By Prospero

The air of a ghost town has long pervaded East Jerusalem, the Arab part of the city Israel occupied in 1967. Harassed by settlers intent on turning it Jewish, and mostly ignored by an Israeli municipality that invests far more in Jewish than Arab residents, and a Palestinian Authority (PA) that is busy building Ramallah not Jerusalem as Palestine’s cultural and economic capital, its numerous Palestinian residents have long felt abandoned. A towering separation wall that Israel erected over the past decade severs its centre from Arab suburbs and the broader Palestinian hinterland.

Of late, though, the despair has begun to lift. Frustrated by the failure of negotiators and outside mediators to deliver them from their 43-year limbo, East Jerusalemites are reviving the city themselves. A new generation of professionals is transforming into arthouses the cinemas torched by their parents in the First Intifada as a decadent diversion from the liberation struggle. “The main battle is cultural,” says Suhail Khoury, who runs the city’s Edward Said Music Conservatory, which is preparing to open in a renovated Palestinian mansion in the bedraggled city centre. “You can rebuild demolished homes within months, but a destroyed identity takes generations to rebuild.”

The nucleus of the fledgling art scene is al-Zahra, a street hitherto so forsaken it seemed under curfew. After 30 years, the wreck of the al-Quds cinema reopened last month as a slick and elegant cultural centre called Yabous, symbolically named after the Jebusites, Jerusalem’s indigenous inhabitants before King David conquered them. Across the road artisans are revamping a ruined mansion as a music conservatoire, replete with a garden where Mr Khoury plans to stage open-air
concerts. A new art-gallery, al Khoash, has opened next door. The United Nations has funded an upgrade of East Jerusalem’s soulless and weathered hotels into stylish boutique inns, and two bookshops have opened cafes hosting packed book-readings.

Often female and secular, today’s activists are more likely to be wearing designer dresses than macho kaffiya masks. Many came from the Galilee, a predominantly Arab part of Israel, to study and then stayed. Others are Jerusalemites streaming back from Ramallah or abroad to prevent Israel’s chauvinistic interior ministry from snatching their residency rights. (While Jews the world can claim over instant citizenship, Israel strips residency rights from East Jerusalemites who spend more than five years outside Israeli control.)

In the recently revamped grounds of the YMCA, the city’s pretty young things dance to Cultureshoc, a local band which taunts Israel’s checkpoint occupiers with rock of a more creative sort. “Silly boys with your mean toys, pumped up muscles, reckless loose canons,” sings Amira Dibsi, the band’s lithe half-British half-Palestinian Goth. “You might bring me harm but you won’t make me run.”

The city is attracting headline international acts, too. “Bonjour Palestine,” crooned Rachid Taha, Algeria’s leading Rai musician, when he opened a summer festival. When bouncers tried to prevent beardless and unveiled fans from dancing in front of the stage, he drew them back. Refreshingly, the smoke lingering in the air was a theatrical device to attract crowds, not the plumes spewing from Israeli tear-gas canisters to disperse them.

Anxious to escape the tightening religious grip on the western part of the city, a few secular Jewish Jerusalemites are venturing east. Bottle-blonde Israeli girls cuddle Palestinian boyfriends in the East’s Borderline bar. Sedate businessmen, who until recently confined their nights out to Jewish venues, dine beneath chandeliers at Notre Dame’s Rotisserie, rapidly carving out a reputation as the city’s best restaurant.

Anxious for a respite from a boycott campaign which has led international artists to cancel performances in Israel, a few Jewish twenty-somethings join Palestinians bopping to Rachid Taha. “I was surprised by how normal and non-political it felt,” said Meron Rappoport, an Israeli journalist. Shlomo Lecker, a veteran Israeli
lawyer, recalls wistful Friday afternoons when he befriended Palestinian girls in long-silenced discos opposite the Old City’s Damascus Gate in the more innocent early years of the occupation.

Still, in a city Israel annexed in 1981 and declared its eternal capital, the revival has its limits. Neither Israeli nor Palestinian leaders promote such pluralism. Yabous’ Jerusalem Festival does not exclude Israelis, but does nothing to include them either. It says it needs to stay below the radar lest Israel’s municipal authorities seek to constrain its activities.

And familiar Palestinian hostility to Israel often harms its citizens more than the Israelis. When Ilham Madfai, a guitarist who lives in Amman, requested an Israeli visa rather than an Palestinian permit to perform in East Jerusalem, Yabous cancelled the concert.

Article courtesy The Economist online.  Photo courtesy APJP

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Mourning Juliano Mer-Khamis - Image courtesy anarkismo.net

By LARRY PORTIS

The last time I spoke with Juliano Mer-Khamis was exactly five years ago. My companion, Christiane Passevant, and I were in Haïfa to meet with him and others in connection with a project on dissident women in the Middle East. Juliano didn’t arrive for the interview after having told me the previous evening he would spend the day in Jenin and then see us in Haïfa. When he didn’t show I began leaving him messages on his cell phone. We were perturbed because the appointment had been made well in advance and we had meetings in the West Bank and could not linger in Haïfa. Finally we made contact late in the evening: “Larry, Larry,” he said, “I’m stuck at a checkpoint, it’s raining like mad and,” he laughed, “the soldiers are quite nervous. They think I’m a suspicious person.”

All this and more instantly came to mind when I learned that Juliano had just been assassinated in his car upon leaving his Freedom Theatre in Jenin on April 4 with his son and the boy’s nanny. Juliano reportedly received five bullets fired point blank at his head by one or two men with hoods who just walked up to the vehicle and let loose through the window. The woman accompanying Juliano and his son was shot in the hand.

I didn’t know Juliano all that well, but I felt I did, for with him there were never formalities. He was like that—open, friendly and confident. He took things as they came, often giving the impression of being volatile and even superficial. After all, as a friend and long-time activist in Haïfa once told me: “Juliano is an artist and, moreover, an anarchist.” As if the observation explained everything. Maybe it does, but my friend, I am sure, would agree that there was much substance behind his devil-may-care personality. Juliano was a fearless and uncompromising activist against the Zionist state and its colonial oppression.

