Cruel

“Fascism is capitalism plus murder.”

Upton Sinclair.

A fire destroyed the lives of 55 Moroccan workers, among which 35 women, in a mattress factory in Hay Hassani, an industrial district of the city of Casablanca.


According to aljazeera.net, "Civil protection officials said it had become clear that safety norms had not been applied in the Rosamor factory in the south-west of Morocco's biggest city."

An emergency officer said managers had locked in staff during work hours to stop theft, trapping them in the fire on Saturday. The blaze quickly turned into an inferno, burning victims alive, while others leapt to safety, but many women workers were too scared to jump and were trapped.

Later on, the authorities arrested the factory's bosses and an enquiry into the causes of the blaze was ordered.

Unfortunately, In a country where a savage and primitive predatory form of capitalism has flourished, endemic corruption, a quasi-absence of state regulations, added to a systematic abuse of workers' rights, tragedies like the one that struck Casablanca might reoccur.

History Written by Those Who Hanged the Heroes

"Honesty has a beautiful and refreshing simplicity about it. No ulterior motives. No hidden meanings. An absence of hypocrisy, duplicity, political games, and verbal superficiality. As honesty and real integrity characterize our lives, there will be no need to manipulate others."

Charles Swindoll

According to Electronic Intifada, the pro-Israel, gutter propagandist group, CAMERA, "[has been] orchestrating a secret, long-term campaign to infiltrate the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia to rewrite Palestinian history, pass off crude propaganda as fact, and take over Wikipedia administrative structures to ensure these changes go either undetected or unchallenged."

It looks like the EI article has sparked a reaction from Wikipedia administrators and from Camera operatives who seem to have halted their activities.

Next time you look for a Wiki reference on Palestine (and that goes for me as well), please pinch you noses hard... it stinks lies, manipulations and canard there.

Cartoon I Do

From now on I'll try to punctuate my posts on this blog by some humble, mostly political cartoons of mine inspired by current and past events.

This one I drew in august 2007 with an epithet in Arabic deploring the calamitous Arab leadership.

This other one is a bit older, december 2006.

And this last one I made last august just before Moroccan legislative elections.

More to come.

Spy Game: Who's Playing Whom?

Another American citizen arrested on "suspicion of passing classified defence information to Israel during the 1980s, according to the justice department." (Aljazeera.net).

This story far from surprising me, has yet again revived the old torturous question about who's playing whom? who's getting the upper hand in this supposedly "special relationship" between Israel and the US?

Many have read the paper by Mearsheimer and Walt who asked "why has the United States been willing to set aside its own security in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries is based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives. [H]owever, neither of those explanations can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the United States provides to Israel."

The courageous authors, who have been subjected to ad hominem attacks and an unprecedented campaign of character assassination have succeeded in breaking the taboo surrounding the intricate links between both America and Israel.

They argued that one of the reasons "to question Israel’s strategic value [to the U.S.] is that it does not act like a loyal ally."

Israeli officials frequently ignore U.S. requests and renege on promises made to top U.S. leaders (including past pledges to halt settlement construction and to refrain from “targeted assassinations” of Palestinian leaders). Moreover, Israel has provided sensitive U.S. military technology to potential U.S. rivals like China, in what the U.S. State Department Inspector‐General called “a systematic and growing pattern of unauthorized transfers.” According to the U.S. General Accounting Office, Israel also “conducts the most aggressive espionage operations against the U.S. of any ally.” In addition to the case of Jonathan Pollard, who gave Israel large quantities of classified material in the early 1980s (which Israel reportedly passed onto the Soviet Union to gain more exit visas for Soviet Jews), a controversy erupted in 2004 when it was revealed that a key Pentagon official (Larry Franklin) had passed classified information to an Israeli diplomat, allegedly aided by two AIPAC officials. Israel is hardly the only country that spies on the United States, but its willingness to spy on its principal patron casts further doubt on its strategic value.

Of course there are those, like Chomsky, who argue that Israel is America's cop on the beat in the region. In other words it is (benevolently) doing America's dirty work in the ME, working as a client-state and providing the U.S. of all kind of subterfuges it needs, even to the detriment of Israel's own security. Hum...? But why would they have to spy on their protectors then? I agree with Mearsheimer-Walt on this one.

