"My integrity and self-esteem are intimately tied to my lifelong identification with the oppressed, and my belief that if humanity is to flourish in the future it is essential for the strong to respect the global rule of law as much as the weak. At present, we have a global law that does not treat equals equally; the weak are held accountable, while the strong enjoy impunity. This represents law without justice, inviting charges of hypocrisy and double standards." Professor Richard Falk, United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, who was recently deported from the country by the Israeli authorities.
It seems to me that it is more often than not the war criminals, the economic crooks and the bigots who ask for forgiveness and forgetfulness in the interests of 'peace'. This Christmas season we should remember that tolerance, and peace on earth belongs to those of us who pursue peaceful lives, who show not only genuine remorse for our wrong-doings, but make amends, and who open our minds and our hearts to fellow humans close and far who are suffering in this period. The crooks may pull faces, telling us we are too serious, that we should move on, that we should feel sorry for them, indeed, and order us to join the party and be merry and not to spoil the fun and enforced optimism by being angry. Or they may deflect criticism of their cruel and inhumane practices by making personal attacks. They are able to do so because they believe themselves to be all-powerful; the will of the international community to bring them to be justice is in their eyes non-existent. When Richard Falk when to South Africa in 1968 as an official observer he recalls, 'I was struck at the time by the sincere failure of "decent" white South Africans to realize the misery and humiliation of the apartheid system although it was part of their immediate surrounding.' And yet Falk cautions the pessimists among us: 'do not assess prospects of a successful outcome for the oppressed side by the current apparent relation of forces. An oppressive order is likely to appear all-powerful until it is on the verge of collapse.'
So angry we should be. We too want peace, but not on the criminals' terms and not at the expense of acccountability and the restitution of justice. So this Christmas we do NOT forgive:
- George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfield, Colin Powell, and Condi Rice. If you are still in any doubt why, read here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marjorie-cohn/cheney-throws-down-gauntl_b_152211.html?view=print
- Tony Blair. Thought his crimes had been forgotten, think again: http://www.redress.cc/global/dhalpin20081218 and http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/mar/28/iraq.freedomofinformation
- All groups and individuals that humiliate, exclude, harm and kill women in the name of religion and culture
- All groups and individuals that incite violence, spout racial and class/caste bigotry in the name of purity and nationalism
- Mugabe, who has destroyed not only his country, but the hopes of many in Southern Africa, as are the leaders of the ANC in South Africa
- The leaders of theocracies the world over who deny citizens access to decent family planning in the name of 'preserving life'
- The apartheid Israeli state and military who, with the support of the US and Europe and, sadly, many Arab countries, are perpetrating a slow genocide of the Palestinian people imprisoned inside the Gaza strip.
These are just to mention a few who will contribute to more misery this Christmas and who will very likely sit down to peaceful meals with their families, regardless.
There will be no peace on earth without justice!
Happy Christmas/holidays.
Elly @ SA
Wednesday, 24 December 2008
Tis the season to be angry!
Friday, 12 December 2008
Show some Rahma
Recently I've been moved by a series of advertisements run by a Saudi campaign entitled Rahma, which is part of Full Stop Advertising’s corporate social responsibility drive. They depict the abusive treatment of domestic workers in Saudi Arabia and remind employees that mercy will be shown to those who themselves show mercy in their daily lives. A particularly striking video shows a group of glamourous hijab-wearing women enjoying a meal together; while the behaviour of the hostess towards her guests is welcoming and gracious, her attitude towards her Asian maid is cruel and very far from gracious. As women we should be particularly aware of the worth and dignity of those that wash our clothes, clean our floors and cook our meals. Many of our mothers performed that role for their families, even if some of us are now priviledged enough to hire people to do these important jobs. If we are to accuse the rest of the world of anti-Arab feeling, then we should acknowledge that in the Arab world there is much snobbery as well as an ugly racism towards those considered somehow socially, culturally and racially inferior. In an excellent recent article by Mona Eltahawy we learn just how narrow is many people's idea of religious observance and piety: an Egyptian woman who identifies herself as a religious Muslim, persecutes and publically humiliates a Sudanese girl. None of us can say we are ignorant of these forms of discrimination, and all of us have a responsibility to step up, as did Mona, and put a stop to practices that demean and degrade us all as humans.
