04 October 2010
No More and No Less by Mahmoud Darwish
15 September 2010
27 July 2010
Which Way is Up???
S.P. Scott, in his 1904 tome, The History of the Moorish Empire in Europe, wrote:
"The noble and elevating pursuits of science were not neglected under the Moors of Sicily and their intelligent and progressive conquerors, the Norman princes. Geography, astronomy, chemistry, and medicine were studied with diligence and success. al-Idrisi, whose decent from the royal dynasty of the Fez has been obscured by the eminent reputation he attained as a geographer and a philosopher, made for Roger II a planisphere which represented at once the surface of the earth and the positions of the heavenly bodies. From the minarets of Palermo, the Arab astronomer observed the motions of the planets, the periodical recurrence of eclipses, the relative positions and general distribution of the stars in space, by the aid of instruments invented on the Guadalquivir and the Tigris, and of tables computed on the plains of Babylon centuries before the Christian era. The Moslem thus consecrated to the prosecution of scientific research the towers of his most sacred temples, at a time when from the cathedrals of Europe doctrines were promulgated which menaced, with the severest penalties that ecclesiatical malignity could devise, every occupation which in any way contributed to the emancipation of reason or the intellectual progress of humanity [...]"
"The great work of al-Idrisi was compiled under the auspices of Roger II. The Arab was peculiarly fitted for the treatment of the comprehensive science of physical and descriptive geography. His information had been largely obtained by practical experience. He had served in campaigns conducted on the frontiers of civilization; in the capacity of a merchant he had traversed with the plodding caravan vast regions diversified with illimitable plains, lofty mountains, noble rivers; as a pilgrim he had performed his devotions at the cradle of the Moslem faith; in the tirels pursuit of learning he had prosecuted his researches over strange countries and among strange peoples; his features and his costume were familiar to the residents of the great European and Asiatic capitals; his peregrinations had extended from the Douro to the Indus, from the shores of the Baltic to the sources of the Nile. Thus endowed with especial qualifications, the Arab geographer was equally at home, whether recounting to a delighted audience the experiences of an extended journey or explaining to an assemblage of students the physical features of the earth and the relative distribution of land and water as depicted on the surface of a terrestrial globe. The work of al-Idrisi is an imperishable monument to the intelligence, the industry, the criticism, of the compiler, whose studies were confirmed in many instances by personal observation, and hte practical value of whose undertaking was established by his scientific atainments as well as by the copious erudition of the illustrious monarch by whose command it originated and was brought to a successful termination." (Pp. 68 - 72)
To read more from this book click here.
To see an online exhibition from the Bibliothèque nationale de France dedicated to Muhammad al-Idrisi (in French) click here.
26 July 2010
NYT Editorial: Fear of Freedom
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/opinion/25sun1.html?_r=1&ref=global-home
Published: July 24, 2010
A prisoner who begs to stay indefinitely at the Guantánamo Bay detention center rather than be sent back to Algeria probably has a strong reason to fear the welcoming reception at home.
Abdul Aziz Naji, who has been held at Guantánamo since 2002, told the Obama administration that he would be tortured if he was transferred to Algeria, by either the Algerian government or fundamentalist groups there. Though he offered to remain at the prison, the administration shipped him home last weekend and washed its hands of the man. Almost immediately upon arrival, he disappeared, and his family fears the worst.
It is an act of cruelty that seems to defy explanation.
Mr. Naji, 35 and born in Algeria, was picked up by the police in Pakistan in May 2002 and turned over to the Americans on suspicion of being a terrorist. He admitted working for the humanitarian wing of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistani terrorist organization, but the Bush administration never charged him with a crime, explained why he was being held, or demonstrated any connection to terrorist acts.
The Obama administration, which is trying to reduce the population at Guantánamo, battled Mr. Naji’s lawyers all the way to the Supreme Court for the right to send him to Algeria. Mr. Naji argued that once he was in his home country, he would be tortured, either by the government on suspicion of being a terrorist, or by fundamentalist groups pressuring him to join their cause.
The court, which issued a terse order rejecting his plea, apparently accepted the Obama administration’s assurance that the Algerian government promised not to torture Mr. Naji. Under a 2008 Supreme Court decision, the government is given broad discretion to decide when to accept such promises from a foreign government.
Mr. Naji asked for political asylum in Switzerland, but within hours of the court’s order, he was on a plane bound for Algeria. The court refused to accept a similar plea from another Algerian at Guantánamo who does not wish to go home, Farhi Saeed Bin Mohammed, who has not yet been returned but could be at any time. Four other Algerian prisoners have made similar claims.
Algeria may well have promised not to torture the two men, but it is hard to take that promise seriously, or to know whether it has already been broken. Government officials there say they are not detaining Mr. Naji, but have not accounted for his whereabouts, which they need to do promptly.
The State Department’s human rights report on the country, issued in March, said that reports of torture in Algeria have been reduced but are still prevalent. It quotes human rights lawyers there as saying the practice still takes place to extract confessions in security cases. People disappear in the country, the report said, and armed groups — which obviously made no promises to the administration — continue to act with impunity.
We support the administration’s efforts to close Guantánamo, and understand the concern that if there is a more heavily Republican Congress next year, doing so may become harder. That is no reason to deliver prisoners to governments that the United States considers hostile and that have a record of torture and lawlessness.
The government refuses to deport prisoners to Libya, Syria and other countries known for abuse. It could find a new home for the Algerians.
Published: July 24, 2010
A prisoner who begs to stay indefinitely at the Guantánamo Bay detention center rather than be sent back to Algeria probably has a strong reason to fear the welcoming reception at home.
Abdul Aziz Naji, who has been held at Guantánamo since 2002, told the Obama administration that he would be tortured if he was transferred to Algeria, by either the Algerian government or fundamentalist groups there. Though he offered to remain at the prison, the administration shipped him home last weekend and washed its hands of the man. Almost immediately upon arrival, he disappeared, and his family fears the worst.
It is an act of cruelty that seems to defy explanation.
Mr. Naji, 35 and born in Algeria, was picked up by the police in Pakistan in May 2002 and turned over to the Americans on suspicion of being a terrorist. He admitted working for the humanitarian wing of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistani terrorist organization, but the Bush administration never charged him with a crime, explained why he was being held, or demonstrated any connection to terrorist acts.
The Obama administration, which is trying to reduce the population at Guantánamo, battled Mr. Naji’s lawyers all the way to the Supreme Court for the right to send him to Algeria. Mr. Naji argued that once he was in his home country, he would be tortured, either by the government on suspicion of being a terrorist, or by fundamentalist groups pressuring him to join their cause.
The court, which issued a terse order rejecting his plea, apparently accepted the Obama administration’s assurance that the Algerian government promised not to torture Mr. Naji. Under a 2008 Supreme Court decision, the government is given broad discretion to decide when to accept such promises from a foreign government.
Mr. Naji asked for political asylum in Switzerland, but within hours of the court’s order, he was on a plane bound for Algeria. The court refused to accept a similar plea from another Algerian at Guantánamo who does not wish to go home, Farhi Saeed Bin Mohammed, who has not yet been returned but could be at any time. Four other Algerian prisoners have made similar claims.
Algeria may well have promised not to torture the two men, but it is hard to take that promise seriously, or to know whether it has already been broken. Government officials there say they are not detaining Mr. Naji, but have not accounted for his whereabouts, which they need to do promptly.
The State Department’s human rights report on the country, issued in March, said that reports of torture in Algeria have been reduced but are still prevalent. It quotes human rights lawyers there as saying the practice still takes place to extract confessions in security cases. People disappear in the country, the report said, and armed groups — which obviously made no promises to the administration — continue to act with impunity.
We support the administration’s efforts to close Guantánamo, and understand the concern that if there is a more heavily Republican Congress next year, doing so may become harder. That is no reason to deliver prisoners to governments that the United States considers hostile and that have a record of torture and lawlessness.
The government refuses to deport prisoners to Libya, Syria and other countries known for abuse. It could find a new home for the Algerians.
25 June 2010
Can Jews Travel Safely in the Middle East?
Have you checked out Couchsurfing.com? Not only can you find a free place to crash, but you can join communities and find the answers to your questions.
Read below for user's questions and replies on the subject of being a Jewish traveler in the Middle East. Wanna read more? Click here.
----
Hello everybody
I'm posting this email because I need your opinion.
Every time I talk with my parents about traveling in the Arab countries (Morrocco 2 years ago, Egypt this summer...) we have a big fight because they think to be a jew in the arab countries is risky, and you never know what's going to happen if one knows about that...
Whatever I can say to them, they never listen to me, answering that I'm an idealistic, I've never been to those countries (neither did them, but they lived in Israel during the Kippur War...) and I don't know anything about the risks.
Well, what's your opinion about that?
Is there a real risk? If yes, is there a way to protect against this. If not, how to convince them, or at least relieve them...
I also assume that there must be a difference between the arab countries, and being jewish in Morocco must be quiet different than in Iran. Is there a sort of "classification" to make between the countries
Thank you very much for your answers.
-----
I understand your parents fears because of the tension between Arabs and Israel and you know all the fuss happening over there but i want you to show your parents this message and its from Egyptian guy like me telling you i have jews friends and we are good friends we dont let the religion or the cultural ethics backgrounds hit between us , last one was girl called Rose from USA and another one Called Raquel from Argentina and they were jews and great couchsurfers too!!
you are not the first jew who come here and enjoy it so much. The problem with the the israeli people there is big sensitivity between Arabs and Israeli people not the jews and you dont have to say everywhere too i am jew if you are afraid of it but believe me its ok in case you came to Egypt dont worry just drop me a message and i will take care of you.
we are brothers in humanity in the end so dont worry
God ordered us all to live in hamrony and peace Jews Christians and Muslims.
