Palestine Trip 3: Barriers

Up here. [EDIT: DEAD LINK – REPRODUCED BELOW] There’s photos and all.

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PREVIOUSLY: PALESTINE TRIP 2

Saturday April 10

CHECKPOINTS

Checkpoints. In the morning we go through one on foot, the main Bethlehem checkpoint. Sarah points at some women as we approach – they are about to cut off the road and go overland to the far side of the checkpoint, bypassing it so they can get to work at Jerusalem. Sometimes they will meet a patrol on this bypass. Sometimes the patrol will just turn them back. Other times it is worse.

We walk around a building that’s essentially a concrete bunker, along a narrow route. Soldiers just waved us through, we all have white skin I guess. Half way around we pause and look back over the rooftops and see something happening on the balcony of a building. It looks like a gang of young Palestinian men beating a Palestinian woman with sticks, but it’s too far away to tell for sure. We eventually turn our backs and press on.

We are picked up in West Jerusalem and driven to the Container checkpoint. It has an ominous reputation. We’re meeting Anjela from Machsom Watch (http://www.machsomwatch.org/), an organisation of Israeli women who monitor the checkpoints and try to make sure Palestinians are treated fairly by those on duty. The stories she tells make it sound like this is a mammoth task. We stay at the Container while she makes sure a Doctor is allowed across to an ambulance waiting on the far side. We are told that ambulances aren’t allowed across checkpoints; patients have to be lifted across. If there is a delay in securing an ambulance to meet the patient, delays can be serious. The sick and injured die at checkpoints because of this, or because they are simply turned back.

But to me, the worst part of the checkpoints is the psychology. Every day, Palestinian men and women are subjected to the whims of teenagers schooled in a paranoid mythology and given absolute power over their ability to move freely.

Hell, you take the best teenagers you can find in New Zealand high schools and make them prefects, and like as not it all goes wrong. Its no leap to see how staffing the occupation with teenagers is breeding indignity.

DIVISIONS

Anjela is also part of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolition (http://www.icahd.org/eng/). She has a very good broad sense of what is going on and going wrong in Israel/Palestine, and she leads us on an improvised tour of the area.

We go through Abu Dis which is being sliced up by the enormous, unforgiving wall. It’s an Arab community and Anjela draws attention to the poverty – the roads are poor, the homes are cramped and small, there is nothing green anywhere. We keep driving, and two minutes later we are in the settlement
of Maale Adumim, on the next hill over. There are enormous, vibrant flowerbeds lining the wide, flat roads. Elegant stepped apartment blocks rise cleanly. There is, incredibly, a swimming pool.

A swimming pool, in the desert.

Anjela talks of the children in the Palestinian communities nearby, who have never seen flowers.

Maale Adumim is not peopled with messianic Greater Israel settlers, according to Anjela. The people there are economic migrants. Settlers get a lot of tax breaks, and very nice digs. (We later learn that one of the
drivers who lives in Beit Sahour keeps an apartment in Maale Adumim as well, so he doesn’t lose his Israel permissions.)

You hear a lot about contrasts. In this case, it is the proximity that is most disturbing. The luxury of the settlement is in sharp contrast to the privation of the established village. The settlement is, of course, built
on seized Palestinian land.

We see the wall-struck town of Abu Dis and its close neighbour, the lush settlement of Maale Adummim.

The landscape nearby Abu Dis and Maale Adumim

MAKING LIGHT

In Greek Orthodox tradition, on Holy Saturday, the patriarch goes into a sanctuary in the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and God sends him fire. This fire is then shared among the community.
(http://www.holyfire.org/eng/index.htm;
http://www.holylight.gr/agiofos/holyli.html)

I learned that While this is going on, everyone outside squishes up close and gets ready to start shouting and jumping.

