After mulling it over, I have officially decided to shut down this blog. I have always told myself there would be time to write on this blog, but it never seems to manifest, so I think it's time to shut her down. My other blog will still be running though, so make sure you visit me there.
14 November 2011
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.
07 October 2009
Pakistanis View U.S. Aid Warily
October 7, 2009, 11:00 am
http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/07/pakistanis-view-us-aid-warily/?ref=global-home
By Salman Masood
Christoph Bangert for The New York Times Ali Rizvi, left, and Umair Anjum outside a McDonald’s in Islamabad. The men say the Kerry-Lugar aid bill will undermine Pakistan’s sovereignty.
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — As the Obama administration weighs a shift in its military strategy in Afghanistan, it is also stepping up its efforts to increase aid to neighboring Pakistan. The Senate on Sept. 24 approved legislation to triple nonmilitary aid to Pakistan to about $1.5 billion a year for the next five years. However, conditions laid out in the bill, authored by Senators John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Richard Lugar, Republican of Indiana, have unleashed street protests and a flood of criticism from Pakistanis who say the bill compromises their country’s sovereignty.
President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan has agreed to the stipulations in the Kerry-Lugar bill, but he is coming under sharp criticism from opposition parties and many Pakistanis who view America as a cavalier and condescending ally. Pakistan’s Parliament is discussing the Kerry-Lugar aid bill Wednesday, and it is expected to be a fiery debate.
I spoke with several Pakistanis who shared their concerns about the bill and America’s relationship with Pakistan.
Enver Baig, 63, a former senator, said he felt that America needed to change how it has treated Pakistan and its democratic governments. “We always loved the Americans, but they deserted us soon after the first Afghan war,” he said. “Since then, the trust is gone. It is time to rebuild that trust, but with the introduction of Kerry-Lugar bill, distance between America and Pakistan is increasing because of some severe conditions in the aid package.”
Christoph Bangert for The New York Times Enver Baig says the “trust is gone” between Pakistan and America.
Mr. Baig said. “There is an impression that America wants to micro-manage everything in Pakistan,” he added.
Mr. Baig said he thought the Pakistani government had poorly negotiated draft of the aid bill and instead of asking for aid, which he thought was “peanuts,” the government should have asked that previous loans from the United States be “written off.”
“There is a lot of pressure on the government to get this bill reviewed,” he said. “There are serious reservations with the country’s armed forces as well because the aid package puts curbs and conditions on them in various ways and means. I am sure the armed forces will approach the government and convey their reservations.”
He suggested three things that the United States could do to win over the Pakistani people: It could improve the aid package, increase market access to Pakistani products and have more interaction with the country’s public, politicians and opinion makers.
Umair Anjum, 21, and Ali Rizvi, 22, who said they were studying to be accountants, sat outside a McDonald’s, enjoying a cigarette and the early October breeze. Their views reflected how many urban, educated, English-speaking young Pakistanis view the relationship between their country and America.
“Pakistanis hate America, to some extent because you don’t bomb an ally,” Mr. Rizvi said. “People here do not like the drone attacks. They are important in the war against terror, all right, but America should respect our sovereignty.”
Mr. Anjum said he felt Pakistan was routinely betrayed by the United States. The Kerry-Lugar bill, he said, “is bound to undermine our sovereignty in every possible way. The Americans are trying to dictate us in every walk of life. America is working against our interests. It is promoting India, which has a huge presence in Afghanistan. Our armed forces and people should act like Iran and stand up to American pressure.”
The young men also said that employees from private security firms such as Blackwater were operating with impunity inside Pakistan.
“There are thousands of Blackwater operatives in the country now if you go by the media reports,” Mr. Anjum said. “They have been given a license to kill. They are not accountable to anyone here. Would India allow Blackwater on its territory? Not at all.”
Mr. Rizvi said simply, “They are spies.”
Mehmud ur-Rehman, who owns Peer Book Centre in Aabpara, a bustling market, said that American aid was not reaching many Pakistani people. “Had it been so, people would not be fighting for sugar and flour in long queues across the country,” Mr. Rehman, 49, said. He is currently on bail, having spent a few weeks in prison on charges of selling Islamic books that had been banned by the former government.
Mr. Rehman said the economic crisis had hit him hard. “I have been selling books for 30 years,” he said. “But now the earnings have dropped by half. I don’t have money to timely pay the wholesale trader from whom I get stationery.”
Christoph Bangert for The New York Times Mehmud ur-Rehman, who owns the Peer Book Centre, also views U.S. aid with suspicion.
He said a friend of his, Abid Rehman, died in the terrorist attack on World Food Program office in Islamabad. But he refused to accept that Taliban militants were behind the attack. It was a conspiracy, he said. Even the public claim of responsibility by a Taliban spokesman did not convince him.
Like most Pakistanis, he also voiced suspicion over the United States’ interests in Pakistan, saying that America wanted to denuclearize Pakistan.
During the conversation with Mr. Rehman, an old bearded man, leaning on a walking stick, entered the store. Everyone stood up in deference.
Fazl-e-Haq, 87, dressed in a blue striped shirt and gray trousers, was a former inspector general of the Pakistan Police. Since 1980, he has been writing a column in Jang, the country’s most widely read Urdu daily.
“There will be a revolution in Pakistan by the third quarter 2010,” Mr. Haq said in a somber voice.
“In a country where people are dying of hunger, where women are being kidnapped and raped, where justice or flour is not available to the poor, revolution does not come by knocking at the door first,” he added. “And this will not be a peaceful revolution. It will be a bloody revolution. We have lost our honor. We have sold ourselves.”
Everyone gathered in the store nodded.
And what about America, I asked after having a little dose from this harbinger of doom.
“America is breathing its last,” Mr. Haq replied in a trembling but sure-sounding voice. “Afghanistan will be the graveyard of American imperialism.”
http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/07/pakistanis-view-us-aid-warily/?ref=global-home
By Salman Masood
Christoph Bangert for The New York Times Ali Rizvi, left, and Umair Anjum outside a McDonald’s in Islamabad. The men say the Kerry-Lugar aid bill will undermine Pakistan’s sovereignty.
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — As the Obama administration weighs a shift in its military strategy in Afghanistan, it is also stepping up its efforts to increase aid to neighboring Pakistan. The Senate on Sept. 24 approved legislation to triple nonmilitary aid to Pakistan to about $1.5 billion a year for the next five years. However, conditions laid out in the bill, authored by Senators John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Richard Lugar, Republican of Indiana, have unleashed street protests and a flood of criticism from Pakistanis who say the bill compromises their country’s sovereignty.
President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan has agreed to the stipulations in the Kerry-Lugar bill, but he is coming under sharp criticism from opposition parties and many Pakistanis who view America as a cavalier and condescending ally. Pakistan’s Parliament is discussing the Kerry-Lugar aid bill Wednesday, and it is expected to be a fiery debate.
I spoke with several Pakistanis who shared their concerns about the bill and America’s relationship with Pakistan.
Enver Baig, 63, a former senator, said he felt that America needed to change how it has treated Pakistan and its democratic governments. “We always loved the Americans, but they deserted us soon after the first Afghan war,” he said. “Since then, the trust is gone. It is time to rebuild that trust, but with the introduction of Kerry-Lugar bill, distance between America and Pakistan is increasing because of some severe conditions in the aid package.”
Christoph Bangert for The New York Times Enver Baig says the “trust is gone” between Pakistan and America.
