SMS from Gaza

Mads Gilbert is a Norwegian doctor and solidarity worker who is one of very few foreigners providing eyewitness accounts to Norwegian media from inside the Gaza strip, where he is volunteering at a hospital.

This one was verified to me earlier today by people in the aid community in touch with Mads Gilbert as being geniune. I've snipped the translation from Shädy Äcres:

"Thanks for your support.. They bombed the central vegetable market in Gaza city two hours ago. 80 injured, 20 killed. All came here to Shifa. Hades! We wade in death. Blood and amputees. Many children. Pregnant woman. I have never experienced anything this terrible. Now hearing tanks. Tell it, pass it on, shout it. Anything. DO SOMETHING! DO MORE! We're living in the history books now, all of us! Mads G, 3.1.09 13:50, Gaza, Palestine.

How dare they say there is not a humanitarian disaster happening? This is a crime against humanity. The leaders of this atrocity should be tried and convicted and thrown in jail for the rest of their lives.

Because we can't have these brown folks reading, now can we?

This May, Rizwaan Sabir, a postgraduate student in international relations at the University of Nottingham was detained for almost a week without charges. He has an excellent op-ed in The Guardian about his experience:

After failing to find justification to detain me any longer, on day six of our ordeal, I was released without a charge, without an apology; but with a police warning against accessing an openly available, widely cited al-Qaida document considered relevant to my postgraduate research by me and my academic supervisors. I was only put under threat of future arrest, but Hicham's terrifying detention was prolonged by the authorities, under immigration charges – his ordeal continues to this very day.

What was our offence?

Our offence was that we had in our possession an edited version of a document referred to as the "al-Qaida training manual". A document freely available on the US Department of Justice website and that of the Federation of American Scientists. A document widely available elsewhere on official and unofficial internet sites, in either edited or full versions. A document purchasable in paperback from Amazon. A document I had downloaded months ago for my masters dissertation and upcoming PhD. A document a lecturer knew I was consulting. A document I had sent months ago to Hicham who was helping me draft my PhD proposal. A document many other academics and students studying terrorism will have had in their possession. A document extensively cited in books on terrorism. A bog-standard source. Nothing extraordinary or remarkable about its possession – one would think.

His fellow arestee, Hicham Yezza, is still facing deportation over the same phony outrage. Here is his op-ed on his experiences:

'm constantly coming across efforts being made to give detention without charge the Walt Disney treatment: the crushing weight of solitary confinement is painted as a non-issue; the soul-sapping nothingness of the claustrophobic, cold cell is portrayed as a mild inconvenience. Make no mistake: the feeling that one's fate is in the hands of the very people who are apparently trying to convict you is, without doubt, one of the most devastating horrors a human being can ever be subjected to. It is (to misquote Carl von Clausewitz) the continuation of torture by other means.

"Those who have nothing to hide, have nothing to fear," goes the tautological reasoning of the paranoia merchants calling for harsher, ever more draconian "security" measures - as we saw throughout the 42-days debate. They should read Kafka: nothing is more terrifying than being arrested for something you know you haven't done. Indeed, it is the innocent who suffers the most because it is the innocent who is tormented the most. The guilty calculates, triangulates, anticipates. The innocent doesn't know where to start. The answers and the questions are absolute, unbreachable, towering conundrums.

I underwent 20 hours of vigorous interrogation while entire days were being completely wasted by the police micro-examining every detail of my life: my political activism, my writings, my work in theatre and dance, my love life, my photography, my cartooning, my magazine subscriptions, my bus tickets.

Aspects of my life that would have been seen as commendable in others were suddenly viewed as suspect in my case for no apparent reason other than my religious and ethnic background. I was guilty of being that strangest of creatures: a Muslim who reads; who studied engineering yet writes about Bob Dylan; was a vocal opponent of the Iraq war yet owns all of Christopher Hitchens' writings; admires Terry Eagleton yet defends Martin Amis; interviews Kazuo Ishiguro, listens to Leonard Cohen, goes to Radiohead concerts, all of which became the subject of rather bizarre questioning.

Terror-Støre sjokk-smart på nett-video!

