pixelisation

Muslim professionals living in Britain, with above-average incomes and comfortable middle class lifestyles, are not “average Muslims”.

I could never tire of gazing upon your face.

So what explains this?

Residents of the settlement of Elon Moreh in the West Bank have cut a pipe carrying drinking water to a nearby Palestinian village, and are using it to fill a small swimming pool located at a picnic site, which was itself built on land owned by the village.

The pipe, which carries water to the village of Dir al-Khatab, was rerouted in order to fill the pool. The pipe channels fresh drinking water into the pool and drains dirty water back into the village’s water system.

“They not only use water that doesn’t belong to them, but they also pollute the drinking water of some of the village residents,” said Yoel Marshak, head of the Kibbutz Movement’s Special Assignments Branch. “The little kids pee in the water, which flows straight to the taps of the Palestinian school.”

Writing at Comment is free, Sarah Churchwell attacks the Bourne trilogy of movies, which were all based (loosely) on a Robert Ludlum creation.

Her basic charge is that the women in the Bourne movies do nothing but look “hapless”:

The rule seems to be that the more “realistic” an action film, the more hapless the women. The men can outwit entire government agencies, fight off 43 assailants at once, emerge from spectacular car crashes unscathed, and survive 10-storey drops into the East river (merely what Bourne does in Ultimatum). The women mainly stand around looking anxious. Joan Allen, who plays a CIA boss in all three films, has a slightly less thankless task; her character makes some intelligent decisions, but she isn’t exactly stirring.

I don’t know what Churchwell was watching, but the women in the Bourne movies are not largely useless and do not stand around looking hapless.

The only moral character in the Bourne series is Pamela Landy (played by Joan Allen). The film hints at her battle against sexism in her role as a CIA deputy director. Throughout the movies she retains her composure and professionalism, and sees a difference between right and wrong, good and evil. She has genuine concern for uncovering “the truth” rather than simply “winning”.

Marie Helena Kreutz (Franka Potente) helps Bourne in the first film, offering him solace, which leads to her becoming his love interest. In the second movie (Bourne Supremacy) she is murdered… by a man whose sole motivation is material profit. Throughout the third film (Bourne Ultimatum) it is obvious Bourne still misses her. In other words, she has affected him to such a degree that he has not been able to open up to anyone else. Hardly a minimal tribute to a female character.

Nicky Parsons’ (Julia Stiles’ character) is the only one who comes close to meeting the stereotype of the damsel in distress. But even then Churchwell’s complaints about “misogyny” are a stretch:

The most amazing thing Julia Stiles does in The Bourne Ultimatum is get second billing. She has approximately three scenes, in which her character runs the gamut from concerned to worried. In Stiles’s one big scene she walks hurriedly from an assassin in a crowded Moroccan bazaar, repeatedly glancing back so the killer gets plenty of good looks at her worried face. Never does she do anything in self-defence: grab a scarf or a makeshift wig to cover up her distinctively coloured hair, create a diversion by setting something on fire, invent a story to convince a stranger to help her - and why doesn’t she speak every language on earth, like male CIA agents? All she does is rattle locked doors, until she finds an open one and runs up the stairs. Now that’s ingenuity.

For starters, there is a general underwriting of all characters apart from Bourne. There is a hint in all three movie titles about why this is the case. If Churchwell had entered the cinema expecting to watch The Nicky Parsons Ultimatum and ended up watching a man called Jason Bourne take centre-stage in the movie, her comments might have made more sense.

And I don’t know about Churchwell, but I am thankful I have not experienced a lethal killing machine, trained to show no mercy or remorse his victims, chasing me with a gun. If I were to though, I am sure I would look more than “concerned” and “worried”. Maybe Churchwell is an expert in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu or Krav Maga, which she could have used to fend off a killer agent? If not, I am sure she would do the same as me. When Parsons does go to help Bourne, she is easily beaten off by the agent trying to kill Bourne — this is hardly difficult to understand when one sees that the agent is twice the size of Parsons (this isn’t Crouching Tiger, even if Bourne’s skills are somewhat magical).

