” stream. In an op-ed published the same day news of Lior’s edict broke, Stav characterized the assault on Gaza as a holy war, which is mandated by the Torah itself and must be merciless.

While these leading religious figures called for wars of extermination, some secular Israelis suggested carrying out attacks of a more perverse nature.

The day after Lior and Stav made headlines, news emerged that the City Council of Or Yehuda, located in Israel’s coastal region, printed out and hung a banner supporting Israeli soldiers. The display included language suggesting the rape of Palestinian women. The text of the banner read: “Israeli soldiers, the residents of Or Yehuda are with you! Pound ‘their mother and come back home safely to your mother.”

http://muftah.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/gaza-israel-women-2.jpg?fe293e

In the image, a woman labeled “Gaza,” wears conservative Muslim dress from the waist up and nearly nothing from the waist down, while striking an alluring pose and giving the viewer a come-hither glance. The accompanying Hebrew text reads: “Bibi, finish inside this time! Signed, citizens in favor of a ground assault.” Again, a double-entendre was used to promote war while referencing rape. In Hebrew, the colloquial meaning of “finish” is to ejaculate.

#villa_dans_la_jungle

La spécificité sexiste du racisme israélien (on appelle ça l’intersectionnalité, c’est bien ça ?) :

Israel’s War Against Gaza’s Women & Their Bodies :
►http://muftah.org/israels-war-gazas-women-bodies

Can Palestinian Men be Victims ? Gendering Israel’s War on Gaza
▻http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/18644/can-palestinian-men-be-victims-gendering-israels-w

On pleure la perte des femmes et des enfants, mais les hommes palestiniens peuvent-ils aussi être des victimes ?

Only within this logic can criticism of Israel’s war on Gaza be answered, straight faced, with statements about the “fate” of women and homosexuals “under” Hamas. Recently, a spokesman for Israel answered Noura Erakat’s condemnation of Israel’s violation of international human rights by sharing this gem of wisdom: “Hamas, they wouldn’t allow a young, liberal, secular woman to express her views like you do, ma’am. They would not allow my gay friends to express their sexuality freely.” This statement aims to mobilize the gendered discourse of the War on Terror, a discourse that plays on the affective registers of US liberalism through a pandering to feminist and LGBTQ rights. This pandering allows Islamophobia and war to be manifested as a public and international good—after all, it is “we” that are defending the helpless from the ravages of Muslim and Arab men. Laleh Khalili has called this “the use of gendered ‘telling’ to distinguish those who are to be protected from those who are to be feared or destroyed.” This discourse is so powerful that it does not need to rely on facts—it has in fact overridden them.

The Israeli war machine, much like the US war machine in Afghanistan or Iraq, does not protect Palestinian queers and women and children. It kills them, maims them, and dispossesses them alongside their loved ones—for the simple reason that they are Palestinian, and thus able to be killed with impunity while the world watches. Today, the difference between Palestinian womenandchildren and Palestinian men is not in the production of corpses, but rather in the circulation of those corpses within dominant and mainstream discursive frames that determine who can be publicly mourned as true “victims” of Israel’s war machine. Thus the sheer number of womenandchildren dead are enough to mobilize the US president and the UN to make statements “condemning” the violence—but the killing, imprisonment, and maiming of Palestinian men and boys in times of war and ceasefire goes uncited. In Israel men, settlers, and even soldiers are framed as victims of Palestinian terrorism and aggression. All are publicly mourned. In an almost direct reversal, while Palestinian boys and men have been the primary target of Israel, as evidenced by the population of political prisoners and targeted assassinations, are not seen by western based mainstream media as victims of Israeli terrorism and aggression. Palestinians are put in the self-defeating position of having to fight to be recognized as human, to be recognized in death and in life as victims of Israeli policies and actions.

#Proche_Orient #racisme #pinkwashing

Israel’s War on African Refugees

Exactly two years (this Saturday) after then-20-year-old Haim Mola, and a group of his fellow Jewish Israelis firebombed the homes of several African families and an African nursery in Tel Aviv, their acts of terrorism can be considered unqualified successes in terms of influencing the Israeli government’s agenda. Rather than punishing them for their actions, the state has rewarded the group by implementing public policies that support its racist agenda. In the past twenty-four months, Israel has deported thousands of non-Jewish Africans from the country and the Netanyahu government has declared that it will not rest until the remaining 50,000 are expelled, as well.

In a country where human rights are respected and racist violence is abhorred, such despicable acts would have been punished severely. Elected leaders would have expressed solidarity with the community under attack and publicly proclaimed the terrorists’ professed goals— the expulsion of all non-Jewish Africans — would never be achieved.

But, Israel is no such country. Here, the human rights of non-Jewish Africans are not respected, because a majority of Jewish Israelis do not view them as humans deserving of rights, but rather as a form of “cancer”. Here, racist violence against non-Jewish Africans is not abhorred; in fact, according to a survey by the Israel Democracy Institute, a third of Jewish Israelis openly support such actions.

An Israeli court released the terrorist Haim Mola eight months after his rampage without sentencing him to a single day in jail. The same month, the Israeli government deported the man who ran the firebombed nursery back to Africa.

Although I have been reporting on Israel’s war on Africans for the past four years, the issue has received only scant attention in the mainstream media. Therefore, I decided this year to travel to North America for a one month tour of communities and college campuses to raise awareness about the plight of non-Jewish African asylum-seekers in Israel.

The video featured below is a recording of one of my stops on this cross-continental tour, at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. In this 72-minute presentation (which includes a slideshow), I examine the causes of Israel’s African refugee crisis and document in detail the horrific depths the Israeli state has unashamedly plumbed to achieve its goal of ethno-religious purity.

▻http://muftah.org/israels-war-african-refugees

#Israël #réfugiés #asile #migration