Laila Lalami

If further proof were needed that Arafat is a completely irredeemable corrupt ruler, here it is. The Arab daily newspaper Al Watanclaims that he pocketed $5 million, which had been intended as humanitarian aid for the Palestinian people.

Even worse, the newspaper claims Arafat also diverted aid money from Arab states–earmarked for those who had lost homes in the recent Israeli incursion into the West Bank–and invested it to increase his stock holdings in a concrete company, thereby profiting from rising concrete prices resulting from increased demand for construction materials to rebuild the destroyed Palestinian housing.

Arafat stole $5.1 million in foreign aid
The most sickening part about it all? There is probably no other leader of good maturity and standing that can win in the proposed end-of-year Palestinian elections. There is a political vacuum. Hanan Ashrawi, where are you?

From the L.A. Weekly:

Even as we expect women to be alluring, seductive, hot, we often despise them when they actually are. While it would be nice to think that we’ve moved beyond such ancient pathologies (…), few things remain more volatile than women shaking off their traditional role as objects of male fantasy and actively pursuing their own desires. After all, it’s one thing for a model to shake her booty in a music video aimed at leering teens, quite another for her to take the lead singer to bed and expect him to deliver those orgasms.

This profound ambivalence toward female desire helps explain the fevered articles that have greeted the American publication of The Sexual Life of Catherine M., the international best-seller by Parisian art critic Catherine Millet. Already a scandale in Paris — whenever women write freely of sex, the French pretend to be shocked — the book has given women critics an undeniable frisson, although not always a happy one. While Salon’s Stephanie Zacharek dubs it a groundbreaking work (“a dare to every human being, particularly every woman, who claims to be sexually open. No woman has ever written a book like this”), Judith Thurman’s New Yorker review sniffs at the volume as if she’d just been handed an orgiast’s soiled panties.

Liberte, Egalite, Infidelite

I try to avoid reading news from the Middle East if I can because it upsets me so much that I get depressed for days and sometimes I get insomnia, but I feel I have to blog about this eyewitness account I read today on Z mag:

In the morning the Israeli soldiers entered people’s homes and we could hear loud banging from inside. A woman emerged from a house and begged us to come inside to see what the soldiers were doing. There were no soldiers in her house yet, but the clanging of the soldiers next door filled the house. It was so loud! It soon became apparent why. In the living room of her house we could see a small hole forming where the soldiers in the house next door were starting to break through the wall. When I think back on this experience, I realize how terrifying it must have been for those whose homes were invaded in this way. Imagine sitting in your living room waiting for men with guns to come tearing through your wall.
In the moment, we didn’t have time for fear. We yelled at the soldiers through the wall. “Stop! What are you doing? Can we talk to you about this please?” The effort to break through the wall didn’t stop, but some soldiers came to the door of the house we were in to confront us. We tried to reason with them. They insisted that they had to break through the walls of the house in order to search it. “Why don’t you come through the door?” we asked. They replied, “Because it’s not safe.” There was no reasoning with them. There was no explaining to them that they had just crossed the threshold of that house without harm, so breaking through the wall didn’t make much sense. At that point, the soldiers decided they’d had enough of us and they ordered us to leave the house. We refused and linked arms. A couple of them lunged at us and tried to pull us out of the room, but we resisted and they gave up pretty easily. Throughout all of this, the clanging on the other side of the wall never missed a beat. The most we could get out of them was an agreement to move the family’s stuff away from the wall that they were breaking through. Later, I visited that part of the camp again, and sat with a family in their home. On either side of us the walls were broken through in order to create a long passageway. The soldiers had spray painted arrows on the sparkling white tile of the kitchen walls, red pointing to the holes in the walls, black pointing to the real door of the house. When I asked some soldiers about this later, they explained to me that the purpose of this type of destruction was for the protection of soldiers in case of a gun battle in the camp. The idea was that the soldiers could move from house to house instead of running through the narrow alleys of the camp where they are supposedly more vulnerable. In other words, they had effectively turned people’s houses into a future battleground.

Eyewitness report from Balata

Non-sequitur moment: I was standing in line at the library, a book under one arm, looking through my purse for money for photocopies, my disheveled hair in the way, when an elderly man turned around, looked at me, and said in a strong Italian accent, “Why has God been so good to you?” He smacked his lips together and then walked up to the librarian to check his books out.
Oookaaay.