If anything the three movies show men to be nothing more than violent killers (the Treadstone/Blackbriar agents are all men); greedy and motivated by material profit (Brain Cox’s villainous CIA deputy director Ward Abbott, the Russian oil magnate and mob boss Yuri Gretkov, and the Russian secret service agent Kirill); weak (the Guardian journalist, Simon Ross); and career-orientated amoralists (Noah Vosen, the head of Operation Blackbriar, played by David Strathairn). Indeed, even our intrepid hero is shown to break the law repeatedly (of course, he does so in order to survive) and his origins in choosing to become “Jason Bourne” (and give up his real identity) are murky and even immoral.

Churchwell notes that women can be action heroes, but these are supposedly only in the sci-fi fantasy genre; for “realism”, women are required to become mere mantelpieces and just look hapless. First, I would say “so what?” The biggest films of modern cinema history, and some of the most popular television series, are sci-fi/fantasy; and some of the most criticised movies belong in the action genre. Secondly, even in “realistic” movies we have characters like Sarah Connor (Terminator 2); Geena Davis’ suburban mother Samantha Caine who finds out she is a CIA assassin in The Long Kiss Goodnight (who was basically Bourne before Bourne was born); Uma Thurman and the female cast in Kill Bill (imagine the outcry at a movie called Kill Belinda); and the Alias television series.

Now, I don’t doubt television and cinema doesn’t embody prejudices and political agendas of the day; all cultural artefacts will to some extent. And I don’t doubt Hollywood, in particular, hasn’t been at the forefront in pushing sexism and racism. These are very interesting areas of research no doubt. However, Churchwell’s comments are not a real examination of the evidence which leads to a reasonable thesis. It is appears a mess of a ‘critique’ and makes light of misogyny, which, properly defined, is a hatred of women.

In my view, she picked the wrong film on which to base her critique. There are many examples, past and present, that would form a much firmer basis for her attack. For example, consider the recent Transformers movie which have no “female” robots, despite the original animation having a female robot as one of the Autobots (the good guys — the evil doers, the Decepticons, are all male). In fact, the only human female character is in the movie to bring the target audience (young males) through the turnstile — the fact this is a movie aimed at a younger audience and not (supposedly) discerning adults who might at least be able to spot misogyny, should have caught Churchwell’s attention over a movie whose main object of criticism was state/government agencies, their secretive operations and the implications for invididuals working in these organisations.

For seven-year-old Javaid Iqbal, the holiday to Florida was a dream trip to reward him for doing well at school.

But he was left in tears after he was stopped repeatedly at airports on suspicion of being a terrorist.

The security alerts were triggered because Javaid shares his name with a Pakistani man deported from the US, prompting staff at three airports to question his family about his identity.

The family even missed their flight home from the U.S. after officials cancelled their tickets in the confusion. And Javaid’s passport now contains a sticker saying he has undergone highlevel security checks.

Source.

As frequent as the string of former weak-willed jihadists writing about how to reform Islam, is the phenonmenon of ex-leftists writing how to reform the political left in Britain.

Andrew Anthony, promoting his new book at Comment is free, is the latest, complete with infanilte appeals to “reality”.

The following letter was sent to WordPress:

Dear Sir,

We have applied to you to remove the unlawful statements regarding my client Mr. Adnan Oktar (who is the author of the books written under the pen name Harun Yahya) in your blogs. The number of our attempts to inform and warn you regarding these defamation blogs must have been at least twenty, many times through your support page, a couple of times to your legal department and we even sent a regular mail to Mr. Matt Mullenweg. Most of our attempts were unanswered.