We were crammed into an alley outside the church, with hundreds of other people, waiting for news. A great cry of cheers erupted from within, and then the crowd shifted, somehow making space as a series of men came charging out screaming with excitement waving around fire as they went. The crowd thrust candles into the passing flames as more and more people came out, there was shouting and praising God, and many elbows in ribs and shoves in backs and burnt nose hairs. People forced their way out of the church and into the already crowded alleyway and a fight almost broke out between Sarah and a guy who was using an empty pram as a prod to clear his path of little old ladies.

It was insane. It was another sign of how people do religion in Jerusalem.

THE WAILING WALL

We went to the Western Wall as well. The sun smashed down on the enormous wall, fifteen or more metres high and built of mighty sandstone blocks. A direct connection with God, in Judaism. It was impossible not to be moved by the deep respect shown towards this holy site. We couldn’t take photos –
it was the Sabbath, and an old Rabbi was trooping the crowd making sure no-one was breaking custom.
Jean-Guy, being a Jew, invited me down to see things up close, and so off I went. I put on a cardboard kippa and went down. Jean Guy led me into the tunnel at the side of the wall, which was thick with Orthodox Jews in their big hats, praying alone or in groups, reading the Torah, and in one memorable case jumping up and down shaking his hand at the wall. Again, as so many other times, I thought I was in another world. We came out into the sun and Jean-Guy smiled at me and said “What did you think? For me, it was very strange.”

We rejoined the others at the vantage point on the far side. We could see the top of the Dome of the Rock peeking over the Western Wall – the holiest place in one traditions and the second holiest in another, a literal stone-throw apart.

NEXT: PALESTINE TRIP 4

Palestine Trip 2: Facts on the Ground

Up here. [EDIT: LINK DEAD-REPRODUCED BELOW]
On a lighter note, some more testimony as to the Godlike power of Leon has been added to the Making Leon a God website.
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PREVIOUSLY: PALESTINE TRIP 1

Friday April 9, 2004

The call to prayer sounds like a cross between an air raid siren and a Leonard Cohen song, and it sounds at the first touch of dawn, which is way to early for us. We sleep uneasily after that, not quite believing where we were.

Breakfast with Sabine and Jean-Guy – pita bread and houmous and cheese and meat. Nothing gets you in a local mood like diving into the local breakfast. Then ATG people Samer and Sarah appeared and we were out.

BEIT SAHOUR

Samer drove us around Beit Sahour, and we started to see the things we’d only read about before – the settlements, the bypass roads. The closeness of them is shocking. From the street outside our hotel you can see a huge settlement, Gilo I think, which is still being worked on. It’s literally just across the valley. It is built inside the ‘green line’, on Palestinian land, and it is staring the population of Beit Sahour in the face every single day.

Bypass roads, as well, are a revelation. They carve through the west bank sheathed in barbed wire and electric fences, and as they go they chop up communities, cut off farmland and orchards, and necessitate the demolition of Palestinian homes. We see a group of five homes that are hemmed in by bypass roads; all will be demolished eventually. The families just have to move. Nearby, a bypass road loops around an olive orchard, cutting it off completely from the locals.

I have been reading about bypass roads and settlements for years, but until I saw them I didn’t really understand what they were and what they meant. I didn’t understand how powerful they were – the power of, as the saying goes, ‘facts on the ground’.

AIDA CAMP

We visited a refugee camp in Bethlehem, Aida camp. It has evolved from a hilltop covered with tents in ’48 into an alley-network of cramped tenements. Kids called out greetings, ran down for photos. Everyone
greeted us warmly: “you are welcome.”

There were signs of conflict. Bullet holes in the wall of a school. Ruined walls and buildings. A factory’s blue corrugated wall ripped open by a missile, the interior now dormant.

Alongside Aida is a field. Across the field is Gilo settlement. The separation wall enters the field from two directions. Soon, new construction will join the wall together, and cut off this view.