Mr. Baig said. “There is an impression that America wants to micro-manage everything in Pakistan,” he added.
Mr. Baig said he thought the Pakistani government had poorly negotiated draft of the aid bill and instead of asking for aid, which he thought was “peanuts,” the government should have asked that previous loans from the United States be “written off.”
“There is a lot of pressure on the government to get this bill reviewed,” he said. “There are serious reservations with the country’s armed forces as well because the aid package puts curbs and conditions on them in various ways and means. I am sure the armed forces will approach the government and convey their reservations.”
He suggested three things that the United States could do to win over the Pakistani people: It could improve the aid package, increase market access to Pakistani products and have more interaction with the country’s public, politicians and opinion makers.
Umair Anjum, 21, and Ali Rizvi, 22, who said they were studying to be accountants, sat outside a McDonald’s, enjoying a cigarette and the early October breeze. Their views reflected how many urban, educated, English-speaking young Pakistanis view the relationship between their country and America.
“Pakistanis hate America, to some extent because you don’t bomb an ally,” Mr. Rizvi said. “People here do not like the drone attacks. They are important in the war against terror, all right, but America should respect our sovereignty.”
Mr. Anjum said he felt Pakistan was routinely betrayed by the United States. The Kerry-Lugar bill, he said, “is bound to undermine our sovereignty in every possible way. The Americans are trying to dictate us in every walk of life. America is working against our interests. It is promoting India, which has a huge presence in Afghanistan. Our armed forces and people should act like Iran and stand up to American pressure.”
The young men also said that employees from private security firms such as Blackwater were operating with impunity inside Pakistan.
“There are thousands of Blackwater operatives in the country now if you go by the media reports,” Mr. Anjum said. “They have been given a license to kill. They are not accountable to anyone here. Would India allow Blackwater on its territory? Not at all.”
Mr. Rizvi said simply, “They are spies.”
Mehmud ur-Rehman, who owns Peer Book Centre in Aabpara, a bustling market, said that American aid was not reaching many Pakistani people. “Had it been so, people would not be fighting for sugar and flour in long queues across the country,” Mr. Rehman, 49, said. He is currently on bail, having spent a few weeks in prison on charges of selling Islamic books that had been banned by the former government.
Mr. Rehman said the economic crisis had hit him hard. “I have been selling books for 30 years,” he said. “But now the earnings have dropped by half. I don’t have money to timely pay the wholesale trader from whom I get stationery.”
Christoph Bangert for The New York Times Mehmud ur-Rehman, who owns the Peer Book Centre, also views U.S. aid with suspicion.
He said a friend of his, Abid Rehman, died in the terrorist attack on World Food Program office in Islamabad. But he refused to accept that Taliban militants were behind the attack. It was a conspiracy, he said. Even the public claim of responsibility by a Taliban spokesman did not convince him.
Like most Pakistanis, he also voiced suspicion over the United States’ interests in Pakistan, saying that America wanted to denuclearize Pakistan.
During the conversation with Mr. Rehman, an old bearded man, leaning on a walking stick, entered the store. Everyone stood up in deference.
Fazl-e-Haq, 87, dressed in a blue striped shirt and gray trousers, was a former inspector general of the Pakistan Police. Since 1980, he has been writing a column in Jang, the country’s most widely read Urdu daily.
“There will be a revolution in Pakistan by the third quarter 2010,” Mr. Haq said in a somber voice.
“In a country where people are dying of hunger, where women are being kidnapped and raped, where justice or flour is not available to the poor, revolution does not come by knocking at the door first,” he added. “And this will not be a peaceful revolution. It will be a bloody revolution. We have lost our honor. We have sold ourselves.”
Everyone gathered in the store nodded.
And what about America, I asked after having a little dose from this harbinger of doom.
“America is breathing its last,” Mr. Haq replied in a trembling but sure-sounding voice. “Afghanistan will be the graveyard of American imperialism.”
07 September 2009
Sudan Fines Woman Who Wore Pants
September 8, 2009
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and WALEED ARAFAT
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/world/africa/08sudan.html?_r=1&ref=global-home
NAIROBI, Kenya — A Sudanese woman who wore pants in public was fined the equivalent of $200 but spared a whipping Monday when a court found her guilty of violating Sudan’s decency laws.
The woman, Lubna Hussein, an outspoken journalist who had recently worked for the United Nations, faced up to 40 lashes in the case, which has generated a swarm of interest both inside and outside Sudan.
Mrs. Hussein vowed to appeal the sentence and even marched into the court in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, wearing the same pair of loose-fitting green slacks that she was arrested in.
Manal Awad Khogali, one of her lawyers, said the judge hearing the case called only police witnesses to testify and refused to allow Mrs. Hussein — who has pledged to use her trial to bring attention to women’s rights in Sudan — to defend herself.
“He didn’t give us a chance,” Mrs. Manal said.
After the trial was over, Mrs. Hussein, a 34-year-old widow, seemed defiant as ever. “I will not pay a penny,” she told The Associated Press.
The judge had threatened to jail her for one month if she did not pay the fine. But according to The A.P., Mrs. Hussein flatly said: “I would spend a month in jail. It is a chance to explore the conditions in jail.”
On Monday night, after refusing her lawyers’ advice to pay up, Mrs. Hussein was whisked off to jail, though her lawyers said that in the coming days a committee formed for her defense may pay the fine and free her.
Sudan is partly governed by Islamic law, which calls for women to dress modestly. But the law is vague. According to Article 152 of Sudan’s penal code, anyone “who commits an indecent act which violates public morality or wears indecent clothing” can be fined and lashed up to 40 times.
It was the potential lashing, customarily carried out with a plastic whip that can leave permanent scars, that seemed to raise so many eyebrows. On Monday, diplomats from the British, French, Canadian, Swedish and Dutch Embassies showed up at the Khartoum courthouse, along with a throng of women protesters, many wearing pants. Witnesses said several bearded counterprotesters in traditional Islamic dress also arrived and yelled out “God is Great.”
Riot police broke up the demonstration and carted away more than 40 women. Sudanese officials said they were released shortly later. Witnesses said the police beat up at least one woman.
Mrs. Hussein is a career journalist who recently worked as a public information assistant for the United Nations in Sudan. She quit, she said, because she did not want to get the United Nations embroiled in her case.
But just as it did with the closely-watched case of a British schoolteacher, who faced whippings and a prison sentence in 2007 for allowing her 7-year-old students to name a class teddy bear Muhammad, the Sudanese government found a compromise.
Sudan’s leaders are eager to normalize relations with the United States and other Western countries and appeared to come up with a solution in which Mrs. Hussein was punished but not so severely as to draw more international ire.
She was arrested in July, along with 12 other women, who were caught at a cafe wearing trousers.
“I am Muslim. I understand Muslim law,” Mrs. Hussein said in an interview on Friday. “But I ask: What passage in the Koran says women can’t wear pants? This is not nice.”
Jeffrey Gettleman reported from Nairobi, and Waleed Arafat from Khartoum, Sudan.
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and WALEED ARAFAT
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/world/africa/08sudan.html?_r=1&ref=global-home
NAIROBI, Kenya — A Sudanese woman who wore pants in public was fined the equivalent of $200 but spared a whipping Monday when a court found her guilty of violating Sudan’s decency laws.
The woman, Lubna Hussein, an outspoken journalist who had recently worked for the United Nations, faced up to 40 lashes in the case, which has generated a swarm of interest both inside and outside Sudan.
