“Revolutionary fantasy - Enter Stage Right” plus 3 more

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• Revolutionary fantasy - Enter Stage Right
• A brief note on Jerusalem - Al-Ahram Weekly
• Celebrating Twain's adventures, 100 years after his ... - Lincoln Journal Star
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Revolutionary fantasy - Enter Stage Right Posted: 25 Apr 2010 05:11 PM PDT	Revolutionary fantasy By Daniel M. Ryan web posted April 26, 2010 Watchers of the Tea Party movement have noticed an odd dichotomy: they've been portrayed as a bunch of dangerous characters, shelterers of violent extremism, a force of disruptive troublemakers, by the usual sources. And yet, eyewitness reports and footage of real Tea Party protestors have shown little more than rambunctiousness. No clashes with the police, no vandalism, hardly any litter. They say their piece and they go back to their lives. No hint of any professional agitators egging people on to disruptive, let alone violent, acts. It's almost as if a Boy Scout troop was accused of harboring a crime ring. Plot devices are one thing; they attract us in part because of their exciting implausibility. The very implausibility makes them exciting. How many of us, outside of people who work in one, have ever heard the phrase "Code Blue" in a hospital? Fiction is one realm; fact is another. A lot of fiction tends to play upon our tendencies to hysteria, in the non-clinical sense. Even the most unassuming of us would sometimes like to believe that things are the opposite of what they seem. The boring old town with right-living folk has dark secrets; the boring old house has a clothes cupboard that leads to a magical exciting land. The people who seem rather predictable have secret lives that are titillating or exciting, or disturbing. The good ol' dependable wallflower has secret powers and is busy saving the world while everyone's ignoring him. The irascible cuss is actually a supervillain out wreaking havoc and killing people. And, of course, the stolid butler was the one who did it. Either that or the cop. Normally, the bounds between the two realms are pretty clear. To a degree, all fiction is escape fiction. Not being tied to the facts is what given fiction its distinctiveness. In normal times, the only people who have difficulty distinguishing the two stick out like a sore thumb. Nowadays, though, the distinction is more widely blurred. Look at all the "non-fiction fiction" there has been disseminated about the Tea Party crew. A consummate outsider would find the whole imbroglio amusing. The Tea Party movement, to someone who has no knowledge of the United States or its political drama, appears to be sized up as revolutionary insurgents. The liberals bashing them would appear to be the reliably Tory guardians of the Old Order, treating the Tea Partiers as if they were a revolutionary threat poisoning the minds of the embittered lower orders. From what I've read and seen, the Tea Party movement is filled with people who take politics – and their good names – seriously. They're too serious to act like the adolescent Left, who like to chortle about scaring "the Man." Bill Clinton got criticized for his recent statement suggesting that the Tea Party contingent may be nurturing new Timothy McVeighs. Had the sides been reversed, he would have been treated as a joke…as someone whose goat was got. Exciting Dramas… It seems only a matter of time before the tea party movement is sized up as a fomenter of revolution. Let's face it: there is a bit of blur in the line between fiction and fact; as standards keep going the same direction we know they are already, the line will get even more blurry. One of the entry points for "non-fiction fiction" in politics is revolution, an exciting drama for those who are safe from it. There are a lot of quasi-fictional narratives about revolution, most using certain politico-economic metrics like science fiction authors use discoveries in the hard sciences: as plot devices. Untangling the real thing takes a lot of work, and an unusual amount of dispassion. Since successful revolutions always appeal to universal values, that dispassionateness is mandatory. Despite the name recognition of another intellectual, the man to beat in revolution studies is none other than Alexis de Tocqueville. His The Ancient Regime And The Revolution, although merely a history of pre-revolutionary France, had a model that applies to a lot of revolutions since. The key to understanding his work are these two points: the grievances complained about were mostly remedied by the late Ancient Regime, and the revolutionary Republic's reforms were in many cases a formal endorsement of advances that the Ancient Regime had enacted, was on the way to enacting, or was arguably on the way to enacting. It's a known fact that Louis XVI would have stayed on the French throne after 1789 had he agreed to a constitutional monarchy like Britain's; he had that chance until 1791. His refusal to do so is one of the reasons he's thought of as stupid. The fact that it was offered him in the first place suggests that he was thought of as reasonable. Had he been the tyrant that lurid legends pronounce him to be, the revolutionaries of 1789 wouldn't have even bothered. The Romanian revolutionaries in 1989 didn't palaver at all with Nicolae "Draculescu" Ceauşescu. Not only French but Russian history shows that revolutions are preceded either by liberalizations and/or granting of privileges to the commonfolk. The Marxian interpretation of this, we've heard too much of. One take we've heard too little of is the blood-and-guts cynic's, namely: the reforms made, their order, their pace and their implementation showed to the multitude that the existing order was weak enough to overthrow. Interestingly, the American experience gives a hint as to another element not often mentioned: alienated from the existing order, the ordinary folk assume the functions of government themselves…often without any formal authority. As a result, the formal authority becomes more and more irrelevant to ordinary people's lives. This was the case in the United States by 1775. …And The Real- Life Obverse Although distressing to some, the blood-and-guts approach tells some home truths that are sometimes needful. The British authorities in the American colonies were weak. One of the reasons why there were so many jailbreaks in pre-revolutionary times was that the jails were easy to break into. Moreover, the low taxes that Americans paid at the time were balanced by minimal government services. (No, there wasn't too much sterling spent on the colonial jails.) In many cases, the American governed had to govern themselves outside of any formal authority structure because no-one else would. Yes, this included fending off the natives and sometimes attacking them. In more peaceable times, the colonial authorities appreciated this because it kept their costs down. Before Lord North, the chief reason for crackdowns resulted from native people's complaints about the colonists being too aggressive. Even the quitrent, or property tax, collectors were easygoing. In addition, the Redcoats had no idea how to fight a war against insurgents. They didn't know