January 1, 2009
By ETHAN BRONNER and TAGHREED EL-KHODARY
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/01/world/middleeast/01mideast.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&src=igw
JERUSALEM — After five straight days of punishing air attacks, Israel rejected a proposal for a 48-hour cease-fire in its military onslaught in Gaza on Wednesday, saying it would maintain pressure on Hamas. But it did not rule out future diplomacy and was open to ways of increasing humanitarian aid.
The decision was announced after a security cabinet meeting here.
The Israeli air strikes on Gaza continued on Wednesday, and at least 20 more rockets were fired by Hamas militants in reprisal into southern Israel, including three that landed in the city of Beersheba. Mark Regev, the spokesman for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said earlier that the country’s leaders “view it as important to keep up the pressure on Hamas.”
“We cannot give them a respite to rearm and regroup,” he said. “We need a real, sustainable solution, not a Band-Aid.” But he added that Israel would still explore ways to expedite humanitarian aid to Palestinian civilians in Gaza and would also explore a broader diplomatic effort to achieve a lasting cease-fire.
He and other officials said Israel was continuing to talk to American and European leaders about finding a longer-term diplomatic solution.
The idea of a 48-hour cease-fire emerged from a conversation between Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner of France and Defense Minister Ehud Barak of Israel. It was supposed to establish at least a temporary pause in the fighting that would allow humanitarian relief to be delivered to the besieged coastal strip.
“The leading option right now is still a ground invasion, but the target of this operation is an improved cease-fire, and if that can come without the invasion, fine,” a close aide to Mr. Barak said Tuesday, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he is not Mr. Barak’s authorized spokesman. “But, of course, Hamas has to agree, and there has to be a mechanism to make it work.”
On Wednesday, rockets fired by Hamas militants struck targets more than 20 miles from Gaza, displaying greater range than earlier in the conflict. In Beersheba, one hit an empty school, according to news reports. Schools in Beersheba were ordered closed Tuesday because of an earlier missile strike. The Israeli military says that, while some Hamas rockets are home-made, the longer-range missiles are more sophisticated and are smuggled into Gaza.
Israeli warplanes bombed tunnels along Gaza’s border with Egypt which provide crucial supply lines. The crump of bombing could be heard from the Egyptian side of the frontier.
With Gaza’s food and medical supplies threatened by the conflict, a British government minister, Douglas Alexander, said aid was “desperately needed.”
“The human cost of this conflict is unacceptable and the humanitarian situation is getting worse by the hour,” said Mr. Alexander, the international development secretary, as he announced a $10 million emergency aid package on Wednesday.
In Cairo, a meeting of foreign ministers from the 22-member Arab League began amid calls by some Arab leaders for Palestinians to end disputes between Hamas in Gaza and the Fatah movement led by Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, in the West Bank, according to news reports.
The latest European diplomacy began Tuesday when Mr. Kouchner met with his European Union colleagues over the Gaza crisis and called publicly for a permanent cease-fire. A similar call came from the so-called quartet of powers focused on the region — the United Nations, the European Union, the United States and Russia.
President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made phone calls to Israeli and Arab leaders to explore prospects for halting the fighting. They emphasized that any cease-fire should be “durable and sustainable,” compelling Hamas to end its rocket attacks, a State Department spokesman said.
“That is different from the cease-fire that existed in the last six months,” said the spokesman, Gordon Duguid, noting that Hamas had routinely violated the previous agreement by firing rockets into southern Israel.
The flurry of diplomacy appeared to be mostly byplay in Jerusalem and Gaza, as Israeli officials spoke of a continuing and expanding military operation, and Hamas vowed to step up its resistance. It was also clear that the number of targets available from the air was declining, making the likelihood of a ground offensive greater.
In Gaza, Hamas militants issued a taped statement vowing revenge for those killed in the Israeli air raids since Saturday and warning that a ground invasion would prove painful for Israel. Palestinian officials say that more than 370 people have been killed, among them, the United Nations says, at least 62 women and children and an unknown number of civilian men. Two sisters, ages 4 and 11, were killed in a strike in the north as concern was growing around the world that the assault was taking a terrible toll on civilians.
“It would be easier to dry the sea of Gaza than to defeat the resistance and uproot Hamas, which is in every house of Gaza,” said the statement from the military wing of Hamas. It was played on Hamas’s television station, which had been shut down by an Israeli missile but went back on the air by broadcasting from a mobile van. The statement added that if there was a ground invasion, “the children of Gaza will be collecting the body parts of your soldiers and the ruins of tanks.”
Israeli warplanes, returning repeatedly to the same section of Gaza City overnight, pummeled the main government complex with about 20 missiles, residents said Tuesday. The building had been evacuated since the start of the operation on Saturday, which also hit nearly all of Hamas’s security complexes, its university and other symbols of its sovereignty and power.
The Nakhala family, which lives next to the compound, was inspecting the damage on Tuesday morning and recounting the utter fear and panic they all felt as the missiles hit.
“We have no shelters in Gaza,” said the father, Osama Nakhala. “Where shall we go? I also have to worry about my mother, who is 80 years old and paralyzed.”
His 13-year-old son, Yousef, was with him. When asked his view of the situation, Yousef took an unusual stand for someone in Gaza, where Israel is being cursed by most everyone. “I blame Hamas. It doesn’t want to recognize Israel. If they did so there could be peace,” he said. “Egypt made a peace treaty with Israel, and nothing is happening to them.”
His brother Amjad, 16, disagreed and blamed the Palestinian president in the West Bank, Mahmoud Abbas, saying that he had sided with Israel.
Gaza City was entirely without electricity for the first time, the result of an air attack that hit the system’s infrastructure. Repair workers said they were afraid to work because of the possibility of more raids.
The few open bakeries and grocery stores had lines stretching outside as people tried to stock up. But essentials, like diapers, baby food, bread, potatoes and fresh vegetables, were in short supply and costlier than normal.
Israel sent in about 100 trucks with emergency supplies of food and medicine, the military reported.
At the Hassouna Bakery near Shifa Hospital, about 100 men and 50 women waited in separate lines to buy bread. Amal Altayan was telling others in the line that she kept her cellphone in her pocket so that if an Israeli missile destroyed her house she would be able to phone for help. The other women mocked her, saying that if a missile hit her house, she would be gone. Showing familiarity with the kind of knowledge circulating in Gaza these days, Ms. Altayan replied, “It depends. If it is an F-16 I will turn into biscuits, but if it is an Apache I may have a chance.”
Osama Alaf, 41, said he spent four hours waiting in line to buy bread. “I bought flour until now,” he said. “I don’t have cooking gas, but I make a fire out of cartons and paper and make bread that way.” Asked whom he blamed, he said, “Israel, which is slaughtering us, and whoever is cooperating with Israel, like Egypt.”
Anger at Egypt has grown across the Arab and Muslim worlds because it has declined to open its border with Gaza and is seen as cooperating with Israel.
Ethan Bronner reported from Jerusalem, and Taghreed El-Khodary from Gaza. Steven Erlanger contributed reporting from Rafah, Egypt; Mark Landler from Washington and Alan Cowell from London.
31 December 2008
30 December 2008
Help Palestinians in the Gaza Strip
Israel's massive bombardment of Gaza must end immediately.
The Bush Administration must demand that the bombing stop, that Gaza's borders be reopened under UN supervision, and that negotiations resume toward reinstating an effective cross-border ceasefire.
Again, as in the past, Israel's overwhelming and disproportionate violence in retaliation puts innocent civilians in the firing line, thereby inflaming Palestinian and regional passions. Indeed, this is the third such devastating assault launched by Israel with the Bush Administration's acquiescence (remember the re-conquest of the West Bank in 2003, and the wars on Gaza and Lebanon in 2006). And to what end? All these attacks on Gaza bring massive civilian deaths, destruction of property, and deepening bitterness toward Israel and the United States. The conditions in Gaza are already deplorable; what hope can Gaza cling to in its darkest hour of need? A nation without hope has nothing to lose, and already, factions are calling for a renewed intifada against Israel.
One cannot view this tragic episode outside the context of Israel's long and cruel history in Gaza which has been criminal, by any measure of international law and conventions.
Should the White House once again fail to act to restrain Israel and to provide real leadership in the search for peace, this tragedy will continue to grow: Palestinian suffering and bitterness will deepen, Israelis will remain insecure, and extremism will be further fueled by anti-American anger.
The bottom line, here, is that, while the stupidity of Hamas' reckless behavior cannot be excused because of the continued danger such ill-considered actions pose to the security and well-being of its own constituents, there can be no justification for Israel's massive and brutal assault.
What can you do today?
These and other organizations are collecting donations for relief to Gaza:
UNRWA
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East is accepting donations: http://www.un.org/unrwa/emergency/donation/emergency_activities.html
ANERA
-Accepting donations for medical supplies:
https://secure2.convio.net/anera/site/Donation2?df_id=1280&1280.donation=form1
Palestine Red Crescent Society
-Cash donations are being accepted into an established bank account http://www.palestinercs.org/news_details.aspx?nid=39
Medical Aid for Palestinians
-Donations for medical supplies (Donations taken in pounds not dollars)
-Donations made at https://www.bmycharity.com/V2/main_V2.aspx?p=donation&id=395758
The Bush Administration must demand that the bombing stop, that Gaza's borders be reopened under UN supervision, and that negotiations resume toward reinstating an effective cross-border ceasefire.
Again, as in the past, Israel's overwhelming and disproportionate violence in retaliation puts innocent civilians in the firing line, thereby inflaming Palestinian and regional passions. Indeed, this is the third such devastating assault launched by Israel with the Bush Administration's acquiescence (remember the re-conquest of the West Bank in 2003, and the wars on Gaza and Lebanon in 2006). And to what end? All these attacks on Gaza bring massive civilian deaths, destruction of property, and deepening bitterness toward Israel and the United States. The conditions in Gaza are already deplorable; what hope can Gaza cling to in its darkest hour of need? A nation without hope has nothing to lose, and already, factions are calling for a renewed intifada against Israel.
One cannot view this tragic episode outside the context of Israel's long and cruel history in Gaza which has been criminal, by any measure of international law and conventions.
Should the White House once again fail to act to restrain Israel and to provide real leadership in the search for peace, this tragedy will continue to grow: Palestinian suffering and bitterness will deepen, Israelis will remain insecure, and extremism will be further fueled by anti-American anger.
The bottom line, here, is that, while the stupidity of Hamas' reckless behavior cannot be excused because of the continued danger such ill-considered actions pose to the security and well-being of its own constituents, there can be no justification for Israel's massive and brutal assault.
What can you do today?
These and other organizations are collecting donations for relief to Gaza:
UNRWA
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East is accepting donations: http://www.un.org/unrwa/emergency/donation/emergency_activities.html
ANERA
-Accepting donations for medical supplies:
https://secure2.convio.net/anera/site/Donation2?df_id=1280&1280.donation=form1
Palestine Red Crescent Society
-Cash donations are being accepted into an established bank account http://www.palestinercs.org/news_details.aspx?nid=39
Medical Aid for Palestinians
-Donations for medical supplies (Donations taken in pounds not dollars)
-Donations made at https://www.bmycharity.com/V2/main_V2.aspx?p=donation&id=395758
29 December 2008
Gaza Toll Hits 300 in 3rd Day of Israel Strikes
December 30, 2008
By TAGHREED EL-KHODARY and ISABEL KERSHNER
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/30/world/middleeast/30mideast.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&src=igw
GAZA — In a third straight day of deadly air strikes against the emblems and institutions of Hamas on Monday, Israeli warplanes pounded targets in Gaza including the Interior Ministry while the Israeli Army declared areas around the beleaguered enclave a “closed military zone.”
The attacks brought the death toll in Gaza to more than 300, according to Palestinian medical officials.
Israel says that its onslaught — its most ferocious against Palestinians in decades — is designed to prevent Palestinians from attacking towns in southern Israel with missiles. But a rocket fired from Gaza killed a man and wounded seven in the Israeli town of Ashkelon on Monday, the Israeli Army said. Three Israelis were also stabbed by a Palestinian in a Jewish settlement in the West Bank, the army said.
The air strikes followed bombing late Sunday that hit the Islamic University in Gaza, a Hamas stronghold, and the Interior Ministry, according to Hamas. Footage recorded from Israeli warplanes showed bombs striking the entrances to tunnels allegedly used to smuggle weapons into Gaza from Egypt.
The Hamas-owned television station Al Aqsa was also hit, as was a mosque that the Israeli military said was being used as a terrorist base. Speaking in Parliament, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that the attack in Gaza would be “widened and deepened as is necessary” and referred to its operations as part of Israel’s long-term struggle against Israel’s Islamist enemies, the newspaper Haaretz reported on its Web site.
The Bush administration placed the responsibility for ending the violence on Hamas.
“In order for the violence to stop, Hamas must stop firing rockets into Israel and agree to respect a sustainable and durable cease-fire,” a White House spokesman, Gordon D. Johndroe, told reporters in Texas. “Hamas has once again shown its true colors as a terrorist organization.”The United Nations Relief and Works Agency said more than 50 of those killed by Israeli strikes were civilians, Reuters reported. The agency based its assessment on visits by agency officials to hospitals and medical centers.
In a statement on Monday, the Israeli Army said some areas around Gaza had been declared a “closed military zone,” a move which some analysts depicted as a potential precursor to a ground offensive. The military said the declaration meant that civilians, including journalists, could be denied access to an area up to two miles from Gaza.
On Sunday, Israeli troops and tanks massed along the Gaza border and the government said it had called up reserves for a possible ground operation.
A military spokeswoman, Maj. Avital Leibovich, said the closed zone around Gaza had mostly to do with concerns of safety. She said the military had information that Hamas may employ either suicide bombers or more powerful missiles from the border area and it wanted to clear the area. She said she was sure journalists would be permitted to return.
“No one is trying to hide anything,” she said.
The continued airstrikes, which Israel said were in retaliation for sustained rocket fire from Gaza into its territory, unleashed a furious reaction across the Arab world, raising fears of greater instability in the region.
Much of the anger was also directed at Egypt, seen by Hamas and some nearby governments as having acceded to Israel’s military action by sealing its border with Gaza and forcing back many Palestinians at gunpoint who were trying to escape the destruction.
Witnesses at the Rafah border crossing described a chaotic scene as young men tried to force their way across into Egypt, amid sporadic exchanges of gunfire between Hamas and Egyptian forces. Egyptian state television reported that one Egyptian border guard was killed by a Hamas gunman. A Palestinian man was killed by an Egyptian guard near Rafah, Reuters reported.
In Gaza, officials said medical services, stretched to the breaking point after 18 months of Israeli sanctions, were on the verge of collapse as they struggled to care for the more than 600 people wounded in two days.
At Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, women wailed as they searched for relatives among bodies that lay strewn on the hospital floor. One doctor said that given the dearth of facilities, not much could be done for the seriously wounded, and that it was “better to be brought in dead.”
The International Committee of the Red Cross appealed on Sunday for urgent humanitarian assistance, including medical supplies, to be allowed to enter Gaza. Israeli officials said that some aid had been allowed in through one of the crossings. Egypt temporarily opened the Rafah crossing on Saturday to allow some of the wounded to be taken to Egyptian hospitals.
Israel made a strong push to justify the attacks, saying it was forced into military action to defend its citizens. At the same time, the supreme religious leader of Iran and the leader of Hezbollah expressed strong support for Hamas.
Across Gaza, families huddled indoors as Israeli jets streaked overhead. Residents said that there were long blackouts and that they had no cooking gas. Some ventured out to receive bread rations at bakeries or to brave the streets to claim their dead at the hospitals. There were few mass funerals; rather, families buried the victims in small ceremonies.
At dusk on Sunday, Israeli fighter jets bombed over 40 tunnels along Gaza’s border with Egypt. The Israeli military said that the tunnels, on the Gaza side of the border, were used for smuggling weapons, explosives and fugitives. Gazans also use many of them to import consumer goods and fuel in order to get around the Israeli-imposed economic blockade.
In the first two days of the operation Israeli jets destroyed at least 30 targets in Gaza, including the main security compound and prison in Gaza City known as the Saraya, metal workshops throughout Gaza that were suspected of manufacturing rockets, and Hamas military posts.
Israel appeared to be settling in for a longer haul. The government on Sunday approved the emergency call-up of thousands of army reservists in preparation for a possible ground operation as Israeli troops, tanks, armored personnel carriers and armored bulldozers massed at the border.
Speaking before the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem, Israel’s defense minister, Ehud Barak, said the army “will deepen and broaden its actions as needed” and “will continue to act.” Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Israel’s goal was not to reoccupy Gaza, which it left unilaterally in 2005, but to “restore normal life and quiet to residents of the south” of Israel.
Tzipi Livni, Israel’s foreign minister, appeared on American talk shows to press Israel’s case. She said on “Fox News Sunday” that the operation “is needed in order to change the realities on the ground, and to give peace and quiet to the citizens in southern Israel.”
Militants in Gaza fired barrages of rockets and mortar shells the farthest yet into Israel on Sunday. One rocket fell in Gan Yavneh, a village near the major port city of Ashdod, almost 20 miles north of Gaza. Two landed in the coastal city of Ashkelon. Several Israelis were wounded.
Fawzi Barhoum, a spokesman for Hamas, told reporters that Israel had started a “war” but that it would not be able to choose how it would end. He called for revenge in the form of strikes reaching “deep into the Zionist entity using all means,” including suicide attacks.
The hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens now within rocket range have been instructed by the authorities to stay close to protected spaces.
In Lebanon, the leader of the Shiite militant group Hezbollah, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, put his fighters on alert, expressing strong support for Hamas and saying that he believed Israel might try to wage a two-front war, as it did in 2006. He called for a mass demonstration in Beirut on Monday. And he, too, denounced Egypt’s leaders. “If you don’t open the borders, you are accomplices in the killing,” he said in a televised speech.
Iran’s supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, condemned the silence of some Arab countries, which he said had prepared the grounds for the “catastrophe,” an Iranian news agency, ISNA, reported.
“The horrible crime of the Zionist regime in Gaza has once again revealed the bloodthirsty face of this regime from disguise,” he said in a statement. “But worse than this catastrophe is the encouraging silence of some Arab countries who claim to be Muslim,” he said, apparently in a reference to Egypt and Jordan.
Egypt has mediated talks between Israel and the Palestinians and between Hamas and Hamas’s rival, Fatah, leaving it open to criticism that it is too willing to work with Israel. In turn, Egypt and other Western-allied Sunni Arab nations are deeply opposed to Hezbollah and Hamas, which they see as extensions of Iran, their Shiite nemesis.
Across the region, the Israeli strikes were being broadcast in grisly detail almost continually on Arab satellite networks.
In the Syrian capital, Damascus, a large group of protesters marched to Yusuf al Azmeh Square, where they chanted slogans and burned Israeli and American flags.
In Beirut, protesters were bused to a rally outside the United Nations building, holding up Palestinian flags and Hamas banners. Muhammad Mazen Ibrahim, a 25-year-old Palestinian who lives in one of the refugee camps here, choked up when asked about the assault on Gaza.
“There’s an agreement between Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel against Hamas,” he said. “They want to end them; all the countries are in league against Hamas, but God willing, we will win.”
That sentiment is widespread here. Many see Ms. Livni’s visit to Cairo last week as evidence that Egypt, eager to be rid of Hamas, had consented to the airstrikes.
The anger echoes what happened in July 2006, when the leaders of Saudi Arabia and Egypt publicly blamed Hezbollah for starting the conflict with Israel. Popular rage against Israel soon forced the leaders to change their positions.
Hamas, sworn to the destruction of Israel, took control of Gaza when it ousted Fatah last year. An Egyptian-brokered six-month truce between Israel and Hamas, always shaky, began to unravel in early November. It expired 10 days ago.
Taghreed El-Khodary reported from Gaza, and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem. Reporting was contributed by Ethan Bronner from Jerusalem, Robert F. Worth and Hwaida Saad from Beirut, Lebanon, Nazila Fathi from Tehran, Rina Castelnuovo from the Israel-Gaza border, Khaled Abu Aker from Ramallah, West Bank, an employee of The New York Times from Syria and David Stout from Washington.
By TAGHREED EL-KHODARY and ISABEL KERSHNER
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/30/world/middleeast/30mideast.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&src=igw
GAZA — In a third straight day of deadly air strikes against the emblems and institutions of Hamas on Monday, Israeli warplanes pounded targets in Gaza including the Interior Ministry while the Israeli Army declared areas around the beleaguered enclave a “closed military zone.”
The attacks brought the death toll in Gaza to more than 300, according to Palestinian medical officials.
Israel says that its onslaught — its most ferocious against Palestinians in decades — is designed to prevent Palestinians from attacking towns in southern Israel with missiles. But a rocket fired from Gaza killed a man and wounded seven in the Israeli town of Ashkelon on Monday, the Israeli Army said. Three Israelis were also stabbed by a Palestinian in a Jewish settlement in the West Bank, the army said.
The air strikes followed bombing late Sunday that hit the Islamic University in Gaza, a Hamas stronghold, and the Interior Ministry, according to Hamas. Footage recorded from Israeli warplanes showed bombs striking the entrances to tunnels allegedly used to smuggle weapons into Gaza from Egypt.
The Hamas-owned television station Al Aqsa was also hit, as was a mosque that the Israeli military said was being used as a terrorist base. Speaking in Parliament, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that the attack in Gaza would be “widened and deepened as is necessary” and referred to its operations as part of Israel’s long-term struggle against Israel’s Islamist enemies, the newspaper Haaretz reported on its Web site.
The Bush administration placed the responsibility for ending the violence on Hamas.
“In order for the violence to stop, Hamas must stop firing rockets into Israel and agree to respect a sustainable and durable cease-fire,” a White House spokesman, Gordon D. Johndroe, told reporters in Texas. “Hamas has once again shown its true colors as a terrorist organization.”The United Nations Relief and Works Agency said more than 50 of those killed by Israeli strikes were civilians, Reuters reported. The agency based its assessment on visits by agency officials to hospitals and medical centers.
In a statement on Monday, the Israeli Army said some areas around Gaza had been declared a “closed military zone,” a move which some analysts depicted as a potential precursor to a ground offensive. The military said the declaration meant that civilians, including journalists, could be denied access to an area up to two miles from Gaza.
On Sunday, Israeli troops and tanks massed along the Gaza border and the government said it had called up reserves for a possible ground operation.
A military spokeswoman, Maj. Avital Leibovich, said the closed zone around Gaza had mostly to do with concerns of safety. She said the military had information that Hamas may employ either suicide bombers or more powerful missiles from the border area and it wanted to clear the area. She said she was sure journalists would be permitted to return.
“No one is trying to hide anything,” she said.
The continued airstrikes, which Israel said were in retaliation for sustained rocket fire from Gaza into its territory, unleashed a furious reaction across the Arab world, raising fears of greater instability in the region.
Much of the anger was also directed at Egypt, seen by Hamas and some nearby governments as having acceded to Israel’s military action by sealing its border with Gaza and forcing back many Palestinians at gunpoint who were trying to escape the destruction.
Witnesses at the Rafah border crossing described a chaotic scene as young men tried to force their way across into Egypt, amid sporadic exchanges of gunfire between Hamas and Egyptian forces. Egyptian state television reported that one Egyptian border guard was killed by a Hamas gunman. A Palestinian man was killed by an Egyptian guard near Rafah, Reuters reported.
In Gaza, officials said medical services, stretched to the breaking point after 18 months of Israeli sanctions, were on the verge of collapse as they struggled to care for the more than 600 people wounded in two days.
At Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, women wailed as they searched for relatives among bodies that lay strewn on the hospital floor. One doctor said that given the dearth of facilities, not much could be done for the seriously wounded, and that it was “better to be brought in dead.”
The International Committee of the Red Cross appealed on Sunday for urgent humanitarian assistance, including medical supplies, to be allowed to enter Gaza. Israeli officials said that some aid had been allowed in through one of the crossings. Egypt temporarily opened the Rafah crossing on Saturday to allow some of the wounded to be taken to Egyptian hospitals.
Israel made a strong push to justify the attacks, saying it was forced into military action to defend its citizens. At the same time, the supreme religious leader of Iran and the leader of Hezbollah expressed strong support for Hamas.
Across Gaza, families huddled indoors as Israeli jets streaked overhead. Residents said that there were long blackouts and that they had no cooking gas. Some ventured out to receive bread rations at bakeries or to brave the streets to claim their dead at the hospitals. There were few mass funerals; rather, families buried the victims in small ceremonies.
At dusk on Sunday, Israeli fighter jets bombed over 40 tunnels along Gaza’s border with Egypt. The Israeli military said that the tunnels, on the Gaza side of the border, were used for smuggling weapons, explosives and fugitives. Gazans also use many of them to import consumer goods and fuel in order to get around the Israeli-imposed economic blockade.
In the first two days of the operation Israeli jets destroyed at least 30 targets in Gaza, including the main security compound and prison in Gaza City known as the Saraya, metal workshops throughout Gaza that were suspected of manufacturing rockets, and Hamas military posts.
Israel appeared to be settling in for a longer haul. The government on Sunday approved the emergency call-up of thousands of army reservists in preparation for a possible ground operation as Israeli troops, tanks, armored personnel carriers and armored bulldozers massed at the border.
Speaking before the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem, Israel’s defense minister, Ehud Barak, said the army “will deepen and broaden its actions as needed” and “will continue to act.” Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Israel’s goal was not to reoccupy Gaza, which it left unilaterally in 2005, but to “restore normal life and quiet to residents of the south” of Israel.
Tzipi Livni, Israel’s foreign minister, appeared on American talk shows to press Israel’s case. She said on “Fox News Sunday” that the operation “is needed in order to change the realities on the ground, and to give peace and quiet to the citizens in southern Israel.”
Militants in Gaza fired barrages of rockets and mortar shells the farthest yet into Israel on Sunday. One rocket fell in Gan Yavneh, a village near the major port city of Ashdod, almost 20 miles north of Gaza. Two landed in the coastal city of Ashkelon. Several Israelis were wounded.
Fawzi Barhoum, a spokesman for Hamas, told reporters that Israel had started a “war” but that it would not be able to choose how it would end. He called for revenge in the form of strikes reaching “deep into the Zionist entity using all means,” including suicide attacks.
The hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens now within rocket range have been instructed by the authorities to stay close to protected spaces.
In Lebanon, the leader of the Shiite militant group Hezbollah, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, put his fighters on alert, expressing strong support for Hamas and saying that he believed Israel might try to wage a two-front war, as it did in 2006. He called for a mass demonstration in Beirut on Monday. And he, too, denounced Egypt’s leaders. “If you don’t open the borders, you are accomplices in the killing,” he said in a televised speech.
Iran’s supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, condemned the silence of some Arab countries, which he said had prepared the grounds for the “catastrophe,” an Iranian news agency, ISNA, reported.
“The horrible crime of the Zionist regime in Gaza has once again revealed the bloodthirsty face of this regime from disguise,” he said in a statement. “But worse than this catastrophe is the encouraging silence of some Arab countries who claim to be Muslim,” he said, apparently in a reference to Egypt and Jordan.
Egypt has mediated talks between Israel and the Palestinians and between Hamas and Hamas’s rival, Fatah, leaving it open to criticism that it is too willing to work with Israel. In turn, Egypt and other Western-allied Sunni Arab nations are deeply opposed to Hezbollah and Hamas, which they see as extensions of Iran, their Shiite nemesis.
Across the region, the Israeli strikes were being broadcast in grisly detail almost continually on Arab satellite networks.
In the Syrian capital, Damascus, a large group of protesters marched to Yusuf al Azmeh Square, where they chanted slogans and burned Israeli and American flags.
In Beirut, protesters were bused to a rally outside the United Nations building, holding up Palestinian flags and Hamas banners. Muhammad Mazen Ibrahim, a 25-year-old Palestinian who lives in one of the refugee camps here, choked up when asked about the assault on Gaza.
“There’s an agreement between Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel against Hamas,” he said. “They want to end them; all the countries are in league against Hamas, but God willing, we will win.”
That sentiment is widespread here. Many see Ms. Livni’s visit to Cairo last week as evidence that Egypt, eager to be rid of Hamas, had consented to the airstrikes.
The anger echoes what happened in July 2006, when the leaders of Saudi Arabia and Egypt publicly blamed Hezbollah for starting the conflict with Israel. Popular rage against Israel soon forced the leaders to change their positions.
Hamas, sworn to the destruction of Israel, took control of Gaza when it ousted Fatah last year. An Egyptian-brokered six-month truce between Israel and Hamas, always shaky, began to unravel in early November. It expired 10 days ago.
Taghreed El-Khodary reported from Gaza, and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem. Reporting was contributed by Ethan Bronner from Jerusalem, Robert F. Worth and Hwaida Saad from Beirut, Lebanon, Nazila Fathi from Tehran, Rina Castelnuovo from the Israel-Gaza border, Khaled Abu Aker from Ramallah, West Bank, an employee of The New York Times from Syria and David Stout from Washington.
28 December 2008
Sex slavery: Living the American nightmare
Shadowy multibillion-dollar industry far more widespread than expected
By Alex Johnson and Cesar Rodriguez
Reporters
msnbc.com and Telemundo
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28161210/?GT1=43001
updated 7:07 a.m. CT, Mon., Dec. 22, 2008
When FBI and immigration agents arrested a 28-year-old Guatemalan woman three months ago in Los Angeles, they announced that they had shut down one of the most elaborate sex trafficking rings in the country. It was also the family business.