Mrs. Hussein vowed to appeal the sentence and even marched into the court in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, wearing the same pair of loose-fitting green slacks that she was arrested in.
Manal Awad Khogali, one of her lawyers, said the judge hearing the case called only police witnesses to testify and refused to allow Mrs. Hussein — who has pledged to use her trial to bring attention to women’s rights in Sudan — to defend herself.
“He didn’t give us a chance,” Mrs. Manal said.
After the trial was over, Mrs. Hussein, a 34-year-old widow, seemed defiant as ever. “I will not pay a penny,” she told The Associated Press.
The judge had threatened to jail her for one month if she did not pay the fine. But according to The A.P., Mrs. Hussein flatly said: “I would spend a month in jail. It is a chance to explore the conditions in jail.”
On Monday night, after refusing her lawyers’ advice to pay up, Mrs. Hussein was whisked off to jail, though her lawyers said that in the coming days a committee formed for her defense may pay the fine and free her.
Sudan is partly governed by Islamic law, which calls for women to dress modestly. But the law is vague. According to Article 152 of Sudan’s penal code, anyone “who commits an indecent act which violates public morality or wears indecent clothing” can be fined and lashed up to 40 times.
It was the potential lashing, customarily carried out with a plastic whip that can leave permanent scars, that seemed to raise so many eyebrows. On Monday, diplomats from the British, French, Canadian, Swedish and Dutch Embassies showed up at the Khartoum courthouse, along with a throng of women protesters, many wearing pants. Witnesses said several bearded counterprotesters in traditional Islamic dress also arrived and yelled out “God is Great.”
Riot police broke up the demonstration and carted away more than 40 women. Sudanese officials said they were released shortly later. Witnesses said the police beat up at least one woman.
Mrs. Hussein is a career journalist who recently worked as a public information assistant for the United Nations in Sudan. She quit, she said, because she did not want to get the United Nations embroiled in her case.
But just as it did with the closely-watched case of a British schoolteacher, who faced whippings and a prison sentence in 2007 for allowing her 7-year-old students to name a class teddy bear Muhammad, the Sudanese government found a compromise.
Sudan’s leaders are eager to normalize relations with the United States and other Western countries and appeared to come up with a solution in which Mrs. Hussein was punished but not so severely as to draw more international ire.
She was arrested in July, along with 12 other women, who were caught at a cafe wearing trousers.
“I am Muslim. I understand Muslim law,” Mrs. Hussein said in an interview on Friday. “But I ask: What passage in the Koran says women can’t wear pants? This is not nice.”
Jeffrey Gettleman reported from Nairobi, and Waleed Arafat from Khartoum, Sudan.
03 September 2009
Yale Press Bans Images of Muhammad in New Book
August 13, 2009
By PATRICIA COHEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/books/13book.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=yale%20university%20press,%20danish%20islam&st=cse
It’s not all that surprising that Yale University Press would be wary of reprinting notoriously controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a forthcoming book. After all, when the 12 caricatures were first published by a Danish newspaper a few years ago and reprinted by other European publications, Muslims all over the world angrily protested, calling the images — which included one in which Muhammad wore a turban in the shape of a bomb — blasphemous. In the Middle East and Africa some rioted, burning and vandalizing embassies; others demanded a boycott of Danish goods; a few nations recalled their ambassadors from Denmark. In the end at least 200 people were killed.
So Yale University and Yale University Press consulted two dozen authorities, including diplomats and experts on Islam and counterterrorism, and the recommendation was unanimous: The book, “The Cartoons That Shook the World,” should not include the 12 Danish drawings that originally appeared in September 2005. What’s more, they suggested that the Yale press also refrain from publishing any other illustrations of the prophet that were to be included, specifically, a drawing for a children’s book; an Ottoman print; and a sketch by the 19th-century artist Gustave Doré of Muhammad being tormented in Hell, an episode from Dante’s “Inferno” that has been depicted by Botticelli, Blake, Rodin and Dalí.
The book’s author, Jytte Klausen, a Danish-born professor of politics at Brandeis University, in Waltham, Mass., reluctantly accepted Yale University Press’s decision not to publish the cartoons. But she was disturbed by the withdrawal of the other representations of Muhammad. All of those images are widely available, Ms. Klausen said by telephone, adding that “Muslim friends, leaders and activists thought that the incident was misunderstood, so the cartoons needed to be reprinted so we could have a discussion about it.” The book is due out in November.
John Donatich, the director of Yale University Press, said by telephone that the decision was difficult, but the recommendation to withdraw the images, including the historical ones of Muhammad, was “overwhelming and unanimous.” The cartoons are freely available on the Internet and can be accurately described in words, Mr. Donatich said, so reprinting them could be interpreted easily as gratuitous.
He noted that he had been involved in publishing other controversial books — like “The King Never Smiles” by Paul M. Handley, a recent unauthorized biography of Thailand’s current monarch — and “I’ve never blinked.” But, he said, “when it came between that and blood on my hands, there was no question.”
Reza Aslan, a religion scholar and the author of “No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam,” is a fan of the book but decided to withdraw his supportive blurb that was to appear in the book after Yale University Press dropped the pictures. The book is “a definitive account of the entire controversy,” he said, “but to not include the actual cartoons is to me, frankly, idiotic.”
In Mr. Aslan’s view no danger remains. “The controversy has died out now, anyone who wants to see them can see them,” he said of the cartoons, noting that he has written and lectured extensively about the incident and shown the cartoons without any negative reaction. He added that none of the violence occurred in the United States: “There were people who were annoyed, and what kind of publishing house doesn’t publish something that annoys some people?”
“This is an academic book for an academic audience by an academic press,” he continued. “There is no chance of this book having a global audience, let alone causing a global outcry.” He added, “It’s not just academic cowardice, it is just silly and unnecessary.”
Mr. Donatich said that the images were still provoking unrest as recently as last year when the Danish police arrested three men suspected of trying to kill the artist who drew the cartoon depicting Muhammad’s turban as a bomb. He quoted one of the experts consulted by Yale — Ibrahim Gambari, special adviser to the secretary general of the United Nations and the former foreign minister of Nigeria — as concluding: “You can count on violence if any illustration of the prophet is published. It will cause riots, I predict, from Indonesia to Nigeria.”
Aside from the disagreement about the images, Ms. Klausen said she was also disturbed by Yale’s insistence that she could read a 14-page summary of the consultants’ recommendations only if she signed a confidentiality agreement that forbade her from talking about them. “I perceive it to be a gag order,” she said, after declining to sign. While she could understand why some of the individuals consulted might prefer to remain unidentified, she said, she did not see why she should be precluded from talking about their conclusions.
Linda Koch Lorimer, vice president and secretary of Yale University, who had discussed the summary with Ms. Klausen, said on Wednesday that she was merely following the original wishes of the consultants, some of whom subsequently agreed to be identified.
Ms. Klausen, who is also the author of “The Islamic Challenge: Politics and Religion in Western Europe,” argued that the cartoon protests were not spontaneous but rather orchestrated demonstrations by extremists in Denmark and Egypt who were trying to influence elections there and by others hoping to destabilize governments in Pakistan, Lebanon, Libya and Nigeria. The cartoons, she maintained, were a pretext, a way to mobilize dissent in the Muslim world.
Although many Muslims believe the Koran prohibits images of the prophet, Muhammad has been depicted through the centuries in both Islamic and Western art without inciting disturbances.