The first time we met Juliano was in late May 1992 in the northern Palestinian town of Jenin. We went there to work with Juliano’s mother, Arna Mer-Khamis, to help in the preparation of a children’s theatrical production. The event was staged by Arna’s association—Care and Learning—a initiative carried out also in Gaza that sought to help Palestinian children traumatized by the colonial occupation and the struggle against it accompanying the first Intifada (1987-1993). Arna’s idea was that the previous four or five years of strikes, military curfew, repression and uprising had deprived the children not only of educational continuity but also of the stable family relationships necessary for healthy development. Not only was the image of their parents demeaned by the occupier’s brutality, the uprising instilled the idea that only violent retaliation was a respectable response. She saw her role as providing outlets for the rage pent-up in the children because of shattered homes and weakened social bonds. The objective was not to dilute the will to resist Israeli occupation and domination, but rather to strengthen it by helping the children to counter oppression with more reflection and with confidence in themselves and their society. The danger, according to Arna, was that Palestinians would enter increasingly into armed struggle thus allowing the Israeli state to justify its own violence in the use of armed force impossible to compare with that of the occupied and colonized Palestinians.

At the very moment we entered Jenin, we were confronted with a slight taste of what she was talking about. Arna arrived at our meeting place in the midst of a general commotion caused by an Israeli garbage truck driver coming from a nearby Israeli settlement. About a hundred yards from us, some kids had apparently thrown rocks at the truck, and the driver had stopped and climbed down from his seat brandishing an automatic weapon with which he began sweeping the area, although not yet shooting. Arna, seeing that Christiane was carrying a camera, immediately pushed her into the street telling her to take pictures of the man, which she commenced to do. Once having perceived Christiane, he returned to his truck and drove off. Arna explained that seeing someone clearly not Palestinian taking pictures probably stopped the man from shooting. We then introduced ourselves.

The following day we helped in the physical preparations for the children’s play, clearly a great event in the lives of children from the enormous refugee camp in Jenin. We met Juliano two days later when the children gave their grand performance, for which they had rehearsed for weeks. He came and filmed the whole thing. In the evening we all went to Haïfa where we ate with Arna, Juliano and one of his brothers, Spartacus, before leaving for Jerusalem.

Juliano, artist and activist, was born in 1958 into an extraordinary family. Arna Mer, born in 1929 and raised in a Kibbutz, fought with the Haganah and the Palmach in the 1948 war and even figured on a propaganda poster driving a jeep. But she quickly saw the colonial reality and the racist mentality implicit in the Zionist enterprise. Already in 1949, she agitated against the newly created Israeli state. In the 1950s she met and then married Saliba Khamis, against the will of her family. He was a Palestinian intellectual and member of the Communist Party. Anti-Zionist, Arna was a well-known activist throughout her adult life and experienced imprisonment and beatings at the hands of the Israeli authorities. Her creation of Care and Learning and the children’s theatre was the logical continuation of her activities.

When Arna Mer-Khamis died of cancer in 1995, Juliano continued his mother’s work, an effort made difficult by the Israeli assault on the Jenin refugee camp in April 2002. The military blitzkrieg destroyed the camp and massacred many of its inhabitants—a kind of dress rehearsal of the Gaza “Cast Lead” bombardments in 2008. It also left the children’s theater demolished. But in 2004 Juliano brought out his documentary film, Arna’s Children, about his mother’s work with the children and what happened to the children in the interim. A good number of them had become martyrs to the cause. The film was acclaimed and, in 2006, Juliano created Freedom Theatre in the rebuilt Jenin camp.

When asked about Arna’s goals and his efforts to perpetuate them, Juliano explained in 2010: “All our energy is devoted to creating something that doesn’t yet exist. These workshops are perhaps the solution to war.” When people of different cultures and backgrounds can live together and, especially, create together in order to overcome the intolerances that isolation and its enmities that it engenders, the rest is not essential. For us, he insisted, “There is no religion, no identity, nothing, we are just human beings, that’s all. My name is Juliano.”

But the theatre did not please everyone, and Juliano was an easy target. His life was structured by his acting career and, especially, the direction of the Freedom Theatre. He was back and forth between Haïfa and Jenin on a regular basis. And although he had received threats, and arson was attempted on Freedom Theatre on two occasions, he did not allow such intimidation to limit his activities.

Juliano responded to criticism of Freedom Theatre in a declaration made on April 19, 2009. Anonymous leaflets distributed within the Jenin camp, he said, claim the theatre is against religion. On the contrary, responded Juliano: “We respect all religions and the traditions in the Jenin refugee camp. We are not here to take religion away, but to fight the Israeli occupation unconditionally and create an independent Palestinian state. We are here to arm young people with knowledge, values and respect for their history, their religion and their families.” He also accused the detractors of the theatre of only “pretending to protect our children when, in fact, they are ready to sacrifice them for their own interests. In constantly fighting every cultural project in the Jenin camp, they indirectly collaborate with the Israeli occupation.”

Targeted assassinations of activists are, of course, nothing unusual in the Occupied Territories of Palestine. After all, an elite corps of snipers is a permanent and unconcealed fixture of the Israel army, and bothersome individuals are regularly “taken out”. What is unusual in this case is that Juliano was a well-known personality. His acting career was substantial. Beginning in the 1980s, he acted in many films in and out of Israel, notably, but not only, in some of Amos Gitaï’s films, such as Esther (1986), Yom Yom (1998), Kippur (2000) and Kedma (2002). His murder will be controversial in Israel, as was that of Rachel Corrie. But in this case the assassination will be attributed to Palestinians.

Whether the Israeli state, Jewish fundamentalist nationalists or their mirror image—theocratic Muslim fanatics—killed Juliano makes no difference in the end. In the Palestinian context, the latter are creations of the former.

The future of Palestine and the whole Middle East depends on people like Arna and Juliano, those who reject intolerance in the struggle for justice. And their time is coming, as revealed by the Intifadas breaking out everywhere in North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean.