I like to read Harpers’ wrap up every week. I am particularly fond of the caustic tone. Example: “The attorney general also proposed regulations requiring 100,000 Muslim and Middle Eastern foreigners to register with the federal government and submit to fingerprinting; potential terrorists who are already in the country are expected to comply voluntarily.”

I have a new favorite web site. It’s called pseudodictionary. You can submit your own made-up words, expressions, etc. Lots of fun.

Remember last month’s gaffe by the Beijing Evening News? When they reprinted as fact a story that appeared in The Onion? Well, they finally got around to retracting it.

After initially refusing to run a retraction, this city’s most popular newspaper has apologized to readers for an erroneous report that U.S. lawmakers were threatening to pull out of Washington unless a fancy new Capitol was built.
The state-run Beijing Evening News admitted in its Tuesday edition that it had been snookered by a story published by the Onion, the American publication known for its spoofs of current events. The Onion reported last month that members of Congress were pressing for construction of a brand-new Capitol, complete with a retractable dome and luxury boxes, in order “to stay competitive.”
Last week, the Beijing Evening News rehashed the item as a real news story, without citing its source. But after “our reporter in Washington checked out [the story], he discovered that some of its contents were identical to the Onion’s joke article,” the Beijing tabloid said Tuesday.

Beijing Newspaper Retreats, Apologizes for Capitol Gaffe

Straight out of a Tom Clancy novel: The Moroccan secret service, which participated with the CIA in interrogating 14 Moroccan nationals being held at Guantanamo, was able to get information about an Al-Qaida recruiter operating out of the Kingdom. This individual, a Saudi national, was then tailed by the Moroccan secret service, leading to the arrest of 3 alleged Al-Qaida members, who were reportedly plotting suicide attacks in nearby Gibraltar against NATO ships passing through the straits. There are no intentions to extradite the three, and they will be prosecuted according to Moroccan law. The Moroccan press today is unanimous (e.g. this article) in congratulating the DST (Department de la Surveillance du Territoire, the secret service) and the Gendarmerie Royale, but is worried about possible connections between Al-Qaida and Morocco’s own burgeoning islamist movement.

A while back, I blogged about The Bondwoman’s Narrative, the book that was bought at auction by famed Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates and which he authenticated, edited, and sold to Warner Books. Back then, I expressed some skepticism about his methodology. I was not entirely surprised, therefore, by this article in the Boston Globe.

Before publication, Gates sold an excerpt to The New Yorker, to which he is a frequent contributor. Almost immediately after picking up the magazine, a Princeton graduate student in British and American literature, Hollis Robbins, recognized passages copied from Charles Dickens’s ”Bleak House.” (One wonders, idly, how the 24 scholars who Gates says reviewed the manuscript missed this and other borrowings.) Halfway into a letter to the editor – and cognizant of Gates’ superstar status in academe (and also aware that Princeton was trying to woo him away from Harvard) – Robbins instead phoned a friend at the magazine. By evening Robbins was on the phone with Gates. Skip’s [Henry Louis Gates'] remarkable spin campaign was underway.
Instead of being abashed, Gates decided to celebrate Crafts’s copying from Dickens. Using faddish jargon – not a retraction, not an apology – in a letter to The New Yorker, Gates explained that Crafts ”was seeking a relation to a canonical tradition, finding in Dickens a language and rhetoric that she sometimes assimilated and sometimes simply appropriated.” A source at the magazine professed bemusement at the ”Ambrose-like latitude” that Crafts had with sources, and said that the copying would have been taken more seriously if committed by a staff writer.

Narrative of a slave tale

First, it was Senegal, an ex-colony, that kicked their asses. Now, the French played against Uruguay, with one player getting carded, and couldn’t score. So, just to qualify for the next round, they’ll have to beat Denmark by at least two points. “Thursday’s results mean Roger Lemerre’s side are in danger of becoming the first defending champions to fail to make it to the second round since Brazil in 1966,” says the BBC. Ouch. And it doesn’t look like Zineddine Zidane will be playing. France face anxious wait.

Good news though: The US team actually beat Portugal, in yet another upset. They won 3 to 2. Next stop, Korea. USA Stun Portugal.