My interview on NPR
http://www.nhpr.org/node/33433
And for Mac users
http://www.nhpr.org/audio/
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Word of mouth
My interview on NPR
http://www.nhpr.org/node/33433
And for Mac users
http://www.nhpr.org/audio/
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Fragmentation and pastoralism
"RAMI ZURAYK and HAMRA ABU ‘EID (Beirut) modified this picture for the present situation by presenting a case study on the contemporary livelihoods of two Bedouin groups settled in the Lebanese Bekaa plain. Their data stem from a joint research project at the American University of Beirut, in collaboration with TARIQ TALL (Amman). Zurayk and Abu ‘Eid were able to document that mobile pastoralism continues to be an efficient economic strategy and that Bedouin communities which had been forced to give up livestock breeding were less resilient against shocks such as droughts and price rises and had a lower quality of life than those who continued to keep livestock breeding in their portfolio of resources. According to this study, the greatest obstacle to mobile pastoralism is the fragmentation of landscapes by national borders, roads and agricultural areas."
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=30872
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=30872
Iara Lee: Hip Hop as Global Resistance
"Fuck the police coming straight from the underground/ a young nigga's got it bad cause I'm brown/ and not the other color/ so police think/they have the authority/to kill a minority."
These lyrics spoken by Ice Cube, for instance, could just as easily have been uttered by DAM (Da Arab MCs), a Palestinian hip-hop trio forced to live as "Israeli Arabs" in an Israeli slum.
My current film, Cultures of Resistance (out Fall 2010), is an exploration of the variety of activism in a world plagued with war, oppression and poverty. I pay special attention to creative action, specifically, and in my travels throughout the Middle East I encountered a hip-hop reborn through artists like the Ramallah Underground and Shadia Mansour, both Palestinian, as well as London-based Iraqi rapper Lowkey (who are all part of a larger collective known as the Arab League of Hip Hop). Their flows cut deep against the tyranny of Israeli and US occupation of their lands as they call for equality for all people, and reaffirm their Arab identity despite brutal attempts at cultural erasure. The goal, Shadia said, was to tell the world that "Palestine is on the map," and always will remain so."
These lyrics spoken by Ice Cube, for instance, could just as easily have been uttered by DAM (Da Arab MCs), a Palestinian hip-hop trio forced to live as "Israeli Arabs" in an Israeli slum.
My current film, Cultures of Resistance (out Fall 2010), is an exploration of the variety of activism in a world plagued with war, oppression and poverty. I pay special attention to creative action, specifically, and in my travels throughout the Middle East I encountered a hip-hop reborn through artists like the Ramallah Underground and Shadia Mansour, both Palestinian, as well as London-based Iraqi rapper Lowkey (who are all part of a larger collective known as the Arab League of Hip Hop). Their flows cut deep against the tyranny of Israeli and US occupation of their lands as they call for equality for all people, and reaffirm their Arab identity despite brutal attempts at cultural erasure. The goal, Shadia said, was to tell the world that "Palestine is on the map," and always will remain so."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/iara-lee/hip-hop-as-global-resista_b_660608.html
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
السياحة غير العادلة
يفيد تقرير صدر حديثاً عن شركة «Global Blue»، بعنوان «تمعّن في إنفاق السياح»، بأنّ 83% من الإنفاق دون ضرائب (Tax Free Spending). أي إن الإنفاق السياحي كان خلال النصف الأوّل من العام الجاري متركزاً في منطقة بيروت الكبرى، تليها مناطق المتن وكسروان وبعبدا، بنسبة 13% و2% و1% على التوالي، ما يعني أنّ الأطراف البعيدة عن المركز لا تستفيد أبداً من الأموال التي تنساب على الأعمال التجاريّة والخدماتيّة في الداخل.