As for Israel and Zionism, their time is running out. Zionism is now on the ropes. More settlements will be built, but facts on the ground can also be uprooted. The wall can be torn down. The economic and ideological foundations of this pariah state are cracked and breaking apart. The day can be foreseen when a re-structuring of power in the whole area will occur. The US Empire must recede, and along with it will go the fatally flawed Zionist project, no longer buoyed by the atavistic nationalist trends of the early twentieth century. The building of theocratic political entities and “ethnically pure nation states” is not the future of humanity.

Larry Portis has recently published American Dreaming: A Novel. He can be reached at larry.portis@orange.fr

(Courtesy CounterPunch.org)

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Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik

by Michael Gillespie

Speaking at a press conference aired nationally several hours after a mentally unstable young man killed six people and wounded 19 during an assassination attempt in which U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) was shot in the head in Tucson, AZ on Saturday, January 8, Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik expressed the concerns and sentiments of many Americans regarding violence in media, cultural decline, and the dangerously divisive tone and content of our political discourse.

“I think it’s time as a country that we need to do a little soul-searching, because I think the vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from people in the radio business and some people in the TV business and what we see on TV and how our youngsters are being raised, that this has not become the nice United States of America that most of us grew up in. And I think it’s time that we do the soul-searching,” said Dupnik.

“When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government, the anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous. And, unfortunately, Arizona I think has become sort of the capital. We have become the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry. … All I can tell you is that there is reason to believe that this individual may have a mental issue, and I think that people who are unbalanced are especially susceptible to vitriol,” said Dupnik.

Toward the end of press conference, Dupnik reiterated his criticism of inflammatory media programming: “Let me just say one thing, because people tend to pooh-pooh this business about all the vitriol that we hear inflaming the American public by people who make a living off of doing that. That may be free speech. But it’s not without consequences.”

Dupnik, a sheriff for 30 years and an Arizona law enforcement officer for more than 50 years, directly addressed elements of a socially-destabilizing dynamic at the center of American cultural and political life. He was not the first to do so, and the questions Dupnik raised are not new ones. In her book, Mayhem: Violence as Public Entertainment, published in 1998 during a series of 15 school shootings across the USA that took more than 40 lives between 1995 and 2000, Sissela Bok noted, “The United States has the highest levels of homicide of any advanced industrial nation in the world.”

“Is it alarmist or merely sensible to ask about what happens to the souls of children nurtured, as in no past society, on images of rape, torture, bombings, and massacre that are channeled into their homes from infancy?” asked Bok, who received her B.A. and M.A. in psychology from George Washington University in 1957 and 1958, and her Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University in 1970.

Formerly a Professor of Philosophy at Brandeis University, Bok is currently a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, Harvard School of Public Health. The accomplished philosopher and ethicist hoped for a wide-ranging debate about the mass marketing of violence as entertainment, a public discussion that would lead to effective remedies and a reduction in gun violence. As evidenced by continued high levels of gun violence in America, including a school shooting at Virginia Tech in April 2007 that took 32 lives, despite a general reduction in crime rates, that discussion never quite seems to find purchase or result in any significant reduction of violent programming in media. Instead, by many standards our nation falls ever more obviously into decline, becomes more and more violent, and our politics are increasingly polarized, more divisive than at any time since the Civil War.

Most Right-wing Big Media talk show celebrities and pundits, including Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Republican 2008 Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin, mightily offended by Dupnik’s remarks, responded defensively and angrily during the following days as a media frenzy developed. Limbaugh, Beck, Palin, and others who fan the flames of angry political rhetoric have a lot to lose should Americans lift themselves out of their Big-Media-induced paralysis and demand effective action based on the sheriff’s concerns. Media giant Clear Channel pays Limbaugh about $38 million per year. That amount doesn’t include his income from speaking engagements, the stock market, or other investments. Beck’s annual income from Fox News, Premier Radio Networks, Simon and Schuster, and other sources has been reported to be some $32 million. Palin, who quit her job as governor of Alaska to pursue a lucrative career in Big Media, signed a multi-year contract with Fox News and is reported to have earned some $12 million since deciding that she didn’t want to become “a lame duck.” Those millions, a mere fraction of the amount of loot Limbaugh and Beck earn for inciting fear and loathing, is about one hundred times what Palin would have earned had she remained governor of Alaska.

“Acts of monstrous criminality stand on their own. They begin and end with the criminals who commit them,” said Palin on January 12, denying any connection between media violence, talk radio vitriol, and gun violence.

The vast majority of media figures involved in what is called the public discussion have chosen to ignore the issue of violence in media programming, preferring instead to cast doubt on any suggestion of a causative link between overheated political rhetoric and the Tucson shooting while focusing on mental illness and questions about gun control legislation.

On January 11, one of the nation’s most accomplished former law enforcement administrators, one whose area of expertise is motivation and behavior, commented on the issue of violent media programming and angry political rhetoric.

“I’ve been asked this question about the movies and the media and the negative impact of violence in these areas, which is much more profound and significant than a little political rhetoric,” said Roger Depue, a 21-year veteran of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and a former chief of the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit, during an interview conducted by Charlie Rose.

“What I basically say is, ‘Most people can handle it. Most people can deal with it, normal, stable individuals, they can see it for what it is, and they can deal with it. But if a person is predisposed, or if he is psychotic, or if he is having these dangerous fantasies and something like that comes along, it can trigger, it can cause him to go off in that direction,’” said Depue.

Though two of the nation’s most experienced law enforcement professionals, one at the local level and the other at the national level, voiced grave concern about violent media programming and its socially destabilizing effects in the wake of the Tucson tragedy, when President Barack Obama spoke in Tucson at the memorial service for the victims on January 12, he told the nation, “… none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack. None of us can know with any certainty what might have stopped those shots from being fired.”

As the President’s remarks suggest, it is most unlikely that what will pass for a national public discussion of violent media programming and bitter political rhetoric will, in reality, be wide-ranging, meaningful, or productive.

