Laila Lalami

It has been disappointing to see so many of our leading artists and writers line up in defense of Roman Polanski. Bernard-Henri Levy, the French philosopher who once said that the Muslim veil was “an invitation to rape,” has now been confronted with an actual case of rape, but appears to think there should be an exception for genius filmmakers. Levy has drafted a petition in defense of Polanski. It is true that Levy has fought against rape—but in regions like Darfur and Bosnia. Now that the perpetrator is in his own backyard, he talks of his outrage as seeing Polanski “apprehended like a common terrorist.”

The October 8 issue of the New York Review of Books includes this short piece by Gary Wills, a damning account of how little Barack Obama has done to restore the system of checks and balances:

George W. Bush left the White House unpopular and disgraced. His successor promised change, and it was clear where change was needed. Illegal acts should cease—torture and indefinite detention, denial of habeas corpus and legal representation, unilateral canceling of treaties, defiance of Congress and the Constitution, nullification of laws by signing statements. Powers attributed to the president by the theory of the unitary executive should not be exercised. Judges who are willing to give the president any power he asks for should not be confirmed.

But the momentum of accumulating powers in the executive is not easily reversed, checked, or even slowed. It was not created by the Bush administration. The whole history of America since World War II caused an inertial transfer of power toward the executive branch. The monopoly on use of nuclear weaponry, the cult of the commander in chief, the worldwide network of military bases to maintain nuclear alert and supremacy, the secret intelligence agencies, the entire national security state, the classification and clearance systems, the expansion of state secrets, the withholding of evidence and information, the permanent emergency that has melded World War II with the cold war and the cold war with the “war on terror”—all these make a vast and intricate structure that may not yield to effort at dismantling it. Sixty-eight straight years of war emergency powers (1941–2009) have made the abnormal normal, and constitutional diminishment the settled order.

The truth of this was borne out in the early days of Barack Obama’s presidency. At his confirmation hearing to be head of the CIA, Leon Panetta said that “extraordinary rendition”—the practice of sending prisoners to foreign countries—was a tool he meant to retain. Obama’s nominee for solicitor general, Elena Kagan, told Congress that she agreed with John Yoo’s claim that a terrorist captured anywhere should be subject to “battlefield law.” On the first opportunity to abort trial proceedings by invoking “state secrets”—the policy based on the faulty Reynolds case—Obama’s attorney gen- eral, Eric Holder, did so. Obama refused to release photographs of “enhanced interrogation.” The CIA had earlier (illegally) destroyed ninety-two videotapes of such interrogations—and Obama refused to release documents describing the tapes.

You can read it all here.

At one of those dinners that can happen only in Los Angeles, I found myself seated at a table with an American community organizer, an Australian banker, an Israeli model/actress, an Iraqi human rights activist, a French businessman, and an Indian TV producer. Against all better judgment, the topic of Israel/Palestine was brought up. The banker turned to me and said, “I know you and [the Iraqi human rights activist] would disagree with me, but I support AIPAC. So does [the Israeli actress]. I think they’re doing a great job.”

The Iraqi activist and I exchanged a glance, wondering which one of us would open that particular can of worms. I cleared my throat. “Have you heard of J Street?” I began. “It’s a …”

The banker interrupted me. “Yeah, I’ve heard of those guys. They’re a bunch of well-meaning American Jews who don’t know what it’s like on the ground.”

As I said, this gentleman was neither an Israeli nor a Palestinian, so I imagine that whatever he knew about “what it was like on the ground” must have been at second hand. Still, the whole conversation made me realize how entrenched AIPAC was, and how much work an upstart like J Street has to do.

This weekend, the New York Times Magazine ran a rather long article by James Traub about J-Street. The lobbying group’s positions are summarized about halfway through the piece:

According to its “statement of principles,” [J Street] favors “creation of a viable Palestinian state as part of a negotiated two-state solution, based on the 1967 borders with agreed reciprocal land swaps” — the formula envisioned by the Clinton administration in its 2000 negotiations with Yasir Arafat and Ehud Barak. Ben-Ami says he also favors Jerusalem as the shared capital of the two states. On the question of talks with Hamas, classed as a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union, J Street takes the cautious view that while we should not speak directly with officials, we should engage through intermediaries with the goal of finding interlocutors willing to live in peace with Israel.