The woman, Maribel Rodriguez Vasquez, was the sixth member of her family to be rounded up in the two-year multi-agency investigation. Vasquez, five of her relatives and three other Guatemalan nationals were charged with 50 counts, alleging that they lured at least a dozen young women — including five minors as young as 13 years old — to the United States with promises of good jobs, only to put them to work as prostitutes. All remain in custody as investigators attempt to unravel the complex case.
Vasquez — quickly dubbed the “L.A. Madam” — attracted attention because she had been featured on the fugitive-hunting television program “America’s Most Wanted.” But it was one of only a few such cases to be spotlighted by national media, contributing to the false impression that cases of immigrant sex trafficking are isolated incidents, law enforcement officials and advocates for immigrants say.
The reality is that human trafficking goes on in nearly every American city and town, said Lisette Arsuaga, director of development for the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking, a human rights organization in Los Angeles.
“Human trafficking is well hidden,” Arsuaga said. “I consider it a huge problem.”
Her assessment is shared by authorities in Bexar County, Texas, where the Sheriff’s Office has formed a task force with Shared Hope International, an anti-slavery organization founded by former Rep. Linda Smith, D-Wash. Bexar County is considered a crossroads of the cross-border Mexican sex slave trade because two Interstate highways that crisscross the state intersect there, some 150 miles from the Mexican border.
“I could go to a truck stop in South Texas right now and get on a CB radio and ask for some sweet stuff, and someone’s going to come out and offer something to sell,” Sheriff’s Deputy Chris Burchell said.
A $9.5 billion-a-year industry
Federal officials agree that the trafficking of human beings as sex slaves is far more prevalent than is popularly understood. While saying it is difficult to pinpoint the scope of the industry, given its shadowy nature, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials estimated that it likely generates more than $9.5 billion a year.
Last year alone, the FBI opened more than 225 human trafficking investigations in the United States. Figures for 2008 are not yet available, but in a coordinated nationwide sweep in July, federal, state and local authorities made more than 640 arrests and rescued 47 children in just three days.
In congressional testimony this year, FBI Director Robert Mueller called sex trafficking “a significant and persistent problem in the U.S. and around the world.”
Most cases involve “international persons trafficked to the United States from other countries,” who are generally less aware of their rights, probably do not speak English and are frightened to go to the authorities, he said. “Victims are often lured with false promises of good jobs and better lives and are then forced to work in the sex industry.”
While an increasing number of young men and boys are being forced into the commercial sex industry, more than 80 percent of victims are women and girls, the State Department estimated this year. Of those, 70 percent are forced into prostitution, stripping, pornography or mail-order marriage.
That allegedly was the case with the L.A. Madam.
Prosecutors said in court documents that the Vasquez ring sold Guatemalan women and girls to one another like slaves for several years. Ring members also would try to keep them in line by taking them to witch doctors who threatened to put curses on them and their families if they ran away, the prosecution said.
In one incident, three of the defendants repeatedly kicked and hit one of the victims to punish her for trying to escape, the documents allege.
“These young women were enticed into coming to this country by promises of the American dream, only to arrive and discover that what awaited was a nightmare,” said Robert Schoch, an ICE special agent.
A modern-day form of slavery
Less publicized cases reveal ordeals just as horrific.
In August, three owners and operators of Asian massage parlors in Johnson County, Kansas, near Kansas City, pleaded guilty to human trafficking of women they recruited from China and forced into prostitution.
Charging documents said the defendants, all Chinese nationals, arranged the women’s travel, meeting them at the Kansas City, Mo., airport and driving them directly to one of two massage parlors they operated in Overland Park. There, the women were forced to work from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. seven days a week performing “sexual services on male patrons in exchange for money.”
Occasionally, one of the women would be sent to a nearby apartment to provide “extended sexual services,” prosecutors said. Otherwise, they lived in the massage parlors, monitored 24 hours a day by surveillance cameras.
The case made it clear that “human trafficking is a modern-day form of slavery that reaches from the other side of the globe to the suburban Midwest,” U.S. Attorney John F. Wood said.
Last month, police in Nashville, Tenn., arrested two men and charged them with holding a young Mexican woman as a sex slave, driving her across Tennessee, Georgia and Florida, where she was forced to engage in prostitution with as many as seven men a day, court records said.
Investigators alleged that the woman, 22, was tortured, stabbed and cut with an ice pick to ensure her obedience. They said the men also threatened to kill her family in Mexico and her sister in Atlanta if she did not follow their orders.
“The account given by this woman is very, very disturbing,” said Don Aaron, a spokesman for the Nashville police.
Beatings, rapes and forced abortions
In New York, meanwhile, Consuelo Carreto Valencia, a 4-foot-10, 61-year-old grandmother, pleaded guilty in July to smuggling dozens of women from Mexico and violently coercing them to perform sex acts.
Prosecutors said that Valencia was the matriarch of an extensive prostitution ring based in Mexico. The victims were compelled to perform sex acts 12 hours a day and were subjected to beatings, rape and forced abortions, they said.
Valencia agreed to the guilty plea after her attorney, John S. Wallenstein, told her she could go to prison for life if she were convicted on all counts.
“I said the jurors are going to want to jump out of the jury box and tear you to pieces,” Wallenstein was quoted as saying.
Cases hard to build
But law enforcement officials say that such successes are relatively rare. Often, victims are too frightened to cooperate with investigators, and when they are willing to help, they often speak little or no English, making it problematic to present cases that commonly rest on one person’s word against that of another.
“We have cases come up all the time, but no one really knows about it because Hispanic illegal immigrants fear being deported,” said Sara Sherman, an anti-slavery activist with Free For Life Ministries in Nashville.
Sheriff’s Deputy Keith Bickford, coordinator of the Human Trafficking Task Force in Multnomah County, Ore., said “The girls need help,” but he said they are “so difficult to deal with that we don’t have anyone trained to deal with them.”
Catching ringleaders in the act is particularly difficult, said Minneapolis Deputy Police Chief Valerie Wurster.
“We don’t find people who are chained to beds,” Wurster said. “What we’re finding is people who are very frightened, who don’t have resources locally, being managed by someone who is telling them things that aren’t very true about the environment that they’re living in.”
Federal authorities said that because the victims of sex slavery are captive and cannot come forward, they need more help from the public.
The Justice Department maintains a human trafficking hotline at 1-888-428-7581, but there is a great deal of work left to do, said Carmen Pitre, executive director of the Task Force on Family Violence, an agency that supports victims of trafficking in Milwaukee.
“We’ve come to learn that cases of trafficking are all around us in plain sight,” Pitre said. “Today, you can buy a human being for $200 in any major city in the world.”
Copyright © 2008 msnbc.com and Telemundo
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28161210/?GT1=43001
MSN Privacy . Legal
© 2008 MSNBC.com
Shadowy multibillion-dollar industry far more widespread than expected
By Alex Johnson and Cesar Rodriguez
Reporters
msnbc.com and Telemundo
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28161210/?GT1=43001
updated 7:07 a.m. CT, Mon., Dec. 22, 2008
When FBI and immigration agents arrested a 28-year-old Guatemalan woman three months ago in Los Angeles, they announced that they had shut down one of the most elaborate sex trafficking rings in the country. It was also the family business.
The woman, Maribel Rodriguez Vasquez, was the sixth member of her family to be rounded up in the two-year multi-agency investigation. Vasquez, five of her relatives and three other Guatemalan nationals were charged with 50 counts, alleging that they lured at least a dozen young women — including five minors as young as 13 years old — to the United States with promises of good jobs, only to put them to work as prostitutes. All remain in custody as investigators attempt to unravel the complex case.
Vasquez — quickly dubbed the “L.A. Madam” — attracted attention because she had been featured on the fugitive-hunting television program “America’s Most Wanted.” But it was one of only a few such cases to be spotlighted by national media, contributing to the false impression that cases of immigrant sex trafficking are isolated incidents, law enforcement officials and advocates for immigrants say.
The reality is that human trafficking goes on in nearly every American city and town, said Lisette Arsuaga, director of development for the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking, a human rights organization in Los Angeles.
“Human trafficking is well hidden,” Arsuaga said. “I consider it a huge problem.”
Her assessment is shared by authorities in Bexar County, Texas, where the Sheriff’s Office has formed a task force with Shared Hope International, an anti-slavery organization founded by former Rep. Linda Smith, D-Wash. Bexar County is considered a crossroads of the cross-border Mexican sex slave trade because two Interstate highways that crisscross the state intersect there, some 150 miles from the Mexican border.
“I could go to a truck stop in South Texas right now and get on a CB radio and ask for some sweet stuff, and someone’s going to come out and offer something to sell,” Sheriff’s Deputy Chris Burchell said.
A $9.5 billion-a-year industry
Federal officials agree that the trafficking of human beings as sex slaves is far more prevalent than is popularly understood. While saying it is difficult to pinpoint the scope of the industry, given its shadowy nature, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials estimated that it likely generates more than $9.5 billion a year.
Last year alone, the FBI opened more than 225 human trafficking investigations in the United States. Figures for 2008 are not yet available, but in a coordinated nationwide sweep in July, federal, state and local authorities made more than 640 arrests and rescued 47 children in just three days.
In congressional testimony this year, FBI Director Robert Mueller called sex trafficking “a significant and persistent problem in the U.S. and around the world.”
Most cases involve “international persons trafficked to the United States from other countries,” who are generally less aware of their rights, probably do not speak English and are frightened to go to the authorities, he said. “Victims are often lured with false promises of good jobs and better lives and are then forced to work in the sex industry.”
While an increasing number of young men and boys are being forced into the commercial sex industry, more than 80 percent of victims are women and girls, the State Department estimated this year. Of those, 70 percent are forced into prostitution, stripping, pornography or mail-order marriage.
That allegedly was the case with the L.A. Madam.
Prosecutors said in court documents that the Vasquez ring sold Guatemalan women and girls to one another like slaves for several years. Ring members also would try to keep them in line by taking them to witch doctors who threatened to put curses on them and their families if they ran away, the prosecution said.
In one incident, three of the defendants repeatedly kicked and hit one of the victims to punish her for trying to escape, the documents allege.
“These young women were enticed into coming to this country by promises of the American dream, only to arrive and discover that what awaited was a nightmare,” said Robert Schoch, an ICE special agent.
A modern-day form of slavery
Less publicized cases reveal ordeals just as horrific.
In August, three owners and operators of Asian massage parlors in Johnson County, Kansas, near Kansas City, pleaded guilty to human trafficking of women they recruited from China and forced into prostitution.
Charging documents said the defendants, all Chinese nationals, arranged the women’s travel, meeting them at the Kansas City, Mo., airport and driving them directly to one of two massage parlors they operated in Overland Park. There, the women were forced to work from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. seven days a week performing “sexual services on male patrons in exchange for money.”
Occasionally, one of the women would be sent to a nearby apartment to provide “extended sexual services,” prosecutors said. Otherwise, they lived in the massage parlors, monitored 24 hours a day by surveillance cameras.
The case made it clear that “human trafficking is a modern-day form of slavery that reaches from the other side of the globe to the suburban Midwest,” U.S. Attorney John F. Wood said.
Last month, police in Nashville, Tenn., arrested two men and charged them with holding a young Mexican woman as a sex slave, driving her across Tennessee, Georgia and Florida, where she was forced to engage in prostitution with as many as seven men a day, court records said.
Investigators alleged that the woman, 22, was tortured, stabbed and cut with an ice pick to ensure her obedience. They said the men also threatened to kill her family in Mexico and her sister in Atlanta if she did not follow their orders.
“The account given by this woman is very, very disturbing,” said Don Aaron, a spokesman for the Nashville police.
Beatings, rapes and forced abortions
In New York, meanwhile, Consuelo Carreto Valencia, a 4-foot-10, 61-year-old grandmother, pleaded guilty in July to smuggling dozens of women from Mexico and violently coercing them to perform sex acts.
Prosecutors said that Valencia was the matriarch of an extensive prostitution ring based in Mexico. The victims were compelled to perform sex acts 12 hours a day and were subjected to beatings, rape and forced abortions, they said.
Valencia agreed to the guilty plea after her attorney, John S. Wallenstein, told her she could go to prison for life if she were convicted on all counts.
“I said the jurors are going to want to jump out of the jury box and tear you to pieces,” Wallenstein was quoted as saying.
Cases hard to build
But law enforcement officials say that such successes are relatively rare. Often, victims are too frightened to cooperate with investigators, and when they are willing to help, they often speak little or no English, making it problematic to present cases that commonly rest on one person’s word against that of another.
“We have cases come up all the time, but no one really knows about it because Hispanic illegal immigrants fear being deported,” said Sara Sherman, an anti-slavery activist with Free For Life Ministries in Nashville.
Sheriff’s Deputy Keith Bickford, coordinator of the Human Trafficking Task Force in Multnomah County, Ore., said “The girls need help,” but he said they are “so difficult to deal with that we don’t have anyone trained to deal with them.”
Catching ringleaders in the act is particularly difficult, said Minneapolis Deputy Police Chief Valerie Wurster.
“We don’t find people who are chained to beds,” Wurster said. “What we’re finding is people who are very frightened, who don’t have resources locally, being managed by someone who is telling them things that aren’t very true about the environment that they’re living in.”
Federal authorities said that because the victims of sex slavery are captive and cannot come forward, they need more help from the public.
The Justice Department maintains a human trafficking hotline at 1-888-428-7581, but there is a great deal of work left to do, said Carmen Pitre, executive director of the Task Force on Family Violence, an agency that supports victims of trafficking in Milwaukee.
“We’ve come to learn that cases of trafficking are all around us in plain sight,” Pitre said. “Today, you can buy a human being for $200 in any major city in the world.”
Copyright © 2008 msnbc.com and Telemundo
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28161210/?GT1=43001
MSN Privacy . Legal
© 2008 MSNBC.com
27 December 2008
Israeli Attack Kills Scores Across Gaza
December 28, 2008
By TAGHREED EL-KHODARY and ISABEL KERSHNER
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/world/middleeast/web28mideast.html?_r=1&hp
GAZA CITY — The Israeli Air Force on Saturday launched a massive attack on Hamas targets throughout Gaza in retaliation for the recent heavy rocket fire from the area, hitting mostly security headquarters, training compounds and weapons storage facilities, the Israeli military and witnesses said.
Dr. Muawiya Hassanein, the head of emergency services at the Gaza Ministry of Health, said that at least 195 Palestinians were killed in the Israeli air strikes.
Most of the fatalities were among members of the security forces of Hamas, the Islamic group that controls Gaza, but a few civilians were also among the dead, including children. Scores more Palestinians were wounded.