These defamation blogs contained slanders to some of my client’s friends as well. They also applied WordPress.com support with their official ID cards and a representative directed them to write to the legal department. So they did but again no response from legal.
So we have become obliged to apply to Turkish judicial courts to stop this defamation executed through your services. By the decision of Fatih 2nd Civil Court of First Instance, number 2007/195, access to WordPress.com has been blocked in Turkey.

The organization, which is led by Edip Yuksel, responsible for these defamation blogs in question are currently up for crimes such as “building an organization to commit crime” in Turkey. The sites of Edip Yuksel, www.yahyaharun.com, www.19.org, www.calinmisgenclik.com and also the blog under your site with the user name http://adnanoktar.wordpress.com have been blocked by Turkish judicial courts in Turkey before(by Gaziosmanpasa Civil Court of First Instance, dated 06.04.2007 and decision number 2007/130 D. Is) . We have also sent you the official documents on this judicial decision in one of our applications to you.

Since Edip Yuksel and his crime organization could easily start new blogs in your site, they had even launched a campaign in opening defamation blogs regarding my client and had explicitly expressed this organized endeavor in his defamation blogs:

“In order to make people hear our voice, let everyone start new blogs from websites such as http://blogcu.com or http://wordpress.com and let them copy the posts on those blogs and paste them to their own. You can start several at once, if possible. Please remember that the name you will give to the blogs, should be related to Adnan Oktar or Harun Yahya in order to find them quickly through Google search. If the names are already taken, you can solve this problem by using characters such as “_” (Adnan_Oktar) or numbers such as AdnanOktar100, Adnan_Oktar_50.”

The aim of all of these blogs that he and his organization starts, was to insult my client. All of them were completely full of slanderous statements. There are still some sites left open -not accessible from Turkey, but still accessible abroad - :

http://adnanoktar.wordpress.com
http://adnanoktarveislam.wordpress.com/
http://fitikado.wordpress.com

http://oktarbabuna.wordpress.com
http://adnancilar.wordpress.com/
http://adnanoktarveislam.wordpress.com/
http://whoisharunyahya.wordpress.com/
http://adnanoktargercekleri.wordpress.com/
http://quiestharunyahya.wordpress.com/
http://harunyahyaarabic.wordpress.com/
http://safsataciharunyahya.wordpress.com/
http://savsatalaracevap.wordpress.com/

The below are taken but still empty:

http://adnanzedeler.wordpress.com/
http://kodadiabi.wordpress.com/

As we have requested before:

WE DEMAND YOU TO REMOVE AND PROHIBIT ANY BLOGS IN YOUR SITE THAT CONTAIN MY CLIENT’S NAME ADNAN OKTAR OR HIS PEN NAME HARUN YAHYA OR VARIOUS COMBINATION OF THESE 4 NAMES.

Yours sincerely,

Attorneys of Mr. Adnan Oktar (Harun Yahya)
Atty. Kerim Kalkan / Atty. Ceyhun Gökdoğan (Istanbul Barr register number:
27405)

Address: Darulaceze caddesi, Bilal Is Merkezi, A Blok, D:5. Okmeydani Sisli
Istanbul
Telephone: 90 212 220 31 20
Fax: 90 212 220 74 21
E-mail: rotahukuk@rotahukuk.com
ceyhungokdogan@istanbulbarosu.org.tr

Source.

More here, here and here.

There is always discussion on how much Palestinians are genuinely interested in peace. Rashid Khalidi, writing in the London Review of Books, reminds us of how Fatah and Hamas share responsibility for the current predicament.

There is rarely, however, discusion on whether Israel is interested in a genuine peace with the Palestinians; although the failure to discuss this might be more of an issue in the US (perhaps even more than Israelis own willingness to question its approach to the Palestinians?).