Det går visst faktisk an å ha et fornuftig terrorsyn selv om man er toppolitiker:



Andre biter av intervjuet her og her. Og det som jeg antar er en tekstversjon her. Skulle gjerne sett hele om noen vet hvor man finner det. Kan ikke se det på Le Mondes nettsider.

Real, Actual People That I Have Met Being Killed By Terrorism

The Taliban launched an attack at the Serena hotel in Kabul a few hours ago. The Norwegian foreign minister Jonas Gahr Støre was staying at the hotel and attending a meeting at the time. He was one floor below the suicide bomber, but was not injured. A Norwegian reporter from the Dagbladet newspaper was killed by gunfire. I've seen both of these men in real life. Støre just two months ago.

Foreign policy as we experience it is mostly just ink on a page or pixels on a screen, but suddenly it zooms up very very close. The accelerating speed at which the world can go from being very far away to killing someone standing next to you seems to be rapidly becoming how we think, hohttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifw we have to think, of globalisation. Even in this, the most shielded and padded corner of the world. But there is something hypocritical about this, isn't there? About how important it suddenly gets when it's people we've vaguely seen in the middle distance sometime?

The UN Secretary General is saying Støre was the target, and this shows that we must strengthen security. The Taliban are saying they didn't even know Støre was in the building, they were just gunning for NATO personell in general, but oh by the way would we mind terribly pulling our troops out of Afghanistan?

Update: Daily Kos has a post, too with more info in English on Norwegian Afghanistan policy and some background on the hotel.

Which Islam, exactly?

A blogpost I wrote in October of 06 has become a part of an FAQ over at Eurofascism.info. Actually, it was a comment on the post. We were discussing the Muhammed caricatures and criticism of Islam. Since that particular comment actually has gotten quite a lot of attention from the weirdest of places, I reproduce it (in Norwegian) below. Øyvind Strømmen did a translation (and also added some bits) of the most important part of the comment into English is in the FAQ.

Warning: my comment was written quite off-handedly as a comment, so it's not very well-written.

Du [Kapitalismus] spør meg om hvordan vi skal bedrive islamkritikk. Det er et relevant spørsmål, men jeg mener at det vi heller bør diskutere er hvorvidt det å kritisere islam er relevant og interessant.

Og ikke bare kan jeg ikke gi deg ett svar, jeg er nødt til å svare deg med to spørsmål:

1. Hva er islam?
2. Hva er kritikk?

Altså, ett: Forstår du islam som verdisystem, verdensforståelse, et sett med kulturelle praksiser, et sett med politiske styresett, etc.? Alle disse størrelsene kaller seg islam, eller muslimske.

Vi kan ikke tenke på islam som en monolittisk størrelse. Til tross for den ortodoks/kjettersk-dikotomien som ligger innebygd i urtekstene til de monoteistiske religioner, så er islam ikke en homogen størrelse, men et heterogent spenningsfelt. Det er en rekke kulturelle praksiser, en rekke politiske bevegelser, et verdensbilde, en matkultur, et språk, en retorikk. Det som kaller seg selv islam er noe som griper langt, langt inn i livene til 1.3 milliarder mennesker og deres naboer og medborgere og venner og bekjente og kjæledyr etc., og som defineres ulikt av hver enkelt.

Hvis du kritiserer islam kan du i praksis kritisere alt fra musikken til Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan til Talibans styresett, til en kvinnekultur i Etiopia, til Irans regjeringsmakt, til dervishene, til den kosmologiske verdensforståelsen til en beduin, til en gren av poesi, til intensjonene til en oudspiller i Istanbul, til arabiske slavehandlere på 1800-tallet.

Og to: Med kritikk, mener du en vennlig diskusjon over en kaffekopp, en aviskronikk, lovgivning, utfrysning, segregering, apartheid, vennlig erting, karikaturer eller krig? Kritikk kan ta enormt mange former, og formen er helt essensiell. Formen kan være vold og overgrep, eller respekt og dialog.