The reaction to the punishing attacks was swift and varied. A spokesman for President Bush called on Israel to avoid inflicting civilian casualties, although he did not call for a halt to the attacks on Hamas. Egypt condemned the raid and opened its border crossing so that the wounded could be treated, and a spokesman for Javier Solana, the foreign policy chief of the European Union, condemned Israel’s action and called for an immediate halt to the strikes.
For its part, Israel said the strikes would not only continue, but that they would be intensified.
The air attack came after days of warnings by Israeli officials that Israel would retaliate for intense rocket and mortar fire against Israeli towns and villages by Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza.
On Wednesday alone, more than 60 rockets and mortars were fired, some reaching further than previously. While the rockets are meant to be deadly, and several houses and a factory were hit, sowing widespread panic, no Israelis were killed or seriously injured in the recent attacks.A shaky Egyptian-brokered truce between Israel and Hamas started to break down in early November. Hamas had originally agreed to a six-month lull, and declared it officially over when the six-month period expired on Dec. 19.
Though Israel had been threatening to end its policy of restraint that saw only limited strikes against rocket launchers and squads in recent days, the timing of the raid came as a surprise to Gazans. It came in mid-morning, when official buildings and security compounds were filled with personnel and children were at school, and not, as many had anticipated, at night.
Expecting some kind of Israeli response, the Hamas leaders in Gaza had already been in hiding for two days.
In a statement issued immediately after the raid, the Israeli military warned that “This operation will be continued, expanded and intensified as much as will be required.”
“We face a period that will be neither easy nor short, and will require determination and perseverance until the necessary change is achieved in the situation in the south,” Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense minister, said.
In Waco, Tex., where President Bush is vacationing, a White House spokesman, Gordon Johndroe, said: “Hamas must end its terrorist activities if it wishes to play a role in the future of the Palestinian people. The United States urges Israel to avoid civilian casualties as it targets Hamas in Gaza.”
President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, who was sharply critical of the Israeli attack, said in a statement, “Egypt condemns the Israeli military aggression on the Gaza Strip and blames Israel, as an occupying force, for the victims and the wounded.”
The spokesman for Mr. Solana said the European Union, “condemns the disproportionate use of force.”
At Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, scores of dead bodies were laid out in front of the morgue waiting for family members to identify them. Many were dismembered.
Inside the hospital, relatives carried a five-month old baby who had suffered a serious head wound from shrapnel. Overwhelmed, the hospital staff seemed unable to offer help.
At the Gaza City police station, at least 15 traffic police who had been training in a courtyard were killed on the spot.
Tamer Kahrouf, 24, a civilian who had been working on a construction site in Jabaliya, north of Gaza City, said he saw his two brothers and uncle killed before his eyes when the Israeli planes bombed a security post nearby. Mr. Kharouf was wounded and bleeding from the head.
Women were wailing as they searched for their relatives among the dead. Sawsan Al-Ajab, 50, was looking for two sons, aged 32 and 24, who both worked at the Gaza police station.
The Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert appealed to the Gazans to reject Hamas and the rocket launchers in an interview with the Al Arabiya Arabic satellite television station on Thursday.
But Ms. Ajab’s anger was not initially directed against Hamas.
“Egypt, the United States and Israel have agreed together to destroy Hamas,” she said.
In Israel, the authorities seemed braced for yet more rocket fire from Hamas. The Home Front Command declared a “special situation” in all communities up to 12 miles from the Gaza border, Israel Radio said. Bomb shelters in all those communities have been opened, and residents have been asked not to congregate out of doors and to remain in protected areas, the radio said.
Taghreed El-Khodary reported from Gaza City and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem.
By TAGHREED EL-KHODARY and ISABEL KERSHNER
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/world/middleeast/web28mideast.html?_r=1&hp
GAZA CITY — The Israeli Air Force on Saturday launched a massive attack on Hamas targets throughout Gaza in retaliation for the recent heavy rocket fire from the area, hitting mostly security headquarters, training compounds and weapons storage facilities, the Israeli military and witnesses said.
Dr. Muawiya Hassanein, the head of emergency services at the Gaza Ministry of Health, said that at least 195 Palestinians were killed in the Israeli air strikes.
Most of the fatalities were among members of the security forces of Hamas, the Islamic group that controls Gaza, but a few civilians were also among the dead, including children. Scores more Palestinians were wounded.
The reaction to the punishing attacks was swift and varied. A spokesman for President Bush called on Israel to avoid inflicting civilian casualties, although he did not call for a halt to the attacks on Hamas. Egypt condemned the raid and opened its border crossing so that the wounded could be treated, and a spokesman for Javier Solana, the foreign policy chief of the European Union, condemned Israel’s action and called for an immediate halt to the strikes.
For its part, Israel said the strikes would not only continue, but that they would be intensified.
The air attack came after days of warnings by Israeli officials that Israel would retaliate for intense rocket and mortar fire against Israeli towns and villages by Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza.
On Wednesday alone, more than 60 rockets and mortars were fired, some reaching further than previously. While the rockets are meant to be deadly, and several houses and a factory were hit, sowing widespread panic, no Israelis were killed or seriously injured in the recent attacks.A shaky Egyptian-brokered truce between Israel and Hamas started to break down in early November. Hamas had originally agreed to a six-month lull, and declared it officially over when the six-month period expired on Dec. 19.
Though Israel had been threatening to end its policy of restraint that saw only limited strikes against rocket launchers and squads in recent days, the timing of the raid came as a surprise to Gazans. It came in mid-morning, when official buildings and security compounds were filled with personnel and children were at school, and not, as many had anticipated, at night.
Expecting some kind of Israeli response, the Hamas leaders in Gaza had already been in hiding for two days.
In a statement issued immediately after the raid, the Israeli military warned that “This operation will be continued, expanded and intensified as much as will be required.”
“We face a period that will be neither easy nor short, and will require determination and perseverance until the necessary change is achieved in the situation in the south,” Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense minister, said.
In Waco, Tex., where President Bush is vacationing, a White House spokesman, Gordon Johndroe, said: “Hamas must end its terrorist activities if it wishes to play a role in the future of the Palestinian people. The United States urges Israel to avoid civilian casualties as it targets Hamas in Gaza.”
President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, who was sharply critical of the Israeli attack, said in a statement, “Egypt condemns the Israeli military aggression on the Gaza Strip and blames Israel, as an occupying force, for the victims and the wounded.”
The spokesman for Mr. Solana said the European Union, “condemns the disproportionate use of force.”
At Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, scores of dead bodies were laid out in front of the morgue waiting for family members to identify them. Many were dismembered.
Inside the hospital, relatives carried a five-month old baby who had suffered a serious head wound from shrapnel. Overwhelmed, the hospital staff seemed unable to offer help.
At the Gaza City police station, at least 15 traffic police who had been training in a courtyard were killed on the spot.
Tamer Kahrouf, 24, a civilian who had been working on a construction site in Jabaliya, north of Gaza City, said he saw his two brothers and uncle killed before his eyes when the Israeli planes bombed a security post nearby. Mr. Kharouf was wounded and bleeding from the head.
Women were wailing as they searched for their relatives among the dead. Sawsan Al-Ajab, 50, was looking for two sons, aged 32 and 24, who both worked at the Gaza police station.
The Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert appealed to the Gazans to reject Hamas and the rocket launchers in an interview with the Al Arabiya Arabic satellite television station on Thursday.
But Ms. Ajab’s anger was not initially directed against Hamas.
“Egypt, the United States and Israel have agreed together to destroy Hamas,” she said.
In Israel, the authorities seemed braced for yet more rocket fire from Hamas. The Home Front Command declared a “special situation” in all communities up to 12 miles from the Gaza border, Israel Radio said. Bomb shelters in all those communities have been opened, and residents have been asked not to congregate out of doors and to remain in protected areas, the radio said.
Taghreed El-Khodary reported from Gaza City and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem.
The Transformative 120: Text Messages Prove a South African HIV Lifeline
Nancy Scola
November 25, 2008 12:46 PM
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/009090.html
Taken together, a handful of numbers are adding up to a powerful HIV/AIDS lifeline along South Africa's northeastern coast. Of the six million South Africans infected with the disease, just one in ten are currently in treatment. The HIV infection rate in KwaZulu-Natal province (KZN) stands at a breathtakingly 39 percent. Meanwhile, a whopping four-fifths of all South Africans have access to a cell phone.
But a new program called Project Masiluleke -- Zulu for "wise council" -- is using the 120 characters commonly left over in cell phone text messages to connect South Africans who desperately need testing and treatment with the nation's HIV/AIDS resources.
But let's back up a bit. The cost of making a cell phone call in southern Africa can be, as it is in many spots on the globe, prohibitively expensive. But text messages are, by comparison, cheap. Resourceful mobile owners in South Africa have figured out a workaround to the air time problem by texting friends and family the simple message of "Please Call Me" -- a tactic similar to how American teenagers once avoided collect-call charges by using names like "Brian PickMeUpAtSchool."
PCM messages, as they're known, are enormously popular. South Africans send an amazing 30 million of them a day, which is about one daily ping for every one and a half citizens. Phone carriers like Vodacom, finding their networks swamped with PCMs, made a decision. They'd let customers send a handful of them each day, for free. But they'd use the space left over by the short messages to subsidize the service through advertising.
And that clever marketing use of the white space left on the table by PCMs has, in turned, inspired a life-saving application in KwaZulu-Natal. During a trial run of Project Masiluleke this fall, mobile customers found that advertising given over to texts pointing them to the National AIDS Helpline (0800-012-322) and HIV911 (0860-448-911).
The results of the demonstration were promising. During the six week run, some 20 million Please Call Me messages went out with the HIV/AIDS hotline information. (Of course, that 20 million represents just a small slice of the PCMs sent during that period. It would be interesting to know who was selected to get the special messaging -- keeping in mind that targeting recipients for HIV info carries its own baggage.) Calls to the national hotline in Johannesburg jumped a remarkable 350 percent.
HIV and AIDS carry a nearly debilitating social stigma in South Africa, with even government officials at the highest level of government in Pretoria holding on to some warped views of the disease. That social reprobation means that many potential carriers of either HIV or TB (diseases that are closely twined in South Africa) resist getting tested.
Intimate and discrete, text messaging can be a powerful solution: at once both more immediate than an email and less invasive than a phone call. In a place like KwaZulu-Natal, where a Motorola RAZR might be someone's primary way of communicating with the world, texting can be a powerful lifeline that sits comfortably in nearly everyone's pocket.
Project Masiluleke grew out of the Pop!Tech conference held each year in Camden, Maine. In 2006, South African HIV and TB advocate Zinny Thabethe spoke about the disconnect between HIV carriers and treatment. The Pop!Tech Accelerator project teamed with the South African Praekelt Foundation's SocialTxt program, frog design, and others to launch Project Masiluleke.
The Please Call Me announcements are just the first step in Project Masiluleke's mobile response to HIV/AIDS. Once the PCM texts are relaunched as a full-fledged program at the start of 2009, they will be followed by texts geared toward reminding patients of scheduled anti-retroviral therapy and other medical treatments, "virtual call centers" staffed by HIV carriers, and at-home HIV testing augmented will mobile-phone based support.
(Credit for original photo: Pop!Tech)
Nancy Scola is a Brooklyn-based writer, blogger, and editor who focuses on the place where technology meets culture. She's worked in the past on Capitol Hill, in presidential politics, and in progressive radio
November 25, 2008 12:46 PM
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/009090.html
Taken together, a handful of numbers are adding up to a powerful HIV/AIDS lifeline along South Africa's northeastern coast. Of the six million South Africans infected with the disease, just one in ten are currently in treatment. The HIV infection rate in KwaZulu-Natal province (KZN) stands at a breathtakingly 39 percent. Meanwhile, a whopping four-fifths of all South Africans have access to a cell phone.
But a new program called Project Masiluleke -- Zulu for "wise council" -- is using the 120 characters commonly left over in cell phone text messages to connect South Africans who desperately need testing and treatment with the nation's HIV/AIDS resources.
But let's back up a bit. The cost of making a cell phone call in southern Africa can be, as it is in many spots on the globe, prohibitively expensive. But text messages are, by comparison, cheap. Resourceful mobile owners in South Africa have figured out a workaround to the air time problem by texting friends and family the simple message of "Please Call Me" -- a tactic similar to how American teenagers once avoided collect-call charges by using names like "Brian PickMeUpAtSchool."
PCM messages, as they're known, are enormously popular. South Africans send an amazing 30 million of them a day, which is about one daily ping for every one and a half citizens. Phone carriers like Vodacom, finding their networks swamped with PCMs, made a decision. They'd let customers send a handful of them each day, for free. But they'd use the space left over by the short messages to subsidize the service through advertising.
And that clever marketing use of the white space left on the table by PCMs has, in turned, inspired a life-saving application in KwaZulu-Natal. During a trial run of Project Masiluleke this fall, mobile customers found that advertising given over to texts pointing them to the National AIDS Helpline (0800-012-322) and HIV911 (0860-448-911).
The results of the demonstration were promising. During the six week run, some 20 million Please Call Me messages went out with the HIV/AIDS hotline information. (Of course, that 20 million represents just a small slice of the PCMs sent during that period. It would be interesting to know who was selected to get the special messaging -- keeping in mind that targeting recipients for HIV info carries its own baggage.) Calls to the national hotline in Johannesburg jumped a remarkable 350 percent.
HIV and AIDS carry a nearly debilitating social stigma in South Africa, with even government officials at the highest level of government in Pretoria holding on to some warped views of the disease. That social reprobation means that many potential carriers of either HIV or TB (diseases that are closely twined in South Africa) resist getting tested.
Intimate and discrete, text messaging can be a powerful solution: at once both more immediate than an email and less invasive than a phone call. In a place like KwaZulu-Natal, where a Motorola RAZR might be someone's primary way of communicating with the world, texting can be a powerful lifeline that sits comfortably in nearly everyone's pocket.
Project Masiluleke grew out of the Pop!Tech conference held each year in Camden, Maine. In 2006, South African HIV and TB advocate Zinny Thabethe spoke about the disconnect between HIV carriers and treatment. The Pop!Tech Accelerator project teamed with the South African Praekelt Foundation's SocialTxt program, frog design, and others to launch Project Masiluleke.
The Please Call Me announcements are just the first step in Project Masiluleke's mobile response to HIV/AIDS. Once the PCM texts are relaunched as a full-fledged program at the start of 2009, they will be followed by texts geared toward reminding patients of scheduled anti-retroviral therapy and other medical treatments, "virtual call centers" staffed by HIV carriers, and at-home HIV testing augmented will mobile-phone based support.