the land; the colonists did. Also, despite the unofficiality of the colonial troops, they were a good match for the redcoats as a fighting force. The "armed mob" that the militias were, were fairly up on tactics and carried arms which were not all that inferior to the Redcoats'. Yes, it's true that the present government of the United States is nothing like the late-colonial government. Taxes are much higher; the corpus of laws and regulations is huge instead of minimal. Most U.S. government spending can be considered largesse; there was effectively none in colonial times. The U.S. government is much bigger, much better staffed, deploys a lot more resources and material, and is much better armed relative to the governed than the British authorities ever were. The soldiers at the time and place of the Boston Massacre only had muskets. What was at Waco? Granted that the blood-and-guts perspective leaves out a crucial element, but it does shed a valuable light as to the logistics of the situation. Any would-be group of new American revolutionaries would not only be vastly out-armed, but also would be vastly outmaneuvered. In a very real way, thanks to post-modern surveillance technology, there's no place to hide. Or there won't be soon. America, after all, is not Afghanistan. I did mention leaving something out, and that's the will to use what one's got. There were two crucial weaknesses in the ancient regime at the time of 1789: lack of money and lack of will. The government of Louis XVI was bankrupt; that's why the Estates-General was called in the first place. In addition, a large segment of the rulers had gone native. It's a fact that the reliable liberal bloc was the aristocracy. De Tocqueville himself mentioned that many a bureaucrat was Rousseauesque in his communications. When Rousseau died, before 1789, his funeral in Paris was close to that of a national hero. Given that the 1789 reform movement flew under Rousseauian colors, the rulers were all-but disarmed at the values level. That unity of values is what made reform, and a new unity without bloodshed, seem possible. Of course, that dream turned into a nightmare. At this level, there's little sign that American government officials have gone native in that way. They're still holding up their prerogatives, particularly tax prerogatives. As far as the governed are concerned, there's little will to do anything beyond petition for redress of grievances. The libertarian cleavage of society into rulers and ruled is only common-sensical at the talk level. Conclusion As the both the matèriel and values angles show, the United States is nowhere near a pre-revolutionary state. The governing class is still self-confident – if anything, a little too self-confident – and the weapons imbalance heavily favors the government. Any band of revolutionaries would be hard-pressed to mount a successful prison break, an act that the American colonialists found easy to do.   All fictions aside, the claim that the Tea Party movement is a harbinger of any revolutionary or insurgent tendencies is little short of ludicrous. Someone who believes the opposite is best pegged as overly entertained. Daniel M. Ryan is currently watching The Gold Bubble.   Send a link to this story   Home
A brief note on Jerusalem - Al-Ahram Weekly Posted: 25 Apr 2010 01:58 PM PDT Historiography, when it claims to be scientific, seeks to refute myth through the search for its origins and functions. It simultaneously aims to replace myth with a record of events composed with the proclaimed intent to learn the truth "as it really was" and in accordance with a method that strives to be scientific. This "scientism" has gradually become more and more aware of its rhetorical and ideological facets. Ideology, inclusive of its political ends, perspectives and motives, inevitably influences the historical narrative and, before this, the process of selectivity (whether deliberate or unconscious) that affects the choice of historical incidents and the relative emphasis given to them. At a broader level, ideology affects how historical time is divided into eras and how these eras are characterised and weighed. In fact, chronological taxonomy and appraisal is ultimately an ideological process. Historiography and historians, therefore, need to be subjected to close and constant scrutiny and criticism, and for this process academic freedom is indispensable in order to ensure an open interchange between scholars that is unrestrained by pieties and taboos. Revising historiographical processes from time to time is not only needed in order to unearth new facts and re- examine old ones, and to test new methods of criticism, research, deconstruction and synthesis. It is also valuable when a prevailing political discourse begins to crumble, whether as a result of critical assault or because of its own inconsistencies, or when it is no longer of use to its author (the state, for example). Let's assume, for example, that a certain discourse shaped the writing of history from its ideological standpoint, setting the beginning, the golden age and the era of decline accordingly. Then suppose we learned that the beginning was not really a beginning, that the age of decline turned out to be an age of enlightenment or progress in many respects, and that a host of other facts did not fit into the old schema. We could only conclude that the order of discourse had taken certain events and ignored others, construed its selected events in a certain way, and, instead of dismantling myth created and fed on one, and built history around it. We would have to conclude, further, that history and the act of writing history were bent into the service of the political objectives of national or religious movements, or of a state or ruling regime. Official histories are being exposed all the time for their ideological biases. Often they are written from the standpoint of the contemporary borders of a state. To read them one might think the entire area encompassed within those borders shared a single history that set it apart from other areas over the ages and that the inhabitants of that area were similarly distinct from other peoples by virtue of their shared history. More importantly, as far as the topic here is concerned, history, when written in an ideological frame of mind, is trim. It is retrospectively deterministic, discarding everything that might be regarded as accidental or inconsequential to what was meant to be -- the existing political boundaries, the role of this or that religious or ethnic minority or majority, the rise of a particular ruling elite, for example -- or to what ought not to be -- the current foundations of a democratic majority, for example. Nevertheless, because of its pretence to being history it still operates within a cognitive framework that permits for verification, refutation, argumentation and debate. As such, it is distinct from myth and from sacred history, which are concerned with "the story of things" and "their meaning" and not necessarily their history. The mythical story lends meaning and sense to human societies. It defines their origins, their reason for existence, their mission on earth, or their "historical right". Every myth is a creation