This isn’t exactly earth-shattering. In fact, from where I stand, this doesn’t go nearly far enough. So to think that this group (which, let’s remember, is probably closer to representing the views of American citizens than those of a foreign nation) is having such a hard time being heard is really kind of depressing. In the end, as with so much else, it all has to do with passion:

J Street specializes in mounting campaigns that may appeal to the 92 percent [of American Jews] who care about other causes more than they do about Israel. Last September, the organization asked supporters to sign a petition demanding that sponsors revoke an invitation to Sarah Palin to speak at an otherwise nonpartisan rally on Iran. J Street says that more than 25,000 people signed it in 24 hours. [...]

This in turn raises a question about J Street’s prospects. As a lobbying group, would you rather represent the passionate few or the dispassionate many? The National Rifle Association knows the answer to that question. One administration official involved with the Middle East points out that Aipac cultivates single-issue partisans. Wielding the other 92 percent into a potent political force, he notes, will be “a major, long-term and uphill task.” He adds, “I’m not sure it can be done.”

You can read the entire article here.

Last night, when President Obama was delivering his speech on health care reform to Congress, I thought that there was something wrong with my ears. (Something that, as my friend A. pointed out, my health care provider would not be pleased about; they’re liable to re-classify it as a pre-existing condition.) I thought perhaps I had imagined the guy who heckled the President from the floor. But no, I hadn’t. There really is a Congressman Joe Wilson, he’s a Republican from South Carolina, and he really did scream “You lie!” while the President was describing his plan. Why is it so impossible to have an adult, reasonable conversation about health care reform in this country?

Gary Younge lays out a few possible reasons in a short piece that appeared in The Nation this morning. Here is how it begins:

Spare a thought, and maybe even a dime, for Kenneth Gladney. In August he and other members of the right-wing St. Louis Tea Party arrived at a town-hall meeting organized by Missouri Democrat Russ Carnahan to lobby against universal healthcare. In the spirit of this fraught summer, a fight broke out, ending in six arrests.

Who threw the first punch depends on whom you ask. But who got the worst of it was fairly clear. Gladney was taken to the emergency room with injuries to his knee, back, elbow, shoulder and face and ended up in a wheelchair. His troubles were just beginning. Recently laid off, this particular anti-health reform protester, it turned out, had no health insurance. Last heard, he was still accepting donations for his medical expenses.

It’s not difficult to ridicule the American right. Its peculiar blend of paranoia, mania, fantasy and misanthropy has been given full rein these past few months. Those who demanded in July to see Obama’s birth certificate (which does exist) ended August invoking the British healthcare system’s “death panels” (which do not). That most of their claims were verifiably false was of little consequence–to them at least. At one point they insisted that if scientist Stephen Hawking were British and subject to the National Health Service, he would be dead, even though Hawking is British, alive and grateful to the NHS for his care.

You can read the rest here. As for Obama’s plan, I really urge you to watch what Dennis Kucinich has to say about it. We need the public option. Now.

On this day forty years ago, a twenty-seven year old colonel named Muammar al-Gaddafi overthrew King Idris of Libya in a bloodless coup. It seems to me that coverage of Gaddafi is broadly limited to two topics: his social antics (e.g. the tent he set up in the garden of the Hotel Marigny, his all-female bodyguard corps, his ridiculous outfits, and so on) and the Lockerbie bombing. One rarely hears about all the political prisoners who have been rotting in his jails for several decades.

A couple of years ago, the novelist Hisham Matar wrote a very moving piece about his father, Jaballa Matar, who was allegedly kidnapped by Egyptian security forces in March 1990 and then rendered to Libya. He has not been seen in nineteen years, and has not been heard from in ten.

How does one remain free from becoming a symbol or a victim? How do we remain whole and free from hate, yet truthful to our memory?

Life attempts to teach us about loss: that one can still find peace in the finality of death. And yet, my loss gives no peace. My father is not incarcerated, yet he is not free; he is not dead, yet he is not alive either. My loss is self-renewing, insistent and incomplete.

I was always told to expect to lose my father. Many Libyan political dissidents have been assassinated or kidnapped. But now I know that I had no comprehension of the danger he was in. If I had, I would have held on to him with all I could, or tried harder to persuade him not to engage in political dissent, perhaps. Regret is the cruellest companion for those of us who are left behind.