(Credit for original photo: Pop!Tech)
Nancy Scola is a Brooklyn-based writer, blogger, and editor who focuses on the place where technology meets culture. She's worked in the past on Capitol Hill, in presidential politics, and in progressive radio
24 December 2008
Bread of Life, Baked in Rhode Island
December 25, 2008
By KATIE ZEZIMA
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/25/business/smallbusiness/25sbiz.html?_r=1&hp
GREENVILLE, R.I. — To the Cavanagh family, the product they make at a nondescript plant here is just bread and water. But to millions at churches around the world, it is a sacred offering.
From a purely economic point of view, it is something that is almost just as rare: a seemingly recession-proof business.
With the exception of a decline during recent Catholic Church priest scandals, the Cavanagh Company’s business of making communion bread has been growing steadily for the last 65 years.
The bread is used as a sacramental offering that, for Catholics and some other Christians, represents the breaking of the bread at the Last Supper and the body of Christ.
The family-owned company makes about 80 percent of the communion bread used by the Catholic, Episcopal, Lutheran and Southern Baptist churches in the United States. It has a similar market share in Australia, Canada and Britain, and is now looking to expand to West Africa.
“We feel as though we’re a bakery, and all we’re making is bread,” said Andy Cavanagh, the company’s general manager, and part of the fourth generation of Cavanaghs to work here. “It’s not that we don’t have respect for what happens to it, but that transformation is out of our hands and takes place in a church. The best thing we can do is make sure the bread is perfect in every way possible.”
Some customers say the Cavanaghs have such a big market share because their product is about as close to perfect as earthly possible.
“It doesn’t crumb, and I don’t like fragments of our Lord scattering all over the floor,” said the Rev. Bob Dietel, an Episcopal priest.
Mr. Dietel uses Cavanagh altar bread at his parish, St. Aidan’s, in Camano Island, Wash. He likes that the large wafer, which he holds up and breaks during Mass, cracks cleanly.
A few years ago, the congregation switched to the wheat wafer the Cavanaghs make from the white.
“There’s a nice clean bread flavor, as opposed to the paste flavor you have with some other breads,” Mr. Dietel said.
His congregation buys about 6,000 wafers a year from a Seattle religious goods store. Traditionally, nuns, priests or members of a congregation baked altar bread. (In the Catholic tradition it is unleavened and contains only flour and water; other denominations, including Southern Baptists, allow the use of additional ingredients.)
In 1943, Andy’s great-grandfather, John Cavanagh Sr., an inventor, and grandfather, John Jr., were asked to help local Catholic nuns renovate their antiquated baking equipment. The men created new ovens and mixers for the nuns; then three years later, John Jr. and his brother Paul started making bread themselves.
They distributed all of it to Catholic churches and monasteries.
The Cavanaghs are Catholic and John Sr. let his sons run the business so he could concentrate on his first love, liturgical art. Crosses and paintings are showcased in a room in the Rhode Island offices.
For about 20 years, the Cavanagh bread was small, white and nearly transparent, intended to melt on the tongue. After the changes initiated in the church at the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, Catholic churches wanted the wafers to be thicker and chewable, like real bread.
The Cavanaghs started producing the wafers of today — usually whole wheat and sealed on the outside to prevent crumbs.
In 1970, Paul’s sons Brian and Peter joined the business and started expanding the company’s reach beyond New England and the Catholic Church, where fewer and fewer nuns were making bread.
The company will not disclose sales numbers, but says it makes about 850 million wafers each year, and that each wafer sells for less than a penny. Most of the company’s bread is sold wholesale to religious supply stores and Southern Baptist bookstores. In the Catholic Church the company sells to monasteries; the nuns then sell the bread to churches.
“It’s a source of income for us, but at the same time it’s a service to the parishes in the diocese,” said Sister Marilyn McGillan of the Sisters of the Precious Blood in Watertown, N.Y. Her monastery sells to about 100 churches in the Catholic Diocese of Ogdensburg, N.Y. “We’re like a clearinghouse for altar breads for our dioceses.”
There are plenty of varieties. The company sells both white and wheat flour wafers, in sizes ranging from one and one-eighth inches wide to nine inches wide. Some are double-thick, and all except the large ones can be embossed with designs including a cross or a lamb.
‘They’re the classic symbols of Christianity,” Andy Cavanagh said.
Brian and Peter Cavanagh still run the company, and expect Andy, 30, Peter’s son; and his two brothers, Dan, 31 and Luke, 28, to buy them out one day.
The family members pride themselves on having never had an argument over business. They eat lunch together daily, and business talk almost always turns into discussions about New England sports teams.
“When you emphasize family, the business falls into place,” Brian said.
Each brother has his own niche. Andy deals with the finances, Luke the Web site and Dan the machines.
Dan Cavanagh feels most at home in the large baking area.
In huge tubs, about 90 pounds of cake flour is mixed with about 13 gallons of water. The batter is then sent through a tube, where it is piped onto a large metal plate. Another plate clamps on top, and it goes through the oven. Each plate is like a “very large, 500-pound waffle iron,” Dan Cavanagh said.
After coming out of the oven, the wafers spend about 15 minutes in what amounts to a humidifier, so they do not become brittle. When sufficiently moist they roll down a tube and into a spinning cylinder that resembles the ones in bingo halls.
The wafers are then shot to a machine that either puts them in sleeves of 100 or counts them for bags of 250. Then they are boxed.
The bread for Southern Baptist churches is baked on the other side of the room. The mixing process is similar, except the dough contains oil. Since the bread rises, it is baked in a large rotating oven and comes out as small squares.
The wafers and bread are made in both white and whole wheat, but most congregations prefer the whole wheat variety because it has more flavor, the Cavanaghs said.
Business dropped about 10 percent after the clergy sexual abuse scandal that rocked the Catholic Church in 2002, according to the Cavanaghs. But it has picked up recently — perhaps because of the growing worldly concerns that come with a bad economy.
The company now sells church supplies including altars and pews in England and Australia, and is keeping an eye on the growing Catholic communities in Africa and South America.
But no matter where they do business, they say, the company will remain in Rhode Island, and in the family.
“It’s so gratifying to have it be a successful family business,” Brian Cavanagh said.
By KATIE ZEZIMA
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/25/business/smallbusiness/25sbiz.html?_r=1&hp
GREENVILLE, R.I. — To the Cavanagh family, the product they make at a nondescript plant here is just bread and water. But to millions at churches around the world, it is a sacred offering.
From a purely economic point of view, it is something that is almost just as rare: a seemingly recession-proof business.
With the exception of a decline during recent Catholic Church priest scandals, the Cavanagh Company’s business of making communion bread has been growing steadily for the last 65 years.
The bread is used as a sacramental offering that, for Catholics and some other Christians, represents the breaking of the bread at the Last Supper and the body of Christ.
The family-owned company makes about 80 percent of the communion bread used by the Catholic, Episcopal, Lutheran and Southern Baptist churches in the United States. It has a similar market share in Australia, Canada and Britain, and is now looking to expand to West Africa.
“We feel as though we’re a bakery, and all we’re making is bread,” said Andy Cavanagh, the company’s general manager, and part of the fourth generation of Cavanaghs to work here. “It’s not that we don’t have respect for what happens to it, but that transformation is out of our hands and takes place in a church. The best thing we can do is make sure the bread is perfect in every way possible.”
Some customers say the Cavanaghs have such a big market share because their product is about as close to perfect as earthly possible.
“It doesn’t crumb, and I don’t like fragments of our Lord scattering all over the floor,” said the Rev. Bob Dietel, an Episcopal priest.
Mr. Dietel uses Cavanagh altar bread at his parish, St. Aidan’s, in Camano Island, Wash. He likes that the large wafer, which he holds up and breaks during Mass, cracks cleanly.
A few years ago, the congregation switched to the wheat wafer the Cavanaghs make from the white.
“There’s a nice clean bread flavor, as opposed to the paste flavor you have with some other breads,” Mr. Dietel said.
His congregation buys about 6,000 wafers a year from a Seattle religious goods store. Traditionally, nuns, priests or members of a congregation baked altar bread. (In the Catholic tradition it is unleavened and contains only flour and water; other denominations, including Southern Baptists, allow the use of additional ingredients.)
In 1943, Andy’s great-grandfather, John Cavanagh Sr., an inventor, and grandfather, John Jr., were asked to help local Catholic nuns renovate their antiquated baking equipment. The men created new ovens and mixers for the nuns; then three years later, John Jr. and his brother Paul started making bread themselves.
They distributed all of it to Catholic churches and monasteries.
The Cavanaghs are Catholic and John Sr. let his sons run the business so he could concentrate on his first love, liturgical art. Crosses and paintings are showcased in a room in the Rhode Island offices.
For about 20 years, the Cavanagh bread was small, white and nearly transparent, intended to melt on the tongue. After the changes initiated in the church at the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, Catholic churches wanted the wafers to be thicker and chewable, like real bread.
The Cavanaghs started producing the wafers of today — usually whole wheat and sealed on the outside to prevent crumbs.
In 1970, Paul’s sons Brian and Peter joined the business and started expanding the company’s reach beyond New England and the Catholic Church, where fewer and fewer nuns were making bread.
The company will not disclose sales numbers, but says it makes about 850 million wafers each year, and that each wafer sells for less than a penny. Most of the company’s bread is sold wholesale to religious supply stores and Southern Baptist bookstores. In the Catholic Church the company sells to monasteries; the nuns then sell the bread to churches.
“It’s a source of income for us, but at the same time it’s a service to the parishes in the diocese,” said Sister Marilyn McGillan of the Sisters of the Precious Blood in Watertown, N.Y. Her monastery sells to about 100 churches in the Catholic Diocese of Ogdensburg, N.Y. “We’re like a clearinghouse for altar breads for our dioceses.”
There are plenty of varieties. The company sells both white and wheat flour wafers, in sizes ranging from one and one-eighth inches wide to nine inches wide. Some are double-thick, and all except the large ones can be embossed with designs including a cross or a lamb.
‘They’re the classic symbols of Christianity,” Andy Cavanagh said.
Brian and Peter Cavanagh still run the company, and expect Andy, 30, Peter’s son; and his two brothers, Dan, 31 and Luke, 28, to buy them out one day.
The family members pride themselves on having never had an argument over business. They eat lunch together daily, and business talk almost always turns into discussions about New England sports teams.
“When you emphasize family, the business falls into place,” Brian said.
Each brother has his own niche. Andy deals with the finances, Luke the Web site and Dan the machines.
Dan Cavanagh feels most at home in the large baking area.
In huge tubs, about 90 pounds of cake flour is mixed with about 13 gallons of water. The batter is then sent through a tube, where it is piped onto a large metal plate. Another plate clamps on top, and it goes through the oven. Each plate is like a “very large, 500-pound waffle iron,” Dan Cavanagh said.
After coming out of the oven, the wafers spend about 15 minutes in what amounts to a humidifier, so they do not become brittle. When sufficiently moist they roll down a tube and into a spinning cylinder that resembles the ones in bingo halls.
The wafers are then shot to a machine that either puts them in sleeves of 100 or counts them for bags of 250. Then they are boxed.
The bread for Southern Baptist churches is baked on the other side of the room. The mixing process is similar, except the dough contains oil. Since the bread rises, it is baked in a large rotating oven and comes out as small squares.
The wafers and bread are made in both white and whole wheat, but most congregations prefer the whole wheat variety because it has more flavor, the Cavanaghs said.
Business dropped about 10 percent after the clergy sexual abuse scandal that rocked the Catholic Church in 2002, according to the Cavanaghs. But it has picked up recently — perhaps because of the growing worldly concerns that come with a bad economy.
The company now sells church supplies including altars and pews in England and Australia, and is keeping an eye on the growing Catholic communities in Africa and South America.
But no matter where they do business, they say, the company will remain in Rhode Island, and in the family.
“It’s so gratifying to have it be a successful family business,” Brian Cavanagh said.
Generation Faithful: Jordanian Students Rebel by Embracing Islam
December 24, 2008
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/24/world/middleeast/24jordan.html?_r=1&hp
AMMAN, Jordan — Muhammad Fawaz is a very serious college junior with a stern gaze and a reluctant smile that barely cloaks suppressed anger. He never wanted to attend Jordan University. He hates spending hours each day commuting.
As a high school student, Mr. Fawaz, 20, had dreamed of earning a scholarship to study abroad. But that was impossible, he said, because he did not have a “wasta,” or connection. In Jordan, connections are seen as essential for advancement and the wasta system is routinely cited by young people as their primary grievance with their country.
So Mr. Fawaz decided to rebel. He adopted the serene, disciplined demeanor of an Islamic activist. In his sophomore year he was accepted into the student group affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, Jordan’s largest, most influential religious, social and political movement, one that would ultimately like to see the state governed by Islamic law, or Shariah. Now he works to recruit other students to the cause.
“I find there is justice in the Islamic movement,” Mr. Fawaz said one day as he walked beneath the towering cypress trees at Jordan University. “I can express myself. There is no wasta needed.”
Across the Middle East, young people like Mr. Fawaz, angry, alienated and deprived of opportunity, have accepted Islam as an agent of change and rebellion. It is their rock ’n’ roll, their long hair and love beads. Through Islam, they defy the status quo and challenge governments seen as corrupt and incompetent.
These young people — 60 percent of those in the region are under 25 — are propelling a worldwide Islamic revival, driven by a thirst for political change and social justice. That fervor has popularized a more conservative interpretation of the faith.
“Islamism for us is what pan-Arabism was for our parents,” said Naseem Tarawnah, 25, a business writer and blogger, who is not part of the movement.
The long-term implications of this are likely to complicate American foreign policy calculations, making it more costly to continue supporting governments that do not let secular or moderate religious political movements take root.
Washington will also be likely to find it harder to maintain the policy of shunning leaders of groups like the Brotherhood in Egypt, or Hamas in Gaza, or Hezbollah in Lebanon, which command tremendous public sympathy.
Leaders of Muslim countries have tried to appease public sentiment while doing all they can to discourage the West from engaging religious movements directly. They see the prospect of a thaw in relations with the West, and see these groups as a threat to their monopoly on power.
Authoritarian governments view relative moderation as more of a political challenge than extremism, which is a security problem that can be contained through harsh methods.
“What happens if Islamists accepted the peace process and became more pragmatic?” said Muhammad Abu Rumman, research editor at the newspaper Al Ghad in Amman. “People see them as less corrupt and as the only real opposition. Israel and the U.S. might look at them differently. The regime is afraid of the Brotherhood when it becomes more pragmatic.”
The financial crisis only adds to the anxiety of governments in the Middle East that had hoped economic development could appease their citizens, create jobs for legions of unemployed and underemployed young people and dilute the appeal of Islamic movements. But the crisis and the drop in oil prices have hit hard, throwing the brakes on once-booming economies in the Persian Gulf region, and modest economic growth elsewhere in the region.
In this environment, governments are forced to confront a reality of their own creation. By choking off democracy and free speech, the only space where groups could gather and discuss critical ideas became the mosque, and the only movements that had room to prosper were religion-based.