Henry Siegman argues the Israelis have not shown any real interest in peace:

The Middle East peace process may well be the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history. Since the failed Camp David summit of 2000, and actually well before it, Israel’s interest in a peace process – other than for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and international acceptance of the status quo – has been a fiction that has served primarily to provide cover for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian land and an occupation whose goal, according to the former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon, is ‘to sear deep into the consciousness of Palestinians that they are a defeated people’. In his reluctant embrace of the Oslo Accords, and his distaste for the settlers, Yitzhak Rabin may have been the exception to this, but even he did not entertain a return of Palestinian territory beyond the so-called Allon Plan, which allowed Israel to retain the Jordan Valley and other parts of the West Bank.

On the issue of settlements, Yonatan Mendel, reviewing Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation by Eyal Weizmanout, points out how they are designed to ’secure’ land for Israeli occupation:

A single settlement only marked the beginning of a ‘securing’ project: it was not enough in itself. Logic required that more settlements be built around it. Then, in order to secure the newly established blocks of settlements, a secure network of roads was needed to run between them, but in order to secure the roads, more settlements needed to be constructed along them. Which is not to forget the Wall that is needed to secure Israelis from the Palestinians, as well as securing the army patrols that secure the fences around the settlements, which secure the roads that altogether, in a bizarre way, secure Israeli citizens living in Haifa, Tel Aviv and Beer Sheba. This evolving master-plan, which begins with placing civilians in the front line and ends with layer upon layer of security to secure security, ignores the crucial fact that the settlers and settlements were the central cause of security threats and a major incitement to Palestinians. In other words, the security imperative is one of the greatest threats to Israel’s security.

(Mendel also points how Israel — which accuses Hizbollah and Palestinians fighters of hiding amongst civilians — puts its own civilians on the front line, using them secure and then expand its control of the West Bank.)

A new law swept through Congress by the US government before the summer recess is to give American security agencies unprecedented powers to spy on British citizens without a warrant.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was approved by Congress earlier this month to help the National Security Agency in the fight against terrorism. But it has now emerged that the bill gives the security services powers to intercept all telephone calls, internet traffic and emails made by British citizens across US-based networks.

As much of the world’s telecoms networks and internet infrastructure runs through the US, the new act will give the security services huge scope for monitoring and intercepting Britons’ private communications, as well as those of other foreign citizens. The new act has led to fears it will see a huge increase in the number of British citizens being extradited to the US.

‘Just because it happens to pass through the US they claim they can do whatever they want,’ said Tony Bunyan, director of Statewatch, the civil rights group that campaigns against state surveillance. ‘Where is the EU saying, “What’s going on here, we’ve got to protect the rights of our citizens?”‘

The Dutch Liberal Democrat MEP Sophie in ‘t Veld has tabled a series of questions demanding answers from the EU parliament. In a statement to European politicians, In ‘t Veld warns the US law will ‘directly apply to EU citizens and constitutes a major violation of privacy and civil liberties’.

Source.

The release of The Israel Lobby & U.S. Foreign Policy by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt is causing a small storm in the US. M-W’s paper and book can be downloaded from a Harvard website.

Last year Mearsheimer and Walt (M-W) had their views published in the London Review of Books, which also raised accusations of “anti-Semitism” from the usual suspects. There was also a LRB-sponsored debate held in New York to accompany the publication of the M-W paper.

Whilst “criticism” of against M-W from anti-Palestinian bigots, pro-Israeli zealots and a docile and an incompetent and docile American media (especially on the Israel-Palestine conflict) is to be expected, M-W’s position was the subject of fairer critical analysis by people generally thought of as also being critical of Israeli-US relations:

- “AIPAC’s complaint” by Eric Alterman in The Nation
- “The Israel Lobby?” by Noam Chomsky at ZNet
- Rashid Khalidi in the debate I’ve linked to above states he disagrees with M-W
- “It’s Not Either/Or” by Norman Finklestein (not a direct criticism, but the implications are there; and let’s not forget he has been the target of this “Israel Lobby”)

The above suggests that a part of the “debate” that probably gets lost — this being a “controversial” issue — is the philosophical/academic positions of M-W compared to their critics on the left, even if both might agree on the problems generated by uneven US-Israeli-Palestinian relations.