Postscript: There is also an excellent discussion of the campaign over on MMW; Krista asks whether the term 'mercy' is appropriate when what we are talking about here is justice for the individual. Justice is not bestowed by the powerful on the powerless, as mercy can be said to be. I think, however, that we should understand the word, rahma, in its complete sense; rahma, and even mercy in the Christian sense, is not the same as the magnanimous gesture of a king or the pardon of a judge. Rahma/mercy is the highest form of love towards a human being. As I once read, Love is mercy, it is not a democracy. This is not to disparage democracy, it is simply to point out that while we squabble over what is 'fair' and 'equal' and 'just' as we inevitably do, rahma is a clear duty of us all. We must be merciful because we are all in desperate need of mercy in our lives, for none of us can protect ourselves entirely from misfortune and injury (physical or emotional); every society I am aware of has developed with a power dynamic that makes many of us vulnerable to attack - take the family on the microcosmic level: an older sibling is put in a position where the abuse of power is so easy. While we are children, our parents can tell the older sibling to stop treating the younger one unfairly, but as we become adults and that power structure remains in place, the elder one who has engendered the loyalty and love of the younger one, must now be merciful, and not abuse his or her priviledged position. Yes, the younger one seeks justice in the long-term, but in the meantime they require mercy.
Monday, 1 December 2008
Kind enemies and hateful friends
On Saturday, I was fortunate enough to attend a lecture at SOAS, London, on the grave injustices of the ongoing and illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine. On the panel were revisionist Israeli historian, Illan Pappe, author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Gideon Levy, journalist at Haaretz, whose weekly column on the occupation, The Twilight Zone, is like a smack in the complacent face of the liberal and fundamentalist Zionist alike, and Karma Nabulsi, an Oxford academic and a former PLO representative. I will not go into detail here about the aspects of the occupation each panelist threw further light on, except to say that no matter how much I think I know about the 41 year occupation, and the events of the 1948 Nakba, my sense of outrage is never blunted.
Three weeks ago, an article appeared in Haaretz by Levy entitled, Let's hope Obama won't be a 'friend of Israel' . Levy made the very simple, but rarely heard, point that friends that do not criticise you for your mistakes, and in the case of Israel, fail to condemn your contempt for international law and human rights, are not true friends: "When we say that someone is a "friend of Israel" we mean a friend of the occupation, a believer in Israel's self-armament, a fan of its language of strength and a supporter of all its regional delusions. When we say someone is a "friend of Israel" we mean someone who will give Israel a carte blanche for any violent adventure it desires, for rejecting peace and for building in the territories."
Such a friend is hateful: Israel's greatest friend, Bush, "let it embark on an unnecessary war in Lebanon. He did not prevent the construction of a single outpost. He may have encouraged Israel, in secret, to bomb Iran. He did not pressure Israel to move ahead with peace talks, he even held up negotiations with Syria, and he did not reproach Israel for its policy of targeted killings." While Israel and Israelis may at present believe that this friendship protects them from terror, it does quite the opposite. America (and the UK's) economic and military support of Israel ensures that year by year its enemies multiply and their rage intensifies. Meanwhile Israeli society has achieved a state of chilling moral bankruptcy with its total insensitivity to the suffering of millions of its close neighbours, the Palestinians, that can only have been possible through the Israeli media and military's sixty-year long project to dehumanise the inhabitants of historic Palestine, forcing into exile huge numbers of people who to this day have no right of return, and rounding up, relocating and caging others - as if they were herds of animals - behind walls and checkpoints in shrinking bantustans.
Photo of Gideon Levy via arendt-art.de
I was struck by Levy's subversion of the idea of friendship that had featured so heavily in the recent, carefully staged, American election 'debates'. The two vice-presidential candidates tried to outdo each other in their expressions of love for Israel, and ended up bonding over their shared admiration for this failed state - an occupying power that is to date in contravention of over 100 UN resolutions, has no internationally recognised capital and no agreed borders (to name just a few of its failures). With friends like these, who needs enemies, as the saying goes... Levy has predictably been branded a self-hating Jew, in other words an enemy of the Israeli people and the Jewish State, as if his words and not their deeds were imperiling them. Yet Israel is his home and as much as he is heckled for speaking the truth, he has no intention of leaving. My impression is that he would rather stay and see it become a pluralistic nation-state with rights for all its citizens regardless of race or creed. He has, unfortunately, little reason for optimism at present.
Israel needs kind enemies such as Levy.
The Muslim world also needs such 'enemies'.
When discussing Islam, Muslim-majority countries, Muslim communities and individuals in the same breath as women's rights, many individuals, writers, activists and organisations both within the 'community' and without are branded Islamophobes, enemies of Islam, traitors, and so on. I would never deny that Islamophobia exists, just as my extensive reading of literature about the holocaust and the politics of Europe that lead up to this horrific mass-persecution and killing of innocents, would ever allow me to deny that anti-Semitism exists. And yet should not the true friend of Muslims, of Islam and of governments of Islamic lands be the first person to point out injustice, hypocrisy, cruelty, stupidity and the spreading of false and malevolent ideas, wherever he or she sees them? The 'hateful friend', in contrast, is like the courtier that shields a king from the cruelty and humiliations inflicted upon his subjects, and from their growing discontent, until, too late, he advises 'his excellency' of his kingdom's descent into civil war.