Tell your parents you have already Egyptian buddy who is welcoming me here :D
----
I understand Amgad and for sure he is a great guy, but it's true that there are problems, not in Egypt but perhaps in middle east. For sure not if you are with a couch surfer, for my experience they are really opened minded. But you must be careful, and careful don't mean panic. Just double check your words depending were you are.
For example, I´m from Spain if you go near to bull fight and you said bullfight it´s a crime.. i sure you will face same problems not risk just not a nice situation.
It is the same here the problem is not to be Jewish the problem is with Israel. Be sure in most of the Arab countries nobody cares of your religion but politic is an other thing
So be careful, respect the tradition of the country and be nice. I had travelled to a lot of countries and with this three things in mind you won't face any problem
----
I'm an American Jewish woman, and I have lived in Jerusalem for 6 months, Jordan for 5 months, and spent 10 days each in Turkey and Egypt. I will be returning to Jordan in about a month, and plan on traveling to Syria and Lebanon this time as well. Also, I'm training to be archaeologist, and most of the people I work with have spent extensive periods of time in all parts of the Middle East, so I have also learned from their stories.
Basically, being Jewish in the Middle East can cause problems, but not nearly to the degree that your parents (or Israelis in general) believe. First of all, most people will not assume you are Jewish, and this is not information you should offer until you have had some time to assess how they will react. I look VERY typically Jewish for a North American, and my name is very Jewish as well, but everyone just assumed that I was Christian, except for places like Amman and Petra, where there are plenty of tourists of all stripes. Even people who might think negatively about Jews or Israelis (which the vast majority of Middle East inhabitants are perfectly able to differentiate between), will view you as the 'exception' once they have the chance to get to know you before finding out you are Jewish. Do not wear a star of David or chai necklace, speak Hebrew, or refer to anything Jewishly related with strangers until you know them better. DO NOT TALK POLITICS!!! Actually, talking politics can sometimes be tricky to avoid, but I have found it easiest to either agree with whoever I am speaking with, or remain neutral unless I am pretty confident about the context. This is also a good way to learn about different views that you might not encounter as much outside of the region. I have found it pretty easy to be discrete, while still connecting with people in different ways along the way. I even managed to keep kosher by claiming that I was vegetarian. Being Jewish has been pretty much a non-issue for me in the Middle East. Being a woman has been much trickier, especially in Egypt.
My parents also do not like the fact that I travel around in Arab countries, but they have gotten used to it. My mom was comforted by the fact that the Syrian government recently gave a permit for Dr. Gill Stein from UChicago to dig a really important site, since it seemed to show that either the Syrians really were incapable of picking up on western Jewish names, or they really didn't care. I plan to make my career digging in Islamic and Arab countries, so I clearly like the region. As for classifying danger levels for different Arab countries, basically, the ones that have the biggest problems with Israel and/or Jews are the least able to recognize Jews when they meet one. The countries/places where they are more likely to tell that you are Jewish, are able to do so because there are enough Jewish tourists there to develop a more 'realistic' stereotype.
Enjoy Egypt!!!!
----
i dont know ur parents and their hypersensivity (mine will get top marks in it) and even though i m 41 and traveleed over 80 countries and have survived terrorist areas and ware zones but my parents take their job very seriously as parents, god bless them. they are retired and have enough time to do a theis on wher i go for my well being....and generally know more (than CIA or EIU would gather in short time). they always believe in megadeth song - so far so good so what....?? and surprinsly thats the only thing we agree in life....so i generally dont tell them when i go to a difficult or sensitive place...but tell them on return...however..i do leave my whereabouts and contacts to one or two close friends who dont loose their marbles if i m in trouble...
u seem to have traveled well and with so many CS friends and dozens of references...i m sure u will survive well anywhere.....unless u want to make a policital speech, discuss religion, wear something so obvious (as susannah mentiond a david or similar), cant hold ur drinks and then u generally wont remember what u said later or u get provokated on drop of a hat to discuss ur convictions about such issues....think twice .....it may not be life threatening but surely wont be too pleasent or desirable...i once offered by a freind in finland an isreali white wine (wine came from golan heights) and when i mentioned this to an arab freind, the disussion moved from wine to golan heights and policitcs
well there are many jews not only as tourist, but as residents in arab countries as well. we have in UAE, there are jews in yeman but obviously if u are in minority (for that matter of any religsion race colour anywhere in the world) it best to watch ur back...but be urself...
read enough about the region and its history to know what could be sensitive...keep track of news of whats going on politically in the region on daily basis as the day there is a skirmish between isreal and its neighbours, that day may not be very calm ....and u may be at a wrong place at wrong time....such as if u were a arab in united states on 12th sept 2001 or from basque region in madrid the day there was a bomb blast or between a pakistani and indian the day there is a skirmish on LOC...
enough said....quite hopeful that u will enjoy it , i had some great experienves in iran, turkey, syria, lebanon, jordon and gulf, pakistan as tourist, i m neither muslim or christian and can write wonderful stories about my so postive experience. however, I lived and worked in egypt and the only relevent issue i can recall from my persoanl experience is when i wanted to cross suez enroute to sinai region in late 2003, i was stopped by the guard as he thought i was a yehudi...when he saw my passport and realised i was not i was let go...i was told i looked like one perhaps on that day....and did not know what happened in sinai region (google it u will know)...
enjoy ur journey.....and we wait to hear ur intereestig and encouraging stories..
----
People in the street were in general friendly. All were OK, except only ONE of the early teenage kids, who threw a stone on me. (But one must realize this is what they grew up with in Palestine - throw stones on Izraelis, which was almost exclusively only soldiers, what they saw in this village).
The Israeli guy who drove me there goes there regularly and said his only problem are the Israeli army.
BUT, an Israeli in Palestine SHOULD be prepared for some aggressivity, probably, but I met only some Israelis who go there regularly and those had no bad comments.
When I was in Jordan, a shop-seller told me that he often guesses which visitors are Israelis though they pretend not to be. (Perhaps from their Arabic) And he said, that he made a few friends among the Israeli visitors. And his parents were from Palestine!
He said (literally) "I hate the Israeli king, not the people" (well his country is ruled by king, so .. :-)
JEW IS NOT AN ISRAELI!!!
Also not to us Europeans. But Israelis (as influenced by their propaganda) are kind of taking themselves as representatives of all Jews when interpreting every anti-Israeli stance as antisemitism.
(Recently I saw a great documentary by an Israeli author, who mapped antisemitism in the world and saw that it is really good business, e.g., for one institution in US who works against antisemitism and interpets everything as that)
On the other hand, there ARE people in the Muslim countries, who hate West as such, no matter if you are a Jew.
But MOST people, I believe, are rather keen on showing they are not connected with terrorism. (We should realize it is West which is having GENERAL islamophobia, just as it had its anti-Jewish sentiments and fears hundred years ago!! I think hatred towards West is a feature of MINORITY of Muslims, on the other hand)
See, in Kosovo the Muslims were telling my Israeli friends
that they feel with them, since they have similar (hi-)story of their state!
Anyway, I suggest, you post this message in Israel group asking answer ONLY from those who DID travel in Arab countries. (And remember that troubles they may mention could mostly be not connected with you as a non-Israeli)
I am also curious in this subject.
When I planned to visit Syria and suggested I would pretend to be an Israeli, an Arab I was mailing with recommended me not to do so ....
And I was not allowed to Syria, but perhaps I would have listened to him :-)
----
I thought I might as well add a comment in case it helps. I am Jewish and travelled in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey for almost 3 months in the fall 2009, and I have also travelled on a separate trip to Morocco. My last name is not a common Jewish name, but it did come up on many occasions when the topic of religion came up with people I encountered. Based on prior advice from Arab friends in Canada, I was cautious about who I told, but my experience was that it was never of issue of contention and certainly not at all an issue of hostility. Very much to the contrary. Based on their lived experience, people I talked to certainly had a lot of strong feelings about Israel, but separated being Jewish from being Israeli or often more specifically from being a Zionist. From the people I met it was very clear that this was a political issue to them. It is obviously based on your own feelings of comfort how much about yourself you want to discuss or disclose. There were Jewish communities in all these countries, and I had locals and couchsurfers in several cities take me to the old Jewish quarters… which were very well maintained and quite interesting. My trip was really wonderful, and I really found that preconceptions of the region from its portrayal in North America had little relevance to my actual experience there. I met many amazing people through the couchsurfing community and hopefully you will be able to connect with a lot of them while travelling. You are welcome to contact me if you have other questions. Have a great trip!
----
I am French ( jewish background, not practising so much) but recently moved to ISrael.
My name is really French though as my father is christian catholic born and then converted.
I think the majority of the problems are more political than religious, actually muslim countries respect very much the dedication someone has on a specific religion , whatever this religion is.
So, yes, the problem is mainly political, and so for this reason you will not have problems coming, as a jew, to these arab countries.
You will have more problems, I guess, coming as an israeli. Don't talk about politics, buy a nice carpet, take nice pictures of the pyramids and ride the back of a camel, but don't talk politics ;)
----
It'snot a big deal :D as long as you don't stick a paper of your forehead saying I am an Israeli, **** Arabs,lol
----
I also am Jewish and lived in the Middle East region for a year. I first came to Palestine, Nablus to work and then travelled around the West Bank and then Israel. Then I went to Jordon and now am in the UAE. I have to pretty much agree with the other Jewish women who responded to your post. My parents were very concerned about me having 3 strikes against me coming here: American, Jewish, and Female. But I can say so far (Ishallah! :) that I have had all positive experiences. Also the key for me was my conservative dress. People even thought I was a Palestinian or of Arab decent--Lebanon when in Paletine or elsewhere. That purely means that they do not recognize or know what a Jew looks like. Whenever the topic of religin came up, I did skirt the issue and just tell them that I am spiritual. I am not so sensitve to keep it secret b/c was not raised religious and I am open to all cutlures and religions.