http://www.al-akhbar.com/ar/node/199615
هل تذكرون
خلال السنوات التي مرّت، شارك وزراء في الحكومات الثلاث السابقة، ونواب بعضهم لا يزال في المجلس النيابي، وموظفون كبار لا يزال بعضهم في الخدمة الفعلية، وقضاة لا يزالون يشغلون مناصب رفيعة، وضباط كبار من الجيش وقوى الأمن الداخلي والأجهزة الأمنية، وكوادر ناشطون في أحزاب سياسية وجمعيات أهلية ومنظمات غير حكومية، وإعلاميون ينتشرون كالفطر في وسائل إعلامية داخلية وخارجية... كل هؤلاء شاركوا في أقذر عمل استهدف النيل من أشخاص ومجموعات بأكملها، ومن دولة وجمهور ومن مقاومة كانت ولا تزال هي الهدف. كل ذلك، ولم يرفّ جفن لأحد من هؤلاء
ابراهيم الأمين
http://www.al-akhbar.com/ar/node/199694
الشرطة الإسرائيليّة تدمّر مساكن بدو بعد ترحيلهم
قال المتحدث باسم المنظمة غير الحكومية «منتدى تشريع» التي تدافع عن حقوق البدو في الدولة العبرية، ياكوف مانورمن، إن حوالى 1500 شرطي إسرائيلي رحّلوا اليوم سكان قرية للبدو قرب بئر السبع بصحراء النقب (جنوب) ودمروا مساكنهم.
http://www.al-akhbar.com/ar/node/199742
Monday, July 26, 2010
My illiterate mother's math: power, hegemony and knowledge
"In 1967, I started to see the practical limits of the education I had been given. The Israeli Arab war started a process that made the real environment and its power relations more visible. My sense of the intellectual, moral, and humanitarian dimensions of math and science gradually gave way to a sense of the central functions of math and science: creating power and generating hegemony. The stunning Israeli military victory in 1967 was a victory of superior math, science, and technology — not a victory of moral superiority or greater personal courage. The message of the highly sophisticated warplanes and bombs was loud and clear. Thus, although it is true that math, science, and technology produce planes, for example, that can transport people for harmless purposes, they frequently produce warplanes whose function is to kill and destroy. In almost every country in the world, the number of warplanes is many times the number of civilian planes. Just as it is misleading to emphasize the protein and other values in meat that has been poisoned, it is deceptive to stress only the technical skills and knowledge one can acquire through education while ignoring its potentially dangerous consequences. In addition to the destructive machinery, certain values and patterns of thinking and behaving that are associated with current models of learning are equally destructive.
My mother’s sewing demonstrated another way of conceptualizing and doing math, another kind of knowledge, and the place of that knowledge in the world. But the value of my mother’s tradition and of her kind of mathematics and knowledge, though not intrinsically disempowering was continually discredited by the world around her, by what Paulo Freire calls the culture of silence, and by cultural hegemony. Although I was not yet ready to question the theoretical bases of positivistic math and science, this discovery allowed me to recognize the need for a different type of education, and to respect all forms of knowledge and their relation to action.
...
My mother’s sewing demonstrated another way of conceptualizing and doing math, another kind of knowledge, and the place of that knowledge in the world. But the value of my mother’s tradition and of her kind of mathematics and knowledge, though not intrinsically disempowering was continually discredited by the world around her, by what Paulo Freire calls the culture of silence, and by cultural hegemony. Although I was not yet ready to question the theoretical bases of positivistic math and science, this discovery allowed me to recognize the need for a different type of education, and to respect all forms of knowledge and their relation to action.
...
Hegemony is to be understood here as a form that often precedes political and military conquests and continues after them. But unlike military conquest, hegemonic conquest permeates almost all spheres, and those being dominated facilitate their own domination. Hegemony is always linked to an ideology that reflects the manners and interests of the invaders and their culture. This ideology embodies certain conceptions, values, language, relations, and interests that are translated into daily practices. Crucial to the hegemonic relationship is the belief of the conquered that the lifestyle and values of the hegemonic group are inherently, naturally, and objectively superior. Hegemony is successful when the invader’s ideology is taken or even assumed to be universal and superior; when, like the math I valued, it is believed to transcend class, gender, culture, and national boundaries.
Ideology is a worldview that embodies a particular language and certain conceptions, values, relations, and interests that are translated into daily practices and that produce a certain consciousness. Consequently, the role of intellectuals and institutions is of primary importance, since the reproduction of a hegemonic ideology is achieved through them. Intellectual development in a colonial hegemonic context is designed to provide ideology without a basis in power. This allows intellectuals to participate vicariously in the moral, intellectual, humanitarian, and technical aspects of Western culture, as well as in educational, scholarly, and research activities. The training of colonial intellectuals directs them to derive their sense of worth and status from this vicarious participation, alienating them from their own culture, history, and people. The indigenous population, however, often supports this process by giving status to such intellectuals. Generally speaking, hegemonic education produces intellectuals who have lost their power base in their own culture and society and who have been provided with a foreign culture and ideology, but without a power base in the hegemonic society. I personally have seen this process as I have worked with and observed Palestinian intellectuals over the past twelve years. I have observed that, because they lacked a power base at both ends, these intellectuals tend to sharply overvalue symbolic power and tokens—such as titles, degrees, access to prestigious institutions, and awards— associated with the dominant culture.