We walked up to the end of the wall nearest Aida and some Israeli troops appeared from the other side. We walked away and they paced after us. Being followed by a force of uniformed men and women carrying weapons is not a nice feeling. They came up to the fringe of Aida proper and then watched
us for a while before going back. “They are not allowed here but they come and go as they please. They do whatever they want.”

It is hard to keep hope alive here. The Al Rowwad centre (http://alrowwad.virtualactivism.net/) keeps children busy with theatre and art projects. They have toured theatre pieces through Europe. The director
of Al Rowwad, AbdelFattah Abu-Srour, earned a PhD in France but turned down the right to stay there: “If I had it, the temptation to leave here when it got difficult would have been too great.”

JERUSALEM
The Holy City on Good Friday. It was incredible. Jerusalem’s Old City is a network of narrow streets, some of them built over so completely that you’re effectively underground. It twists and turns and is full of colour and culture – ultraorthodox Jews in their enormous hats, orthodox Jews in their traditional garb, Arab women in hejab, Christian priests and nuns and monks in full dress, salesmen and touts of all stripes, tourists, pilgrims, soldiers, us. It was an incredible place, unlike any place I’ve been to or seen. Probably it’s unique.

We sat in on a talk given by Rabbi Arik Ascherman of Rabbis for Human Rights (http://www.rhr.israel.net/), which was centred on RHR’s work in solidarity with the Palestinians.

Then we just explored. We ended up walking the Via Dolorosa, the path Jesus took with the cross to Calvary (as defined, of course, in the middle ages) to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which was a confusing dark cave housing a mad melange of different Christian traditions, each pitting prayers and
incense against the others in trying to carve out a space for their individual flavour of the divine. Down below the Church was a deep chamber, the tomb of Jesus in Catholic tradition. (In Protestant tradition, it’s a few hilltops over.)

Its easy to forget that in amongst this best-guess mythplanting, there is truth – Jesus did preach here in Jerusalem, he did die here. The Temple did stand here – one wall, the Western Wall, remains.

Okay, it’s a bit harder to prove that Mohammed and his horse rode up to heaven from the Rock on Temple Mount. But I’m happy to give them the benefit of the doubt.

That evening we went to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. On Good Friday, passing from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, the spot where Jesus was crucified and rose again to the spot where he was born. Quite an Easter – and not a chocolate egg between us.

NEXT: PALESTINE TRIP 3

Jazz Cellar

Jazz belongs in cellars. Heading down a few steps and into a small, smoky bar with no windows – that’s its natural environment.
Last night Cal and I went to Henry’s Jazz Cellar, one of Edinburgh’s long-standing jazz venues, and checked out a group called Les Ecossais. They were all music student age, and their look was somewhere between Boyzone and the skatepunks doing grinds in Bristo Square. It was nice to not be the youngest in a jazz venue – there were a lot of young folk there, diluting the old Jazzheads.
They got props from the crowd, too, and deserved it. Their stuff was pretty fresh. Mostly new compositions by themselves, with some by other folk I’ve never heard of (unsurprising given how closely I follow jazz, i.e. not even a little). It was a pretty cool set, and a good evening out. Must go again.
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What the hell is going on in New Zealand? I’m hearing crazy stories second hand, and the stuff I see in the news is crazy enough. Like, Brash making a speech in Napier today that was only a few steps removed from the British National Party cultural purity line? This can’t be true, can it? Like, a Maori woman declaring a train after the hikoi ‘for Maori only’ and forcing non-Maori off? Urban myth, surely? Like, a Maori person getting verbally abused in a corner store while buying milk? This one, sadly, is true.
It seems like New Zealand is turning into a different country while I am away from it. And it seems the new country is much nastier than the old one.
I hate to see the politics of fear played out so strongly in Aotearoa. It makes me ill.
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Excellent piece on reading the Iraq prison stuff, at Teresa Neilsen Hayden’s divine Making Light. Very much worth checking out.