Rather than sign a joint editor’s note for the book and the removal of the images, Ms. Klausen has requested instead that a statement from her be included. “I agreed,” she said, “to the press’s decision to not print the cartoons and other hitherto uncontroversial illustrations featuring images of the Muslim prophet, with sadness. But I also never intended the book to become another demonstration for or against the cartoons, and hope the book can still serve its intended purpose without illustrations.”
Other publishers, including The New York Times, chose not to print the cartoons or images of Muhammad when the controversy erupted worldwide in February 2006.
Ms. Klausen said, “I can understand that a university is risk averse, and they will make that choice” not to publish the cartoons, but Yale University Press, she added, went too far in taking out the other images of Muhammad.
“The book’s message,” Ms. Klausen said, “is that we need to calm down and look at this carefully.”
August 13, 2009, 1:06 pm
Discussion: The Yale Press Decision Not to Publish Controversial Cartoons
By Patricia Cohen
Yale University Press decided to pull 12 controversial caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad from a forthcoming book after a number of experts on Islam and counterterrorism warned that reprinting them could cause violence. When the cartoons were published in 2005 and 2006, riots erupted around the world and more than 200 people were killed. The press withdrew the drawings as well all other images of the prophet from the book, “The Cartoons That Shook the World,” which details the entire controversy. Some argue that Yale University Press’s decision is a defeat for free expression and a victory for extremists. Others maintain the removal of the images is prudent given the risk of violence.
August 13, 2009
3:45 pm
The university should be apologizing to the author for not only removing the so-called “offensive” cartoons, but also removing other noted illustrative examples of Muhammed.
Central to the point, Muslim extremists are using their clout to forcefully bend the laws of the land to cater their specific needs, just witness Europe, Middle East, Asia. They should learn to assimilate and become part of the new country they selectively chose for themselves, and learn to live in harmony with their neighbors.
Censorship reflects society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime. ~Potter Stewart
— FireInsideTheMan
4. August 13, 2009
5:11 pm
Apparently the post-modern university requires an outside panel to tell them what’s right. I would too if I didn’t have any convictions of my own.
— Stewart Trickett
5. August 13, 2009
5:28 pm
This strange and sad decision by Yale raises questions not only of academic freedom, but also of the role of universities and university presses in our culture. University presses provide a vehicle for disseminating scholarly research that is important to human knowledge and understanding, but not always commercially viable. As universities such as Yale grow into mega-corporations preoccupied with brand management, the university presses within them are squeezed by these pressures and their very integrity and reason for being are inherently subject to compromise. This could have happened at Harvard, Princeton, or Oxford University Press instead. It may well be for this reason that the author decided not to pull the book entirely, wishing to see her life’s work published in imperfect form rather than not published at all. The author has my sympathies, but my deepest concern is for all of us and for what other realms of knowledge and understanding will remain unpublished or even unexplored if this troubling trend continues.
— Ilsa Frank
6. August 13, 2009
6:02 pm
“The price of liberty is eternal vigilance”
Too bad the cowards at Yale are so afraid of being politically incorrect so they exercise self censorship
Milton had a few things to say on the subject as well.
Yale betrays the whole ethos of Western liberalism to the cause of convenience.
I’m with Ilsa.
— david wilder
7. August 13, 2009
6:41 pm
brave, brave Yale Press. I’m so proud.
— jeff hamren
8. August 13, 2009
7:33 pm
Probably Yale is partly funded by Saudi donations?
— Gerald Boisen
9. August 13, 2009
10:34 pm
Lux et veritas? Sad and scary tale…
— esthermiriam
10. August 13, 2009
10:36 pm
Brandeis has closed its fine art museum and wants to sell its collection, Yale edits out the visual from a work of scholarship about them — what is going on out there?
— esthermiriam
11. August 13, 2009
11:56 pm
Mr. Donatich justifies the Press’s acquiescence with the panel of authorities by equating publication of the images with having “blood on [his] hands.” But these anonymous advisers have nothing to gain and everything to lose from giving the Press the green light. Was the reverse question asked: who would be helped, and who might be protected, by Ms. Klausen’s contribution to the debate?
— Emily Satterthwaite
12. August 14, 2009
3:33 am
The cowardice and the tortured excuses are breathtaking. There is another point besides the obvious one of academic freedom and bowing to generalized intimidation. The book is an effort to examine these images and put them in a context of other images of Muhammad. By not printing these images, Yale University is effectively disassociating itself from this point of view. The sub-text is that these images are too offensive to even reprint. This undermines the author’s work. I wish some other university press would step forward and offer to publish the book as is. Or even better, a joint publication of a broad range of scholarly publishers.
— Robert Sadin
13. August 14, 2009
8:56 am
Yale’s decision sadly confirms the diminishing role of academia in expanding our understanding of the world around us. This is a complex story worth exploring fully without censorship!
— Sam Cruz
14. August 14, 2009
9:19 am
Not only is this proof of people knuckling under to the undue influence of religions (whatever ones they may be), it also shows how censorship rears its ugly head much too often in today’s world. In addition, can anyone reading this book really take any of it seriously when they do not print the very cartoons that the book is about? Is the Yale University Press going to now start printing art books with hundreds of high-grade blank pages because someone, somewhere, might object to a bit of Renaissance nudity. Titian beware! The invasion of the YUPies is near!
— David
15. August 14, 2009
10:47 am
Why blame Yale only? None of the U.S. newspapers or publication published those articles- but they did widespread reporting on it.
— Karan
16. August 14, 2009
12:28 pm
Well done! The most rational and decent desision made in a long time by those in the world of commications. In a culture bent on ratings and firing people up the simplicity in simply doing the right thing is without a doubt the most powerful. People need to be more reflective about their own behavior and right now I choose to think about the word - respect - and what it means, and then finding the power in this word, and then the act of being respectful, towards all things and all people.
Well done Yale Press, well done.
Ellen
— Ellen Shanley
17. August 14, 2009
3:23 pm
Way to go guys - stand up for academic freedom at all costs and then…..
Oops, my mistake - sorry about that.
— Charles Duwel
18. August 14, 2009
10:32 pm
The current administration at Yale, like an increasing number of their colleagues in the American academy, while continuing to wave their flags of pedagogical excellence fervently in a mild breeze, fold them away when the winds pick up. They believe in very little.
What they do seem to believe in and have done very well is raising money, and previously generous alumni who are upset by this nauseating display of academic cowardice and censorship should take note.
— Ben Ledbetter
19. August 15, 2009
10:10 am
The money trail is pretty clear. Yale is a partner to the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. I am sure they do not want to lose their $50 million gift from the Saudis by offending them with this book.
— Roberta Wagner
20. August 17, 2009
9:36 am
Will the Yale School of Medicine begin to censor their textbooks and language when discussing conditions concerning “private areas”? After all, everyone can see this material on the internet. That would be favorable over offending someone living near, say, the Indonesian embassy.
— Brian
21. August 17, 2009
12:23 pm
Yale is setting a frightening precedent as one of the leading academic presses in the country. In not publishing these images (not only the cartoons, but other widely viewed and available images of Muhammad), Yale Press believes it will protect people from the furor they incite – instead it is allowing such furor to trump reasonable discussion, debate and scholarly investigation, which is exactly what Ms. Klausen is arguing in her book: “The book’s message is that we need to calm down and look at this carefully.”
You can read more about how First Amendment advocates are responding to this at the National Coalition Against Censorship’s blog: http://ncacblog.wordpress.com.
