11 Apr 2012 | Uncategorized
By being declared persona non grata by Israel, German author Günter Grass joins a select group of other intellectuals also unwelcome in the Jewish state.
There’s Noam Chomsky, an iconic left-wing figure and world expert on linguistics and philosophy, who was refused entry by Israeli immigration officials in May 2010. Preceding him was controversial US academic Norman Finkelstein, denied entry at Ben Gurion airport in May 2008. (Both are Jewish, meaning they have the legal right, rarely refused, to apply for Israeli citizenship, making the gesture yet more ludicrous).
No reasonable person would deny Israel’s right to monitor and defend its own borders and refuse entry or deport those deemed a security risk or “not conducive to the public good”.
You could perhaps make this case when it comes to the many journalists and activists (as well as the odd tourist) deported or denied entry over the years.
Hard to see, though, the imminent risk to security or public order posed by hoary old writers or figures such as Ivan Prado, Spain’s top clown, deported in May 2010 when he tried to enter the country en route to launching a clown festival in Ramallah.
And these figures were turned back in the actual act of trying to enter Israel. Grass, who wrote what consensus has deemed a rather poor poem about the danger Israel posed to Iran, had not expressed any intention to visit Israel in the near future. But why let that get in the way of a pointless but populist gesture.
Some have argued that the fact the 84-year-old Nobel laureate served in the Nazi Waffen SS, something he only revealed in 2006, makes his harsh criticism of Israel’s nuclear policy in What Must be Said distasteful in the extreme, if not entirely illegitimate.
Indeed, there’s much that can be viewed as disagreeable about this poem, not least the rather embarrassing way Grass portrays himself as a revolutionary underdog who is bravely speaking out only now in the face of great oppression and at personal risk to himself.
That’s just not true, unless the outpouring of hyperbole by Israeli officials, each trying to outdo the other in ramping up their level of outrage, puts him in imminent danger.
Israel’s foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman said it was an expression of the “cynicism” of some Western intellectuals, “who for their self-promotion and desire to sell a few more books are willing to sacrifice the Jewish people for the second time on the altar of deranged anti-Semites.”
“What must be said is that it belongs to European tradition to accuse the Jews of ritual murder before the Passover celebration,” raged Emmanuel Nahshon, the deputy chief of mission at the Israeli Embassy in Berlin.
“Even before the traces of the swastika on his clothes were gone, Grass joined the crusade against the State of Israel,” the Hebrew Writers Association said in a public statement this week; now other Israeli figures want the Nobel Prize committee to withdraw their award to Grass.
And then came the ban by Israeli interior minister Eli Yishai — a man unlikely to have been captivated by Grass’s seminal The Tin Drum but well aware of what gestures would play well with his right-wing constituency.
This has had the neat and self-defeating effect of turning the issue from one about outrage over a distasteful, self-pitying poem (only lauded as a work of lyrical genius by Iran’s deputy culture minister) into one of freedom of speech.
Intellectuals and journalists have rushed to support not Grass’s words, but his right to say them. Salman Rushdie, who knows a thing or two about censorship, got it right when he tweeted:
It has not gone unnoticed that denying entry permits to people whose views it doesn’t like puts the Israeli state on a par with truly unsavoury states. Israeli paper Ha’aretz wrote in an editorial this week that Yishai’s decision not to let Grass enter Israel because of this poem was “characteristic of dark regimes like those in Iran or North Korea”.
The ultimate effect of all this pointless posturing has once again brought into focus Israel’s growing confusion over democracy, which goes far beyond the simple right to vote.
Israel’s stringent border controls exist, surely, to protect its citizens from physical danger and militant attack — not from ideas it disagrees with.
Daniella Peled is an editor at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. A former foreign editor of the Jewish Chronicle, she writes widely on Israel and Palestine and is a regular contributor to Ha’aretz
4 Apr 2012 | Index Index, minipost
A TV presenter has been killed by a car bomb in Iraq. Kamiran Salaheddin was killed at around 9pm on Monday (2 April) night, after a bomb placed under his car exploded. Salaheddin presented Al-Iraq w-al Hadath (Iraq and Events), a news and current affairs programme on Salahaddin TV, where he had been employed since 2005. The journalist was also the head of the local journalists’ union in Tikrit. Salaheddin is the first journalist to be killed in Iraq this year.
30 Mar 2012 | Middle East and North Africa
“Our theatre is the street,” said Nasreddine Ben Maâti, President of Eich el-Fan (“live the art” in English), a young association dedicated to street art. “Tunisian citizens are boycotting theaters and cinemas so we decided to go for the people instead of them coming to us,” he added.
Their goal is to tour Tunisia and perform in the streets of the interior and marginalised regions, where the wave of protests that toppled the 23 year rule of President Zeine el-Abidin Ben Ali began.
On 22 March, the association organized an artistic event named Occupy Bourguib Art Street on the capital’s main avenue (Habib Bourguiba Avenue). It was not long before police intervened to disperse the young artists playing music, dancing and drawing graffiti. “Two police officers came toward us and asked us to leave, they were saying what we are doing was prohibited, and told us to go home”, Nasreddine told Index. “They only know two expressions: it is prohibited, and go home”, he added.