The most important thing is not to broadcast your religion and do NOT talk politics. Just agree and listen to the other side which will most likely be the Arab position--valid and important view. There are so many steroetypes and sound byte style news in the world. So this is a unique opportunity to really see, understand and experience the other side that mainstream or at least US mainstream media does not show. I have respect for all people regardless of their culture and religion. I remain neutral with speaking with anyone not from my home country of the USA. I hope that you relish this opportunity so you can also spread forth the notion of how wonderful, friendly the people are here in the Middle East. Just dress conservatively and you will blend in too.
Bon Voyage!
----
Well
i'm from Syria..
as my opinion i think it isn't a problem .. you are a guest anyway.. and we always welcome our gestes..loool
i think it's saf,, don't worry..
by the way you don't have to say to eaveryone you are a jewish .. just take it easy..
good luck
----
Read below for user's questions and replies on the subject of being a Jewish traveler in the Middle East. Wanna read more? Click here.
----
Hello everybody
I'm posting this email because I need your opinion.
Every time I talk with my parents about traveling in the Arab countries (Morrocco 2 years ago, Egypt this summer...) we have a big fight because they think to be a jew in the arab countries is risky, and you never know what's going to happen if one knows about that...
Whatever I can say to them, they never listen to me, answering that I'm an idealistic, I've never been to those countries (neither did them, but they lived in Israel during the Kippur War...) and I don't know anything about the risks.
Well, what's your opinion about that?
Is there a real risk? If yes, is there a way to protect against this. If not, how to convince them, or at least relieve them...
I also assume that there must be a difference between the arab countries, and being jewish in Morocco must be quiet different than in Iran. Is there a sort of "classification" to make between the countries
Thank you very much for your answers.
-----
I understand your parents fears because of the tension between Arabs and Israel and you know all the fuss happening over there but i want you to show your parents this message and its from Egyptian guy like me telling you i have jews friends and we are good friends we dont let the religion or the cultural ethics backgrounds hit between us , last one was girl called Rose from USA and another one Called Raquel from Argentina and they were jews and great couchsurfers too!!
you are not the first jew who come here and enjoy it so much. The problem with the the israeli people there is big sensitivity between Arabs and Israeli people not the jews and you dont have to say everywhere too i am jew if you are afraid of it but believe me its ok in case you came to Egypt dont worry just drop me a message and i will take care of you.
we are brothers in humanity in the end so dont worry
God ordered us all to live in hamrony and peace Jews Christians and Muslims.
Tell your parents you have already Egyptian buddy who is welcoming me here :D
----
I understand Amgad and for sure he is a great guy, but it's true that there are problems, not in Egypt but perhaps in middle east. For sure not if you are with a couch surfer, for my experience they are really opened minded. But you must be careful, and careful don't mean panic. Just double check your words depending were you are.
For example, I´m from Spain if you go near to bull fight and you said bullfight it´s a crime.. i sure you will face same problems not risk just not a nice situation.
It is the same here the problem is not to be Jewish the problem is with Israel. Be sure in most of the Arab countries nobody cares of your religion but politic is an other thing
So be careful, respect the tradition of the country and be nice. I had travelled to a lot of countries and with this three things in mind you won't face any problem
----
I'm an American Jewish woman, and I have lived in Jerusalem for 6 months, Jordan for 5 months, and spent 10 days each in Turkey and Egypt. I will be returning to Jordan in about a month, and plan on traveling to Syria and Lebanon this time as well. Also, I'm training to be archaeologist, and most of the people I work with have spent extensive periods of time in all parts of the Middle East, so I have also learned from their stories.
Basically, being Jewish in the Middle East can cause problems, but not nearly to the degree that your parents (or Israelis in general) believe. First of all, most people will not assume you are Jewish, and this is not information you should offer until you have had some time to assess how they will react. I look VERY typically Jewish for a North American, and my name is very Jewish as well, but everyone just assumed that I was Christian, except for places like Amman and Petra, where there are plenty of tourists of all stripes. Even people who might think negatively about Jews or Israelis (which the vast majority of Middle East inhabitants are perfectly able to differentiate between), will view you as the 'exception' once they have the chance to get to know you before finding out you are Jewish. Do not wear a star of David or chai necklace, speak Hebrew, or refer to anything Jewishly related with strangers until you know them better. DO NOT TALK POLITICS!!! Actually, talking politics can sometimes be tricky to avoid, but I have found it easiest to either agree with whoever I am speaking with, or remain neutral unless I am pretty confident about the context. This is also a good way to learn about different views that you might not encounter as much outside of the region. I have found it pretty easy to be discrete, while still connecting with people in different ways along the way. I even managed to keep kosher by claiming that I was vegetarian. Being Jewish has been pretty much a non-issue for me in the Middle East. Being a woman has been much trickier, especially in Egypt.
My parents also do not like the fact that I travel around in Arab countries, but they have gotten used to it. My mom was comforted by the fact that the Syrian government recently gave a permit for Dr. Gill Stein from UChicago to dig a really important site, since it seemed to show that either the Syrians really were incapable of picking up on western Jewish names, or they really didn't care. I plan to make my career digging in Islamic and Arab countries, so I clearly like the region. As for classifying danger levels for different Arab countries, basically, the ones that have the biggest problems with Israel and/or Jews are the least able to recognize Jews when they meet one. The countries/places where they are more likely to tell that you are Jewish, are able to do so because there are enough Jewish tourists there to develop a more 'realistic' stereotype.
Enjoy Egypt!!!!
----
i dont know ur parents and their hypersensivity (mine will get top marks in it) and even though i m 41 and traveleed over 80 countries and have survived terrorist areas and ware zones but my parents take their job very seriously as parents, god bless them. they are retired and have enough time to do a theis on wher i go for my well being....and generally know more (than CIA or EIU would gather in short time). they always believe in megadeth song - so far so good so what....?? and surprinsly thats the only thing we agree in life....so i generally dont tell them when i go to a difficult or sensitive place...but tell them on return...however..i do leave my whereabouts and contacts to one or two close friends who dont loose their marbles if i m in trouble...
u seem to have traveled well and with so many CS friends and dozens of references...i m sure u will survive well anywhere.....unless u want to make a policital speech, discuss religion, wear something so obvious (as susannah mentiond a david or similar), cant hold ur drinks and then u generally wont remember what u said later or u get provokated on drop of a hat to discuss ur convictions about such issues....think twice .....it may not be life threatening but surely wont be too pleasent or desirable...i once offered by a freind in finland an isreali white wine (wine came from golan heights) and when i mentioned this to an arab freind, the disussion moved from wine to golan heights and policitcs
well there are many jews not only as tourist, but as residents in arab countries as well. we have in UAE, there are jews in yeman but obviously if u are in minority (for that matter of any religsion race colour anywhere in the world) it best to watch ur back...but be urself...
read enough about the region and its history to know what could be sensitive...keep track of news of whats going on politically in the region on daily basis as the day there is a skirmish between isreal and its neighbours, that day may not be very calm ....and u may be at a wrong place at wrong time....such as if u were a arab in united states on 12th sept 2001 or from basque region in madrid the day there was a bomb blast or between a pakistani and indian the day there is a skirmish on LOC...
enough said....quite hopeful that u will enjoy it , i had some great experienves in iran, turkey, syria, lebanon, jordon and gulf, pakistan as tourist, i m neither muslim or christian and can write wonderful stories about my so postive experience. however, I lived and worked in egypt and the only relevent issue i can recall from my persoanl experience is when i wanted to cross suez enroute to sinai region in late 2003, i was stopped by the guard as he thought i was a yehudi...when he saw my passport and realised i was not i was let go...i was told i looked like one perhaps on that day....and did not know what happened in sinai region (google it u will know)...
enjoy ur journey.....and we wait to hear ur intereestig and encouraging stories..
----
People in the street were in general friendly. All were OK, except only ONE of the early teenage kids, who threw a stone on me. (But one must realize this is what they grew up with in Palestine - throw stones on Izraelis, which was almost exclusively only soldiers, what they saw in this village).
The Israeli guy who drove me there goes there regularly and said his only problem are the Israeli army.
BUT, an Israeli in Palestine SHOULD be prepared for some aggressivity, probably, but I met only some Israelis who go there regularly and those had no bad comments.
When I was in Jordan, a shop-seller told me that he often guesses which visitors are Israelis though they pretend not to be. (Perhaps from their Arabic) And he said, that he made a few friends among the Israeli visitors. And his parents were from Palestine!
He said (literally) "I hate the Israeli king, not the people" (well his country is ruled by king, so .. :-)
JEW IS NOT AN ISRAELI!!!
Also not to us Europeans. But Israelis (as influenced by their propaganda) are kind of taking themselves as representatives of all Jews when interpreting every anti-Israeli stance as antisemitism.
(Recently I saw a great documentary by an Israeli author, who mapped antisemitism in the world and saw that it is really good business, e.g., for one institution in US who works against antisemitism and interpets everything as that)
On the other hand, there ARE people in the Muslim countries, who hate West as such, no matter if you are a Jew.
But MOST people, I believe, are rather keen on showing they are not connected with terrorism. (We should realize it is West which is having GENERAL islamophobia, just as it had its anti-Jewish sentiments and fears hundred years ago!! I think hatred towards West is a feature of MINORITY of Muslims, on the other hand)
See, in Kosovo the Muslims were telling my Israeli friends
that they feel with them, since they have similar (hi-)story of their state!
Anyway, I suggest, you post this message in Israel group asking answer ONLY from those who DID travel in Arab countries. (And remember that troubles they may mention could mostly be not connected with you as a non-Israeli)
I am also curious in this subject.
When I planned to visit Syria and suggested I would pretend to be an Israeli, an Arab I was mailing with recommended me not to do so ....