— Claire
22. August 17, 2009
1:12 pm
This is the very definition of Cowardice.
— Christian in NYC
23. August 19, 2009
12:42 pm
To #8….i do believe that ex president whats his name and his father did at least drive by yale, but am uncertain as to what education they may have received there …and yes, as i recall, the ex pres. does have extremely warm relations with saudi arabia.
— FAL
By PATRICIA COHEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/books/13book.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=yale%20university%20press,%20danish%20islam&st=cse
It’s not all that surprising that Yale University Press would be wary of reprinting notoriously controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a forthcoming book. After all, when the 12 caricatures were first published by a Danish newspaper a few years ago and reprinted by other European publications, Muslims all over the world angrily protested, calling the images — which included one in which Muhammad wore a turban in the shape of a bomb — blasphemous. In the Middle East and Africa some rioted, burning and vandalizing embassies; others demanded a boycott of Danish goods; a few nations recalled their ambassadors from Denmark. In the end at least 200 people were killed.
So Yale University and Yale University Press consulted two dozen authorities, including diplomats and experts on Islam and counterterrorism, and the recommendation was unanimous: The book, “The Cartoons That Shook the World,” should not include the 12 Danish drawings that originally appeared in September 2005. What’s more, they suggested that the Yale press also refrain from publishing any other illustrations of the prophet that were to be included, specifically, a drawing for a children’s book; an Ottoman print; and a sketch by the 19th-century artist Gustave Doré of Muhammad being tormented in Hell, an episode from Dante’s “Inferno” that has been depicted by Botticelli, Blake, Rodin and Dalí.
The book’s author, Jytte Klausen, a Danish-born professor of politics at Brandeis University, in Waltham, Mass., reluctantly accepted Yale University Press’s decision not to publish the cartoons. But she was disturbed by the withdrawal of the other representations of Muhammad. All of those images are widely available, Ms. Klausen said by telephone, adding that “Muslim friends, leaders and activists thought that the incident was misunderstood, so the cartoons needed to be reprinted so we could have a discussion about it.” The book is due out in November.
John Donatich, the director of Yale University Press, said by telephone that the decision was difficult, but the recommendation to withdraw the images, including the historical ones of Muhammad, was “overwhelming and unanimous.” The cartoons are freely available on the Internet and can be accurately described in words, Mr. Donatich said, so reprinting them could be interpreted easily as gratuitous.
He noted that he had been involved in publishing other controversial books — like “The King Never Smiles” by Paul M. Handley, a recent unauthorized biography of Thailand’s current monarch — and “I’ve never blinked.” But, he said, “when it came between that and blood on my hands, there was no question.”
Reza Aslan, a religion scholar and the author of “No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam,” is a fan of the book but decided to withdraw his supportive blurb that was to appear in the book after Yale University Press dropped the pictures. The book is “a definitive account of the entire controversy,” he said, “but to not include the actual cartoons is to me, frankly, idiotic.”
In Mr. Aslan’s view no danger remains. “The controversy has died out now, anyone who wants to see them can see them,” he said of the cartoons, noting that he has written and lectured extensively about the incident and shown the cartoons without any negative reaction. He added that none of the violence occurred in the United States: “There were people who were annoyed, and what kind of publishing house doesn’t publish something that annoys some people?”
“This is an academic book for an academic audience by an academic press,” he continued. “There is no chance of this book having a global audience, let alone causing a global outcry.” He added, “It’s not just academic cowardice, it is just silly and unnecessary.”
Mr. Donatich said that the images were still provoking unrest as recently as last year when the Danish police arrested three men suspected of trying to kill the artist who drew the cartoon depicting Muhammad’s turban as a bomb. He quoted one of the experts consulted by Yale — Ibrahim Gambari, special adviser to the secretary general of the United Nations and the former foreign minister of Nigeria — as concluding: “You can count on violence if any illustration of the prophet is published. It will cause riots, I predict, from Indonesia to Nigeria.”
Aside from the disagreement about the images, Ms. Klausen said she was also disturbed by Yale’s insistence that she could read a 14-page summary of the consultants’ recommendations only if she signed a confidentiality agreement that forbade her from talking about them. “I perceive it to be a gag order,” she said, after declining to sign. While she could understand why some of the individuals consulted might prefer to remain unidentified, she said, she did not see why she should be precluded from talking about their conclusions.
Linda Koch Lorimer, vice president and secretary of Yale University, who had discussed the summary with Ms. Klausen, said on Wednesday that she was merely following the original wishes of the consultants, some of whom subsequently agreed to be identified.
Ms. Klausen, who is also the author of “The Islamic Challenge: Politics and Religion in Western Europe,” argued that the cartoon protests were not spontaneous but rather orchestrated demonstrations by extremists in Denmark and Egypt who were trying to influence elections there and by others hoping to destabilize governments in Pakistan, Lebanon, Libya and Nigeria. The cartoons, she maintained, were a pretext, a way to mobilize dissent in the Muslim world.
Although many Muslims believe the Koran prohibits images of the prophet, Muhammad has been depicted through the centuries in both Islamic and Western art without inciting disturbances.
Rather than sign a joint editor’s note for the book and the removal of the images, Ms. Klausen has requested instead that a statement from her be included. “I agreed,” she said, “to the press’s decision to not print the cartoons and other hitherto uncontroversial illustrations featuring images of the Muslim prophet, with sadness. But I also never intended the book to become another demonstration for or against the cartoons, and hope the book can still serve its intended purpose without illustrations.”
Other publishers, including The New York Times, chose not to print the cartoons or images of Muhammad when the controversy erupted worldwide in February 2006.
Ms. Klausen said, “I can understand that a university is risk averse, and they will make that choice” not to publish the cartoons, but Yale University Press, she added, went too far in taking out the other images of Muhammad.
“The book’s message,” Ms. Klausen said, “is that we need to calm down and look at this carefully.”
August 13, 2009, 1:06 pm
Discussion: The Yale Press Decision Not to Publish Controversial Cartoons
By Patricia Cohen
Yale University Press decided to pull 12 controversial caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad from a forthcoming book after a number of experts on Islam and counterterrorism warned that reprinting them could cause violence. When the cartoons were published in 2005 and 2006, riots erupted around the world and more than 200 people were killed. The press withdrew the drawings as well all other images of the prophet from the book, “The Cartoons That Shook the World,” which details the entire controversy. Some argue that Yale University Press’s decision is a defeat for free expression and a victory for extremists. Others maintain the removal of the images is prudent given the risk of violence.
August 13, 2009
3:45 pm
The university should be apologizing to the author for not only removing the so-called “offensive” cartoons, but also removing other noted illustrative examples of Muhammed.
Central to the point, Muslim extremists are using their clout to forcefully bend the laws of the land to cater their specific needs, just witness Europe, Middle East, Asia. They should learn to assimilate and become part of the new country they selectively chose for themselves, and learn to live in harmony with their neighbors.
Censorship reflects society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime. ~Potter Stewart
— FireInsideTheMan
4. August 13, 2009
5:11 pm
Apparently the post-modern university requires an outside panel to tell them what’s right. I would too if I didn’t have any convictions of my own.
