amateur ramblings

Under intense and unreasonable scrutiny from the very beginning for a perceived “closeness” to Islam, the Barack Obama campaign has once again fallen prey to the work of right-wing anti-Muslim organizations in the United States. The campaign’s freshly-appointed Muslim-American outreach coordinator Mazen Asbahi resigned after only ten days on the job following a misinformation campaign regarding his alleged “ties” to “Muslim fundamentalists.” National media, including the Wall Street Journal, by and large quoted these sources without investigating their claims or origins and, sadly, the Obama campaign has shown once again that it was not willing to stand by Muslim Americans in the face of this now routine anti-Muslim xenophobia. By letting his outreach coordinator go, Barack Obama is letting the Muslim American community go with him.

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Too often academic proposals and editorials are produced which presume to offer ‘advice’ to administrators and policy-makers and other functionaries of the state. And often in this process there is a certain sympathy towards the governor in terms of ‘difficulties’ of his ‘job.’ There is a fixation running throughout the media and academia on what governments can or cannot do; what they are or are not “capable” of doing; and further, how they can do them in the best way possible.

That is the way I can best understand what editorials which take no meaningful positions whatsoever, but express frustration at “incompetence,” are doing, as if one should appreciate what I can only describe as “finesse” in management and governance without even considering what kind of actions and decisions are being undertaken, or what their assumptions and consequences are, in the first place. Nowhere has this been more clear than in press ambiguity on the occupation of Iraq, where the position has not been to end the occupation, but to run it more intelligently. (more…)

You might expect that to be a critique of the Bush administration–but when Samir al-Taqi said it, he was being anything but critical. That is actually the way he explained the stark reality that is shaping the way he and other intellectuals are approaching Syrian foreign policy.

If it were a critique of the Bush administration, as it should have been, al-Taqi would not have followed up with, “we need the United States to discuss regional problems.” Are you sure you don’t need regional actors to discuss regional problems? And if the US is a de facto regional actor, isn’t it time for it to get the fuck out and start being a regional actor in the vicinity of, say, New Orleans?

If it were a show of resistance, anything close to opposition to the American empire, they would not be offering “advice” to the next imperial president. Sami al-Moubayed would not have bent over backwards to prove that Syria is a good pet, “ready to be helpful [to Washington]” as long as it stops its “campaign to vilify and demonize Syria.” Is Syrian foreign policy really: don’t hurt our feelings (or threaten our assets) or we won’t support your imperial aspirations in the Middle East? Bilateral imperialism is still imperialism.

I get the impression that Syrian officialdom lives vicariously through Hasan Nasrallah’s resistance. Anybody who thought otherwise has not noticed the opportunistic nature of the “official” image of defiance. We should not think, anyway, that these three would have dared go to Washington and extend a hand to AIPAC had they not run their plans by somebody else first.

Fallujah is closer to Washington than New Orleans.

This is, truly, a dark, dark comedy–only nobody knows to laugh.

There are many official postings on the walls of this Damascene kindergarten, primary, and secondary school, containing gems (or, at least, we are supposed to assume they are gems because they are on the wall) from aqwal so-and-so. I have always been suspicious of such postings, especially ones that assert positive aspects of a thing: I’m reminded here of the BlueStarPR posters around San Francisco that address many things about Israel, except the occupation. Even the new oil company advertisements, which never refer to oil production, but always to some environmental program or humanitarian assistance that the company in question claims to be responsible for, come to mind. It would not be necessary to desecrate our sensory landscape with these things, unless the points they made were not, at the very least, questionable.

But along with all these official items, are the unofficial and unauthorized ones that pop-up uncontrollably and unpredictably, and which official administrators no matter the setting are often tempted to paint over. So it is that the graffiti photographed above in this particular school, written on there by some daring child, from a more authentic collection of aqwal, will probably be erased some day, or maybe the perpetrator punished. Maybe if they cannot remove it they will simply cover it up with a cartoon telling the students how to think, or a periodic table.