All Aboard!

Non Violent Initiative to Free Gaza

This may, marks the 60th anniversary of the Nakba (or the Catastrophe) which saw the creation of Israel on the land stolen from the Palestinians. This injustice engendered a permanent state of tension and violence which often spills over to other regions of the world. Sixty years of:

Insults, incursions, illegal and immoral occupation...

Slaughter, siege, settlements and segregation...

Rampage and racist institutionalization...

Apartheid and annexation...

Ethnic cleansing, extrajudicial executions and...

Lobby pressure and intimidations

The Free Gaza initiative has launched a campaign aiming at breaking the siege on Gaza by organizing a non-violent journey by sea and trying to reach the open sky concentration camp called Gaza. "We've tried to enter Palestine by land. We've tried to arrive by air. Now we're getting serious. We're taking a ship" says their website.

Yesterday, normanfinkelstein.com published an appeal by the group of activists calling for more volonteers and asking for financial help:

Dear Boat People:It is three and a half months until the launch of our boat project to Gaza. Those of us actively involved in boat procurement have been working hard at finalizing some of the details, and we can announce that we are negotiating for boats that will hold up to 40-45 people.

We won't stop looking for other boats (depending on funding), but we are confident that 40-45 people will be able to go in August on the maiden voyage to Gaza. Here, then, are the details

1. Twenty-five of us will assemble in Cyprus on August 1, 2008.
   
   
2. 15-20 people will go directly to Egypt on July 25 to help sail one or more boats to Cyprus. No experience required, but we also need a mix of backgrounds for this part of the project. Nonviolent training for this group will take place in Egypt. We will let you know more about these details, after we get a count of people who are interested in this part of the project. (Contact Paul Larudee for more details at Harmonicprogressive@gmail.com)

As well as telling us which of those two groups you want to join, we also need commitments for the following:An additional ground crew of 10-12 people willing to stay in Cyprus for the duration of the trip, field media opportunities, run training in nonviolent techniques, and then either be willing to be part of the second trip in mid-August or remain the ground crew. Some of you are already specifically interested in being just ground crew, so please reconfirm by contacting Bella at accessforpeace@riseup.net

We need feedback from all of you by the end of April, because there will be certain abilities, languages, countries and ages that will have primary consideration.

During the British mandate on Palestine, hundreds (around 4,500) of holocaust survivors, secretly packed by Zionist agents of the Haganah on an old steamer, the "exodus," succeeded in 1947 in breaking the British blockade on Palestine aimed at limiting the number of Jewish migrants. The whole thing was carefully orchestrated in order to provoke the inevitable bloody confrontation that ensued. The pictures of desperate European Jews, being forced to go back to war-torn Europe shocked the Western (mainly American) viewers and helped boost the Zionist project in Palestine.

The current Free Gaza initiative may be inspired by the "Exodus" story, but its aim is diametrically opposed to it. I have a feeling it's going to be hot in Gaza beach this August. Watch this space!

You've Had Enough of AIPAC? ... Here Comes J Street

"The world is pretty awful today, but it is far
better than yesterday."

Noam Chomsky

An interesting article was published yesterday on the New York based Jewish newspaper, The Forward, titled "For Israel’s Sake, Moderate American Jews Must Find Their Voice" by Jeremy Ben-Ami, executive director of the newly formed Jewish lobby group, J Street.

According to Antiwar.com, the movement, allegedly aimed at counterbalancing the influence of AIPAC as the major representative of Jewish-Americans, has already been joined by some prominent Jewish figures.

The author states that...

For the sake of Israel, the United States and the world, it is time for American political discourse to re-engage with reality. Voices of reason need to reclaim what it means to be pro-Israel and to establish in American political discourse that Israel’s core security interest is to achieve a negotiated two-state solution and to define once and for all permanent, internationally-recognized borders.

Ben-Ami goes on to explain his personal history and how his disillusions with what he calls "the extreme right" of the Jewish political spectrum came about, calling for a rupture.

