Laila Lalami

Prime Minister Fouad Saniora’s pleas to Secretary Rice to stop Israel’s bombing of Lebanon:

Is the value of human rights in Lebanon less than that of citizens elsewhere?” he asked. “Are we children of a lesser god? Is an Israeli teardrop worth more than a drop of Lebanese blood?”

Compare with Shylock’s speech, in The Merchant of Venice:

He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and what’s his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villany you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.

Unfortunately, no one’s paying attention to that last line.

Why is it that the government of Egypt allows demos against stupid Danish cartoons but bans demos against the horrendous war on Lebanon? And then when people finally manage to get a demo, they are harassed by thugs working for the Egyptian police. Your tax dollars at work, people. (At the tune of about $2 Billion a year.)

(via.)

My last giveaway for today is Ronit Chacham’s Breaking Ranks: Refusing to Serve in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, a collection of interviews with members of the Israeli Defense Force about why they refused to serve in the Occupied Territories. These refuseniks’ account is more topical today than ever, when Israel is bombing Lebanon and Gaza, and when more than 600 civilians have already paid the price of this folly.

As usual, the first reader to email me with a request gets the book. Please use the subject line: “Chacham.” Please include your mailing address. Previous winners excluded.

Update: The winner is Donna S., from San Antonio, Texas.

I have just been told that there will be a rally in Portland for peace in the Middle East. Here are the details:

Rally for Peace
Sunday, July 30th
1 pm
Pioneer Courthouse Square
Portland

Be there!

I’m doing another giveaway today: Jami Attenberg’s Instant Love, which the author kindly signed when she came through Portland last month. Told through the alternating points of view of several women, the novel focuses on the difficulty of making connections and forming relationships. Some of you may already know Attenberg through her blog, whatever-whenever.net, or through her many published writings, including, most recently, this great piece for Nextbook.

So. The first reader to email me with a request gets the book. Please use the subject line: “Attenberg.” Please include your mailing address. Previous winners excluded.

Update: The winner is Shabana S. from New York, New York. There will be another book given away later today. Good luck.

This week, I am doing several giveaways, scattered throughout the day. The first is a copy of Faïza Guène’s Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow, a debut novel by a young French-Algerian author. It’s a coming-of-age story set in one of Paris’s infamous cités, and it has been praised by Sandra Cisneros (“a tale for anyone who has ever lived outside looking in”), and, uh, me (“moving and irreverent”). It’s also received quite a bit of attention, from the NYT to the SF Chronicle to Salon.

You know the drill: The first reader to email me with a request gets the book. Please use the subject line: “Kiffe Kiffe.” Please include your mailing address. Previous winners excluded.

Update: The winner is Beau G. from Chicago, Illinois. There will be another book given away later this morning. Good luck.

This has been linked to on several blogs already: John Updike reviews Ngugi wa Thiong’o's much-anticipated novel Wizard of the Crow. I haven’t yet read the book (it just arrived in the mail yesterday) and it may well be that it’s not any good, but I did want to excerpt from Updike’s usual nuggets of wisdom:

The novel’s frequent recourse to magic realism, in the course of what its own text admits may seem “too incredible a narrative of magic and greed,” would seem appropriate to a culture so susceptible to the claims of the supernatural.

Isn’t he priceless?

On the Israeli side: 51 people have been killed, including 28 civilians and 23 IDF soldiers. Residents of northern towns in Israel are confined to bomb shelters, and about half have evacuated.

On the Palestinian side: 140 people have been killed, including about 70 civilians and 70 fighters from Hamas or Jihad. Crossings into Gaza remain shut, and “food shortages are chronic.”

On the Lebanese side: 423 people have been killed including: 376 civilians, 20 Lebanese soldiers, and 27 Hizbullah members. About a third of the civilians were young children. More than 750,000 Lebanese have been displaced (one out of every 5 citizens). An estimated 50,000 homes have been destroyed, not counting the roads, bridges, airport, seaports and other civilian infrastructure.

All this in addition to four unarmed UN peacekeepers (from China, Austria, Finland and Canada), killed by an Israeli “precision-guided aerial bomb.”

Marc Acito (How I Paid For College) explains the virtues of Portland Bohemianism, or PoBo, for short:

Unlike traditional bohemians, PoBos don’t necessarily live in self-induced poverty. Instead, PoBos opt for simplicity. Even downsizing empty-nesters paying too much in the Pearl are bohemian in their rejection of the sprawling, fuel-inefficient suburbanism of places such as Phoenix, a city that expands 1.2 acres an hour.

In the city that works, our artists and intellectuals do just that, free from the cutthroat competition of New York, the mendacious maneuvering of Los Angeles or the smug self-congratulation of San Francisco. We’re a humble bunch, content to create in our affordable houses and ride our bikes to the farmers market in our sensible footwear.

Read it all here.

Yesterday I ran a short piece by a Jewish friend of mine about the war in Israel, the Lebanon, and Gaza, and invited people to chime in with their opinions as well. Book critic John Freeman wrote in with this short note about the place of the United Nations, in all this madness:

The U.N. has taken a bit of a beating in books recently, from Eric Shawn’s The U.N. Exposed, to Paul Kennedy’s recent book, The Parliament of Man, which maintains the thinnest shred of optimism about the organization’s future.

Somehow all these criticisms seem pointless during war time, when it would seem the U.N. has become a target. A day after Jan Egeland, the U.N.’s emergency relief coordinator, suggested the offensive in Lebanon was in clear violation of international law, Israelis fired on a U.N. observer post 21 times, ultimately killing four unarmed peacekeepers. When their colleagues came to dig out their bodies — they were fired on, too.

What’s appalling is the U.N. made repeated calls to the Israeli Defense Force to protest the shelling. The IDF’s impunity surely has something to do with how often the U.S. vetoes resolutions critical of Israel on the Security Council. (Including one just two weeks ago). Not to mention the fact that Israel has ignored countless U.N. resolutions against its behavior.

So the bullying — is that even the word when people are dead? — continues. And what hasn’t been mentioned in U.S. papers is that this happened before — and on a much larger scale. In 1996, Israel shelled U.N. headquarters in Beirut, killing 102 civilians who had taken refuge there. NBCC finalist Robert Fisk was there and reported it, and his dispatch is still available online and is notable for how easily it could describe what’s happening today.

I don’t have much to add to this, except to say that the top three violators of U.N. security council resolutions are, in order: Israel (30 resolutions on Palestine and the Occupied Territories), Turkey (20 resolutions on Cyprus), and Morocco (15 resolutions on Western Sahara). And all three are allies of the U.S. and in no danger of being asked to abide by these resolutions. Which is why it’s so comical to hear Condi Rice asking, nay, demanding, that the Lebanese apply resolution 1559.