Scoop.it

By Nick Danforth 

The Washington Post

Much has been made of how European imperial powers reshaped the Middle East after World War I, a transformation often said to have begun 100 years ago this week when France and Britain signed the Sykes-Picot agreement. But fewer people realize that, in addition to creating the map of the modern Middle East, postwar European imperialists actually created the concept. The region we recognize as the Middle East today, a roughly defined but distinct swath of territory stretching from Turkey to Egypt to Iran, only came into being with the end of the Ottoman Empire and the disappearance of the older, now antiquated-sounding “Near East.”

The British used to think of the region that roughly corresponds to today’s Middle East as two entities: the Near East (the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean) and the Middle East (the region around Iran and the Persian Gulf). By Nick Danforth, based on A. Keith Johnston’s 1852 “Chart of the World Showing the Forms and Directions of the Ocean Currents.”
During the 19th century, the British mentally divided what most of the world now considers the Middle East into the Near East (the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean) and the Middle East (the region around Iran and the Persian Gulf). There was a certain geographic and strategic logic to this division. The Near East was, well, nearer than the Middle East, and the Middle East was in the middle of the Near and Far Easts. For British colonial administrators, the Middle East was the region that was crucial to the defense of India, while the Near East was largely under the control of the Ottoman Empire.

This all changed after the Ottoman Empire’s collapse a century ago. The Balkans and then modern Turkey began to seem more Western, while other parts of the Near East came under British control and fell victim to that empire’s bureaucratic reorganization. Winston Churchill, as secretary of state for the colonies, created a “Middle Eastern Department” covering the newly acquired territories of Palestine, Jordan and Iraq. Now this region, too, became part of Britain’s plans for defending its colonial holdings everywhere east of the Suez Canal. In the dramatic words of the historian Roderic Davison, “In this fashion the Middle East burst onto the Mediterranean Coast.”

For several decades, the new usage remained confined to obscure branches of the British government. But, as this chart shows, it spread to the broader English-speaking public during World War II, when people suddenly started reading daily news reports about military developments in the area. Then, when Americans took a newfound interest in the region with the advent of the Cold War, they adopted the then-prevalent British term for it.

Does any of this matter?

Some have suggested that the term “Middle East” is problematic because it is, undeniably, a Western term reflecting a Western perspective. India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, once observed that the region should really be called West Asia, and there have been occasional efforts to adopt terms like “Southwest Asia” in academic circles. Yet there are plenty of countries whose names imply a relative geography that we hardly notice — Norway (north) and Austria (east), for example. And Arabic speakers have long referred to North Africa as the Maghreb — from a word meaning west — because it is on the western side of the Arabic-speaking world.

Anti-imperialist critics of the concept might also take comfort from knowing that no less an imperialist than Churchill never much liked the term he helped create. In 1950, he lamented: “I had always felt that the name ‘Middle East’ for Egypt, the Levant, Syria, and Turkey was ill-chosen. This was the Near East.”

Source: www.washingtonpost.com

AARON HOMER

Inquisitr.com

A Florida man released his five dogs on a Muslim neighbor’s Bichon Frise, while standing naked in his doorway and calling the neighbor a “Muslim terrorist” as his dogs tore the neighbor’s animal to shreds.

As WJHL, in Johnson City, Tennessee, reports, Jackie Hammock, 72, had no love for his neighbor, Azard Baksh, and had previously threatened the man.

On Monday, the neighbors’ dispute came to a head, as Baksh was walking his Bichon Frise, Myra. As Myra stopped in a grassy area to relieve herself, Hammock, completely naked, came to his front door, released his five dogs, and hurled insults at Baksh while his dogs attacked the Myra.

“He started, ya know, cussing me, ‘Muslim terrorist, Islamic Muslim terrorist. Go back where you come from. The big mother dog came and grabbed Myra, shook her like a teddy bear. And I started screaming. He started calling me names and said, ‘Don’t walk in this street, you Muslim terrorist. Stay out of here.’”
Hammock’s wife called the dogs inside, but Hammock released them once again, still naked. Then a second time, the dogs were called inside, and Hammock released them again.

Neighbor Sue White witnessed the entire assault.

“He was standing at his door and I was sitting right there. I had a straight shot. It was very disturbing.”
Baksh ran to White’s house to get help. From there, Myra was taken to an emergency veterinary clinic.

Unfortunately, Myra was no match for Hammock’s dogs. Bichon Frises are considered a “Toy” breed, and only weigh about 10-20 pounds.