Somehow, for American politicians or activists to express opposition to settlement expansion — or support for active American diplomacy, dialogue with Syria or engagement with Iran — has become subversive and radical, inviting vile, hateful emails and a place on public lists of Israel-haters and antisemites. For the particularly unlucky, it leads to public, personal attacks on one’s family and heritage. Enough. In early 21st-century America, the rules of politics are being rewritten, and conventional political orthodoxy is clearly open to once-inconceivable challenges. It is time for the broad, sensible mainstream of pro-Israel American Jews and their allies to challenge those on the extreme right who claim to speak for all American Jews in the national debate about Israel and the Middle East — and who, through the use of fear and intimidation, have cut off reasonable debate on the topic.

The author continues denouncing the incestuous alliances and strong ties that AIPAC has cultivated with right-wing Christian Zionists, such as John Hagee.

In our name, PACs and other political associations have embraced the most radically right-wing figures on the American political scene [...] all in the guise of being “pro-Israel.” In Washington today, these voices are seen to speak for the entire American Jewish community. But they don’t speak for me. And I don’t believe they speak for the majority of the American Jews with whom I have lived and worked.

All this sounds fair enough to me but I can't help being doubtful about the extent to which such initiative might lead or the real motives behind such a move, because throughout the article it is only a question really of who deserves to be considered pro-Israel. At times, the article sounds circumvallating around core issues like the notion of Justice, of negotiating with Hamas, the legitimate representative of the Palestinians, the question of the right of return, the question of Jerusalem... Sometimes the author who claims to be "moderate" (whatever the term might mean) refers with nostalgia to members of the Irgun (a terrorist Zionist organisation which helped form the first battalions of the Israel "Defence" Force) like Z. Jabotinsky, a notorious murderer.

But the author finally hints at an aspect of Israel's position, rarely evoked.

I also know in my heart that this is not just a matter of survival. What will it say of us as a people if at a rare moment in our communal history when we have achieved success, acceptance and power, we fail to act according to the values and ideals passed down to us over thousands of years when we were the outcasts, the minority and the powerless?

I might be doubtful about such initiatives but something that should bring comfort to many Justice and Peace activists is the fact that the lobby is definitely weakening by the day!

Cartoons for Justice: the Other Way to Fight

I've come across some great cartoons recently dealing with issues close to my heart. Artists have covered issues with an audacity and growing courage seldom manifested in the past, denouncing Zionist ongoing crimes in Palestine, depicting the absurdity of the Iraq occupation and praising liberation and resistance struggles everywhere.

But the one artist who caught my eyes most is the Brazilian, freelance cartoonist, Carlos Latuff.

Samples of his work were published throughout the internet and the American scholar Norman G. Finkelstein hosts a series of samples of Carlos' cartoons on his official website.

According to another website, allegedly Carlos' official blog, the artist is inviting "Arab newspapers and magazines to reproduce [his] cartoons free of charge in order to reach Arab audience whom do not speak English and have no Internet access." Apparently, it is catching fire with the cartoons starting to appear in many Arab magazines and newspapers.

The website also claims that "[it] was visited by the U.S. Department of Defence Network Information Center, while searching for 'Carlos Latuff' on Google." They might be doing something right then!

... So for anybody reading this, please reproduce and communicate latuff's work.

> Other Artists:

Equally talented and a friend of this blog, is the Belgian cartoonist and journalist, Ben Heine. His work can be found on his blog here.

Khalid Bendib, who speaks courageously to power and greed.

Anis Hamadeh, the accomplished artist who committed himself to beautifully preserve the Palestinian memory.

And many more: look at the Photo/Cartoon section of this blog.

Pictures are Courtesy of Carlos Latuff.

Speaking French to a... Cradle!

The Sad Story of a Culturally Alienated Society

When I first decided to start blogging, it was clear in my mind that I wouldn't in any way write in French. And yet French has accompanied me for most of my life and is practically a second mother tongue. I decided to write in English and Arabic. The first because it is the world's language and the latter because it's supposed to be my own language, part of my identity, of which I'm proud. I wasn't motivated at all by any anti-French feeling or some weird nationalistic zealotry. I was simply trying (symbolically) to reclaim the right to my own language and to emancipate (legitimately I think) from the imposed linguistic prison and cultural prism through which I was subconsciously forced to see and interpret the world.