— Stewart Trickett
5. August 13, 2009
5:28 pm
This strange and sad decision by Yale raises questions not only of academic freedom, but also of the role of universities and university presses in our culture. University presses provide a vehicle for disseminating scholarly research that is important to human knowledge and understanding, but not always commercially viable. As universities such as Yale grow into mega-corporations preoccupied with brand management, the university presses within them are squeezed by these pressures and their very integrity and reason for being are inherently subject to compromise. This could have happened at Harvard, Princeton, or Oxford University Press instead. It may well be for this reason that the author decided not to pull the book entirely, wishing to see her life’s work published in imperfect form rather than not published at all. The author has my sympathies, but my deepest concern is for all of us and for what other realms of knowledge and understanding will remain unpublished or even unexplored if this troubling trend continues.
— Ilsa Frank
6. August 13, 2009
6:02 pm
“The price of liberty is eternal vigilance”
Too bad the cowards at Yale are so afraid of being politically incorrect so they exercise self censorship
Milton had a few things to say on the subject as well.
Yale betrays the whole ethos of Western liberalism to the cause of convenience.
I’m with Ilsa.
— david wilder
7. August 13, 2009
6:41 pm
brave, brave Yale Press. I’m so proud.
— jeff hamren
8. August 13, 2009
7:33 pm
Probably Yale is partly funded by Saudi donations?
— Gerald Boisen
9. August 13, 2009
10:34 pm
Lux et veritas? Sad and scary tale…
— esthermiriam
10. August 13, 2009
10:36 pm
Brandeis has closed its fine art museum and wants to sell its collection, Yale edits out the visual from a work of scholarship about them — what is going on out there?
— esthermiriam
11. August 13, 2009
11:56 pm
Mr. Donatich justifies the Press’s acquiescence with the panel of authorities by equating publication of the images with having “blood on [his] hands.” But these anonymous advisers have nothing to gain and everything to lose from giving the Press the green light. Was the reverse question asked: who would be helped, and who might be protected, by Ms. Klausen’s contribution to the debate?
— Emily Satterthwaite
12. August 14, 2009
3:33 am
The cowardice and the tortured excuses are breathtaking. There is another point besides the obvious one of academic freedom and bowing to generalized intimidation. The book is an effort to examine these images and put them in a context of other images of Muhammad. By not printing these images, Yale University is effectively disassociating itself from this point of view. The sub-text is that these images are too offensive to even reprint. This undermines the author’s work. I wish some other university press would step forward and offer to publish the book as is. Or even better, a joint publication of a broad range of scholarly publishers.
— Robert Sadin
13. August 14, 2009
8:56 am
Yale’s decision sadly confirms the diminishing role of academia in expanding our understanding of the world around us. This is a complex story worth exploring fully without censorship!
— Sam Cruz
14. August 14, 2009
9:19 am
Not only is this proof of people knuckling under to the undue influence of religions (whatever ones they may be), it also shows how censorship rears its ugly head much too often in today’s world. In addition, can anyone reading this book really take any of it seriously when they do not print the very cartoons that the book is about? Is the Yale University Press going to now start printing art books with hundreds of high-grade blank pages because someone, somewhere, might object to a bit of Renaissance nudity. Titian beware! The invasion of the YUPies is near!
— David
15. August 14, 2009
10:47 am
Why blame Yale only? None of the U.S. newspapers or publication published those articles- but they did widespread reporting on it.
— Karan
16. August 14, 2009
12:28 pm
Well done! The most rational and decent desision made in a long time by those in the world of commications. In a culture bent on ratings and firing people up the simplicity in simply doing the right thing is without a doubt the most powerful. People need to be more reflective about their own behavior and right now I choose to think about the word - respect - and what it means, and then finding the power in this word, and then the act of being respectful, towards all things and all people.
Well done Yale Press, well done.
Ellen
— Ellen Shanley
17. August 14, 2009
3:23 pm
Way to go guys - stand up for academic freedom at all costs and then…..
Oops, my mistake - sorry about that.
— Charles Duwel
18. August 14, 2009
10:32 pm
The current administration at Yale, like an increasing number of their colleagues in the American academy, while continuing to wave their flags of pedagogical excellence fervently in a mild breeze, fold them away when the winds pick up. They believe in very little.
What they do seem to believe in and have done very well is raising money, and previously generous alumni who are upset by this nauseating display of academic cowardice and censorship should take note.
— Ben Ledbetter
19. August 15, 2009
10:10 am
The money trail is pretty clear. Yale is a partner to the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. I am sure they do not want to lose their $50 million gift from the Saudis by offending them with this book.
— Roberta Wagner
20. August 17, 2009
9:36 am
Will the Yale School of Medicine begin to censor their textbooks and language when discussing conditions concerning “private areas”? After all, everyone can see this material on the internet. That would be favorable over offending someone living near, say, the Indonesian embassy.
— Brian
21. August 17, 2009
12:23 pm
Yale is setting a frightening precedent as one of the leading academic presses in the country. In not publishing these images (not only the cartoons, but other widely viewed and available images of Muhammad), Yale Press believes it will protect people from the furor they incite – instead it is allowing such furor to trump reasonable discussion, debate and scholarly investigation, which is exactly what Ms. Klausen is arguing in her book: “The book’s message is that we need to calm down and look at this carefully.”
You can read more about how First Amendment advocates are responding to this at the National Coalition Against Censorship’s blog: http://ncacblog.wordpress.com.
— Claire
22. August 17, 2009
1:12 pm
This is the very definition of Cowardice.
— Christian in NYC
23. August 19, 2009
12:42 pm
To #8….i do believe that ex president whats his name and his father did at least drive by yale, but am uncertain as to what education they may have received there …and yes, as i recall, the ex pres. does have extremely warm relations with saudi arabia.
— FAL
Showcase: Neighborly Hatred
If you have the chance check out the NYTs gallery of photos and video on their website! Plus Justyna's website, which is amazing!!!
September 3, 2009, 12:00 am
By James Estrin
http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/showcase-45/?ref=global-home
PERPIGNAN, France — If you want to understand why Justyna Mielnikiewicz has spent eight years photographing border disputes and ethnic conflicts in the South Caucasus, you should know two stories from her childhood.
First: When she was a child in Marklowice, in the Silesian region of Poland, she said her family spoke “proper” Polish at home and the local Silesian dialect outside, to fit in with the locals. Justyna watched her sister switch to dialect the moment she crossed the fence around their yard. But Justyna was a stubborn child and got it in her head to speak only proper Polish everywhere. As a result, she was mercilessly bullied by her schoolmates and nicknamed “the stranger.”
Second: On the way to school every day, she passed a large monument commemorating the Auschwitz prisoners who were marched through her village by the German army as they retreated from the Russians in early 1945. Thousands died along the way.
Now, Ms. Mielnikiewicz, 36, focuses on the crossroads between ethnicity, political borders and history. She sees the Caucasus — where Russia has recognized the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent from Georgia — as a place perfectly suited to explore these themes.
She recalled: “When I started going to Abkhazia, people said: ‘Why are you coming here? Nobody’s interested. I said it’s because it’s my personal journey to learn why people are doing this to each other, why people who live together can suddenly hate each other.”
This eight-year journey has now brought Ms. Mielnikiewicz to the Visa pour l’Image photojournalism festival in France, where she is to receive the Canon Female Photojournalist Award on Saturday. It is presented by the French Association of Female Journalists and includes a prize of 8,000 euros ($11,418) that will enable Ms. Mielnikiewicz to finish a project that will be exhibited at next year’s festival in Perpignan.
Ms. Mielnikiewicz photographed the war in South Ossetia for The Times. Her coverage included an audio slide show, “Photographers Journal: Fleeing the Georgian Conflict” and her pictures appeared in “Conflict in South Ossetia.”