America has become the most violent nation on earth and one of the most repressive. Even a cursory examination of the relevant statistical studies provides ample evidence. Though it incarcerates a higher percentage of its citizens than any other country, the USA leads the wealthy nations of the world in gun deaths, murders, suicides, and accidental shootings, according to a 1998 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published in the International Journal of Epidemiology. Another long-term CDC study found that while “the overall annual death rate for U.S. children aged less than 15 years declined substantially [primarily as a result of decreases in death associated with disease] during the same period, childhood homicide rates tripled, and suicide rates quadrupled.” The study of 26 high-income countries found that the overall firearm-related death rate among U.S. children aged less than 15 years was nearly 12 times higher than among children in the other 25 countries combined. The firearm-related homicide rate in the United States was nearly 16 times higher than that in all of the other countries combined; the firearm-related suicide rate was nearly 11 times higher; and the unintentional firearm-related death rate was nine times higher.

Why, one might ask, with this information widely available, do Americans not rise up and demand action to reduce violence in media programming, vitriolic political debate, and gun violence? The short answer is surprisingly simple—Big Media and Big Politics prevent a productive public discussion and the implementation of necessary reforms.  What the public will get instead is what it has always gotten in the past, a seeming sincere but brief and superficial debate designed to protect the status quo.  Real reform that would save lives might also negatively affect the profitability of criminally irresponsible Big Media corporations that are heavily dependent on ever more violent programming.

American life and culture are increasingly characterized by violence not because it must be so, but because Big Media corporations very deliberately make it so. Modern American life is saturated with violent entertainment fare produced by Big Media corporations that subject audiences to a relentless and ever-present barrage of media violence. Violent entertainment programming on screens of all sizes is enormously lucrative and socially destabilizing. Violent media programming is designed and carefully crafted to be exciting and especially attractive to younger, immature, politically and socially naive audiences. Typically combined with salacious story lines and images, media violence speeds up the heart rate and has an addictive quality, which allows corporations to capture and to hold the attention of large audiences, which are sold to advertisers for huge amounts of money.

Most violent media programming is freighted with political messages and content crafted to suit the agendas of powerful and influential special interest groups. Perhaps the most egregious example is the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bias that has long been prevalent in Big Media entertainment and news—also known as infotainment—programming. Audiences thus accustomed to and enamored of the notion that violence is the response of first choice in challenging situations are far less likely to question their government’s unnecessary, illegal, and immoral wars abroad, or the “collateral damage”, torture, collective punishment, ethnic cleansing, and other war crimes that characterize neoconservative foreign policy. Big Media reporters, editors, and producers are trained to self-censor, to avoid information not in sync with the prevailing ethos of the Congressional-military-industrial-media-security-intelligence complex, to cooperate with the retired generals who serve as pundits in Big Media venues where they invariably publicize the Pentagon’s talking points while promoting the latest high-tech weapons system. So-called “defense industry” corporations work hand-in-glove with Big Media corporations, and indeed many of the largest are or have been jointly-owned and operated.

Though it desensitizes vast audiences to violence, few politicians object to the ubiquitous use of socially-destabilizing sexualized violence in entertainment media product because their political campaigns, which are enormously expensive, take place largely if not exclusively in Big Media environments. To say the least, politicians hesitate to criticize or attempt to regulate the powerful industry that controls the venues in which their political fortunes are decided. No critical, meaningful, productive public discussion of media violence or vitriolic political discourse—much of which is more about entertainment and partisan politics than about news—can take place in Big Media venues where it would be moderated by wealthy celebrity propagandists in the employ of Big Media corporations that control the public airways and use them with little or no regard for any legitimate public interest or the common good. Thus Americans are treated to the spectacle of our president ever so carefully tip-toeing around senior and former senior law enforcement professionals’ plainly stated, well-informed, and realistic concerns about the socially-destabilizing and too often deadly effects of media violence and violent political rhetoric.

Thus our country, our culture, and our economy deteriorate as Big Corporations wax fat, while our bankrupt and increasingly corrupt government lurches drunkenly into history, the most violent and destructive force on the planet, for now.

Crown thy good with brotherhood?

Or, How the mighty are fallen.

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BY Samir Twair

        The Multi Ethnic Star Orchestra (MESTO) has performed in Cairo and Amman and on May 13, it was featured in Abu Dhabi’s “Rhythms from Arabia” festival in the emirate’s dazzling Abu Dhabi Theater.  The 45-member orchestra was transported from Los Angeles to the Gulf by the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage.

        MESTO appeared on the seventh evening of the 11-day festival and immediately conductor Dr. Nabil Azzam was interviewed by major TV hosts in the Arab media who wanted to know more about his successful efforts to keep classic Arab music alive in the U.S.

        Moroccan singer Karima Skalli joined the Los Angeles orchestra which performed signature pieces of Muhammad Abd al-Wahhab and Farid al-Atrash as well as original compositions of Maestro Azzam.

        Dr. Azzam, who is from Nazareth and earned his Ph.D. degree in music at UCLA in 1990, wrote his doctoral dissertation on the works of Abd al-Wahhab whom he studied under in Cairo. A favorite of the audience was his violin solo from Abd al-Wahhab’s Unshudat al-Fann.

        Favorites sung by Skalli included Ya Habibi Ta’ala, LaMush Ana, and Inta ‘Umri. Al-Atrash’s Banadi Alaik was performed along with Abd al-Wahhab’s  “My Beloved Country” and “Eternal River.”

        Critics raved over the sensitive rendering of classic Arab compositions by non-Arab musicians who have been working under the baton of Dr. Azzam for a decade. The Abu Dhabi performance gave Dr. Azzam and his wife, Suheir, the opportunity to visit with their son, Salim, who is an international attorney based in the Emirate.

        MESTO will present its fall concert Oct. 30 in Zipper Hall, Downtown Los Angeles and a winter performance Dec. 3 in Santa Monica’s Broad Theater. Azzam’s new CD, “Full Moon” has just been released and another, entitled “Eclipse,” is slated for August.  For more information, please go to www.mesto.org.