Wherein I Try To Save Iraq, And Fail

Pearce writes, on Iraq and Saddam:
How would you have dealt with Saddam Hussein?…If you wouldn’t keep him in power, how would you have deposed him? And how would you keep extremists from taking power once he was gone?
Morgue, home sick today, responds:
Okay, assuming the kind of setup that says, instead of launching the Iraq war, the Coalition decided to halt action and say “okay, no war. but we still want Saddam gone. How would you do it then, left-wing person?”

Here are some scratchy-type-top-of-head ideas for a plan.

(Note: I take it as written that the Iraqi people want a democracy, and are capable of democracy. A lot of people dispute this, particularly the second one. I also take as written that democracy, for all its flaws, is the best form of government in the world at present.)

(And note: you don’t need an identified alternative to know that alternatives have not even been explored.)

Strategy:

* chip away

It will take a long time to bring about change without massive destruction – probably decades. Accept this. Improvement for Iraqis will be incremental. Accept this too.

* legitimise and use the UN

The only way to create a justifiable intervention in Iraq is through the UN; flawed as it is, it is also the only way to provide some kind of legitimacy that will prevent actions creating international resentment down the line. All actions should be performed through this body.

* have Arab nations take the lead

The Arab nations aren’t that fond of Saddam. Use this. Have Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Saudi take the lead in all dealings with Saddam. Do not give Saddam the option of calling it a culture war.
And don’t let the US get involved on any organisational level. They can contribute troops and suchlike, but they can’t be involved with policy or be seen to be leading negotiations. The history between Iraq and the US will not lend itself to negotiations.

* use Saddam’s ego to control him

Hussein is cornered and ready to fight. Every time the UN takes action, he should always be provided with an avenue of honorable retreat. Over many iterations, the cumulative effect will be large – his power base will erode, the sacrifices he must make can be made incrementally larger, other avenues will gradually present themselves. This is, of course, how most international politics is done, which makes the utter failure to deploy it against Iraq quite astonishing.

This will probably mean Saddam gets to be a hero, and his sons get to live in luxury. Let them.

* don’t make a big public issue of Weapons of Mass Destruction

Saddam has his reputation relying on his awesome military power. Getting into public games over what he has and what he wants is not going to lead to anything but a runaround. Keep the demand for inspections high on the agenda, but don’t make it a matter of public image. Progress was being consistently made on this issue.

* prepare a democracy-building plan

So when Saddam is gone, this is ready to take its place. Preferably it will start at the ground level, with elections held in each small region and each chunk of city. This will elect a congress that is actually seen as representative. Part of the problem in Iraq is that the new temporary government has never been accepted. Remember, in some areas Iraqis self-organised elections after Saddam was deposed – and these elections were forcibly shut down by the coalition.

* accept the fact that Iraq will have an Islamic presence in government

And so it should, it’s a democracy. But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Islam can be quite progressive. It’s taking massive abuse of power to maintain the oppressive status quo in Iran, and in Iraq the citizens are used to freedom from the excesses of Sharia.

A continued UN presence to ensure Iraq doesn’t fall into fundamentalist hands, as happened in Iran in ’79, will also be necessary I think.

Tactics:

* abandon trade sanctions

This is a human rights imperative. The trade sanctions have to be ended. This is political capital, however. Iraq has always been able to buy itself out of trade sanctions with WMD co-operation, according to resolution 687 – but that’s apparently not going to happen, since the US scotched the deal in the mid-90s. Give them up for something else, but give them up, incrementally if possible.

* attack the regime apparatus at the ground level, starting small

Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and other organisations have been reporting on specific atrocities in Iraq for a long time. Low-level personnel who are responsible must be targetted whenever they can be identified. (Police officers and police chiefs, for example.)

The idea is to make a big issue about one event, make it a political problem for Iraq (which, remember, has been trying for years to present itself as a responsible player on the world stage.) Then do everything possible to get the regime to sacrifice the person targetted for criminal justice.

