The L.A. Times has a profile of UCLA professor Jonathan Friedlander, who is using his collection of ‘orientalist paraphernalia’ for an exhibit at the Powell Library. The items were collected over the years, bought at antique shops or even at the local Sav-On.
Several hundred items will be on view until Dec. 16. The complete collection, by contrast, comprises more than 1,500 pieces: 1930s comics and pulp fiction such as “Spicy Adventures” and “Desert Madness”; ads for Ben Hur Flour; bottles of Pyramid Beer; video games such as “The Prince of Persia”; sheet music for songs including “The Sheik of Araby” and “Persian Moon.” Exotic topless women undulate on the covers of Arabic music CDs. Fierce warriors scowl from the covers of DVDs. (Most of the collection is available for view on a database at the exhibition, which includes listening stations and film clips.)
Despite his attraction to these artifacts, Friedlander maintains there’s something pernicious at work in them. The images, which seem increasingly cartoonish the more you look, portray the Middle East as an irrational, oversexed, violent land given to despotism and mysticism. The women tend to move in harems and wear very little; the men seem not to go very far without their scimitars.
“It becomes ahistorical anything goes,” Friedlander says of the mishmash of myth, reality and disparate historical periods portrayed. “And you erase people’s cultures this way: It all becomes ‘the East,’ ‘the Orient.’ “
What’s even more twisted is how Camel cigarettes are exported and sold to the Arab world. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that one can sell the Orientalist mystique even to the Arabs. How’s that for a research topic?
The condition of migrants who try to cross from Morocco to Spain continues to worsen. Just this week, a seventeen year old boy from Cameroon, who had traveled from his native country all the way to Morocco in order to penetrate Europe, was found dead.
Spain and Morocco’s security forces are investigating the death of a Cameroonian boy whose body was found a short distance from the border fence where a group of 300 would-be immigrants battled police on Sunday night in an attempt to force their way into Melilla.
The body of the youth, identified as 17-year-old Joe Ypo, was found shortly after 7pm on Monday on the Moroccan side of the border. In the same area 17 hours earlier the group of mostly sub-Saharan migrants had used makeshift ladders in an attempt to scale the barbed-wire fence that rings the Spanish North African enclave. They were fought back by 80 Spanish Civil Guard officers armed with riot gear as well as Moroccan border guards, resulting in injuries to 10 officers and three immigrants. Eighty-seven of the assailants were arrested by Moroccan police.
People are using ladders to climb over land borders and inflatable boats to cross water ones. What limits does desperation have to reach before something is done for them?
An editorial in the Los Angeles Times a couple of weeks ago alerted me to the troubles facing Tel Quel magazine, its editor-in-chief, Ahmed R. Benchemsi, and its news director, Karim Boukhari. The Times‘ editorial is no longer available online, unfortunately, but it detailed a bizarre turn of events that could have only taken place in Al-Maghrib Al-Habib.
Let me get to the facts. In one of its summer issues, the magazine ran a blind item by Karim Boukhari poking fun at an unnamed Member of Parliament, of an unnamed political party, saying that she had gotten into a verbal fight with a colleague and sneered that the latter “ate escargots.” (I can’t help but mention, en passant, that only in Morocco is being accused of eating escargots an insult.)
A week later, Karim Boukhari posted another blind item about the same person, this time giving her the pseudonym of ‘Asmaa’ and saying that she used to earn a living as a ‘cheikha’ (which translates, roughly, as a ‘bar dancer’.) He repeated the escargots anecdote, said that there was nothing wrong with having worked as a ‘cheikha,’ and ended the item with “Asmaa, on t’aime!” (You don’t need me to translate that part, do you?)
Note that the MP was never named or described in ways that could have identified her. So the story should have ended there. Except it didn’t. In late July, charges of libel were brought against the magazine, its editor in chief, and its news director, by Member of Parliament Hlima Assali. The two journalists were asked to appear in court on August 8 (traditionally a period of rest for the courts). The editor-in-chief sent his lawyer to ask for a postponement, since he was planning a visit to the U.S. at that time and through the end of the month.
The magistrate did grant a postponement. But only for a week. Then, on August 15, in the absence of the editor-in-chief, the news director, and their lawyers, the judge closed the proceedings and found for the plaintiff, slapping the magazine with punitive damages of 1 million dirhams, plus a fine of 25.000 dirhams and a suspended jail sentence of two months for each of the journalists.
Some of you may not be familiar with Tel Quel, so let me put this in clear terms: Tel Quel is the best thing that’s happened to the Moroccan press in the last five years. It has broken many unspoken rules of self-censorship with its coverage of, among other things, the king’s salary, the horrific border crossings of migrants, the incursions of Islamists on all aspects of the culture, the sex lives of Moroccans, the independence demonstrations in the Sahara, and so on. The style is occasionally sensationalistic, but, alone among other publications, the magazine has had the courage to demand that the women who were jailed after the Agadir sex scandal should be freed.
All this is a long way of saying that if you care for freedom of the press, if you think that people should have the right to be present at their own trial, if you think that a blind item can’t serve as the basis of a libel suit, if you think that such a suit shouldn’t end in a fine of $100,000 in a country where the average salary is less than $300, then please support Tel Quel by signing the online petition.