Poenget mitt er at det å kritisere islam som sådan er nesten alltid en eller annen form for kulturelt overgrep, fordi a) islam er ikke en monolittisk størrelse og b) tendensen er alltid henimot at noen ekstreme, voldelige og undertrykkende fundamentalistiske grupper er målet for islamkritikk. Dermed får de definere islam i vestlige øyne. Men islam er mye, mye mer. Å si at man ikke kan respektere islam eller kristendommen er å fordømme et ideologisk ståsted, og er i siste ende (slik jeg ser det) en posisjon som beveger seg ut i det samme ortodokse feltet det prøver å kritisere. Jeg tror du ville være overrasket over hvor mange mennesker du kjenner som ville ha beskrevet seg selv som kristne, om du hadde presset dem litt.

Vi må alltid sette et menneskes praktiske væren i verden foran når vi skal bedømme mennesket. Jeg mener at det blir feil å fordømme islam når det i praksis betyr at du fordømmer mennesker man rent faktisk har utrolig mye til felles med. Det er ikke sånn vi lærer oss å leve sammen og fungere. Igår oppdaget jeg ved et tilfelle at en person jeg har kjent i flere måneder er muslim. Skulle jeg brått fordømme de gode samtalene vi har hatt, alle de tingene vi har til felles? Er det ikke bedre å finne berøringspunkter oss imellom heller enn å definere oss selv som fundamentalt annerledes allerede i utgangspunktet?

[...]

Spørsmålet er altså hvorvidt det er hensiktsmessig, både ideologisk, realpolitisk og etisk, å kritisere islam. Jeg mener at man alltid rammer noen uskyldige forbipasserende med den kritikken. I siste ende er det dem som dør av den holdningen.

La oss derfor heller diskutere praksiser, med utgangspunkt i menneskerettigheter. Kjønnslemlestelse er ikke et problem fordi det er en praksis som ligger innenfor den muslimske kultursfæren, men fordi en kvinne blir skadet for livet. Burqaen er ikke et problem fordi den er muslimsk, men fordi den er obligatorisk og kvinneundertrykkende (men samtidig kan den også være et selvvalgt uttrykk, og det kan vi godt fordømme, men vanskelig lovgi mot). Al-Qaeda er ikke et problem fordi de ber til en skikkelse som de kaller Allah, men fordi de dreper mennesker. På samme måte er ikke kvinnesynet til fundamentalistiske muslimer problematisk fordi det tar utgangspunkt i en lesning av koranen, men fordi kvinner blir undertrykte.

Jeg fordømmer ikke Bush fordi han er kristen, jeg fordømmer ham fordi han er en katastrofalt dårlig president. Jeg fordømmer deler av ideologien hans, og noe av det faller innenfor en kristen kulturforståelse, men det er ikke derfor jeg fordømmer den. Jeg fordømmer den fordi den dreper mennesker.

From the Dept. of You Can't Make This Stuff Up

My friend M, the visa applicant, informs me of this wonderful form:

38. IMPORTANT: ALL APPLICANTS MUST READ AND CHECK THE APPROPRIATE BOX FOR EACH ITEM.
A visa may not be issued to persons who are within specific categories defined by law as inadmissible to the United States (except when a waiver is obtained in advance). Is any of the following applicable to you?

* Have you ever been arrested or convicted for any offense or crime, even though subject of a pardon, amnesty or other similar legal action? Have you ever unlawfully distributed or sold a controlled substance(drug), or been a prostitute or procurer for prostitutes?

Yes No

* Have you ever been refused admission to the U.S., or been the subject of a deportation hearing or sought to obtain or assist others to obtain a visa, entry into the U.S., or any other U.S. immigration benefit by fraud or willful misrepresentation or other unlawful means? Have you attended a U.S. public elementary school on student (F) status or a public secondary school after November 30, 1996 without reimbursing the school?

Yes No

* Do you seek to enter the United States to engage in export control violations, subversive or terrorist activities, or any other unlawful purpose? Are you a member or representative of a terrorist organization as currently designated by the U.S. Secretary of State? Have you ever participated in persecutions directed by the Nazi government of Germany; or have you ever participated in genocide?

[This one is my favourite. Ed.]

Yes No

* Have you ever violated the terms of a U.S. visa, or been unlawfully present in, or deported from, the United States?

Yes No

* Have you ever withheld custody of a U.S. citizen child outside the United States from a person granted legal custody by a U.S. court, voted in the United States in violation of any law or regulation, or renounced U.S. citizenship for the purpose of avoiding taxation?