Such an example makes the act of painting over seem innocent, or the unauthorized script whimsical: but something happened in Damascus last week, and it too, is being painted over. It is a classical official information control strategy to produce stories about a topic dealing with everything but the issue at stake: so rather than cover the slaughter of prisoners at Seydnaya Prison last week, the official Syrian news sources reported on a conference of Orthodox Assyrian Christian leaders in Seydnaya.

The truth, these days, it seems, can only be shared in whispers.

Since I’ve been in Damascus long enough for any American journalist to be considered an expert on the entire Middle East (exactly two weeks), I figured that it would not be too strange for me to share some of my observations on traffic in downtown Damascus.

If you’ve spent most of your life in exploitative parts of the world (Europe, America, among other places), you are sure to notice the different way traffic is done, or rather, the way it happens, in Damascus. That means there are not really ‘lanes’ in any systematic sense, and that cars are literally within centimeters of one another at any given time. There are constantly random obstacles popping up in the way in the more crowded areas, like people crossing the street or bicyclists weaving their way through traffic on the busiest streets. I doubt any still picture can really relay the fluidity of traffic in Damascus.

I’ve encountered more than one person that considers this to be a lack of “civilization,” whatever that means, and they immediately formulate a traffic “problem” that must be “fixed” by the institution of things like detailed traffic laws, lanes, a bunch of police officers giving out tickets, and “driver’s education,” which doesn’t teach you how to drive a car in traffic, but how to follow the rules while driving a car whether or not there are other cars out there.

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Have you had a chance to think much about borders, besides the pain of waiting in line to have your passport checked and visa approved? If not, take an hour or two out of your time to watch al-Hudud (“The Border”), a Syrian comedy starring Durayyid Lahham and Raghda, and written by esteemed writer, the late Muhammad al-Maghout. In al-Hudud, the aloof but incredibly perceptive traveler Abdel Wudud attempts to pass between two countries named Sharqistan and Gharbistan (in Arabic, sharq is “east,” and gharb “west”) when he ends up losing his passport somewhere between the two checkpoints marking the entrance to each country. Despite his numerous attempts to explain the situation to the senior guard at both ends, he is merely sent in circles back and forth, as each one promises to allow him in with the permission of the other side.
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Since my encounter with Ismail Khaldi, I have been thinking of the crucial defining characteristic of a “token” in political terms. I think I understand it now, after having seen The Spook Who Sat By The Door. Not only does the token in his appointed capacity have no power to change a system’s design or behavior, he actually plays no crucial service whatsoever in its maintenance. Thus, Dan Freeman in The Spook becomes the first black member to be admitted to the CIA after intense training, but is given a position photocopying papers even though he is advertised as proof that the CIA is now “integrated.” And Ishmael Khaldi is the “first Bedouin Arab” to work for the Israeli foreign ministry in the United States, as we often hear, but his job is to give stump speeches on college campuses and to be shown off to ASUC officials. It’s no surprise that at the same time Tikvah and similar groups buy people dinner to come “see the Arab” in the zoo-like showcase they’ve organized in order to obscure Israeli apartheid, that Israeli Knesset members are calling for the ejection of all Arab MP’s from parliament, and all Arabs, out of Israel. Yet another proof that Israel is the most progressive occupying power in the world.

Recognizing that an enemy is human does not make him your friend or cause him to stop his oppression. It does not remove the basic and most important division between friend and enemy, in the Schmittian formulation, which is organized on political lines. It is a sad thing that humanity may need to be “recovered” in some cases, but it is an even sadder thing that the friend/enemy distinction has been so perverted and distorted, that some people are naive enough to believe that to humanize is to make another your political friend, instead of your political enemy. Do we already believe that enemies are not human, in order to be surprised that in fact, they are?