Ultimately, I found that the power of Western hegemony rests on the claims of superiority, universality, and ethical neutrality of Western math, positivistic science, technology, and education. These claims extend into social, cultural, moral, political, and intellectual spheres. But continuing to accept Western math, science, and education as universal and authoritative is detrimental to creating a healthier and more humane world. Like any other human activity, math, science, and education need a critical analysis, not only at the implementation and application stage but also, and more important, at the level of the basic premises and values that govern their conceptions, practices, and production.
In short, the 1967 war, its aftermath, and the discovery of my mother’s math convinced me that education can do one of two things: it can either introduce hegemony into the community, or it can reclaim and develop what has been made invisible by hegemony.
Education of the second kind, which I refer to in this essay as community education, requires us to use our senses again, to make things visible, and to allow people to speak. Like many other peoples in the Third World, Palestinians have been denied the value of our experience and have been robbed of our voice and sense of self-worth. Value, language, and visibility are at stake here because they have been taken away from people’s fundamental activities. My mother, for example, was unable – and was never given the chance – to articulate her work and her thinking. Meaningful education, or community education, thus reclaims people’s lives, their sense of self-worth, and their ways of thinking from the hegemonic structures, and facilitates their ability to articulate what they do and think about in order to provide a foundation for autonomous action."
Ideology is a worldview that embodies a particular language and certain conceptions, values, relations, and interests that are translated into daily practices and that produce a certain consciousness. Consequently, the role of intellectuals and institutions is of primary importance, since the reproduction of a hegemonic ideology is achieved through them. Intellectual development in a colonial hegemonic context is designed to provide ideology without a basis in power. This allows intellectuals to participate vicariously in the moral, intellectual, humanitarian, and technical aspects of Western culture, as well as in educational, scholarly, and research activities. The training of colonial intellectuals directs them to derive their sense of worth and status from this vicarious participation, alienating them from their own culture, history, and people. The indigenous population, however, often supports this process by giving status to such intellectuals. Generally speaking, hegemonic education produces intellectuals who have lost their power base in their own culture and society and who have been provided with a foreign culture and ideology, but without a power base in the hegemonic society. I personally have seen this process as I have worked with and observed Palestinian intellectuals over the past twelve years. I have observed that, because they lacked a power base at both ends, these intellectuals tend to sharply overvalue symbolic power and tokens—such as titles, degrees, access to prestigious institutions, and awards— associated with the dominant culture.
Ultimately, I found that the power of Western hegemony rests on the claims of superiority, universality, and ethical neutrality of Western math, positivistic science, technology, and education. These claims extend into social, cultural, moral, political, and intellectual spheres. But continuing to accept Western math, science, and education as universal and authoritative is detrimental to creating a healthier and more humane world. Like any other human activity, math, science, and education need a critical analysis, not only at the implementation and application stage but also, and more important, at the level of the basic premises and values that govern their conceptions, practices, and production.
In short, the 1967 war, its aftermath, and the discovery of my mother’s math convinced me that education can do one of two things: it can either introduce hegemony into the community, or it can reclaim and develop what has been made invisible by hegemony.
Education of the second kind, which I refer to in this essay as community education, requires us to use our senses again, to make things visible, and to allow people to speak. Like many other peoples in the Third World, Palestinians have been denied the value of our experience and have been robbed of our voice and sense of self-worth. Value, language, and visibility are at stake here because they have been taken away from people’s fundamental activities. My mother, for example, was unable – and was never given the chance – to articulate her work and her thinking. Meaningful education, or community education, thus reclaims people’s lives, their sense of self-worth, and their ways of thinking from the hegemonic structures, and facilitates their ability to articulate what they do and think about in order to provide a foundation for autonomous action."
http://summit.kein.org/node/895
This is a very important article on education and knowledge and learning by Mounir Fasheh for which I have to thank dear Marcy...
Free the tabbouleh
"Some dish, that victorious salad. Tabouleh’s usually just an appetizer. Not Abdulhadi’s. His 1,081 kilos of chopped parsley, bulgur wheat, onion, tomato and mint filled a 15-foot plate. What Abdulhadi relished most was the “political victory”: “It took me 18 months to convince Guinness to enter it under ‘Palestine’ - not ‘occupied West Bank,’ not even ‘occupied Palestine,’ simply Palestine.”"
