Laila Lalami

Bill O’Reilly. What can I say? Only in this country can a man who anchored a trashy tabloid show like Inside Edition pretend to know the truth about the Muslim world. I wouldn’t normally bother with this article, but he mentions Morocco, and that piqued my interest.

O’Reilly claims that when he went to Morocco kids came up to him, asked for handouts, and then asked him “Are you a Jew?” Problem is, child beggars would be hard pressed to string together a complete question in English. But maybe O’Reilly understood what they said because he speaks Arabic. And not just any kind of Arabic — Moroccan Arabic, notorious for its love of difficult consonant clusters. Give it to the man for actually trying to communicate with the natives.

O’Reilly also claims that “they are taught hatred of the Jews at school.” Wow. He actually stepped inside a Moroccan school and examined all the textbooks? Heh. Course not. Because if he were to visit a Moroccan school, say in Casablanca, he might notice that some of the pupils are Jewish.

The worst is that he claims that unless the U.S. keeps up its protection of Israel, there will be another Jewish Holocaust. Someone tell this man that while the Nazi holocaust was going on in Europe, the Moroccan sultan refused to hand over his Jewish citizens to the Vichy government of France for deportation to concentration camps. If hatred of the Jew was ingrained in Muslims, why didn’t the Moroccans sacrifice their fellow citizens in 1941?

But that’s not the kind of thing he wants to hear. He already knows the truth.

Moroccans go to the polls tomorrow in what is billed as the country’s first free and fair elections. Although the citizenry will be faced with a choice between twenty-six (!) parties, it seems at least a positive step that any voting violations will be punished with stiff prison terms and that a minimum of 10% of parliament seats will be for women representatives. I am not a big fan of the quota system, but I guess in this case it will be useful because it means that many more votes for the reform of the Moudawana (legal system that covers women’s rights). Also worthy of note is the almost certain exit of Youssoufi, who had served as Premier for nearly 10 years.

Sporadic blogging this week, I’m afraid. I’ve come down with a bad cold, following our weekend hike to Mount San Gorgonio. I’m absolutely exhausted all the time and in fact plan on going right back to bed this minute.

My husband has been raving to me about The Last American Man by Elizabeth Gilbert. Here’s what he says: “It’s the true story of Eustace Conway, who by the age of seven could throw a knife accurately enough to nail a chipmunk to a tree. When he was twelve he could hit a running squirrel with a bow and arrow, and by the time he was seventeen he headed into the mountains and survived by dressing in the skins of animals he had hunted and eaten. Now in his late 30’s, Eustace owns a thousand acres of pristine wilderness and lives in a teepee in the woods full-time. But he is also a college graduate and tours the country educating people about nature. He is the perfect cross between Davy Crockett and Henry David Thoreau. If you love the outdoors, you will love this book.”

Tempers continue to flare between Moroccans and Spaniards since the last row in July, which I had blogged about here. Famed Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, who was due to receive an honor at the Marrakesh Film Festival, turned down the invitation. According to this report, Moroccan writer and Goncourt-Prize winner Tahar Ben Jelloun castigated Almodóvar in an open letter to the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia. Almodóvar of course had to respond in kind. Isn’t this like a prime-time soap?

From the Guardian:

In October last year, an item appeared on an authoritative Russian studies website that soon had the science-fiction community buzzing with speculative excitement. It asserted that Isaac Asimov’s 1951 classic Foundation was translated into Arabic under the title “al-Qaida”. And it seemed to have the evidence to back up its claims.

“This peculiar coincidence would be of little interest if not for abundant parallels between the plot of Asimov’s book and the events unfolding now,” wrote Dmitri Gusev, the scientist who posted the article. He was referring to apparent similarities between the plot of Foundation and the pursuit of the organisation we have come to know, perhaps erroneously, as al-Qaida.

The Arabic word qaida - ordinarily meaning “base” or “foundation” - is also used for “groundwork” and “basis”. It is employed in the sense of a military or naval base, and for chemical formulae and geometry: the base of a pyramid, for example.(…)

The Empire portrayed in Asimov’s novels is in turmoil - he cited Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as an influence. Beset by overconsumption, corruption and inefficiency, “it had been falling for centuries before one man really became aware of that fall. That man was Hari Seldon, the man who represented the one spark of creative effort left among the gathering decay. He developed and brought to its highest pitch the science of psycho-history.”

Seldon is a scientist and prophet who predicts the Empire’s fall. He sets up his Foundation in a remote corner of the galaxy, hoping to build a new civilisation from the ruins of the old. The Empire attacks the Foundation with all its military arsenal and tries to crush it. Seldon uses a religion (based on scientific illusionism) to further his aims. These are tracked by the novel and its sequels across a vast tract of time. For the most part, his predictions come true.

Seldon, like Bin Laden, transmits videotaped messages for his followers, recorded in advance. There is also some similarity in geopolitical strategy. Seldon’s vision seems oddly like the way Bin Laden has conceived his campaign. “Psycho-history” is the statistical treatment of the actions of large populations across epochal periods - the science of mobs as Asimov calls it.

Would that all this horror were only sci-fi… You can read more of this article here:War of the Worlds

For Chuck Palahniuk’s fans (like my husband), this deliciously taunting sentence:

There are worse things you can do to the people you love than kill them.

Palahniuk’s new book, Lullaby, is coming out, and Heather Havrilesky reviews for the Washington Post:

Palahniuk’s first novel, Fight Club, was an exercise in nihilistic acting-out, littered with the sort of apocalyptic quips and uber-clever dialogue that play well on the big screen. Lullaby follows in the same tradition, with zingers that range from insightful to downright nonsensical.

This bit of news is old by now, but I happened to hear the Moonlight Sonata this morning on the radio, so I decided to blog about it. Daniel Barenboim, the famous conductor, has been conducting seminars every year in the Middle-East, which he co-sponsors with Edward Said, himself a gifted pianist. This week in Ramallah, Barenboim defied the ban on travelling to the territories in order to play for Palestinian music students.

The old Steinway grand had seen better days, but when Daniel Barenboim drew the first nostalgic notes of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata from it today, 200 neatly uniformed Palestinian students froze in delight.
Music, and especially music of this caliber from a live Israeli master, is not something that has often graced young lives more wrapped up in the daily misery of curfews, roadblocks, dangers and hatreds.

‘Moonlight’ and Mendelssohn in the West Bank

I went to the UCLA Writers’ Fair this morning. Even though some of the lectures included the standard advice you get in classes or read in books about writing, it was still fun. I particularly liked Rob Roberge’s comments and his good sense of humor.

Okay, so I have finally got around to moving to MT. Please excuse the mess while I rebuild everything and add new stuff.