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The Miss Asia USA Fashion Extravaganza held July 18 at the Sheraton Universal Hotel had a decidedly Middle Eastern flavor to it. The fun, energetic, and exciting runway show featured the traditional, lavish parade of national costumes. The spectacular outfits and dress were worn by young women representing such countries as Lebanon (Natalia DiNatale, 19), Armenia (Trayfena Zambre, 16), Iran (Jasmine Naziri, 19 as well as Saghar Sadri, 24), and Kyrgyzstan (Elvira Osmonova, 26). Other traditional Asian countries with contestants or delegates included the Philippines, Cambodia, Japan, Indonesia, China, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, Vietnam, Korea, Taiwan, and even a couple of young women representing Mongolia. The runway show also featured sassy collections from SCALA, InVein Clothing designer line, and BG Haute. And for the always sensational swimsuit competition, the young ladies wore Malibu Dream Girl. The entertainment between change of wardrobe included young singers, a 13 year old Mongolian body contortionist, and a belly dancer called Flower from Glendale. Flower was dressed in what I would call an Oakland Raiders (black & silver beaded) harem outfit, and when she shook those curvy hips of hers in rapid succession, you felt the motion! Cal Tech reported small tremors in the Burbank/Pasadena area. The Fashion show held at the Sheraton is a prelude to the Miss Asia USA 2010 pageant which will be held on Saturday, August 21, 2010 at the La Mirada Performing Arts Theater. Miss Asia USA is the premiere cultural pageant for Asian women (at least 25% Asian ancestry, naturally born female 16 years old and up, never married or had any children) who can trace their ancestry to the 58 countries considered part of the Asian continent. According to pageant promoter, Virgelia Villegas, one of the goals is “to unite the 58 countries and regions of the Asian continent in a friendly competition which promotes leadership, personal growth, camaraderie, and strengthens cultural values.” The 30 some delegates in this year’s pageant go through rigorous rehearsals, training workshops in poise, walking, modeling, public speaking, fashion and wardrobe coordination, goal setting, and interview skills. The contestants also listen to motivational speakers to inspire self-confidence, and help the young women to be the epitome of beauty, elegance, intelligence, class, and grace. For competing, the contestants get to keep three sets of swimwear, a beautiful cocktail dress, rhinestone shoes, embroidered sash, beauty and hair products from James Albert Beauty Salon as well as a $9,500 scholarship from Albert. Back in 2007, Hanin Hawatneh (18 years old, 5′7) was one of the first young women to represent Jordan, and was sponsored by. Dr. Grewal of Valenica and Amani Carpets of W. Hollywood. Remarked Hawatneh at that pageant: “The experience of representing my country, Jordan, with pride and honor was beyond amazing!” Another contestant, boistered by the esteem of participating in the Miss Asia USA pageant, reiterated a famous quote: “Don’t tell me the sky is the limit when there are footprints on the moon.

” For show ticket information you can call 818-891-5556 or e-mail: info@MissAsiaUSA.org.

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Courtesy of The Electronic Intifada

Cartoonist Naji al-Ali was a towering figure in the Palestinian cultural and political scene. His daily political drawings were a knife-twisting, gut-wrenching journey into how Palestinians perceived their predicament. Each drawing taps into hidden reservoirs of forbidden ideas and feelings — all somehow related to the unfulfilled expectations of the Palestinian national movement and the larger struggle for Arab self-determination. Hope, injustice, anger, pain and the struggle for dignity bled from al-Ali’s nib in a manner so raw that they captured the imagination of millions. During his life and after his death at the hands of an unknown assassin in 1987, al-Ali was widely admired and respected as a visionary artist and political commentator. Indeed, with few if any amendments, hundreds of his decades-old drawings could be republished today to reflect the miserable state of the contemporary Palestinian and Arab reality.

How does one book explain the weight of such an enormous yet largely silenced cultural and political heritage? It can’t, and the new volume A Child in Palestine: The Cartoons of Naji al-Ali, published by Verso, doesn’t. What it does do however is guide the reader through the background and logic behind many of these ideas. In so doing, the enormous gap between Western perceptions of the Arab world, and how the majority of downtrodden Arabs view themselves and Western policies in the region, is laid bare. In the process, al-Ali is also able to humanize his Arab subjects. He portrays refugees, peasants and members of the Arab working classes, as conscious, politicized and resisting agents, struggling against enormous odds, and engaging in the defense of their dignity and rights.

A Child in Palestine is clearly oriented to a Western audience. Its division into five thematic chapters (Palestine; Human Rights; US Dominance, Oil and Arab Collusion; the Peace Process; and Resistance) is designed to orient readers to general concepts in al-Ali’s drawings. Joe Sacco’s brief but compassionate introduction, combined with the short introductory essays at the beginning of each chapter, offers context to readers. One or two explanatory lines at the bottom of each drawing attempt to accomplish the task of translating any Arabic text as well to describe the illustrated universe of concepts depicted. Reductive by nature, the explanations generally accomplish their task, although they sometimes feel insufficient when contrasted with al-Ali’s caustic wit.

Al-Ali was an unapologetic radical concerned with the liberation of his people, both on a national and individual level. He once explained that the political duties of caricature drawing were “Incitement, preaching the birth of a new Arab human being.” Moreover, he saw no need to mince words or drawings, preferring to go straight to biting critiques of his adversaries: US imperialism, Zionism and the State of Israel, the Arab ruling classes and the bourgeois Palestinian national leadership. As al-Ali saw it, the situation was too far gone, too hypocritical, and too Orwellian to waste time beating around any bushes.

Al-Ali’s family fled their village of Shajara in Palestine’s Galilee region during the 1948 Nakba, the expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland and the creation of the State of Israel, yet to return. The trauma of the Nakba was compounded by Israel’s repeated military assaults against neighboring Arab states and the Palestinian national movement, and was reinforced by inter-Arab rivalries and divisions and complicity in Zionist aspirations. In response, some picked up their rocks or guns — al-Ali picked up his pen.