I did try to persuade him to leave his political work, because I loved my father more than I loved my country; or, to put it another way, I had learned by then to live without my country, but not without my father.

When Father was taken, the world did feel empty. For the first couple of years, our ship was lost, then we recovered our bearings and learnt that the speed by which one resumes living is no indication of the depth of one’s grief.

You can read the full essay here. More recently, the Guardian asked Matar about the release of the terminally-ill Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. “I think of [my father] listening to the celebrations of the prison guards at the news of al-Megrahi’s return,” he wrote. “The prisoners might have been given presents to mark the occasion. Then I think of al-Megrahi’s children welcoming him home.”

What a strange week this has been. The Mexican navy seized more than a ton of cocaine that had been stuffed inside frozen sharks, the Venezuelan government banned Coke Zero because of unspecified health concerns, and American neo-conservatives suddenly developed a pious concern for the Iranian people. Bill Kristol, for instance, wrote passionately in the Washington Post about “the brave Iranians demonstrating for freedom and democracy” and urged President Obama to “speak for liberty. Speak for America.” In the Weekly Standard, Michael Goldfarb expressed the fervent hope that the administration would “stand up and support the Iranian kids who are pleading for help as they’re beaten in the streets.” In the National Review, Jonah Goldberg begged the president to “look to the real Iranian street at the moment of its greatest need, when its heart may be open to loving America.”

But it wasn’t that long ago that these same people wanted to bomb the country. When he was on the campaign trail in 2008, John McCain responded to a South Carolina voter’s question about Iran by singing “Bomb, bomb, bomb / bomb, bomb Iran.” The neo-cons have consistently argued that Iran was a hostile theocracy ruled by a genocidal madman, and that, were it to acquire nuclear weapons, it would undoubtedly use them against Israel. Using diplomacy with Iran, they said, was utterly futile. A small contingent on the left, meanwhile, pointed out a rather inconvenient fact: it was George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 that emboldened Iran and turned it into a regional power. Using force would only further destabilize an already volatile part of the world. And in any case, given the costly wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, the U.S. could ill afford to open yet another front. Engagement with Iran, they said, was necessary.

Going into the presidential elections, the neo-cons didn’t expect much because the candidates in Iran have to be vetted by the twelve-member Council of Guardians, half of whom are appointed by Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, and half elected by the Majlis. This essentially means that no true reformist would ever be allowed to run. A few liberals, however, were hoping that Mir-Hossein Mousavi, a former Prime Minister who now chairs the Iranian Academy of Arts, would defeat the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Mousavi is not a reformist (he served under Ayatollah Khomeini, for God’s sake), but he seems to many people to be more of a pragmatist, someone who would be more open to dialogue.

What happened on June 12 took both camps by surprise. The state-run news agency called the election for Ahmadinejad just two hours after polls closed, even though there were nearly 40 million ballots cast. Despite his lackluster performance as president, Ahmadinejad had seven million more votes in 2009 than in 2005. Furthermore, he won in Tehran (where he is reportedly unpopular) as well as in places like Khameneh (Mousavi’s hometown in East Azerbaijan) or Aligoodarz (Mehdi Karroubi’s hometown in Lorestan). Soon after, images of demonstrators brutally repressed by riot police began to filter in from the country. Free and fair elections do not usually result in popular uprisings of the magnitude we saw on our computer and television screens. It was clear that the elections were a fraud.

While the neo-cons’ calls for a muscular reaction are hardly surprising, several people from across the political spectrum seem to have joined them in demanding a louder response from the White House. Andrew Sullivan posted a steady stream of eyewitness accounts, videos, and tweets (much of which unconfirmed) over the weekend following the election. He switched the color of his blog banner to green, in solidarity with Mousavi supporters. He urged Western governments not to recognize Ahmadinejad as the victor in this election. In the Nation, John Nichols found Obama’s response to be “tepid” and “disappointing” and wished that the president would take a clue from Nicolas Sarkozy, who boldly declared that the events in Iran are “a tragedy.” (By the way, one little detail that seems to have escaped the attention of those who loved Sarkozy’s comment: he was speaking from Libreville, where he was attending the funeral of his good friend Omar Bongo, the dictator who has ruled Gabon with an iron fist for 41 years.) In the New York Times, Roger Cohen wrote that, although he had in the past argued for engagement with Iran, he felt that “in the name of the millions defrauded, President Obama’s outreach must now await a decent interval. ”