And I was not allowed to Syria, but perhaps I would have listened to him :-)
----
I thought I might as well add a comment in case it helps. I am Jewish and travelled in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey for almost 3 months in the fall 2009, and I have also travelled on a separate trip to Morocco. My last name is not a common Jewish name, but it did come up on many occasions when the topic of religion came up with people I encountered. Based on prior advice from Arab friends in Canada, I was cautious about who I told, but my experience was that it was never of issue of contention and certainly not at all an issue of hostility. Very much to the contrary. Based on their lived experience, people I talked to certainly had a lot of strong feelings about Israel, but separated being Jewish from being Israeli or often more specifically from being a Zionist. From the people I met it was very clear that this was a political issue to them. It is obviously based on your own feelings of comfort how much about yourself you want to discuss or disclose. There were Jewish communities in all these countries, and I had locals and couchsurfers in several cities take me to the old Jewish quarters… which were very well maintained and quite interesting. My trip was really wonderful, and I really found that preconceptions of the region from its portrayal in North America had little relevance to my actual experience there. I met many amazing people through the couchsurfing community and hopefully you will be able to connect with a lot of them while travelling. You are welcome to contact me if you have other questions. Have a great trip!
----
I am French ( jewish background, not practising so much) but recently moved to ISrael.
My name is really French though as my father is christian catholic born and then converted.
I think the majority of the problems are more political than religious, actually muslim countries respect very much the dedication someone has on a specific religion , whatever this religion is.
So, yes, the problem is mainly political, and so for this reason you will not have problems coming, as a jew, to these arab countries.
You will have more problems, I guess, coming as an israeli. Don't talk about politics, buy a nice carpet, take nice pictures of the pyramids and ride the back of a camel, but don't talk politics ;)
----
It'snot a big deal :D as long as you don't stick a paper of your forehead saying I am an Israeli, **** Arabs,lol
----
I also am Jewish and lived in the Middle East region for a year. I first came to Palestine, Nablus to work and then travelled around the West Bank and then Israel. Then I went to Jordon and now am in the UAE. I have to pretty much agree with the other Jewish women who responded to your post. My parents were very concerned about me having 3 strikes against me coming here: American, Jewish, and Female. But I can say so far (Ishallah! :) that I have had all positive experiences. Also the key for me was my conservative dress. People even thought I was a Palestinian or of Arab decent--Lebanon when in Paletine or elsewhere. That purely means that they do not recognize or know what a Jew looks like. Whenever the topic of religin came up, I did skirt the issue and just tell them that I am spiritual. I am not so sensitve to keep it secret b/c was not raised religious and I am open to all cutlures and religions.
The most important thing is not to broadcast your religion and do NOT talk politics. Just agree and listen to the other side which will most likely be the Arab position--valid and important view. There are so many steroetypes and sound byte style news in the world. So this is a unique opportunity to really see, understand and experience the other side that mainstream or at least US mainstream media does not show. I have respect for all people regardless of their culture and religion. I remain neutral with speaking with anyone not from my home country of the USA. I hope that you relish this opportunity so you can also spread forth the notion of how wonderful, friendly the people are here in the Middle East. Just dress conservatively and you will blend in too.
Bon Voyage!
----
Well
i'm from Syria..
as my opinion i think it isn't a problem .. you are a guest anyway.. and we always welcome our gestes..loool
i think it's saf,, don't worry..
by the way you don't have to say to eaveryone you are a jewish .. just take it easy..
good luck
----
28 April 2010
Listening to (and Saving) the World’s Languages
April 28, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/29/nyregion/29lost.html?ref=global-home
By SAM ROBERTS
The chances of overhearing a conversation in Vlashki, a variant of Istro-Romanian, are greater in Queens than in the remote mountain villages in Croatia that immigrants now living in New York left years ago.
At a Roman Catholic Church in the Morrisania section of the Bronx, Mass is said once a month in Garifuna, an Arawakan language that originated with descendants of African slaves shipwrecked near St. Vincent in the Caribbean and later exiled to Central America. Today, Garifuna is virtually as common in the Bronx and in Brooklyn as in Honduras and Belize.
And Rego Park, Queens, is home to Husni Husain, who, as far he knows, is the only person in New York who speaks Mamuju, the Austronesian language he learned growing up in the Indonesian province of West Sulawesi. Mr. Husain, 67, has nobody to talk to, not even his wife or children.
“My wife is from Java and my children were born in Jakarta — they don’t associate with the Mamuju,” he said. “I don’t read books in Mamuju. They don’t publish any. I only speak Mamuju when I go back or when I talk to my brother on the telephone.”
These are not just some of the languages that make New York the most linguistically diverse city in the world. They are part of a remarkable trove of endangered tongues that have taken root in New York — languages born in every corner of the globe and now more commonly heard in various corners of New York than anywhere else.
While there is no precise count, some experts believe New York is home to as many as 800 languages — far more than the 176 spoken by students in the city’s public schools or the 138 that residents of Queens, New York’s most diverse borough, listed on their 2000 Census forms.
“It is the capital of language density in the world,” said Daniel Kaufman, an adjunct professor of linguistics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. “We’re sitting in an endangerment hot spot where we are surrounded by languages that are not going to be around even in 20 or 30 years.”
In an effort to keep those voices alive, Professor Kaufman has helped start a project, the Endangered Language Alliance, to identify and record dying languages, many of which have no written alphabet, and encourage native speakers to teach them to compatriots.
“It’s hard to use a word like preserve with a language,” said Robert Holman, who teaches at Columbia and New York University and is working with Professor Kaufman on the alliance. “It’s not like putting jelly in a jar. A language is used. Language is consciousness. Everybody wants to speak English, but those lullabies that allow you to go to sleep at night and dream — that’s what we’re talking about.”
With national languages and English encroaching on the linguistic isolation of remote islands and villages, New York has become a Babel in reverse — a magnet for immigrants and their languages.
New York is such a rich laboratory for languages on the decline that the City University Graduate Center is organizing an endangered languages program. “The quickening pace of language endangerment and extinction is viewed by many linguists as a direct consequence of globalization, said Juliette Blevins, a distinguished linguist hired by City University to start the program.
In addition to dozens of Native American languages, vulnerable foreign languages that researchers say are spoken in New York include Aramaic, Chaldic and Mandaic from the Semitic family; Bukhari (a Bukharian Jewish language, which has more speakers in Queens than in Uzbekistan or Tajikistan), Chamorro (from the Mariana Islands), Irish Gaelic, Kashubian (from Poland), indigenous Mexican languages, Pennsylvania Dutch, Rhaeto-Romanic (spoken in Switzerland) and Romany (from the Balkans) and Yiddish.
Researchers plan to canvass a tiny Afghan neighborhood in Flushing, Queens, for Ormuri, which is believed to be spoken by a small number of people in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The Endangered Language Alliance will apply field techniques usually employed in exotic and remote foreign locales as it starts its research in the city’s vibrant ethnic enclaves.
“Nobody had gone from area to area looking for endangered languages in New York City spoken by immigrant populations,” Professor Kaufman said.
The United Nations keeps an atlas of languages facing extinction, and U.N. experts as well as linguists generally agree that a language will probably disappear in a generation or two when the population of native speakers is both too small and in decline. Language attrition has also been hastened by war, ethnic cleansing and compulsory schooling in a national tongue.
Over the decades in the secluded northeastern Istrian Peninsula along the Adriatic Sea, Croatian began to replace the language spoken by what is described as Europe’s smallest surviving ethnic group. But after Istrians began immigrating to Queens, many to escape grinding poverty, they largely abandoned Croatian and returned to speaking Vlashki.
“Whole villages were emptied,” said Valnea Smilovic, 59, who came to the United States in the 1960s with her parents and her brother and sister. “Most of us are here now in this country.”
Mrs. Smilovic still speaks in Vlashki with her 92-year-old mother, who knows little English, as well as her siblings. “Not too much, though,” Mrs. Smilovic said, because her husband only speaks Croatian and her son, who was born in America speaks English and a smattering of Croatian.
“Do I worry that our culture is getting lost?” Mrs. Smilovic asked. “As I get older, I’m thinking more about stuff like that. Most of the older people die away and the language dies with them.”
Several years ago, one of her cousins, Zvjezdana Vrzic, an Istrian-born adjunct professor of linguistics at New York University, organized a meeting in Queens about preserving Vlashki. She was stunned by the turnout of about 100 people.
“A language reflects a singular nature of a people speaking it,” said Professor Vrzic, who recently published an audio Vlashki phrasebook and is working on an online Vlashki-Croatian-English dictionary.
Istro-Romanian is classified by Unesco as severely endangered, and Professor Vrzic said she believed the several hundred native speakers who live in Queens outnumber those in Istria. “Nobody tried to teach it to me,” she said. “It was not thought of as something valuable, something you wanted to carry on to another generation.”
A few fading foreign languages have also found niches around New York and the country. In northern New Jersey, Neo-Aramaic, rooted in the language of Jesus and the Talmud, is still spoken by Syrian immigrants and is taught at Syriac Orthodox churches in Paramus and Teaneck.
The Rev. Eli Shabo speaks Neo-Aramaic at home and his children do, too, but only “because I’m their teacher.”
Will their children carry on the language? “If they marry another person of Syriac background, they may,” Father Shabo said. “If they marry an American, I’d say no.”
And in Long Island, researchers have found several people fluent in Mandaic, a Persian variation of Aramaic spoken by a few hundred people around the world. One of them, Dakhil Shooshtary, a 76-year-old retired jeweler who settled on Long Island from Iran 45 years ago, is compiling a Mandaic dictionary.