myth, a story of origins. When incorporated into a religion it becomes an article of faith and beyond question or, at least, difficult to broach. But here I would like to differentiate between two orders of faith: faith in what we might term simple or lesser truths, and faith in God. The former type of truth can be disproven; the latter can be neither proven nor disproven. If an alternative coherent historical narrative conflicts with a historical narrative of a creed it might shake one's faith in certain notions that had been taken as given out of ignorance or tradition, but not, for example, in divine omnipotence, which is of an order beyond logical or empirical refutation. When sacred history is integral to a religion and Holy Scriptures are treated as history books in which divine purpose is presented and explained in the form of historical events, it is difficult to subject it to scholastic criticism and discussion. Naturally, the confrontational stance is not the best approach. More appropriate would be to attempt to separate the events, symbols, holy places, miracles and marvels of sacred history from mundane history. The latter, being within the grasp of the finite human mind, can be explored by means of historical documents (such as records, memoirs, transmitted testimonies), archaeological evidence and, above all, an open and rational mind that refuses to submit to superstition and myth as though they were concrete facts. Meanwhile, scriptural history will continue to impart its meanings and mysteries and to provide a source for drawing morals and lessons. But politics, which is the interplay between social forces and interests and, hence, a mundane activity of the first order, rejects such a separation. It utilises myth and sacred history in order to explain and justify ends and means, to shape awareness, to build support and mobilise action, and to win legitimacy. In every national rhetoric (not to mention every national conflict), sacred history and mundane history are inextricably intertwined. Sacred history provides the calendar of the days and years, the battles and the places to commemorate, and these intersect with the events that political consciousness sets as the historical landmarks it needs to shape public awareness, underpin legitimacy and justify actions. Nowhere are sacred and mundane (so as not to use profane) histories so intimately intertwined as they are in Jerusalem. The sources of sacred history, here, are divine scriptures that relate a story about this city, and these have contributed to shaping the awareness of entire peoples on the forces that have fought and are fighting over it, on good and evil, and on their own identities, regardless of how remote the peoples are from the site itself. Jerusalem occupies a central place in their conception of history as they were brought up to understand it. This body of stories had a profound impact on whole generations of Western historians and Orientalists who were nurtured on them at home, at school and through their literature and arts and who, in their professional lives, came to treat the Torah or the Old Testament as though it were a history textbook or a biography of a people. These scholars began to excavate in the ground, digging ever wider and deeper in the search for evidence to substantiate Biblical persons, places and events that their religious education had made as familiar to them as the names of their hometowns. It was a kind of circular logic at work, the fallacy of a premise that sustains itself on tenuous, although seemingly concrete, scientific evidence. It was an almost blatantly crude ideological product, and it was a political enterprise par excellence on the part of individuals and groups who regarded the present-day inhabitants of Palestine as transients in their sacred history and in their constructed history of the world. International relations and law are founded upon the people's right to the country in which they were born and in which their fathers and their fathers' fathers lived, whose soil they tilled and watered with their sweat, about which they wrote their poems and epics, and upon which they built and inherited their cultures and civilisations. Imagine what the world would be like if the inhabitants of every country were treated as though incidental or extraneous to that country's ancient, true and sacred history, and that this history were championed by outsiders -- voyagers, adventurers and "discoverers" -- who saw indigenous inhabitants as an anarchic human heap, or mere background decoration, or, at best, an excavating tool. What if we decided that this sacred history is what confers title to any country? Surely we would find it difficult to imagine this "right" being used to displace people who had been living in a country for only a few hundred years. We would even find it unacceptable to apply it to a people who can be proven with concrete evidence to have originated elsewhere several generations ago, let alone to a people who have lived in a country for thousands of years. Would we not? PALESTINE AND SACRED HISTORY: Yet this is precisely what is happening to and in Palestine. This is the ideological strategy being used to expropriate Palestine from its people. A "sacred" historical right of another people has been given precedence over the right of the indigenous populace to their land, a right acquired by virtue of their continued presence on it for hundreds and thousands of years. The Palestinians today are the product of centuries of the intermixing, interacting and intermingling of people on the ground from the age of Canaan to the age of a prevailing Arab Islamic culture. That lived history of uninterrupted demographic and cultural fusion on the ground is now being supplanted by another history, one that in the eyes of its proponents is true and sacred and, hence, justifies the destruction of an existing society and the creation of a new one on its ruins. This other history is being used to produce an ideological rhetoric that is being put to the service of an expansionist colonialist project. That long and concerted drive, from the arrival of the first civilian delegates and zealous evangelists to the Ottoman Porte and the Levant through the rise of Zionist leaders to the journalists who are filing reports from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem today, should have stimulated a critical academic response. So far there is little sign of one. The sacred history that proclaims the Jews' right to Palestine almost overwhelmingly dominates the political rhetoric and intellectual discourse in the media and in universities, not just in Israel but also throughout the West. And in this rhetoric and discourse, modern and modernised Zionism represents that hypothetical history. Refuting that discourse through scientific historical methods and rational argument is a natural response that should be encouraged, especially in the face of scholars from university departments of history and archaeology that were founded for the pursuit of a sacred history that pretend this version of history is universal history, and that are quite adept at turning historical scholasticism toward political ends, such as promoting the