Hammock’s five dogs were all mixed-breeds, and the largest two were described as being 50-60 pounds.
Myra died overnight of her injuries.

According to WCMH in Columbus, Hammock was not at all apologetic about the dog attack when cops came to talk to him. A police officer asked a now-clothed Hammock if he had allowed his dogs to attack his neighbor’s dog.

“Oh yes sir, absolutely. I hate that terrorist pr**ck.”
Hammock was taken to jail and charged with cruelty to animals, aggravated assault and exposure of sexual organs.

In the wake of the November 13, 2015, terrorist attacks in Paris, and the December 2, 2015, terrorist attack in San Bernadino, hate crimes against Muslims have been on the rise, according to Huffington Post.

Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on Islamic-American Relations (CAIR), said he hasn’t witnessed so much Islamaphobia in the U.S. since the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

“We’re seeing so many of these things happening that it’s unbelievable. It’s off the chart — and I don’t think we’ve seen the end of it.”
In fact, New York Times writer Liam Stack, in a February 15 report, compiled a list of hate crimes against Muslims and their property — and the list is far from inclusive.

• On December 13 in Hawthorne, California, vandals spray-painted “Jesus” on a mosque wall, and left a replica of a hand grenade nearby.
• On December 6 in Buena Park, California, vandals targeted a Sikh Temple with anti-Muslim graffiti. Sikhism is a completely different religion from Islam.
• On November 26 in Pittsburgh, a passenger in a cab shot and killed the cab driver after demanding to know that he was Muslim.
• In Queens, a man walked into a convenience store shouting “I kill Muslims!” He then punched the convenience store clerk in the head repeatedly.

As of this writing, it is not clear if Jackie Hammock, the Florida man who let loose his dogs on a Muslim neighbor’s pet, has an attorney or has posted bail.

Source: www.inquisitr.com

By Noura Erakat

Nakba Files.org

The Nakba marks a momentous rupture in the history of Arab connection to the land of Palestine. The forcible, mass removal of native Palestinians in 1948 thus overwhelms the history, literature, activism, and memory regarding the Palestinian Question. To begin in 1948 is to narrate a story of collective loss, one that gives vivid expression to the collusion of state powers, the asymmetric capacities between industrialized and developing nations, the unyielding sway of nationalism, and to the remarkable expendability of certain human life.

While these expressive lessons are particular to Palestine and Palestinians, they are also plainly unexceptional. The question of Palestine is like so many other case studies of settler-colonialism, institutionalized racism, and state-led practices of systematic dehumanization. And so many other case studies are like Palestine in their modalities of repression and technologies of violent domination. If, indeed, there is no Palestinian exception, what does that freedom from anecdotal particularity afford us in the way of understanding the conflict and its possible solutions?

One productive approach is to try to understand how anti-blackness informs the conflict. Here I draw on the work of afro-pessimists who have theorized anti-blackness as an analytical framework with a focus on the afterlife of slavery in the New World. This framework informs how the nation-state comes to embody technologies of power, coercion, and violence that determine death and the possibilities of life. Scholar Rinaldo Walcott explains:

“What it means to be human is continually defined against Black people and Blackness….It is precisely by engaging the conditions of the invention of blackness, the ways in which its invention produces the conditions of unfreedom and the question of how those conditions produce various genres of the Human, genres that are continually defined against blackness, that any attempt to engage a decolonial project may avoid its own demise.”
This framework urges us to rethink Zionism so that it is not just a settler-colonial movement predicated on the forced removal and annihilation of the native, but also a nationalist movement predicated on the racialized tropes deployed against Jews of Europe. An anti-blackness framework also urges us to think about other communities, besides native Palestinians, that intersect with the category of “black.” People of African descent have long been in Palestine/Israel, and their presence cuts across dominant categories: there are Afro-Palestinians (predominantly Muslim), Ethiopian Israeli Jews (whose mass migration begins to achieve momentum in the mid-eighties), and recently-arrived asylum seekers from Sudan and Eritrea (both Muslim and Christian). Such provocations unsettle a stark native-settler binary and illuminate broader implications for anti-racist commitments within the Palestinian liberation struggle.