The artists refused to leave, and police used to tear gas to disperse them. A photographer who was filming police physically abusing an artist drawing graffiti on the floor was arrested and held for one hour. In the police station, he was beaten by four police officers, according to the association.
On the same day, Wissem Khemiri, a graffiti artist and member of the association Live the Art was taken to a police station when a general in the army spotted him drawing graffiti on the wall of a Tunis art school. The content of the graffiti seems to have irritated this general and opened some old wounds: Khemiri’s drawing was dedicated to Abd el-Aziz Skik, an army general who is believed to have been murdered following an order from former President Ben Ali. Khemiri was suggesting that some figures in the army collaborated with the former regime to kill Skik — on the graffiti, he wrote “the betrayed general”. He was freed the same day of his arrest, but the army general who arrested him accused him of “assaulting the dignity of the national army”.
The struggle of artists who choose to perform in the streets did not end there. On 25 March the Tunisian Association for Art Graduates, in collaboration with Live the Art and many more associations organised a cultural manifestation named “the People Want Theatre”, to celebrate World Theatre Day.
Tunisian artists and actors who gathered outside the capital’s main theater to take part in the event were assaulted. This time, however, the assaulters were right wing extremists, and the events occurred under the eyes of police.
“Police officers were watching, they only intervened four hours later,” said Lobna Noomene, a singer who witnessed the incident .
A Salafi extremist hit her on her head while she was rushing to get inside the theatre. “It is not the physical assault that hurts, but what really hurts is how someone has the courage to unfairly assault someone else ,” she told Index.
Artists in Tunisia have fears about the rise of ultra-conservative forces that seek to ban art works that they deem insulting to the values of Islam. On 26 June 2011, ultra-conservative protesters attacked a movie theatre that was airing Neither God nor Master, a film by Tunisian director Nadia el-Fani. The film’s name was later on changed to Secularism by God’s Willing. Meanwhile, the CEO of Nessma TV is currently on trial over the airing of the French-Iranian film Persepolis.
For Noomene, the ministries of interior and culture are to blame too. She explains:
For Salafists, everything is haram [forbidden]. But, the Interior Ministry should take responsibility for what happened, it should not have allowed for two events that are ideologically antagonist to take place in the same location on the same time. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Culture is out of touch with the artist, it does not have a real project to ensure the safety of artists, and it did not take a real position for what happened. But we will not put an end to our shows, and our manifestations. We will not stop living.
27 Mar 2012 | Africa, Malawi
President Bingu wa Mutharika in Malawai is facing growing criticism for authoritarianism, from both internal and external critics. He has been accused of trampling on democratic freedoms, human rights abuses and presiding over the collapse of Malawi’s economy by the donor community. On 15 March 2012 the Public Affairs Committee (PAC), a Malawian religious rights group, called for the resignation of the president, or for a referendum for the president. Unless the president complies within 90 days he will face ‘civil disobedience’ charges.
Mutharika, a former World Bank economist, is seen as becoming increasingly autocratic and his disagreements with the West over politics and economic policy have left the country without critical external aid from donors and the International Monetary Fund. Several major donors, including the UK, cut their aid in 2011 over concerns about the infringement of democratic freedoms, economic management and governance. Nearly three-quarters of Malawi’s population of 15.4 million people live on less than $1 (60 pence) a day. Mutharika has accused Western donors of funding an opposition protest movement that is challenging his regime.
This recent criticism comes from the powerful Church lobby, The Public Affairs Committee. The PAC’s call is the latest in a series of ultimatums for Mutharika to step down. The leaders of Malawi’s main churches, which have considerable standing and influence in the country, dominate the 20-year-old PAC. The PAC was instrumental in forcing the Malawi Congress Party to move Malawi from a one-party dictatorship to plural politics in the 1990s.
Mutharika’s regime has in the past demonstrated eagerness to use country’s security forces to thwart popular demonstrations and disrupt opposition rallies. Newspapers are being targeted and articles deemed “contrary to public interest” are being censored by Mr Mutharika’s government. Famously in May last year, when he sacked government minister Joyce Banda, Mutharika pronounced: “When God noted that Lucifer was being big-headed, he did not hesitate to evict him from the heavenly government. I am not the first to fire someone, it started in heaven. So before you start faulting me for being intolerant because I have sacked Joyce Banda from DPP, fault God for sacking Lucifer from heaven.”
On Sunday (March 18 2012) the police tear-gassed and assaulted opposition supporters as opposition presidential aspirant Atupele Muluzi, tried to address a gathering. He was later arrested, and riots continued in Lilongwe. Angry Malawians responded by attacking a police station, beating up officers and looting their houses.
In July last year, 19 people were killed in a police crackdown to quell protests over deteriorating political and economic conditions. There has been arbitrary arrest of prominent anti-government activists such as John Kapito, chairs of the state-funded Malawi Human Rights Commission (MHRC) and former attorney general, lawyer cum human rights campaigner, Ralph Kasambara.
Students in May 2011 were tear gassed and several lecturers at Chancellor College in Zomba were dismissed following an unsavoury stand-off between academics and the police. The row started because Peter Mukhito, the Inspector General of the Police, quizzed a political studies lecturer, Blessings Chitinga over his discussions of the Arab Springs Revolts. “