Expectedly, al-Ali made many enemies along the way. His ideas, simply put, were illegal, the grounds for certain arrest and torture at the hands of Israel or the Arab dictatorships. Banned throughout most of the Arab world and in Israel, it is amazing to see what a following he was able to galvanize under these conditions, and what he is still able to stir today.

One does not envy the editorial task of sifting through thousands of al-Ali drawings and selecting the appropriate ones for an imagined Western audience. Certainly there are plenty of themes that he addressed that find little or no representation in this book, and all to the reader’s loss. The two most prominent are sectarianism and women’s rights — both highly relevant to the contemporary Arab reality and their depictions in Western media. Al-Ali addressed both squarely, lambasting sectarianism, and supporting women’s rights. But he understood that both could not be sufficiently addressed in isolation from the struggle to free Palestinians and Arabs from imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism and occupation. Most observers focus on al-Ali’s signature character Handalah, the ten-year-old refugee child observing the absurdity around him. However, the hero of many of his drawings is actually the figure of Fatima — the mother figure in his reoccurring depictions of the plight of a typical Palestinian refugee family. Although Fatima is selectively depicted in the book, the theme of women’s rights is under-represented considering Fatima’s centrality in al-Ali’s overall body of work.

In spite of these flaws, A Child in Palestine is successful in providing a general readership with the chance to see the Arab world and Palestine from within, looking out. This is no small feat considering US and European policies in the region and the demonization of Arabs and Palestinians in the mainstream Western media. In this regard, Naji al-Ali’s defiance and determination to struggle still calls out from the pages, offering people hope and solidarity whatever their background.

Toufic Haddad is a Palestinian-American journalist based in Jerusalem. He is also the co-author of Between the Lines: Israel, the Palestinians and the US “War on Terror” with Israeli author Tikva Honig Parnass, published by Haymarket Books, 2007. He can be reached at tawfiq_haddad AT yahoo DOT com.

Published in The Independent Monitor December 2009 issue.

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Contributing Editor

After more than one month of rehearsals, The Santa Monica College/Community Orchestra, conducted by Dr. Jim Martin, played its premiere concert on Oct. 11 to audience acclaim.

“I thought [it was] the best we’ve done at any reading of the music,” viola player Wynn Battig said.

The orchestra played “Water Music” by George Frideric Handel and “Symphony No. 4, ‘Tragic’ in C minor” by Franz Schubert before the intermission. It returned accompanied by piano soloist Nora Chiang for Ludwig Van Beethoven’s “Piano Concerto No. 1 in C major, opus 15.”

The concert took place at The Edye Second Space in the Santa Monica College Performing Arts Center, which features an additional venue, the World Stage.

“I wish it would have started on time,” oboe player Kathrine French said. “After that, it went well.”

French, who has played the oboe for 19 years, is a community member of the orchestra.

The performance received positive acclaim by audience members and performers alike.

“I felt we rose to the occasion,” cellist Julie Standing said. “The [piano] soloist was fabulous.”

SMC faculty member, concertmaster and first violinist Martine Verhoeven said there are only two things she would have changed about the concert: That she and several other instrumentalists were sick with a cold, and an audible mistake during the piece by Beethoven.

“We laughed about it,” Verhoeven said. She said they learned that “you cannot change things at the end.”

The concertmaster was also impressed by Chiang, calling her “exact” and “sensitive.”

Verhoeven teaches the strings class at SMC and is currently in her 12th year of teaching.

It was international student Kazune Okuyama’s first time joining the orchestra for a performance. His grandparents traveled from Japan to attend.

The first chair violinist has been playing for 10 years.

“I have practice for one hour every day,” Okuyama said. “[But] I had to prepare my feelings for this concert.”

The music impressed SMC students from conductor Martin’s Scholar’s Music 32 class.

“We came to listen to Handel’s ‘The Water Music,’” student Diana Elihu said. “It’s different to hear it than to study it so we find that really interesting.”

Her colleagues shared her respect for the music.

“The music selection and the way it moves through the pieces was interesting,” Linda Elihu said. She described the music as “powerful and sweet.”

Audience members praised the selections.

“That performance was great,” Ernest Perez said. “I thought the arrangements were incredible.”

The performance was especially noteworthy for young piano student Tiggy Menkir, whose piano teacher, Chiang, was the piano soloist.

“We’re looking forward to the pianist,” said Menkir’s mother Roman Farede, a professor at SMC.

Menkir has played some pieces by Beethoven and looked forward to hearing a professional rendition.

Concert-goers also took notice of the venue.

“It’s my first time at this venue,” Perez said. “The acoustics here are incredible. We’re very impressed.”

Student Linda Elihu appreciated the set-up of the theater.

“We have college as well as professional programming,” World Stage assistant house manager Louis Fiol said.

The SMC Performing Arts Center, under the artistic direction of alumni Dustin Hoffman, has featured performances by opera singer Placido Domingo in addition to Tony award-winning acts. It will also host SMC Orchestra’s future performances.

The orchestra’s next concert will be Dec. 12, 2009 at the SMC Performing Arts Center.

Published in The Independent Monitor November 2009 issue.

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 If artist Huguette Caland had a theme song, it would have to be “I Did It My Way.”

In 1945, when she was 13, Caland witnessed her father Bechara el-Khoury’s inauguration as the first president of Lebanon. She broke family conventions in 1952 when she married Paul Caland, the nephew of the publisher of the pro-French daily Le Jour, a competitor of her uncle’s pro-independence daily, L’Orient.

Huguette Caland in one of her signature kaftans. Photo by Samir Twair.

“It didn’t matter,” she said, “both papers eventually merged.”

Caland studied art at age 16 with the Italian artist Fernando Manetti, but It wasn’t until her daughter and two sons were born that she became a full-time student at the American University of Beirut in 1964. She graduated four years later with a degree in fine arts.