Israeli Jewish society features a stark socio-economic and racial hierarchy. It includes Western European Jews, African Jews, Middle Eastern Jews, and Russian Jews, as well as other social groups like non-Jewish foreign workers. The oppression these groups experience cuts across various intersecting axes of race, class, gender, national origin, as well as other distinctive markers. Palestinians, including citizens of Israel, do not represent the most extreme site of oppression in this social order; rather, they are outside it altogether. They constitute a baseline equivalent with social death because of the extreme institutional deprivation they endure, which denies them access to opportunities, movement, family, nationhood, land, livelihood, and security in the physical and metaphysical sense. Palestinian nationalism equips us to resist this dehumanizing framework by exposing the annihilationist logics of Zionist settler-colonization and demanding a restoration of indigenous sovereignty. It does not, however, adequately grapple with the racial logics that mediate Palestinian deprivation and Israeli socio-racial stratification.

Among liberal Zionists, the treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is a matter of foreign policy, while racial discrimination, against Palestinians with Israeli citizenship and African descendants, is a domestic issue. In a Palestinian nationalist framework, Afro-Israelis and asylum-seekers might be seen as settlers, even if relatively less privileged ones, and Israel’s violent exclusion of them demonstrates its constitutive race-based logics. But what is the connection, if any, between the exclusion and discrimination against these native and settler classes?

Borrowing from afro-pessimist works on the condition of being human, we may reconsider Zionism as a civilizational project that reifies the ineligibility of Jews for European whiteness even as it divests Palestinians of any material or metaphysical value. As a derivative of Enlightenment Europe, Zionist nationalism reproduced the polarized binaries of the superior, enlightened West and the inferior, primitive East. It claimed that Jews as a national entity belonged to the superior, enlightened West despite their geographical origins in the East, and sought to enlighten (read: colonize) its primitive peoples. Accordingly, Zionist ideology inferiorized the non-Western Jew, and aimed to civilize her by erasing her difference, just as Enlightenment Europe had sought to do with its Jewish population. It combated anti-Jewish bigotry by internalizing and reproducing it.

The nationalization of Judaism (Israel refuses to recognize an “Israeli” nationality, only a Jewish one, as confirmed by the Supreme Court in the Ornan case) nevertheless ascribed significant value to Eastern and African Jewish identity; they remained superior to the Palestinian native. Zionism consecrated Jewish nationality in law and strictly regulated its acquisition and the myriad entitlements that flow from it. Palestinians who lacked Jewish nationality were not eligible for rehabilitation, or whiteness, at all, and had to be removed, dispossessed, and/or contained. The Palestinian body, as a site of exploitation, dispossession, and precarity, lacks material value. The value of Jewish nationality, and, by extension, Israeli Whiteness, directly correlates to the deprivation of Palestinian land, presence, and nationhood. Structurally, therefore, the approximation of whiteness within Israel necessitates the ongoing deprivation of Palestinians. And the deprivation of Palestinians reproduces and reifies the logic constitutive of Israel’s racial hierarchal regime.

Settler-decolonization affords an opportunity for emancipation from the fundamental assumptions of white supremacy by addressing the very racial logics that presuppose Jewish inferiority to European Whiteness. Destruction of the colonial relation that facilitates systematic Palestinian deprivation should thus subvert those disfiguring oriental tropes that positioned Jews as outsiders in Europe and, later, as colonial masters in the Middle East. Such a movement aims not only to unsettle a native-settler relationship, but also to unsettle the system of stratified value measured against it. Under such a framework, Jews are able to resist, rather than embody, the racial logics that produced their exclusion within Europe and that continue to stratify Israeli society.

This is also a worthwhile inquiry in light of the resurgence of Black-Palestinian solidarity. It helps navigate the responsibilities that may inhere to the Palestinian movements claiming such solidarities. For example, without scrutinizing the modalities of anti-blackness, non-black Palestinians may risk reifying these institutionalized systems of dehumanization. Palestinian proximity to social death makes Palestinians the non-human, figurative black body in this moment in Israel/Palestine. However, unlike their Afro-Palestinian, Afro-Arab, Afro-Israeli, and African diaspora counterparts more generally, this status is contingent rather than global. Like the Eastern Jews who are eligible for modified whiteness within a Zionist schema, Palestinians view national sovereignty as means for their own aspirations to contingent whiteness. There is therefore an inherent risk within the Palestinian movement for settler-decolonization of reifying anti-blackness: in seeking to overthrow the yolk of Zionist settler-colonization without addressing the racist logics motivating its annihilationist assumptions, Palestinians risk restoring indigenous sovereignty and reproducing the same state structures predicated on dehumanizing a putative other. Not all settlers are the same. Removing the settler without combating the supremacist logics that facilitated her presence risks leaving those logics intact.