For Professor Kaufman, of the Graduate Center, the quest for speakers of disappearing languages has sometimes involved serendipity. After making a fruitless trip in 2006 to Indonesia to find speakers of Mumuju, he attended a family wedding two years ago in Queens, and Mr. Husain happened to be sitting next to him. Wasting no time, he has videotaped Mr. Husain speaking in his native tongue.
“This is maybe the first time that anyone has recorded a video of the language being spoken,” Professor Kaufman said, who founded a Manhattan research center, the Urban Field Station for Linguistic Research, two years ago.
He has also recruited Daowd I. Salih, a 45-year-old refugee from Darfur who lives in New Jersey and is a personal care assistant at a home for the elderly, to teach Massalit, a tribal language, to a linguistic class at New York University. They are meticulously creating a Massalit lexicography to codify grammar, definitions and pronunciations.
“Language is identity,” said Mr. Salih, who has been in the United States for a decade. “So many African tribes in Darfur lost their languages. This is the land of opportunity, so these students can help us write this language instead of losing it.”
Speakers of Garifuna, which is being displaced in Central America by Spanish and English, are striving to keep it alive in their New York neighborhoods. Regular classes have sprouted at the Yurumein House Cultural Center in the Bronx, and also in Brooklyn, where James Lovell, a public school music teacher, leads a small Garifuna class at the Biko Transformation Center in East Bushwick.
Mr. Lovell, who came to New York from Belize in 1990, said his oldest children, 21-year-old twin boys, do not speak Garifuna. “They can get along speaking Spanish or English, so there’s no need to as far as they’re concerned,” he said, adding that many compatriots feel “they will get nowhere with their Garifuna culture, so they decide to assimilate.”
But as he witnessed his language fading among his friends and his family, Mr. Lovell decided to expose his younger children to their native culture. Mostly through simple bilingual songs that he accompanies with gusto on his guitar, he is teaching his two younger daughters, Jamie, 11, and Jazelle, 7, and their friends.
“Whenever they leave the house or go to school, they’re speaking English,” Mr. Lovell said. “Here, I teach them their history, Garifuna history. I teach them the songs, and through the songs, I explain to them what it’s saying. It’s going to give them a sense of self, to know themselves. The fact that they’re speaking the language is empowerment in itself.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/29/nyregion/29lost.html?ref=global-home
By SAM ROBERTS
The chances of overhearing a conversation in Vlashki, a variant of Istro-Romanian, are greater in Queens than in the remote mountain villages in Croatia that immigrants now living in New York left years ago.
At a Roman Catholic Church in the Morrisania section of the Bronx, Mass is said once a month in Garifuna, an Arawakan language that originated with descendants of African slaves shipwrecked near St. Vincent in the Caribbean and later exiled to Central America. Today, Garifuna is virtually as common in the Bronx and in Brooklyn as in Honduras and Belize.
And Rego Park, Queens, is home to Husni Husain, who, as far he knows, is the only person in New York who speaks Mamuju, the Austronesian language he learned growing up in the Indonesian province of West Sulawesi. Mr. Husain, 67, has nobody to talk to, not even his wife or children.
“My wife is from Java and my children were born in Jakarta — they don’t associate with the Mamuju,” he said. “I don’t read books in Mamuju. They don’t publish any. I only speak Mamuju when I go back or when I talk to my brother on the telephone.”
These are not just some of the languages that make New York the most linguistically diverse city in the world. They are part of a remarkable trove of endangered tongues that have taken root in New York — languages born in every corner of the globe and now more commonly heard in various corners of New York than anywhere else.
While there is no precise count, some experts believe New York is home to as many as 800 languages — far more than the 176 spoken by students in the city’s public schools or the 138 that residents of Queens, New York’s most diverse borough, listed on their 2000 Census forms.
“It is the capital of language density in the world,” said Daniel Kaufman, an adjunct professor of linguistics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. “We’re sitting in an endangerment hot spot where we are surrounded by languages that are not going to be around even in 20 or 30 years.”
In an effort to keep those voices alive, Professor Kaufman has helped start a project, the Endangered Language Alliance, to identify and record dying languages, many of which have no written alphabet, and encourage native speakers to teach them to compatriots.
“It’s hard to use a word like preserve with a language,” said Robert Holman, who teaches at Columbia and New York University and is working with Professor Kaufman on the alliance. “It’s not like putting jelly in a jar. A language is used. Language is consciousness. Everybody wants to speak English, but those lullabies that allow you to go to sleep at night and dream — that’s what we’re talking about.”
With national languages and English encroaching on the linguistic isolation of remote islands and villages, New York has become a Babel in reverse — a magnet for immigrants and their languages.
New York is such a rich laboratory for languages on the decline that the City University Graduate Center is organizing an endangered languages program. “The quickening pace of language endangerment and extinction is viewed by many linguists as a direct consequence of globalization, said Juliette Blevins, a distinguished linguist hired by City University to start the program.
In addition to dozens of Native American languages, vulnerable foreign languages that researchers say are spoken in New York include Aramaic, Chaldic and Mandaic from the Semitic family; Bukhari (a Bukharian Jewish language, which has more speakers in Queens than in Uzbekistan or Tajikistan), Chamorro (from the Mariana Islands), Irish Gaelic, Kashubian (from Poland), indigenous Mexican languages, Pennsylvania Dutch, Rhaeto-Romanic (spoken in Switzerland) and Romany (from the Balkans) and Yiddish.
Researchers plan to canvass a tiny Afghan neighborhood in Flushing, Queens, for Ormuri, which is believed to be spoken by a small number of people in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The Endangered Language Alliance will apply field techniques usually employed in exotic and remote foreign locales as it starts its research in the city’s vibrant ethnic enclaves.
“Nobody had gone from area to area looking for endangered languages in New York City spoken by immigrant populations,” Professor Kaufman said.
The United Nations keeps an atlas of languages facing extinction, and U.N. experts as well as linguists generally agree that a language will probably disappear in a generation or two when the population of native speakers is both too small and in decline. Language attrition has also been hastened by war, ethnic cleansing and compulsory schooling in a national tongue.
Over the decades in the secluded northeastern Istrian Peninsula along the Adriatic Sea, Croatian began to replace the language spoken by what is described as Europe’s smallest surviving ethnic group. But after Istrians began immigrating to Queens, many to escape grinding poverty, they largely abandoned Croatian and returned to speaking Vlashki.
“Whole villages were emptied,” said Valnea Smilovic, 59, who came to the United States in the 1960s with her parents and her brother and sister. “Most of us are here now in this country.”
Mrs. Smilovic still speaks in Vlashki with her 92-year-old mother, who knows little English, as well as her siblings. “Not too much, though,” Mrs. Smilovic said, because her husband only speaks Croatian and her son, who was born in America speaks English and a smattering of Croatian.
“Do I worry that our culture is getting lost?” Mrs. Smilovic asked. “As I get older, I’m thinking more about stuff like that. Most of the older people die away and the language dies with them.”
Several years ago, one of her cousins, Zvjezdana Vrzic, an Istrian-born adjunct professor of linguistics at New York University, organized a meeting in Queens about preserving Vlashki. She was stunned by the turnout of about 100 people.
“A language reflects a singular nature of a people speaking it,” said Professor Vrzic, who recently published an audio Vlashki phrasebook and is working on an online Vlashki-Croatian-English dictionary.
Istro-Romanian is classified by Unesco as severely endangered, and Professor Vrzic said she believed the several hundred native speakers who live in Queens outnumber those in Istria. “Nobody tried to teach it to me,” she said. “It was not thought of as something valuable, something you wanted to carry on to another generation.”
A few fading foreign languages have also found niches around New York and the country. In northern New Jersey, Neo-Aramaic, rooted in the language of Jesus and the Talmud, is still spoken by Syrian immigrants and is taught at Syriac Orthodox churches in Paramus and Teaneck.
The Rev. Eli Shabo speaks Neo-Aramaic at home and his children do, too, but only “because I’m their teacher.”
Will their children carry on the language? “If they marry another person of Syriac background, they may,” Father Shabo said. “If they marry an American, I’d say no.”
And in Long Island, researchers have found several people fluent in Mandaic, a Persian variation of Aramaic spoken by a few hundred people around the world. One of them, Dakhil Shooshtary, a 76-year-old retired jeweler who settled on Long Island from Iran 45 years ago, is compiling a Mandaic dictionary.
For Professor Kaufman, of the Graduate Center, the quest for speakers of disappearing languages has sometimes involved serendipity. After making a fruitless trip in 2006 to Indonesia to find speakers of Mumuju, he attended a family wedding two years ago in Queens, and Mr. Husain happened to be sitting next to him. Wasting no time, he has videotaped Mr. Husain speaking in his native tongue.
“This is maybe the first time that anyone has recorded a video of the language being spoken,” Professor Kaufman said, who founded a Manhattan research center, the Urban Field Station for Linguistic Research, two years ago.
He has also recruited Daowd I. Salih, a 45-year-old refugee from Darfur who lives in New Jersey and is a personal care assistant at a home for the elderly, to teach Massalit, a tribal language, to a linguistic class at New York University. They are meticulously creating a Massalit lexicography to codify grammar, definitions and pronunciations.
“Language is identity,” said Mr. Salih, who has been in the United States for a decade. “So many African tribes in Darfur lost their languages. This is the land of opportunity, so these students can help us write this language instead of losing it.”
Speakers of Garifuna, which is being displaced in Central America by Spanish and English, are striving to keep it alive in their New York neighborhoods. Regular classes have sprouted at the Yurumein House Cultural Center in the Bronx, and also in Brooklyn, where James Lovell, a public school music teacher, leads a small Garifuna class at the Biko Transformation Center in East Bushwick.
Mr. Lovell, who came to New York from Belize in 1990, said his oldest children, 21-year-old twin boys, do not speak Garifuna. “They can get along speaking Spanish or English, so there’s no need to as far as they’re concerned,” he said, adding that many compatriots feel “they will get nowhere with their Garifuna culture, so they decide to assimilate.”