I never felt the urgency or need to write about this issue until I recently witnessed one of my closest friends speak to his newborn son (few days old) in French. He explained how he (an Arab) and his wife (Arab too), although living in Morocco, a supposedly Arab (and Berber) country, deliberately decided to speak French and inculcate French culture to their beloved newborn child.

This is not an exceptional peculiarity in today's Morocco.The north-African kingdom is one of the rare Arab countries (with Lebanon) who -thanks to geographical or geopolitical considerations- has remained open to foreign cultural influences and benefited largely and undeniably from that interaction. But the country has developed very little during its 52 years of independence and having adopted an archeo-capitalistic economic and political system, only a fraction of the population has really achieved any social success. A system that fosters the advancement of a small breed of elites, already favoured by their blood kinship and/or by nepotism. But the system also allowed some, to contemplate and achieve real success, forming a tiny but remarkably active urban bourgeoisie. However, in order to enter this glittering and restrictive world of fortune and achievement, made in Morocco, you must adopt the language of success: French. That, in turn, acted as an efficient incentive for a massive cultural cringe.

Affluent Moroccans -with the exception of some prosperous conservative Islamists- and those who aspire to join them or at least enable their children to reach prosperity, speak often French and put their children in missions françaises : French government-funded schools, originally created to provide education for French nationals and which now receive mostly Moroccan children whose parents prefer to pay the overly expensive application fees rather than trust the bankrupt public education system.

Hence (maybe) the attitude of my friend toward his newborn child. A behaviour significantly representative of an ambitious class of young parents legitimately avid of securing their offspring's future.

In addition to this quite pragmatic and reasonably understandable attitude, the Moroccan society has gradually drifted into a cultural alienation en masse: e.g. It's commonplace in Morocco to hear self-loathing comments dismissive of Moroccans own culture as inferior to that of western immediate neighbours; many would claim that Morocco was better-off under Franco-Spanish occupation while all evidence show how the country was grossly and savagely raped and exploited and little infrastructure left for the sake of the country's own development; very fierce opposition often develops against any reform of the education system that would include "Arabisation," a term which became synonymous of aversion and often generates odium since the failure of a reform conducted in the 70s for purely electoralistic purposes, with no clear planning by the then-(allegedly)-panarabist party of Istiqlal, and which saw generations of young Moroccan students engage in an educational system ridiculously incompatible with the realities of the job market producing scores of under-qualified and dangerously disillusioned graduates. Although this phenomenal failure was clearly due to political interference and lack of planning, the Arabic language per se, remained the principle cause of the fiasco in the mind of many Moroccans who often praise almost everything French as panacea.

Self-loathing is commonly heard in discussions with people mostly discouraged and deeply disillusioned with their own cultural background and own identity.

That, to me, shows a serious and quasi-pathological state of self-hatred often dubbed by social anthropologists, "colonial mentality."

"Culturally alienated societies often exhibit a weak sense of cultural self-identity and place little worth on themselves," yielding dysfunctional attitudes and a "permanent state of discouragement" according to post-colonial anthropologists like Helen Tiffin. Mental and social well being, the prerequisite condition for healthy, cohesive and productive societies can rarely be achieved in these conditions. Alfred Adler, the pioneer of social and community psychology, clearly identified an intrinsic inferiority complex at the root of the self-devaluating process in culturally cringed societies. He emphasised "the importance of social equality in order to prevent various forms of psychopathology and espoused the development of social interest and democratic family structures as the ideal ethos for raising children." (source: Wikipedia). I think that my friend would be interested in hearing that.

Unbelievably enough, half a century after (formal) independence from France, almost half of the Moroccan population is still illiterate. Most of the few presumably literates speak, read or write only Arabic, many of whom understand barely classical Arabic. The fact of adopting French as the quasi-exclusive language of mainstream news, knowledge, science, economics has in effect acted as a cultural Apartheid for the scores of disenfranchised, uneducated Moroccans, condemning them to a state of permanent ignorance and subordination. The dilemma is to insure that knowledge and information is provided fairly to the largest possible amount of people without stigmatizing any of the foreign languages and cultures or denying their invaluable benefits or losing one's own culture and identity in the process.

