(right to left anticlockwise) - "I'm not going to give you any guarantees, other than that the police doesn't have time for us. Everyone is tied up with the safety and security of one person only, and any surprise will run right by them"
"But Shihab Basha, this time we could go to jail..."
"Mustafa, prison in this country is for the poor, and you are going to get rich...Yalla?"
"Mustafa, do you remember the trap we have got all these people into...the trap is open. We are the ones just sitting inside it because no one has ever tried to get out of it..."
After two weeks, in Mohammed Naguib Metro Station...
No guarantees...No difficulties either...
Metro
by Magdy al-Shafi'i
the First Graphic Novel in Arabic
Published by Dar Malameh (Features)
I am really excited about this. Many will say that this is yet another step towards the "Westernization" of Arabic literature, but I seriously think that popular literature in Arabic, especially in Egypt, where due to the poor education system, relatively few people are reading seriously, needs to be given a fillip. I will try to find a copy of this when I am not reading Abbasid poetry about liquor and and wine-bearing girls dressed like smooth beautiful boys.
(tarboush tip: Taken from the blog of contemporary Egyptian novelist Mohammad `Alaa el-Din.)
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For those of you who have a memory spanning back to events before the current week (unlike much of the U.S. population), you may remember the timely release of over 400 Palestinian prisoners who were being held in Israeli prisons immediately preceding the ever-so-eventful Annapolis conference. If you have a memory even longer than that (good for you!) you may have deduced that such prisoner releases serve a primary role as a political bargaining chip when the Israeli government wants to gain benevolent occupier points with international powers.
The point that this Haaretz staff editorial makes, and a good one, is this: if you can just release hundreds of prisoners at a time, how can you justify holding them in the first place?
This regular game with the fate of people - some 10,000 of them - who are incarcerated in Israel, taking no account of the length of their prison sentences but only the political utility their fate can serve, warps Israel's image as a law-abiding state. If at any given moment there is a pool of candidates for release, it stands to reason they could have been released long ago….
When Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says that the easiest gesture Israel can make is releasing prisoners, the resulting impression is that they are being held just for that purpose. That is a highly problematic reason for incarceration.
The idea that the vast majority of prisoners in Palestinian prisons do not pose any real threat to the State of Israel would certainly be congruous with the anecdotes and experiences of people I’ve met who have been or whose family members have been in Israeli prisons. The anecdotes of these people include: one arrested for bringing his employees to do construction in Israel who didn’t have the proper papers, one for working in Israel without the right papers during the time when money was frozen over the past year in the West Bank, one for organizing a teacher’s union during the First Intifada, and one Palestinian citizen of Israel arrested but gotten out of jail by lawyers because a guy from the West Bank without the right papers got into his cab. It’s almost considered odd if you’re a Palestinian man from the West Bank and have NOT been to jail at least once. Also, it makes sense that the majority of the people in jail don’t pose a real threat to Israel if you consider the policy towards many who do: extrajudicial assassination.
So yesterday, I wandered by a newspaper (also Haaretz, the Hebrew version) lying open to a cartoon depicting a similar revolving door idea. It shows Israeli soldiers monitoring a single line of Palestinian prisoners walking through the first door of a bus with their hands cuffed behind their backs with heads bent and wary expressions, only to emerge from the back door of the bus smiling and waving and –get this— each carrying his own blue shoulder duffel bag.
Where the heck do the bags come into this picture? Is there an impression in Israeli society that Palestinian prisoners regularly get handouts in jail to take home with them? Can anyone enlighten the bags-materializing-apparently-from-bus-matter phenomenon in this cartoon for me? It's possible that it's an innocent addition meant to illustrate a point similar to that of the editorial. Does anyone have any insights into this?
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This is pretty funny: Ynet reports that Israel’s consulate in Los Angeles is appealing to Walt Disney Corporation “to question whether Hamas violated copyright laws” by using a Mickey Mouse look-a-like (Farfour) in an anti-Israel kids show.
Allow me to help out with this one: Yes, Hamas robbed Mickey. No, Disney will never get a dime. Yeah, that’s messed up. But shit – no one gives a fuck.
I mean seriously, what's the point of all this? If it's to drag Hamas' name through the mud, it's obvious they're doing a great job of that alone. Besides, Farfour is dead now. Let the poor martyr rest in peace...
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Posted at the request of KABOBfriend Sharen:
Urgent Open Letter to the U.S. Congress Protesting U.S. Senator Biden’s Amendment to Partition Iraq
We --- Iraqi-Americans and Iraqis around the world --- are Arabs, Kurds, Turkomen, Sunnis, Shia’, Christians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Syriac, Yazidis, Sabeans and Armenians. We are, above all, Iraqis.
As Iraqis, we have been unheard and unrepresented in Washington, which is unilaterally deciding the fate of our homeland. Iraq is a country with a pre-colonial identity as a nation-state --- Mesopotamia --- going back to ancient pre-biblical times.
Iraqis of different backgrounds, races, ethnicities and sects have coexisted for thousands of years, shaping and being part of a great and pluralistic civilization.
Only the Iraqi people have the right to determine the political and national future of Iraq. We, therefore, strongly denounce the resolution that was passed by the US Senate on September 26, 2007 that would allow a foreign government (the U.S. Government), not the Iraqis, to divide Iraq into ethnically-defined regions and sow the seeds for further conflict across our country and the whole region. This would be the act of a new colonial power – not the act of a great democracy --- no different in substance from the acts of the post-World War I colonial powers in dividing the Middle East.
To read the rest of the petition and sign it, click here.
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From Egyptian cartoonist Tarek Shahin, brilliant as always. Check out his website for new material published once a week:
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(right to left anticlockwise) - "I'm not going to give you any guarantees, other than that the police doesn't have time for us. Everyone is tied up with the safety and security of one person only, and any surprise will run right by them"
Metro
