amateur ramblings

The cartoon above by Gretchen Faust in the Daily Cal pretty much sums up what it means to have a Panda Express on campus. First, it literally doesn’t fit. Second, it’s an ominous threat to the independent small businesses in the space. And Third, despite the way some people have been waxing philosophical about free choice in food choice, this is a financial issue, not a philosophical one. Panda has nothing to offer but money. And the problem is, not even that much is certain.

My op-ed in the Daily Cal today addresses the last issue,  showing how the supposed financial need for Panda is actually based on an increase in Auxiliary spending. The Auxiliary is a part of the University administration whose expenses the ASUC must pay for with profits from commercial services. This year, the Auxiliary’s spending will go up almost $300,000. According to members of the Store Operations Board, Panda Express’ revenues to the ASUC will probably only be within that range, if not less. That means that the sum gain for student organizations and the ASUC is $0, and that Panda revenues may go exclusively towards covering rising Auxiliary spending, even while changing the landscape of our campus. A bailout plan for the Auxiliary.

Check out the op-ed here:

While many students have been quick to rally either for or against the Panda Express chain on campus, something that has been left out of the conversation is an explanation of the financial circumstances that are being used to explain the necessity of the chain’s presence. What members of the Store Operations Board, some ASUC Senators and the ASUC Auxiliary have been saying is that the ASUC will go into deficit within a year if we do not find a new source of revenue. But the unanswered question is, how did the ASUC end up in this position?

Tikvah Students for Israel’s false accusations that SJP members are behind hateful vandalism at UC Berkeley exacerbate campus tensions and endanger students on campus rather than defuse the situation

Anybody who has studied the Israeli occupation of Palestine knows that supremacist arguments and narratives frame much of the dissent against and support for Israeli state policies. These points of view cover the range from some Israeli ministers who believe that all Arabs should be kicked out of Israel and the West Bank, some people who believe that all Jews in Israel should return to Europe, and even those who believe that Jews and Arabs inherently cannot mix and must live segregated from one another.

Approaching Israel and Palestine from a perspective that is not rooted in one of these racist points of view is essential to, first of all, finding hope in human resilience and resistance against systems of oppression, as well as finding a place where principled activists can situate themselves vis-á-vis US support for Israeli state policies regardless of their backgrounds.

With that said, yesterday evening a hate crime occurred on the UC campus when pro-Israel propaganda at a bus stop was tagged with a swastika. Nobody should accept these kinds of hateful messages, regardless of who they come from. As somebody who passed by this particular sign on more than two occasions last night, I can attest that the two messages that were on the board were likely not placed by the same person. On my way to a student government meeting around 8:45PM, I passed by the board and noticed that it was tagged with the phrase “Free Palestine.” On my way out only about a half an hour later, I noticed that a swastika was added below the message. What this indicates to me is that these are two separate messages, possibly added by different people, at different times– maybe even somebody trying to frame a connection that does not exist between the two messages. (more…)

According to Haaretz, Danny Ayalon, the ex-Israeli ambassador to the US and newly annointed member of Israel’s fascist Yisrael Beiteinu party (whose leader, Avigdor Lieberman, recently suggested that the Israeli state should do what it can to expel the 20% of Israeli citizens who are Palestinian), issued the following ‘warning’:

“If the government of Israel does not act to have a Jewish majority in the North, then the Arab majority in the Galilee will declare independence and [demand] international recognition on the basis of the precedents of Kosovo, Abkhazia and [South Ossetia].”

The Israeli government moves ordinary Jews and Arabs around as if it is playing chess. Don’t like the demographics of this particular sub-region of Israel? Give an incentive to Israeli Jews to move there by subsidizing settlement construction or with other ‘perks’–maybe even help out Jews around the world to acquire Israeli citizenship and move into one of these new settlements. This strategy is not new at all when it comes to Israeli state designs–in fact, this sort of “acting to have a Jewish majority” is the very premise of Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon’s settlement plans in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which were introduced in the late 1970s. What is interesting, however, is that it is being applied to an area already under Israeli sovereignty in order to prevent the possibility of a future secessionist movement.

When it came to the West Bank and Gaza, settlement construction became a government policy for two reasons: one, it provided the army with a pretext to continue occupying Palestinian land because it placed Israelis in the middle of what could be framed as a “dangerous” situation; and two, because it would create “facts on the ground” which could lead to a “demographic transformation” that could give Israel a pretext not to withdraw from all of the occupied territories, and to make the consolidation of a sovereign, contiguous Palestinian state impossible.

And while the Israeli government attempts to orchestrate the living patterns and dynamics of Jewish populations in settlements, it also wreaks havoc on the Palestinian people. Ordinary Palestinians are viewed as obstacles to the state’s grand plans for Jewish-stateness, and efforts must be made to get rid of them. In 1947 and 48, Israel’s pre-state terror squads razed villages killing men, women, and children, causing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to flee in terror. Today, the Israeli government uses means just as explicit to make life unlivable for Palestinians, by putting them under siege, preventing them from moving freely within their own lands, and disallowing their refugee relatives to return back to their homes. If a Palestinian town is “inconveniently placed” when it comes to Israel’s own state interests, it builds a wall around it to disconnect the residents from their agricultural lands, jobs, and surrounding towns, crippling their economy and encouraging them to leave to make way for Jewish-only settlements.

While the rhetoric of Yisrael Beiteinu party members, including Danny Ayalon, some tell us, is not mainstream in Israel (the party is currently part of the government), its underlying logic of demographic control of the population and a forced sort of gerrymandering is very much a mainstay of Israeli politics. When Avigdor Lieberman threatens to expel Palestinian citizens of Israel from the state, he shares already the government’s official understanding of those non-Jewish citizens as “threats” to the state, even if some of the softer Zionists believe there is room for a group of people in Israel that is by necessity institutionalized as a minority. He is only willing to be more bombastic about it. When Ayalon says that Jews must move to the north of Israel to prevent a Palestinian secession, he already shares the Israeli state’s historical position of re-settling Jews and expelling Arabs in order to produce a claim to sovereignty.

In short, in a state which defines itself as being a Jewish state–since states can have religions these days–demographic control is everything. It is the key element in all state strategy, and it is the measuring stick by which ‘stability’ and ‘sustainability’ are assessed. Everything else–including things like democracy, freedom, equality, justice, peace, which are not present in the Israeli state’s calculus when it comes to Palestinians, citizens or not–is of a lesser, disposable priority and, quite often, antithetical to the state.

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.