If we premise political friendship on our humanity, then we implicitly confirm that an enemy is not human, and that what is not human, is our enemy. Insodoing we rely upon and produce an abstract humanity that has conditions on its membership greater than one’s simply being a Homo sapien. Actual political conflicts are not resolved by “recognizing our common humanity,” even if prejudices might be challenged through such work; but prejudice and hatred are not the only political conflicts we know, and they are probably not even the most important ones. So Israeli-Palestinian comedy tours won’t stop the occupation, and they won’t resolve the political division between friend and enemy. Claiming that they do only serves to obscure their own ineffectiveness from view, as well as the real political conflict and the related power dynamics. The fact that they don’t shape or re-shape power dynamics is the surest marker that they are in fact not engaged, intrinsically, in any political activity whatsoever.

It is easy enough to prove this, as the statement “we are all human,” is robbed of its delusional grandeur simply by adding the word “obviously” either before, after, or in the middle of it.

If you have had difficulties typing Arabic text into Photoshop, I have created a Google Code project to develop an open-source script that will provide a solution: Arabic4MacPhotoshop. The Photoshop Script that I wrote will enable Photoshop users to create properly shaped Arabic text in Photoshop graphics.

Currently, Arabic text in Photoshop on Mac appears as disconnected characters in backwards-order (pictured to the right). My script, which does not work in all cases and may require some additional fiddling on the part of the user, will automatically convert Arabic text you have entered into Photoshop into legible Arabic script. It will automatically remove all diacritic marks from your text and create individual text layers for each marking, so that you can position them in the correct spot above the appropriate letter. Unfortunately, I don’t know of any simple way to avoid this extra step for the time being.

What this script does is evaluate Arabic characters to determine what the correct shape should be, whether it is at the beginning, middle, or end of a word, and what the preceding character is. It then converts the Unicode representation in memory to the one for the specific ligature rather than the base character. It will then create a new Text Layer with the “fixed” text, as well as additional layers for any diacritic mark (fatha, domma, kasra, shaddeh, etcetera). If you wish to edit your text after this point, you must repeat the process and edit the original, disconnected, backwards text, rather than the “fixed” text. Otherwise you will run into problems.

While this script does not solve all issues, it provides an alternative fix for probably an overwhelming amount of Arabic work that needs to be done in Photoshop. One solution for Mac Photoshop users is this $1,700 modified application which supposedly has completely integrated Arabic functionality as well as other features. I have never used this program since it is more expensive even than the original Photoshop. The other option is to use the free and open-source program the GIMP, which works on Windows, Linux, and Mac, and fully supports Arabic text.

If you are interested in viewing or contributing to the source code for this project in order to make future improvements, please visit the project site: Arabic4MacPhotoshop. Also feel free to report any problems and suggestions so that they might be improved. As this script is released under the GPLv3, any and all revisions must in distribution include the source code in its entirety, and commercial use or reproduction is prohibited.

If you like this free and open-source product, please consider donating to support the development of other tools like it by clicking the button below!

“Journalism Is Not a Crime” — this has become the rallying cry of James Karl Buck, a UC Berkeley journalism student who was arrested by Egyptian police while covering demonstrations in Mahalla, Egypt earlier this year. When he was arrested, James posted an update to his Twitter feed informing activists and bloggers around the world of what had happened. Within two days, UC Berkeley administrators had managed to arrange for the American embassy in Egypt to send a lawyer to the police station at which James was held in order to arrange for his release.

James was arrested with his local Egyptian translator, Mohammad Maree. While James was allowed to leave, authorities refused to release Mohammed, even though they periodically lied and claimed that he was no longer in jail. Mohammed is now held at the al-Borg prison in Alexandria, where it has been confirmed he was tortured with electricity. As the Egyptian government continues to violently attack its own people, it is clear that James was spared primarily because of his US citizenship. James has relentlessly been doing what he can back in the US to put public pressure on the Egyptian government, which receives billions of American taxpayer dollars every year, to release Mohammed.

Like the imperial stagehands that they are, our lovely Arab governments have always loved people from the West more than their own citizens. What’s there not to love? Treating Americans nicely might win you a dinner at the White House, or fawning praise from Thomas Friedman at the New York Times for being “progressive” or “moderate” while your own people are rotting in jails because of your arrogance and cruelty or starving because of your incompetence. Lend a helping hand to James’ campaign to free Mohammed by signing the petition, and fight the racism of Arab governments.