The picture is not completely bleak though. The Aljazeera "revolution" having proved to the world and to the most sceptics (amongst which I counted) that the Arabic language was alive and kicking, easily adaptable to different issues ranging from news to science, art...

Also the recent publication by some prominent Moroccan intellectuals and journalists of magazines and newspapers in Darija, the local Arabic dialect, opened an even larger opportunity to reach the greatest number of people.

Picture Courtesy of "Ladies! Yea Ladies!"

Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité... Terms and Conditions Apply!

Paris, 3 days ago, the news dispatch from the AFP reads:

A French senior civil servant has been sacked for publishing a violent anti-Israeli diatribe on a web site, the interior ministry said. Bruno Guigue, deputy prefect of the south-western town of Saintes, wrote in an online column this month that Israel was "the only state where snipers shoot down little girls outside their school gates." The author of several books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Guigue wrote of the "Israeli jails where -- thanks to religious law -- they stop torturing on the Sabbath." Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie dismissed the official after learning of the column on Wednesday, the ministry said.

Bruno Guigue wrote the piece (fr) on a website, oumma.com, in which he criticized some French neocons and proIsrael advocates, who launched a frenzied campaign against the UN Council on HR. The article is a rare demonstration of eloquent courage. Refreshingly honest and quite significant given the rank and quality of the author.

[...] As for terrorism, the state of Israel can boast of unrivalled achievements. The awful attacks of september 11, 2001 have caused ten times less victims than the 1982 siege of Beirut by Tsahal. Western admirers of Israel must be mesmerized by an army capable of killing children using cruise missiles [...] wrote the author.

Guigue commented on the biased and openly defamatory campaign by a bunch of French intellos who proclaimed themselves contemporary defenders of French values, and paramount of all is of course the right to express one's self. The likes of Pascal Bruckner, Alain Finkielkraut (the equivalent in France of Norman Podhoretz), Claude Lanzmann, Elie Wiesel, Pierre-André Taguieff, Frédéric Encel, George Frêche, Robert Redecker (the gutter geek of French intelligentsia) and many others, most of whom open Islamophobes, periodically popping-up on screens to explain how it is important for France not to pander to "Islamofascists." They supported the publication of the Danish cartoons -fair enough- but they added that Western values are in big danger of being eroded by an ever growing Muslim population (some have even invented the term of Eurabia). Yesterday, I browsed over some prominent French newspapers and news websites, but haven't found a word from those same auteurs de la bien-pensance -or preachers of the well thinking as they are sometimes sarcastically called- who seem to consider that the freedom and values they are allegedly defending, exclude obvious offenders like Israel who has the money to buy out their bloody conscience.

Five Years of Protectorate

Five years after the US-led invasion of Iraq and the installation of a puppet regime, Iraqis are still waiting for the seventh heaven promised by Bush and Co.

The slight decline in the inter-ethnic violence must be the result of the almost now complete segregation of the Iraqi society. Iraq has been fragmented, shattered according to the whim of the invaders. Divide Et Imperia.

The stooge government doesn't have much authority nor enjoys any meaningful sovereignty, having to constantly be monitored and protected by the American master. A little illustration:

Gun-waving soldiers first cleared all traffic from the streets. Then four black armored cars, each with three machine gunners on the roof, raced out of a heavily fortified exit from the Green Zone, followed by sand-coloured American Humvees and more armoured cars. Finally, in the middle of the speeding convoy, we saw six identical bullet proof vehicles with black windows, one of which must have carried Mr Maliki. [...] The Iraqi prime minister was only going to the headquarters of the Dawa party to which he belongs and which are only half a mile from the Green Zone but his hundreds of security guards acted as if they were entering enemy territory.
Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad.

Over one million Iraqis have died as a result of the illegal invasion of their country according to many sources. More than four million Iraqis have now either left the country or been forced to move from their homes and neighbourhoods in order to aggregate with fellow ethnic or sectarian peers. And those numbers are now acknowledged by the Americans themselves, who so far have lost around four thousand of their soldiers for the sake of Chevron, Exxon-Mobile, Carlyle, and the like. Democracy and justice will have to wait.