But as he witnessed his language fading among his friends and his family, Mr. Lovell decided to expose his younger children to their native culture. Mostly through simple bilingual songs that he accompanies with gusto on his guitar, he is teaching his two younger daughters, Jamie, 11, and Jazelle, 7, and their friends.
“Whenever they leave the house or go to school, they’re speaking English,” Mr. Lovell said. “Here, I teach them their history, Garifuna history. I teach them the songs, and through the songs, I explain to them what it’s saying. It’s going to give them a sense of self, to know themselves. The fact that they’re speaking the language is empowerment in itself.”
05 March 2010
105,000 Dots for Iraq, and Counting
Check out the EFA for more information on this exhibit, and don't forget to watch the livefeed on March 8th!
March 4, 2010, 10:08 am
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/15000-dots-for-iraq-and-counting/
By ALI ADEEB
Warzer Jaff Wafaa Bilal, an Iraqi-American artist, as his back was being tattooed. On Monday, Mr. Bilal will remove his shirt and subject his back to 24 hours of nonstop tattooing.
Updated, 3:08 p.m. | An earlier version of this post misstated the number of ink dots that will represent Iraqi casualties. It is 100,000, not 10,000, for a total of 105,000 dots. The start time of the performance was also misstated — it is 8 p.m., not 8 a.m.
In the annals of performance art, this may be one of the more masochistic acts. On March 8, Wafaa Bilal, an Iraqi-American artist, will remove his shirt and subject his back to 24 hours of nonstop tattooing.
The plan calls for a tattoo artist to burn 105,000 dots into his skin in the shape of Iraq. Five thousand will be done with red ink, to represent American casualties in the Iraq War. The remainder, representing unidentified and forgotten Iraqi victims, will be done with ink that is visible only under ultraviolet light.
The performance, called “… and Counting,” has an ambitious philanthropic goal: Mr. Bilal hopes to raise $1 per dot in support of Rally For Iraq, a new nonprofit that plans to bring Iraqi orphans to the United States as students.
“This is the least I can do to try to help my country and my people. “ said Mr. Bilal, assistant arts professor teaching photography and imaging at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. “The pain that I will be going through is nothing compared to the suffering of my people. I am afraid that the American public is forgetting about them, and I want to bring attention to the situation in Iraq.”
Mr. Bilal, who left Iraq after the Gulf War in 1991 and has lived in the United States since 1992, has been an outspoken opponent of the Iraq War since it began in 2003.
His antipathy deepened in 2004 when an American missile attack at a checkpoint killed his brother.
The tattoo project is not the first time he has merged his politics and art. In 2007, in a performance titled “Shoot an Iraqi,” he spent a month living in a room of a Chicago art gallery and being shot at by a paintball gun. The gun was connected to an Internet site through which viewers could command the trigger. He turned the event into a book, “Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun.” That year, Mr. Bilal was named the artist of the year by The Chicago Tribune.
The following year, in a project called “Dog or Iraqi,” he allowed the audience to decide whether he or a dog should be subjected to the torture technique called waterboarding, in which water is poured over a person’s face and into his mouth and nose, causing a drowning sensation. He was chosen over the dog and was waterboarded.
He said he believed that artists should be more than educators; they should be provocateurs.
“The best we can hope for is to shock the audience and create engagement,” Mr. Bilal said. “It is not always about education all the time, but agitation also.”
“… And Counting” is the first fund-raising event for Rally for Iraq, which was founded by a group of Iraqi-Americans. The organization intends to raise enough money to support an initial group of five students.
“We believe that educating the new generation will be the best way to help our country build its future,” said Hussein Al-Baya, one of the organization’s co-directors.
Mr. Bilal’s performance will begin at 8 p.m. March 8 at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts and will be streamed on the foundation’s Web site using two cameras, one showing Mr. Bilal’s back and the other showing the audience. Throughout the event, a litany of names of people killed in the war will be read aloud. Mr. Bilal is to fly to San Francisco the day after the performance to exhibit his artwork.
In preparation for the event, he has already inked the names of 16 Iraqi cities on his back.
Mr. Bilal visited his family in Iraq last July. He felt that he needed to get to know his sisters and brothers again. The war, he said, had stolen their hope.
“Some people say that when you cross the ocean it doesn’t matter anymore, but we Iraqis are always nostalgic,” he said. “It would be a great achievement if my work can help bring some hope to Iraqis for a better future.”
Ali Adeeb is a former intern and Baghdad newsroom manager for The New York Times. Kirk Semple contributed reporting.
March 4, 2010, 10:08 am
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/15000-dots-for-iraq-and-counting/
By ALI ADEEB
Warzer Jaff Wafaa Bilal, an Iraqi-American artist, as his back was being tattooed. On Monday, Mr. Bilal will remove his shirt and subject his back to 24 hours of nonstop tattooing.
Updated, 3:08 p.m. | An earlier version of this post misstated the number of ink dots that will represent Iraqi casualties. It is 100,000, not 10,000, for a total of 105,000 dots. The start time of the performance was also misstated — it is 8 p.m., not 8 a.m.
In the annals of performance art, this may be one of the more masochistic acts. On March 8, Wafaa Bilal, an Iraqi-American artist, will remove his shirt and subject his back to 24 hours of nonstop tattooing.
The plan calls for a tattoo artist to burn 105,000 dots into his skin in the shape of Iraq. Five thousand will be done with red ink, to represent American casualties in the Iraq War. The remainder, representing unidentified and forgotten Iraqi victims, will be done with ink that is visible only under ultraviolet light.
The performance, called “… and Counting,” has an ambitious philanthropic goal: Mr. Bilal hopes to raise $1 per dot in support of Rally For Iraq, a new nonprofit that plans to bring Iraqi orphans to the United States as students.
“This is the least I can do to try to help my country and my people. “ said Mr. Bilal, assistant arts professor teaching photography and imaging at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. “The pain that I will be going through is nothing compared to the suffering of my people. I am afraid that the American public is forgetting about them, and I want to bring attention to the situation in Iraq.”
Mr. Bilal, who left Iraq after the Gulf War in 1991 and has lived in the United States since 1992, has been an outspoken opponent of the Iraq War since it began in 2003.
His antipathy deepened in 2004 when an American missile attack at a checkpoint killed his brother.
The tattoo project is not the first time he has merged his politics and art. In 2007, in a performance titled “Shoot an Iraqi,” he spent a month living in a room of a Chicago art gallery and being shot at by a paintball gun. The gun was connected to an Internet site through which viewers could command the trigger. He turned the event into a book, “Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun.” That year, Mr. Bilal was named the artist of the year by The Chicago Tribune.
The following year, in a project called “Dog or Iraqi,” he allowed the audience to decide whether he or a dog should be subjected to the torture technique called waterboarding, in which water is poured over a person’s face and into his mouth and nose, causing a drowning sensation. He was chosen over the dog and was waterboarded.
He said he believed that artists should be more than educators; they should be provocateurs.
“The best we can hope for is to shock the audience and create engagement,” Mr. Bilal said. “It is not always about education all the time, but agitation also.”
“… And Counting” is the first fund-raising event for Rally for Iraq, which was founded by a group of Iraqi-Americans. The organization intends to raise enough money to support an initial group of five students.
“We believe that educating the new generation will be the best way to help our country build its future,” said Hussein Al-Baya, one of the organization’s co-directors.
Mr. Bilal’s performance will begin at 8 p.m. March 8 at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts and will be streamed on the foundation’s Web site using two cameras, one showing Mr. Bilal’s back and the other showing the audience. Throughout the event, a litany of names of people killed in the war will be read aloud. Mr. Bilal is to fly to San Francisco the day after the performance to exhibit his artwork.
In preparation for the event, he has already inked the names of 16 Iraqi cities on his back.
Mr. Bilal visited his family in Iraq last July. He felt that he needed to get to know his sisters and brothers again. The war, he said, had stolen their hope.
“Some people say that when you cross the ocean it doesn’t matter anymore, but we Iraqis are always nostalgic,” he said. “It would be a great achievement if my work can help bring some hope to Iraqis for a better future.”
Ali Adeeb is a former intern and Baghdad newsroom manager for The New York Times. Kirk Semple contributed reporting.
17 January 2010
When Fear Turns Graphic
January 17, 2010
Abroad
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
ZURICH
SWITZERLAND stunned many Europeans, including not a few Swiss, when near the end of last year the country, by referendum, banned the building of minarets. Much predictable tut-tutting ensued about Swiss xenophobia, even though surveys showed similar plebiscites would get pretty much the same results elsewhere.
A poster was widely cited as having galvanized votes for the Swiss measure but was also blamed for exacerbating hostility toward immigrants and instigating a media and legal circus. “We make posters, the other side goes to the judge,” is how Alexander Segert put it when we met here the other day. “I love it when they do that.”
He designed the poster in question. As manager of Goal, the public relations firm for the Swiss People’s Party, Mr. Segert has overseen various campaign posters. This one, for the referendum, used minarets rising from the Swiss flag like missiles (“mushrooms,” Mr. Segert demurred, implausibly). Beside the missiles a woman glowers from inside a niqab. “Stop” is written below in big, black letters.
The obvious message: Minarets lead to Sharia law. Never mind that there are only four minarets in Switzerland to begin with, and that Muslims, some 340,000 of them, or 4 percent of the population, mostly from the Balkans and Turkey, have never been notably zealous.