Today, the search for identity in the Middle East no longer involves tension between the secular and religious. Religion has won.
The struggle, instead, is over how to define an Islamic society and government. Zeinah Hamdan, 24, has traveled a typical journey in Jordan. She says she wants a more religious government guided by Shariah law, and she took the head scarf at a younger age than anyone else in her family.
But when she was in college, she was offended when an Islamist student activist chastised her for shaking a young man’s hand. She wants to be a modern religious woman, and she defines that as working and socializing in a coed environment.
“If we implement Shariah law, we will be more comfortable,” she said. “But what happens is, the people who come to power are extremists.”
Like others here, she is torn between her discomfort with what she sees as the extreme attitudes of the Muslim Brotherhood and her alienation from a government she does not consider to be Islamic enough. “The middle is very difficult,” she said.
Focus on Popular Causes
Under a bright midday sun one recent day, Mr. Fawaz and his allies in the Islamic student movement put on green baseball caps that read, in Arabic, “Islamic Current of Jordan University” and prepared to demonstrate. Mr. Fawaz carried a large poster board reading, “We are with you Gaza.”
The university protest reflected the tactics of the Muslim Brotherhood in the country as a whole: precisely organized, deliberately nonthreatening and focused on popular causes here such as the Palestinians. The Brotherhood says it supports democracy and moderation, but its commitment to pluralism, tolerance and compromise has never been tested in Jordan.
Mr. Fawaz and about 200 other students stood in a straight line, extending nearly two city blocks, parallel to the traffic on the major roadway in front of the university. More than half of the students were women, many with their faces veiled.
State security men in plain clothes hurried up and down the line. “Brother, for God’s sake, when will you be angry?” one security agent screamed into his phone, recording for headquarters the slogan on a student’s placard.
At 12:30 p.m., the male students stepped into the road, blocking traffic, while the women rushed off to the sidewalk and melted back into the campus. One minute later, they walked out of traffic, took off their caps and folded up their signs, tucked them into computer bags and went back to school.
“I want to be able to express what I want; I want freedom,” Mr. Fawaz said, after returning to the campus. His glasses always rest crooked on his face, making him look younger, and a bit out of sorts. “I don’t want to be afraid to express my opinion.”
Mr. Fawaz grew up in a small village called Anjara, near Ajloun, about 50 miles from Amman. His father grew up in the Jordan Valley and worked as a nurse in Irbid. Mr. Fawaz said he was 8 years old he was first invited to “leadership retreats” with a youth organization of the Brotherhood.
When he was 13, the youth group took him on a minor pilgrimage to Mecca. So, he said, he had been enticed by religion at an early age. But he only decided to become politically active — and to join the Brotherhood — when he was denied a scholarship to study abroad.
While there are no official statistics on student membership in the Brotherhood, only a fraction of Jordan University students are formally affiliated. Yet many others say they share the same vague sense of discontent and yearning, the same embrace of the Brotherhood’s slogan, “Islam Is the Solution,” a resonant catchall in the face of many problems.
The university, with about 30,000 students from across the country, has long served as a proxy battlefield for Jordan’s competing interests.
Competing Loyalties
In Jordan, unlike Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood is legal, with a political party and a vast network of social services. It also has a political party, called the Islamic Action Front. While some fear it as too extreme, others argue that it has sold out by working within a political system they see as corrupt and un-Islamic. On campus, the Islamists try to build sympathy, handing out study sheets or copying notes for students.
Mr. Fawaz decided this year to run as an Islamist candidate for the student council, an influential organization with its own budget and the right to put up posters, distribute fliers and hold on-campus events.
The Islamic students’ movement had boycotted the elections for years to protest a change of election rules that called for appointing — not electing — half of the council’s 80 members. The rule change, decreed by the former university president, was made in order to block the Islamists, who were the most organized group on campus, from controlling the council.
That is a direct echo of how the state has long tried to contain the Islamist movement in Jordan. The Brotherhood is allowed to operate, but the government and the security services broadly control the outcome of elections.
Indeed, as Islamist movements have swelled, governments across the Middle East have chosen both to contain and to embrace them. Many governments have aggressively moved to roll back the few democratic practices that had started to take root in their societies, and to prevent Islamists from winning power through the voting booth. That risks driving the leaders and the followers of Islamic organizations toward extremism.
At the same time, many governments have tried to appease popular Islamist fervor. Jordan recently granted a Muslim Brotherhood-aligned newspaper the right to publish daily instead of weekly; held private talks with Hamas leaders; arrested a poet, saying he had insulted Islam by using verses of the Koran in love poems; and shut down restaurants that had served alcohol during Ramadan, though they had been licensed by the state to do so.
This year, the new president of Jordan University permitted all student council seats to be elected, but with rules in place that would, again, make it nearly impossible for the Islamist bloc to have control.
Two days before the voting took place, Mr. Fawaz was campaigning on the steps of the education building, dressed in his best suit and tie. His campaign message to the students was simply, “For your sake.”
Running as an Islamist risks consequences: Mr. Fawaz said that he was approached by a student in his class who he believed was delivering a message from the security services. “He told me that they will write about me; I will never get a job,” Mr. Fawaz said.
But even when the police ordered him to take down his posters on election day, he remained resolute and confident.
“Everybody knows that I am going to win,” Mr. Fawaz said, without sounding boastful. “Because I represent the Islamic movement.”
But he did not win. Instead, a candidate representing a large tribe from the city of Salt won, reflecting the loyalty to bonds of kinship and family heritage even as tribal culture has begun to absorb more conservative Islamic practices and beliefs.
Yet Mr. Fawaz was untroubled. “What is important for me,” he said, “is to serve the movement by spreading the word among the students.”
Amjad al-Absy, 28, remembers the moment when he pledged to join the Muslim Brotherhood. He was 15 and he was identified by Brotherhood recruiters when he was playing soccer in a Palestinian refugee camp. He described how the Brotherhood monitors young men — when they play soccer, go to school, to mosque, to work, as well as in the street and singles out those who appear receptive.
“Once you say yes, they put you in a ring, in a family,” said Mr. Absy. “Outside of the Brotherhood, there is no concern for young men, there is no respect. You are alone.”
Mr. Absy and his friend Tarak Naimat, 24, said that while they were students at the university, they had helped to recruit other young men.
“In the computer lab, in the mosque, you buddy up,” Mr. Naimat said. “Then you participate in events together. Then he becomes a member. If he’s advanced, it can take six months. If less, maybe two years.”
The appeal, Mr. Naimat said, was simple: “It gives you the feeling you can change things, you can act, you can be a leader. You feel like you are part of something important.”
Recruiters to the movement operate in a social atmosphere far more receptive than in the past. Every one of five young men talking near the cafeteria of the university recently insisted that the only way Jordan would have democracy was under an Islamic government, which is what the Brotherhood says it wants to achieve.
Muhammad Safi is a 23-year-old with neatly gelled hair and a television-white smile who described himself as the least religious student at the table. He said he had lived in the United States for five years and was eager to marry an American so he could return. Yet he declared: “An Islamic state would be better. At least it would take care of people.”
A Political Crossroads
The task facing Middle East governments and Islamic leaders is to figure out how to harness the energy of the Islamic revival. The young — the demographic bulge that is defining the future of the Islamic world and the way the West will have to engage it — have embraced Islam with all the fervor of the counterculture.
But the movement is still up for grabs — whether it will lead to greater extremism, even terrorism in some cases, and whether the vague dissatisfaction of young people will translate into political engagement or disaffection.
So the cycle is likely to continue, with religious identification fueled not only by the Islamic movements, but also by governments eager to use religion to enhance legitimacy and to satisfy demands of their citizens. That, in turn, broadens support for groups like the Brotherhood, while undermining support for the government, said many researchers, intellectuals and political scientists in Jordan.
The battle lines are clear on the campus of Jordan University. Bilal Abu Sulaih, 24, is a leader in the Islamic student movement. He returned to school this year to study Islamic law after being suspended for one year for organizing protests, he said. During the year off, he said, he worked as a student organizer for the political party office of the Brotherhood. “We are trying to participate,” he said of the movement’s role on campus. “We do not want to overpower everyone else.”
But his reassurances were brushed aside as another student confronted him. “It’s not true,” shouted Ahmed Qabai, 28, who was seated on a nearby bench. He thrust a finger in Mr. Sulaih’s direction.
“You want to try to control everything,” Mr. Qabai said. “I’ve seen it before, your people talking to women and asking them why they’re not veiled.”
Mr. Sulaih, embarrassed by the challenge, said, “It’s not true.”
Mr. Qabai made it clear that he detested the Muslim Brotherhood, getting more and more worked up, until finally he was screaming. But what he said summed up the challenge ahead for Jordan, and for so many governments in the region: “We all know Islam is the solution. That we agree on.”
Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting.
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/24/world/middleeast/24jordan.html?_r=1&hp
AMMAN, Jordan — Muhammad Fawaz is a very serious college junior with a stern gaze and a reluctant smile that barely cloaks suppressed anger. He never wanted to attend Jordan University. He hates spending hours each day commuting.
As a high school student, Mr. Fawaz, 20, had dreamed of earning a scholarship to study abroad. But that was impossible, he said, because he did not have a “wasta,” or connection. In Jordan, connections are seen as essential for advancement and the wasta system is routinely cited by young people as their primary grievance with their country.
So Mr. Fawaz decided to rebel. He adopted the serene, disciplined demeanor of an Islamic activist. In his sophomore year he was accepted into the student group affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, Jordan’s largest, most influential religious, social and political movement, one that would ultimately like to see the state governed by Islamic law, or Shariah. Now he works to recruit other students to the cause.
“I find there is justice in the Islamic movement,” Mr. Fawaz said one day as he walked beneath the towering cypress trees at Jordan University. “I can express myself. There is no wasta needed.”
Across the Middle East, young people like Mr. Fawaz, angry, alienated and deprived of opportunity, have accepted Islam as an agent of change and rebellion. It is their rock ’n’ roll, their long hair and love beads. Through Islam, they defy the status quo and challenge governments seen as corrupt and incompetent.
These young people — 60 percent of those in the region are under 25 — are propelling a worldwide Islamic revival, driven by a thirst for political change and social justice. That fervor has popularized a more conservative interpretation of the faith.
“Islamism for us is what pan-Arabism was for our parents,” said Naseem Tarawnah, 25, a business writer and blogger, who is not part of the movement.
The long-term implications of this are likely to complicate American foreign policy calculations, making it more costly to continue supporting governments that do not let secular or moderate religious political movements take root.
Washington will also be likely to find it harder to maintain the policy of shunning leaders of groups like the Brotherhood in Egypt, or Hamas in Gaza, or Hezbollah in Lebanon, which command tremendous public sympathy.
Leaders of Muslim countries have tried to appease public sentiment while doing all they can to discourage the West from engaging religious movements directly. They see the prospect of a thaw in relations with the West, and see these groups as a threat to their monopoly on power.
Authoritarian governments view relative moderation as more of a political challenge than extremism, which is a security problem that can be contained through harsh methods.
“What happens if Islamists accepted the peace process and became more pragmatic?” said Muhammad Abu Rumman, research editor at the newspaper Al Ghad in Amman. “People see them as less corrupt and as the only real opposition. Israel and the U.S. might look at them differently. The regime is afraid of the Brotherhood when it becomes more pragmatic.”
The financial crisis only adds to the anxiety of governments in the Middle East that had hoped economic development could appease their citizens, create jobs for legions of unemployed and underemployed young people and dilute the appeal of Islamic movements. But the crisis and the drop in oil prices have hit hard, throwing the brakes on once-booming economies in the Persian Gulf region, and modest economic growth elsewhere in the region.
In this environment, governments are forced to confront a reality of their own creation. By choking off democracy and free speech, the only space where groups could gather and discuss critical ideas became the mosque, and the only movements that had room to prosper were religion-based.
Today, the search for identity in the Middle East no longer involves tension between the secular and religious. Religion has won.
The struggle, instead, is over how to define an Islamic society and government. Zeinah Hamdan, 24, has traveled a typical journey in Jordan. She says she wants a more religious government guided by Shariah law, and she took the head scarf at a younger age than anyone else in her family.
But when she was in college, she was offended when an Islamist student activist chastised her for shaking a young man’s hand. She wants to be a modern religious woman, and she defines that as working and socializing in a coed environment.
“If we implement Shariah law, we will be more comfortable,” she said. “But what happens is, the people who come to power are extremists.”
Like others here, she is torn between her discomfort with what she sees as the extreme attitudes of the Muslim Brotherhood and her alienation from a government she does not consider to be Islamic enough. “The middle is very difficult,” she said.
Focus on Popular Causes
Under a bright midday sun one recent day, Mr. Fawaz and his allies in the Islamic student movement put on green baseball caps that read, in Arabic, “Islamic Current of Jordan University” and prepared to demonstrate. Mr. Fawaz carried a large poster board reading, “We are with you Gaza.”
The university protest reflected the tactics of the Muslim Brotherhood in the country as a whole: precisely organized, deliberately nonthreatening and focused on popular causes here such as the Palestinians. The Brotherhood says it supports democracy and moderation, but its commitment to pluralism, tolerance and compromise has never been tested in Jordan.
Mr. Fawaz and about 200 other students stood in a straight line, extending nearly two city blocks, parallel to the traffic on the major roadway in front of the university. More than half of the students were women, many with their faces veiled.
State security men in plain clothes hurried up and down the line. “Brother, for God’s sake, when will you be angry?” one security agent screamed into his phone, recording for headquarters the slogan on a student’s placard.
At 12:30 p.m., the male students stepped into the road, blocking traffic, while the women rushed off to the sidewalk and melted back into the campus. One minute later, they walked out of traffic, took off their caps and folded up their signs, tucked them into computer bags and went back to school.
“I want to be able to express what I want; I want freedom,” Mr. Fawaz said, after returning to the campus. His glasses always rest crooked on his face, making him look younger, and a bit out of sorts. “I don’t want to be afraid to express my opinion.”
Mr. Fawaz grew up in a small village called Anjara, near Ajloun, about 50 miles from Amman. His father grew up in the Jordan Valley and worked as a nurse in Irbid. Mr. Fawaz said he was 8 years old he was first invited to “leadership retreats” with a youth organization of the Brotherhood.
When he was 13, the youth group took him on a minor pilgrimage to Mecca. So, he said, he had been enticed by religion at an early age. But he only decided to become politically active — and to join the Brotherhood — when he was denied a scholarship to study abroad.
While there are no official statistics on student membership in the Brotherhood, only a fraction of Jordan University students are formally affiliated. Yet many others say they share the same vague sense of discontent and yearning, the same embrace of the Brotherhood’s slogan, “Islam Is the Solution,” a resonant catchall in the face of many problems.
The university, with about 30,000 students from across the country, has long served as a proxy battlefield for Jordan’s competing interests.