It was a tumultuous time, the Arab world was recovering from the disastrous June 1967 war with Israel. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians took refuge in Lebanon and the privileged Maronite Christian woman began to wonder about the homeless masses languishing in camps in her country. Who were they? How were they surviving?  What were their stories?

The camps were a separate entity and it took hours of appeals, red tape and bending of regulations before the Office of Palestinian Affairs permitted Caland and other concerned wives of Lebanese leaders to talk to women in the camps.

“We had to gain the confidence of the Palestinians. We went to the camps in the morning and took sick people to hospitals and tried to set up kindergartens. In the afternoon, I worked at my art studio,” Caland said.

Huguette Caland with mannequins she designed wearing her fashions. Photo by Samir Twair.

In 1969, Caland became the first president of INAASH, or the Association for the Development of Palestinian Camps. This organization continues to sponsor kindergartens and youth centers while setting up cooperatives in which women produce embroidery for international markets.

From the get-go, Caland realized the desperately poor refugee women needed to earn money for themselves and their families. The best way to achieve this, she reasoned, was for them to produce traditional Palestinian embroidery for wealthy people who appreciated the intricate handiwork.

Caland said she does not know how many Palestinian women were initially involved and how the marketing of their embroidery was carried out, “I don’t like numbers and I wasn’t involved with those details.”

Chaise lounge in Huguette Caland’s studio filled with pillows embroidered by Palestianian women refugees she befriended in the late 1960s. Photo by Samir Twair.

She does remember the first efforts at reproducing regional embroidery designs were “pathetic.”

“These women were too traumatized or too far removed from their villages to reproduce traditional embroidery. The little samples we gave them to exercise on were disheartening.

“But,” she said, “their progress grew by leaps and bounds as they began to earn money for their handiwork. Slowly these uprooted women gained self-respect and a degree of independence from their husbands.”

Lebanese society had for the most part shunned the Palestinian refugees. But in 1970, when Caland had a one-woman show at Dar el-Fan, an upscale Beirut cultural center, she arranged for two buses to transport the refugees to attend her exhibition. It was, she remarked, probably the first time they had been invited to a Lebanese social gathering.

In 1970, the women’s liberation movement was rising throughout the west, but it hadn’t lapped up on the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean. Nonetheless, Caland was about to liberate herself from the confines of upper-class Lebanese society.

Her first step was to abandon the haute couture Parisian fashions her French/Lebanese husband preferred. Thenceforth, she wore only her signature garment, a kaftan she designed and often embellishes with sketches, faces, calligraphy or whatever strikes her fancy.

“The big drama was when I changed my look,” she recalled. The kaftans almost prompted a divorce. It was then the artist told her husband she was leaving for Paris. She departed five days later.

At age 39, she left “everything – my life, three children and a beautiful home. I wanted my own identity. I was tired of being the daughter of, the wife of, the niece of, the sister of.”

Caland thrived in Paris. Her artwork sold. While shopping in Pierre Cardin’s boutique, none other than the designer himself approached the kaftan-clad Lebanese and remarked “I like the way you dress.”

She replied: “Me too.”

Cardin commissioned Caland to design 102 kaftans under the Nour line which were presented in 1979 at Espace. Each hand-woven woolen or silk creation was sewn with linings and finishing touches worthy of the House of Cardin.

“It took me eleven months to produce the kaftan collection,” Caland said. “It was the only job I had in my life.”

This telltale remark signifies Caland does not regard the hours she expends daily on painting, designing and creating fashions as work. However, Caland’s multimedia painting, titled “City,” sold for $20,400 at a Christie’s auction in Dubai May 24, 2006.

Cross-hatched tiles form a unique mosaic designed by Huguette Calandin her kitchen. Photo by Samir Twair.

Caland’s works are on display at her galleries in Beirut and Paris.

“Only at this stage in my life are Arabs becoming aware of my work,” Caland said.

The third act of her life began when she moved to Southern California in 1988 at the urging of her filmmaker son, Philippe.

This time, her work of art became the residence and studio she built for herself in Venice, a beach city suburb of Los Angeles that has been home to artists, actors and nonconformists since it was founded in 1905.

The unique fortress-like cement compound Caland commissioned architect Neil Kaufman to design on a single-residence lot took six months to conceive and 18 months to construct. Its uniqueness makes it a Venice landmark that even The Los Angeles Times featured in a two-page spread in its Home section.

From the moment a visitor is admitted through an antique green-painted wood plank door, Caland’s presence prevails. Her paintings, a collage of love letters returned from a long-ago lover, sculptures, skylights and a crosshatched, vibrant green mural in her kitchen pronounce this is the home of an artist.

Guest house on Huguette Caland’s compound. Photo by Samir Twair.

There are no doors in her sun-splashed home except for the door to the guest bathroom. Oriental rugs are scattered on plywood floors stained in salmon and blue hues. A few of the famous Cardin kaftans hang in one of two walk-in closets each of which is the size of an apartment living room.

Local artists are attracted to the lovely home where Caland serves the food of her childhood. Her daughter, two sons and six grandsons live nearby.

“I love Venice,” she said while painting a canvas for an upcoming show in Dubai. “I love every minute of my life.”

A 75-foot long lap pool serves as a moat on the eastern border of her compound – she swims 20 to 40 laps daily, which may explain why her hair is cut ultra-short.

Her studio is the largest room in the 4600 square foot dwelling. It features 18-foot ceilings, gallery walls and track lighting as well as tables which support her large canvases of works in progress. In one corner there is a chaise lounge covered with pillows covered in the embroidery of the Palestinian refugee women she championed nearly four decades ago.

It was the embroidery on these pillows that caught the eye of the director of the Los Angeles Craft and Art and Folk Art Museum when she visited Caland’s home. This evolved into the historic, first-ever “Sovereign Threads” exhibition of Palestinian embroidery in Los Angeles July 16 to Oct. 8, 2006.

Living room of Venice Beach home artist Huguette Caland designed. Photo by Samir Twair.