Yes No

* Have you ever been afflicted with a communicable disease of public health significance or a dangerous physical or mental disorder, or ever been a drug abuser or addict?

[although this one is pretty good, too.]

Yes No
While a YES answer does not automatically signify ineligibility for a visa, if you answered YES you may be required to personally appear before a consular officer.

Waterboarders & Freeloaders

Here's a couple of resources on the totally humane non-torture or at the very least kinder, gentler torture that our allies are doing: Waterboarding.org and the blogpost "Waterboarding is torture... period."

What's the definition of terrorism again? Wanting to subvert democratic values through killing and inflicting pain and suffering?

* * *

Data on the sales record of In Rainbows is now available online. It turns out there was a far higher percentage of freeloaders than expected. Being a senseless optimist, I feel that I should point out that Radiohead is a huge band with a huge following. If they were a small, local band doing the same thing, I suspect the number of people who would pay would go up dramatically. But then again, I also believe that mankind is not born inherently evil, so what do I know?

Islamophobofascism Awareness Week

Have you heard the bullshit coming out of Martin Amis?

There’s a definite urge — don’t you have it? — to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order,’ ” Amis said. “What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation — further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan.… Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children. They hate us for letting our children have sex and take drugs – well, they’ve got to stop their children killing people. It’s a huge dereliction on their part. I suppose they justify it on the grounds that they have suffered from state terrorism in the past, but I don’t think that’s wholly irrational. It’s their own past they’re pissed off about; their great decline. It’s also masculinity, isn’t it?”

All this, of course, because it is Islamophobofascism awareness week. Also: Terry Eagleton responds.

Humiliation ⇒ Terrorism ⇒ Al-Qaeda (⇒ George Bush)

A while back, I linked to a video of Lawrence Wright talking on Al Qaeda. I finally got the time to watch it - home internet I worship at thy fibre-optic'd feet - and it's even better than I thought. Wright is a commanding public speaker, fluently speaking from a rich reserve of first-hand, historical and statistical knowledge to paint a lucid portrait of the islamic radicalism of the previous 50 years. If you want to have a sensible picture of Islamic terrorism, you should take the hour-and-change out of your day it takes to watch this. If nothing else, watch the first 15 minutes or so, in which the most important points pop up. If you have a little more time, watch the 40 minutes of his prepared speech, and quit after the questions (there are too many not-questions-but-comments (to one of which Wright gives only a delightfully dry "I agree"), but Wright gives interesting, well-composed, eloquently improvised answers).

And really, we should have a sensible picture of terrorism. Not because terrorism is a threat to us* but because it has become the universal symbol of evil which is used to justify political oppression. When we juxtapose the minor but very real threat of Al-Qaeda with the massive, completely insurmountable political and social problems of which the terrorist organisation is merely a symptom, one realises just how completely and utterly the Bush administration has destroyed any hope of ending radical Islam in our lifetime. In unilaterally and single-mindedly pursuing the military "war on terror", they have exacerbated the demographic, sociological and political problems which are causing the problem they are trying to defeat. Like slamming your fist repeatedly into an anthill to stop the ants from biting you. The increasing alienation of immigrant populations in Europe; the continuuing conflict in Israel/Palestine; world poverty (Islam encompasses roughly 1/5th the world's population, but roughly 1/2 the world's poor); the reinvigoration of Al-Qaeda in Iraq and the general sense of cultural humiliation which Wright describes so vivily. These are the real problems.

But I don't want to make this a rant against Bush. That's an easy strategy. The problem is far more decentralised and far more subtle than that. The basic premise of Wrights speech is that what Al-Qaeda really is, is a manifestation of cultural humiliation and alienation. The overriding sociological factor of islamic extremists is that they are generally young men who feel alienated from the culture they are in. They find other young men who feel the same way, one thing leads to another, and they go blow something up. This happens easily in societies with little or no social life - 15 of the 19 terrorists on 9/11 were Saudis, you will recall - but it can just as well happen in cultures that have social lives that exclude young men of their religion. In short: the backlash, when it happens, will be easy to blame on the terrorists, but a more correct way of putting what is happening is that we are helping to create the problem ourselves. Sowing the wind, as it were.