Picture Courtesy of Carlos Latuff.

Non-Violent Dissent Pays

Fouad Mourtada reportedly freed yesterday after being granted royal amnesty, having spent nearly two mouths in prison for no tangible reason other than committing a crime of lèse-majesté. Even in Morocco, resilient, perseverant and honest non-violent dissent pays.

The news from Morocco (if confirmed) is a real sigh of relief for many bloggers, and HR activists who campaigned hard to make the case of Fouad known and widely published. But this is not a victory for democracy nor for HR (as the Moroccan writer Laila Lalami rightly pointed out on her blog) because the institutions of the monarchy have acted in clear subservience to the central power. And I don't think that one can feel comfortable yet in a country where people are being imprisoned and later released according to the will and whims of one single person. Anyway, Fouad is now a free man. Until Mourtada's arrest, Moroccans have enjoyed reasonably free access to the internet compared to the regional standards. They rightly spotted the danger of imprisoning Mourtada and they succesfully named and shamed the Moroccan government for what it did. Throughout the Arab World, though, many bloggers and other prisoners of opinion still languish in prisons sometimes without due process or any legal recourse.

By the way, Aid Maulid a'Nabawi Saîd (happy Maulid feast).

Chutzpah & Rekindling Hope in Obama

According to the Israeli TV and to Al-Quds Al-Arabi (as translated by the Missing Link and reported by eatbees), the Israeli cabinet has decided to forcibly evacuate northern Gaza. "[Defence Minister Ehud] Barak intends to plan for the removal of tens of thousands of Palestinians from the northern Gaza Strip, namely from the region that the resistance uses for the launch of these rockets, and to move them toward Gaza City and to confine them there," said the television report.

Chutzpah means shameless, arrogant audacity and effrontery in Hebrew, a feeling well known and "enjoyed" amongst Israelis those days. Contemptuous as they are, of the lives of hundreds of thousands they have destroyed, of the cry for reason and peace of millions who marched for justice around the world. This unmitigated effrontery, betrays in fact the levels of confidence Israel and its supporters have today, on their ability of taming most of international bodies and most importantly, the capacity to control US's foreign policy and dictate their own interests to the American decision makers.

Talking about American decision makers, I've had a protracted and interesting discussion with my friend eatbees, about the ability for someone like Sen. Barak Obama to force change in an already corrupt political system, deeply plagued by the anti-democratic influence of lobbies and pressure groups. And we evoked the relationship Obama has with the Israel lobby. The speech he gave in front of the AIPAC gathering last year, wasn't a straightforward neocon-style obsequious eulogy, but was nonetheless quite in favour of the Zionist state and it's recent actions, including its criminal destruction of neighbouring Lebanon, some mounts before. A support he reiterated in some of hes recent comments. Eatbees referred me to this article, in which I learned that the man had in 1998, attended a dinner keynoted by the late Columbia Professor Edward Said -that must be a first for a presidential hopeful,- and that one of Obama's colleagues at the university of Chicago was the Palestinian scholar at Columbia, Rashid Khalidi. George Galloway, the pro-Palestinian British MP and radio host, answered in favour of Obama when I phoned his program last year to quote parts of Barak's address in front of AIPAC. Galloway claims that Obama's body-language betrayed the feeling of unease he must have experienced in such sycophantic place, much to the dismay of many of Israel supporters who attended the speech. Obama was indeed attacked virulently recently by some prominent Israel lobby muggers, who clearly want to force him into the polemic.

Now, of course, I don't think that having dinner with Said is by any stretch of the imagination, a guarantee that a future Obama administration would at last play the role of the honest broker other administrations ought to have played for decades, but surely Obama comes at a time when many great taboos in American politics are collapsing. The lobby might have retained an enormous influence, but many analysts have decided not to succumb to its intimidations anymore and have began to expose its mafia-like machinery. What's more, the traditional fund-raising mechanisms which the Israel supporters have long dominated can now effectively be bypassed through the usage of Internet. Obama proved that to be efficient!

Will Obama be the providential emperor who will put an end to that damn Chutzpah? I prefer to wait and see.