Every time this is done, congratulate Iraq and Saddam on its honorable behaviour as a modern state. Then do it again. Keep hitting at the low-level building blocks, and rewarding the people at the top of the chain. Alone, this tactic won’t change much, but as part of a suite of tactics, it should help destabilise the regime’s control structure and ability to project its domination down to those in the street.

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Ach. This is hard. I will return to these ideas some other time.

And I bet George Monbiot has written something cool on this, but my google-fu is not enough to find it.

Palestine 1: Welcomes

My first account is up here [LINK DEAD – REPRODUCED BELOW].
If you want to subscribe to the morgueatlarge email list, just send a blank message to: morgueatlarge-subscribe@topica.com
More to follow. Photos uploaded; links will be available soon.

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[ORIGINAL EMAIL TEXT]

Thursday April 8

So we’re zooming down the highway to Jerusalem on Holy Thursday. The speedo hovers around 120k, and the sun is coming down, and Cal and I are in the Middle East.

We’ve come with an outfit called Olive Tours, who work with the Alternative Tourism Group. A week-long tour in Israel and Palestine, meeting peace groups, meeting locals, seeing what its like on the ground. It all came together fast, and it nearly didn’t happen, but we’re here. Only a few people know. We don’t want our mothers to worry.

Getting here was a story in itself. In Zurich, after talking my way around the fact that my passport was expiring in 5 months 3 weeks instead of 6 months, we got the full interrogation by a mild-mannered El Al Air clerk. Where were we from? Where did we live? Why were we going to Israel? Had anyone given us a bomb? Any weapons? What about small weapons, just for personal use? We stuck to our story of going for Easter, good Christian pilgrims. Lying makes me uncomfortable and I didn’t enjoy it. Heart was
bumping good. We went into a side room with him and our bags were swabbed by bomb-detecting gear; then we were ushered out while they went through the contents in detail. We were glad we’d ditched the Private Eye we’d been reading on the way over, the one with an article ripping shreds out of Sharon.

But we made it through, and suddenly we were at Tel Aviv airport waiting for a driver to meet us. And now we were on the road.

Joseph, the Arab driver, slowed down, and we saw lights and concrete blocks in the road up ahead. ‘Is this a checkpoint?’ Cal asked. ‘Yes,’ Joseph said. ‘Say you are going to church.’

And suddenly there were soldiers around us. Fatigues and automatic weapons. We were both still running adrenaline-hot, ready for more questions, wondering what would happen if we were turned back. A soldier came up to Joseph’s window and we squeezed hands in the back seat.

Joseph and the soldier talked in Hebrew briefly, then, incredibly, shook hands warmly and waved goodbye. “My friend!” Joseph said as we drove off. “He is Russian! And a Christian!”

Our first checkpoint experience, the lesson being that the unexpected would always be just around the corner. There were many more checkpoints to come in the week ahead, though, and that was the only one that gave anyone cause to smile.

Now we were in the West Bank, in Bethlehem. The Occupied Territories, seized by Israel in 1967 and still held now. Its a hilly town, and I was suddenly reminded of home – I hadn’t seen a landscape so like Wellington’s hills since I left New Zealand. Joseph was, Cal thought, somewhat amused by our gushing comments, “It’s just like home!” We weren’t blind to the irony ourselves.

We arrived at the Three Kings hotel in Beit Sahour, just outside of Bethlehem, and were set up in a room and given a great, filling meal. Along the way we met Samer, the Palestinian ATG guy who was our organiser, and the other half of the tour group, Jean Guy and Sabine from Paris. After dinner,
we joined the Parisians and wandered down to the local Catholic church to see the tail end of the service. As we went we saw Beit Sahour at night. Shops were open late, and teenagers wandered the streets chatting and texting and flirting. Men sitting on their porches greeted us: “Where are you from?” “You are welcome.”