Competing Loyalties
In Jordan, unlike Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood is legal, with a political party and a vast network of social services. It also has a political party, called the Islamic Action Front. While some fear it as too extreme, others argue that it has sold out by working within a political system they see as corrupt and un-Islamic. On campus, the Islamists try to build sympathy, handing out study sheets or copying notes for students.
Mr. Fawaz decided this year to run as an Islamist candidate for the student council, an influential organization with its own budget and the right to put up posters, distribute fliers and hold on-campus events.
The Islamic students’ movement had boycotted the elections for years to protest a change of election rules that called for appointing — not electing — half of the council’s 80 members. The rule change, decreed by the former university president, was made in order to block the Islamists, who were the most organized group on campus, from controlling the council.
That is a direct echo of how the state has long tried to contain the Islamist movement in Jordan. The Brotherhood is allowed to operate, but the government and the security services broadly control the outcome of elections.
Indeed, as Islamist movements have swelled, governments across the Middle East have chosen both to contain and to embrace them. Many governments have aggressively moved to roll back the few democratic practices that had started to take root in their societies, and to prevent Islamists from winning power through the voting booth. That risks driving the leaders and the followers of Islamic organizations toward extremism.
At the same time, many governments have tried to appease popular Islamist fervor. Jordan recently granted a Muslim Brotherhood-aligned newspaper the right to publish daily instead of weekly; held private talks with Hamas leaders; arrested a poet, saying he had insulted Islam by using verses of the Koran in love poems; and shut down restaurants that had served alcohol during Ramadan, though they had been licensed by the state to do so.
This year, the new president of Jordan University permitted all student council seats to be elected, but with rules in place that would, again, make it nearly impossible for the Islamist bloc to have control.
Two days before the voting took place, Mr. Fawaz was campaigning on the steps of the education building, dressed in his best suit and tie. His campaign message to the students was simply, “For your sake.”
Running as an Islamist risks consequences: Mr. Fawaz said that he was approached by a student in his class who he believed was delivering a message from the security services. “He told me that they will write about me; I will never get a job,” Mr. Fawaz said.
But even when the police ordered him to take down his posters on election day, he remained resolute and confident.
“Everybody knows that I am going to win,” Mr. Fawaz said, without sounding boastful. “Because I represent the Islamic movement.”
But he did not win. Instead, a candidate representing a large tribe from the city of Salt won, reflecting the loyalty to bonds of kinship and family heritage even as tribal culture has begun to absorb more conservative Islamic practices and beliefs.
Yet Mr. Fawaz was untroubled. “What is important for me,” he said, “is to serve the movement by spreading the word among the students.”
Amjad al-Absy, 28, remembers the moment when he pledged to join the Muslim Brotherhood. He was 15 and he was identified by Brotherhood recruiters when he was playing soccer in a Palestinian refugee camp. He described how the Brotherhood monitors young men — when they play soccer, go to school, to mosque, to work, as well as in the street and singles out those who appear receptive.
“Once you say yes, they put you in a ring, in a family,” said Mr. Absy. “Outside of the Brotherhood, there is no concern for young men, there is no respect. You are alone.”
Mr. Absy and his friend Tarak Naimat, 24, said that while they were students at the university, they had helped to recruit other young men.
“In the computer lab, in the mosque, you buddy up,” Mr. Naimat said. “Then you participate in events together. Then he becomes a member. If he’s advanced, it can take six months. If less, maybe two years.”
The appeal, Mr. Naimat said, was simple: “It gives you the feeling you can change things, you can act, you can be a leader. You feel like you are part of something important.”
Recruiters to the movement operate in a social atmosphere far more receptive than in the past. Every one of five young men talking near the cafeteria of the university recently insisted that the only way Jordan would have democracy was under an Islamic government, which is what the Brotherhood says it wants to achieve.
Muhammad Safi is a 23-year-old with neatly gelled hair and a television-white smile who described himself as the least religious student at the table. He said he had lived in the United States for five years and was eager to marry an American so he could return. Yet he declared: “An Islamic state would be better. At least it would take care of people.”
A Political Crossroads
The task facing Middle East governments and Islamic leaders is to figure out how to harness the energy of the Islamic revival. The young — the demographic bulge that is defining the future of the Islamic world and the way the West will have to engage it — have embraced Islam with all the fervor of the counterculture.
But the movement is still up for grabs — whether it will lead to greater extremism, even terrorism in some cases, and whether the vague dissatisfaction of young people will translate into political engagement or disaffection.
So the cycle is likely to continue, with religious identification fueled not only by the Islamic movements, but also by governments eager to use religion to enhance legitimacy and to satisfy demands of their citizens. That, in turn, broadens support for groups like the Brotherhood, while undermining support for the government, said many researchers, intellectuals and political scientists in Jordan.
The battle lines are clear on the campus of Jordan University. Bilal Abu Sulaih, 24, is a leader in the Islamic student movement. He returned to school this year to study Islamic law after being suspended for one year for organizing protests, he said. During the year off, he said, he worked as a student organizer for the political party office of the Brotherhood. “We are trying to participate,” he said of the movement’s role on campus. “We do not want to overpower everyone else.”
But his reassurances were brushed aside as another student confronted him. “It’s not true,” shouted Ahmed Qabai, 28, who was seated on a nearby bench. He thrust a finger in Mr. Sulaih’s direction.
“You want to try to control everything,” Mr. Qabai said. “I’ve seen it before, your people talking to women and asking them why they’re not veiled.”
Mr. Sulaih, embarrassed by the challenge, said, “It’s not true.”
Mr. Qabai made it clear that he detested the Muslim Brotherhood, getting more and more worked up, until finally he was screaming. But what he said summed up the challenge ahead for Jordan, and for so many governments in the region: “We all know Islam is the solution. That we agree on.”
Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting.
23 December 2008
Hanukkah Receives Kosher Pop Welcome
By JON PARELES
Published: December 22, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/arts/music/23mati.html?_r=1
Matisyahu deployed what may be the only large, mirrored, rotating dreidel in show business — a Jewish answer to a disco ball — at Webster Hall on Sunday night, the first night of Hanukkah. It was also the first of eight New York City shows for Matisyahu in his third annual Festival of Lights series, bringing different opening acts and guests each night. A large menorah was set up for a mid-concert lighting ceremony, with the blessings declaimed in Hebrew by an audience volunteer.
Matisyahu, who was born Matthew Miller, sings explicitly devotional songs about God, Moshiach (the Messiah) and Orthodox Jewish identity. By setting them to reggae, rock and hip-hop beats, and after working his way up the jam-band circuit, he also reaches listeners with their minds on more secular pursuits, like dancing and drugs. Simcha Levenberg, the M.C. who introduced him, drew big laughs with jokes about marijuana and LSD, although Matisyahu’s song “King Without a Crown” insisted, “If you’re trying to stay high, then you’re bound to be low.”
Matisyahu has built a career on analogies between Rastafarian roots reggae and Hasidic songs. Both are concerned with faith and survival struggles and have lyrics phrased in Biblical allusions; both draw on modal scales and melismatic vocal lines that can sound Middle Eastern. Near the end of the concert Matisyahu sang long, cantorial phrases while rocking back and forth, as if davening, or praying. Yet if his lyrics weren’t so clear about their references to Jewish history and the majesty of God, most of the time Matisyahu would simply be one more reggae-loving rocker.
In “Jerusalem,” which drew heartfelt singalongs, he worries about assimilation, singing, “Cut off the roots of your family tree/Don’t you know that’s not the way to be.” But the roots of his music are Afro-Caribbean and African-American. He uses Jamaican reggae and dancehall toasting, sometimes delivered with a Jamaican accent; he also uses hip-hop cadences and showed off his vocal beatboxing.
His band also segues into rock, for chiming marches that borrow their idealistic sound from U2. Matisyahu is less concerned with a musical heritage than with a religious one.
Album by album Matisyahu has expanded his music. Along with basic roots reggae he now uses faster, tongue-twisting dancehall toasting and the electronic beats and brooding chords of hip-hop. And he’s looking farther: Matisyahu joined Crystal Method, the thumping, rock-tinged electronica duo that opened the show, to sing and rap on a song from their next album, due in March.
Matisyahu rarely improves on his sources. His voice is thin and sometimes nasal, closer to Jack Johnson than to Bob Marley or Sting; his rhymes can be as awkward as they are earnest. But his band — which was augmented, for a few songs, by an Israeli oud player — carries simple vamps through multiple transformations, from meditations to shredding guitar solos. It’s music for believers, with a groove for everyone else.
Matisyahu is at Webster Hall, 125 East 11th Street, East Village, Tuesday and Thursday , and at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, 66 North Sixth Street, at Wythe Avenue, Saturday through Dec. 30. Tickets: (212) 307-7171 or ticketmaster.com.
Published: December 22, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/arts/music/23mati.html?_r=1
Matisyahu deployed what may be the only large, mirrored, rotating dreidel in show business — a Jewish answer to a disco ball — at Webster Hall on Sunday night, the first night of Hanukkah. It was also the first of eight New York City shows for Matisyahu in his third annual Festival of Lights series, bringing different opening acts and guests each night. A large menorah was set up for a mid-concert lighting ceremony, with the blessings declaimed in Hebrew by an audience volunteer.
Matisyahu, who was born Matthew Miller, sings explicitly devotional songs about God, Moshiach (the Messiah) and Orthodox Jewish identity. By setting them to reggae, rock and hip-hop beats, and after working his way up the jam-band circuit, he also reaches listeners with their minds on more secular pursuits, like dancing and drugs. Simcha Levenberg, the M.C. who introduced him, drew big laughs with jokes about marijuana and LSD, although Matisyahu’s song “King Without a Crown” insisted, “If you’re trying to stay high, then you’re bound to be low.”
Matisyahu has built a career on analogies between Rastafarian roots reggae and Hasidic songs. Both are concerned with faith and survival struggles and have lyrics phrased in Biblical allusions; both draw on modal scales and melismatic vocal lines that can sound Middle Eastern. Near the end of the concert Matisyahu sang long, cantorial phrases while rocking back and forth, as if davening, or praying. Yet if his lyrics weren’t so clear about their references to Jewish history and the majesty of God, most of the time Matisyahu would simply be one more reggae-loving rocker.
In “Jerusalem,” which drew heartfelt singalongs, he worries about assimilation, singing, “Cut off the roots of your family tree/Don’t you know that’s not the way to be.” But the roots of his music are Afro-Caribbean and African-American. He uses Jamaican reggae and dancehall toasting, sometimes delivered with a Jamaican accent; he also uses hip-hop cadences and showed off his vocal beatboxing.
His band also segues into rock, for chiming marches that borrow their idealistic sound from U2. Matisyahu is less concerned with a musical heritage than with a religious one.
Album by album Matisyahu has expanded his music. Along with basic roots reggae he now uses faster, tongue-twisting dancehall toasting and the electronic beats and brooding chords of hip-hop. And he’s looking farther: Matisyahu joined Crystal Method, the thumping, rock-tinged electronica duo that opened the show, to sing and rap on a song from their next album, due in March.
Matisyahu rarely improves on his sources. His voice is thin and sometimes nasal, closer to Jack Johnson than to Bob Marley or Sting; his rhymes can be as awkward as they are earnest. But his band — which was augmented, for a few songs, by an Israeli oud player — carries simple vamps through multiple transformations, from meditations to shredding guitar solos. It’s music for believers, with a groove for everyone else.
Matisyahu is at Webster Hall, 125 East 11th Street, East Village, Tuesday and Thursday , and at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, 66 North Sixth Street, at Wythe Avenue, Saturday through Dec. 30. Tickets: (212) 307-7171 or ticketmaster.com.
Young Muslims Build a Subculture on an Underground Book
By CHRISTOPHER MAAG
Published: December 22, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/us/23muslim.html?_r=1&hp
CLEVELAND — Five years ago, young Muslims across the United States began reading and passing along a blurry, photocopied novel called “The Taqwacores,” about imaginary punk rock Muslims in Buffalo.
“This book helped me create my identity,” said Naina Syed, 14, a high school freshman in Coventry, Conn.
A Muslim born in Pakistan, Naina said she spent hours on the phone listening to her older sister read the novel to her. “When I finally read the book for myself,” she said, “it was an amazing experience.”
The novel is “The Catcher in the Rye” for young Muslims, said Carl W. Ernst, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Springing from the imagination of Michael Muhammad Knight, it inspired disaffected young Muslims in the United States to form real Muslim punk bands and build their own subculture.
Now the underground success of Muslim punk has resulted in a low-budget independent film based on the book.
A group of punk artists living in a communal house in Cleveland called the Tower of Treason offered the house as the set for the movie. The crumbling streets and boarded-up storefronts of their neighborhood resemble parts of Buffalo. Filming took place in October, and the movie will be released next year, said Eyad Zahra, the director.
“To see these characters that used to live only inside my head out here walking around, and to think of all these kids living out parts of the book, it’s totally surreal,” Mr. Muhammad Knight, 31, said as he roamed the movie set.
As part of the set, a Muslim punk rock musician, Marwan Kamel, 23, painted “Osama McDonald,” a figure with Osama bin Laden’s face atop Ronald McDonald’s body. Mr. Kamel said the painting was a protest against imperialism by American corporations and against Wahhabism, the strictest form of Islam.
Noureen DeWulf, 24, an actress who plays a rocker in the movie, defended the film’s message.
“I’m a Muslim and I’m 100-percent American,” Ms. DeWulf said, “so I can criticize my faith and my country. Rebellion? Punk? This is totally American.”
The novel’s title combines “taqwa,” the Arabic word for “piety,” with “hardcore,” used to describe many genres of angry Western music.
For many young American Muslims, stigmatized by their peers after the Sept. 11 attacks but repelled by both the Bush administration’s reaction to the attacks and the rigid conservatism of many Muslim leaders, the novel became a blueprint for their lives.
“Reading the book was totally liberating for me,” said Areej Zufari, 34, a Muslim and a humanities professor at Valencia Community College in Orlando, Fla.
Ms. Zufari said she had listened to punk music growing up in Arkansas and found “The Taqwacores” four years ago.
“Here was someone as frustrated with Islam as me,” she said, “and he expressed it using bands I love, like the Dead Kennedys. It all came together.”
The novel’s Muslim characters include Rabeya, a riot girl who plays guitar onstage wearing a burqa and leads a group of men and women in prayer. There is also Fasiq, a pot-smoking skater, and Jehangir, a drunk.
Such acts — playing Western music, women leading prayer, men and women praying together, drinking, smoking — are considered haram, or forbidden, by millions of Muslims.
Mr. Muhammad Knight was born an Irish Catholic in upstate New York and converted to Islam as a teenager. He studied at a mosque in Pakistan but became disillusioned with Islam after learning about the sectarian battles after the death of Muhammad.