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/24/opinion/24iht-edkessel.html?_r=2&emc=tnt&tntemail1=y
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/24/opinion/24iht-edkessel.html?_r=2&emc=tnt&tntemail1=y
سيدة الخس
Let them eat strawberries
"Now, however, Abdulfattah and other farmers in Gaza are being forced by Israel to abandon their crops yet again, although this time there is no recourse in shifting production to another, "safer," fruit or vegetable. Under the current form of the illegal Israeli-imposed closure, farmers in Gaza can no longer export their produce outside the Gaza Strip, and they are facing further restrictions on the types and amounts of products they can grow. The effects have been disastrous. Before the imposition of the total closure of the Gaza Strip on 14 June 2007 -- itself only a more stringent form of a closure policy in place since the early 1990s -- the Gaza Strip produced almost 400,000 tons of agricultural products annually, one third of which was intended for export. Despite the 2005 Agreement on Movement and Access between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, which set a target for exports for Gaza at 400 trucks per day, only 259 trucks have left the Gaza Strip with goods in the last three years. Accordingly, since 2007, farmers in Gaza have reported a 40 percent decrease in income: in 2008 alone, farmers in the Gaza Strip lost an estimated US $6.5 million."
Israel forced a complete change in the local food systems of Gaza when it occupied it, and now it is destroying whatever remains of it.
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11414.shtml
Israel forced a complete change in the local food systems of Gaza when it occupied it, and now it is destroying whatever remains of it.
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11414.shtml
Badael-Alternatives بدائل
I was so busy this weekend I didn't have time to link to Badael: Here it is. My editorial was about in cash donations for poverty alleviation, and Rameh Hamiyyeh told us how the bad farming season turned into a bad mouneh season.
http://www.al-akhbar.com/ar/taxonomy/term/16833,18995
http://www.al-akhbar.com/ar/taxonomy/term/16833,18995
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Sizing up the food movement
"July 17, 2010 -- Socialist WebZine -- How can we change the world? This is the question that socialists face in the 21st century. It certainly offers more possibilities than the one presented in the mid-1990s that asked whether we had reached the end of history. However, capitalism is also attempting to provide an answer to this question by offering individualised ways to change the world. Food is an important arena for this project – corporations insist that eating the right food or drinking the right coffee can really make a difference in the world.
Behind the antiseptic choices offered by the system, lies the storm and stress of capitalism. Corporations chasing each other across the world in search of profits, workers being squeezed for ever lower wages and natural resources being monopolised and spoiled. Old wine in a new bottle – a certified organic 100% post-consumer recycled bottle, but the same old bitter wine. In the process, a world transformed is neatly reduced to an individual act of consumption that serves to substitute itself for any bonds of solidarity or affinity. Personal choices about which corporate products to consume become the only acceptable avenue for “politics”, a term now used to discuss which products corporations offer instead of examining the consequences of the very existence of corporations themselves.
No food item better demonstrates capitalism’s ability to quietly adapt to and create consumption patterns while shielding consumers from the transformative nightmares it engenders than soy. The seemingly innocent jiggly glob of crushed soybeans has caught the attention of North American consumers looking toward a post-meat world. Its pristine white colour radiates goodness, the plastic packaging it arrives in screams about good health and the imaginary hippie-style communal edginess is irresistible to the deeply alienated late capitalist consumer."
Behind the antiseptic choices offered by the system, lies the storm and stress of capitalism. Corporations chasing each other across the world in search of profits, workers being squeezed for ever lower wages and natural resources being monopolised and spoiled. Old wine in a new bottle – a certified organic 100% post-consumer recycled bottle, but the same old bitter wine. In the process, a world transformed is neatly reduced to an individual act of consumption that serves to substitute itself for any bonds of solidarity or affinity. Personal choices about which corporate products to consume become the only acceptable avenue for “politics”, a term now used to discuss which products corporations offer instead of examining the consequences of the very existence of corporations themselves.
No food item better demonstrates capitalism’s ability to quietly adapt to and create consumption patterns while shielding consumers from the transformative nightmares it engenders than soy. The seemingly innocent jiggly glob of crushed soybeans has caught the attention of North American consumers looking toward a post-meat world. Its pristine white colour radiates goodness, the plastic packaging it arrives in screams about good health and the imaginary hippie-style communal edginess is irresistible to the deeply alienated late capitalist consumer."