“You are welcome” was a phrase we heard every day, everywhere we went in Palestine. And it was sincere, and we did feel it, we did feel welcome. A feeling precisely opposed to the way we’d felt at Zurich.

“What is your intention? What are you going to do? Why do you want to go to Israel?”

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morgue

Cal on the plane

NEXT: PALESTINE TRIP 2

Palestine: My Points of Reference

I’m about to start the long-awaited account of our trip to Palestine.
And I need to set some stuff down first. So here it is.
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When I was showing Palestine photos to my workmates Teresa and Kerry, I realised how hard it was to talk about anything without massive digressions explaining where I’m coming from, and why I hold the perspective I do.
Here, then, in abbreviated form, are some points of reference to use when reading about Palestine.

Continue reading Palestine: My Points of Reference

whatever we say he is

So I’m reading this book on Eminem. It’s by Anthony Bozza, a Rolling Stone journo who’s covered him since he started to break, and its pretty much in that RS free-flowing journo style – not nearly confrontational/cutting edge like the mag supposedly was in its heyday, but solid, investigative, thoughtful.
I still don’t quite know where I’m at with Marshall Mathers and his music. I remember the strange feeling as music critic after music critic lined up with the teens of the world in hailing the coming of the Great White Rapper. I didn’t get it. His singles (especially ‘My Name Is’ with its numb hook that still sends me to sleep) didn’t turn me on, and the controversy over his content was nothing new in the hiphop lyric field; I had no incentive to look closer.
But he kept getting bigger and bigger.
I don’t class myself as a hiphop backpacker, but rap music holds a key place in my background. Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet in 1990 was my wake-up call to the world of music. I had coasted through the 80s without ever engaging in music on any level – nothing ever got to me, until this. (Honorable exception: Karma Chameleon, the only song from the 80s I remember enjoying in the 80s.) PE was astonishing. Finally, music I could get into!
Over the next few years I followed Matt, Nicky and Brad’s explorations into the music, and eventually started making my own. I fell pretty firmly into what Bozza calls the ‘College Rap’ crowd – Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, Digable Planets, De La Soul, Arrested Development.
I did enjoy the music of the aggressive, and rising, gangsta sound. The gangsta fantasy never really bothered me, except for its prevalence, and the suspicion that way too many people were taking it seriously as a bible for life.
The misogyny and homophobia were bigger deals, but still not dealbreakers. I needed to investigate and see how deep it ran, how serious the artist was, in order to figure out if I could back the music.
Course, I wouldn’t do any digging if the beats weren’t good. That’s why I didn’t care about Eminem for ages, and why I’m coming late to the party now – his recent single ‘Lose Yourself’ is outstanding in every way. And I still haven’t figured it out, but its a familiar process – trying to get to the meat of what’s going on with the image that’s presented.
Which leads back to the book. Here’s a quote from Bozza’s book, because it crystallises exactly the core of my reaction to the media storm over Eminem back when I hadn’t found any reason to care about him:
“When he did appear the problem for me was that he received all this analysis and psychoanalysis that black rappers never got. If you look at somebody like Tupac… when he was alive he was a ‘bad boy’, that’s all people thought of him. There was no effort in the media to deconstruct who he is or where he comes from. But as soon as Marshall Mathers appeared they all said ‘Oh, this troubled white youth. May we lay you down on the couch? What’s your problem?’ To me it really highlighted the issue that nobody gave a rat’s ass about why young black men felt like expressing themselves in this way, but as soon as a white guy did it then there was an effort to understand.”
The quote is actually from someone named Farai Chideya, a journo who runs Pop and Politics.
And I’m not going to follow this line of thought any further, because my dinner’s getting cold.