Patrick Witty, the international picture editor at The Times, worked closely with Ms. Mielnikiewicz. On the second day of the war, he recalled, she sent him an e-mail message saying she had no ambitions to become a war photographer. “Despite this,” Mr. Witty said, “and despite her lack of a flak jacket, a helmet, or any experience photographing conflict before, she made the most memorable and moving pictures of the war. Her work is breathtaking.”
For the Perpignan competition, however, the photographs she submitted were not about the war but about the context of the war and the forces that create divisions.
While the chaos of war was a jarring experience for Ms. Mielnikiewicz, it was the the empty streets of the the Georgian city of Gori that really bothered her.
“I never realized that silence was the scariest thing, more than the explosions,” she said. “There were no cars, no one walking. It is not normal to hear silence in a big city. During war, reality goes upside down.”
The fighting has ended — at least for now — and Ms. Mielnikiewicz has gone back to documenting the context of the conflict . She is still trying to figure out why people can act so cruelly to their neighbors.
September 3, 2009, 12:00 am
By James Estrin
http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/showcase-45/?ref=global-home
PERPIGNAN, France — If you want to understand why Justyna Mielnikiewicz has spent eight years photographing border disputes and ethnic conflicts in the South Caucasus, you should know two stories from her childhood.
First: When she was a child in Marklowice, in the Silesian region of Poland, she said her family spoke “proper” Polish at home and the local Silesian dialect outside, to fit in with the locals. Justyna watched her sister switch to dialect the moment she crossed the fence around their yard. But Justyna was a stubborn child and got it in her head to speak only proper Polish everywhere. As a result, she was mercilessly bullied by her schoolmates and nicknamed “the stranger.”
Second: On the way to school every day, she passed a large monument commemorating the Auschwitz prisoners who were marched through her village by the German army as they retreated from the Russians in early 1945. Thousands died along the way.
Now, Ms. Mielnikiewicz, 36, focuses on the crossroads between ethnicity, political borders and history. She sees the Caucasus — where Russia has recognized the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent from Georgia — as a place perfectly suited to explore these themes.
She recalled: “When I started going to Abkhazia, people said: ‘Why are you coming here? Nobody’s interested. I said it’s because it’s my personal journey to learn why people are doing this to each other, why people who live together can suddenly hate each other.”
This eight-year journey has now brought Ms. Mielnikiewicz to the Visa pour l’Image photojournalism festival in France, where she is to receive the Canon Female Photojournalist Award on Saturday. It is presented by the French Association of Female Journalists and includes a prize of 8,000 euros ($11,418) that will enable Ms. Mielnikiewicz to finish a project that will be exhibited at next year’s festival in Perpignan.
Ms. Mielnikiewicz photographed the war in South Ossetia for The Times. Her coverage included an audio slide show, “Photographers Journal: Fleeing the Georgian Conflict” and her pictures appeared in “Conflict in South Ossetia.”
Patrick Witty, the international picture editor at The Times, worked closely with Ms. Mielnikiewicz. On the second day of the war, he recalled, she sent him an e-mail message saying she had no ambitions to become a war photographer. “Despite this,” Mr. Witty said, “and despite her lack of a flak jacket, a helmet, or any experience photographing conflict before, she made the most memorable and moving pictures of the war. Her work is breathtaking.”
For the Perpignan competition, however, the photographs she submitted were not about the war but about the context of the war and the forces that create divisions.
While the chaos of war was a jarring experience for Ms. Mielnikiewicz, it was the the empty streets of the the Georgian city of Gori that really bothered her.
“I never realized that silence was the scariest thing, more than the explosions,” she said. “There were no cars, no one walking. It is not normal to hear silence in a big city. During war, reality goes upside down.”
The fighting has ended — at least for now — and Ms. Mielnikiewicz has gone back to documenting the context of the conflict . She is still trying to figure out why people can act so cruelly to their neighbors.
01 September 2009
For Longtime Captives, a Complex Road Home
September 1, 2009
By BENEDICT CAREY
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/health/01psych.html?ref=global-home
Jaycee Dugard has suffered sexual abuse, neglect and emotional manipulation to an extent hard to imagine, according to the charges in the case involving her abduction. But therapists say the biggest challenge facing Ms. Dugard, who was found last week after 18 years in captivity, may be switching families.
“Her captor was her primary relationship, and the father of her two children, and at some level separation may be difficult for all of them,” said Douglas F. Goldsmith, executive director of the Children’s Center in Salt Lake City. Dr. Goldsmith added that any therapy “has to be mindful that there are three victims, not one, and that they will be entering a new life together.”
About two-thirds of children who are kidnapped or abused suffer lingering mental problems, most often symptoms of post-traumatic stress and depression.
Recent studies have found that about 80 percent of victims do show significant improvement in mood after three to four months of trauma-focused weekly therapy. Still, given the information available so far, experts say Ms. Dugard and her two children face an unusually complex task.
Her stepfather, Carl Probyn, says she has already told her mother of feeling guilt that she bonded with the man who kidnapped her when she was 11. She and her children will have to learn to connect with and trust her first family, the one from which she was taken in 1991.
“The way I think about this case is that it is an extreme version of a phenomenon that is really not that uncommon: a child engaged in an abusive relationship when young and, not knowing any better, coming to accept it as their life, adapting as best they can,” said Lucy Berliner, director of the trauma program at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. “Certainly every case is different, but we now have some proven interventions we can use.”
Therapists say Ms. Dugard’s transition to a new life is likely to take some time, probably years. Elisabeth Fritzl, the Austrian woman held in a dungeon by her father for 24 years, has reportedly undergone extensive therapy and still struggles mentally, 16 months after she was freed.
And Shawn Hornbeck, abducted in Missouri at age 11 in 2002 and held captive for four years, told reporters nearly two years after being freed that he was still learning to cope with the emotional effects.
By contrast, Elizabeth Smart, the young woman in Utah who was kidnapped at age 14 in 2002 and held for nine months, is now reportedly doing well, a student at Brigham Young University. When she was reunited with her family, she told CNN last week, “we just spent time as a family, which was like — it was the best thing I could have done.”
The main challenge in all such cases, experts say, is breaking the bond with the captor and abuser. David Wolfe, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Toronto, has studied victims and some perpetrators of long-term abusive relationships.
In these cases, as in many kidnappings, perpetrators work hard to win the trust of their victims. “It’s a common element,” Dr. Wolfe said. “The child is frightened, and the perpetrator works to gain or regain the child’s confidence, to come across as a really good person: ‘I’m not going to hurt you, everything’s going to be O.K.’ and so on.
“So the child never knows when to fight or run,” he continued. “Do I wait and it’ll get worse? Or do I believe him and I won’t be hurt?”
Humans are wired to form social bonds, and such scraps of kindness can deepen even a relationship built on manipulation and abuse. Some victims have profoundly ambivalent feelings toward abusive captors, psychologists say, and tend to do better when they acknowledge their mixed feelings. Thinking of the perpetrator as a monster feels unfair; on the other hand, it would be wrong to call him merely misguided.
Once victims have shaken the influence of a perpetrator and re-established trust with loved ones, they can better learn through therapy how to ease the impact of their ordeal, said John A. Fairbank, a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at Duke and co-director of the U.C.L.A.-Duke University National Center for Child Traumatic Stress.
