[A version of this essay was published in Counterpunch.] During the run up to the invasion of Afghanistan, three burly American classmates jeered at me. They said, “We’re gonna kill Osama.” Presumably, I would be especially aggrieved at Osama’s death, since I am a Muslim, and therefore, an Osama sympathizer if not also a bomb-carrying [...]
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More sophisticated readers of the New York Times’ editorial pages have, for years, fumed at Thomas Friedman’s inane musings. Even less sophisticated readers, some of which write book reviews and essays for online magazines named after mysterious flatbreads, have bristled at Friedman’s claims, prose and weak reasoning. There are times, in fact, that one might [...]
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[A guest post by Tipu Sultan] Once, I Was An Oil Drop I was taught that oil was the most glorious thing that had ever happened to humankind. My first memory of this education was at age six. I was inducted into the girl-scouts, along with some of the other girls in the corporate-garrison town-city [...]
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My review of Habibi is out in The Sunday Guardian today. It was originally longer. The full piece is below: I. Hating Art I have hated many pieces of art in my life. An Italian restaurant I used to go to was decorated with enormous abstract oil paintings. The paintings were so aggressively bad they [...]
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[Part 6 of 6 -- A short version of this series was published at DAWN - Books & Authors] That three million perished in the 1971 conflict is widely stated around the world. Salil Tripathi points out that “Killing three million people over 267 days amounts to nearly 11,000 deaths a day. That would make it one [...]
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[Part 5 of 6] [...] men see the abuse of “their” women as a degradation of their masculinity. What counts is not the suffering of the women, but the effect it has on men. Ruth Seifert, “War and Rape: Analytical Approaches” All facets of the 1971 conflict and the subsequent nation-making processes had a devastating [...]
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[Part 4 of 6] Marshaling colonial legacies, the post-colonial state seeks to consolidate the nation as a new form of empire, demanding hyper-masculine militarization and territorial and extra-territorial control. This requires the manufacture of internal and external enemies to constitute a national identity, constructed in opposition to the anti-national and non-native enemies of the nation. [...]
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[Part 3 of 6] I hate all armies. Yours, mine—all armies. -Muhammad Zinnatul Alam, the lone survivor of the Thanpara massacre.1 The main focus of Sarmila Bose’s much talked about book, Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War is the civil war in East Pakistan, and not the international war between India and [...]
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[Part 2 of 6] Translation: The Ideology of Pakistan: Every nation has a specific civilization and culture. The civilizational and cultural capital of the Muslims of the Subcontinent comes from Islam. This capital, their beliefs and religious rituals, mannerisms, religious and historical literature, literary and technological research, is preserved in their literature and philosophy. On this [...]
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[Part 1 of 6] Forgetting is imposed as a strategy to hide the haunting memories that cannot be revealed without destroying our romance with nationalism. ~Yasmin Saikia During the many blackouts and power outages in the Pakistan of my childhood, my family used to sit in the veranda of our home cursing the electricity department [...]
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Holy Jesus, Moses and Muhammad. The power-points, I urge you to drop everything and just stare at them, are amazing. They really are. They show, quite clearly, the mental acuity of a 12 year old child when confronted with a newspaper. There is reading comprehension, of course, and even retention and maybe some kind of [...]
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I am rather stuck on the fliegender Teppich in the NPD ad. I want to continue the link I made between Hans Schweitzer’s anti-Semitic cartoons and the NPD flying-carpet by focusing on this particular relationship between orientalism and anti-Semitism. The 1926 Lotte Reiniger movie Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed was one of the first “animated” [...]
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When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled “made in Germany”; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism;it will be called, of course, “Americanism.” Halford E. Luccock, Keeping Life Out of Confusion Before Times were good for many Americans—or, at least, times were good [...]
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The New York Police Department is doing everything it can to make sure there’s not another 9/11 here and that more innocent New Yorkers are not killed by terrorists,” NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said. “And we have nothing to apologize for in that regard.” – “With CIA help, NYPD built secret effort to monitor mosques, [...]
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One thing that the First World really gets right is good dental care. The more money you have, the better the teeth. Unfortunately, despite the fact that we Americans (at least those with good dental insurance) have some of the pearliest, straightest teeth in the world, we are seldom grateful for this gift. The word [...]
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The saying goes that we all have rituals – and the sayer points, often times metaphorically, to baseball players. The raise, the pinch, the shuffle, the swing, the dust-off, the spit, the spit, the spit. Ritual seems a bad word, suddenly. Habit? Superstitious habit? Let us stick with ritual for a second. I don’t think [...]
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I have a new piece up at The National, Pakistan: why the US must think outside the ‘military’ box: A decade after the events of September 11, we continue to know little and understand even less of Pakistan. This despite the fact that we are entering a golden age of production of knowledge on that [...]
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I. A Terribly Attractive Man I probably first heard the name Qaddafi on the radio, from NPR, an always present background noise in my childhood. But the name only acquired meaning when I heard it uttered by my Great Aunt in a stage whisper to my mother: “That Mr. Qaddafi is terribly attractive!” She hissed, [...]
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Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) by D. H. Lawrence BENJAMIN FRANKLIN had a specious little equation in providential mathematics: Rum + Savage = 0. Awfully nice! You might add up the universe to nought, if you kept on. Rum plus Savage may equal a dead savage. But is a dead savage nought? Can you [...]
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You fill the air with smiles For miles and miles and miles Though you’re no Mona Lisa For worlds I’d not replace Your sunny, funny face I love your funny face Your sunny, funny face You’re not exotic but so hypnotic You’re much, too much If you can cook the way you look I’d swim [...]
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