occupation of a country and expelling its indigenous inhabitants. However, there is another natural response. It comes from the oppressed who are being driven off their land and surrounded by settlers; whose homes, streets and villages are being besieged by myths and fictions, and are being demolished to make way for settlers and the construction of streets and villages bearing Old Testaments names; and who have been transformed into a minority in their own land and literally labelled migrants and guests in Israel, in blatant contradiction to the palpably obvious fact that they are the native inhabitants who have been overrun by immigrants and guests (anyone who can so blatantly forge the history of the present can hardly be trusted with the history of the past). The natural response of the oppressed is to fight and to resist. Resistance derives its legitimacy from extended inhabitation in a land combined with the rejection of colonialism as an act of aggression and armed robbery. It is an inalienable human right that predates international law and that is not founded upon sacred history. Yet resistance nevertheless requires a national and religious discourse to stand up against the rhetoric and sacred history of the invaders, or, perhaps, an alternative reading of that sacred history and its places. It needs to invest the legacy, history and religion of the people in the resistance process. Now the problem is that the more Arab countries have proved incapable of or unwilling to confront or resist Israel (a worldly power built upon military and colonialist conquest, political and colonialist engineering, and nation- and government-building, all of which are consummately mundane activities), the more the role of a sacred history opposed to the Zionist sacred history grew in prominence and the more instrumental the element of faith has become in mobilising and militarising the masses in those countries whose governments failed to do their duty. Since Jerusalem lies at the core of Zionist sacred history (in contrast to its living history in Budapest, Vienna, Paris, Warsaw and, later, Tel Aviv, the Kubbutzim, the Moshavim and the IDF, which are all very secular in nature), Zionist mobilisation, especially since 1967, has centred on Jerusalem. The Zionist and Israel's national religious rhetoric converged on Jerusalem in such an absolutist way that everything called Jerusalem in that rhetoric is held sacred and, hence, non-negotiable. Accordingly, Jerusalem must be expanded and in this process Zionism and the government of Israel have taken the place of the divine. Suddenly, places located dozens of kilometres away are now called Jerusalem or a part of Jerusalem, making them part of the eternal and indivisible capital of Israel. The Islamist mobilisation is centred on Haram Al-Sharif, the first Muslim qibla (direction of prayer) and the third holiest sanctuary in Islam, and around Israel's declared and secret plans for that area. Undoubtedly, the occupied people, in general, needed Jerusalem as a symbol. This applies to the Palestinian inhabitants of Jerusalem in particular for whom the sacred site has become a focal point of life and identity. Their city has been torn apart and severed from the West Bank, while they have been reduced to a handful of impoverished ghettos in a Judaicised city, deprived of national institutions in the city, and effectively placed under economic blockade by cutting them off from their natural environment in the West Bank. Haram Al-Sharif is the only centre left for them to rally around, and they move as one whenever they feel that it is at risk. Unfortunately, at the larger Arab and Islamic levels there are huge gaps. By reducing Palestine to Jerusalem the discourse ignores the rest of Palestine, and by reducing Jerusalem to Haram Al-Sharif, it ignores what is happening to the rest of Jerusalem under the policies of Israelification and Judaicisation. This reductionism plays into the hands of Israel as a material, earthly project. Zionism has Israelified the whole of Palestine and Jerusalem, apart from Haram Al-Sharif, beneath which there are excavations telling the story of a virtual city that is being constructed for tourists mostly out of special electronic effects and that has more in common with Disneyland than it does with the history of Jerusalem. As I see it, a religious discourse that converges with the Palestinian and Arab resistance discourse should proceed in entirely the reverse direction. The whole of Jerusalem should be Haram Al-Sharif and all of Palestine should be Jerusalem. Accordingly, it becomes a national, Arab national and religious duty to fight aggression against Palestine. The Quran speaks of the Prophet Mohammed's night flight to Al-Aqsa Mosque, "the vicinity of which We have blessed." I urge greater focus on the meaning of "vicinity" here. I suggest we drop the discussion about whether it was Solomon, David or Malaki Sadeq who built the Temple Mount, or whether it was in Jerusalem or in Mecca that Abraham tested the loyalty of his son. Rather than detracting from the legitimacy of Jewish sacred history, this type of debate affirms it, albeit as an antithesis and a current adversary. It affirms it by speaking in the same logic, even if we were to call the temple that allegedly stood on that spot a mosque, as do the interpreters of the Quran. This is why I urge focusing on what is happening in Jerusalem today. Sacred history and myth are not Israel's only tools. Indeed, more active are military force, the bulldozer and the crane, architects and urban planners, construction workers and steamrollers, all of which are being put to work to change realities on the ground in order to achieve concrete ends that are ostensibly justified by myth and sacred history. Jerusalem has changed radically in a few decades. Someone born there in 1967 would return today to find it completely different. This is the political reality that affirms that it is unrealistic to restore Jerusalem to how it stood before 1967. It underpins Bush's letter of guarantee to Sharon in 2004 and it is what recently inspired the Europeans -- under US-Israeli pressure -- to revise a Swedish proposal calling for the division of Jerusalem so as to read "a capital for two states". It is why the "two sides" have agreed to make modifications and changes to the pre-June 1967 borders. WHAT IS HAPPENING NOW IN JERUSALEM: Israel has used the following stratagems and procedures to Judaicise Jerusalem: - It invented the notion that Jerusalem is non-negotiable by converting a religious notion ("sacred Jerusalem") into a political concept. - It projected the Old Testament narrative onto every neighbourhood, hill and cave in Jerusalem, renamed them accordingly and targeted them for Jewish settlement, and transformed the original inhabitants into "guests" preparatory to squeezing them out and expelling them. - It expanded the borders of Jerusalem in order to extend the non-negotiable Israeli monopoly on the city's sanctity over the greatest possible area of land. - It expropriated Arab land and property and built settlements. - It reduced the number of Arab inhabitants through various forms of intimidation and administrative methods. Notably, it changed their