What goes around comes around. Not only did Caland put the museum director in touch with curators of Palestinian embroidery, but the daughters and granddaughters of women whom Caland helped in 1969 have benefited from the Los Angeles exhibition. The museum sold their needlework and all proceeds went back to the women of the camps.

 Published in The Independent Monitor November 2009 issue.

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 Guest Writer

The Arab Film Festival showcased three different films this year that shed light on gay life in the Arab World, and broke new ground in the festival’s reach.

In Not Quite the Taliban, Jordanian director Fadi Hindash puts himself on the line by discussing his sexual orientation as part of a larger documentary about Westernized Arabs. He reveals the way many Arabs in Dubai, his birthplace (although Hindash is Palestinian with a Jordanian passport), lead double lives and mesh together a strange combination of Western pop culture and Arab traditions. Hindash is repeatedly harassed by the police, and eventually must leave the full truth out of his film.

The documentary The Beirut Apartment touches on everything about Lebanese society as told by young gays and lesbians. Youssef reveals how his family kidnapped and threatened him when they discovered he was gay, but bit by bit began to accept his identity. Maha, a psychotherapist, admits that she missed the war and feels somehow dependent on it. She also talks about her work with Helem, the first Lebanese center for gays and lesbians. Faisal, a Palestinian living in Lebanon, discusses the hardships of being without national rights. All of the interviewees seek safety in the director’s apartment while outside Beirut rebuilds and recovers from war.

The festival also showed Lebanese film Help, which was banned in its country of origin for graphic content. In Help the main character befriends a prostitute and gay man who live together on the fringes of society. His new friends open his mind but also lead him into dangerous situations.

All three of the films were co-presented by Bibi, a group that throws Middle Eastern-themed parties to raise money for charities. Bibi’s latest beneficiary is Lebanese lesbian, bisexual, and transgender women’s organization MEEM. MEEM plans to use the funds to promote their book of nonfiction stories from women in Lebanon, according to Bibi organizer Rostam Pahlevan.  Pahlevan spoke enthusiastically about how the festival could bring more attention to Bibi’s causes.

“The most exciting thing is we are bridging gaps and raising awareness,” he said.

It is progress to see a famous Arab-American festival include LGBT issues as homosexuality is often harshly rejected in Arab culture. Homosexual activity is still illegal in all of the 22 Arab countries except Iraq, Jordan, and the West Bank. While the Egyptian film industry, the largest in the Arab world, has released three films with lesbian or gay characters (The Yacobian Building, Heena Maysara, and Bedoon Rekaba), all three were nearly censored and received a lot of controversy.

However, Pahlevan said the Arab Film Festival had worked with another LGBT organization before and were very open to the idea of collaborating with them.  “The organizers have been very cordial, very warm, very welcoming, and very excited about this partnership,” he emphasized.

To contact Bibi, visit their Myspace at http://www.myspace.com/bibsf. The trailer of The Beruit Apartment can be viewed at http://www.myspace.com/thebeirutapt, and the Arab Film Festival’s website is http://www.aff.org/. 
 
Published in The Independent Monitor November 2009 issue.

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Los Angeles, October 6, 2009– One of the biggest issues facing America today is how to engage the people of the Middle East and Muslim World. President Obama made that clear to the world in his historic Cairo speech this past July. But how can we hope to foster cross-cultural peace overseas when we know so little of the Arab population in our own backyard?

Country Called Amreeka

There are an estimated 3.5 million Arab Americans living in all 50 of the United States today. They are neighbors, classmates, voters, heroes, relatives, and friends.  Since 9/11, they have become the object of relentless scrutiny, yet little is understood about them. For example, current statistics show that most Arab Americans (75%) are NOT Muslims, and most Muslims in America (76%) are NOT Arab. In A COUNTRY CALLED AMREEKA:  Arab Roots, American Stories (Free Press; October 6, 2009; $25.00), Syrian American civil rights lawyer Alia Malek gives faces to the hard-to-pronounce names and tells the story of a community that has become essential for us to recognize, so that we better understand our own American history and how our society is evolving. 

Just as the recent award-winning National Geographic Entertainment film AMREEKA, by Cherien Dabis, blazed new ground in its depiction of a mother and son from the West Bank trying to assimilate in America, Alia Malek’s A COUNTRY CALLED AMREEKA brings to captivating life true stories of a wide variety of Arab Americans from across the country, navigating the divide between their original heritage and their new world in the United States.

Organized around a timeline of events that begins unexpectedly for most readers in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1960s, each chapter corresponds to one event and one Arab American, allowing readers to live that moment in history in the skin of an individual Arab American.  Her Majesty Queen Noor of Jordan calls the book, “Infectiously readable, the profiles in A COUNTRY CALLED AMREEKA add character and texture to the history of the Arab-American community, challenging every tired stereotype and giving us new insight into what it means to be an Arab-American today.”

In an interview about A COUNTRY CALLED AMREEKA, Alia Malek can discuss not only the specifics of the Arab American narrative and place in American history but issues relevant to all Americans such as:

The “new America” of people with hyphenated-identities who saw themselves in President Obama and were essential in bringing him to power (and who applauded his choice of a wise Latina for the U.S. Supreme Court).

How race and ethnicity have evolved in American society in the last 100+ years and how demographic changes have re-defined who Americans are ethnically and racially.

The disproportional effect of the Arab Israeli conflict and the Palestinian struggle on Arab American lives.

Ethnic profiling post-9/11

What it’s like for Arabic-speaking soldiers to fight for the U.S. in Iraq.

The Arab American perspective on events such as the Birmingham church bombing in 1963, the 1973 Oil Embargo, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and of course 9/11.

What it’s like to be shut out of the national narrative.

Any current event in the world, from an Arab-American perspective.

To arrange an interview with Alia Malek about A COUNTRY CALLED AMREEKA, please contact Jill Siegel at 212-698-1252 or email her, jill.siegel@simonandschuster.com.

If you would like to present Alia Malek and her book at your organization for a talk, please get in touch with me. Note that Alia Malek will be on the West Coast during the first half of November 2009.

 Published in The Independent Monitor November 2009 issue.

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