Greenwashing the Nakba
"For anyone taking a road trip along the highways of the part of Palestine that became Israel in 1948, one is bound to spot a blue and green structure in the shape of a bird marked with the Hebrew letters KKL, which stands for Keren Kayemeth L'Yisrael, the Hebrew name of the Israeli branch of the Jewish National Fund (JNF). All around the bird one will see expanses of forests planted sometime in the past few decades. A walk through one of these forests will take the visitor past fruit trees, cactus plants, terraced hillsides and the ruins of buildings. In some cases, these ruins are explained in a JNF brochure pointing to their ancient history; in other cases, one is left to the devices of one's imagination. In all cases, these sites are what remains of some of the more than 500 villages depopulated and destroyed through the course of Israel's establishment, the homes of millions of Palestinian refugees struggling to return to them for more than 60 years. By walking through a JNF park or forest, one inhales the fresh smell of the greenwashing of Palestine's Nakba." (Thanks Marcy)
Hazem Jamjoum in EI
USAID calculated deception?
"It is also interesting to observe that the policies of USAID, an instrument that the State Department uses to pursue the US's objectives overseas, also conflict with Washington's official stances. USAID programmes for the Palestinians effectively exclude East Jerusalem. Its green papers and other official reports and statements make frequent mention of "the West Bank and Gaza" as headings for its activities, but rare are references to East Jerusalem. It is as though, for USAID, East Jerusalem is not an indivisible part of the occupied territories, in spite of Washington's official acknowledgement that it is and in spite of the inclusion of East Jerusalem among the final status issues in the US- brokered negotiating process between the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Israel, the occupying power. One cannot help but suspect USAID -- and by extension the State Department -- of perpetrating a certain calculated deception through its deliberate and systematic omission of East Jerusalem in its programmes and documents."
Is there life after hummus? ماوراء معركة الحمص بين لبنان واسرائيل
My interview with France 24
اندلعت معركة من نوع جديد قبل عدة أعوام بين لبنان واسرائيل عُرفت بمعركة الحمص. الناظر للقضية من بعيد يعتقد أنها ربما نوع من الشوفينية الجوفاء أومسألة سطحية...المعركة هي في الواقع مزيج من حماية التراث وكسب الاسواق
http://www.france24.com/ar/20100710-beyond-business-lebanon-israel-homos
اندلعت معركة من نوع جديد قبل عدة أعوام بين لبنان واسرائيل عُرفت بمعركة الحمص. الناظر للقضية من بعيد يعتقد أنها ربما نوع من الشوفينية الجوفاء أومسألة سطحية...المعركة هي في الواقع مزيج من حماية التراث وكسب الاسواق
http://www.france24.com/ar/20100710-beyond-business-lebanon-israel-homos
Can't digest this occuppation
"Nasser's campaign began when he heard from a friend who had flown in from the U.S. that the Israeli national airline, El Al, had served mosakhen, a dish made of bread, chicken and onion spiced with purple summak, as an "Israel national dish".
"That was hard to digest. Everyone knows mosakhen is Palestinian. They've tried that before, with hummous (the famed Mideast chick pea paste), and falafel (fried chick peas in a pitta bread sandwich). It's below the belt," says the Palestinian-born New Yorker, who came back to his homeland in the peace years of the early '90s.
"Israeli chutzpah (cheek) at its worst, I call it," he adds, "I had to ruin their tasteless assault, to cook up something that would instead celebrate our Palestinian national culture and identity in the world."" (Thanks Marcy)
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=52211
"That was hard to digest. Everyone knows mosakhen is Palestinian. They've tried that before, with hummous (the famed Mideast chick pea paste), and falafel (fried chick peas in a pitta bread sandwich). It's below the belt," says the Palestinian-born New Yorker, who came back to his homeland in the peace years of the early '90s.
"Israeli chutzpah (cheek) at its worst, I call it," he adds, "I had to ruin their tasteless assault, to cook up something that would instead celebrate our Palestinian national culture and identity in the world."" (Thanks Marcy)
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=52211
Monday, July 19, 2010
Amazing--Heatmap - Density of fast food restaurants in the 48 contiguous states in the US
http://maps.forum.nu/gm_heatmap.html
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
+081.jpg)
Posts