status to "immigrants" and confiscated "identity cards" (as Israel calls their permit for permanent residence in the city) under the Law and Regulations of Entrance into Israel. - It severed the city from the West Bank by altering its legal status, distinguishing the status of its inhabitants from that of other inhabitants of the West Bank, building a cordon of settlements around the city and, most recently, constructing a separating wall referred to in Hebrew as the "wrapping of Jerusalem". In Palestine under the British mandate, the British high commissioner designated the area to the west of Jerusalem for growth and development and the area outside of the walls to the east of Jerusalem for limited construction. He prohibited construction in the old municipality altogether. However, the high commissioner annexed Jewish settlements to Jerusalem, which is to say that the idea of expanding the city to include larger numbers of Jewish inhabitants while shrinking the area for Arab inhabitants dates to the mandate era. In 1947, the high commissioner annexed the Hakirim and Ramat Rahil settlements -- located four kilometres way from the Old City -- to Jerusalem, while he kept Arab villages right next to the walls of the Old City, such as Salwan, Al-Tur and Sur Baher, outside of the city's zone. Those were early days yet. Since then, Israel has expanded the city to reach the outskirts of Bethlehem in the south and Ramallah in the north and equated Jerusalem to the structural map of the city or the areas administered by the Jerusalem municipality. All this was blended with the status of Jerusalem in Old Testament creed, as epitomised by the prayer that ends, "If I forget thee Jerusalem, may my right hand forget her skill." It is uncertain whether the Jerusalem in that prayer referred to a heavenly city that would conjoin with earth on the Day of Judgement or to a physical city of uncertain location. But it certainly did not refer to the area that falls under the municipality of Jerusalem as defined and governed by the successive coalition governments that have ruled Israel since the occupation. No sooner had the 1967 war ended than Prime Minister Levi Ashkol declared the unification of the two parts of Jerusalem. But the declaration was far from as bold as the proud trumpeting of "one Jerusalem" that we hear nowadays. At that time, Israel feared the international repercussions of its annexation, which was also opposed by four ministers representing the Labour contingent in the ruling coalition on the grounds that it formed an obstacle to peace. Menachem Begin, who was also a minister in the national unity government at the time, wanted to broadcast the unification of Jerusalem loud and clear, but he was voted down by those who were reluctant to needlessly provoke Arab, Muslim and Christian sensitivities after the 1967 defeat. The resultant resolution was a masterpiece of the Israeli art of couching their actions in wordings that appear dry, routine, neutral and harmless. Adopted in its session of 27 June 1967, the resolution to annex East Jerusalem to Israel, in flagrant contravention of international law that prohibits the annexation of territories won by force of arms, reads: "The area of the Land of Israel which will be identified in the annex are to become areas subject to the provisions of law, justice and administration in effect in the state." Naturally, you won't find Jerusalem explicitly mentioned in the text and the maps in the annex only show small coloured patches indicating the areas to be placed under the jurisdiction of Israeli law. Nor did the then Israeli minister of justice utter the word Jerusalem in the statement he delivered to the Knesset justifying this decree. Israeli intransigence and conceit on the matter of Jerusalem had not yet come to fruition. That would come in time, in inverse proportion to the Arabs' ability and willingness to act and in direct proportion with the hypocrisy and duplicity of what is ideologically termed the international community. The Knesset ratified the government's annexation act and amended the Law and Administration Ordinance Law (Article 11) and the Municipalities Law accordingly. In those days, Israel was tight- lipped. But it planned and worked and expropriated land and built settlements. In tandem it tossed the indigenous Arab inhabitants into the mills and mazes of Israeli law and justice. The actions made the news. The outcome, which inevitably affirmed the confiscator's right, was not newsworthy because it did not substantiate Israel's democracy. The temporary injunction issued by the court to halt the confiscation until the minister pleads the case to the court is newsworthy. The occupation power confiscates land and property in accordance with the law. After all, it made the laws in accordance with which it seizes land, demolishes homes, and alters the terrain and changes the demography. In the absence of any Arab action or long-range strategy to counter Israel's long-range planning strategy, the Arabs of Jerusalem will remain victim of the laws created by the confiscators. On 30 July 1980 the Knesset passed the Basic Law (the equivalent of a constitutional article) declaring Jerusalem, "complete and united", as the eternal capital of Israel. Begin, who was now prime minister, had been pressing for such a law since the annexation. Now the opportunity for it was ripe, for he had just signed the first peace agreement with an Arab country, the largest Arab country. As a consequence of this law, the Jerusalem municipality expanded from 5.6 to 71 square kilometres. In 1993, the municipality was expanded again to 130 square kilometres. In 2005, the government's plans for Jerusalem until 2020 will increase the municipal area by another 40 per cent. Meanwhile, East Jerusalem has turned into scattered neighbourhoods, separated from each other by settlements and surrounded by dozens of other settlements. Contributing to the Israeli government and the Jerusalem municipality's expansionist drive were international Jewish organisations and funds that financed the purchase of land and homes that were too difficult to expropriate, and Jewish societies that infiltrated Arab neighbourhoods house by house by keeping track of the deaths of their owners and their descendants abroad, forging documents and dangling financial enticements. The Arab inhabitants of Jerusalem, who had no viable institutions of their own to protect them, were up against a powerful, wealthy, and very patient network of Jewish and Zionist institutions. In the face of this concerted encroachment, the Jerusalem Committee, created by the Organisation of the Islamic Conference in the wake of the assault on Al-Aqsa Mosque, issued a stream of speeches and statements, and even these have dwindled recently. From 1948 to 1967, Israel expropriated properties of Arabs in West Jerusalem equivalent to about 40 per cent of the area of that part of the city. These lands were confiscated under the Absentees' Property Law, which was framed in such a way to apply to every Palestinian who had left his usual place of residence. Such "absentees" were abundant, of course, as they were in fact Palestinians who had been "absented" by having been turned into