He said he wrote “The Taqwacores” to mend the rift between his being an observant Muslim and an angry American youth. He found validation in the life of Muhammad, who instructed people to ignore their leaders, destroy their petty deities and follow only Allah.
After reading the novel, many Muslims e-mailed Mr. Muhammad Knight, asking for directions to the next Muslim punk show. Told that no such bands existed, some of them created their own, with names like Vote Hezbollah and Secret Trial Five.
One band, the Kominas, wrote a song called “Suicide Bomb the Gap,” which became Muslim punk rock’s first anthem.
“As Muslims, we’re not being honest if we criticize the United States without first criticizing ourselves,” said Mr. Kamel, 23, who grew up in a Syrian family in Chicago. He is lead singer of the band al-Thawra, “the Revolution” in Arabic.
For many young American Muslims, the merger of Islam and rebellion resonated.
Hanan Arzay, 15, is a daughter of Muslim immigrants from Morocco who lives in East Islip, N.Y. In the months after the Sept. 11 attacks, pedestrians threw eggs and coffee cups at the van that transported her to a Muslim school, she said, and one person threw a wine bottle, shattering the van’s window.
At school, her Koran teacher threw chalk at her for requesting literal translations of the holy book, Ms. Arzay said. After she was expelled from two Muslim schools, her uncle gave her “The Taqwacores.”
“This book is my lifeline,” Ms. Arzay said. “It saved my faith.”
Published: December 22, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/us/23muslim.html?_r=1&hp
CLEVELAND — Five years ago, young Muslims across the United States began reading and passing along a blurry, photocopied novel called “The Taqwacores,” about imaginary punk rock Muslims in Buffalo.
“This book helped me create my identity,” said Naina Syed, 14, a high school freshman in Coventry, Conn.
A Muslim born in Pakistan, Naina said she spent hours on the phone listening to her older sister read the novel to her. “When I finally read the book for myself,” she said, “it was an amazing experience.”
The novel is “The Catcher in the Rye” for young Muslims, said Carl W. Ernst, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Springing from the imagination of Michael Muhammad Knight, it inspired disaffected young Muslims in the United States to form real Muslim punk bands and build their own subculture.
Now the underground success of Muslim punk has resulted in a low-budget independent film based on the book.
A group of punk artists living in a communal house in Cleveland called the Tower of Treason offered the house as the set for the movie. The crumbling streets and boarded-up storefronts of their neighborhood resemble parts of Buffalo. Filming took place in October, and the movie will be released next year, said Eyad Zahra, the director.
“To see these characters that used to live only inside my head out here walking around, and to think of all these kids living out parts of the book, it’s totally surreal,” Mr. Muhammad Knight, 31, said as he roamed the movie set.
As part of the set, a Muslim punk rock musician, Marwan Kamel, 23, painted “Osama McDonald,” a figure with Osama bin Laden’s face atop Ronald McDonald’s body. Mr. Kamel said the painting was a protest against imperialism by American corporations and against Wahhabism, the strictest form of Islam.
Noureen DeWulf, 24, an actress who plays a rocker in the movie, defended the film’s message.
“I’m a Muslim and I’m 100-percent American,” Ms. DeWulf said, “so I can criticize my faith and my country. Rebellion? Punk? This is totally American.”
The novel’s title combines “taqwa,” the Arabic word for “piety,” with “hardcore,” used to describe many genres of angry Western music.
For many young American Muslims, stigmatized by their peers after the Sept. 11 attacks but repelled by both the Bush administration’s reaction to the attacks and the rigid conservatism of many Muslim leaders, the novel became a blueprint for their lives.
“Reading the book was totally liberating for me,” said Areej Zufari, 34, a Muslim and a humanities professor at Valencia Community College in Orlando, Fla.
Ms. Zufari said she had listened to punk music growing up in Arkansas and found “The Taqwacores” four years ago.
“Here was someone as frustrated with Islam as me,” she said, “and he expressed it using bands I love, like the Dead Kennedys. It all came together.”
The novel’s Muslim characters include Rabeya, a riot girl who plays guitar onstage wearing a burqa and leads a group of men and women in prayer. There is also Fasiq, a pot-smoking skater, and Jehangir, a drunk.
Such acts — playing Western music, women leading prayer, men and women praying together, drinking, smoking — are considered haram, or forbidden, by millions of Muslims.
Mr. Muhammad Knight was born an Irish Catholic in upstate New York and converted to Islam as a teenager. He studied at a mosque in Pakistan but became disillusioned with Islam after learning about the sectarian battles after the death of Muhammad.
He said he wrote “The Taqwacores” to mend the rift between his being an observant Muslim and an angry American youth. He found validation in the life of Muhammad, who instructed people to ignore their leaders, destroy their petty deities and follow only Allah.
After reading the novel, many Muslims e-mailed Mr. Muhammad Knight, asking for directions to the next Muslim punk show. Told that no such bands existed, some of them created their own, with names like Vote Hezbollah and Secret Trial Five.
One band, the Kominas, wrote a song called “Suicide Bomb the Gap,” which became Muslim punk rock’s first anthem.
“As Muslims, we’re not being honest if we criticize the United States without first criticizing ourselves,” said Mr. Kamel, 23, who grew up in a Syrian family in Chicago. He is lead singer of the band al-Thawra, “the Revolution” in Arabic.
For many young American Muslims, the merger of Islam and rebellion resonated.
Hanan Arzay, 15, is a daughter of Muslim immigrants from Morocco who lives in East Islip, N.Y. In the months after the Sept. 11 attacks, pedestrians threw eggs and coffee cups at the van that transported her to a Muslim school, she said, and one person threw a wine bottle, shattering the van’s window.
At school, her Koran teacher threw chalk at her for requesting literal translations of the holy book, Ms. Arzay said. After she was expelled from two Muslim schools, her uncle gave her “The Taqwacores.”
“This book is my lifeline,” Ms. Arzay said. “It saved my faith.”
22 December 2008
Forest Plan in Brazil Bears the Traces of an Activist’s Vision
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/22/world/americas/22brazil.html?_r=1
RIO DE JANEIRO — Twenty years ago, a Brazilian environmental activist and rubber tapper was shot to death at his home in Acre State by ranchers opposed to his efforts to save the Amazon rain forest.
After his death at age 44, Francisco Alves Mendes, better known as Chico, became a martyr for a concept that is only now gaining mainstream support here: that the value of a standing forest could be more than the value of a forest burned and logged in the name of development.
This month, Brazil took what environmentalists hope will be a big step forward in realizing Mr. Mendes’s vision. The government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva introduced ambitious targets for reducing deforestation and carbon dioxide emissions in a nation that is one of the world’s top emitters of this heat-trapping gas.
The plan promises to make Brazil a more influential player in global climate-change discussions, helping to push the United States and the European Union to agree to emissions cuts and head off the adverse effects of climate change. It could also encourage more pledges from wealthy countries seeking to essentially pay Brazil to preserve the forest for the good of all humanity.
But some environmentalists question whether the new targets, which would reduce Brazilian deforestation by 72 percent by 2017, are achievable in a country that has shown few signs of adjusting its development model as a major food provider to the world, especially in the midst of a global economic crisis.
To achieve the first phase of planned cuts, Brazil would have to reduce deforestation next year by 20 percent, to less than 4,000 square miles. That would be the lowest amount per year ever recorded in Brazil, said Paulo Adario, the Amazon campaign director for Greenpeace in Brazil.
Brazil’s economy is centered on the export of agricultural products, like soybeans and beef, and commodities like iron ore.
“The Brazilian model is to be the food supplier to the world and a big supplier of ethanol,” Mr. Adario said. “The economy will continue to move in the same basic direction. There is no magic in Brazil.”
Up until now, Brazil’s economic choices have driven much of the deforestation in the Amazon, he said. In the late 1960s and the 1970s, the military government encouraged landless families to settle in the region. Road-building, land speculators and ranchers followed, and the forests fell at a quickening pace.
The burning and decomposition of trees produce carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.
Mr. Mendes organized tappers to confront crews and flew abroad to confront lenders paying for roads. His efforts to stop logging in an area planned for a forest reserve led to his death. Since his killing, on Dec. 22, 1988, more than 20 reserves have been created, protecting more than eight million acres.
Mr. Mendes was an early advocate of the idea that people who live in the forest could create livelihoods from sustainable forest resources, rather than the one-time economic benefit of cutting down trees. Carbon financing, the compensation of forest dwellers for pursuing sustainable industries, would provide an added incentive, which is vital given the uncertain markets for natural rubber and other non-timber forest products.
“The notion that we in the north will help pay for that climate service is an important development and represents the mainstreaming of the concept that Chico Mendes and those like him were pioneers in creating,” said Richard H. Moss, the head of climate change programs at the World Wildlife Fund in Washington.
The killings of Mr. Mendes and of Sister Dorothy Stang, a 73-year-old Catholic nun who was gunned down in 2005 for speaking out against logging in the Amazon, ratcheted up international pressure on Brazil to find ways to limit forest clearing without sacrificing development.
“Brazil was always on the defensive when it came to the question of climate change,” said Carlos Minc, Brazil’s environment minister. “And now it has completely changed, passing a bolder plan than India and China.”
Mr. Minc said the plan would help meet a demand of some of the more developed countries, including the United States, which has said it would not agree to firm emissions targets until less-developed countries that produce significant amounts of greenhouse gases do the same.
Deforestation produces more than a fifth of human-generated carbon dioxide by some estimates. Some 75 percent of Brazil’s carbon dioxide emissions come from deforestation, Mr. Minc said.
Brazil’s plan would sharply slice those emissions, reducing them by some 4.8 billion tons by 2018. Some environmentalists contend that deals involving compensation for forest protection could weaken climate agreements in many ways. They also say the plan leaves the most difficult targets to the government that will follow Mr. da Silva’s. His term ends in 2010.
Still, it is viewed by some scientists and climate experts as major step forward. “For the first time we have out in the open very clear goals for reduction in deforestation,” said Walter Vergara, the lead climatologist for Latin America at the World Bank.
The global recession could end up being a godsend by lowering demand for agricultural goods.
But it could also slow the flow of technology needed to make industries more efficient and limit pledges from foreign governments like Norway, Sweden and Germany, whose payments would help preserve the forest. So far, those countries have not suggested that they would reduce their contributions, Mr. Minc said.
“The global recession and the climate crisis don’t necessarily have to be adversaries, with one competing for the resources of the other,” Mr. Minc said.
RIO DE JANEIRO — Twenty years ago, a Brazilian environmental activist and rubber tapper was shot to death at his home in Acre State by ranchers opposed to his efforts to save the Amazon rain forest.
After his death at age 44, Francisco Alves Mendes, better known as Chico, became a martyr for a concept that is only now gaining mainstream support here: that the value of a standing forest could be more than the value of a forest burned and logged in the name of development.
This month, Brazil took what environmentalists hope will be a big step forward in realizing Mr. Mendes’s vision. The government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva introduced ambitious targets for reducing deforestation and carbon dioxide emissions in a nation that is one of the world’s top emitters of this heat-trapping gas.
The plan promises to make Brazil a more influential player in global climate-change discussions, helping to push the United States and the European Union to agree to emissions cuts and head off the adverse effects of climate change. It could also encourage more pledges from wealthy countries seeking to essentially pay Brazil to preserve the forest for the good of all humanity.
But some environmentalists question whether the new targets, which would reduce Brazilian deforestation by 72 percent by 2017, are achievable in a country that has shown few signs of adjusting its development model as a major food provider to the world, especially in the midst of a global economic crisis.
To achieve the first phase of planned cuts, Brazil would have to reduce deforestation next year by 20 percent, to less than 4,000 square miles. That would be the lowest amount per year ever recorded in Brazil, said Paulo Adario, the Amazon campaign director for Greenpeace in Brazil.
Brazil’s economy is centered on the export of agricultural products, like soybeans and beef, and commodities like iron ore.
“The Brazilian model is to be the food supplier to the world and a big supplier of ethanol,” Mr. Adario said. “The economy will continue to move in the same basic direction. There is no magic in Brazil.”
Up until now, Brazil’s economic choices have driven much of the deforestation in the Amazon, he said. In the late 1960s and the 1970s, the military government encouraged landless families to settle in the region. Road-building, land speculators and ranchers followed, and the forests fell at a quickening pace.
The burning and decomposition of trees produce carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.
Mr. Mendes organized tappers to confront crews and flew abroad to confront lenders paying for roads. His efforts to stop logging in an area planned for a forest reserve led to his death. Since his killing, on Dec. 22, 1988, more than 20 reserves have been created, protecting more than eight million acres.
Mr. Mendes was an early advocate of the idea that people who live in the forest could create livelihoods from sustainable forest resources, rather than the one-time economic benefit of cutting down trees. Carbon financing, the compensation of forest dwellers for pursuing sustainable industries, would provide an added incentive, which is vital given the uncertain markets for natural rubber and other non-timber forest products.
“The notion that we in the north will help pay for that climate service is an important development and represents the mainstreaming of the concept that Chico Mendes and those like him were pioneers in creating,” said Richard H. Moss, the head of climate change programs at the World Wildlife Fund in Washington.
The killings of Mr. Mendes and of Sister Dorothy Stang, a 73-year-old Catholic nun who was gunned down in 2005 for speaking out against logging in the Amazon, ratcheted up international pressure on Brazil to find ways to limit forest clearing without sacrificing development.
“Brazil was always on the defensive when it came to the question of climate change,” said Carlos Minc, Brazil’s environment minister. “And now it has completely changed, passing a bolder plan than India and China.”
Mr. Minc said the plan would help meet a demand of some of the more developed countries, including the United States, which has said it would not agree to firm emissions targets until less-developed countries that produce significant amounts of greenhouse gases do the same.
Deforestation produces more than a fifth of human-generated carbon dioxide by some estimates. Some 75 percent of Brazil’s carbon dioxide emissions come from deforestation, Mr. Minc said.
Brazil’s plan would sharply slice those emissions, reducing them by some 4.8 billion tons by 2018. Some environmentalists contend that deals involving compensation for forest protection could weaken climate agreements in many ways. They also say the plan leaves the most difficult targets to the government that will follow Mr. da Silva’s. His term ends in 2010.
Still, it is viewed by some scientists and climate experts as major step forward. “For the first time we have out in the open very clear goals for reduction in deforestation,” said Walter Vergara, the lead climatologist for Latin America at the World Bank.
The global recession could end up being a godsend by lowering demand for agricultural goods.
But it could also slow the flow of technology needed to make industries more efficient and limit pledges from foreign governments like Norway, Sweden and Germany, whose payments would help preserve the forest. So far, those countries have not suggested that they would reduce their contributions, Mr. Minc said.
“The global recession and the climate crisis don’t necessarily have to be adversaries, with one competing for the resources of the other,” Mr. Minc said.
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