And in the end, it is us here in Europe who will be at the receiving end of the backlash. The gap between the native populations and immigrant populations in Western Europe are widening, and recent events like the Muhammed caricatures of Denmark are just flashpoints in the development of a smug cultural identity founded on intolerance and exclusion. The idea that we can stop globalisation is childish and selfish. The idea that we should combat Islam and muslims - Huntingtons clash of civilisations - is a part of the very structures which produce terrorism and extremism.

Last words of the film: "I don't think the future in Europe looks very attractive." Boy, no.

* "More people die in car chrashes every day than died on 9/11", to use a common comparison. Other things that kill more people every year than terrorism: WAR. FAMINE. PLAGUE.

You Do the Math

Since it's been 6 years since the WTC attacks, I thought I'd repost this thing I wrote back then. I'd have redone the math, but honestly, it hasn't changed at all. At this point it's just a simple matter of attrition and addition. Multiplication, really.

5 years

5 years.
1825 days.
That's 5 long, long years.
On the other hand, Bush only has 861 days left in office.
861 days, 8 hours and 6 minutes.
And 52 seconds (but who's counting).

2973 people died in the September 11th attacks (oh, and the 19 hijackers, but who is counting them? And incidentally, why aren't we counting them?).

2973. That's a lot of people dead for no reason.

Every single one of those one thousand eight hundred and twentyfive days since those 2973 people, roughly 30.000 children died from easily preventable causes.

Jeepers, if we were counting, that would be 53 million children. Put it another way: think about that really big class you were in when you were a kid? 30 kids, far too many for the overworked teacher. You're dead. You are all dead, and a thousand other classrooms like the one you were in. Every day for five years.

On the day that those 2973 people died, roughly 30.000 children died from easily preventable causes. That number of children also died the day before and the day after. That's like 60 crammed-full jumbo jets crashing every day.

Somewhere between 62.000 and 180.000 people have died thus far in the war "on" terror, according to the Independent. That's at least 33 people every day = roughly 1/1.000th of the WTC disaster, or roughly 1/10.000th of the children who died that day.

The thing we spend the most money on around the world is weapons that enable us to kill other people. We spend $950 billion on this. The US alone spends $441.6 billion on this.

If you take what the US spends every single year on being able to kill other people, and had put it into food distribution, sustainable development, clothes and medicine for those 53 million children (they mostly die from things like diarrhoea, pneumonia, measles and malaria), you could have saved every last one of those children about 200 times over, and still have money left to put them through school for five to eight years.

Also, 2.9 million people died from AIDS last year. Somebody should really be looking into that.

We like to focus on big, dramatic dangers, and because of that, we're less focused on actual problems that are actually killing us. Unlike September 11th, life is mostly not like Hollywood movies. Statistics are realer than anything to the people doing the dying, and there are 30.000 good reasons every day to stop being idiots.

I have a suggestion. It's a really simple and easy suggestion. My suggestion is based on the fact that a) I consider myself as being strongly opposed to human beings, both children and adults dying unnecessarily. b) I think that we are vastly overestimating our need for killing each other.

1) Maybe we can all get together on the children not dying, and the not killing each other unnecessarily?

2) Then we could funnel some if not all of the money and work skills used for the military into non-military work around the world.

3) Maybe we could all get together on the not occupying other countries and killing people there.

4) Points 1, 2 and 3 would lead to other people maybe feeling less inclined to coming over to our place and killing people over here, or having their cousins who already live here not killing people over here. It might even lead to people over there killing each other less, and people over here killing each other less.

5) It would also lead to less dying in general from easily preventable cause, like hunger, AIDS, malaria, diahrroea, pneumonia, infections, terrorism and laser-guided smart bombs.

"In other words, they were a lot like us"

Lawrence Wright talks about Al-Qaeda. He's the author of The Looming Tower. The central argument is that the uniting sociological factor among jihadists today is alienation and cultural displacement. Most members join in a different country from where they were born. Also: moslems are 1/5th of the world's population, but roughly half of all poor people are moslem.

Looks like an incredibly interesting talk. I'm going to watch it later.