Tuesday November 10, 2009
Not a Good Match: Hezbollah and Anne Frank. (Middle East Issues photo illustration/Getty Images)
First, let me make it clear: There's little doubt that Hezbollah, the rogue Lebanese militia, political party and one-time terrorist organization, is into holocaust denial. It denies Israel the right to exist. It's all of a piece for Israel-deniers also to deny that the holocaust took place. And it wouldn't at all be surprising if Hezbollah misused Lebanon's already heavy-handed censorship laws to bully schools out of using certain texts that refer to the holocaust.
That, apparently, is what Hezbollah did, successfully, regarding The Diary of Anne Frank. According to a Nov. 6 Agence France Press report, "Anne Frank's diary has been censored out of a school textbook in Lebanon following a campaign by the militant group Hezbollah claiming the classic work promotes Zionism. The row erupted after Hezbollah learned excerpts of The Diary of Anne Frank were included in the textbook used by a private English-language school in western Beirut."
The report, by Natacha Yazbeck, a Lebanese reporter who writes for AFP, goes on to quote from Hezbollah's Al-Manar television channel's report on the book ("What is even more dangerous is the dramatic, theatrical way in which the diary is emotionally recounted"). She then notes that "a member of the school board, Jimmy Shoufani, told AFP the school dropped the textbook from its curriculum after the controversy erupted. He asked that the school not be identified."
He asked that the school not be identified? I can understand a source preferring to remain anonymous when a flammable mixture of Hezbollah, antagonism and anti-Semitism abetted are part of the context. But the guy was quoted. Why keep the name of the school a secret? To protect who? The students aren't in danger. Call it what you will, Hezbollah isn't big on going after children, and it's not as if Hezbollah wouldn't be aware of the school carrying the alleged textbook. Which leaves the school itself and the embarrassment factor--if, in fact, that was the case.
But here's the thing. There aren't that many English-language private schools in Beirut. There's International College and there's the American Community School. Neither school's board of directors or trustees lists a Jimmy Shoufani.
There are a few other professional or cultural English-language schools, but not for schoolchildren. In a southern suburb of Beirut--in Choueifat, a small Christian and Druze enclave at the edge of Hezbollah country--there's the fine and legendary International School of Choueifat, an English-language school, which doesn't list its directors. Could it be the culprit?
I'd like to know.
It isn't very becoming of a school to censor a classic of 20th century literature, even less so for a school in or near Beirut, supposedly the 2009 World Book Capital. Yet operating as it does so close to Hezbollah's nerve (and quite nervy, if you've ever met its goonish militiamen) centers, opting to remove Anne Frank rather than invite confrontation would seem to be a defensible move. Survival in a place as fractured as Lebanon is achieved at the price of endless compromises. And a school like Choueifat has working internet connections: Anne Frank is all over the web. If it takes removing a hard copy or two to placate the ogre next door, so be it, as long as Anne's words, themselves all-too familiar with ogres next door, keep flowing. In a sense, the Choueifat school's decision (if it is, in fact, the Choueifat school) takes on an ironically Frank-like dimension, and could be taught that way in the very context of the Anne Frank diaries.
But the question remains: Why is AFP hiding the school's identity? What was the textbook in question? Why not cite it? Why not put the Anne Frank passages in some sort of context? And isn't it possible that AFP simply fell into a Hezbollah trap, reporting on a second-hand report on Hezbollah's Al Manar, itself possibly an opportunistic fabrication at the expense, as always, of what Hezbollah calls "the Zionist Entity" (because it still plays those juvenile games of refusing to call Israel by its name)?
Meanwhile, press and bloggers have picked up the AFP report and spread it wide. The more reason to question, if not the authenticity of the report, at least its various holes.
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Monday November 9, 2009
It never Flew Very High: A lone Palestinian flag in the West Bank, where Israel ensures that Palestinian flags, let alone rights, never flutter too assertively. (Uriel Sinai/Getty Images)
Really. Is anyone surprised? The Palestinian Authority, never intended by its Israeli and American midwives as more of a symbolic toy with which to placate Palestinian nationalists until Israel could make their claim to the West Bank risible, is on the verge of collapse, now that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas won't run again in the 2010 elections and other Palestinian leaders may follow in his resigning footsteps.
"I think he is realizing that he came all this way with the peace process in order to create a Palestinian state, but he sees no state coming," Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian peace negotiator, tells The Times. "So he really doesn't think there is a need to be president or to have an Authority. This is not about who is going to replace him. This is about our leaving our posts. You think anybody will stay after he leaves?"
Erekat may be misjudging the attraction of nearly $900 million in U.S. aid alone to the Palestinian Authority, which tends to give many an incentive for people to stay. It's not as if the jobs are raining on the West Bank outside the PA's version of Tammany Hall. Still, Erekat has a valid point, if not fear.