In this heavily immigrant country the ultranationalist Swiss People’s Party is now the leading political party, aided at the polls by incidents like the New Year’s Day attack by a Somali Muslim immigrant in Denmark on Kurt Westergaard, the artist whose caricature of the Prophet Mohammad with a bomb in his turban was among the cartoons published in 2005 in a Danish newspaper that provoked violent protests around the world. All across Europe populist parties are growing, capitalizing, to an extent unknown across the Atlantic, on a very old-fashioned brand of propaganda art. The dominance in America today of the 24-hour cable news networks and the Internet, the sheer size of the country, the basic conventions of public discourse, not to mention that the only two major parties have, or at least feign having, a desire to court the political center, all tend to mitigate against the sort of propaganda that one can now find in Europe.
It manages, if often just barely, to skirt racism laws. In Italy, where attacks on immigrant workers in the Calabrian town of Rosarno this month incited the country’s worst riots in years, the Lega Nord, part of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s ruling coalition, has circulated various anti-immigrant posters. One, mimicked by Jean-Marie Le Pen’s far-right National Front Party in France, showed an American Indian to make the point that immigrants will soon turn Europeans into embattled minorities stuck on reservations.
The National Front also distributed a poster of Charles de Gaulle alongside a remark he once made (in the context of the Algerian occupation) to suggest that true Gaullists today would vote for Le Pen. “It is good that there are yellow Frenchmen and black Frenchmen and brown Frenchmen,” de Gaulle is quoted as saying. “They prove that France is open to all races,” adding, “on the condition that they remain a small minority. Otherwise, France will no longer be France.”
In Austria the far-right Freedom Party has come up with a poster bearing the slangy slogan: “Daham Statt Islam, Wir Für Euch” (roughly, Home Instead of Islam, or Islam Go Home, We Are for You). And Britain’s neo-Nazi National Party, which, to the great embarrassment of the country’s political leaders, lately won two seats on the European Parliament, swiped the minaret poster by switching the Swiss flag for a Union Jack. Mr. Segert and the Swiss People’s Party weren’t too pleased, populists being one thing, neo-Nazis, another.
It may be hard for Americans to grasp the role these images can play here. In subways and on the streets in America, posters and billboards are eye-catching if sexy or stylish, like Calvin Klein’s advertisements, or if modish and outrageous, like Benetton’s, but they’re basically background noise. By contrast, they’re treated more seriously here, as news, at least when they’re political Molotov cocktails. Cheap to produce compared with television commercials and easy to spread in small countries like Switzerland, where referendums are catnip to populists, they have the capacity to rise above the general noise.
Mr. Segert is the de facto reigning minister of such propaganda. He has used red rats to caricature Swiss leftists. He came up with an image of black and brown hands riffling through a stack of Swiss passports. And (until the minaret poster, this one caused the biggest kerfuffle) he cooked up the idea of three fluffy white sheep kicking a black sheep off the Swiss flag. “For More Security” was the accompanying slogan.
Cries of racism, occasional legal proceedings — none of which ended up in fines against him, Mr. Segert hastens to point out — and even bans on their display in left-leaning cities like Basel and Geneva, have only increased the reproduction of the images. All of which, as Mr. Segert said, suits him and his bosses just fine.
“If what we do stirs up controversy, then we’ve already won the election,” he told me, a thought echoed when I met with Marc Bühlmann, a political scientist here. “All these right-wing populist parties have learned to get TV and newspapers to show these posters over and over with the excuse of asking, ‘Should we allow such images?’ ” Mr. Bühlmann said. “The aim in making the posters is to be as racist as possible, so then when critics complain, the populists can say elites don’t want ordinary people to know the truth. And the media fall for it every time.”
Mr. Segert wouldn’t disagree. Crude, cleverly exploiting the ancient power of a still picture over moving ones to fix an image in a viewer’s mind, the posters share a calculated homeliness and violence that is in its own way artful. I showed a variety of them to Jacques Séguéla, chief creative officer for France’s second-largest advertising agency, who ran François Mitterrand’s presidential campaign.
“Fifty percent Stalin, 50 percent Norman Rockwell,” was his assessment. “The images are aggressive, not funny, without charm, straight to the point, clear and” — he was speaking aesthetically here — “in no way radical. They’re the opposite of most advertising today. They aim just at their target audience.”
And that’s all they need to do. Marcus Stricker, creative director of Netprinz, which handles advertising for Switzerland’s Free Democratic Party, a competitor of Mr. Segert’s, credits the minaret poster with employing a bygone graphic style that conjures up “good old Switzerland, when everything was safe, clean and growing.” Like Mr. Bühlmann he blames the news media for providing, as he put it, “effectively millions of dollars in free advertising.” It went without saying that my own interest in the poster brouhaha multiplied the problem.
He was nevertheless reluctant to give Mr. Segert too much credit for swinging the vote. Local issues did more to sway public opinion, he said. We met in a crowded bar above the Zurich train station, and before parting he unfurled a poster by a human rights organization called the Society for Swiss Minorities, distributed by the Swiss Council of Religions, showing a mosque, a synagogue, two churches and a Buddhist temple beneath a broad, pale blue sky, with the slogan “Der Himmel über der Schweiz ist gross genug” (“the sky over Switzerland is big enough”) in discreet lettering across the top.
It was made to compete with Mr. Segert’s work. Two can play that game, Mr. Stricker wanted me to know. Except that the image, tasteful and vague, stressing elegance over incitement, actually suggested the opposite.
Mr. Segert knows why. A 46-year-old German (yes, an immigrant himself in Switzerland), he is the father of two adopted children from North Africa, although he declined to talk about his personal life. He was happy, on the other hand, to discuss work, which he volunteered he would gladly do for the Green Party or Social Democrats, if they hired him. “For me it’s an intellectual exercise,” he said, as if cynicism were a point of professional pride.
In the next room young, clean-cut associates brooded over drawing boards and computer screens. Clients must “do their homework,” Mr. Segert said, by way of explaining how a design evolves. “It sounds easy, but most political parties don’t know their own message.” That’s the problem for centrist and many left-leaning parties.
By contrast, “everyone knows what the Swiss People’s Party stands for,” he said. “It’s against the European Union, for neutrality, lower taxes, no illegal aliens. You can hate it or love it, but the message is clear.” That message must then be refined. “Maybe 80 to 90 percent of people are not interested in elections. So our job is to tell them: Be interested in what doesn’t interest you, make a decision about something you don’t care about, then act on it, vote. That’s a lot for a poster to accomplish. We’re successful because we know how to reduce information to the lowest level, so people respond without thinking.”
This was essential, he stressed: “The message must go straight to the stomach, not to the brain, and connect with specific emotions involving fear, health, money, safety. We can focus just on our target audience so we can speak in a special language and speak to a feeling these people already have. We can’t move anyone who doesn’t already have this feeling. In our case the target audience is low income, with little schooling. They have the same right to vote as people who support the Green Party and read 3 newspapers and 10 magazines.”
I asked whether special language applied to red rats, which can conjure up Nazi propaganda. Mr. Segert brushed off the comparison. As a public-relations man he has “no taboos,” he said. “We don’t begin by thinking what we can’t do. When I chose to show rats, I didn’t ask whether it’s politically correct. I couldn’t do my job if I did that. I only wanted to know whether it serves our purpose, and if we have a problem with the law. My party already deals with taboos like Islam and immigration, so our job is just to think about how to make the strongest image, then let the lawyers tell us whether it’s racist.”
He recounted the making of the minarets design. There were some early all-text trials, he recalled, which looked too wordy. One version showed missiles without the woman, another, the woman in a burqa, without eyes. “That was too impersonal,” Mr. Segert said. He and his colleagues, adding eyes, then debated what should be behind them. “Should they look sexy, not sexy?” he said. “To me the look we decided on is less aggressive than helpless.”
It can also be read the other way around. Mr. Segert added that, instead of the Swiss flag, the Matterhorn was tried, but the mix of minarets with the woman in a niqab and the mountain created confusion. Without the mountain, he said, the image, “could have been Istanbul or Dubai.”
“There was nothing wrong,” he continued, “nothing to disturb the view.”
But a flag solved that. “Minarets and the Swiss flag sent the message we wanted because they don’t fit together. A person looks and thinks, ‘This must be changed.’ ”
A certain person, anyway. The final poster, though heavy-handed, performs a complex task. The image of minarets beside the woman in the niqab stirs up a negative feeling among target voters. “No, I don’t want minarets because I will find myself living under Sharia law,” the viewer decides. But the referendum to ban minarets required a yes vote. “It’s always easier to do a campaign for a no vote,” Mr. Segert noted, “because people instinctively want to maintain the status quo. It’s what they already know. With a yes vote you need some positive symbol. But we had only this negative one, of minarets and Sharia.
“So we needed some bridge, some transition from no to yes.”
The designers experimented with the word “Verbieten,” meaning to forbid, but this turned out to look too complicated. The obvious solution, arrived at after a few false starts, was simply, “stop.”
The word performs a double role, emphasizing the initial message (stop minarets) then causing a viewer, when arriving at the word, mentally to stop, be free to switch gears and register “yes,” written just below “stop.” That is, vote yes.
“So there are three steps to the image,” Mr. Segert concluded. “Minarets lead to Sharia. No to minarets. Yes to the referendum.”
“It looks simple,” he said, staring at the finished image.
“But that’s the art of it.”
He smiled.
Abroad
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
ZURICH
SWITZERLAND stunned many Europeans, including not a few Swiss, when near the end of last year the country, by referendum, banned the building of minarets. Much predictable tut-tutting ensued about Swiss xenophobia, even though surveys showed similar plebiscites would get pretty much the same results elsewhere. A poster was widely cited as having galvanized votes for the Swiss measure but was also blamed for exacerbating hostility toward immigrants and instigating a media and legal circus. “We make posters, the other side goes to the judge,” is how Alexander Segert put it when we met here the other day. “I love it when they do that.”
He designed the poster in question. As manager of Goal, the public relations firm for the Swiss People’s Party, Mr. Segert has overseen various campaign posters. This one, for the referendum, used minarets rising from the Swiss flag like missiles (“mushrooms,” Mr. Segert demurred, implausibly). Beside the missiles a woman glowers from inside a niqab. “Stop” is written below in big, black letters.