Hug Day

Back in University in the mid 90s, a large chunk of my social life was built around “the BBS”. It was a bulletin board system for Vic students (and ex-students), and it was a virtual hangout for an awful lot of cool and interesting folk. An important element that sets it apart from every other virtual community I’ve come across was the amount of crossover into real life – most people on it knew most other people on it in the real world and BBS parties were commonplace.
I loved the BBS. I met many wonderful people, had many preconceptions challenged, had my first and only “e-romance”, was introduced to The Onion, and learned lessons about online discourse that have served me well as the entire world has gone digital…
…but this isn’t a general nostalgia trip. This is about something specific.
Somewhere along the line, the BBS ended up celebrating Hug Day. This was basically an excuse for going around and hugging other BBS members in real life, because Hugs Are Good. Somehow or other I became the flagwaver for hug day in the BBS’s latter days (the BBS was shut down for good in 99 – or 2000? – a shadow of its former self due to member attrition and the rise of so many other avenues for online entertainment and community).
Anyway, today I’m thinking about hug day, and that excuses to hug other human beings are far too infrequent. So, promise me that today you’ll go out and hug someone you normally wouldn’t hug. Your excuse can be this: “I promised Morgan.”
And you wouldn’t want to let me down, would you?
(I can’t remember the time of year in which Hug Day fell – late in semester 1 I think. Doesn’t matter much. Every day is Hug Day!)

The Net Redeems Itself

In my last post I wondered at the failure of the internet to stay on top of the prison story as compared to slow-coach television.
I neglected to mention that the first I saw of the prison story was in Idiot/Savant’s No Right Turn. So the internet won the race (like Vortox, the internet always wins) but Old Media won the, erm, the discus and the javelin and stuff.
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And the internet has provided my new favourite thing:
people who have had control devices implanted in their brains by the New World Order have set up an online questionnaire to be filled out by the perpetrators.
“While we all want the torture you are heaping on us to stop, at the same time, we would like to know something about you as well.”
(Found via the delightful Making Light, still essential reading for writers of all stripes.)

Feeling Horrified

So I was planning a happy-skippy blog entry about how I’ve been really busy knocking off dozens of items from my post-Palestine to-do list (no exagerration – the list came to 40 items and I’m down to the teens). And talking about Kill Bill, because I saw part 2 and feel I have Things To Say about it. And making wry comment on the coverage that sheep and that budgie have been getting all around the world.
But I’ve just seen the coverage of the Iraqi prisoner abuse.
First thing – it’s on TV way before the net. Discussion boards have the story but the mainstream newssites and big blogs aren’t covering it yet. Weird – TV ahead of the internet – I can’t think the last time it happened to me.
Second thing – oh my lord. Of course, it’s one incident and it’s being dealt with and it’s not a general situation – but there have been so many reports of this kind of thing in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Gitmo. It is a sign of a general culture. This kind of activity is the outgrowth of the rhetoric surrounding the US military effort and ‘clash of civilisations’ and war on terror etc. It’s *inevitable*. It was predicted. It has been reported before. But photos tell a different story.
Third thing – it’s been a rough two weeks for the Arab world (which does exist as a collective entity on some level, if only because the rest of the world keeps lumping them together) – Bush supporting Sharon, Fallujah being bombed, and now this. If you’re already feeling victimised, this run of events certainly looks like the West is prepping for a fight to the finish with the Arab Middle East.
Fourth thing – the grinning thumbs-up may be familiar to anyone who’s been paying attention to the war-blogs for the last few weeks – the ‘Boudreaux controversy’ has been argued all over and made it into Salon.com a few days ago. Basically, its a photo of a grinning GI next to an Iraqi kid holding a sign – but there are two versions of what the sign says, one sickening and one heartwarming. Obviously one, or both, was photoshopped for political reasons. I think psychological logic supports the idea its the negative one, but it’s impossible to prove. This prison activity will lend more weight to this logic, because its premised on the fact that some soldiers in Iraq are happy to humiliate the Iraqis. And now we see that this is indeed the case.
Christ. Things are going to get worse before they get better.
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I did like Kill Bill 2, for what its worth.