This echo chamber worries me, because it seems to me it could easily pave the way for further escalation and eventual military action. Which is why Obama’s cautious stance so far on Iran is the right move. At the moment, all we know for certain is that the will of Iranian voters has been obstructed and that they are letting their voices heard. The breathtaking protests we are seeing may be pro-Mousavi, but they are also just as likely to be anti-regime (in fact, I rather suspect that Mousavi is now thrust into a role he did not foresee). I hope that the will of the people prevails.

One thing is clear, however. Polls have shown that Iranians feel that nuclear weapons are a proper deterrent in a neighborhood that already includes nuclear-armed powers (Pakistan, Israel) and multiple American bases (Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Turkey.) Regardless of who will lead Iran for the next four years, the country’s nuclear ambitions will not go away.

Despite the unusually gloomy weather here in Santa Monica, I feel like summer is already here. I’m done with my book tour, I met two pressing deadlines, and my last class of the quarter at UC Riverside was yesterday. So I’ve had some time to catch up on the news and especially on the coverage of Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo, most of which seemed to me to be encomiums. (And I say this as someone who likes Obama. But liking Obama and agreeing with him on Middle East policy are two different things.)

It simply isn’t true, as I’ve heard some commentators say, that this was the first time that a sitting U.S. president quoted from the Qur’an, invoked Palestine and the plight of the Palestinians, or promised to stop Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories. The main difference, it seems to me, was one of style, not substance. Obama brings his considerable charisma and his compelling life story to this speech. He was exceedingly careful in his choice of words and avoided any direct confrontation. Another advantage for him is the fact that people everywhere, both here in the United States and in the Middle East, are so relieved not to have to listen to the bellicose and idiotic words of George W. Bush anymore. This is why so many people paid so much attention to this speech.

One important test of this new approach, to my mind, is the settlements. Obama has already told Netanyahu that he wants a complete stop to Israeli settlements and that he won’t accept “natural growth” exceptions. If he can do that, then this speech will be remembered as a turning point; if he can’t, then it will go the way of all the speeches by the previous five administrations: nowhere.

The Telegraph reports that Major General Antonio Taguba, who authored the infamous report that exposed the abuse in Abu Ghraib and other prisons in 2004, has now revealed that there are photos of U.S. soldiers allegedly raping Iraqi prisoners. These photos were part of the initial set that became widely known a few years ago, but have never been released.

“The mere description of these pictures is horrendous enough, take my word for it,” [Taguba said.]

In April, Mr Obama’s administration said the photographs would be released and it would be “pointless to appeal” against a court judgment in favour of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

But after lobbying from senior military figures, Mr Obama changed his mind saying they could put the safety of troops at risk.

Earlier this month, he said: “The most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to inflame anti-American public opinion and to put our troops in greater danger.”

I think these photographs will come out eventually, whether with the permission of the Obama administration or without it. (Remember: the Taguba report and the abuse it documented became widely known thanks to the reporting of Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker and the people at Sixty Minutes.) This set of photographs will probably come to light, too. Yes, public sentiment will be inflamed. And it should be. But the truth always comes out in the end. And then people will direct some of their anger at Obama, the man who tried to stop the release of the photographs.

(via)

Who censors the internet? It turns out it’s not just the usual suspects.

Despite the fact that I voted for Barack Obama, I’ve refrained from commenting about him since his election.  I didn’t really want to speculate about what he could or could not do, what he might or might not do, and especially what he should or should not do.  I figured that January 20th would come soon enough and I would have plenty of empirical data upon which to base any observations.

I’m glad that day has come.

Eight years ago, I voted for Ralph Nader because I thought there really wasn’t much of a difference between Democrats and Republicans on the major issues.  But after the debacle in Florida, the Supreme Court decision, and the abysmal presidency that followed, I learned a simple lesson: Not all politicians are equal.  There are some who are so talentless, so impervious to common sense, so lacking in simple compassion that they make a mockery of the office. I suppose I’m too cynical now to expect vast differences in government policy but I am still fired up about this particular change, about Barack Obama, and about the departure of George W. Bush.

Cartoon: Mike Lukovich