refugees and dispossessed. After 1967, Israel began to expropriate lands in East Jerusalem. It is still doing so at a feverish pace in order to build settlements. The Arab quarters of East Jerusalem were soon dissected by such settlements as Ramat Eshkol, Givat Tsarfatit, Har Hotzvim, Nevi Yacoub, Gilo and others. In the next wave, lands were seized in order to build the settlements encircling East Jerusalem. They include Basgat Zaif, Mitsodat Zaif, Har Homa, Maali Adomim and Atrut. These simultaneously form the settlement cordon that also cuts East Jerusalem off from the West Bank, which, in turn, has been cut into two parts -- north and south -- between which communications are difficult. This latter wave of confiscations was conducted in accordance with the Land Acquisition Law of 1967, which legalises expropriations for the public welfare. The cordon is now being completed in the area called Zone E, which connects Maali Adomim to the northeast with Basgat Zaif and Nevi Yacoub to the northwest. In Zionist ideology, building settlements is in the public welfare and, hence, justifies seizing land from those who are not meant to benefit from the settlements and upon the ruins of whose homes and welfare the settlements are built. This is a little lesson on how, in Israel, the law codifies ideology and serves political aims and interests. Even if lawyers and judges behaved as though they were purely professional and apolitical, they are political by virtue of just doing their jobs. When you have a corpus of law tailored for political ends, interpreting the law, pleading on the basis of it, and passing judgments under it are political activities, regardless of how objectively or impartially one might go about them. When the Israeli Supreme Court approves these laws and issues rulings on the basis of them it is not acting impartially. How could it? It is the supreme court of the Israeli occupation machine and its chief instrument in the business of justifying, disguising and executing the process of Israelification and Judaicisation and eliminating the obstacles to the occupation and settlement expansion. Since 1967, Israel has taken over 85 per cent of the land of East Jerusalem, using the Absentees' Property Law, the Land Acquisition Law and other devices. Since the de facto annexation of Jerusalem, Israeli law and courts colluded in one of the most nefarious and cruel legal scams in history. The moment the Israeli Supreme Court gave its stamp of approval to the annexation, the Arabs in that city -- its indigenous inhabitants generation after generation and the original owners of the homes and properties in it -- were cast as immigrants into Israel. The date of their entry was the date of annexation and, now that their property had just become part of Israel, by the whisk of Israel's magic wand, from one day to the next they were made alien residents in their own homes. Accordingly, in the case of Mubarak Awad, the court ruled that being born in Jerusalem does not necessarily confer upon the Arab citizen the right to live there or safeguard him from expulsion by having his residence permit (so-called identity card) withdrawn. Under Entry Into Israel Law, immigrants are granted residence, but in the event an alien resident obtains residence in another country or another passport, or remains abroad for the major portion of a several year period, he loses his right to reside in Israel. And thus the law has joined forces with the ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem. In 2008, alone, 4,577 Arab residents of Jerusalem had their residence cards confiscated. To further facilitate the process, in 2006, the Supreme Court approved a law that started off as an ordinance to be renewed annually. Under this new law, inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza married to Israeli citizens are no longer eligible for residence and citizenship in Israeli (and Jerusalem) on family reunification grounds. If an Arab resident of Jerusalem or an Arab citizen of Israel is married to a Palestinian in the West Bank or Gaza, he or she will have to leave Jerusalem in order to live with his/her spouse and children. The decision to build the 88 kilometre-long annexation barrier was taken by the Ministerial Committee for Jerusalem Affairs on 11 May 2002. In addition to cutting between houses of the same village, literally separating one side of the street from the other, abolishing ancient roads such as the Jerusalem-Ramallah road, and turning entire neighbourhoods and villages into islands, the wall cast out of Jerusalem between 80,000-90,000 Arabs who held Jerusalem or Israeli identity cards. More recently, on 11 May 2008, the Israeli government moved to register Palestinian properties in the tabu (land registration office) in the name of Jews who took over these properties in the area of Harat Al-Sharaf. The area is adjacent to the Wailing Wall and Haram Al-Sharif. The original inhabitants were expelled from the area in order to make place for a square for prayer in front of the Wailing Wall and to revive the "Jewish Quarter" as this part of the Old City within the walls has come to be named. The area itself has been doubled and tripled several times. However, the registration of expropriated properties in the name of private Jewish individuals marked a precedent that is now being repeated routinely. The Absentees' Property Law and Land Acquisition Law have been privatised in the areas occupied in 1948. Israel is even eliminating the questions of the refugees and Jerusalem from a formalistic standpoint, by dispersing them into thousands of private ownership cases, whereas previously these lands were regarded as public property and let out to Jewish citizens, even if with 49 or 99 year leases. This privatisation, naturally, is sponsored, planned and protected by the state. It is part of the greater project to eliminate pending final status issues concerning the Palestinians and Jerusalem. Meanwhile, Arab regimes are engaged in a different kind of privatisation process as far as all this is concerned. That process goes by the name, "leave the Palestinian question to the Palestinians." For the Palestinian Authority, it is leave Jerusalem to the Jerusalemites. In practical terms, this form of privatisation means leaving the Palestinians/Jerusalemites stranded. Which is why, again, I urge the adoption of the formula: the whole of Jerusalem equals Haram Al-Sharif and the whole of Palestine equals Jerusalem. Then Jerusalem and Palestine will be reinstated as core concerns of the entire Arab nation and not just the Palestinians alone. Only then will the impending demolition of a Palestinian home in Jerusalem be taken up as a cause of all Jerusalemites, Palestinians and Arabs. We do not leave poverty to the poor, illness to the ill or education to the uneducated. Society assumes such burdens and this is how societies develop and nations are built. The reverse approach -- allowing the Palestinians and Jerusalemites to fend for themselves, which is equivalent to the logic of letting the poor, ill and uneducated fend for themselves -- opens the question of Jerusalem to a completely different type of symbolism. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.