The authority was designed as a semi-autonomous stepping-stone government on the way to Palestinian statehood and full sovereignty. But statehood was conditional on Palestinians and Israelis resolving fundamental issues--the right of return for Palestinian refugees on the Palestinian side, the removal of Israeli settlements in the West Bank (or a formal agreement over their existence) on the Israeli side, and, for both sides, an agreement over the status of Jerusalem, which both sides claim.
None of that has happened. Yasser Arafat in 2000, at Camp David negotiations mediated by President Clinton, may have missed the best chance for Palestinian statehood in three generations by turning down an imperfect but relatively solid offer of autonomy over most of the West Bank and Gaza. Since then, Israeli intransigence and a mixture of American inaction, mixed signals and overt favoritism toward Israel have damaged the Palestinian Authority's legitimacy in Palestinian eyes, undermined the validity and sincerity of the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, and fueled more radical movements such as Hamas, which never recognized the Oslo accords. Hamas' appeal translated in electoral victories for Hamas in the Palestinian parliament in 2006--and Hamas' control over the Gaza Strip in 2007.
It's a wonder the Palestinian Authority has managed to last this long. It was never an instrument of Palestinian authority or self-respect, but a sort of allowance for Israelis, and to some extent for Americans, to manipulate at will, permanently delaying the promise (and, in international law's eyes, imperative) of a Palestinian state. Abbas has had enough, it appears.
Read the full FAQ, "What Is the Palestinian Authority?"
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Sunday November 8, 2009
A Flack Jacket of Stars and Stripes: Men and women share baked goods outside the mosque at the Silver Spring Muslim Community Center in Maryland. Nidal Hasan regularly attended prayers there during the six years he was serving as a military psychiatrist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Even in the United States, land of diversity and individualism, there's still nothing like race and ancestry to imprison you in other people's dumbest assumptions and cruelest distortions.
An American -- American-born, American-bred, American-educated -- is suspected of having committed the mass killing that resulted in the death of 13 people at Fort Hood on Nov. 5. The killer joins the long list of other Americans who have committed mass killings, the second-worst of them in 1991 in the small central Texas city of Killeen, the after-hour shadow of Fort Hood. But the suspect this time has an Arabic-sounding name. Although it shouldn't, it changes everything. A mass murder, bad enough in itself, becomes cause for mass speculation studded with prejudice.
Arabs and Muslims in this country, already condemned to be each other's unwilling synonyms in too many Americans' eyes, are once again on the defensive, having to prove loyalty and love of country even though the only people who should be on the defensive are war-loving Americans who think they can offshore violence and national arrogance ("we fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here," in the supremely insulting words of George W. Bush) without ever paying the consequences at home.
It's never so convenient.
Continue reading "The Prejudice of Speculation in the Fort Hood Killings."
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Friday November 6, 2009
Turkish Heartthrob: Kivanc Tatlitug, whose eyes, hair, whiskers and roses he brings his wife after their quarrels have turned "Noor" the Arab world's most successful television soap opera ever. The show was produced in Turkey in 2005-07, where it was a flop. (Michael Buckner/Getty Images)
"Noor," or "Gümüs" in its original language, is a Turkish television soap opera that originally aired in Turkey from 2005 to 2007. It was a flop. When its producer dubbed it into Arabic (in Syrian dialect) and the show aired from 2008 to 2009 on the Saudi-owned, Dubai-based Middle East Broadcasting Center (MBC), a pan-Arab broadcasting network, "Noor" became an immediate sensation and one of highest-rated television shows in the world.
The show drew appeal from all demographics through storylines focusing on a large, multi-generational family whose many members lounge through love stories. "We always joked," blogger Ajnabiya wrote on another blogger's post on the show, "that the nicest thing was that each member of the family, from the Jido down to the grand-daughter was in some kind of love story. It is a fun escape for anyone, especially those living in a closed society, or as in Lebanon, always confronted with political problems and the like.
But the show's most ardent gravity centers are Noor, the generously busted dark-haired actress played by Songül Öden, and Noor's husband Mohannad, played by the seemingly blue-eyed Turkish Adonis, Kivanc Tatlitug, and his blond curls. Mohannad, a rose-plucking romantic, treats his wife as an equal, supports her in her professional dreams (she is a designer), knows how to spell the word "tender"--and enact it.
He is an angelic husband, but not an angel, at least not according to the traditional Islamic repertoire of acceptable behavior. He (like other characters on the show) had pre-marital sex and fathered a child out of wedlock. He kisses his wife. On screen. Like more groundbreaking Western television fare of a few decades ago, the show includes a storyline about a character's abortion, alcohol flows freely at mealtime, none of the women wear anything like veils, and religion is subordinate to the challenges and pleasures of everyday life, passions of the heart included.
Read the rest of "The Arab World's Most Popular Television Soap Opera."
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