Mapping possible strategies and frameworks that address these risks is a critical task for the Palestinian movement. Worthwhile questions include what is the proper place of African Jewish-Israelis and African asylum-seekers in an anti-Zionist framework? What are the possibilities and limitations of coalition with Middle Eastern Jews? How does attention to or elision of Afro-Palestinian communities inform understandings of Palestinian liberation? These are all questions that help to guide our thinking beyond the Palestinian exception and to use the practice of Palestinian struggle and resistance as a platform for addressing liberation not just for a nation, but, more broadly, for humanity’s expendable populations.

Source: nakbafiles.org

By Emily Langer 

The Washington Post

Clovis Maksoud, who advocated on behalf of Arab nations and Palestinian rights as a scholar, a journalist and, for more than a decade, a prominent representative of the Arab League, died May 15 at a hospital in Washington. He was 89.

The cause was a cerebral hemorrhage, said his daughter, Lisette Mondello.

A Lebanese American, Mr. Maksoud spent much of his life as an envoy of the Arab world to the West, representing Arab concerns at the United Nations and in Washington, as well as in commentary that regularly appeared in publications including The Washington Post and the New York Times.

He played his most high-profile role as an ambassador of the Arab League, an organization of Arab nations founded in Cairo in 1945 that represents 22 countries across the Middle East and North Africa.

After a stint as the group’s representative in India from 1961 to 1966, he served in the dual role of observer at the United Nations and chief representative in Washington from 1979 until 1990, when he resigned his post after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

The aggression by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein — and the ensuing debate over the proper international response to what some Arab countries regarded as a regional problem — divided the Arab world. “The Arab house has fallen on itself,” Mr. Maksoud said in a statement at the time. “Unable to rationalize or analyze these developments, I am no longer able to cope with them.”

“‘On the one hand,” he said, “I cannot accept the violation of an established reality — the invasion of Kuwait. On the other, I cannot accept the rush towards the internationalization of the crisis. The original action was wrong and the ensuing reaction is wrong. I find myself intellectually paralyzed and politically incapacitated.”

A coalition of forces led by the United States ultimately pushed the Iraqi military from Kuwait in the Persian Gulf War of the early 1990s.

More than a decade later, when Hussein was toppled after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Mr. Maksoud observed a “deep sense of shame in the Arab world.”

“Most people are very pleased that he is out,” Mr. Maksoud said of Hussein in an interview with the syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer, “but they are embarrassed that they didn’t do it and that, rather, it was done ‘for them.’ ”

Mr. Maksoud often spoke before Western leaders, policymakers and journalists, presenting the Arab perspective on matters of international importance.

After the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, he told the Times that Arab concerns had been “blacked out for a long time in the United States.” He decried U.S. politicians who fell “all over each other’’ to demonstrate their commitment to Israel, with few or no questions asked.

“We in the Arab world are genuinely sick and tired of being the whipping boy and the target of cheap shots at our national aspirations, internationally recognized rights and legitimate interests,” he said in 1984.

Clovis Maksoud was born in Bristow, Okla., on Dec. 17, 1926. His mother was an Orthodox Christian, and his father, a Maronite Catholic, had settled in Oklahoma for petroleum exploration.

The family moved to Beirut when Mr. Maksoud was in high school. He studied political science at the American University of Beirut, where he graduated in 1948 before receiving a law degree from George Washington University in 1951 and pursuing graduate studies at the University of Oxford.

In between his ambassadorial appointments with the Arab League, Mr. Maksoud was the editor of the Egyptian daily newspaper Al-Ahram and the Lebanese weekly An-Nahar. A Washington resident, he retired in 2013 after more than two decades as a professor of international relations at American University, where he was the director of the Center for the Global South. He also taught at Georgetown University.

An English edition of his memoir, “From the Confines of Memory: My Journey With Arab Nationalism,” is forthcoming.

His marriage to the former Rosemary Curry ended in divorce. His second wife, Hala Salaam Maksoud, a founder of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, died in 2002 after nearly three decades of marriage. Survivors include a daughter from his first marriage, Lisette Mondello of Arlington, Va.; and a grandson.

Throughout his career, Mr. Maksoud sought to combat anti-Arab prejudice. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he proposed an international anti-terrorism agency to be led by Muslims and Arabs.

“We cannot judge Christianity by [the] Ku Klux Klan and we cannot judge Islam by the Taliban,” he told the Toronto Star. That imperative, he said, needed to “be rubbed into our consciousness.”

Source: www.washingtonpost.com