Celebrating Twain's adventures, 100 years after his ... - Lincoln Journal Star Posted: 24 Apr 2010 09:44 PM PDT This is a big year for the man born Samuel Langhorne Clemens: 2010 marks the 175th anniversary of his birth, and Wednesday was the 100th anniversary of his death. In his 74 years, the man better known as Mark Twain gave us words. Many, many words. A wealth of witticisms. An endless stream of facts and fictions, factual fictions and fictional facts, "some of which actually happened." He left behind at least one masterpiece. Gone for a century, Twain remains America's most endlessly relevant writer. We still read his books. We still use his thoughts to express our own. "We're still attracted to his way of seeing and expressing himself 100 years after his death," said Michael Kiskis, a professor of American literature and a Twain scholar at Elmira College in Elmira, N.Y., where Twain is buried. "That's very special. That doesn't happen with many writers." Twain poses a contradiction of sorts. He was the quintessential man of his time and place, not "an American, but THE American," he called himself. His works are as evocative an account of 19th century America as any. And yet, we read him not just as a document of the past. He feels modern, even prescient now. Twain still matters because a thought perfectly expressed has no shelf life. And a good story's always a good story. Whenever. What Twain teaches us about tweeting Did you know Mark Twain has a Twitter page? He hasn't been too active since the early part of 2009, but he still has about 1,900 followers. It's not surprising that Twain's most memorable musings fit the website's 140-characters-or-less format quite well. What's surprising is how much his tweets sound like they were written last week. "I was gratified to be able to answer promptly. I said I don't know." "If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything." "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco." With his ability to express an idea quickly and humorously, Twain might have fit right in with our young, brevity-obsessed generation. "He was great at capturing a specific thought in a very tight frame, which is very modern," Kiskis said. "He would have been a great advertising person now. He would know how to catch your attention and finish your thought in a couple sentences." Twain's sayings seem off-the-cuff, created in a fit of wit. But the writer slaved over them. His journals depict a constant process of writing stuff down, crossing parts of it out, shuffling words around and paring a thought down to its essence. He worked unbelievably hard at the seemingly effortless. He once wrote that he would have written less if he had more time. While Twain might have been a great tweeter, he likely would have scoffed at most tweets - and text messages and e-mail and Facebook status updates and any other 21st century form of communication. In an age where everyone's a writer, almost no one chooses his words carefully. "Twain wasn't just about brevity for brevity's sake," Kiskis said. "You can be brief but stupid, too." A tweet like, say, "Just got back from gym. Going 2 grab some Wendy's," would have likely made Twain's bushy white brows furrow and confirm something he once said: "Often it does seem a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat." That's only 71 characters. 'The nation's first rock star' That's what Twain biographer Ron Powers called him. "At the close of the Civil War," Powers wrote, "Americans were ready for a good cleansing laugh." Twain traveled the world and held large lecture hall audiences rapt with his backwoods dialect and funny stories. "So many schoolchildren read Mark Twain in the classrooms," said Barb Snedecor, director of the Center for Mark Twain Studies at Elmira. "But I don't think we get a clear enough picture of the celebrity status of this man." His rock star status went beyond U.S. borders. When Twain undertook his world tour near the end of the 19th century, he was known across the globe. "He was not just dominant in the American consciousness," Kiskis said, "but also a major influence in the rest of the world." Despite his work being about the American experience, the tales transcended cultural barriers. If a good story's a good story whenever, a good story's also a good story wherever. 'The father of American literature' William Faulkner called him that. Ernest Hemingway said, "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called 'Huckleberry Finn.'" Why does a story about a mischievous river rat and a runaway slave drifting down the Mississippi still resonate? Well, it was a good story, one that spoke to one of the great themes of American literature: the search for freedom. But the influence of the language can't be overstated. "Compared to the generation of writers before him," said Nebraska Wesleyan University professor Larry McClain, who teaches U.S. literature, "there's much less of a self-consciously anglophilic voice. Whitman in poetry and Twain in fiction were the first writers to really successfully use the American idiom." Twain's Huck and Jim talked like people talk: vulgar, uneducated, teeming with the colloquialisms of their dialects. At the time, that was revolutionary. "Twain looked forward to modern literature, said that characters ought to speak in their own language," McClain said. Characters like Hester Prynne and Captain Ahab don't speak like real people. "But Huck Finn sounds like someone we know." Even now. Mark Twain sounds like someone we know, too. "There's a timelessness about what he said, which is true of all great writers to some extent," Snedecor said. "What he said still rings true today. It's contemporary even though it was said more than 100 years ago. That's just so mysterious and wonderful to me." Reach Micah Mertes at 402-473-7395 or mmertes@journalstar.com.   Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.
Alan Sillitoe - Daily Telegraph Posted: 25 Apr 2010 10:44 AM PDT Published: 5:43PM BST 25 Apr 2010 Comments 1 | Comment on this article The best-selling Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and Other Stories (1959) both chronicled the hopeless prospects, drunkenness, casual fights and drab sex lives of young working class men of that era. In his earliest work, before his powerful sense of social injustice began to dominate his fiction, Sillitoe created plausible, complex youths who rebelled against the establishment, epitomised by parent, policeman and boss. Inevitably his work chimed at a time when youth culture and adolescent anger were beginning to dominate the media through the work of John Osborne, Brando, James Dean, JD Salinger and the still-embryonic pop music. But to consider Sillitoe solely as the author of two adroitly-timed works would be to diminish both his status and the art he brought to his craft over four decades. Among his further novels, collections of poetry, screenplays, essays, plays and children's books, Sillitoe developed his themes and understanding of humanity and began to internalise injustice, to reflect oppression on the workings of the human psyche. If his life's work forever explored the privations of his upbringing, in his maturity his singular characters were touched by the universal. Alan Sillitoe was born in Nottingham on March 4 1928. His father was an unskilled labourer, often unemployed, and the family was perpetually moving to avoid the attentions of rent collectors. He was educated at local elementary schools from where, despite an early enthusiasm for English Literature, he failed to pass the entrance exam for the local grammar school and he left at 14. Three months into his first job, at the Raleigh bicycle works, he walked out in a dispute over pay, and worked briefly in a plywood factory before becoming a capstan lathe operator until he joined the Ministry of Aircraft Production as an air traffic control assistant in 1945. The following year he enlisted in the RAFVR. Although he was initially accepted as a pilot, the end of the war with Japan had rendered further pilots unnecessary, and Sillitoe served as a telegraphist and radio operator in Malaya. In 1948 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and spent 16 months in a military hospital, where he began educating himself by reading Greek and Latin classics in translation. He was also deeply influenced by Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914), a portrayal of lower class Edwardian England that Sillitoe found did not treat the working class as caricatures. In 1949 he wrote his first novel and left hospital with his discharge papers and his first rejection slip. In 1952 Sillitoe and the American poet, Ruth Fainlight, moved to Europe and lived for six years in France, Spain and Majorca, surviving on his limited RAF disability pension. He wrote steadily — short stories for magazines and unpublished novels — even writing on book covers when money was too tight to buy paper. At the suggestion of the poet Robert Graves, whom he met in Majorca, he began working his short stories about life in Nottingham into a novel. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was an instant critical and commercial success. Its portrayal of Arthur Seaton, a rebellious factory worker and amoral adulterous lover, was praised for its unsentimental evocation of working class existence. The novel established many of the themes that were to occupy Sillitoe throughout his life: social injustice, the "bunker" mentality of the working class, the mindlessness of their only realistic employment and the consequent banality and ephemerality of their lives. Having moved to London, Sillitoe published, to great acclaim, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and Other Stories which won the Hawthornden Prize. The collection included some of his finest work, but it was the title story, in which a Borstal boy deliberately loses a race he is capable of winning in order to spite the governor and so retain his self-esteem, which won particular praise. Sillitoe's eagerly awaited third novel, The General was published in 1960, the same year in which his screenplay for Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was successfully filmed, and made a star of Albert Finney. With its portrayal of extramarital sex and raw melodrama, it transformed British cinema and was much-imitated. The General, on the other hand, unmemorably filmed in 1967 as Counterpoint, was savaged by the critics, who accused Sillitoe, not for the last time, of allowing his politics to diminish the fiction. There was a similar reaction to Key To The Door (1961) which followed Brian Seaton, the older brother of Sillitoe's original protagonist, from childhood through his National Service in Malaya. The novel included some of Sillitoe's most vivid writing, but this was outweighed by heavy-handed political philosophising and a weak dramatic structure. He concluded the Seaton trilogy in 1989 with The Open Door, which described Brian's return from the Far East and his attempts to become a writer. Although well received, there was a wistful sense of an ageing author returning to the scene of his greatest triumph. After The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner had been successfully filmed with Sir Michael Redgrave and Tom Courtenay in 1961, Sillitoe moved his family to Morocco. In Tangier he wrote The Ragman's Daughter (1963), which was filmed a decade later and which displayed an increasingly simplistic depiction of the oppressors and the oppressed, and an exhortation to violent insurrection which denuded the characters of their psychological complexity. Sillitoe's view of Britain withered further after a trip to Russia as a guest of the Soviet Writers' Union, an account of which he published in Road to Volgograd (1964). In 1964 and again in 1966 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was unsuccessfully produced as a play, and his own production of Lope de Vega's play All Citizens Are Soldiers met a similar fate. By now Sillitoe was commuting between England and Spain and, in transit, he published his Frank Dawley trilogy, The Death of William Posters (1965), A Tree on Fire (1967) and the disastrously delayed The Flame of Life (1974). These novels follow Frank Dawley, who forsakes his family for personal freedom and enlists as a revolutionary in Algeria before returning home to rabble-rouse from the base of his utopian community. Overwrought, with an excess of theorising, stylistic superfluity and little narrative tension, the trilogy did little to enhance Sillitoe's reputation. Although Sillitoe considered himself a poet, and published volumes of poetry throughout his career, the critical response rarely raised itself above the mildly positive. More successful was his collection of short stories, Guzman, Go Home, and Other Stories (1968), and the picaresque novel which he wrote in the comic manner of Fielding, A Start in Life (1970). In 1971 he was fined for refusing to fill in a census form, after which he travelled on the Continent for a year while he wrote the Orwellian political fantasy Travels in Nihilon (1972) which described living in a nihilistic state. The nihilism described reflected the work's reception — a mixture of critical reserve and public indifference. By contrast, Raw Material (1972), which interwove novel and biography, philosophical speculation and family history, aroused great interest. A further collection of stories, Men, Women and Children (1973), including one of his finest short fictions, Mimic, in which a man tries to cope with life by imitating it, was also well received and marked a return to form in his portrayal of human complexity. If his work was becoming less cumbersomely political, Sillitoe remained committed beyond his literary life. He attended Unesco conferences, criticised the Soviet treatment of Jews and was stridently pro-Zionist., His increased focus on the individual dominated The Widower's Son (1976), which traced the breakdown of a working class army officer's marriage, using marriage as an extended metaphor for war. He also wrote three plays for television, his first — warmly received — children's story, Big John and the Stars (1977), and spent two months in Jerusalem at the invitation of the mayor at the Mishkenot Sha'ananim, a retreat for celebrated writers. Sillitoe's tenth novel, The Storyteller (1979), was his most ambitious, charting the decline and suicide of a schizophrenic mute who is overwhelmed by the characters in his head that people his stories. In the book, distinctions of fantasy and reality are blurred as, analogously, they are in the work of any novelist. In The Second Chance and Other Stories (1980) Sillitoe developed this theme, dappling his tales with acting, mimicry and masquerade. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Sillitoe continued to expand his range as a novelist. Although he mined working class Nottingham for Out of the Whirlwind (1987), he wrote a traditional adventure story in The Lost Flying Boat (1983), in addition to further volumes of poetry and stories for children. In 1994 he published his autobiography, Life without Armour, which enabled his readers to attempt to establish where the young Alan Sillitoe ended and the young Arthur Seaton began. If Alan Sillitoe never regained the fame and focus of his early years, he nevertheless produced a substantial and variegated body of work that was, when taken as a whole, probably as underrated as his initial success, though undoubtedly merited, was excessive. Sillitoe was a mild-mannered man who remained committed to political causes and social justice throughout his life. A workaholic, he relaxed by travelling, taking bicycle rides in the Kent countryside and tuning into foreign stations on his radio transmitter. He married Ruth Fainlight in 1959. They had a son and a daughter. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

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