The most rigorously tested therapy is called trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy. In weekly sessions over three to four months, people learn how to examine and refute suspect assumptions about their ordeal. One of the most common of these is “I can’t trust anyone anymore.” Another is “It’s my fault I didn’t resist more.”
“Of course it is not their fault, and we communicate that,” said Dr. Berliner, the Seattle therapist. “But at the same time, in many cases they did go along, they did make decisions not to fight or run, and we help people examine why they made those decisions — to understand that judging themselves harshly in retrospect might not be fair to the child they were in that moment.”
Typically, people in trauma-focused therapy also learn methods to regulate the strength of their emotions. These methods include simple breathing and relaxation techniques, as well as mindfulness, an exercise in allowing an emotion to take hold and pass without acting on it.
Finally, victims often work with the therapist to build a narrative, oral or written, of the entire ordeal, then file it as a chapter of their lives rather than the entire story. If appropriate, they may also “relive” the experience multiple times until its emotional power wanes. This approach is not for everyone — it seems to make some people more distraught — but experts say it can be helpful in some patients.
So far, Jaycee Dugard seems to be doing just as her fellow abductee Ms. Smart advised: staying with family, keeping herself and her children away from public scrutiny. Those are good instincts, therapists say.
“It’s not like resilience is out of the question in a case like this,” said Dr. Judith A. Cohen, medical director of the Center for Traumatic Stress in Children and Adolescents at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh. “In a lot of kidnapping cases, people do remarkably well, and this woman has already shown amazing survival skills.
“That she managed to survive for so long suggests that she might do well in the years to come.”
Police Find Bone Fragment
SAN FRANCISCO — Law enforcement officials in the Bay Area community of Antioch said Monday that a bone fragment had been found in the search of a house neighboring the property of Phillip Garrido, the man charged with abducting Ms. Dugard. But a spokesman for the county sheriff said it was not clear if the fragment was human.
Searchers have been looking for evidence not only in the Dugard case but also in a string of murders in the area. The authorities suspect that Mr. Garrido had access to the neighbor’s property, and may have lived there, in 2006.
By BENEDICT CAREY
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/health/01psych.html?ref=global-home
Jaycee Dugard has suffered sexual abuse, neglect and emotional manipulation to an extent hard to imagine, according to the charges in the case involving her abduction. But therapists say the biggest challenge facing Ms. Dugard, who was found last week after 18 years in captivity, may be switching families.
“Her captor was her primary relationship, and the father of her two children, and at some level separation may be difficult for all of them,” said Douglas F. Goldsmith, executive director of the Children’s Center in Salt Lake City. Dr. Goldsmith added that any therapy “has to be mindful that there are three victims, not one, and that they will be entering a new life together.”
About two-thirds of children who are kidnapped or abused suffer lingering mental problems, most often symptoms of post-traumatic stress and depression.
Recent studies have found that about 80 percent of victims do show significant improvement in mood after three to four months of trauma-focused weekly therapy. Still, given the information available so far, experts say Ms. Dugard and her two children face an unusually complex task.
Her stepfather, Carl Probyn, says she has already told her mother of feeling guilt that she bonded with the man who kidnapped her when she was 11. She and her children will have to learn to connect with and trust her first family, the one from which she was taken in 1991.
“The way I think about this case is that it is an extreme version of a phenomenon that is really not that uncommon: a child engaged in an abusive relationship when young and, not knowing any better, coming to accept it as their life, adapting as best they can,” said Lucy Berliner, director of the trauma program at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. “Certainly every case is different, but we now have some proven interventions we can use.”
Therapists say Ms. Dugard’s transition to a new life is likely to take some time, probably years. Elisabeth Fritzl, the Austrian woman held in a dungeon by her father for 24 years, has reportedly undergone extensive therapy and still struggles mentally, 16 months after she was freed.
And Shawn Hornbeck, abducted in Missouri at age 11 in 2002 and held captive for four years, told reporters nearly two years after being freed that he was still learning to cope with the emotional effects.
By contrast, Elizabeth Smart, the young woman in Utah who was kidnapped at age 14 in 2002 and held for nine months, is now reportedly doing well, a student at Brigham Young University. When she was reunited with her family, she told CNN last week, “we just spent time as a family, which was like — it was the best thing I could have done.”
The main challenge in all such cases, experts say, is breaking the bond with the captor and abuser. David Wolfe, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Toronto, has studied victims and some perpetrators of long-term abusive relationships.
In these cases, as in many kidnappings, perpetrators work hard to win the trust of their victims. “It’s a common element,” Dr. Wolfe said. “The child is frightened, and the perpetrator works to gain or regain the child’s confidence, to come across as a really good person: ‘I’m not going to hurt you, everything’s going to be O.K.’ and so on.
“So the child never knows when to fight or run,” he continued. “Do I wait and it’ll get worse? Or do I believe him and I won’t be hurt?”
Humans are wired to form social bonds, and such scraps of kindness can deepen even a relationship built on manipulation and abuse. Some victims have profoundly ambivalent feelings toward abusive captors, psychologists say, and tend to do better when they acknowledge their mixed feelings. Thinking of the perpetrator as a monster feels unfair; on the other hand, it would be wrong to call him merely misguided.
Once victims have shaken the influence of a perpetrator and re-established trust with loved ones, they can better learn through therapy how to ease the impact of their ordeal, said John A. Fairbank, a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at Duke and co-director of the U.C.L.A.-Duke University National Center for Child Traumatic Stress.
The most rigorously tested therapy is called trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy. In weekly sessions over three to four months, people learn how to examine and refute suspect assumptions about their ordeal. One of the most common of these is “I can’t trust anyone anymore.” Another is “It’s my fault I didn’t resist more.”
“Of course it is not their fault, and we communicate that,” said Dr. Berliner, the Seattle therapist. “But at the same time, in many cases they did go along, they did make decisions not to fight or run, and we help people examine why they made those decisions — to understand that judging themselves harshly in retrospect might not be fair to the child they were in that moment.”
Typically, people in trauma-focused therapy also learn methods to regulate the strength of their emotions. These methods include simple breathing and relaxation techniques, as well as mindfulness, an exercise in allowing an emotion to take hold and pass without acting on it.
Finally, victims often work with the therapist to build a narrative, oral or written, of the entire ordeal, then file it as a chapter of their lives rather than the entire story. If appropriate, they may also “relive” the experience multiple times until its emotional power wanes. This approach is not for everyone — it seems to make some people more distraught — but experts say it can be helpful in some patients.
So far, Jaycee Dugard seems to be doing just as her fellow abductee Ms. Smart advised: staying with family, keeping herself and her children away from public scrutiny. Those are good instincts, therapists say.
“It’s not like resilience is out of the question in a case like this,” said Dr. Judith A. Cohen, medical director of the Center for Traumatic Stress in Children and Adolescents at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh. “In a lot of kidnapping cases, people do remarkably well, and this woman has already shown amazing survival skills.
“That she managed to survive for so long suggests that she might do well in the years to come.”
Police Find Bone Fragment
SAN FRANCISCO — Law enforcement officials in the Bay Area community of Antioch said Monday that a bone fragment had been found in the search of a house neighboring the property of Phillip Garrido, the man charged with abducting Ms. Dugard. But a spokesman for the county sheriff said it was not clear if the fragment was human.
Searchers have been looking for evidence not only in the Dugard case but also in a string of murders in the area. The authorities suspect that Mr. Garrido had access to the neighbor’s property, and may have lived there, in 2006.
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