The obvious message: Minarets lead to Sharia law. Never mind that there are only four minarets in Switzerland to begin with, and that Muslims, some 340,000 of them, or 4 percent of the population, mostly from the Balkans and Turkey, have never been notably zealous.
In this heavily immigrant country the ultranationalist Swiss People’s Party is now the leading political party, aided at the polls by incidents like the New Year’s Day attack by a Somali Muslim immigrant in Denmark on Kurt Westergaard, the artist whose caricature of the Prophet Mohammad with a bomb in his turban was among the cartoons published in 2005 in a Danish newspaper that provoked violent protests around the world. All across Europe populist parties are growing, capitalizing, to an extent unknown across the Atlantic, on a very old-fashioned brand of propaganda art. The dominance in America today of the 24-hour cable news networks and the Internet, the sheer size of the country, the basic conventions of public discourse, not to mention that the only two major parties have, or at least feign having, a desire to court the political center, all tend to mitigate against the sort of propaganda that one can now find in Europe.
It manages, if often just barely, to skirt racism laws. In Italy, where attacks on immigrant workers in the Calabrian town of Rosarno this month incited the country’s worst riots in years, the Lega Nord, part of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s ruling coalition, has circulated various anti-immigrant posters. One, mimicked by Jean-Marie Le Pen’s far-right National Front Party in France, showed an American Indian to make the point that immigrants will soon turn Europeans into embattled minorities stuck on reservations.
The National Front also distributed a poster of Charles de Gaulle alongside a remark he once made (in the context of the Algerian occupation) to suggest that true Gaullists today would vote for Le Pen. “It is good that there are yellow Frenchmen and black Frenchmen and brown Frenchmen,” de Gaulle is quoted as saying. “They prove that France is open to all races,” adding, “on the condition that they remain a small minority. Otherwise, France will no longer be France.”
In Austria the far-right Freedom Party has come up with a poster bearing the slangy slogan: “Daham Statt Islam, Wir Für Euch” (roughly, Home Instead of Islam, or Islam Go Home, We Are for You). And Britain’s neo-Nazi National Party, which, to the great embarrassment of the country’s political leaders, lately won two seats on the European Parliament, swiped the minaret poster by switching the Swiss flag for a Union Jack. Mr. Segert and the Swiss People’s Party weren’t too pleased, populists being one thing, neo-Nazis, another.
It may be hard for Americans to grasp the role these images can play here. In subways and on the streets in America, posters and billboards are eye-catching if sexy or stylish, like Calvin Klein’s advertisements, or if modish and outrageous, like Benetton’s, but they’re basically background noise. By contrast, they’re treated more seriously here, as news, at least when they’re political Molotov cocktails. Cheap to produce compared with television commercials and easy to spread in small countries like Switzerland, where referendums are catnip to populists, they have the capacity to rise above the general noise.
Mr. Segert is the de facto reigning minister of such propaganda. He has used red rats to caricature Swiss leftists. He came up with an image of black and brown hands riffling through a stack of Swiss passports. And (until the minaret poster, this one caused the biggest kerfuffle) he cooked up the idea of three fluffy white sheep kicking a black sheep off the Swiss flag. “For More Security” was the accompanying slogan.
Cries of racism, occasional legal proceedings — none of which ended up in fines against him, Mr. Segert hastens to point out — and even bans on their display in left-leaning cities like Basel and Geneva, have only increased the reproduction of the images. All of which, as Mr. Segert said, suits him and his bosses just fine.
“If what we do stirs up controversy, then we’ve already won the election,” he told me, a thought echoed when I met with Marc Bühlmann, a political scientist here. “All these right-wing populist parties have learned to get TV and newspapers to show these posters over and over with the excuse of asking, ‘Should we allow such images?’ ” Mr. Bühlmann said. “The aim in making the posters is to be as racist as possible, so then when critics complain, the populists can say elites don’t want ordinary people to know the truth. And the media fall for it every time.”
Mr. Segert wouldn’t disagree. Crude, cleverly exploiting the ancient power of a still picture over moving ones to fix an image in a viewer’s mind, the posters share a calculated homeliness and violence that is in its own way artful. I showed a variety of them to Jacques Séguéla, chief creative officer for France’s second-largest advertising agency, who ran François Mitterrand’s presidential campaign.
“Fifty percent Stalin, 50 percent Norman Rockwell,” was his assessment. “The images are aggressive, not funny, without charm, straight to the point, clear and” — he was speaking aesthetically here — “in no way radical. They’re the opposite of most advertising today. They aim just at their target audience.”
And that’s all they need to do. Marcus Stricker, creative director of Netprinz, which handles advertising for Switzerland’s Free Democratic Party, a competitor of Mr. Segert’s, credits the minaret poster with employing a bygone graphic style that conjures up “good old Switzerland, when everything was safe, clean and growing.” Like Mr. Bühlmann he blames the news media for providing, as he put it, “effectively millions of dollars in free advertising.” It went without saying that my own interest in the poster brouhaha multiplied the problem.
He was nevertheless reluctant to give Mr. Segert too much credit for swinging the vote. Local issues did more to sway public opinion, he said. We met in a crowded bar above the Zurich train station, and before parting he unfurled a poster by a human rights organization called the Society for Swiss Minorities, distributed by the Swiss Council of Religions, showing a mosque, a synagogue, two churches and a Buddhist temple beneath a broad, pale blue sky, with the slogan “Der Himmel über der Schweiz ist gross genug” (“the sky over Switzerland is big enough”) in discreet lettering across the top.
It was made to compete with Mr. Segert’s work. Two can play that game, Mr. Stricker wanted me to know. Except that the image, tasteful and vague, stressing elegance over incitement, actually suggested the opposite.
Mr. Segert knows why. A 46-year-old German (yes, an immigrant himself in Switzerland), he is the father of two adopted children from North Africa, although he declined to talk about his personal life. He was happy, on the other hand, to discuss work, which he volunteered he would gladly do for the Green Party or Social Democrats, if they hired him. “For me it’s an intellectual exercise,” he said, as if cynicism were a point of professional pride.
In the next room young, clean-cut associates brooded over drawing boards and computer screens. Clients must “do their homework,” Mr. Segert said, by way of explaining how a design evolves. “It sounds easy, but most political parties don’t know their own message.” That’s the problem for centrist and many left-leaning parties.
By contrast, “everyone knows what the Swiss People’s Party stands for,” he said. “It’s against the European Union, for neutrality, lower taxes, no illegal aliens. You can hate it or love it, but the message is clear.” That message must then be refined. “Maybe 80 to 90 percent of people are not interested in elections. So our job is to tell them: Be interested in what doesn’t interest you, make a decision about something you don’t care about, then act on it, vote. That’s a lot for a poster to accomplish. We’re successful because we know how to reduce information to the lowest level, so people respond without thinking.”
This was essential, he stressed: “The message must go straight to the stomach, not to the brain, and connect with specific emotions involving fear, health, money, safety. We can focus just on our target audience so we can speak in a special language and speak to a feeling these people already have. We can’t move anyone who doesn’t already have this feeling. In our case the target audience is low income, with little schooling. They have the same right to vote as people who support the Green Party and read 3 newspapers and 10 magazines.”
I asked whether special language applied to red rats, which can conjure up Nazi propaganda. Mr. Segert brushed off the comparison. As a public-relations man he has “no taboos,” he said. “We don’t begin by thinking what we can’t do. When I chose to show rats, I didn’t ask whether it’s politically correct. I couldn’t do my job if I did that. I only wanted to know whether it serves our purpose, and if we have a problem with the law. My party already deals with taboos like Islam and immigration, so our job is just to think about how to make the strongest image, then let the lawyers tell us whether it’s racist.”
He recounted the making of the minarets design. There were some early all-text trials, he recalled, which looked too wordy. One version showed missiles without the woman, another, the woman in a burqa, without eyes. “That was too impersonal,” Mr. Segert said. He and his colleagues, adding eyes, then debated what should be behind them. “Should they look sexy, not sexy?” he said. “To me the look we decided on is less aggressive than helpless.”
It can also be read the other way around. Mr. Segert added that, instead of the Swiss flag, the Matterhorn was tried, but the mix of minarets with the woman in a niqab and the mountain created confusion. Without the mountain, he said, the image, “could have been Istanbul or Dubai.”
“There was nothing wrong,” he continued, “nothing to disturb the view.”
But a flag solved that. “Minarets and the Swiss flag sent the message we wanted because they don’t fit together. A person looks and thinks, ‘This must be changed.’ ”
A certain person, anyway. The final poster, though heavy-handed, performs a complex task. The image of minarets beside the woman in the niqab stirs up a negative feeling among target voters. “No, I don’t want minarets because I will find myself living under Sharia law,” the viewer decides. But the referendum to ban minarets required a yes vote. “It’s always easier to do a campaign for a no vote,” Mr. Segert noted, “because people instinctively want to maintain the status quo. It’s what they already know. With a yes vote you need some positive symbol. But we had only this negative one, of minarets and Sharia.
“So we needed some bridge, some transition from no to yes.”
The designers experimented with the word “Verbieten,” meaning to forbid, but this turned out to look too complicated. The obvious solution, arrived at after a few false starts, was simply, “stop.”
The word performs a double role, emphasizing the initial message (stop minarets) then causing a viewer, when arriving at the word, mentally to stop, be free to switch gears and register “yes,” written just below “stop.” That is, vote yes.
“So there are three steps to the image,” Mr. Segert concluded. “Minarets lead to Sharia. No to minarets. Yes to the referendum.”
“It looks simple,” he said, staring at the finished image.
“But that’s the art of it.”
He smiled.
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